Prefacing Material On Jean-François Lyotard (for reading his The Differend)
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C O N T E N T S : I) A Brief Biographical Sketch II) Studies III) Other Voices on Lyotard IV) More on Lyotard’s Influence V) Background Studies
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I) A Brief Biographical Sketch:
Jean-François Lyotard
(1924-1998; b. Vincennes, France; d. Paris, France).
Lyotard, in his personally reflective work Peregrinations, wrote that his earliest aspirations included becoming a Dominican monk, a painter, or a historian ...
... With these goals—monk, painter, story-teller—he was was educated at the Paris Lycées Buffon and Louis-le-Grand, and then the Sorbonne (where he studied philosophy and literature). When the Second World War broke out, he served as a medical volunteer in the streets of Paris. He married Andrée May in 1948, with whom he had two children, Corinne and Laurence. Passing the agrégation (examination to become a teacher), he then started his teaching in 1950 at a boy’s school in Constantine, in French East Algeria, then from 1952-59, teaching military children at La Flèche. In the midst of these teaching engagements, in 1954, his environs and political activism led him to join Socialisme ou Barbarie, a socialist revolutionary organization (see info here and here). For about fifteen years, his life was one of devotion to far-left political thought and action. In 1964, a political splintering of the organization led Lyotard and his friend Pierre Souyris to join the break-away group Pouvoir Ouvrier (see info here and here). Just two years later came his resignation from official political membership, his break from faith in the efficacy of Marxist-led theory and practice, and his dedicated recommitment to the full breadth of philosophical study and writing. Into the mid 1960‘s he assisted teaching at the Sorbonne and then took a full position Université de Paris X, Nanterre--exercising his political activism in the “May 1968” political movement (see info here and here and here). Around this time, he engaged study of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and also earned his doctorat d’état for his manuscript Discours, figure. In the late 1960’s he engaged a research position at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and then, in the early 1970’s, a position at Université de Paris VIII, Vincennes, which he held for almost 20 years, during which he became a celebrated teacher, wrote voraciously, established his name (publishing his most famous work, The Postmodern Condition in 1979 (see info here and a copy of the text here)), and lectured worldwide (especially at University of California Irvine, San Diego, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Emory, University of Minnesota, Université de Montréal, Universidade de São Paulo). In the early 1990’s, he married his second wife, Dolorès Djidzek, with whom he had a son, David, in 1993. In April of 1998, in Paris, he died of leukemia.
Click here for a selected bibliography of Lyotard’s works.
(1924-1998; b. Vincennes, France; d. Paris, France).
Lyotard, in his personally reflective work Peregrinations, wrote that his earliest aspirations included becoming a Dominican monk, a painter, or a historian ...
- ... although, the English may be misleading, he may have wanted to be a writer of histories or histories, which is better translated as “stories,” and stories may be novels as much as the history of social science. This ambiguity is most telling. Within the every essay, “Clouds,” where he delineates these aspirations, he interrupts his own recounting of his life narrative by elaborating the two sides of what he terms “narratology,” one that embraces the disordered beauty within the orderly form of ancient narrative style, the other that is the lover of scientific rationality and insists narrative have beginning, middle, and end, and not so much disorder permitted between. Critiquing both while forging an argument about the detriment of inflexible narratives, Lyotard likens the best form to clouds that never stop changing their relation to one another and within themselves. This is helpful to keep in mind when thinking about a brief a biographical sketch--what does the narrative of one’s life do to and tell us about its object? Nevertheless ...
... With these goals—monk, painter, story-teller—he was was educated at the Paris Lycées Buffon and Louis-le-Grand, and then the Sorbonne (where he studied philosophy and literature). When the Second World War broke out, he served as a medical volunteer in the streets of Paris. He married Andrée May in 1948, with whom he had two children, Corinne and Laurence. Passing the agrégation (examination to become a teacher), he then started his teaching in 1950 at a boy’s school in Constantine, in French East Algeria, then from 1952-59, teaching military children at La Flèche. In the midst of these teaching engagements, in 1954, his environs and political activism led him to join Socialisme ou Barbarie, a socialist revolutionary organization (see info here and here). For about fifteen years, his life was one of devotion to far-left political thought and action. In 1964, a political splintering of the organization led Lyotard and his friend Pierre Souyris to join the break-away group Pouvoir Ouvrier (see info here and here). Just two years later came his resignation from official political membership, his break from faith in the efficacy of Marxist-led theory and practice, and his dedicated recommitment to the full breadth of philosophical study and writing. Into the mid 1960‘s he assisted teaching at the Sorbonne and then took a full position Université de Paris X, Nanterre--exercising his political activism in the “May 1968” political movement (see info here and here and here). Around this time, he engaged study of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and also earned his doctorat d’état for his manuscript Discours, figure. In the late 1960’s he engaged a research position at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and then, in the early 1970’s, a position at Université de Paris VIII, Vincennes, which he held for almost 20 years, during which he became a celebrated teacher, wrote voraciously, established his name (publishing his most famous work, The Postmodern Condition in 1979 (see info here and a copy of the text here)), and lectured worldwide (especially at University of California Irvine, San Diego, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Emory, University of Minnesota, Université de Montréal, Universidade de São Paulo). In the early 1990’s, he married his second wife, Dolorès Djidzek, with whom he had a son, David, in 1993. In April of 1998, in Paris, he died of leukemia.
Click here for a selected bibliography of Lyotard’s works.
II) Studies:
full of incendiary influences and contrasts:
History of Philosophy
Phenomenology (and its blend into existentialism)
Post-Structuralism (and its blend into deconstruction)
Postmodernism
Marxism and Anti-Marxism Politics
Freudian and Anti-Freudian Psychoanalysis/Social Theory/Politics
Aesthetics and Art Criticism (widely including all the arts, from literature to painting to sculpture to a little bit on film, etc.)
History of Philosophy
Phenomenology (and its blend into existentialism)
Post-Structuralism (and its blend into deconstruction)
Postmodernism
Marxism and Anti-Marxism Politics
Freudian and Anti-Freudian Psychoanalysis/Social Theory/Politics
Aesthetics and Art Criticism (widely including all the arts, from literature to painting to sculpture to a little bit on film, etc.)
But even this diversity belies the true and vaster scope of his influences, dealings, and preoccupations . . .
a fuller picture can be had by offering a quick survey of a handful of topics
that immediately come to mind that he writes about in The Differend:
Kant’s 3rd Critique & Wittgenstein are his pretext;
he engages then-contemporary holocaust deniers publishing in France;
and offers close textual analyses on Protagoras, Gorgias, Plato, Antisthenes,
Kant, Gertrude Stein, Aristotle, Hegel, Levinas,
the French political document “Declaration of 1789,”
and the Cashinahua, a native tribe in South America,
and their study by D’Ans and Levi-Strauss;
he reviews analytic philosophy & formal logic;
references diverse works of literature
(from Kafka to Proust, Balzac and Zinoviev to Aeschylus and Beckett)
and the arts (from John Cage to Schönberg, Gertrude Stein, Butor to Cézanne);
he addresses critical theory, Marxism, Freud, existentialism, humanism, phenomenology, Auschwitz,
both the mystics and ascetics, the cynics and absurdists and Gnostics,
Christian love, the abyss, freedom, horror, time, archipelagos,
myth, contemporary philosophy of science, philosophy of law, ethics,
and much, much more . . .
a fuller picture can be had by offering a quick survey of a handful of topics
that immediately come to mind that he writes about in The Differend:
Kant’s 3rd Critique & Wittgenstein are his pretext;
he engages then-contemporary holocaust deniers publishing in France;
and offers close textual analyses on Protagoras, Gorgias, Plato, Antisthenes,
Kant, Gertrude Stein, Aristotle, Hegel, Levinas,
the French political document “Declaration of 1789,”
and the Cashinahua, a native tribe in South America,
and their study by D’Ans and Levi-Strauss;
he reviews analytic philosophy & formal logic;
references diverse works of literature
(from Kafka to Proust, Balzac and Zinoviev to Aeschylus and Beckett)
and the arts (from John Cage to Schönberg, Gertrude Stein, Butor to Cézanne);
he addresses critical theory, Marxism, Freud, existentialism, humanism, phenomenology, Auschwitz,
both the mystics and ascetics, the cynics and absurdists and Gnostics,
Christian love, the abyss, freedom, horror, time, archipelagos,
myth, contemporary philosophy of science, philosophy of law, ethics,
and much, much more . . .
All of contemporary thought that names itself postmodernism is in the wake of Jean-François Lyotard. However, so little of what calls itself postmodernism respects the warnings and reminders of Lyotard’s work. Thus, it may be more accurate to say that all of the major currents of contemporary philosophy are in his wake as being those guilty of that which he diagnoses.
Jacques Derrida, in his memorial essay “Lyotard and Us,” writes, “For I know that the debt that binds me to Jean-François Lyotard is in some sense incalculable; I am conscious of this and want it thus” (Jacques Derrida, “Lyotard and Us,” Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard, ed. Claire Nouvet, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Kent Still (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1-26, 9). This may be the most honest expression of Lyotard’s influence.
Jacques Derrida, in his memorial essay “Lyotard and Us,” writes, “For I know that the debt that binds me to Jean-François Lyotard is in some sense incalculable; I am conscious of this and want it thus” (Jacques Derrida, “Lyotard and Us,” Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard, ed. Claire Nouvet, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Kent Still (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1-26, 9). This may be the most honest expression of Lyotard’s influence.
III) Other Voices on Lyotard:
Lyotard is, according to Peter Dews, “something of an anomaly. Lyotard has, in a number of respects, remained on the margins of an orthodoxy which defined itself precisely in terms of its focus on, and celebration of, the marginal.”
--Peter Dews, “Review: The Letter and the Line: Discourse and Its Other in Lyotard,”
Diacritics 14, 3: Special Issue on the Work of Jean-François Lyotard (1984): 39-49, 40.
Diacritics 14, 3: Special Issue on the Work of Jean-François Lyotard (1984): 39-49, 40.
Robert Harvey and Lawrence Schehr name him “a polymath of a special sort. . . . A philosopher steeped in phenomenology, a militant for pluralist thinking, an esthetician of the figural, Lyotard staked out territories for innumerable scholars in literature, the arts, politics, and ethics, as well as in more recently recognized fields such as gender studies and postcolonialism.”
--Robert Harvey and Lawrence R. Schehr,
“Editor’s Preface,” Yale French Studies 99 (2001): 1-5, 1.
“Editor’s Preface,” Yale French Studies 99 (2001): 1-5, 1.
His early work was political radicalism followed by work in phenomenology infused with psychoanalysis and Marxism and directed to studies of the social sciences, literature, and art. His interests span the canon and the divide between Continental and Analytic philosophy, and the conception of a “pure” philosophy divorced from the other humanities, social sciences, and fine arts (one name he held was “curator” for Les Immatériaux, an art exhibit at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris).
The “Les Immatériaux” exhibition was in the Grande Galerie,
Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou,
March 28-July 15, 1985, managed by the Centre de Creation Industrielle
& curated by Lyotard and Thierry Chaput.
Lyotard edited the exhibition catalog, Les Immatériaux, v.1:
Album. Inventaire (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985) &
simultaneously, he & Élie Théofilakis released a collection of essays,
Modernes et Après? “Les Immatériaux” (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1985).
pictured at left: Centre Pompidou, Paris
Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou,
March 28-July 15, 1985, managed by the Centre de Creation Industrielle
& curated by Lyotard and Thierry Chaput.
Lyotard edited the exhibition catalog, Les Immatériaux, v.1:
Album. Inventaire (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985) &
simultaneously, he & Élie Théofilakis released a collection of essays,
Modernes et Après? “Les Immatériaux” (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1985).
pictured at left: Centre Pompidou, Paris
While Geoffrey Bennington notes that, “at first sight, [Lyotard’s oeuvre is] more remarkable for its shifts and breaks than for any continuity,” but it is also not at all entirely discontinuous.
--Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1.
In memorial, Michael Naas points out that “in every subject he took on, in all these heterogeneous projects, Lyotard was interested in what resists within them and in the dangers of resisting and thus concealing this heterogeneity and this resistance.”
Michael Naas, “Lyotard Archipelago,” Minima Memoria:
In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard,
ed. Claire Nouvet, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Kent Still
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 176-96, 180.
In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard,
ed. Claire Nouvet, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Kent Still
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 176-96, 180.
All of his works seem to be after a consideration of what is not considered. The Postmodern Condition captures the spirit of this, as it names the postmodern as: “that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.”
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Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Op. Cit., cf. 79-82.
In the publicity leaflet for the Pompidou Les Immatériaux exhibit, Lyotard described its purpose as: “neither pedagogical or demagogical ... Our objective is to rouse a sensitivity which already exists in all of us, to make one feel the strange in the familiar, and how difficult it is to imagine what’s changing.” (Photographs: left: Jack Lang (l) & J-F. Lyotard (r) at Les Immatériaux' opening; below, l-to-r: interior exhibit rooms at Les Immatériaux. |
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IV) More on Lyotard’s Influence:
While all “postmodernists” and “postmodernism” is in the wake of Lyotard, most of it belies his insights and shies away from his direct engagement. Lyotard crafted arguments and employed words and ideas to unhinge thought that then became the very currency of the consumptive culture they sought to evade.
Contemporary thinkers may not account for Lyotard’s influence because it may be unconscious. To claim their heritage in his insights is risky because what, exactly, is his position on anything at all? It often feels unfaithful to Lyotard’s thought to try to pin it to one clear stance on any one issue.
A final point of incalculability of Lyotard’s influence may be, as Derrida admitted, that influence from Lyotard often yielded work without “even a common accord [ensemble]” to its origin.
In addition to Derrida, Lyotard was friends with Gilles Deleuze, and he was geographically, temporally, and philosophically close to Michel Foucault. The nearly simultaneous early works of Lyotard and Derrida were concerned explicitly with Husserl’s phenomenology. Within about a four-year spread, all four thinkers were producing works critical of phenomenological and structuralist positions simultaneously as the influence of Freud and Marx can be felt in them in varying degrees. A sharp departure from Freud and Marx can be read barely a year apart in both Lyotard and Deleuze. This shared vocabulary of concerns and influences does not guarantee accord between these thinkers, but the dialogue is as rich as it is nuanced in agreements and disagreements.
Even as Lyotard diverged further away as the others tended to greater agreement amongst themselves, by all accounts that have surfaced, not one holds a negative image of Lyotard as a person and philosopher. Even his most biting critics often only admit to not understanding him. No one dismisses his rigor, passion, or genuineness. But, most of contemporary philosophy is guilty before Lyotard’s thinking; most contemporary thought can be taken to task by his careful readings. Occasionally, those in his wake recognize this and recognize that his work has succeeded, as in Gary Browning’s reflection that, “his work … is important, and offers flashes of inspiration as well as sustained hard thinking that challenge much in what we are and how we operate” (Gary Browning, Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives, Op. Cit., vii).
Beyond his progeny of postmodernity itself, Lyotard has lit contemporary thought through with further, notable “flashes of inspiration.” The first, not new, but newly infused with relevancy, is fragmentation. Lyotard, being a careful reader of Hegel and Husserl, embraced the opposite impulse from the construction of a system or a Wissenschaft. His thinking more closely resembles an abstract mosaic mural: each piece a sparkling artifact of rethinking thoughts and each can be seen to link almost endlessly with so many other captivating tiles around it. And, stepping back, one can see a fantastic large mural—but it is abstract: it does not represent any one thing and every re-seeing reveals the lines tending in a new direction to new shapes wherein new color combinations catch the eye. His legacy is further like the image he was partial to: clouds in the sky, forever drifting, forming shapes here and there that one may see and another may see differently, perennially blurring together and separating. Hand in hand with his thought embodying fragmentation, it embraces pluralism. To see something in the mural or in the sky, one cannot expect only what one wants. One must entertain open desire for the multiplicity of possible views, methodologically (phenomenology, structuralism to post-structuralism, Freudian to Lacanian psychoanalysis, analytic philosophy) and materially (history, science, art, politics).
Most important, and why Lyotard has uniquely brought something to these not new requirements of fragmentary and pluralistic thinking, is that the way that the fragments link together and the plural methods and contents come to inform thinking must neither be purely random nor strictly rule-based. Here is the dangerous edge that Lyotard’s thinking walks. Linkages are endless and phrasing is endless, yet there is silence. The linkages must come together in a legitimate manner, harmonize and open the silent space of accord, even while we ceaselessly seek a new kind of illegitimacy that will permit the meaningful rupturing of silence.
Phenomenology’s seeing is fruitful, but cannot be the method alone. Structuralism’s consequences from seeing the world as a text is fruitful, but cannot be the method alone. Seeing and reading contradict one another as approaches to the world, but uncovering this conflict cannot dismiss its own productivity. Philosophy cannot operate in ignorance of history, but history cannot presume to be a science of actual events. Philosophy cannot operate in ignorance of politics, but politics cannot claim to be the accurate representation of reality. History and politics presume that singular events can be represented and narratives be fixed and truthful; philosophy must reveal the impossibility of capturing the singular event and the illusions that proceed from grand narratives without ignoring our strong drive to these impossibilities and the positive contribution they can issue.
This acceptance and denial required of every position, each itself required, makes reading Lyotard taxing and leaves his synopsis as a legacy of seemingly logical paradoxes. Carefully reading him frustrates the desires of the reader (yet, that frustration being that which intensifies the desire to understand him).
Contemporary thinkers may not account for Lyotard’s influence because it may be unconscious. To claim their heritage in his insights is risky because what, exactly, is his position on anything at all? It often feels unfaithful to Lyotard’s thought to try to pin it to one clear stance on any one issue.
A final point of incalculability of Lyotard’s influence may be, as Derrida admitted, that influence from Lyotard often yielded work without “even a common accord [ensemble]” to its origin.
In addition to Derrida, Lyotard was friends with Gilles Deleuze, and he was geographically, temporally, and philosophically close to Michel Foucault. The nearly simultaneous early works of Lyotard and Derrida were concerned explicitly with Husserl’s phenomenology. Within about a four-year spread, all four thinkers were producing works critical of phenomenological and structuralist positions simultaneously as the influence of Freud and Marx can be felt in them in varying degrees. A sharp departure from Freud and Marx can be read barely a year apart in both Lyotard and Deleuze. This shared vocabulary of concerns and influences does not guarantee accord between these thinkers, but the dialogue is as rich as it is nuanced in agreements and disagreements.
Even as Lyotard diverged further away as the others tended to greater agreement amongst themselves, by all accounts that have surfaced, not one holds a negative image of Lyotard as a person and philosopher. Even his most biting critics often only admit to not understanding him. No one dismisses his rigor, passion, or genuineness. But, most of contemporary philosophy is guilty before Lyotard’s thinking; most contemporary thought can be taken to task by his careful readings. Occasionally, those in his wake recognize this and recognize that his work has succeeded, as in Gary Browning’s reflection that, “his work … is important, and offers flashes of inspiration as well as sustained hard thinking that challenge much in what we are and how we operate” (Gary Browning, Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives, Op. Cit., vii).
Beyond his progeny of postmodernity itself, Lyotard has lit contemporary thought through with further, notable “flashes of inspiration.” The first, not new, but newly infused with relevancy, is fragmentation. Lyotard, being a careful reader of Hegel and Husserl, embraced the opposite impulse from the construction of a system or a Wissenschaft. His thinking more closely resembles an abstract mosaic mural: each piece a sparkling artifact of rethinking thoughts and each can be seen to link almost endlessly with so many other captivating tiles around it. And, stepping back, one can see a fantastic large mural—but it is abstract: it does not represent any one thing and every re-seeing reveals the lines tending in a new direction to new shapes wherein new color combinations catch the eye. His legacy is further like the image he was partial to: clouds in the sky, forever drifting, forming shapes here and there that one may see and another may see differently, perennially blurring together and separating. Hand in hand with his thought embodying fragmentation, it embraces pluralism. To see something in the mural or in the sky, one cannot expect only what one wants. One must entertain open desire for the multiplicity of possible views, methodologically (phenomenology, structuralism to post-structuralism, Freudian to Lacanian psychoanalysis, analytic philosophy) and materially (history, science, art, politics).
Most important, and why Lyotard has uniquely brought something to these not new requirements of fragmentary and pluralistic thinking, is that the way that the fragments link together and the plural methods and contents come to inform thinking must neither be purely random nor strictly rule-based. Here is the dangerous edge that Lyotard’s thinking walks. Linkages are endless and phrasing is endless, yet there is silence. The linkages must come together in a legitimate manner, harmonize and open the silent space of accord, even while we ceaselessly seek a new kind of illegitimacy that will permit the meaningful rupturing of silence.
Phenomenology’s seeing is fruitful, but cannot be the method alone. Structuralism’s consequences from seeing the world as a text is fruitful, but cannot be the method alone. Seeing and reading contradict one another as approaches to the world, but uncovering this conflict cannot dismiss its own productivity. Philosophy cannot operate in ignorance of history, but history cannot presume to be a science of actual events. Philosophy cannot operate in ignorance of politics, but politics cannot claim to be the accurate representation of reality. History and politics presume that singular events can be represented and narratives be fixed and truthful; philosophy must reveal the impossibility of capturing the singular event and the illusions that proceed from grand narratives without ignoring our strong drive to these impossibilities and the positive contribution they can issue.
This acceptance and denial required of every position, each itself required, makes reading Lyotard taxing and leaves his synopsis as a legacy of seemingly logical paradoxes. Carefully reading him frustrates the desires of the reader (yet, that frustration being that which intensifies the desire to understand him).
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KNOWLEDGE
“is not only a set of denotative statements … It also includes notions of ‘know-how,’ ‘knowing how to live,’ ‘how to listen’ …, etc. … Knowledge, then, is a question of competence that goes beyond the simple determination and application of the criterion of truth, extending to the determination and application of criteria of efficiency (technical qualification), of justice and/or happiness (ethical wisdom), of the beauty of a sound or color (auditory and visual sensibility), etc.” (Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 18). |
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V) Background Studies:
(1) Phenomenology
~~See here for more information on Phenomenology.~~
Founded by Edmund Husserl, German, 1920’s
Basic Principle: The world gives itself to us as we give ourselves to the world.
Phenomenology attempts to give a direct description of our lived experience as it is in itself without biases born from historical, psychological, or scientific modes of thinking. Instead, each of these perspectives is to be acknowledged as a single mode among many by which to experience and describe the world.
This lived experience of the world is dynamic; both world and subject constitute meaning. Thus, it upsets the philosophical heritage of positing, on the one hand, the world’s meaning as essentially independent or, on the other, humanity as the determinant or measure of all meaning.
But, let us define “lived” … the description is not of the world lived in its everyday experienced way … that is what Husserl calls the Natural Attitude (the everyday, automatically directed along through pre-given frameworks of intentional relations by which one naturally accords independent existence to these correlates of consciousness or things intended—like when you wake up and turn off the alarm and roll out of bed without thinking about anything other than that, precisely).
The “lived” that the epoché lets us describe is the Phenomenological Attitude (wherein I become aware of the intentional relation in and through which the objects are posited as such, a shifting of my attention from doing the waking up to thinking about the relation in which the alarm and I stand, it is a mode of reflection without bias, I do not think of the clock as a mechanical object that tracks time, but how it calls to me and how I obey it, etc.). This shift helps us to realize the perspectival nature of experience.
Founded by Edmund Husserl, German, 1920’s
Basic Principle: The world gives itself to us as we give ourselves to the world.
- Unsettles our egoistic supremacy as sole interpreter and judge of the meaning and value of world: meaning is created in the co-givenness.
- Primarily methodological: to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in this very way in which it shows itself--this simply expresses Husserl’s oft-repeated maxim: “attend to the things themselves!”
- Etymologically, phainomenon + logos ... i.e., these “things” (essential nature of the world and its contents), present a “seeming” that requires a “seeing” and “discourse.” In other words, the world seems, and the way it seems requires a subject to see it, listen to it, and participate in its elaboration.
- Thus, phenomenology studies everything that shows itself and explicates itself to us when we turn our focused gaze upon it.
Phenomenology attempts to give a direct description of our lived experience as it is in itself without biases born from historical, psychological, or scientific modes of thinking. Instead, each of these perspectives is to be acknowledged as a single mode among many by which to experience and describe the world.
This lived experience of the world is dynamic; both world and subject constitute meaning. Thus, it upsets the philosophical heritage of positing, on the one hand, the world’s meaning as essentially independent or, on the other, humanity as the determinant or measure of all meaning.
But, let us define “lived” … the description is not of the world lived in its everyday experienced way … that is what Husserl calls the Natural Attitude (the everyday, automatically directed along through pre-given frameworks of intentional relations by which one naturally accords independent existence to these correlates of consciousness or things intended—like when you wake up and turn off the alarm and roll out of bed without thinking about anything other than that, precisely).
The “lived” that the epoché lets us describe is the Phenomenological Attitude (wherein I become aware of the intentional relation in and through which the objects are posited as such, a shifting of my attention from doing the waking up to thinking about the relation in which the alarm and I stand, it is a mode of reflection without bias, I do not think of the clock as a mechanical object that tracks time, but how it calls to me and how I obey it, etc.). This shift helps us to realize the perspectival nature of experience.
(2) Structuralism to Post-Structuralism
Whereas this “Rigorous Science” of phenomenology wants us to turn child-like eyes, full of wonder, to the world, Post-Structuralism critiqued phenomenology for not paying attention precisely to all the structures that give us meaning—how so much of meaning is out of our control to define it because of the way we live in society and in language.
As the name suggests, “post-structuralism” is a reactionary movement / development from “structuralism:”
Structuralism:
Is a primarily French theory and school of contemporary Continental philosophy primarily founded by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913, Swiss, whom we may think of as a linguist and, with Charles Sanders Peirce, a founding figure in semiotics (the study of meaning-making in language and other forms of communication)) around the 1950’s, and importantly developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009, French, whom we often name an anthropologist). Structuralism essentially argues that meaning is structured and given to us by our involvement in language / society (not just reality itself). In order to understand many facets of culture, one must understand them in regards to their relationships to and in an overarching system or structure of meaning. This meaning structure is also a structure of power. Hence, this study seeks to lay bare these structures and understand their effects on the deepest levels of human thought, feeling, and action.
(Further, there are many thinkers we can associate here according to theories more so than their direct participation in the school, e.g., Freud (seeking the structures of meaning behind symbols born in our psyches, dreams, and actions), Jung (archetypes create entire cauldron of meaning as collective unconscious), Lacan (whose psychoanalysis further probes the distinctions between the symbolic, real, and imaginary orders), Marx (whose materialist idealism codifies theoretical structure into tangible flows of economic power), etc..)
Post-Structuralism:
Some argue this to be a continuation of Structuralism, some say it is its critique; it is a primarily French theory and school from the 1960’s and 70’s. Its main difference from the former is that it does not divorce these structures from us and posit them as self-sufficient (as if they pre- and post-exist us, structuring us, whereas being little effected by us). Instead, post-structuralism argues that their rigidity is only dependent upon our re-enforcement of them, thus they change with us as they change us. This means that the focus is shifted from being primarily on the structures as objects to being more so on the subjects within and affecting the structures.
Another main difference is that many post-structuralist writings are the practice of applying the insights that come from recognizing these structures and serve the goal of trying to reveal and/or undo the structures. That is, it more explicitly moves from theory (identifying structures) to practice (critiquing and thereby destabilizing them). For example, in critical race theory, we seek to reveal the transcendental norm of whiteness (all that is ‘white’ is deemed the baseline, the norm, and against which we judge all things, e.g., a book store has a section of “poetry,” this is the norm, and then “black poetry,” which is the deviant form of poetry) in order to rework its physical and psychical affect (e.g., not just change laws, terms, but also unconscious biases and habituated body-mind responses, like the accelerated heart rate and clutching one’s purse when a black man steps in an elevator with you).
(Notable figures: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, etc..)
Post-structuralism’s guiding premise, then, builds from structuralism’s, and is that the structure is mental, not in nature itself, but our minds impose this structure upon reality, forms reality in accordance with it—thus, reality (cultural, etc.) is a mental structure, as are the structures that explain reality. There are the more blatant structures of reality, the “surface structures,” of which we can become more explicitly conscious, especially by coming to understand the “deep structures,” those that spring from the unconscious. Like structuralism, post-structuralism believes that myths (traditional and in popular culture) are a predominate form of expression wherein these structures can be discovered, but furthers this to look at the full archives of human creation that range from literature to slang, architectural practices to habituated bodily movements of individuals to crowds to traffic, legal records to media to visual and audible arts, etc., etc..
As the name suggests, “post-structuralism” is a reactionary movement / development from “structuralism:”
Structuralism:
Is a primarily French theory and school of contemporary Continental philosophy primarily founded by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913, Swiss, whom we may think of as a linguist and, with Charles Sanders Peirce, a founding figure in semiotics (the study of meaning-making in language and other forms of communication)) around the 1950’s, and importantly developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009, French, whom we often name an anthropologist). Structuralism essentially argues that meaning is structured and given to us by our involvement in language / society (not just reality itself). In order to understand many facets of culture, one must understand them in regards to their relationships to and in an overarching system or structure of meaning. This meaning structure is also a structure of power. Hence, this study seeks to lay bare these structures and understand their effects on the deepest levels of human thought, feeling, and action.
- Illustration via Ferdinand de Saussure:
- De Saussure, annoyed with linguistics scholars who argued that language could either be studied as a historical product (‘diachronic,’ over time) or through etymology (‘philology,’ study of languages), proposed a tripartite understanding:
- Language: human capacity to develop systems of signs;
- (“sign:” X, wherein X represents Y; comprised of “signifier” (“cat” said) and “signified” (mental image to which “cat” refers: purring fluffy feline))
- Langue: system of language in general or specific language system (e.g., English, German);
- Parole: speech, a speaker’s particular use of the language.
- Language: human capacity to develop systems of signs;
- Then, focused upon langue as a synchronic (existing in a moment in time, not over time), ahistorical phenomenon. Most importantly, he argued that there is a basic “arbitrariness of the sign,” which means that there is an essential difference between the word and thing, the signifier and signified (“cat” is arbitrarily related to the purring thing). This demolishes a theory of language that insists upon a one to one correspondence between sign and signified; it thereby liberated language from being chained both to reality (hence in diachronic development) and to being entirely static (hence in universal essentialism). This means that there IS a SYSTEM of meaning, but the system hasn’t an ultimate rule or set of structures for a relation between words and things. Any argument for meaning, then, that relies upon a genealogical, etymological, philological, historical/historicist, etc. thesis is faulty. Instead, la langue is a system full of complex relations that arches over (equally, lies always beneath) the multiplicity of parole, the individuated expressions, with a relation inherent with difference, a gap, between the two—“language is a system of differences”—there is always a system below your expressions, but there is absolutely no necessary, essential link between the relations:
- There are rules connected to the use of the word and idea of “cat;”
- “Cat” can be a sign for the furry purring feline, a hip jazz singer in the 50’s, a woman’s name, a sexual slur, something on a ship that pulls up the anchor, a stock symbol for Caterpillar, Inc., a symbol for good or bad luck, an Egyptian deity, etc.;
- There is no necessary, essential reason for “cat” to be the sign for any of these examples, nor is there a necessary, essential reason between these examples (e.g., why a feline and a ship device?)
- De Saussure, annoyed with linguistics scholars who argued that language could either be studied as a historical product (‘diachronic,’ over time) or through etymology (‘philology,’ study of languages), proposed a tripartite understanding:
- Illustration via Claude Lévi-Strauss:
- Moving structuralism more explicitly within studies of human cultural meaning, Lévi-Strauss argues linguistics and anthropology to both be essential social sciences and beneficially, mutually aid one another; he explains how “Structural Linguistics” (i.e., structuralism) essentially helps anthropology through describing the four basic operations of structural linguistics (s.l.):
- (1) s.l. shifts study from conscious linguistic phenomena to the study of their unconscious infrastructure;
- (2) s.l. rejects terms being independent entities, instead beginning from the analysis of the relations between terms;
- (3) s.l. introduces the concept of the system (showing how phonemics (perceptually distinct units of sound that differentiate one word from another, e.g.: bad, bat) are part of a system and elucidates this system);
- (4) s.l. aims at discovering general laws by induction (inference of a general law from particular cases) or logical deduction (the inference of particulars from a general law), thus showing them to be absolute. (c.f., Lévi-Strauss, “Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology,” Structural Anthropology).
- This means that structuralism aids anthropology because (a) kinship terms (e.g., father, in-laws, etc.), like phonemes, are elements of meaning; (b) both only acquire meaning if integrated into a system; (c) these systems are built by the mind on the level of unconscious thought; and (d) such elements recur in these patterns across time and culture, (e) showing that they are general laws.
- Moving structuralism more explicitly within studies of human cultural meaning, Lévi-Strauss argues linguistics and anthropology to both be essential social sciences and beneficially, mutually aid one another; he explains how “Structural Linguistics” (i.e., structuralism) essentially helps anthropology through describing the four basic operations of structural linguistics (s.l.):
(Further, there are many thinkers we can associate here according to theories more so than their direct participation in the school, e.g., Freud (seeking the structures of meaning behind symbols born in our psyches, dreams, and actions), Jung (archetypes create entire cauldron of meaning as collective unconscious), Lacan (whose psychoanalysis further probes the distinctions between the symbolic, real, and imaginary orders), Marx (whose materialist idealism codifies theoretical structure into tangible flows of economic power), etc..)
Post-Structuralism:
Some argue this to be a continuation of Structuralism, some say it is its critique; it is a primarily French theory and school from the 1960’s and 70’s. Its main difference from the former is that it does not divorce these structures from us and posit them as self-sufficient (as if they pre- and post-exist us, structuring us, whereas being little effected by us). Instead, post-structuralism argues that their rigidity is only dependent upon our re-enforcement of them, thus they change with us as they change us. This means that the focus is shifted from being primarily on the structures as objects to being more so on the subjects within and affecting the structures.
Another main difference is that many post-structuralist writings are the practice of applying the insights that come from recognizing these structures and serve the goal of trying to reveal and/or undo the structures. That is, it more explicitly moves from theory (identifying structures) to practice (critiquing and thereby destabilizing them). For example, in critical race theory, we seek to reveal the transcendental norm of whiteness (all that is ‘white’ is deemed the baseline, the norm, and against which we judge all things, e.g., a book store has a section of “poetry,” this is the norm, and then “black poetry,” which is the deviant form of poetry) in order to rework its physical and psychical affect (e.g., not just change laws, terms, but also unconscious biases and habituated body-mind responses, like the accelerated heart rate and clutching one’s purse when a black man steps in an elevator with you).
(Notable figures: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, etc..)
Post-structuralism’s guiding premise, then, builds from structuralism’s, and is that the structure is mental, not in nature itself, but our minds impose this structure upon reality, forms reality in accordance with it—thus, reality (cultural, etc.) is a mental structure, as are the structures that explain reality. There are the more blatant structures of reality, the “surface structures,” of which we can become more explicitly conscious, especially by coming to understand the “deep structures,” those that spring from the unconscious. Like structuralism, post-structuralism believes that myths (traditional and in popular culture) are a predominate form of expression wherein these structures can be discovered, but furthers this to look at the full archives of human creation that range from literature to slang, architectural practices to habituated bodily movements of individuals to crowds to traffic, legal records to media to visual and audible arts, etc., etc..
(3) Postmodernism
Lyotard’s Postmodernism strikes a peculiar balance between these two (seemingly) conflicting schools (phenomenology and post-structuralism) by taking some of each. He likes the method of phenomenology, yet, like post-structuralism, acknowledges the power of the “grand narratives” that we live under and how they define our thought and being. This blend is postmodernism.
We see this blend explicitly in The Differend when, in the second chapter, he asks:
The first question hearkens structuralism’s insight into the arbitrariness of the sign (the arbitrary relation between “cat” and the meaning (“sense”) of the furry purring feline object). The second question questions phenomenology’s answer: go back to “the things themselves,” turn to lived experience in order to understand the creation of meaning. Phenomenology, according to Lyotard, permits understanding the “possible in the constitution of reality” (§69). Its perspectival perceiving expresses reality not just as “x is,” but also as “x is not:” “To the assertion of reality, there corresponds a description inconsistent with regard to negation. This inconsistency characterizes the modality of the possible” (§69). So, Lyotard is promoting phenomenology (namely its perspectival viewing) as a way of explaining structuralism’s perplexity. However, he also levels serious critiques against phenomenology because it privileges “presence” … it is the study of phenomena, phenomena are what appears … and post-structuralism has revealed that these formative structures affecting and being affected by us are precisely most powerful because they do not appear. Lyotard’s postmodernism will incessantly borrow from, merge, blend, promote and critique both philosophical approaches to best grasp the meaning-constitutive elements of reality that presence only as absence.
So, what is postmodernism?
The name comes from Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979, translated into English as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in 1984), his most well known book in the United States that explores the impact of the rapid growth and influence of technology on humanity and is centrally concerned with defining the postmodern as that which, in the modern, shows the unpresentable in presentation itself.
We see this blend explicitly in The Differend when, in the second chapter, he asks:
- “How is sense attached to the name when the name is not determined by the sense nor the sense by the name? Is it possible to understand the linkage of name and sense without resorting to the idea of an experience? An experience can be described only by means of a phenomenological dialectic …” (§69)
The first question hearkens structuralism’s insight into the arbitrariness of the sign (the arbitrary relation between “cat” and the meaning (“sense”) of the furry purring feline object). The second question questions phenomenology’s answer: go back to “the things themselves,” turn to lived experience in order to understand the creation of meaning. Phenomenology, according to Lyotard, permits understanding the “possible in the constitution of reality” (§69). Its perspectival perceiving expresses reality not just as “x is,” but also as “x is not:” “To the assertion of reality, there corresponds a description inconsistent with regard to negation. This inconsistency characterizes the modality of the possible” (§69). So, Lyotard is promoting phenomenology (namely its perspectival viewing) as a way of explaining structuralism’s perplexity. However, he also levels serious critiques against phenomenology because it privileges “presence” … it is the study of phenomena, phenomena are what appears … and post-structuralism has revealed that these formative structures affecting and being affected by us are precisely most powerful because they do not appear. Lyotard’s postmodernism will incessantly borrow from, merge, blend, promote and critique both philosophical approaches to best grasp the meaning-constitutive elements of reality that presence only as absence.
So, what is postmodernism?
The name comes from Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979, translated into English as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in 1984), his most well known book in the United States that explores the impact of the rapid growth and influence of technology on humanity and is centrally concerned with defining the postmodern as that which, in the modern, shows the unpresentable in presentation itself.
“A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern.
Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end
but in the nascent state, and this state is constant”
(Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 79).
“The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable
in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms,
the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively
the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations,
not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart
a stronger sense of the unpresentable”
(Ibid., 81).
Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end
but in the nascent state, and this state is constant”
(Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 79).
“The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable
in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms,
the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively
the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations,
not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart
a stronger sense of the unpresentable”
(Ibid., 81).
So, the postmodern is not the period following the modern, nor is it an overturning or out doing of the modern. A lot of contemporary sources talk about the postmodern as being the overturning of the modern by interrupting linearity through an eclecticism (Lyotard remarked such is characterized as wearing Parisian perfume in Tokyo while eating at a MacDonald’s—this is not postmodern, this is just bad taste!).
Lyotard prefers the name “re-writing modernity.”
It is primarily methodological, anti-historicism, and actively seeks to uncover biases of grand narratives. “Grand narratives” are the powerful stories that we call upon to create and structure meaning and, often, to rally people; they are the overarching organizational categories that may conjure national identity, portray capitalist political economy, invoke proletariat struggle or emancipation from marginalization, and are often captured like clichés or catch-phrases, e.g.: ‘power to the people,’ ‘as American as apple pie,’ ‘live free or die,’ ‘we are all God’s creatures,’ ‘class struggle,’ etc.. For postmodernism, all knowledge has become narrative; knowledge is a structuring force or power, not a mere label, but affective creation and direction of meaning/reality. Within this excess of narratives, narrativity itself, the rules and operation of this knowledge-cum-narrative system, and specific, especially strong grand narratives are what postmodernism targets to lay bare.
Postmodernism, then, is critique that constantly turns back to the canon (widely conceived) and takes it up and works through it to see many alternate narratives therein. It does not draw rigid boundaries between disciplines or schools of thought. It is therapeutic. It seeks to lay bare what remains unsaid.
In a letter written in the early 1980s, Lyotard describes the postmodern’s presentation of the unpresentable as one:
Lyotard prefers the name “re-writing modernity.”
It is primarily methodological, anti-historicism, and actively seeks to uncover biases of grand narratives. “Grand narratives” are the powerful stories that we call upon to create and structure meaning and, often, to rally people; they are the overarching organizational categories that may conjure national identity, portray capitalist political economy, invoke proletariat struggle or emancipation from marginalization, and are often captured like clichés or catch-phrases, e.g.: ‘power to the people,’ ‘as American as apple pie,’ ‘live free or die,’ ‘we are all God’s creatures,’ ‘class struggle,’ etc.. For postmodernism, all knowledge has become narrative; knowledge is a structuring force or power, not a mere label, but affective creation and direction of meaning/reality. Within this excess of narratives, narrativity itself, the rules and operation of this knowledge-cum-narrative system, and specific, especially strong grand narratives are what postmodernism targets to lay bare.
Postmodernism, then, is critique that constantly turns back to the canon (widely conceived) and takes it up and works through it to see many alternate narratives therein. It does not draw rigid boundaries between disciplines or schools of thought. It is therapeutic. It seeks to lay bare what remains unsaid.
In a letter written in the early 1980s, Lyotard describes the postmodern’s presentation of the unpresentable as one:
“which refuses the consolation of correct forms …
and inquires into new presentations--
not to take pleasure in them but to better produce the feeing
that there is something unpresentable.”
--Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985,
trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (London: Turnaround, Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1992), 24.
and inquires into new presentations--
not to take pleasure in them but to better produce the feeing
that there is something unpresentable.”
--Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985,
trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (London: Turnaround, Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1992), 24.