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Destination Unknown: Jean-François Lyotard and Orienting Musical Affect

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 5-6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/07494467.2012.759414

1477-2256

Trent Leipert,

Music History and Culture

Abstract Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) was an early theorist of postmodernity though the waning discourse of cultural ‘postmodernism’ has meant that many of his later writings have received little attention from scholars. Although music was never a central concern of Lyotard, it does recur with regularity as a topic throughout his writings. This essay considers the place of Lyotard's conception of affect in his discussions of listening and of contemporary music. As I suggest, music and affect, for Lyotard, share a number of challenges in that both introduce types of untranslatability and miscommunication—hence, a profound uncertainty and disorientation—among subjects. Nevertheless, these same features join with the role of technology and the feeling of time within postmodernity in characterizing (negatively) the present and pointing (more positively) to the development of new sound possibilities, new feelings, and ultimately, new relationships that are necessary within the ‘spaceless zone’ of the future. Keywords: : LyotardAffectPostmodernityThe InhumanTemporality Acknowledgments I thank Martin Scherzinger, Berthold Hoeckner, Steven Rings, and Suzanne Taylor for their comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the University of Chicago's Interdisciplinary Workshop on Modern France and the Francophone World. I thank the participants for their feedback. Notes The title of this essay is in English. Translations attribute only Lyotard, 1993b. Also published in Adam Krims, 1998. http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol6/lyotard.html. Carolyn Abbate (2004) may be said to have (re)initiated this debate with her article, itself sharing many themes discussed by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2004). For a recent overview of the ‘Affective Turn’ and related debates, see Ruth Leys (2011). See, in particular, Lyotard (1994 Lyotard, J-F. 1988b. L'inhumain: causeries sur le temps, Paris: Galilée. [Google Scholar]). Lyotard's own modernist orientation is perhaps revealed in the status he gives to the unrepeatable. While not discussing formal repetition specifically, such positions are further evidence that Lyotard was invested in the relevance of modernist aesthetics in a postmodern epoch. Translation mine. ‘Dans les deux cas, il s'agit de faire sentir (je veux dire: par le sentiment) l'insensible du champ sensoriel, spatial et/ou temporel, l'invisible, l'inaudible.’ The English translation by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby places ‘emotion’ after ‘feeling’ in brackets. This is presumably to specify the English word feeling in this case refers to a state of mind and not sensory feeling. Lyotard's bracketing of ‘sentiment’ (itself rendered as both feeling and sentiment in English) makes it clear that he indeed refers to feeling as a state of mind; I have modified this slightly to ‘feelings’ to make this clearer in the English. As I explain below, it is important to maintain a distinction between emotion and feeling given Lyotard's clear opposition of affect and emotion in Libidinal Economy as well as his thoughts on the differend created when trying to communicate personal feeling. I have likewise changed Bennington and Bowlby's translation of ‘sentiment’ as ‘emotion’ to ‘feeling’ in the following quotation. Oddly, they translate ‘l'insensible’ as ‘insensible’, a rare though direct rendering of the French. The more common sense of this word in English is ‘insensitive’. However, it is in this case no less problematic, for in English, it is always a predicate or condition of a subject, whereas its use in French here would suggest something more like ‘the unfeelable’. See, in particular, Massumi (2002). Also Leys (2011). Several essays in this collection were omitted in the English translation: Lyotard, 1984. For more on Lyotard's concept of the ‘affect-phrase’, see also Tomiche (1994 Lyotard, J-F. (2006). The Affect-Phrase (K. Chrome, Trans.). In Keith Crome and James Williams (Eds.), The Lyotard reader and guide (pp. 104–112). New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]). This is a translation of mutique into the rather uncommon English word mutic. In French, a subtle distinction may be made between muët (mute) and mutique: the former denotes a state always lacking voice whereas the latter connotes the loss of speech. Both suggest silence.