The spectrum of the figural

ISSN 2046-9225 vol. 4, issue 1

Art History Supplement Free , fu l l t ex t onl ine e - journa l s inc e 2011

January 2014

The spectrum of the figural: aesthetics in the eyes of Jean-François Lyotard, by Vlad Ionescu

This paper introduces the “figural” as a key concept in the aesthetics of Jean-François Lyotard. In the aftermath of Lyotard’s later aesthetic writings, the figural is read as the “matrix” of Lyotard’s aesthetics. The emphasis falls on the difference between “discourse”, as an order of signification based on the structuralist model of language and the “figural”, as the trace of an irrecoverable desire to be seen and not read. The three forms of figures are further delineated: the figure-form, -image and -matrix. Finally, his aesthetics is integrated within a broader French critical tradition, forming a constellation between Lyotard’s “figural”, Valéry’s aesthetics and Deleuze’s Logic of sensation (1984). *

Introduction

Les choses réelles agissent esthétiquement par cette multiplicité qui empêche d’en finir avec elles par un acte abstrait.

Paul Valéry, Cahiers II.

Jean-François Lyotard’ s aesthetics opens a reflection on art conceived of as a tension between two irreconcilable

* A first version of this paper was published, in Dutch, in Esthetica as “Lyotards esthetica van het figurale” in 2009. You may read it at http://www.estheticatijdschrift.nl/magazine/2009/artikelen/lyotards-esthetica-van-het-figurale (last accessed December 18, 2013). © Estheticatijdschrift.nl. This translated and updated English version was kindly provided by the author.

http://www.estheticatijdschrift.nl/magazine/2009/artikelen/lyotards-esthetica-van-het-figurale

dimensions: the fluctuations of human desire and “discourse”, i.e., a rigid code that reduces the density and particular expression of desire to the flatness of a set of invariants. The aesthetics of late modernity makes the suspension of discourse’s dialectical movement its own theme. Art becomes the domain of singularities resisting the homogenizing tendency of discourse. It is no longer a palliative reconciliation and appeasement of desire based on a system of dictated aesthetic standards but a fragmentary reflection on the particular impact of human desire that withstands discursive homogenization. The early aesthetics of Jean-François Lyotard opens, as Mikel Dufrenne emphasized, a philosophy of absence and an ‘imperialism of desire’, which means that it struggles with the possibility of a return to a self-centred subject that reflects on an art increasingly playing on absence, fragmentation and loss of identification. What follows, firstly, is a blueprint of Discours, Figure’s major concepts concentrating on the figural as a reconfiguration of the sign. Secondly, possible conjunctions between the figural and other modern aesthetics are presented. Here, Deleuze’s Logique de la sensation and Paul Valéry’s reflections on painting are read through the spectrum of the figural. The lines drawn between these thinkers propose the figural as the stamina of various concepts that delineate the specificity of the visual and its irreducibility to discourse. Two dimensions of Lyotard’s aesthetics are sketched: on the one hand, the concept of the figural stresses the unbridgeable relation between the visual and the discursive. The figural is an event on the surface of discourse that disturbs its invariant dimension. On the other hand, the figural is the axis around which Lyotard’s aesthetics develops and to which he returns in various forms. In other words, the figural as a concept delineates the “matrix” of Lyotard’s own aesthetics. Finally, a few critical readings of Lyotard’s aesthetics (Mike Dufrenne, Pierre V. Zima) are revisited in

order to stress the tenor of his aesthetics and to reformulate the specific problem it tries to approach.

The open space of designation: the figural

Lyotard conceives of the concepts discourse and the figural through a revision of the structuralist model of language.1 “Discourse” refers to a closed system of relations that subsumes an object that it signifies to an invariable set of rules. The meaning of a word depends on the content that the name of an object signals (signifier – signified relation). The meaning of the word also depends upon the relation of opposition and exchange amongst its coexisting, neighbouring terms. Subsuming a correlate under an invariant relation of signifiers produces discursive meaning. This implies the transfer of an object in its density onto the normative, “flat” space of language. Discourse is a text (broadly speaking) in which terms are arranged according to a specific syntax where the terms negatively define each other’s value. “This tree is green” is a sentence where the value of each term depends on a differential relation with its neighbouring terms. This “immobile dialectic” at work in discourse does not necessarily have to be of a linguistic nature – perspective in painting is an example of discourse in visual arts in which objects are arranged according to the laws of geometry. In Lyotard’s view, this closed system inevitably inhibits the referential dimension, i.e. the “here” and “now” of the desiring body. The element that discourse fails to transparently account for and that it merely assimilates is the distance towards the object that it designates. Discourse, narration, history are the outcome of arranging objects and

1 See Gualandi Alberto, Lyotard. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999. The most critical analysis is Mike Dufrenne’s Doutes sur la « libidiné » L’Arc, 64, 1976. See also John Rajchman, Jean-François Lyotard’s Underground Aesthetics in October, Fall, 1998.

events according to an invariable set of rules. The figural is the outcome of repressing (inside discourse) a negativity (bodily distance in space) that is not of the same nature as the negativity of language (internal, differential, keeping terms at invariable distances). Lyotard thus underlines the limits of linguistic meaning and its radical difference from non-linguistic significance. Central to this conception is the idea that the disturbance of invariable intervals between terms is untranslatable in the terms and logic of discourse. The figural is exactly that which comes as Unheimlich into language, breaking it into forms (visual and linguistic) that fall short in comprehending. It is not a mere variation on the sharable language but precisely an effect that this language fails to grasp in its own syntax and morphology. However, how do we arrive at the figural? Both vision and language share one common element: negation. In vision, negation is the referential distance dividing and thus making possible the two poles of representation: subject and object. In language, there is a constitutive “no” at work giving value to terms: the value of each term is determined by the negation of its neighbouring terms. Both dimensions – language and vision – try to grasp the exterior object but neither of them can perfectly achieve this. What is it that we lose in this process of subjecting the exterior and heterogeneous reality under a set of invariables, i.e. discourse? After all, as Lyotard puts it, uttering that the tree is green will not put the colour green into the sentence. Lyotard refers to a step before these two types of negation. Do they not presuppose another non-linguistic type of negation, or rather, an “original”, unfathomable, phantasmatic split? Language is the result of reference and its denotation (Frege), but this distinction seems to point to a pre-linguistic unity. Language is also the outcome of a negation interior to the linguistic system (Saussure), but this

negation seems to suggest a rupture in a primary unity. Lyotard explains this unity through a psychoanalytical framework. The Entzweiung he refers to is the pre-linguistic separation from the mother. This schism between subject and object is at the source of a discourse which tries to close the gap and recuperate this separation within its structure. The figural is, on this account, the trace on the surface of discourse of this tendency to recuperate the designated object inside the discursive order. The Entzweiung not only produces the space between subject and object but it also strongly constitutes all relations to the object according to the working of desire. It is this new actor, desire, which determines the representation of an object. More importantly for aesthetics, art is that form of expression, which makes visible - in its figures - the working of desire. The artistic in art is that element which dislocates what is recognizable in a correlate and an aesthetic discourse is always a discourse on this disruptive element, baptised “the figural.” The figural is precisely that which transgresses the invariable rules of discourse and which questions discourse’s pretension of transparent communication. Lyotard explains the working of the figural (and the figural has to be understood as an element that “works through” the art-work) following the mechanism of the dream-work. As in Freud’s Traumdeutung, displacement and condensation are the main axes on which the dream-work disturbs the transparency of discourse. A secondary elaboration renders a visible image of the repressed and dreamt content. There is no initial clear form of the dream which an interpretation, by clarifying the effects of displacement and condensation, brings back to light. The dream work is rather a process where desire, read “the figural”, distorts the representation. And this is the importance of Freud as Lyotard reads him: the dream interpretation forces us to look at language, to conceive of meaning as a visible space worked by desire and not merely as

signalling a chain of signifiers. This clear demarcation and discrepancy between the visual (as density, depth and singularity) and the “written” discourse (as an inevitable transformative reduction of the visual) is the essential trademark of Lyotard’s aesthetics. The optical, the indexical, the sensible as such can never be innocently transcribed. The figural is an unexpected dislocation, a “fissure” that disturbs the regularity of discourse on its surface. On the one side, the figural is the force that transgresses the regularity of intervals between terms. In this sense, it testifies of an “irrecoverable otherness” (“une alterité irrécuperable”) of the object that discourse fails to account for. On the other side, the figural involves designation, an outward movement, opening discourse to the “other of significance” (“l’autre de la signification”), to a dimension that discourse cannot completely reproduce. The figural exposes the forces involved in the formation of meaning. Over against the figurative, as the representation and recognition of a correlate, the figural is critical because it freezes and frames the trace of desire surfacing on discourse. The figural is the sign on this surface, an element pointing to an exterior object and to a desiring body. Thus, the figural acts on two dimensions: a) it makes visible the singularities that the process of “making discourse” tends to dissolve, an inevitable process to which artistic practice responds and b) it is a transgressive force that disturbs the flattening force of discourse. It has two functions: one critical and one visual. The former resists the unavoidable discursive flattening; the other makes this resistance visible and maintains its specificity. Nostalgia for singularities and defiance against their annihilation: these traces form the matrix of Lyotard’s aesthetics and appear in other conceptual “figures”, like the irrreconciliation of different “régimes de phrases” (Le différend), the tension of the faculties that fail to

grasp the object in the sublime experience (Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime), the “anamnesis” of the visible in (Que peindre? Adami, Arakawa, Buren) or the singularity of the “event” (Peregrinations : Law, Form, Event).

The figural as reconfiguration of the sign

The sign cannot be reduced to signalling an exterior correlate. To the contrary, the correlate becomes a sign at the moment when it is denoted, revealing some of its components while hiding others. Signs do not simply indicate objects; the latter rather become what they are through signs, meaning that signs partially disclose the objects. Otherwise said, relating to an object turns the object into a sign. Discourses always fail to entirely convey an exterior correlate and that is because opacity is central both to the sphere of communication and to the exterior objects themselves. Language cannot assimilate an exterior correlate inside its structure without transforming it, delivering one façade and hiding others.2 This thought is central to Discours, Figure and it is significant to the theory of signs: words are not signs on their own, but they transform the designated object into a sign, which at once discloses one side and conceals other:

“The opacity is in the object, neither in the word, nor in its distance from the object. Words are not signs, but as soon as there is a word, the object designated becomes sign.”3

2 Lyotard refers to this as the radical difference between the “letter” as an essence that makes redundant the material structure that signals it and the “line” as the singular gesture that shows the irreducible material aspect in signifying an object. A figural use of the “letter” is also possible: while the material façade of the “letter” (the signifier) is irrelevant if it merely signals a content (the signified), the “letter” as used by Mallarmé in Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard displays the materiality of the signifiers, making visible their “sensitive arrangement.” 3 Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, Figure. Paris : Klincksieck, Colléction d’esthétique, 1971, 82. My tranlation. The original reads: « L’opacité est dans l’objet, non dans le mot, ni dans sa distance à l’objet. Les mots ne sont pas des signes, mais dès qu’il y a mot, l’objet désigné devient signe… ». The citations from this primary source are my own. In the meanwhile, Discours, Figure has finally been translated

Secondly, the word itself as a sign is opened to a value other than the signalling one (as mere identification of a signified through a signifier). The word as graphic appearance is something to be seen and it is to this material structure of the signs4 that Lyotard dedicates many analyses, like the one on Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard. In this context, the figures are the effects of the sign’s materiality (sonorous or graphic) or, as Deleuze would put it, they are:

“…the effects of the signifier itself, the formal elements of the signifier determined in relation to a phonetic substance to which writing itself conferred a secret privilege.”5

Over and against an account of the unconscious, of the dream-work and the artwork as a chain of signifiers, the figural delivers images and forms that disturb this role attached to the signifier understood in its signalling function and according to its binary internal structure. The figural is not approachable exclusively from a linguistic perspective. On the contrary, it splits open discourse both externally (the sign is what we make out of the designated object) and internally (art testifies of a figural that introduces irregularity in the regular negation that makes discourse possible). The figural responds to the dualism implicit in the nature of the sign. With the figural Lyotard questions the structure of conceiving of the sign in terms of “form” vs. “content,” “signifier” vs. “signified” or the “figurative” vs. “abstraction” where the former terms relate to the second by encompassing or “coating” it. The very dichotomy “figurative” – “abstraction” presupposes the binary logic of representation

into English. See Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon with an introduction by John Mowitt. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 4 Deleuze and Guattari call it « la douleur du graphisme ». Gilles Deleuze; Guattari Felix, L’Anti-Œdipe. Paris : Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972, 241. 5 Deleuze ; Felix, op. cit., 288. My translation. The original reads: «… effets du signifiant lui-même, les éléments formels du signifiant déterminé par rapport à une substance phonique à laquelle l’écriture même confère un privilège secret ».

as such. With Lyotard one has to see the abstraction (as expression of desire) that is at the core of figurative representation and the sign as a process of “making a sign” out of an already opaque exterior correlate. Lyotard proposes a reconfiguration of the sign by tracing the specificity of vision, its effect and irreducibility in the formation of meaning.

The figural: image-form-matrix

There are three dimensions of the figural: the figure-image, the figure-form and the figure-matrix. These are three modes of perceiving the figural as a force that affects the pictorial surface. The figure-image stands for the blurring of the distinctive lines of representation; these lines, discursive in the sense that they attempt to depict a correlate in a clear and distinct manner are distorted, multiplied or recomposed. They produce a disarray of form. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2) is an adequate illustration. The body affected by the figure-image is slightly faint but still recognizable; the object of representation is observable but also fused with the space surrounding it, resulting in an indefinite appearance. The figure-form refers to a plastic space traversed by primary processes, the forces that disregard the figurative representation. Due to this suspension of the depicted object in its unity, the figure-form is the visible materialisation of the processes traversing an artwork. Jackson Pollock or Cy Twombly’s work are examples of the figure-form, or the “nervure of the visible,” as transgression of the figurative line as such. The figure-image still fulfils desire because it finds its pleasure in the recognition of the object, while the revelatory line disappears in the case of the figure-form. The figure-form is a bad form, Dionysian, a force – like the unconscious

processes – that is indifferent to unity, to the Apollonian organization of space according to the rules of Euclidean geometry. Finally, the figure-matrix: invisible as such, it attempts to reveal the phantasm traversing the pictorial space. The matrix refers to an original split, an original disturbance that regulates representative space. Two Freudian concepts are at the basis of the matrix: the death drive and the pleasure principle. The first accounts for psychic phenomena that tend towards the destruction of the organism while the second preserves the organism and stabilizes the psychical energy. Whereas the pleasure principle creates unity, coherence and regulates the structure of discourse, the death drive disturbs this structure, untying the rhythmic pulse of energy. The intensity of an artwork depends exactly on the effect of the death drive as Lyotard interprets it: it is not as much a destructive but rather a creative principle. The figural is not an issue of reconciliation but it is exactly that free, irregular energy that disrupts the organic structure of representation. Take Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III (A few words to sing), to which Lyotard dedicated a whole essay.6 Here the musical domain receives a level of secondary, discursive organisation while language is presented as disturbed in its phonetic form. There is a reversal of roles because “normally” music is perceived as less rigid in its organisation than language. In Sequenza III the figural affects the libretto in its reconfiguration as an unrecognizable space where the soprano’s laughter splits the syllables of “the few words to sing.” The figure-form and figure-image are the perceptible modes in which the figure-matrix manifests itself. The matrix is a shifting source of investments of energy that refuses the

6 Jean-François Lyotard, Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, Collection"10/18," 1973.

transparency, stability and self-sufficiency of a structure. As such, the matrix is recognizable in its projections via the configuration of figures, which disrupt the consistency of the discursive order. For Lyotard the agent of form in art is the death drive, never the pleasure principle. In psychoanalysis, dreams or phantasms open up a space where one can deal with an original loss and where primary processes are the subject of a theoretical discourse. In the artwork, or better said, in the working of art, the spaces of transgressions are the result of the death drive that leaves traces of a figure-matrix. Communicability, a return to reality and reconciliation are not the goals of artistic expression because the latter is the field on which desire imprints and exposes its instable trajectories. Art has no pretension to bridge differences, as it is that very form displaying the phantasm of reconciliation. Freud called “condensation” this disregard for the space between terms and their rearrangement. According to Lyotard, the critical work displays the condensation as such.

Illustration of the figural: Orpheus Eurydice

Orpheus cannot refrain from looking back at Eurydice while stepping out of the Underworld; he disobeys a simple rule. This gesture involves two dimensions: firstly, an inexplicable irrational deed and secondly, the introduction of an irregularity. In Lyotard’s interpretation, it is not Orpheus’ singing on earth that distinguishes him as a poet. To the contrary, it is this irrational transgression and the unexpected irregularity it introduces. His sudden fall into temptation creates a figure-image based on an asymmetry between the law (discourse) and its impulsive disruption (figure). Central in this image is the optical aspect in conjunction with desire, or, rather, the desire to see Eurydice (figure) exactly at the instant when a system of regularities (discourse) prohibits him from looking back. His illegitimate gesture interrupts

the discursive order. Orpheus’s gaze is the figural gesture par excellence that marks the poetic function as such. The myth displays an incompleteness and a lack of reconciliation that the poet is ready to accept. Here is Orpheus receiving the chance to return to the light of day, to continue to be the greatest voice and to reunite with Eurydice. One of the spirits sets the rule: “if, by employing all his intelligence, He is not overcome by his youthful ardour, and is mindful of the rigorous decree.”7 A restless Orpheus replies: “But what do you fear, my heart? What Pluto forbids, Love commands! He is a more powerful god, Who vanquishes both man and gods, And who I must obey.”8 This illustration shows the “baroque” side of the figural: it marks the conflict between a) an abrupt sensation in discord with b) a given system of regularities. The effect is also double: an unexpected transgression and, at the same time, its visible display. The impetus of this transgression lies in its optical-tactical desire to reach Eurydice but the gesture as such disturbs the system of discourse (here the rules involved) that fail to comprehend it. The poetic function, the metaphor, the figural is an irregularity that resists paraphrasing in the terms of discourse; it is not a mere “variation” on received meanings of common language but an intense commotion made visible and preserved in its singularity. Lyotard’s aesthetics fosters other concepts that are extensions of the figural in the sense of concern for the singularity and the force of the visual: the tensor, the event or his reading of the Kantian sublime.

7 In order to illustrate the figural in the gesture of Orpheus, we use the libretto of Alessandro Striggio for Monteverdi’s L’Orpheo, Favola in Musica (Concerto Vocale, René Jacobs, transl. Derek Yeld, Harmonia Mundi, 1995). The original reads: “ s’adoprerà sua ingegno/ Sic he no’l vinca giovenil desio, Nè I gravi imperi suoi sparga d’oblio.” (Monteverdi, 90-91, my emphasis) 8 The original reads: “Ma che temi mio core? Ciò che vieta Pluton, comanda Amore. A nume più possente, Ch evince uomini e Dei, Ben ubbidir dovrei.” (Monteverdi, 94-95, my emphasis)

In this desire to break unexpectedly into the space of regular intervals, to enter the distance itself (the law) that has to be respected is a utopian gesture but the condition sine qua non of artistic creation. This image of a “modern” Orpheus shows precisely the figural at work. It finds often its echo, like Her testimony in Que peindre? Adami Arakawa Buren:

“I would like to say: a suitor, after one year of clever and crafty courtship, when the object is about to give itself, he moves it away. He liked to be seduced. He draws it back or it draws itself back. If you want her, Orpheus is told, do not look at her. He turns back to see her. This look is being ostracized. Orpheus, called from behind by sighs and moans that are a thousand short lines coming from Eurydice’s bosom, turns back and deafens them with a glance. The gaze of the draughtsman freezes the profusion. He opens the space of a possible work, of a form. Allow me to betray you, said the final line to the possible lines. It is about a prudish civility (asceticism would be emphatic), but arrogant.”9 This is another figure-image of the same ‘original’ phantasm of the artist: a slightly arrogant, slightly ambitious desire to inhabit the interval from which other intervals rise, the form that forms, the matrix that spurs images and forms. This is the desire to see the difference itself.10 Sequitur Lyotard: “The artist is not someone who reconciles, but one who endures that unity is absent. The “ugliness” of the work comes from

9 My translation. The original reads : “J’aimerais dire : un soupirant, après un an de cour savante et ruse, quand l’objet va se rendre, l’écarte. Il aimait être séduit. L’écarte ou s’écarte. Si tu veux l’avoir, dit-on à Orphée, ne la vois pas. Il se retourne pour la voir. Ce regard est une mise à l’écart. Orphée appelé de derrière par les soupirs et les gémissements qui sont mille petites lignes parties de la gorge d’Eurydice, se retourne et d’un coup d’œil les assourdit. Le regard du dessinateur arrête la profusion. Il ouvre l’espace d’une œuvre possible, d’une forme. Permettez-moi de vous trahir, a dit la ligne finale aux lignes possibles. Il s’agit d’une civilité (ascèse serait emphatique) pudique, mais arrogante.” (Lyotard, Jean-François, Que Peindre ? Adami Arakawa Buren, Paris : Éditions de la Différance, coll. La vue le texte, 1987, 38, emphasis added). In the meanwhile, Lyotard’s Que Peindre ? has been translated into English. See Jean-François Lyotard, What to Paint ? Adami Arakawa Buren, translated by Antony Hudek, Ionescu Vlad, Peter W. Milne, with an introduction by Herman Parret and an epilogue by Gérald Sfez. Leuven : Leuven University Press, 2012. 10 See Valerio Adami’s Orpheus et Euridice (1974) in Jean-François Lyotard, Que Peindre?, vol. 2 – Oeuvres. Paris: Éditions de la différence, 1987, 1.

this absence. It manifests that art is not religion.”11 The movement of desire finds an end only in death; until then, it advances in various figural surrogates, images and forms with no pretention to bring about atonement, neither for the artist nor for the viewer.

Extension of the figural: Deleuze’s Bacon

The intersections between the aesthetics of Lyotard and Deleuze or Valery propose the figural as a spectrum of similar concepts distinguishing a specific approach of art as sensibility for the irreducibility of vision and its constant tension with discourse. Deleuze’s Logique la sensation is not merely a book on Francis Bacon but a project for a philosophy of art. It is its method that provides innovative readings: commencing from the particular artist towards a larger comprehension of artistic form. From the particular artist one reaches a particular conception of artistic form to be confronted with other possible ones. Each artist fathoms anew the history of art and its formal language. From this angle, in aesthetics, the differences are more important than similarities. Aesthetics becomes the domain where one has to adjust traditional concepts to the unstable dynamic of the artistic field, to show how each conception of form is a new creation that responds to a previous one and opens the path for others. This way, one avoids a holistic “definition” of art from which or onto which the heterogeneity of the artistic field is “explained.” Following the same movement, any critical consideration of form in art commences from a certain tendency, period or artist with no final goal in sight but just the variability of form as a sign of the instability of desire.

11 My translation : “L’artiste n’est pas quelqu’un qui réconcilie, mais qui supporte que l’unité soit absente. La « laideur » de l’œuvre procède de cette absence. Elle manifeste que l’art n’est pas religion.” (Lyotard, op.cit.,383)

And desire unfolds itself according to an irregular movement, which has no final telos. This way, philosophy of art no longer subsumes various tendencies under one definition of art but critically considers different “images” of art, with no pretension to bridge them. Logique de la sensation could be read as an extension of Lyotard’ s aesthetics of the figural, crafted along the tension between figurative representation and the figural. The figurative is the rapport between an exterior correlate and its representation, an image that encapsulates an exterior correlate belonging further to a network of other images, all arranged in a “composed whole” (“ensemble composé”). Deleuze’s terms that refer to “discourse” are the figurative, representation, narration and illustration. The Deleuzian procedure: figural transgression by isolation of the figure in order to fracture narration.12 With Lyotard one could reformulate this gesture in the following way: isolation of the figure in order to break the regular rhythm of images coordinated by the pleasure principle, a return to the partial drives prior to their unity. The figure-image is visible in what Deleuze presents as the double function of the contour, both as delimiting membrane and as common field between the figure and a block of colour. The bodily spasmatic contortions mark the figure-form that we interpret as the “source” of that movement. According to Deleuze, this dynamism originates in the body’s dissipation into the material structure. This spasm turns the body inside out or its tendency to disappear through a needle or a mouth marks the figure-form. The “corps sans organes” as brute flesh and polyvalent formation also illustrates the figure-form as the sign of its irreducibility to discursive representation. Its matrix is visible at the crossing of the figure-image and the figure-form, displaying

12 Gilles Deleuze, Logique de la sensation. Paris : Seuil, 2002, 12.

the desire to dilute the figure’s membrane, the line that distinguishes it from other objects. The figural is that energy that attenuates this membrane understood as the figurative function of the line and that accentuates the impetus of a line of flight. The “corps sans organes” as a force struggling against the stable structure of the organism, is another variation on the figural and an example of conceiving of artistic form as the dynamics of the line. A force fluctuates on the body and deforms its stability. Further traces of the figurative (as discourse) and the figural are: the “bone” as structuring force in tension with the “meat” as figure-image, as an opaque zone. Also, Deleuze’s “diagram,” his variant of the figural as polyvalent force without identifiable significance, unfolds on the surface of the figurative (discourse). The figural is not a nonsensical disruption of force but a presence of forces dissipating the discursive dimension.13 Is this an innocent critical turbulence, symptomatic of French post-structuralism? The figural as a concept questions (negatively) the stability of representation but also proposes (positively) an open notion of form as linear variation of desire. Form is the human imprint of a pathematic body travelled by variation and movement. In this sense, form has nothing stable but its analysis commences from an individual expression, its Kunstwollen, its desire to become form. When it comes to art, there is no synthesis and Lyotard teaches this lesson time and again. The figural can thus function as a model for aesthetics perceived as the result of a particular investment of energy.

13 Deleuze conceives this as an “intrusion” : “C’est comme si la main prenait une indépendance, et passait au service d’autres forces, traçant des marques qui ne dépendent plus de notre volonté ni de notre vue. Ces marques manuelles presque aveugles témoignent donc de l’intrusion d’un autre monde dans le monde visuel de la figuration. Elles soustraient pour une part le tableau à l’organisation optique qui régnait déjà sur lui, et le rendait d’avance figuratif.” ibid., 94.

Valéry and the figural in painting

There are traces of a similar conception of artistic expression in Paul Valéry’s work. His intention was not to question the nature of the sign and other intrigues of post-structuralism, yet it is worth analysing his proto-configuration of a figural aesthetics as delineated in his specific interest in the visual arts, the tensions it involves and the stylistic effects it creates. Here is a relocation of the plan “figure – discourse” in the aesthetics of Valéry. In Degas Danse Dessin, Valéry distinguishes between merely seeing a thing and seeing it in order to draw it. The latter act involves the movement of the hand. Like in Lyotard, representing a thing implies its alteration, or, indeed, an act of “making a sign” out of an object. Valéry writes on the signifying function of the eye:

“Up to that point the eye followed only as intermediary. It made us speak, think; it guided our steps, our ordinary movements; sometimes it aroused our feelings…But drawing according to an object gives the eye a certain command that our will sustains. Hence, in this case, one has to want in order to see and this willed vision has drawing as its end and means at the same time. I cannot make clear my perception of a thing without virtually drawing it, and I cannot draw this thing without a voluntary attention which remarkably transforms what I firstly thought to have perceived and known well.” 14

14 Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin in Pièces sur l’art. Œuvres. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960, 1188. My translation. The original reads: « L’œil jusque-là n’avait suivi que d’intermédiaire. Il nous faisait parler, penser ; guidait nos pas, nos mouvements quelconques ; éveillait quelquefois nos sentiments….Mais le dessin d’après un objet, confère à l’œil un certain commandement que notre volonté alimente. Il faut donc ici vouloir pour voir et cette vue voulue a le dessin pour fin et pour moyen à la fois. Je ne puis préciser ma perception d’une chose sans la dessiner virtuellement, et je ne puis dessiner cette chose sans une attention volontaire qui transforme remarquablement ce que d’abord j’avais cru percevoir et bien connaître ». The result is similar when we try to render a thought in a more expressive way, « par une expression plus voulue. Ce n’est plus la même pensée ».

Connivance of discourse and figure, Lyotard would say. Drawing, in this sense involves la volonté soutenue, a “sustained will”, it requires the unity of the organism. There is incompatibility between drawing (as discourse) and the dream, says Valéry. One stabilizes the object, it necessitates attention and wakefulness, the other disturbs it. The retinal attention has to fight the seductions of the curve, it has to strive to form the “line,” the style traceur, a “conservative” movement, a registration of the “displacements of our eyes”, a conjugation of the “borders of regions diversely coloured”15 where the will directs the hand. Nevertheless, this subordination of the hand to the will is indirect because memory intervenes. Each view of the eye on the model becomes a mnemonic line that inspires the movement of the hand on the paper: “There is a transformation of a visual tracing in manual tracing.”16 “Errors” enter the picture because this operation is not fluent; there is no perfect parallelism between the drawing hand and the memory of an image. It is in these “errors”, in the dissymmetry between seeing and the drawing hand that we recognize traces of the figural: with Valéry, drawing – read, the sign – already transforms, even when attentive, the exterior correlate. Valéry points out that the eye is never neutral, it “invents” because perception is an elaboration of “all it gives as impersonal and definite result of observation.”17 If there is place, in the aesthetics of Paul Valéry, for the figural as mark of desire that disturbs the regulative line of the eye that the will directs, then it finds here a perfect formulation:

“The artist advances, moves back, leans over, winks, employs his body as an accessory of his eye, becomes

15 Ibid., 1189. My translation. The original reads: « les frontières des régions diversement colorées ». 16 Valéry, op.cit., 1189. My translation. The original reads : « Il y a transformation d’un tracement visuel en tracement manuel ». 17 Ibid., 1191. My translation. The original reads: « …tout ce qu’elle nous donne comme résultat impersonnel et certain de l’observation ».

completely an organ of sight, of marking, of adjustment, of developing.”18

An image reminiscent of Deleuze’s Bacon: the artist who disappears through the eye, the regulating force tracing the figure-image. If Lyotard conceived of the figural through the opacity intrinsic to linguistic significance, Valéry marks the presence of the figural though the dissymmetry between the “state of the patch” (of colour) and their mnemonic presence that coordinates the hand and the “state of things or objects”:

“A whole series of mysterious operations between the state of patches and the state of objects intervene, better coordinate brute incoherent givens, resolve contradictions, introduce judgments formed since first childhood, impose on us continuities, connections, modes of transformation that we gather under the names of space, time, matter and movement. We imagine thus the moving animal as we thought that we saw it; and maybe, if we examine with enough subtlety these representations from a while ago, we would find the law of unconscious falsifications which would allow one to draw the movements of birds flying or horses running, as if we could have observed them at ease: but these interpolated movements are imaginary. We attributed probable figures to these fast movements, and it would not be irrelevant to research comparatively documents to clarify this sort of creation through which understanding fills in the gaps of what is registered by the senses.” 19

18 Ibid., 1189. My translation. The original reads: « L’artiste avance, recule, se penche, cligne des yeux, se comporte de tout son corps comme un accessoire de son œil, devient tout entier organe de visée, de pointage, de réglage, de mise au point ». 19 Valéry, op. cit.., 1192. My translation. The original reads: « Toute une série d’opérations mystérieuses entre l’état de taches et l’état de choses ou d’objets interviennent, coordonnent de leur mieux des données brutes incohérentes, résolvent des contradictions, introduisent des jugements formés depuis la première enfance, nous imposent des continuités, des liaisons, des modes de transformation que nous groupons sous le noms d’espace, de temps, de matière et de mouvement. On imaginait donc l’animal en action comme on croyait le voir ; et peut-être, si l’on examinait avec assez de subtilité ces représentations de jadis, trouverait-on la loi des falsifications inconscientes qui permettaient de dessiner des mouvements du vol des oiseaux ou des galops du cheval, comme si on eût pu les observer à loisir : mais ces moments interpolés sont imaginaires. On attribuait à ces mobiles rapides des figures probables, et il ne serait pas sans intérêt de chercher par comparaison de documents à préciser cette sorte de création, par laquelle l’entendement comble les lacunes de l’enregistrement par les sens ».

It is this disequilibrium between a partially opaque correlate and its designation that marks the figural in both Valéry and Lyotard. The figure-matrix, here a ‘law of unconscious falsification’, unfolds in a variety of figure-images and figure-forms. Desire plays the central role for both authors: Valéry speaks of the “desire to form”, (“désir de former”) and of the visual world as a “continuous sensation” (“excitant perpetuel”): “everything arises or feeds the drive to appropriate the figure or the form of the thing that the glance builds.”20 In addition, he distinguishes form from drawing: the latter is the manner of perceiving the former and form is never the same in two individuals - figural construction of an irreducible object. A final bridge between the aesthetics of Valéry and Lyotard: this Venus lying in bed, says Valéry, gathers a multiplicity of elements: both a presentation of various bodily parts and a diverse chromatic system. The irreducibility of this multiplicity to the one-dimensionality of abstract thought delineates artistic creation. The material registration of a plurality of simple elements (the model, the chromatic composition, the trace, etc.) indicates the figural understood as a reconfiguration of exterior elements functioning as “brute multiplicities”, des multiplicités brutes. The essence of art is precisely the resistance of an object to abstract one-dimensional reduction:

“Real things act aesthetically by this multiplicity which prevents having done with them through an abstract act. …. The same thing X confers the diversity a1 = f(X) ; a2 = φ(X) ; a3 = g(X) etc. following that the observer becomes f, φ or g. This verse is melody, it is image, too; also, thought, and f,

20 Ibid., 1212. My translation. The original reads: « tout réveille ou nourrit l’instinct de s’approprier la figure ou le modelé de la chose que construit le regard ». An interesting reflection on the visual in Valéry can be found in his Les deux vertus d’un livre (Oeuvres II. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960). The essay is a reflection on the book as reading surface and as visual object.

φ or g are the devices in between which we can look for passages, modulation.”21

This is an important passage, representative of a figural aesthetics. In Lyotard, as well, the sign is reconfigured according to (a) the position of the viewer, (b) the density of the object itself and (c) the modulation between the two that remains materially inscribed on the sign. A figural aesthetics radically opens discourse to its exterior other, displaying the unbridgeable character of the two dimensions. The goal is not to oppose the figurative to the abstract, but rather to trace how the visible works in representation, how the representation is interesting for the specific manner of materializing human desire. The goal of this approach is less the iconographic search for “meaning” but a visual semiotics interested in mapping out the crystallisation of the energies that an artwork makes visible. It also emphasizes the irreducible visual qualities that are specific to the plastic expression.

To finish with the judgment of Lyotard

Already in Valéry the observer (f, φ, g) is a variable. This formulation articulates the irresolution between the aesthetics of Lyotard and one of its competent critics, Mikel Dufrenne. Dufrenne insists that any figural transgression has to return to the unity of a subject as prerequisite in the phenomenological order. Already in Valéry and to a greater extent in Lyotard and Deleuze, it is this return to the identity of the subject that is questioned. For Lyotard, the subject is always marked by modulations that make it impossible to speak of a return to the same subject. Even more, this return

21 Paul Valéry, Cahiers II. Paris : Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1974, 942. My translation. The original reads: « Les choses réelles agissent esthétiquement par cette multiplicité qui empêche d’en finir avec elles par un acte abstrait… La même chose X donne la diversité a1 = f(X) ; a2 = φ(X) ; a3 = g(X) etc. suivant que l’observateur devient f, φ ou g. Ce vers est mélodie, il est aussi image ; aussi, pensée et les f, φ, g, sont des dispositifs entre lesquels on peut chercher des passages, modulation ».

to the unity of the subject implies a reduction of the multiplicity to sameness, dissolving the event into history, a problem that Lyotard is aware of and which aesthetics tries to save. Moreover, the identity of the subject as such is not part of Lyotard’s philosophical project; in his framework, the subject is an element in the formation of discourse, it is a function that arranges events according to a system of invariables. The result is a coherent narration, history or discourse. Blaming him for being ignorant of the prerequisite of subjectivity is tantamount to shifting the whole spectrum of his philosophical project. However, is it true that the figural is merely a concept for a philosophy of absence replacing a philosophy of presence, as Dufrenne argues? First, it is more than that. The absence that it underlines is the sign of the irreducibility of the artistic experience and its expression, (bodily, libidinal, irregular) to the discursive regular form. “Absence” means here a consideration for the opacity of the world and for the effects that this opacity brings about. Concern for this irreducibility profoundly marks the figural and much of Lyotard’s philosophy. The figural as mark of transgression of the discursive transcribes in critical terms the very attributes of aesthetic modernity. The latter, as materialized in the artistic productions of late modernity, can no longer be an affirmation of presence and reconciliation. The figural at work in the contemporary arts can be understood in comparison to the biological model of the “lysis,” as the disintegration of the membrane of the cell as a unitary whole. By extremely opening up its methods and materials, by integrating elements that refuse any formal stability, contemporary arts dissolves its own limits and make this dissolution its own theme. The figural in the arts is visible in the very instant that displays this dissolution, extension and transgression of the figurative line.

Second, one still has to admit the fragility of such an aesthetic concept. The figural resists its absorption into discourse and yet, as a concept, it belongs to theoretical discourse. Here is the aporia of this project: it tries to save from discourse a moment of singularity that is artistic, strenuous, libidinal but it is this very theoretical designation of the figural that risks absorption into the discursive order. This point marks the tension between two different and irreconcilable orders: the figural as event (in its density, exterior, libidinal, instable) and discourse as theory (stable, regular, systematic). Another remarkable reading of Lyotard is given by Pierre V. Zima’s La Négation Esthétique. Le subjet, le beau et le sublime de Mallarmé et Valéry à Adorno et Lyotard. Zima integrates the aesthetics of Lyotard into the larger context of aesthetic modernity, tracing the similarities and differences between Lyotard and the other three outstanding thinkers. While in Adorno critical reflection is always related to an autonomous individual who resists the ideology of the culture industry, Lyotard, Deleuze and Foucault abolish the autonomous critical subject and the ideal of critique. Lyotard is responsible for the “negation of the subject,”22 his philosophy advocates “indifference” and “consciously breaks the equilibrium inaugurating the postmodern liquidation of form and subject.”23 Postmodernism leaves behind “the category of subjectivity and the autonomous individual subject as critical moment”24 The negation at work in Lyotard is no longer the one of the autonomous subject but as “residue of a repressive order.”25 Zima also repeats Dufrenne’s criticism of forgetting that any transgression or

22 Pierre V. Zima, La Négation Esthétique. Le sujet, le beau et le sublime de Mallarmé et Valéry à Adorno et Lyotard. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2002, 38. 23 Zima, op.cit...,146. My translation. The original reads: « Lyotard a consciemment brisé l’équilibre et inauguré la liquidation postmoderne de la forme et du sujet ». 24 Ibid., 182. My translation. The original reads: « … la catégorie de la subjectivité et au sujet individuel autonome en tant qu’instance critique ». Emphasis added. 25 Ibid., 181. My translation. The original reads: « … en tant que résidu d’un ordre répressif ».

negation has to be related to a self-conscious subject that performs it. Again, the centrality of the subject is something Lyotard seems to forget. To finish with the judgment of Lyotard, one wonders if the negation of the subject is tantamount to its annihilation. Does a philosophy of heterogeneous “régimes de phrases” imply indifference? Most of the criticism that Lyotard receives consists in applying a set of philosophical concepts (the individual subject, autonomy, critique) to a problem that he formulates in completely different terms (the figural, phrases, le différend, the event). In this sense, Lyotard’s philosophy is less an annihilation of the subject but a reformulation of the problem of subjectivity. In other words, he is less interested in what this autonomous subject is (the subject as a gravitational point that consolidates stable meaning) than in what he does and in this sense the subject is a producer of incommensurable “phrases” of figures. What about indifference? Repeatedly Lyotard accentuates the necessity of art to resist its conformity to the requirements of the state to “make money” and “make culture.”26 In this sense, he merely follows Adorno. He further encourages the artist to focus on “l’imprésentable” as the central theme of late modern art. Lyotard shifts the notion of critique from the centrality of the autonomous subject to the issue of “phrases” and “figures.” Only the continuous unfolding of these heterogeneous phrases and figures can still resist the levelling-down of late capitalism. To understand his project one has to see the subject itself is one of two elements involved in the formation of discourse; the second element is narration. A series of elements are related to a subject that maintains their gravity and produces a stable discourse. The subject is that element which arranges and adjusts the energy that these events are. In this process, intensities and particularities are

26 See Jean-François Lyotard, L’Inhumain. Causeries sur le temps, Paris : Galilée, 1988.

inevitably lost. They are tuned in or regulated according to the invariable rules of discourse. In his reflections, Lyotard sees the subject not as a stable quality but as a function that creates different “figures”, “phrases.” Their unparahrasable aspect is essential to Lyotard’s philosophy. The promulgation of heterogeneous figures is the project for a philosophy of culture where artists, writers, philosophers continually bring into relief figures, tensions, events before their intensity and particularity is levelled by the formation of discourse. The latter is the outcome of any crystallization of different events around a gravitational centre (call that spirit, subject or the state). In this context, his investigations lacks the ambition of attaching these figures and phrases to a centre, be that the autonomous subject or the fractured but still “in plaster” critical subject of Adorno, as Zima reads him. Judging Lyotard is less an issue of verifying his argumentative consistency but rather of questioning his impact as a philosopher of culture. He leaves behind a figural aesthetic and a collection of reflections on artists. Can we still return to the primacy of the subject as stable point that dictates values (aesthetic, ethical, thus political)? Or, do we have to reformulate the problem in the aftermath of modern aesthetics (Adorno, Valéry, Lyotard)? Following this trajectory, the issue is no longer a question of uniting phrases around a self-centred subject but of conceiving of artistic form as a function with different intensities, dissipating unstable “phrases.” The “interchangability” of these phrases has a positive effect if seen in the light of their resistance to homogeneity. It is no way indifferent to human values, as Zima would like to believe. It merely proposes a model based on the critical observation of the particularity of each phrase. The critical aspect lies exactly in seeing each phrase as a singular “figure-image”, crystallizing a certain desire, implementing a certain force while repressing another. This is one side of a project of aesthetics after Lyotard. The other

side is a formal “grammar” of these phrases that require their mapping not as much around an autonomous subject but inside the contemporary cultural context whose tensions, issues and desires that these phrases materialize. The tenure of the figural rests on an approach of art as variable movement. Fissure, absence, negation are not banal attributes of an “enfant-terribilism” but they mark a consideration for the convulsive shifts of desire and their figural expression. Transformation, reconfiguration, instability of form – these are attributes that characterize the vertigo of aesthetic modernity. As Adolf Göller accurately notices, even “our pleasure in the beauty of a meaningless form diminishes when its image becomes too clear and complete in our memory.”27 When the singularity of a sensation is regulated and discursively settled, art looses its effect. Göller refers to this as the Ermüdung, jading, a weariness of the sense of form. In its refusal to be stable, art intrinsically struggles with this problem. An aesthetics of the figural tries to capture the form of this gesture. If nostalgia emerges in the aesthetics of Lyotard, then it is the nostalgia of the figural, of attempting to grasp a sensation prior to its recuperation (in history, narration, discourse) or to make visible the event in its fragility and before its eclipse. It is the nostalgia of having tried to momentarily grasp the figural, namely this event untouched by the psychoanalyst, metaphysician, historian … yet.

Vlad Ionescu

VLAD IONESCU is lecturer at the St. Lucas School of Architecture (KU Leuven, Belgium). He defended his PhD on the art theory of Aloïs Riegl,

27 Adolf Göller, What is the Cause of Perpetual Style Change in Architecture?” in Empathy, Form, and Space. Problems of German Aesthetics, 1873-1893. Introduction and translation by Harry Francis Mallgrave. Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and Architecture, 1994, 204.

Heinrich Wölfflin and Wilhelm Worringer. Besides editing and translating the complete series of Jean-François Lyotard’s writings on contemporary arts and aesthetics (Leuven University Press), he published on Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Riegl in Deleuze Studies, on Robert Zimmermann’s aesthetics in ARS and on the iconology of the wind.

The spectrum of the figural

Documents

Transcript of The spectrum of the figural