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Figuring Performance

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/17432197-2146194

1751-7435

Julie Gaillard,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Jean-François Lyotard's engagement with art and writing has received relatively little attention among English-speaking scholars, who have traditionally read him as the theoretician of The Postmodern Condition and for the philosophy of the phrase developed through his engagement with Ludwig Wittgenstein in The Differend. This lack of interest is reflected in the paucity of anglophone monographs on this aspect of Lyotard's oeuvre; Geoffrey Bennington's 1988Lyotard: Writing the Event and Bill Reading's 1991Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics are so far the only ones to address these concerns. The scholarship on performance, on the other hand, has hardly gone out of fashion since its boom in the anglophone world during the 1960s, though it has been underappreciated by francophone scholars. Kiff Bamford's long-awaited Lyotard and the “Figural” in Performance, Art, and Writing thus fills a theoretical void and bridges more than one theoretical gap. Lyotard's notion of the figural provides the author with a locus around which several disciplines, traditions, and contexts come to be interwoven. To trace the notion of the figural from Lyotard's early writing, where the term is expressly present, to his later writing, where his interests seem to have shifted, Bamford progresses through several constellations of concept that he systematically strives to put into perspective. This is done through a constant effort to situate these notions according to the background of their various receptions and of their main philosophical precursors. Rather than superimpose his findings on specific performances that would simply be used as illustrations, the author chooses to interweave the presentation and analysis of selected works of art—mainly by Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, and Gina Pane—in separate sections within the various notional conceptual constellations. Art and theory are set on equal footing and in resonance with each other. Each chapter of the book spirals from theory to art, from art to theory, pointing to the complex interrelations and oppositions between the two. The book as a whole manages to cross disciplinary boundaries and responds to what Bamford calls Lyotard's “philosophical nexus” (171), while still preserving a certain chronological progression of the peregrinations of the figural. The first two chapters present the figural as it is developed mostly in Lyotard's early books Discourse, Figure and Libidinal Economy, while the two last chapters shift to his later concern with the sublime and with affect. Bamford structures his reading of these “periods” in Lyotard's thought with reference to an exhibition, Les immatériaux (The Immaterials), of which the philosopher was appointed curator, instead of the expected pivotal notion of the “differend.” This extensive study of Lyotard's practical engagement with the art world in relation to his written work answers a still-pressing need and is one of the most original contributions of Bamford's book. By placing it at the very center of his work, Bamford challenges a compartmentalization of concepts that has become established within the Lyotardian corpus and attempts to call attention to the consistent forces that set the nexus in motion—the figural being their blanket term.Bamford opens his first chapter on “the figural” not by bluntly defining concepts but by giving a lively account of a performance by Yingmei Duan. This oblique approach enacts an impossibility that is intrinsic to the book's very object. As Lyotard states in Discourse, Figure, the figure is precisely that which is only approachable from within the boundaries of discourse while always remaining outside its grasp. Going back and forth from critical definition to ostensive demonstration, Bamford circles around an object that will forever remain evasive, reproducing this evasiveness in his discourse. Of this intertwining of approaches (theory, performance, art, and art history) and of notions (figure, presence, event) there remains a net woven to capture the incapturable, whose presence is yet felt by the reader through the chapter. “The figure is there now, and it blocks the course of the tale by putting a sort of sigh in its way, something between breathing in and breathing out. It is not the presence of the figure itself” (26, quoted from Lyotard 1991: 20). The text performs the vanishing quality of the figure, recalling past performances in writing. A major issue arises: if presence is an illusion and, as Daniel Buren would have it, needs to be unmasked as such, then what is the status of representation? If “‘figure’ is the trace that indicates the presence of something which escapes presentation” (20), then can the figure be sensed in the event that is a work of art? Also, if the figure is at the core of any performance, whose very definition includes its fleeting character, how can a performance be documented in such a way that this documentation will allow for a new “event,” a “re-performance”? Bamford provides a framework within which these questions are going to resonate and evolve, by interestingly resorting to the notion of the “Arrive-t-il?” (Is it happening?), which is defined in The Differend as a certain suspense in the linking of phrases. “‘Event’ is when the link to the next phrase has not yet been determined, when it remains contingent: it is…the question ‘Arrive-t-il?’” (27–28; quoted from Lyotard 1988: 70). The question opened up by the work of art situates it in this suspense, constitutes it as “event.”Bamford then goes on to explore the related notion of the libidinal. Noting, after James Williams, the “centrality of Freudian desire to the figural” (45), he links an account of the early works Libidinal Economy and Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Libidinal Setups) to a consideration of Lyotard's later writings on art. This enables him to shed light on Lyotard's exploration of “the politics of representational space” (44)—and thus to set up further considerations of a relationship between artistic performance and capitalist performativity. If the figural is this trace indicating that something “does not fit the system of representation in use” (20), then we need to have a clear idea of how this system of representation works. In his early texts, Lyotard finds in Freud a framework for explaining the role of desire with respect to figure and to discourse. Whereas as Bamford explains, “The figural [is a] desire powered by the non-signifying ‘unbound’ forces of the death drive” (47) and is thus related to the “polymorphic perversity” of infantile sexuality, libidinal setups that allow for a channeling of desire through binding and signification. Bamford insists on the overwhelming character of the “theatrical-representative set-up” by which we relate to the given: “We cannot not be in representation” (53; quoted from Lyotard 2006: 328–29). But this setup, while offering a channel where desiring forces come to be bound, still leaves the figure and its nonsignifying quality out of reach. Bamford very carefully underlines this remainder of absence, of negativity, as it is what distinguishes Lyotard from the notion of desire as a fundamental “yes” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, despite their shared intention of giving an alternative to Jacques Lacan's determination of desire as lack. This chapter allows for a new formulation of the figural as an “unpresentable presence of desire in discourse—fuelled by the unconscious” (69); it also enables, thanks to detours through the works of Jacques Monory, Francis Bacon, and Valerio Adami, to show that “absence and the role of negation in representation are issues central to writing about art and performance” (68).The consideration of Les immatériaux enables Bamford to tie together those elements brought to light in the previous chapters and the apparently heterogeneous concerns that drive the Lyotardian corpus. While Lyotard wrote very little on performance itself, his contribution to this groundbreaking 1985 exhibition is enlightening with respect to his engagement with both performance and performativity. The Pompidou Center commissioned an exhibition on new media, shortly after the publication of The Differend, during a period when The Postmodern Condition enjoyed great attention. Les immatériaux is itself conceived of as an artistic performance, provoking questions about communication, the role of the body, and our attachment to its materiality. Bamford shows how the exhibition, in its structure, was reminiscent of the “great ephemeral skin” of Libidinal Economy, while also considering the technological development of globalization and the impact of these changes on both “physical landscapes and altered ways of thinking and being” (76, quoted after Rajchman 1998: 17). The exhibition deprived the viewer of any coherent visual trace, disrupting the “ocular-centrism” (78) characteristic of the theatrical-representative setup. Such an extension beyond the realm of the visual—conveyed partly thanks to a blinding excess of textual information and the presence of a confusing sound system triggered through infrared signals as the viewer shifted in space—brings us back to what Bamford, paraphrasing Abramović, defines as the very mission of performance in the first pages of the book: “to teach the art of slowing down and shift perceptions away from systematized ocular-centric forms” (17). If performance has this power, it is because it is an operation of the body, by the body, for the body. The body, Bamford states after Julia Kristeva, is that which destabilizes the symbolic. Bamford shows how Les immatériaux, by acting on the body and inducing disturbances in the theatrical-representative setup, aims to elicit affect rather than meaning and calls into question the phenomenological conception of the body as the other of the (Cartesian) mind. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's “lived body” is “threatened by electronic replacement” (91). By shifting from Merleau-Ponty's “visible eye” to an “eye of desire” (60), Lyotard opens up a possibility for a new conception of the body and of the mind altogether. This shift is centered on the notion of affect, which will become key to Lyotard's later writings.This original consideration of the body and affect in Les immatériaux leads Bamford to focus on the notion of the sublime, which is reminiscent of the figural in many aspects. Lyotard, rather than merely adapt a preexisting concept, rethinks the sublime through a dialogue with Edmund Burke, Barnett Newman, and, most specifically, Immanuel Kant. Contrary to many commentators, Lyotard refuses to see the Kantian notion of the sublime as a bridge between the faculties. It is rather the opposite: the sublime attests to a differend between the realms of pure and practical reason, between incommensurabilities. The sublime feeling “is present in the pain that the differend presents, together with the pleasure that can arrive when the as yet un-thought links to phrases are found” (134). Yet the figural was precisely defined in chapter 1 in terms of a suspense of the linking between phrases that open up the possibility of the “event.” Bamford thus raises the question: should we conclude that the sublime feeling is the affect that attests the presence of the figure? It does not seem that the figural and the sublime operate on the same plane, because they consist in different modes of response to the event: “Here the event is a demand that we bear witness to the existence of a differend without imposing a linkage that would do an injustice to that differend; whereas the figural delights in the event because of its intensities, its disruptive force, and signals that which cannot be subsumed into any system as a positive ... demonstration of desire” (136). While the figural is related to intensities, the sublime is related to a differend.The last chapter embraces the movement of the “circular coming-back-to” (137) that is characteristic of Lyotard's later writings, by returning to the notion of the figural while shifting the accent to the question of temporality. This is especially important to the extent that a certain temporality is at stake in the different works of art by different artists. This last section provides the occasion to approach the two correlated notions of passibility and advent, which Bamford relates to similar notions in Emmanuel Lévinas and Martin Heidegger, before linking them to the final notion of “spasm.” While passibility is a “state” in which “something is happening to us,” the “advent” constitutes the other pole of this happening, its occurrence, whose essence is not spatial but temporal. The advent affects our passibility as that which escapes the theatrical-representative setup because “it is not a message about the occurrence, it is the occurrence itself” (155). The sublime is related to a dissensus between abstract incommensurabilities; the spasm is a blocking together of two incommensurate temporalities. Signification, because it relies on the linkage of sentences, is caught in a chronological temporality that situates the present between a past and a future. On the other hand, the occurrence is immediate, absolutely present. The affect-phrase “necessitates a blocking together” of these “incommensurate temporalities” (160).Bamford's text is conceived of as a circular journey of five “books,” a quest for the unpresentable and a tracking of its outcroppings. The author, by his own admission, has broken with the conventions of academic writing. The figural is the trace of the presence of the unpresentable within discourse: to bring this trace to the fore, discourse needs to be taken out of joint. The book's object calls for a trajectory that will open up a space for the advent, that will not pretend to reconcile incommensurate realms, and that will rather bear witness to their différend. This being said, one might still regret that more stringent comparisons are not made between the various operations discussed—the figural, the sublime, and the event. While the author very efficiently strives to provide context at multiple levels, it is difficult for a reader not yet initiated to the nuances of Lyotard's thought to understand that, as Bamford states in his conclusion, he is “not claiming an equivalence but recogniz[ing] rather that their ‘manner’ might be described as figural” (166). One might also be surprised by the author's choice of restricting his engagement with works of art to performance and the visual arts, when Lyotard also wrote on theater and extensively on music. However, the conceptual moves that this book provides can easily be used by the reader as tools and extended to these subjects.Bamford's book is a necessary addition to the reception of Lyotard and his relation to art history and performance. It strives to show how to apply Lyotardian notions to the study of performance and how performance can enlighten our understanding of Lyotard. The primacy devolved to the analysis of artwork in a book whose primary concern remains theoretical bodes very well for the future of a true interdisciplinarity, respectful of Lyotard's vision of the commentary as the receiving and prolonging of the gesture of art, where theory aims at being an echo chamber for the spasm, rather than assimilating the work of art.