language & art

1. "The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself" (Lyotard, 81)

2. "The distinctive feature of this second, 'performative,' utterance is that its effect upon the referent coincides with its enunciation....the addressee...is immediately placed within the new context created by the utterance....the sender is dean or rector--that is, he is invested with the authority to make this kind of statement--only insofar as he can directly affect both the referent (the university) and the addressee (the university staff)" (Lyotard, 9).

3. "From this continuity between cybernetic and Lyotardian postmodern social relations....we track Lyotard's postmodernist and game-theoretical worldview back deep into the heart of the Manichean sciences" (Galison, 259)

Lyotard's framework of social relations as agonistic language games seems to me to reduce the complexity of language; this repressed complexity reappears in his essay on art in "What is the Postmodern."

In short, it seems that Lyotard is caught within the very problematic of performativity that he takes as his object of study (as indicated by Galison above). In the second quotation, he asserts that language has a power to create its context. But the slippage between the power of language and social relations, which are irreducible to the utterance itself, is evident in his qualification that the dean must also be invested with a certain authority. This concept of authority seems to elide the problem that the efficacy of the dean's statement depends not so much upon a context engendered solely by the performative utterance, but rather on an institutional context within which language is made to appear stable and univocal, directly affecting its “referent.”

In “What is the Postmodern,” Lyotard takes up the question of the referent in art, but this time to assert that the postmodern “puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself.” That is, postmodern art engages with the question of its own legitimacy, finding that the very means of presentation constitute a limit. That Lyotard does not suggest that language may share this limit with art, that the performative utterance may fail to generate its context, seems to be a moment in Lyotard’s text when his reliance upon game theory and cybernetics (the “Manichean sciences”) has infiltrated his theory of language as the answer to an unasked question (in the sense of the Althusserian problematic). In Lyotard’s discussion of the performative utterance, language takes a form familiar in cybernetic theory: communication-as-control. And while Lyotard questions the dominance of performativity as a criterion of legitimacy, he misses, I think, an important opportunity to destabilize this standard when he imputes so much power to the performative.

Perhaps the circularity of capitalist, scientific, performative processes that other posts (Mark’s stands out in my memory) have indicated is in some way a result of this tension in Lyotard’s method.