Contents:

On Lyotard

On Postmodernism

On Connections between Lyotard, Heidegger, Strauss, and Gilson

On “Re-Writing Modernity”

On Lyotard:

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was a contemporary French philosopher and often considered the “father of postmodernism.”  He coined the term and codified the guiding diagnosis of our “postmodern condition” in a book by that name, which was a commissioned report of the state of knowledge today.  Lyotard is a remarkable thinker; I’ll strongly argue him to be the most rewarding and most perplexing, the most important philosopher in contemporary Continental philosophy (although arguments against this position have undeniably valid points, most notably, his work is not read enough today).  Why (on the various counts)?  Lyotard has a background of incendiary influences: radical Marxian politics, phenomenology, and Freudian psychoanalysis—all carefully read through the history of philosophy and grounding his influence of the development of post-structuralism and founding his critique of it through his own postmodernism, all the while sustaining an abiding passion for aesthetics and art criticism. 

The remarks of various scholars fill in the picture the best: Peter Dews names him “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).  Robert Harvey and Lawrence Schehr name him “a polymath of a special sort,” that is:

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).

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 (he served as a curator for the Les Immatériaux, a 1985 art exhibit at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris).  It is without shock that we then read Gary Browning’s remark, “Lyotard is a demanding thinker, complex and a strain to live with.  He takes paths that are the other side of where most of us are going” (Gary Browning, Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives, vii ).

On The Postmodern:

His name-making book, The Postmodern Condition, 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 (Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81).

This “sense of the unpresentable” is key … we see it hearkened in the essay “Re-Writing Modernity” as he speaks of the ambiguity of the “now” and of his method of philosophy.  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” (Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985, trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (London: Turnaround, Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1992), 24).

So … what is postmodernism?  Postmodernism, for Lyotard, means something very different than how the term is used in the everyday marketplace of contemporary theories and catch-phrases.

Lyotard, rhetorically and mockingly, asks: “… is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change” (Lyotard, The Differend, §182)?  Elsewhere, he affirms that his thought “has obviously nothing to do with what is called postmodernity or post-modernism on the market places of today’s ideologies.  It has nothing to do with the use of parodies and quotations of modernity or modernism in either architectural, theatrical, or pictoral pieces, and even less with that movement resorting to the traditional forms of narrative as they have been displayed in novels or short stories” (Lyotard, “Re-Writing Modernity,” SubStance 16, 3, 54 (1987): 3-9, 8).

Postmodernism is neither a diachronical next period after the modern nor is it the modern’s overturning by an interruption of linearity through an eclecticism or roughshod assembly of artifacts.  Instead, postmodernism is primarily methodological and purports an anti-historicism and active uncovering of bias akin to Husserl’s phenomenology.  Its endeavor is to lay bare what otherwise remains un-presented or covered over in thinking.  Lyotard prefers to name it “re-writing modernity” to emphasize its persistent re-velation and re-address of the prejudicing and fictive grand narratives to which our thought so easily succumbs.  The “Re-” of re-writing refuses any idea of a re-turn to an origin or answer, but encourages re-turn as a working through that is pro-ductive and pro-motive of, in some cases, new pro-grams or, in others, the persistence of its own activity.

Thus, I propose to explain postmodernism as that method and body of insights founded on a secular and rigorous science of stripping away misleading “grand narratives” in philosophic thinking.  I propose that it operates with and by a reverence for unknown possibility equal to religious mysticism—both are pedagogic pursuits, spiritual exercises in the originary sense of philosophy as the love of wisdom and its activity as an exercise of seeking it in the face of adversity, into and though perplexity. 

On the Connections and a Contextualization of Lyotard’s Essay into the Last Four Works:

Gilson, in his essay “The Education of a Philosopher,” wrote about beginning with the philosophy of today so as to enter into the ‘river’ of philosophy, the unending conversation our civilization has produced.  Remember that he wrote of there being no ‘new idea,’ but that ideas are only really ever reincarnated in various forms.

Strauss, in his address “On Liberal Education,” wrote about engaging the greatest books from across the canon and, through this engagement, making them into dialogues.  This engagement was the process by which we “cultivate” ourselves, hone our own minds to be great minds engaging in dialogue with the greatest minds.

Heidegger’s study into the meaning of being, in the selection from his Being and Time, sought to return to the oldest question of being.  Our preparatory task was to reawaken our perplexity at the meaning of being so as to understand the necessity of viewing it as a question needing to be examined.

Lyotard’s essay, “Re-Writing Modernity,” is on the activity of re-writing as a method of doing philosophy.  How do we turn back to the canon, back to these originary questions?  Lyotard proposes that our typical conception of simply turning back to “discover” the ancient wisdom is misconstrued—our activity of turning back actually actualizes that which we seek; memory recreates the object of memory and re-presents it as something new.  Thus, we should simply try to “set the hands of the clock back” and rediscover some answer in the canon; instead, our activity of philosophy (of living) is a process of re-writing—it is doing philosophy as proposed forth by these elements of the past that suggest themselves forward to us. 

Thus, we can see one set of connections between these four readings in their compatible but varying proposals as to how we do and ought to do philosophy, be philosophical, or become educated. 

Another way that we can consider their connections is the intimacy set forth between philosophizing and being:

Consider how Gilson explained why we do philosophy is due to our desire to participate in the conversation, to be a part of the community who think, to live the philosophical (good) life. 

Consider how Strauss explained education by etymological analogy to cultivation, the activity of bringing something into and maintaining its healthy being. 

Consider how Heidegger, especially in the last section of the assignment, posited time as the horizon by which to understand the fundamental structures of Being. 

Lyotard’s re-writing modernity is an activity of philosophy, of doing philosophy, of living the philosophical life.  He is working out the interplay between modernity and postmodernity; these are types of thought, two ways of doing thought, doing philosophy, not time periods.  However, they are invocative of a relationship to time.  He talks about “postmodernism/re-writing modernity” as ambiguous as the “now” moment between the past and the future (every now is instantly not-now, it is no place, no designate time increment; it is always fluid and fleeting).  In contrast, the modern is obsessed with periodization, concretizing and defining everything so as to mean something, wrapping everything in a narrative.  How the modern, then, defines being will be very different from how the postmodern will craft a scene as to the meaning of being.  The way that we do this activity of postmodernism is as a re-writing of modernity, wherein the “re-” is a taking up and “working through” modernity.  This is an activity of life that seeks to understand being by dismantling the definitions from modernity. 

Thus, for Lyotard, the debate between postmodernity and modernity is a coming to understand the ambiguity of experience (especially as revelatory of meaning) and demarcation of time.  “Remembering” (more modern), as differentiated from his “Re-Writing” and “Working Through” (more postmodern), holds an idea and goal of “understanding” being through time, through one’s relation to time, wherein one acts like a detective and goes back to seek one’s origins, but which activity actually enacts the final completion of one’s destiny.  

(Consider the examples of Oedipus, who leaves “home” because it is foretold he will kill his father and marry his mother, but then seeks to know what this fortune meant, and in seeking an answer, he realizes that he did do both, thus initiating his final destiny of putting out his eyes and wandering off in miserable, wretched exile.  Or, consider the example of Marxist revolutions—they seek to alleviate the alienation of labor, but then re-impose versions of the old rules of control and re-perpetuate alienation.  Or, consider Nietzsche—he critiques everyone else for ‘doing metaphysics,’ but then falls prey to this himself by settling his ideas on a foundation of will.) 

Instead of remembering that reenacts the ‘sins’ it sought to avoid, there is another understanding of this “knowing the self” by doing the “working through,” the Freudian Durcharbeitung, wherein the guide is feeling, the listening to feelings, and activity is linkage.  

Freud uses this, still, as therapy; it serves to emancipate us from neuroses.  For Lyotard, it is less curative in a technical, mental sense.  Lyotard is skeptical of those narratives about emancipation.  But, he does connect it to a way of being: through understanding it akin to a Kantian play of the imagination, wherein imagination is more fruitful than reason’s supply of concepts, and where the synthetic work of knowledge gives up its reign or mastery over time, and is, instead, subject to it always and already.  This means that re-writing speaks to our way of being more open to letting things happen, to the event, to the there is…, to the occurrence, to letting things come up and be linked together, wherein each ‘now’ can be an opening.  

For Lyotard, then, this re-writing modernity is less clear than Freud in the sense it is purposive without purpose (it seems to have a purpose, acts as if it had purpose, but actually does not); it embraces the sense of ambiguity he revealed in the “now” in the opening of the essay.  In his embrace of the ambiguous, is this, then, more “true?”  Maybe “more true” in the sense Gilson utilized to stress the importance of questions over answers …?

On “Re-Writing Modernity:”

Currently, a mess of a few ideas, to be polished soon:

Postmodernism

Post-

Re-

Time:  (Referencing Aristotle’s Physics) Lyotard notes the impossibility of demarcating the gone from the coming up without a now moment, but, of course, every now vanishes as soon as it happens, so “… it is once and for all both too late and too soon …” (3).  Too late is an excess of vanishing; too soon is also an excess, but, an excess of what?  “With regard to identity, to the project of grasping and recognizing a ‘being here and now’” (3). 

How does this relate to his topic of modernity?  Well, he has moved from a label for the philosophy that identified it as “post-” to one that is “re-,” both terms being designations used for time.  More directly, he is also making the point that, just like how we need an effervescent “now” to determine what is past and what is to come, “… neither modernity nor the so-called postmodernity can be identified and defined as clear-cut historical entities.

In other words, this philosophy, be it called postmodernism or re-writing modernity, it is not about a diachronical time period. 

“On the contrary the postmodern attitude is still implied in the modern one insofar as modernity presupposes a compulsion to get out of itself and to resolve itself, therefore, into something else, into a final equilibrium … so that in this sense postmodernity ...

The Oedipus Story:

Oedipus the son of Laius, the King of Thebes, and Jocasta, the Queen, is banished from the kingdom while in infancy because an oracle foretold that he would murder his father and marry his mother.  He is rescued and grows up as the son of a foreign King.  He also consults and oracle and is told he should avoid his birthplace, because he will murder his father and marry his mother.  Heeding the warning, thinking the foreign court is his homeland, he leaves.  Encountering Laius, a stranger to him, a quarrel ensues and he kills him, his true father.  Entering Thebes, he solves the riddle of the Sphinx and is rewarded by being elected King by the grateful Thebians, accepting Jocasta, the Queen, as his wife.  After many years a dreadful plague breaks out and the oracle is consulted, which foretells the end of the plague when Laius’ murderer is evicted from the country.  Slowly, Oedipus comes to understand that the murderer is him, and that he has been married to his mother.  In the horror of the realization of his actions and the original oracle’s truth, Oedipus cuts out his own eyes and flees Thebes.

 

When we act as detective and are the object of investigation, in this activity of remembering so as to discover some truth, “… we are driven to carry on and out the crime rather than to break it down” (5).

Oedipus fulfills his destiny by trying to escape it.

Marxist revolutions repeat the alienation of humanity when trying to alleviate it.

Nietzsche reenacts metaphysics when trying to end it.

When remembering, we want to re-grasp the past, to master it; but we are unaware how much our desire performs that which we seek: the origin.  It accomplishes the destiny; creates it, makes it be (6).

Instead, there is an idea of ‘remembering’ as ‘working through’ that is endless (it doesn’t bring about its actualization).  “Unlike remembering, the working through could be defined as a work without purpose and, therefore, without will: without purpose in the sense that it works without being guided by the concept of its aim, but not without purposiveness” (7).

Equally-Floating Attention: (“free-association”) Freudian notion of paying attention to all a patient reports without placing more or less weight on any aspect (7).  This demands no prejudices, a suspension of judgments and responsiveness, to paying attention to every occurrence equally.  The patient must just speak freely, vent all ideas as they occur to him/her, unselected, in disorder.  Lyotard calls this a means of “linking” one sentence to the next without regard to logical, ethical, or aesthetic value.

Linkages is a way to gradually get to a scene … the leading thread is felling, listening to feelings … it draws a scene of the past.  “Lost time” is not presented, or represented; it is the presenting of the elements and re-writing is recording them (7).  This does not produce knowledge of the past.  We get no definition of the past.  The past is only acting as that which gives us the elements with which the scene will be made.

[Philosophy, if all its ideas are only reincarnated (Gilson), a continuing conversation, finds productivity in this kind of activity of re-thinking.]