Beyond the Postmodern? The Inhuman Condition

The introduction to this book argues that Lyotard’s work may be approached anew by recognising that his views developed in significant ways after his most popular work, The Postmodern Condition. In his later book The Inhuman and elsewhere, he suggests that a type of metanarrative persists after the decline of Enlightenment metanarratives, one which he calls “development” and associates with technoscience and capital. This “inhuman condition” is suggested as a perspective for reconsidering Lyotard’s work in light of contemporary concerns such as transhumanism, posthumanism, information society, and new media arts. This chapter frames discussion of these themes by introducing three major areas to be explored in the book, and the relationships between them: nihilism, information, and art.

Inhuman Arts: From Cubism to New Media

Twentieth century European philosophy has seen many influential critiques of the technological dehumanisation process, often accompanied by appeals to the humanising powers of art as a potential response. And yet, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in The Cubist Painters in 1913 that “Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.” What would it mean for art to be “inhuman,” and what relation might inhuman arts have to the dehumanising effects of technology? This chapter traces the idea of the inhuman in art from cubism to new media art, focusing on the reflections on these topics by Lyotard, through his activities both as a philosopher of art and as an exhibition director. It traces the meaning that “the inhuman” has in relation to art in his work from the exhibition Les Immatériaux to his later writings on Malraux, aiming to show how, for Lyotard, a “positive” aesthetic conception of the inhuman can act as an antidote to the “negative” inhuman of contemporary cultural conditions.

Nihilism and the Sublime: The Crisis of Perception

This chapter explores the subtle relations between the themes of nihilism and the sublime in Lyotard’s works. One of the puzzling shifts in Lyotard’s work is from the castigation of nihilism in his earlier “libidinal” philosophy to the elevation of the sublime in his later philosophy of “the differend.” The puzzle is that nihilism and the sublime are identified with each other in Lyotard’s work: they have the same basic structure, and are elaborated through the same examples. This chapter argues that in his later thought, the sublime acts as both a trope of nihilism and as a minimal response to nihilism. The apparent reversal in Lyotard’s thought may be understood as a case of his employment of the sophistical strategy of retorsion (turning an opponent’s argument back against them). Lyotard employs this technique to find, within nihilism itself, a resistance to nihilism in the aesthetic of the sublime. The value of Lyotard’s “sublime” response to nihilism lies in its very extremity: he sketches a liminal possibility for meaning at a point where it would appear that all hope for meaning is lost.

Economy, Ecology, Organology: On Technics and Desire

This chapter explores the theme of general economy which is evident in many of Lyotard’s diverse writings, and relates it to wider contexts – such as ecology and organology –in which it is operative. Economic terms inspired by Freud’s libidinal economy and related philosophical notions have been influential in economics, environmental ecology, and Systems Theory. Lyotard proposed a Nietzschean reading of the Freudian drives which defies convention by placing a positive value on the disharmonious, deregulating function. In various essays he examined ecology, economy, and Systems Theory explicitly, revaluing the way economic terms are typically understood. The chapter charts the links between these themes in Lyotard’s thought, and develops them especially for a critical comparison with Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of ‘general organology.’

Information and Event: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Information

This chapter interprets Lyotard’s remarks on information in the wider context of information theory and philosophy of information. It situates him as a philosopher of information who, despite a lack of specialist, technical knowledge of information theory, contributes to a reflective, philosophical understanding of information on two levels: the social impact of information, and the ontology of information. The chapter criticises Lyotard for failing to distinguish between theories of data transmission such as Shannon’s pivotal Mathematical Theory of Communication and semantic conceptions of information, yet argues that his critique nonetheless applies to many of the more recent semantic theories. The chapter concludes with a programmatic outline for how Lyotard’s critical intervention in the “linguistic turn” in The Differend might be developed for a critical intervention in the “informational turn,” an intervention which revolves around the question of how the event in the Lyotardian sense might be thought within an information-theoretic framework.

The End of Time: Evolution, Extinction, and the Fate of Meaning

Approximately one trillion, trillion, trillion (101728) years from now, the universe will suffer a “heat death.” What are the existential implications of this fact for us, today? This chapter explores this question through Lyotard’s fable of the explosion of the sun, and its uptake and extension in the works of Keith Ansell Pearson and Ray Brassier. Lyotard proposes the fable as a kind of “post-metanarrative” sometimes told to justify research and development, and indeed the meaning of our individual lives, after credulity in metanarratives has been lost: it replaces the adventure of the subject of history aimed towards the perfection and emancipation of the human with the adventure of inhuman, negentropic processes aimed towards the survival and extension of complexity. Negotiating Lyotard’s thought in relation to contemporary movements such as transhumanism and speculative realism, this chapter reflects on the existential significance of the “deep time” revealed by contemporary science.

Immaterial Matter: Yves Klein and the Aesthetics of the Sensible

This chapter demonstrates how Lyotard’s aesthetic theory provides the basis for a new interpretation of Yves Klein which provides an alternative to his common reception as a Conceptual artist. Through the different activities of philosophy and art, Lyotard and Klein both explore the nature of sensibility through an investigation of matter. Both paradoxically conclude that matter is in a sense immaterial. Lyotard understands matter as that part of an artwork which is diverse, unstable, and evanescent: in music, this corresponds to nuance and timbre, and in painting, to colour. Klein develops his meditation on matter firstly through his monochrome “propositions,” calling attention to pure colour (in particular, blue), which he theorises as stabilisations of energy. Beyond this, Klein invents “immaterial” works, such as the famous Void exhibition and his Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility. This chapter develops the confluences between Lyotard’s and Klein’s reflections on “immaterial matter,” and seeks to show how the results achieved in each area of activity (philosophy and art) can contribute to the other.

The Judgement of the Inhuman

The conclusion to this book stakes out the key claims that have been developed in the studies collected here. It argues that the uniqueness and value of Lyotard’s approach to nihilism lies in his refusal of the temptation to overcome it through a notion of unity, and his embrace of incommensurable differences. Lyotard contributes to a thinking of the posthuman and the information society by acknowledging the displacements of the human that science and technology effect, but also by resisting any collapse into a scientism or naturalism which sees no difference between natural or technological processes and political, ethical, or vitalist principles. For him, art functions as a countermovement to nihilism by resisting the demand to give up everything to that which can be calculated, a functional demand made everywhere today in the interests of performativity and in the name of development. For these reasons, Lyotard remains a thinker for our time.

Aesthēsis and Technē: New Technologies and Lyotard’s Aesthetics

This chapter examines Lyotard’s consideration of the way that technologies, and in particular information technologies, reconfigure the nature of aesthetic experience. When art uses communication technologies themselves as its matter or medium, the “traditional” model of aesthetic experience becomes problematised. Lyotard argues that this is the case because information technologies determine or “program” a conceptual meaning in advance of an aesthetic experience. Therefore, we no longer have a situation of the “free play” between sensible forms and concepts that constitutes the aesthetics of the beautiful for Kant. Lyotard argues, however, that this decline in aesthetic experience as traditionally conceived need not be understood negatively: rather, it may be seen positively in so far as it furthers experimentation with materials, and activates an aesthetic of the sublime.