Lyotard and the 'figural' in Performance, Art and Writing

Kiff Bamford

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441181909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Moderne Philosophie

This original study offers a timely reconsideration
of the work of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in relation to art,
performance and writing.
How can we write about art, whilst
acknowledging the transformation that inevitably accompanies
translations of both media and temporality?
That is the question that persistently dogs Lyotard's own writings on art, and
to which this book responds through reference to artists from the
recently-formed canon of performance art history, including the myths of
seminal figures Marina Abramovic
and Vito Acconci, and the controlled documentation of Gina Pane's actions.
Through the unstable, untranslatable element that Lyotard calls the figural, his thought is brought to bear
on attempts to write a history of performance art and to question the paradoxically
prescriptive demand for rules to govern 're-performance'.
Kiff Bamford contextualises Lyotard's writings and
approach with reference to both his contemporaries, including Deleuze and
Kristeva, and the contemporary art about which they wrote, whilst arguing for
the pertinence of Lyotard's provocations today.

Chapter 1

The figural

The body is being used as an art language by an ever greater number of contemporary painters and sculptors, and even though the phenomenon touches upon artists who represent different currents and tendencies, who use widely differing art techniques, and who come from a variety of cultural and intellectual backgrounds, certain characteristics of this way of making art are nonetheless to be found in all its manifestations.¹

—Lea Vergine, 1974.

Every time I try to write about the body, the writing ends up being about language. This is not because I think that the body is reducible to language; it is not. Language emerges from the body, constituting an emission of sorts. The body is that upon which language falters, and the body carries its own signs, its own signifiers, in ways that remain largely unconscious.²

—Judith Butler, 2004.

Yingmei Duan

A darkly painted space: dark, dark blue with dimmed, shaded spotlights from above. She is naked and enwrapped in her own world, sometimes close to the wall – touching, feeling her way along its surface as though clinging to the shadows – while humming slowly to herself a melancholic, but not mournful, tune and slowly caressing her body: her thighs, breasts, stomach. Slowly, ever-so-slowly rocking and moving in sliding steps as though caressing the floor – head down, eyes closed with an intense expression and furrowed brow – she moves towards a visitor, clad in a white coat. The medical overtones are accentuated by the contrast to her nakedness. Sensing the person’s presence she begins to tour the body at a close proximity; very close, with no sense of private space, moving rather into the space between which becomes her own through the strange movement and murmured humming. It is not a serenade in the romantic sense but a seduction of another type, a sensory beguiling of the space between bodies. This is it and this is its importance, its steadiness, her almost imperceptible progress round the space through the energy fields of the visitors.

A newspaper review likened her pose to Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the pose is very close, yet the comparison goes only so far – it is not a shame-filled, crime-ridden angst but a gently soporific pulling of the viewer . . . I grapple for parallels . . . Odysseus and the sirens. But it is too still and the suggestion of the female ensnaring the visitor does not gel; there is no subjugation here and it is the participants who will the artist to involve them.

Her movements are gentle, a rhythmic swaying – back against the wall, arms by her side, head down and chin pressed to herself – turning one way then another while her feet begin moving slightly, slowly, shoulders angled. This shuffling forwards prompts the viewers to move away or steady themselves for the approach of slow, deliberate steps. Again, feet sliding or transferring weight very deliberately in a single movement – like the slow walk undertaken by visitors to Marina Abramović’s ‘drill’, the initiation to durational performance that prefaced this performance. Her face is peaceful, though the slight ‘cough, cough’ interrupts the music of her internalised hum and deepens her furrowed brow. One hand is on a breast, the other on her belly. She turns and feels one shoulder as though embracing herself in sorrow or peace, sadness or intimate meditation. I keep thinking of the title: Intimate distance, not knowing if the Blanchot reference is deliberate or helpful but the connotations of the unbridgeable divide between subjects is effective. There is desire here: desire on the part of the artist to be close to the other, the clothed figure who has come to observe and who has made the effort to stop. In turn the viewer is rewarded somehow by her attention – her slow circling absorbing the viewer’s aura; an energy transformation occurs and often the visitor responds, closing eyes to join in the intimacy and avoid the gaze of others left outside the experience: they are in the art work, in the performance, it is their body which has drawn the others into the space and caused them to linger.

The first few evenings there were not many prepared to linger and the artist stayed near to the walls, but confidence has grown. The naked body slowly tours the proximity of the other’s white coat and breaks the barrier between observer and performer, between subject and object – it is an intertwining in action, the tension is palpable, and the willingness of visitors once approached to remain for the duration of the encounter is almost without exception.

They are informed it is over by a gentle pushing of shoulders, leaving the naked artist alone and humming to herself once more: the recipient is left swaying and in shock, though often smiling.

Lyotard articulates in his heuristic ‘Foreword’, written for the collection of his writings in English in 1989, the inability of the writer to occupy the same time as the reader: ‘Sometimes you do listen to yourself writing. That is not the same thing as hearing yourself writing’. Lyotard supports an overly cautious, self-conscious – more hesitant – approach to writing because it ‘indicates that you are not sure of your direction, unsure of where you are, or completely lost’. Whether through overwriting or a style that feigns nonchalance the result is that it ‘annoys the reader’.³ Such disdain is not for the reader per se but for their presumptions; it is to undo these presumptions that Lyotard took up a variety of writing styles and approaches, including the attempt at a ‘zero-degree style’ in The Differend and its prologue, a ‘Reader’s Dossier’, which allows ‘the reader, if the fancy grabs him or her, to “talk about the book” without having read it’.⁴ Lyotard’s acerbic disdain is for the ceaseless drive to ‘gain time’, a trend that he termed ‘performativity’ in The Postmodern Condition as the quantifiably efficient realization of a measured output, usually within a system. Here Lyotard shares something with Marina Abramović in her mission to teach the art of slowing down and shift perceptions away from systematized ocular-centric forms. Their methods are different but the connection is worth the wait. The intention here is not to annoy the reader but neither to force clarity where its avoidance is a deliberate attempt to acknowledge that which escapes systematization.

Today I saw Yingmei crawl: carefully bending down to place both hands on the floor one after another and then, approaching a couple sitting at the edge of the space, she prowled round them like a big cat, moving arms and legs in synchronicity and nearly touching the couple before coming to rest beside them where she tucked up her knees to make a ball, coughing softly before continuing round the edge of the room in the same manner. I became aware that all the observers were also sitting – perhaps she had reduced herself to our level and altered the piece in doing so, taking on a feline presence. The strains of music from the other pieces, especially Nat King Cole’s Mona Lisa, made the humming less audible today. But it was there.⁵

Defining the figural

Discourse, Figure opens with a disagreement: the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel suggests in Art Poétique (1941) that the visible is readable and that the assembling of elements, whether images or words, follows a logical pattern to form a ‘readable phrase’. Lyotard replies that:

. . . the given is not a text, it possesses an inherent thickness, or rather a difference, which is not to be read, but rather seen; and this difference, and the immobile mobility that reveals it, are what continually fall into oblivion in the process of signification.⁶

Lyotard questions the implication that one can comment on the visual only when a ‘point of view’ is found that allows one to regard it as a text. Therefore, when the visible is represented, what is not signified is the mobile element which reveals it – the mobility of the eye. Already, we have the adequacy of a representational system brought into question and the suggestion that translating one representational system to another results in a loss – thus when a visual artwork is discussed there is always something that is omitted from that discourse, not only because of this translation but also because of the existence in the visual of that untranslatable element which Lyotard will go on to designate the figural. The restriction of a text is its lack of physical depth: we cannot physically move in front of a text to seek alternative viewpoints – such movement is restricted to the metaphorical – and yet the sensible world remains the principal frame of reference for all analogies. The suggestion that through the creation of a scene the visual representation ‘flattens’ physical space and therefore draws it into the realm of the textual is refuted by Lyotard, emphasizing the lack of equivalence in the position of a surface: the textual is written on a flat, horizontal surface rather than the vertical screen of the visual. Here, sitting in front of a computer screen, the same screen which is the surface of many visual manifestations, it may seem that this comparison has less clarity, and indeed the world of the digital screen is the focus for David N. Rodowick’s discussion of the figural in relation to new media, but the contrast of horizontal to vertical is merely a visualization of a point of difference between the two modes of communication which are not actually reliant on the position of their surfaces.⁷ What is key is the means by which the eye reads the text or image, the physical proximity of the eye to the textual page does not allow for the meaning to be altered – once the characters are in focus their meaning usually flows independently of the visual whereas the physical visual surface of a drawing, painting or photograph asks to be regarded at different levels of proximity and with differing elements of experience offered by each (and here the screen of new media does not operate in the same way: there is little revelation or pleasure gained from increased pixilation or optical blindness of the digital screen). Given this distinction, Lyotard explains his objection to ‘reading’ the image: ‘One does not read or understand a picture. Sitting at the table one identifies and recognizes linguistic units; standing in representation one seeks out plastic events. Libidinal events.’⁸

This initial valorization of the plastic, the spatial and thus the bodily realm of gestures, movement and matter which are brought together in the realm of the figural is an important one for this study and contrasts with the idea of the body as a language implied in the quotation from Lea Vergine which prefaced this chapter. Vergine’s description could be misunderstood as the adoption of movement, gesture, performance as a language that can be readily decoded by an audience – but for many of the artists grouped by Vergine under the term ‘Body Art’ in 1974 it is the potential of the body as a site of resistance to such codifications which fired their exploration of the body as an ‘art language’. However, this attention to the body is only part of that which Lyotard designates the figural. Here I must attest to the paradox inherent in the aim of this section because the figural escapes definition. This can be witnessed in Lyotard’s own use of the term throughout Discours, figure, where there is no static explanation of the term as a fixed concept; rather it is posited in one section only to be modified and reconfigured elsewhere. In this sense, Lyotard activates aspects of the figural in the book itself, describing it as:

. . . a dislocated body whereupon speech impresses fragments that in principle can be rearranged in various configurations, but which the constraints imposed by typographic composition – those belonging to signification and ratio – force to present in an immutable order.⁹

For 40 years the body of Discours, figure was not so much dislocated as ripped apart in its translation into English; prior to 2011 only five extracts had been translated which together amounted to a fifth of the text. Mary Lydon, formerly of the University of Wisconsin, was involved in the translation of the whole and before her illness and premature death published two significant sections for literary journals in 1983; others have translated sections which appeared in the following publications: the 1984 Semiotext(e) collection Driftworks, the Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader in 1993 and the introductory section ‘Taking the Side of the Figural’ was published in the 2006 Lyotard Reader and Guide. The full English translation of Discours, figure, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2011 as Discourse, Figure, was a long-overdue event and as it incorporates Mary Lydon’s translations together with the work of translator and Lyotard scholar Anthony Hudek it also indicates some of the troubled history of the books’ journey into English. This skilfully crafted translation helps the English reader to appreciate the deliberate dislocated arrangement of the whole: described by Lyotard as being a compromise between the author’s intentions and his pragmatic restrictions.¹⁰ Being a book of philosophy, not an artist’s book, the physical arrangement of the book does adhere to some norms; it is not a ‘good book’ in Lyotard’s terms and refrains from the further destabilization that Lyotard would desire in order to disrupt ‘the time of the reader’ and a sense of progression through the work. The clearest division of the book’s concerns, and the operation of the figural, is a preoccupation with phenomenology at the outset and a shift to the use of Freud as the main theoretical reference point in the later parts. Briefly, Lyotard initially uses phenomenology to justify the seemingly straightforward argument described above, that the visual cannot simply be read: the mobility – which is central to Merleau-Ponty – is employed to demonstrate the necessary depth or thickness [épaisseur] of the visual experience which is denied in an essentially two-dimensional reading. Initially it appears that Lyotard is himself setting up a binary opposition between the visible, aligned to the figure, and the textual, corresponding to discourse; yet this is a methodological move which is later unpicked and any such clear distinctions are removed.

The initial critique of discourse is a specific reflection on the role of language in philosophy and politics where discourse follows premeditated patterns and structures, swallowing up anything different and reducing alterity to the same. In contrast, the figural is a realm of the unexpected, mediated not through communication but through intensities: systems and signification are disrupted to open up space for that which discourse disallows. Lyotard’s particular focus for attack is structural linguistic discourse – Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson in the first part and later Jacques Lacan – reminding us that Discourse, Figure is the result of Lyotard’s thinking in the late 1960s – a time when structuralism was still the method of choice for many French intellectuals – making Discourse, Figure one of the first in the turn away from, and questioning of, structuralist linguistics.

The system of structural linguistics, based on the work of Saussure, and propagated by the posthumous publication of Cours de linguistique générale, approaches the study of language through an emphasis on underlying structures. Saussure explains the operation of language through a system of differentiation: the sign functioning only in relation to that which it is not, thereby creating a closed system which relies on the whole in order to function. Lyotard criticizes the semiological method – prevalent in France at the time – as a flat field of discourse which does not allow for ‘thickness’ and denies the presence of the figure In this context ‘figure’ is the trace that indicates the presence of something which escapes presentation, that is it does not fit the syst...