Jean-François Lyotard: Pedagogies of Affect (SpringerBriefs in Education) 3030974898, 9783030974893

Table of contents :
Preface: Jean-François Lyotard—Pedagogies of Affect
Distinctive Features
The Audience
Contents
1 The Professor as Pedagogue
1.1 Introduction
1.2 The Fledgling Activist Intellectual
1.3 From High School Teacher to Activist
1.4 Continuing the Gesture: The Professor’s Pedagogical ‘Task’ of Translation
References
2 Pedagogies of Affect with Lyotard’s Freud
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Lyotard’s Turn to Freudian Affect
2.3 The Unconscious as ‘Phrase-Affect’
2.4 Lyotard’s Temporal Pedagogies of Affect
References
3 Infancy and Childhood in Education: Lyotard’s Pedagogies of the Possible
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Infancy and Childhood in Lyotard’s Philosophy
3.3 Radical Temporalities and Resistance Through Infancy and Childhood
3.4 The ‘Labour’ of Childhood
3.5 The Poverty, Renewal and Inventiveness of Infancy in Education
References
4 Lyotard’s Musical Pedagogy: Listening for the Inaudible Gesture in Education
4.1 The Fable as Pedagogic Device
4.2 A ‘Reverie on the Shadows of Sound’
4.3 Gesture
4.4 Breath
4.5 Affect
4.6 Sonorous Matter
4.7 Music in/As Education
4.8 Lyotard’s Musical Pedagogy
References
5 Mattering Lyotard: From the Postmodern to the Sublime as the Condition of Education
5.1 The Sublime and the Postmodern Collide
5.2 Performativity and the Narrowing of Education
5.3 The Temporal Matter of the Sublime
5.4 The ‘Time’ of the Sublime: Newman and the Instant
5.5 Lyotard’s Pedagogy of the Instant: Experiencing Education ‘Sensationally’
References

Citation preview

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN EDUC ATION KE Y THINKERS IN EDUCATION

Kirsten Locke

Jean-François Lyotard Pedagogies of Affect 123

SpringerBriefs in Education

Key Thinkers in Education Series Editors Paul Gibbs, Middlesex University, London, UK Jayne Osgood, Middlesex University, London, UK Labby Ramrathan, School of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

This briefs series publishes compact (50 to 125 pages) refereed monographs under the editorial supervision of the Advisory Editor, Professor Paul Gibbs, Middlesex University, London, UK; Jayne Osgood, Middlesex University, London, UK; and Labby Ramrathan, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. Each volume in the series provides a concise introduction to the life and work of a key thinker in education and allows readers to get acquainted with their major contributions to educational theory and/or practice in a fast and easy way. Both solicited and unsolicited manuscripts are considered for publication in the SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education series. Book proposals for this series may be submitted to the Editor: Nick Melchior E-mail: [email protected]

More information about this subseries at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/10197

Kirsten Locke

Jean-François Lyotard Pedagogies of Affect

Kirsten Locke Faculty of Education and Social Work The University of Auckland Auckland, New Zealand

ISSN 2211-1921 ISSN 2211-193X (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Education ISSN 2211-937X ISSN 2211-9388 (electronic) SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education ISBN 978-3-030-97489-3 ISBN 978-3-030-97491-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97491-6 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface: Jean-François Lyotard—Pedagogies of Affect

This book is an introduction to Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) as an educational thinker whose engagement with politics and art supports a radical reconsideration of the conditions and perimeters of the educational endeavour as a teaching and learning event. Throughout his career as activist, teacher, curator and philosopher, Lyotard utilised a style of pedagogy that was the unifying thread to a disparate intellectual trajectory that involved sudden ruptures with his past activities. The story of this pedagogical approach adds a new dimension to the familiar Anglo-American picture of his work as a philosopher of the ‘postmodern’. The aspects of education that concerned Lyotard were just those prominent in his theoretical, political and aesthetic activity: its role within a society bereft of ‘grand narratives’, its contribution to forms of resistance to the performativity of capitalism, and its spatial and temporal dimensions as an artistic ‘event’. These themes provided Lyotard with a critical application for many of his most important ideas. The book positions Lyotard’s pedagogical approach within an engagement of key theoretical concepts traversed in his political and aesthetic writings throughout his career, exploring his work on politics, art and artists, and his later work on childhood and infancy as a state of openness and receptivity. Each chapter relates his ideas to debates over the place of education in late capitalist societies, showing the affective potentialities of education as a space of resistance to overly deterministic and outcomes-based forms of education.

Distinctive Features The book is designed as an intellectual and political biography with a focus on educational themes. The aim is to achieve narrative readability combined with a high degree of academic scholarship.

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Preface: Jean-François Lyotard—Pedagogies of Affect

The Audience The book is intended for readers who have an interest in the thought of JeanFrançois Lyotard, in his contributions to educational thought, and in the presence of his ideas in conceptions of pedagogy and schooling in today’s society. It is written in a jargon-free, accessible style but does not avoid or oversimplify technical concepts, and so will also serve as a standard reference for courses on the philosophy of education. Auckland, New Zealand

Kirsten Locke

Contents

1 The Professor as Pedagogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 The Fledgling Activist Intellectual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.3 From High School Teacher to Activist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.4 Continuing the Gesture: The Professor’s Pedagogical ‘Task’ of Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2 Pedagogies of Affect with Lyotard’s Freud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Lyotard’s Turn to Freudian Affect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 The Unconscious as ‘Phrase-Affect’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Lyotard’s Temporal Pedagogies of Affect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Infancy and Childhood in Education: Lyotard’s Pedagogies of the Possible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Infancy and Childhood in Lyotard’s Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Radical Temporalities and Resistance Through Infancy and Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 The ‘Labour’ of Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 The Poverty, Renewal and Inventiveness of Infancy in Education . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Lyotard’s Musical Pedagogy: Listening for the Inaudible Gesture in Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 The Fable as Pedagogic Device . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 A ‘Reverie on the Shadows of Sound’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Gesture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Breath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Affect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents

4.6 Sonorous Matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7 Music in/As Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8 Lyotard’s Musical Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Mattering Lyotard: From the Postmodern to the Sublime as the Condition of Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 The Sublime and the Postmodern Collide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Performativity and the Narrowing of Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 The Temporal Matter of the Sublime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 The ‘Time’ of the Sublime: Newman and the Instant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Lyotard’s Pedagogy of the Instant: Experiencing Education ‘Sensationally’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 1

The Professor as Pedagogue

1.1 Introduction Jean-François Lyotard is a major thinker whose relation to education is far from straightforward. While one of the few theorists of his era and context to venture into the field of education as an object of study, Lyotard did this explicitly only a couple of times, most notably when he was commissioned to write the report, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Describing this short treatise on knowledge as an “occasional” (1984, p. xxv) piece, Lyotard would not return to the site of education with the same concentration of analysis again. However, the ideas that are outlined in relation to education in this piece of writing are considered something of a watershed moment in thinking about the place of knowledge in educational institutions such as the university and in postmodern society in general. Arguably, the book enters Lyotard’s oeuvre at a time of transition. The Postmodern Condition is often considered to be one of the seminal articulations of the ‘postmodern’ that marks a particular time and transition in the philosopher’s development, analogous to the technological advances and changes societies were undergoing in the late 1970s in countries such as France. While certainly a product of its time, however, Lyotard’s book on education was also to herald a radical rethinking of education that would prove to be both prescient and prophetic. It is for these reasons, set in a broader philosophical oeuvre that intersects many of the ideas put forward in The Postmodern Condition, that his thought remains relevant to education today. However, Lyotard’s relevance to educational ideas extends beyond this one book devoted to education and this is best exemplified when considering the centrality to his wider career of teaching and its intersection with art, politics and activism. As a teacher at a lycée in Algeria during the Algerian revolution, an academic in French universities in the wider vicinity of Paris, through to time as a travelling professor with a penchant for American lectureships, Lyotard was overtly engaged in education and teaching, albeit in varying forms, all his adult life. To expand understandings of his educational involvement further, Lyotard’s engagement with art and politics, even © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Locke, Jean-François Lyotard, SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97491-6_1

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when situated outside the academy, was framed as pedagogical activity. As an activist in the revisionist left-wing group, Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism), during the 1950s, Lyotard describes his role as all-consuming and devoted solely to support the worker. Lyotard’s activism was framed by the pedagogical task of writing and disseminating ideas through physically distributing political pamphlets at factory gates. Once this activist role had transitioned to that of the ‘academic’, the site of the seminar room was framed by the pedagogical as demonstrated in the essay Endurance and the Profession, whilst the site of the university institution came under political analysis in the essay Nanterre, Here, Now. Both of these essays are to be found in the edited collection, Political Writings, by Bill Readings (1993). As curator of the 1985 exhibition ‘Les Immatériaux’ at the Centre de Pompidou, Lyotard took up the pedagogical mantle to engage the public in a decentring of artistic experience that reflected the postmodern challenge to displace the spectator as knower and bearer of interpretative reason. Likewise, in the many catalogues, letters and commentaries on the various artists he engaged with, Lyotard considered the pragmatic task of engaging and responding to art to be pedagogical in essence and purpose, if only to teach us that, within art, lies the unsayable and unpresentable—a dimension of incalculability at odds with the modern drive to certainty and mastery. The notion of mastery, and the ethical endeavour to decentre this mastery, is central to Lyotard’s pedagogical approach regardless of the site of its occurrence in relation to object and form. However, it is precisely because of this embracing of the incalculable that judgements on Lyotard’s worthiness as a philosopher relevant to education has been varied, suggesting a high incidence of confusion. Part of the reason for this is because Lyotard ‘performs’ something of his own methodology throughout his academic career and, as such, his writings in and around education are often deliberately obscure and playfully indirect in ways that intentionally challenge direct communication and understanding. This is perhaps exaggerated through the activity of translating his works from French to English, an aspect Lyotard considers in line with a broader critique of the heterogeneity of language phrases or ‘idioms’. This is an important pedagogical aspect that we will return to later in this chapter. However, Lyotard remains throughout, ever the teacher, cajoling and even seducing his readers to stand alongside him in a joint collaboration of searching for, however temporary, a shared meaning of sorts. The background to Lyotard’s thinking about education starts with his own career that traverses the roles of student, teacher, activist, art commentator and academic philosopher, and the interweaving threads of continuity and discontinuity that link each one of these roles to a distinct educational project. Lyotard regarded biographical narrative as anathema to ‘explain’ one’s life, preferring instead an approach that looked to continue (as opposed to ‘capture’) the affectual presence of a subject. The closest account to a personal narrative we get from Lyotard himself is outlined in the set of Wellek Library Lectures entitled Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (1998). However, it is useful to set Lyotard in the educational milieu of early- to mid-twentieth-century Paris to understand his approach to education embedded in his writing. As we shall see, the pedagogic relationship is something Lyotard would return to throughout his career and the many objects of study he engaged in.

1.2 The Fledgling Activist Intellectual

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1.2 The Fledgling Activist Intellectual Despite an intellectual stance that challenges the primacy of structuring devices of knowledge in what he would later define as the ‘postmodern condition’, Lyotard was, in fact, a beneficiary of a type of education steeped in intellectual tradition and just those knowledge structures. His intellectual work was decisively entwined with his political activism, and just as Lyotard’s political sympathies altered, so too, did the attentions and foci of his writing career. This section provides an overview of his educational trajectory, providing a closer examination of links that Lyotard makes to education and its relation to knowledge. Born into a middle-class family on August 10, 1924 in Versailles, Lyotard attended the prestigious Paris Lycée Buffon and was later part of the khagne, the advanced class of secondary school graduates at one of France’s most prestigious and oldest schools, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Both geography and chronology are important to note for contextualising Lyotard’s early educational career as the setting for his later intellectual and political activity. Housed in the Parisian Latin Quarter, the Louis-leGrand, itself a product of France’s politically inflected intellectual ferment, would provide part of the city backdrop to the student riots of 1968. Lyotard was a prominent figure in mobilising and giving support to the students during the uprising (providing intellectual grist to his writing mill in essays that deal explicitly with politics, such as those collected in Political Writings). Likewise, the nearby Vincennes would be the arrondissement (a district of the city of Paris) that would house the University of Paris XIII established as a direct result of this uprising (later controversially moving campus to St Denis in the summer of 1980). This was the first university to provide open entry to students in a bid to honour student demands for more freedom and Lyotard would forge a long association with it that began with his appointment as a member of faculty in the early 1970s and later as Emeritus Professor in 1987. In the context of chronology, the generation to which Lyotard belonged formed its educational identity under the spectre of war, followed rapidly by both fledgling identity and the threat of war coming to full fruition during this education. As Lyotard stated in response to a request to define his generation in the famous Les Temps Modernes (established by another group of well-known Parisian intellectuals the generation above Lyotard, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty), “[T]here is one possible qualification: we were fifteen in 1940” (Lyotard, in Spitzer, 2006, p. 48). Described as a “pedagogical hothouse” for the French male elite (Spitzer, 2006, p. 51), the Louis-Le-Grand has a long and illustrious list of alumni spanning the arts, politics and the sciences, including Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice MerleauPonty, Giles Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Chirac, to name only a few of a much longer and esteemed list. This is to say, Lyotard’s education is to be seen as elite, classical, and situated in a pedagogical context of privilege and intellectual competition. While there is little in Lyotard’s own writing on the impact of such an education, we do get an insight from his fellow classmate, the sociologist Alan Touraine, when comparing the French and American academic and political

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experiences of this generation: ‘Each success in that series of schoolboy contests was a milestone on the high road into the professions, … infinitely preferable to a business career’ (cited in Spitzer, 2006, p. 51). In the world in which Touraine was raised, and which Lyotard inhabited, ‘One might be a dedicated fascist or communist but, categorically, not a real estate broker’ (ibid.). As has been noted earlier, while Lyotard would himself eschew the determinism of biography (most notably in the ‘philosophical’ biography of Malraux), his path to intellectual cultural theorist and philosopher, if not completely defined by this educational background, was certainly made possible through such an educational training and schooling experience. To put it another way, Lyotard was more than likely to enter the academic professions as declared by his classmate and was unlikely to ever become a real estate broker! Because knowledge would figure prominently in Lyotard’s analysis of the postmodern, particularly in the book dealing with the institutions of higher education where knowledge is disseminated and produced, it is important to point out the context and content of his training and engagement with knowledge in Lyotard’s own schooling experience. Too young to have fought in the war, Lyotard studied Greek and Latin texts with his fellow classmates, or khagneux, at the Louis-le-Grand in occupied France while the war was spreading ‘in a world outside of time, outside of space, and certainly outside of history’ again to quote Lyotard’s classmate Touraine (cited in Spitzer, 2006, p. 51). By the time of the Paris air raids in 1944, Lyotard was accustomed to making his way down the stairs with his fellow students to continue studying in the basement. “In that isolated milieu” in which Lyotard was receiving his education, Spitzer’s revealing essay continues, “intellectual work, books, and friends” constituted the existence of these young scholars. In a foreshadowing of the conditions for future activism, the isolation and confinement enforced by war and his intellectual intensity meant that Lyotard and his fellow khagneux “lived comradeship with a special intensity” (Spitzer, 2006, p. 51). Recollections of Jean-François (or ‘Jef’ as he was often referred to) inevitably draw on this sense of comradeship, coupled with an intellectual ferocity that was evident early in his schooling career. Another notable fellow alumnus of the LouisLe-Grand, Michael Butor, recalls Lyotard’s “remarkable health—both physical and moral”. Butor continues with his description: “Elegant, Jean-François was more strapping than most. But more than this, he had his feet on the ground and possessed a generous good sense” (Butor, 2001, p. 7). Described by Spitzer as ‘clearly first among equals’ (2006, p. 51) in an already exceptionally gifted group of young men at the Louis-Le-Grand, at the age of 23, Lyotard’s invited essay (as a budding intellectual) in Les Temps Moderne calls on a breathtakingly broad array of thinkers and sources encompassing Gandhi, Raphael, Nietzsche, Camus, Rimbaud, Malraux, Mallarme, Aristotle and Heidegger. Importantly, this early published essay foregrounds a critique that will serve as an intellectual leitmotiv for Lyotard in his later diagnosis of a postmodern condition that views with incredulity the ‘grand narratives’ that have structured modernity. As Spitzer elucidates in relation to this early essay, “Lyotard’s repudiation of the authority of

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high culture is laced with his mastery of its salient texts” (2006, p. 50). This repudiation is further heightened in the essay when Lyotard encapsulates the reasons for this rejection and one of its devastating outcomes in the form of the Nazi death camps (that Lyotard will return to again and again as a device to illustrate the ‘unsayable’ and immemorial dimensions to terror and the human experience). The young Lyotard explains: We were twenty when the Camps vomited onto us what they had not had the time nor the will to digest. Their hollow faces haunted our thoughts: Europe had murdered liberalism, [destroying] three or four centuries of Greco-Latin tradition. (In Spitzer, 2006, p. 49)

Lyotard’s passionate recrimination of the ‘death’ of liberalism is emblematic in its encapsulation of the spirit of the thinkers coming into maturity in post-war France and who would all, in some way, define themselves against the traditions and beliefs of their intellectual forebears. Gilles Deleuze, a colleague and close friend who was also part of the examination panel for Lyotard’s doctorate in 1971, tacitly acknowledges this uniting spirit (albeit manifest in infinite variation amongst the group) when he comments that, “After Sartre, the generation to which I belong was, I think, a strong one (with Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, Lyotard, Serres, Faye, Chatelet, and others)” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 27). Likewise, fellow Louis-Le-Grand alumnus, Jacques Derrida, states that “Lyotard and I, … identified as a ‘generation’—of which I am the last born, and, no doubt, the most melancholic of the group (they were all more joyful than I)” (Derrida, 2001, p. 215). Lyotard, like his fellow compatriots in his generational milieu, pushes back against claims to universalism in some way throughout his intellectual career (no matter how joyfully Derrida describes him in comparison). Indeed, if there is one uniting intellectual thread to Lyotard’s remarkably disparate oeuvre, it is this distrust toward the universal: in theory, the political, knowledge, art, and indeed, any definitive claims to reality or truth. As Spitzer observes of the precocious young scholar in Les Temps Modernes, “The ‘heroic’ era of Occupation and Resistance is cynically dismissed” (2006, p. 49), and with it, any pretence at honouring the optimism of the state of unity and reality as articulated by liberalism and its antecedents. From the Louis-Le-Grand khagne, Lyotard literally crossed the road to study philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne, graduating with the diplôme d’études supérieures (roughly equivalent to an M.A. in Anglo-American parlance). Providing a hint of a future preoccupation in the notion of inarticulate presence to be found in his art writings, but also a radical passivity within political action that would surface after his break from Marx, Lyotard’s master’s thesis, entitled ‘Indifference as an ethical notion’, traverses the political position of Epicureanism, Stoicism, Zen, and Taoist interpretations of indifference (or ‘nothingness’ in the Tao language). At the Sorbonne, Lyotard’s group of ‘comrades’ expanded and, as Butor observes in his recollection of Lyotard, “at the Sorbonne of those days, there was a sizeable minority of Communist students enrolled in the Party” (2001, p. 7). Lyotard “evinced not only acute intelligence concerning the political situation, but also a level of civic conscience that later led him to militate in the Socialisme ou barbaric group” (Butor,

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2001, p. 7). Butor and Lyotard studied together for the agrégation, the examination that allows graduates to teach in secondary schools (or as Butor notes, ‘the “open sesame” in those days for a reasonably remunerated post in French secondary education’ (2001, p. 6). It is worth noting at this stage the particular prestige France places on its secondary teachers, as this is arguably in contrast to the state schooling systems in the Anglophone world. The agrégation is the most prestigious and selective competitive examination granted usually after five years of higher education enabling the graduate and, in Lyotard’s case, the Humanities agrégation is even more exclusive. A successful examination grants agrégés entry into a lycée (secondary school). The oft-quoted desire Lyotard articulated in the Wellek Lectures for a career as an artist, writer or monk was put on hold for practical reasons to do with the obligations he held to provide for his young family, and the self-diagnosed lack of talent in the areas of art and writing (Lyotard, 1998). For Lyotard, the passing of the agrégation meant a guaranteed posting in a secondary school accompanied by financial security. In 1950, Lyotard took up a position teaching philosophy at a boys’ lycée in Constantine, in French-occupied East Algeria. With his wife and young daughter in tow, Lyotard’s career as a teacher had begun. This first encounter with teaching, however, would also activate his acute civic conscience and interest in Marxism in ways that would influence, in varying and often contradictory ways, his philosophical positions in the future.

1.3 From High School Teacher to Activist As an outline of Lyotard’s early professional career demonstrates, teaching was a practical necessity in that it offered a young man with a young family the stability he needed. To a certain extent, while very little is written about Lyotard’s first career as a secondary school philosophy teacher, his life was irrevocably shaped by this pragmatic career choice. However, the importance Lyotard placed on forming meaningful pedagogical relationships with his students is a lesser-acknowledged pillar to an ethical stance that would foreground and anticipate a distinct pedagogical flavour that ran throughout his activist and academic career. Lyotard’s teaching stint in Algeria from 1950 to 1952 laid fertile ground for a flourishing interest in Marxism and the concomitant desire to engage in a revolutionary form of politics. This initial period of Lyotard’s teaching career is often mistakenly conflated with an all-encompassing commitment to political activism. However, Lyotard would not put his revolutionary zeal into action for another four years, and only when back in France in 1954. Instead, for two years’ teaching in Constantine, the visible injustices and incongruities of French rule in Algeria would serve as the backdrop to his teaching life. This period also dismisses the important ‘first’ or ‘final’ book (both correct in their own way), in that Lyotard would end his formative education training with the publication of his first book entitled Phenomenology, an event that would mark a 17-year hiatus of academic writing

1.3 From High School Teacher to Activist

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(before the publication of his doctoral thesis Discourse/Figure in 1971). We will come back to the return of Lyotard to the folds of academia, but it is important to note at this juncture that Lyotard in the early 1950s (before his total immersion in activism began), was working with and through the philosophy in which he had been so thoroughly immersed in his formative education years. He was doing this as a teacher of philosophy, from a perspective that lent itself to the pedagogical scene of address that would come to inform later theoretical directions and which had the immediate effect of correlating the pedagogical relationship with the ethical injustices of the Algerian fight for independence from French occupation. Lyotard, now with two daughters, moved back to mainland France with his family in 1952. In a career move that provides many commentators in academia (particularly those in the discipline of philosophy who tend to be Lyotard’s most quoted interlocuters) with evidence of a career that is stalling, Lyotard continued his secondary school teaching with a position at a military academy. Michael Butor again provides an interesting insight into this, seemingly, philosophically latent period in Lyotard’s life by observing in a visit to his friend the practical imperatives of providing for his family—revolutionary politics or philosophical writings taking a back seat to the pragmatics of earning a stable income. The years 1952–1954 were not happy ones for Lyotard, according to Butor, possibly due to the side-lining of his activist and philosophical activities in favour of paid work to support his growing family: To get back to France, Jean-François accepted a position at La Flèche military school (prytanée), near Le Mans, in the department of the Sarthe. This truly surprised me because it was a high school exclusively for officers’ sons. But the necessities occasioned by family life were of primary concern. He was very unhappy there. During some very cold winter days, I went to visit him … I brought a vinyl recording of the Musical Offering and, in the evening we would listen to Scarlatti sonatas. (Butor, 2001, pp. 7–8)

From this short description provided by Lyotard’s close friend, one can ascertain the sense of frustration and anticipation that Lyotard must have been feeling. Butor’s comments are indeed prophetic, because Lyotard would very soon enter a period of his life that would be dedicated solely to political activism. For the meantime, however, providing for his family and continuing his teaching of the young sons of men he surely would have had significant political differences with remained a necessity. What is always glossed over in the many biographical sketches of Lyotard’s life at this point is the approach Lyotard takes to his teaching life in which his identity as a teacher of philosophy is embedded in the writing of his book on phenomenology. Reference to the profession of teaching is entirely lacking in most accounts, and yet Lyotard joins a cohort of notable philosophers—Hegel is an obvious example—who wrote significant philosophical texts whilst thoroughly immersed in a schooling milieu. Indeed, writing Phenomenology (Lyotard, 1991) as an amalgam of the philosophical training Lyotard had engaged in as a student of philosophy can be seen as the writerly manifestation of the philosophy-teacher role Lyotard occupied in his paid work. Lyotard could well have been unhappy, as Butor suggests, but his teaching life was hardly intellectually stagnant. Lyotard would, however, turn away from both teaching and academia in decisive fashion when he joined the intellectual radical Marxist group, Socialisme ou

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Barbari, in 1954. Taking revolutionary inspiration in the title of the organisation from a phrase attributed to Rosa Luxemburg, Socialisme ou Barbari would be the vehicle to fully immerse Lyotard in an activistic life. When asked in an interview by Gary Olsen about whether or not Lyotard was writing philosophy during the ten years he belonged to Socialisme ou Barbari and the subsequent years he was part of the splinter group Pouvoir Ourvrier, he answers in a way that demonstrates the all-consuming commitment this activist engagement entailed: No, it was impossible for me because my activism was a complete activism. It wasn’t simply being a card-carrying member of the party. I was completely engaged twenty-four hours a day because we had to do everything, not only to write but to print, to distribute, to defend, to go to factory entrances in order to distribute pamphlets, to manifest, to make public our meetings in order to propose or to defend our ideas or our analysis about capitalist society and Stalinist society. (Lyotard, in Olsen, 1995, p. 398)

Lyotard’s involvement in Socialisme ou Barbari, and his full commitment to this radical Marxist group, is often used in biographical notes about Lyotard as a dramatic contrast to Lyotard’s subsequent anti-Marx and anti-foundational, anti-ideological, and anti-mastery stance as an academic. Once again, though, it is possible to link something of the pedagogical flavour that inflected Lyotard’s academic life to his membership of this group. As Kiff Bamford (2020) notes in a newly released collection of Lyotard’s interviews and debates, Socialisme ou Barbari has gone through something of a mythical ‘rewrite’ in its subsequent history, particularly the centrality that is often placed on it as a well-known and impactful organisation. It is quite clear, however, that even on the left it was a marginal and fringe player. The point to take here is that working on the fringes, in the margins, and outside of the mainstream dominant discourse is exactly the pedagogical position that Lyotard takes in his own writerly and philosophical approach. Indeed, a marginal position, whether it be invisible, forgotten, inaudible, etc., is a source of creative potential for Lyotard and is even, perhaps, the more ‘desirable’ and certainly the more ethical position to hold. Derrida makes the observation concerning this marginality, that Lyotard embraced a certain openness throughout his entire academic and activist life that was predicated on dwelling on the fringes (of academia, of philosophy, of Marxism). In a certain sense, this marginality was predicated on a position of extreme vulnerability to life, to what Lyotard will conceive of as ‘the event’, and to above all the tenuousness of any claim to certainty. As so respectfully stated in his written piece after Lyotard’s death, Derrida continues: I did not know him at the time of Socialisme ou barbarie, but I thought I could see traces of a faithful attachment to it in all his great books (for example, to cite only a few, Discourse, Figure, The Postmodern Condition, The Differend, which I would relate today, in admiration, to his last writings on childhood and tears: an immense treatise on absolute disarmament, on that which links thought to infinite vulnerability. (Derrida, 2001, pp. 214–215)

Lyotard’s activism in this period of the mid-1950s and 1960s before his return to the university, needs to be seen as an influential pedagogical thread that ran throughout

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his professional life in relation to this position of marginality and vulnerability. As Derrida observes in the above, this seminal time ‘before’ Lyotard’s official career began in the conventional institutions of academic philosophy was a time of great ferment and activity that would indeed colour the rest of his teaching and academic life. Derrida articulates something similar to Butor and Spitzer, with an appeal to Lyotard’s youthful display of ‘civic’ character and his obligation toward fighting for the underdog, in the margins. It is interesting to turn to Lyotard’s own view on this, where he frames his later academic role within the context of this activistic period, whilst also providing a window into the type of writing and committed activity these years in Socialisme ou Barbarie demanded. Beginning with the acknowledgement that his activism delayed entry into academia, Lyotard continues: I began my philosophical career fifteen years late, years that were dedicated to being an activist in the group Socialisme ou barbarie where I wrote only that which was asked of me and nothing else. We did not have a Xerox machine in those days, only a mimeo machine. We prepared texts to be discussed at our meetings. All the texts we published in our magazine were discussed. We passed out flyers, organized public meetings, and so on. There was a long period, therefore, when I did not write. Finally, I did write articles about Algeria, but this was not writing in the sense we usually mean writing, there was a long delay, apparently a voluntary and conscious one, yes? A refusal … I didn’t think it was the essential thing, the essential thing was to change the world. I was a quite hard-headed partisan. (Lyotard, 1992, p. 402)

This quote is revealing when considering Lyotard’s stance as a teacher, in its depiction of Lyotard producing and disseminating knowledge, and also in the ‘trace’ as Derrida points out, of Marxist thought that frames action as the condition of pedagogy. It is hard not to hear in this articulation from the older Lyotard the echo of ‘revolutionary praxis’ that comes from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, and is encapsulated in the well-known eleventh thesis: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx & Engels, 1975–2005, vol. 5, p. 8). Changing the world as a ‘hard-headed partisan’ for Lyotard was more urgent and more important than his academic writing career, and the scent of revolution too compelling to ignore. Lyotard does not explicitly turn to Marx in an educational context in his writings, but the Marxist notion of ‘revolutionary praxis’ does, at this point in Lyotard’s life, seem to capture the essence of his pedagogical approach: revolutionary praxis requires of one to change one’s circumstances to change one’s self, and vice versa, for social and individual transformation to occur. As Robin Small points out when unpacking the eleventh thesis: Here Marx reasserts the conclusion of his critique of the Hegelian school: philosophy cannot solve its own problems. It is likely to go on forever with the same debates unless it shifts ground and turns into social and political activity—that is, into the ‘praxis’ of the earlier theses. (Small, 2014, p. 20)

Lyotard’s activism seen through the lens of Marx enables us to see the truly pedagogical flavour of this activity, and its echoes in the way Lyotard approached academia even when turning away from Marx. To further elaborate the eleventh thesis as an

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influence on Lyotard, the importance of understanding theory, politics, and the social required of Lyotard to engage in political activism directly. Lyotard encapsulated this Marxist approach with the lived experience and aim of combining theory and practice, and the writings on Algeria during the 1950s and first half of the 1960s demonstrate this necessity. While Lyotard grew increasingly frustrated with Marx and his engagement in radical activism to the extent that he switched careers and reentered the university system in the late 1960s, Derrida’s interpretation of these early ‘career’ years did indeed provide a legacy in Lyotard’s later approach to academia. The desire to understand and activate philosophy, in whatever guise, remained a central concern to Lyotard throughout his life. However, Lyotard had grown disillusioned with the ‘direct’ politics of political activism in these formative early years, which he described as ‘continual work’ and as such, “impossible … to engage in real academic or even writing activity … That is, my writing started, around the middle of the sixties, as the giving up of a political perspective” (Lyotard in Olson, 1995, p. 398). This giving up and letting go of Marx and revolutionary activism propelled Lyotard back into the university, starting with the lectures at the Sorbonne in 1964 that were published in English as the book entitled Why Philosophize? (2013). While Lyotard’s daughter, Corinne Enaudeau, describes this entry point as Lyotard viewing philosophy too explicitly as praxis (in the introduction to the English publication of the lectures), the legacy of political activism would position Lyotard as a vigorous supporter of his students throughout the 1968 uprisings in France. Indeed, his doctoral thesis, published as Discourse, Figure, was worked through in the revolutionary years of 1967–1969 with his university students. Sarah Wilson describes Lyotard’s engagement with the visual arts as ‘an integral part of his political vision’, where: Time, space and colour were transposed in his seminars from the investigations of art and society—the medieval, the renaissance and the modern—to those of the formal investments in both language (discours) and art (figure) of emotion, anguish and the unconscious. (Wilson, 2013, p. 199)

Lyotard’s transition from activist to professor would be complete by the second half of the 1960s, and it is from this juncture that the philosopher more well-known to the academic world emerges.

1.4 Continuing the Gesture: The Professor’s Pedagogical ‘Task’ of Translation Lyotard’s academic career once inside the university system, first in Paris and later as the travelling professor primarily in the United States, always took on the broad character of cultural critic in ways that extended ‘beyond’ the university classroom. Nowhere was this expansive view of academia more concentrated in Lyotard’s intellectual life than in the realm of artists and art commentary and critique. Lyotard’s approach to philosophising brought with him the political activistic perspective, but it

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was in the realm of higher education that Lyotard would extend the political toward an analysis of the artistic gesture. This final section to the chapter ‘lifts’ Lyotard’s narrative from chronological analysis and instead draws a line between Lyotard’s ‘past’ political activism with his more well-known academic role of philosopher, and one important commonality that knits together what at first sight seems a disparate and fragmented career; specifically, the inarticulate affect of politics and art. By way of rounding off a narrative of Lyotard’s career, the section looks at the pedagogical task of translation that goes beyond the straightforward transposition of French to another language, to the ethical necessity Lyotard held toward the carrying on of the affective gesture. Lyotard was tremendously generous to his students, especially when supplying young and emergent scholars the opportunity to translate his work for English publication. Undoubtedly part of Lyotard’s motivation would have been purely pragmatic (graduate students can be soft touches when it comes to opportunities to impress their superiors). Christopher Fynsk (2007, p. 126) humorously recalls Lyotard casually throwing a text he had written on Kafka his way that would later be published as the essay entitled ‘Prescription’ and requesting it be translated as quickly as possible. This, despite the huge pressures and deadlines the young scholar was facing in his own degree programme and the fiendish task of understanding a typically obtuse and difficult work by Lyotard in French (leading Fynsk to respond cheekily in his head to Lyotard’s request to ‘translate this’ with ‘Yeah well, [Professor Lyotard] translate this!’). However, the necessity to translate one language into another that Lyotard faced as a practical requirement to his growing fame outside France, plays a significant role in the wider philosophical ‘task’ of reading Lyotard, and the pedagogical stance that ‘translating’ requires. In acknowledging David Carroll as the translator for the Irvine Wellek Library Lectures published as Peregrinations (1988), lectures Lyotard actually wrote in English from the outset, Lyotard ponders the role of the translator. For him, the practical ‘function’ that Carroll performs is one of translating one idiom (Lyotard’s ‘English’) to an ‘other’ idiom acceptable to English speakers. “This is a tiresome and difficult task, a kind of ‘rewriting’ that makes him co-responsible for these texts”, Lyotard explains (1988, p. xix). As an amusing counterpoint to this version, Carroll sardonically recalls the chaotic scenes at the University of California,1 when Lyotard, surrounded by different English dictionaries, tried desperately (and usually unsuccessfully) to find proof of the existence of a word he thought was English, and which he claimed was perfect for his use. Often, however, the invented word turned out to be a too-fruity neologism described by Carroll as usually an Anglicised version of a French, German, or Latin word that rendered Lyotard’s intended meaning indecipherable.

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Lyotard had a regular one-quarter appointment at the University of California, Irvine, from the mid-1980s where he taught (in English) a critical theory course. This was one of many universities outside of France that Lyotard would have some kind of involvement with on both a casual and permanent basis.

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Indecipherability, however, plays a not insignificant role in the notion of translation as a form of rewriting that incorporates a necessary element of repetition. But what is being repeated? Clearly, Carroll was not being too much of a pedant by enforcing a modicum of decipherability on Lyotard’s ‘English’. Carroll describes how he owed it to the beauty and intricacy of what Lyotard was saying to ensure the non-French audience intended to be the recipients of this work were able to understand, at least a little, of what the speaker (Lyotard) was talking about. In this case, Carroll is siding with the necessity for comprehension, to ensure incorrect wording and poor syntax, at the very least, do not obstruct meaning. However, things become more complicated when taking into account what the ‘about’ is referring to, and the inability and outright refusal made by Lyotard to ever consider ‘words’ adequate to the task of complete decipherability. In reference to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel,2 Lyotard offers the proviso that different languages meet and come into contact with each other, but there can never be one common or core language with the privileged role of deciphering all languages. There can never be total and complete transparency, no ‘grand narrative’ capable of telling all stories, no metaphysics to explain all phenomena. “The Lord was wise to prevent the Tower” Lyotard adds (2009, p. 44). Of course, for Lyotard translation is not an option; there is no other choice but to translate if ‘monism’ as terror and injustice is to be avoided. “This monism is still dangerous”, Lyotard continues. “In our time, it is the monism of the cultural object that comes to take the singular place of works of art” (ibid.). The role translation plays in ‘deepening the singularity’ of the work of art that Lyotard considers a necessity against this monism, and which is constantly under threat, is to transmit or ‘report’ the artistic gesture as affect that the work provokes. “Now, one can only report on or account for an affect by transmitting it, and not by objectifying it” Lyotard warns (2002, p. 80). Here we can get closer to what is repeated, and the role translation plays as a form of repetition in which the gesture specific to a work of art is reworked and rewritten. Working from the unknown in language into the unknown of thought is, in fact, an important pedagogical stance that Lyotard vigilantly defends and upholds throughout his writings. The role of translation is cast as an ethical act that attempts a rewriting of the gesture—‘gestus’—of a way of being toward space and time. Here, the silent gesture is given an ‘other’ voice and is transcribed and translated into words, “and not just any words, but the strange words that philosophy uses in order to come into contact with what it does not know, with what it knows no better than does the artist or the art itself” Lyotard explains (2002, p. 74). The necessary repetition of the gesture, as the affect transmitted in and through art, is the heightened responsibility of translation that preserves the uniqueness and singularity of the art-as-event. While acknowledging it is not possible to accord one philosophical ‘approach’ to Lyotard, it is a fair observation that this translation of the gesture as the irreducible remainder to 2

From the Book of Genesis, this is the story of the unitary movement of the peoples building a tower as monument to a common language and understanding. God is supposed to have prevented the Tower from being built by scattering the different people and languages all over the land, ending the common language and thus ensuring a multitude of differing languages, customs and cultures.

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works of art plays a significant role throughout his writing career. This is an approach to writing philosophy that “is committed to paying its debt to the gesture of color, volume, tone, and line, without the intention of peacefully di-gesting it within the organism of a system, or, worse still, within a ‘worldview’” (Lyotard, 2002, p. 74). What is required in the task of preventing assimilation, monism, and objectivity is an endless series of attempts to reinscribe, to rewrite, and to transmit again and again, the silent gesture that ‘animates’ and provokes a singular and unrepeatable affect. The role of the philosopher as translator of this affect into words requires a testimony to the irreducible inarticulateness of this affect. In a revealing excerpt Lyotard sums up his own methodological position: At such times, the philosopher, like a desperate lover, attempts to give the work something he did not possess, namely, the words to carry on this gesture. And he attempts this even if it means changing the whole of what he thought he knew and was capable of signifying, just so as to be able to give the artist, whether dead or alive, the three words, or perhaps 300 pages, which would transcribe the absolute insignificance of the gesture that is the work of art. (Lyotard, 2002, p. 74)

The role of translation also figures highly in the practical and ‘philosophical’ formation of Lyotard as teacher. For the English speaker and reader of Lyotard, Lyotard’s voice is always ‘deferred’, through the voice of a translator and in the ‘voice’ and tone of English. The act of translation involves listening to a different voice that necessarily impacts on the more subtle nuances in the form of puns and wordplays, coupled with an ironic humour, that were all part of the idiosyncrasies of Lyotard’s writing style.3 However, part of what makes Lyotard so interesting is that he is already in the act of translation when he is commenting on and observing the artistic works that inform the very heart of what he is trying to say (irrespective of what ‘genre’ he is occupying at any given moment). By providing a commentary on art, Lyotard is attempting to translate the gesture, something that remains forever elusive to any definitive account or translation, which allows the space for others to continue with this job. Following this lead then, the issue of translation in appraising Lyotard’s contribution to education can be seen as an attempt to “to translate itself translating, to grasp its own event in the making” (Bennington, 2010, para. 10). Engaging with education as an ‘event’, then, is the task Lyotard both grappled with himself and the one that most concerns this book.

References Bamford, K. (2020). Jean-François Lyotard: The interviews and debates. Bloomsbury.

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Iain Hamilton Grant (In Lyotard, 1993) offers an interesting insight into translating Lyotard’s long sentences, and unique rhythm and style in his ‘Translator’s Preface’ to Libidinal Economy.

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Bennington, G. (2010). Translation in the dark/La traduction au noir. In J-F. Lyotard (Eds.), Ecrits sur l’art contemporain et les artistes/Writings on contemporary art and artists (pp. 208–223). Leaven University Press. Butor, M. (2001). Recollections on Jean-François Lyotard. Yale French Studies, 99, 6–9. Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations. Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (2001). The work of mourning (P.-A. Brault & M. Naas, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Fynsk, C. (2007). Jean-François’s infancy. In C. Nouvet, Z. Stahuljak, & K. Still (Eds.), Minima memoria: In the wake of Jean-François Lyotard (pp. 123–138). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2001). Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans. 10th ed.). Manchester University Press. (Original work published 1979). Lyotard, J.-F. (1988). Peregrinations: Law, form, event (D. Carroll, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1991). Phenomenology [La phénoménologie] (B. Beakley, Trans.). State University of New York Press. (Original work published 1954). Lyotard, J.-F. (1992). That which resists, after all: Jean François Lyotard and Gilbert Larochelle. Philosophy Today, 36(4), 402–417. Lyotard, J.-F. (1993). Libidinal economy [Economie libidinale] (I. H. Grant, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1974). Lyotard, J.-F. (1998). A few words to sing (L. R. Lawlor, Trans.). In A. Krims (Ed.), Music/ideology: Resisting the aesthetic (pp. 15–36). G+B Arts International. Lyotard, J.-F. (2002). Gesture and commentary. (S. A. Schwartz, Trans.). In D. Glowacka & S. Boos (Eds.), Between ethics and aesthetics: Crossing the boundaries (pp. 73–82). State University of New York Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (2009). Music and postmodernity [Musique et postmodernité]. New Formations, 66(Spring 2009), 37–45. https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF.66.02.2009 Lyotard, J.-F. (2013). Why philosophize? Polity Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1975–2005). Collected works (50 vols). Lawrence and Wishart. Olson, G. A. (1995). Resisting a discourse of mastery: A conversation with Jean-François Lyotard. A Journal of Composition Theory, 15(3), 391–410. Readings, B. (1993). Political writings: Jean-Fançois Lyotard. University of Minnesota Press. Small, R. (2014). Karl Marx: The revolutionary as educator. Springer. Spitzer, A. B. (2006). Born in 1925. French Politics, Culture & Society, 24(2), 46–57. Wilson, S. (2013). Lyotard, Monory: Postmodern romantics. In H. Parret (Ed.), L’ assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture–Monory [The assassination of experience by painting–Monory] (pp. 196–253). (Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists; Vol. VI). University of Leuven Press.

Chapter 2

Pedagogies of Affect with Lyotard’s Freud

2.1 Introduction Lyotard was a keen critic of society’s relation to knowledge and the contemporary demand to reduce complexity in favour of easily digestible pieces of information. This well-known critique of the performativity of knowledge that is most explicitly developed in The Postmodern Condition, finds interesting variations in Lyotard’s thinking that allow us to see something of what he thought a ‘good’ teacher was and ‘good’ teaching may entail. Terms such as incommunicability, inarticulateness, untranslatability, the unpresentable, the ineffable and non-mastery (even when viewed as sometimes slightly strange transliterations from French to English) are scattered throughout Lyotard’s writing. While it is tempting to see this as a negative formulation of pedagogy where all that is good is bad (such as efficiency, direct transference of knowledge, achievement), and all that is bad is good (such as opaque meaning, unclear transmission of knowledge, failure), a nuanced view pushes this negative equation toward a more liminal and fragile position that expands the educational landscape to one where anything is possible and where all shadowy avenues have generative potential. Indeed if we are going to take seriously Lyotard’s dictum that to be a good teacher one “cannot be a master and master this course” (1992a, p. 100), and, to learn from others one must first commit to “learn to unlearn” (1992a, p. 101), then forming a view of education that involves a break with conventional ideas about educational development and growth as both essential components and justification of education is necessary. To get to this point, an excursion through texts not often associated with education at all in Lyotard’s oeuvre, namely those devoted to Lyotard’s later reading of Freud in the form of the essay “Emma: Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis” (2002), “The Affect-Phrase” (2006), the book, Heidegger and “the jews,” (1990) and as elaborated in the interview “Freud, Energy and Chance” (1999) will frame the educational focus of this chapter.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Locke, Jean-François Lyotard, SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97491-6_2

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Lyotard’s association with Freud comes into full force at a time when the psychoanalytic wave led by Jacques Lacan was washing over Europe in the mid-1960s and when Lyotard himself made a complete break from the political activism of the radical Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie, and its splinter group Pouvoir Ouvrier. Lyotard attended Lacan’s lectures and, while engaging with academia as a new philosophy lecturer debated key Freudian concepts, specifically in relation to art, with his students. All of this intellectual activity circling Freud (which encompassed art, politics, and culture) culminated in his doctoral thesis and first published book upon re-entry to the university, Discourse, Figure (Lyotard, 2020). Lyotard’s use of Freud at this time, including the very Freudian and slightly scandalous Libidinal Economy (1993) that was published shortly after in this same period of the early 1970s, uses a Freudian sexual energetics that looks at power (puissance) in terms of libidinous desires and intensities. This is in contrast to Lyotard’s later texts where he turns to a Freud whose writing on affect within the rubric of original repression as deferred action, is merged with the Kantian notion of the sublime. This Freudian/Kantian conceptual constellation enables Lyotard to reach a perspective on knowledge and art that explores the way thought exceeds conceptual articulation and representation. “What the name of Freud turns around,” continues Lyotard, “is the principle that there cannot be absolute knowledge” (Lyotard, 1999, para. 6). This concentration on the erosion of certainty when considering knowledge was, for Lyotard, resonant with his past political experiences, and again Lyotard’s background as a radical activist leaves a legacy that influences his intellectual engagement. Lyotard’s strong advocacy for Algerian-led independence while a member of Socialism ou Barbarie resulted in his belief that the kind of representational politics that political collectives (such as those he belonged to throughout the 1950s and 1960s) did not take into account the unknown and unpresentable silences of broader agency that he framed as ‘the political’. Nations should have the right to choose how they are governed, Lyotard surmised, but this political formation must be distinct from the meaning given to the political agency of its citizens. Thus, for Lyotard, the changing ground of what ‘politics’ is needed to be questioned. Van Den Abbeele describes this ‘othering’ of the notion of politics that Lyotard grappled with as “the politics … of what cannot be represented on the ‘scene’ of the political, of the wrong … of ‘the thing’ that remains repressed or suppressed in any social or political arrangement” (Van Den Abbeele, 1991, pp. 155–156). We can see the traces of this political questioning in the way that Lyotard returned to France hungry for the theoretical co-ordinates to enable him to map out in his philosophy this hidden remainder. Lyotard implicitly references his past political activity as an important framing device to help activate his continued concerns about an inability to represent totality in a late interview with the following statement: “And so I came late to writing, and much—“thank God”—had happened to help me make sense of what ought to be thought through” (Lyotard, 1992b, p. 402). This meandering path Lyotard travels to continually engage with the unknown and unpresentable in politics and art during the 1970s leads to the moment that Lyotard devotes entirely to the role of education in The Postmodern Condition that was first published in 1979. With this elongated essay, Lyotard stands still for the briefest

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of moments squarely inside the discipline of education, primarily to critique the narrowing of our relationship to knowledge and its revaluing nature as exchangeable commodity. However, it is Lyotard’s changing engagement with Freud that provides a lesser known, and possibly more interesting, avenue with which to explore the unpresentable and affective dimensions to education. Specifically, the perspective Lyotard provides, via Freud, is of a kind of educational approach that brings into focus the temporal, affective and unpresentable elements to our relationship with knowledge, teaching, and learning. In this we can see that Lyotard is concerned with the silences and barriers to communication that challenge the direct transference of knowledge and meaning in education. This sounds like a very strange way to approach education, which is generally conceived as imparting knowledge to the young in the most straight-forward manner possible. However, Lyotard provides an alternative way to frame education that can be read through his texts on psychoanalysis which involves the ethical necessity to provide opportunities that attest to the ‘unpresentable’ and that stimulate ‘excitement’ as affect. Lyotard’s turn to Freud as a philosopher allows him “to insist on the radical incommensurability of affect with discourse, representation, and articulation in general” (Nouvet et al., 2016, p. 1). This incommensurability provides a pathway to consider the pedagogical power of affect that is framed as a sensitivity to acknowledge what exceeds thought and the capacity for representation. This chapter looks at the implications of positioning teaching and learning as the scene of affective address in order to reclaim a view of education as a series of generative encounters that resist the reductive forces of performativity.

2.2 Lyotard’s Turn to Freudian Affect As a first step toward understanding Lyotard’s theory of affect in the context of education, this section outlines his use of Freud’s thinking on the notions of deferred action as Nachtraglichkeit and originary repression. In French, Nachtraglichkeit translates as après coup and this French term was made prominent by Lacan. The English ‘deferred action’ will be used as the translation from the German because this is more in line with Lyotard’s critique of Lacan and his predominant use of the German term in his texts (Lyotard, 2002). Lyotard’s rewriting of Freud is of particular interest when considering education as a site of affectivity and ‘excitation’ that takes inspiration from Freud’s analysis of the unconscious that Lyotard spoke about in his return to Freud after initially using aspects of psychoanalytical theory in both political and artistic areas of concern in the early stages of his career. Referencing one of the major philosophical books as an important turning point in the way he engaged with Freud in The Differend (1988) written in the 1980s, Lyotard charts his changing use of Freud in the following: I tried, about fifteen years ago, to drown the thesis of the unconscious under the flood of a general libidinal economy … I was [then] led to that which, in Le Différend, is exposed (rather than conceptualised) under the name of phrase … From such an angle I feel capable

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2 Pedagogies of Affect with Lyotard’s Freud of approaching (as a philosopher) that which is the psychoanalyst’s material … I do not intend to “re-write” the unconscious, but to open a little breach in the metaphysics of forces. (46, 56) (Lyotard cited in Tomiche, 1991, p. 55)

The above quote illuminates the key concern that occurs for Lyotard in many variations on the theme of finding ways to demonstrate the incapacity to articulate completeness in any human sphere of engagement (such as in discourse, conceptual meaning, history, etc.). Lyotard is quite clear that his use of Freud here is not to be positioned in the realm of psychoanalysis in the curative sense. Rather, he frames deferred action as a point of entry to explore what it is that is left ‘incomplete’ within human experience and understanding through the analogy of the role the unconscious plays on the conscious that is at once a hidden and constitutive part of consciousness. Importantly, Lyotard is interested in the way Freud was able to think around the possibility of how the unconscious could be ‘exposed’ on the surface of the mind through affect. For our purposes of finding how this can be applied to education, it is helpful to see how Lyotard appropriated these ideas into a political critique in the provocatively named book, Heidegger and “the jews” (1990). In this text Lyotard spends the first half of his argument drawing a direct analogy between the way the figure of “the jews” (nominally conceived as a place-holder name for affect and the unknown, while also a direct reference to the group of people who identify as Jewish) perform upon Western reason, and the way Freud’s ‘affect’ plays upon the conscience. Within this analogy, both the figure of “the jews” and affect are denied any means of presentation and articulation. For Lyotard, the figure of “the jews” “plays in the thought (in the psychic apparatus) of the (European) Occident this role of an imminent terror, not identified as such, unrepresentable, of an unconscious affect and of a medically incurable misery” (Lyotard, 1990, p. 21). The broader context to Lyotard’s reference to the philosopher Martin Heidegger is too large for this current analysis. However, Lyotard is here referring to Heidegger’s membership of the Nazi Party and its role in exposing a shortfall in Heidegger’s conception of Being as constitutive of human experience and articulation. For Lyotard, Heidegger’s joining the Nazi Party demonstrated Heidegger forgot there is always a remainder as a matter of ethical importance to ideologies that purport a complete philosophy. For Lyotard, this political application of Freudian affect in “the jews” as being stubbornly inarticulate further calls on the Freudian rubric of ‘originary repression’ to describe why articulation is simply not available. In an interview, Lyotard explains originary repression within a framework of the unpresentable in the following: Originary repression is Freud’s term …, he invented it. Since the forgetting in question has nothing to do with an act of forgetting resulting from a secondary repression, it does not concern something that has taken place and that one does not remember. Rather it concerns the forgetting of something that has not taken place, but that inhabits the psyche nonetheless, without one knowing what it is. And in this sense I would stress a “differend”—something like an abyss—between the primary processes and their insertions in acts, between the circulating energy of this “x” and the synthesis of time, between, that is, energy and temporalization. (Lyotard, 1999, para. 18)

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What is Lyotard pointing out here? First, Lyotard is highlighting a kind of radical forgetting where a first shock is not registered as an event that a thinking mind can remember. Therefore, the shock is unable to be forgotten in the context in which we usually frame memory and events that we may forget but can be reminded of if prompted. Under the label of Nachtraglichkeit, Lyotard explains a constitutive element of primary (originary) repression through his analysis of deferred action in the following way: Nachträglichkeit thus implies the following: (1) a double blow that is constitutively asymmetrical, and (2) a temporality that has nothing to do with what the phenomenology of consciousness (even that of Saint Augustine) can thematize. The double blow includes a first blow, the first excitation, which upsets the apparatus with such “force” that it is not registered. It is like a whistle that is inaudible to humans but not to dogs, or like infrared or ultraviolet light… This force is not set to work in the machine of the mind. It is deposited there. I imagine the effect of the shock, the unconscious affect, to be like a cloud of energy particles that are not subject to serial laws, that are not organized into sets that can be thought in terms of words or images, that do not experience any attraction at all… the discovery of an originary repressed leads Freud to assume that it cannot be represented. (Lyotard, 1990, p. 15)

It is here that Lyotard awards the affect a ‘physics’ in the form of a (silent) force or energy that occurs in excess of the temporal frame (that is a variation on the silence that occurs in The Differend (1988) as a wrong that enforces a denial of voice and right to articulate). Its starting point, according to Lyotard, is within: [T]he physical hypothesis of the mind, let’s imagine that an “excitation,” that is, a shattering of the system of forces constituted by the psychic apparatus, … affects the system when the latter has nothing to process this excitation, neither when it enters, nor inside, nor when it exits … An excitation which is not “introduced,” in the sense that it affects but does not enter. (cited in Tomiche, 1991, p. 56)

The silence described above as an “excitation” signals a type of presence “more archaic and irreducible” to any mode of articulation. This presence, for Lyotard, is “the pure autonomy of the affect” that, he continues, “does not translate itself in either presentation or representation” (Lyotard, 2002, p. 44). Therefore, “the silence surrounding the ‘unconscious affect’ does not affect the pragmatic realm (the transfer of a meaning to the listener); it affects the physics of the speaker. It is not that the latter cannot make himself understood; he himself does not hear anything” (Lyotard, 1990, p. 12). Of importance here is the temporal displacement that occurs in tandem with the affect and the way the temporal quality of the affect as an occurrence or event effaces any recognition of itself as a silence. It is lost, in that “we are confronted with a silence that does not make itself heard as silence” (Lyotard, 1990, p. 12). This, for Lyotard, is Freud’s important contribution to thinking (“la pensée,” says Lyotard) as such, “since the accent is placed on the unintelligible as irreducibly present but irreducible to the synthesis of time” (Lyotard, 1999, p. 5) just as the affect is silent in its condition as an event. Moreover, Lyotard takes this Freudian inspired analysis further by, in the essay ‘Emma: Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis’ (Lyotard, 2002) presenting the unconscious affect in the constellation of a ‘phrase-affect’.

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2.3 The Unconscious as ‘Phrase-Affect’ Lyotard turns to psychoanalysis because of what he describes as philosophy’s inability and ineptitude to deal with the fertile, unarticulated space of unbridled creativity that the unconscious unleashes. With the quality of silence, the unconscious can potentially shatter the hegemony of a Western philosophy of consciousness that hides “behind a web of evidence” as understanding and certainty, “that ensures its bright life” (Lyotard, 2002, p. 24). In formulating his approach, Lyotard looks to Freud’s unconscious to understand the resistance that traditional forms of Western philosophy have towards silence. Instead of the ‘bright light’ of certainty, philosophy would be transferred to “a court of darkness that resists understanding and reason” (Lyotard, 2002, p. 24). Such an approach is insufferable to such certainties so prized within Western reason and the “inconsistent, yet persevering anguish” that the ‘threat’ of silence poses within a Freudian rubric of unconscious affect (Lyotard, 2002, p. 24). Silence, as inarticulateness in the Freudian sense, fundamentally clashes with the notion of articulation within traditional philosophic branches of linguistics and logic. In Lyotard’s Freudian reading, silence can, instead, be awarded a type of articulation in a negative sense. This negative formulation of articulation Lyotard asserts “is much less than this [what is offered in philosophy]. What I call a phrase is, in the immediacy of its occurrence … the presentation of a universe, however tiny and disabled (Lyotard, 2002, p. 27). This phrase, though felt and sensed, remains silent and “impoverished” of meaning and signification upon its articulation. The affect-phrase differs from Lyotard’s previous ‘philosophy of phrases’ that occur in The Differend, because of the nominal characteristics of the phrase-affect. As Bennington argues, the presentation of a universe Lyotard refers to is not the kind of universe (presented within the phrase-affect) that lends itself to a linking of other phrases, because it is inarticulate and is not “organised according to the four familiar poles in their two familiar axes of addressor-addressee and referentmeaning” (Bennington, 2000, p. 91). The affect-phrase deployed here consists of the nominal dimension of silence that negates the necessity for the traditional polarities of addressee, addressor, and referent. Instead, the phrase is ‘silent’ in its state of pure occurrence, signalled only as an affect that is addressed to no one, refers to nothing, and is empty of meaning and, as such, is unable to present a universe because of these radically un-linkable qualities. Tomiche offers an insight into why these qualities are important to Lyotard’s analysis of silence: The phrase thus interests Lyotard insofar as it is a pure occurrence, “before” representation, signification, and the subject: it is what merely “happens,” the presentation of the universe, before the question can even be raised of what has happened, before the question of the universe presented can be raised. (Tomiche, 1994, p. 44)

It is important to emphasise here that Lyotard’s term ‘phrase’ does not translate easily into the English language as, what Lyotard is evoking is more than grammar and linguistics.1 Both a word and a sentence could be termed as a phrase, but so too 1

It is worth pointing out that in the translation to The Differend, Georges Van Den Abbeele sets the standard in Lyotardian translation by using the English term ‘phrase’ instead of the strictly

2.3 The Unconscious as ‘phrase-Affect’

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could non-linguistic units that exceed signification and expression (such as gestures, silences, and signals. In The Differend, Lyotard infamously considers even the tail wag of a cat to be fall under the premise of a phrase!). In working ‘with’ Freud though, Lyotard is interested in the way the phrase-affect remains silent when it presents itself but loses its quality of silence upon its re-presentation through signification. In The Differend, the silence the affect-phrase ‘presents’ provided Lyotard with quite a challenge. The unique property of silence and non-referential meaning prevent the necessary impetus to link to other phrases that is, in Lyotard’s formulation, a fundamental quality to the phrase. In the following explanation, Lyotard identifies the challenges that he faced in formulating his phrase-affect, and the challenge the phrase-affect poses to discourse: From the fact that the affect-phrase is inarticulate, several noteworthy features appear to follow. Here are three of them: 1) The affect-phrase appears not to allow itself to be linked onto according to the rules of any discursive genre; it appears on the contrary to be able only to suspend or interrupt linkings, whatever they are; 2) the affect-phrase injures the rules of the discursive genres; it creates a damage; 3) this damage gives rise in turn to a wrong. For the damage suffered by discourse can be argued within the rules, but this argumentation is inappropriate to the affect-phrase in every case, if it is true that that phrase does not give rise to a genre and cannot be argued. The damage that the affect-phrase causes the discursive genres is thus transformed into a wrong suffered by the affect-phrase. Articulated phrase and affect-phrase can only ‘meet’ by missing each other. From their differend results a wrong. If articulation and inarticulation are irreducible to each other, this wrong can be said to be radical. (Lyotard in Bennington, 2000, p. 91)

This radical wrong that is ‘suffered’ by the phrase-affect is one of the extremely paradoxical threads of thought that drives much of Lyotard’s later work. Being inarticulate, the phrase-affect is found begging for articulation but is instantly betrayed when given a mode of articulation. Instead, the phrase-affect has to be found to be always wanting to find articulation but must always remain elusively out of grasp if a wrong is not to be imposed. Says Lyotard of this highly paradoxical dimension of the affect-phrase, “they are witnesses but do not represent anything to anybody” (Lyotard in Bennington, 2000, p. 91).2 It is here that Lyotard draws an analogy between philosophy and psychoanalysis in that the affect-phrase mirrors Kant’s notion of aesthetic feeling as ‘pure,’ disinterested (in that it refers to nothing) pleasure or pain. Described by Lyotard as a “no-thing” in the Kantian sense, Lacan’s notion of the ‘Thing’ (la chose) also fits under this figure of the affect. Bennington explains this disinterested ‘thing’ within the affect-phrase as “monotonous in that it is always only a sense of pleasure and /or pain” (Bennington, 2000, p. 91). Bennington continues along this vein of negation, “meaning that it is ‘both an affective state (pleasure or pain) and the sign of that state’: and this status is explicitly related here … to Freud’s semantically correct translation of the French word ‘phrase’ to the English word ‘sentence’. The reasons for this, as given by Abbeele, are because, in both French and English, the word ‘phrase’ can be used as both a verb and noun, and that the phrase gives a broader notion than the ‘sentence’ as indicative of a “constellation of instances, which is as contextual as it is textual” (Van Den Abbeele’s Glossary in Lyotard, 1988, p. 194). 2 This also sheds light on Lyotard’s controversial and often misinterpreted assertion that “The witness is a traitor” in The Inhuman (Lyotard, 1991, p. 204).

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account of affect as non-representational, as opposed to word-or-thing-presentations” (Bennington, 2000, p. 91). The phrase-affect is silent in that it can only signal, as Bennington asserts, to the fact that something is happening or, in Lyotard’s syntax, to the ‘it happens’ of an event. In this sense, Lyotard’s affect has no meaning because it does not communicate anything but itself as an occurrence. According to Nouvet, “the affect only and always says: there is pain/pleasure. It does not signify pain and/ or pleasure; it only gives a sense of pain and/ or pleasure in their absolute singularity” (Nouvet, 2007, p. 111). It does not ‘say’ anything more than what it signals because it can’t—there is nothing to say but that it is an affect that can only be felt in feeling and sensation. Lyotard elaborates further: What is important in the affect is the load it carries, how much it overloads the thoughtbody, the psychical appearance … By “overload” (a mechanical metaphor), one indicates the “presence” of a nonsignificant phrase (pleasure or pain?), neither destined (from whom to whom?), nor referenced (of what is it a question?), which happens suddenly in the course of phrases …Then, in an always unexpected manner (and therefore, in the mode of a “once again”), the affect repeats itself, introduction and repetition together. (Lyotard, 2002, pp. 33– 30)

Here Lyotard incorporates a paradoxical notion of time that is important to his analysis of Freud, and that is crucial to the concept of the (in)articulation of the ‘affectphrase.’ Especially of importance is what Lyotard considers to be the singularity of the affect, and the way this singularity occurs ‘in’ and ‘outside’ “clock time” (Lyotard, 2002) at the same moment (as deferred action). These paradoxical temporalities Lyotard identifies within the affect challenge the notion around the discourse of time (in the Western sense) as linear, chronologically predetermined and measurable. For Lyotard, “the movement that counts time, presupposes time” and it is this ‘aporia’ that the affect-phrase exposes (Lyotard, 2002, p. 30). Inspiration is taken from Freud’s case notes as outlined in Lyotard’s eponymous essay “Emma” in which the patient (Emma) expresses her unreasonable fear of entering all grocery shops. According to Freud’s analysis (via a Lyotardian critique), Emma is able to uncover in her therapy (with Freud) that the irrational fear is linked to an experience she had in a grocer’s shop when she was a child. This experience had been ‘forgotten’ but manifested itself as a disturbance in later life whenever she entered a grocery store. Here, the original ‘first’ shock is the experience Emma had as a child. This shock is so shattering and traumatic for Emma that it is (a) at the time not registered as anything other than a shock, and (b) continuously returns as a second blow, as a return of the original affect, whenever she enters a shop because of the extreme trauma of the first experience but, because she has no memory (or signification), this second blow has no meaning. It just occurs, but this occurrence has its coordinates outside and in excess of the temporality to which it belongs. The technical synopsis of the conflicted temporalities that Emma experiences as a deferred action is explained in Lyotard’s own words in the following excerpt: An event (an excitation) occurs at T2. There is no representative trace of this even in the vertical series of T’2, T”2, etc. the psyche (of Emma at T2) does not then have representations of the event. These images are not merely too confused or too pale, they are not at all. In the place of the vertical line, then, a blank – T2 is forgotten straight away. It is not inscribed

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in the representative order. The same can also be said in mechanical language: the energy introduced by the excitation at T2 is not and has not been tied up in representative formations, neither consciously nor unconsciously. (Lyotard, 2002, p. 32)

The ‘deferred action’ is the return of the first shock, the second of the ‘double blows,’ that is the presentation of the affect-phrase and the representation of the repeated affect (which does not represent anything). In this way, the affect, Lyotard explains, “is how the excitation is present, i.e., as a cloud of energy not entirely fixed in psychic appearance but also not “free” either. The affect is present but not represented” (ibid.). Lyotard will utilise this ‘asymmetrical’ temporality to provide a temporal piece of resistance to the type of linear temporality that the logic of performativity enforces. This will also provide Lyotard with the theoretical impetus to explore how the past can ‘haunt’ the present and claim it by evoking a silent feeling of anxiety that is impossible to articulate.

2.4 Lyotard’s Temporal Pedagogies of Affect Lyotard’s engagement with affect in his later writings contains resources for engaging with affect in education, and these resources come more sharply into focus when put into conversation with Freud’s psychoanalysis. This conversation leads us to a point to consider the impossibility in education of ever successfully articulating or ‘phrasing’ affect, but the concomitant obligation to still provide opportunities that attempt to do so. Lyotard’s turn to Freud’s notions of deferred action and primary repression brings the unpresentable and inarticulate as pedagogic affect to the fore of education, and this forces a complete re-evaluation of conventional approaches to education that insist (increasingly) on transparent meaning and efficient modes of pedagogy to enable effective knowledge transmission. However, Lyotard instead traces the way an imprint of a shock or disturbance of a system opens a possibility to view the processes and content of education quite differently by positioning affect as a disrupter to the smooth performance of the education system. What Lyotard’s return to Freud and affect gives us primarily is a point of entry with which to ask the question: What is ‘at stake’ in education? The provisional answer, after this engagement with Freud is, of course, the ‘inarticulate’ and unpresentable. However, Freud allows Lyotard to push this question of what is at stake in education to the ‘matter’ before thinking, or as Tomiche describes, “a quod (matter as a ‘pure’ phrase event) before all quid” (1991, p. 56). What is unpresentable is what cannot be absorbed into meaning or understanding in education as an occurrence of affect, and this occurrence is temporal, unrepeatable, fleeting, and points us toward positioning education as a series of generative encounters that resist the narrowing of the educative experience to that of simply transferring information to students or ‘phrasing’ pedagogy as a way of harnessing and absorbing affect as part of an educational tool kit of achievable learning outcomes. Affect, in education, must be sought after in the classroom but never totally accessible or realised. This paradoxical dimension presents a

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dilemma for pedagogy: how can education clear space for affect whilst simultaneously ensuring it is not graspable as such. This ineffability also, importantly, must be somehow honoured as an important remainder or ‘excess’ to the educative endeavour that opens space for critical difference and the presence of the as-yet-unknown and unthought. The radical heterogeneity of affect to articulation, or the impossibility that affect presents to articulated meaning in education, requires teachers to take seriously the temporal dimension to both teaching and learning. Through Lyotard’s use of the Freudian notion of deferred action we can gain a point of entry to consider the embodied presence of a teacher in a classroom as part of the affective constellation of engaging with students. This involves the importance of the breath of the teacher reaching the students, the gestures that accompany a point of knowledge, the connecting emotion of locking eyes with students in mutual wonder and joy, the excitement of opening metaphorical doors into different worlds adorned with seductive hints of more to come. Affect, in this context, is a spark of something inarticulate, of something exciting and different, and of mysteries of future learning on the horizon. Acknowledging the embodied connection to the temporal act of teaching enables the teacher to intervene in their students’ perception of class ‘time’ where learning and absorbing information takes on a decidedly messy and physical characteristic where the movement of time is suspended and stalled, where breath, for the briefest of moments, is collectively held in anticipation of something unknowable arriving. For Lyotard, however, the educative ‘moment’ is the acknowledgement that the unknowable must never arrive as such, it must be held in abeyance as always, the first ‘shock’ in Freud’s analysis. The temporal in education, then, means that there has to be something that is always left outside of anyone’s grasp and that whatever has been ‘taught’ is contingent to the moment it emerged in the classroom as a singular event. Lyotard’s turn to Freud to theorise affect also provides another interesting challenge to teachers who frame creativity and art education as the means to speak and represent affect in the classroom. Michalinos Zembylas provides a thoughtful challenge to this approach when considering Lyotard’s affect theory by insisting on the way affect must evade the ‘slippery trap’ of being easily presented through literary and artistic means, because, “in attempting to translate affect into emotional content, they risk implying that affects can eventually be somehow expressed” (2020, p. 188). And of course, once affects can be expressed, they lose any coordinate of difference and can be absorbed into the efficient running of the education system. There are countless examples in the history of massed education where art education has been used precisely for this reason, resulting in a form of education that refuses difference in favour of conformity and sameness. Pedagogies of affect, then, require much more than simply using literature or any artistic activity as the catalyst for learning or self-expression. The positive phrasing of affect through students expressing themselves through art in this way will simply allow the system to absorb such individual attempts at difference, or in Lyotard’s Freudian syntax, allow an insertion of an articulated phrase over an affect-phrase, and thus erase its singular occurrence. Critical

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variations of difference that could provide the generative material for new knowledge and unforeseeable possibilities in education would be cauterised in favour of a system that would necessarily be narrower, less exciting, and far less interesting for the students and teachers alike. Lyotard’s use of Freud’s version of affect as disturbance is a key element to this pedagogical argument and allows a way of viewing a type of education that prioritises opportunities to create spaces that resist normative demands of teaching and learning. This is no ordinary way of approaching education because, as Lyotard has shown with his engagement with Freud, the ‘work’ of affect is that of deconstruction and unravelling of certainty and any claims to a solid pedagogical foundation. Instead, in this light, the educative terrain is remarkable for its challenges, blockages of meaning, and incompleteness. Lyotard’s use of Freud turns the obligation around on teachers to students to ensure education is experienced viscerally, where disruption and resistance manifest in feelings of confusion and bafflement in an epistemological and ontological battle (Locke, 2017). Bringing in Lyotard’s affect into education means that students need to experience and embody much more of the precarity and fragility of being human and bring this vulnerability into their engagement with the necessary educative element of not knowing everything, and of questioning claims to certainty. As such, Lyotard’s workings with Freudian affect position education as a critical and generative activity that relies on disruption, critique and the necessary experience of failure. As Zembylas points out, this is a type of pedagogy that is set against “imperatives for standardization and homogenization in global education contexts” (2020, p. 189). It is this ‘phrasing’ of education as radically heterogeneous to full understanding and knowing where we can find the political potential of pedagogy as a form of resistance to constructions of educational experience that perpetuate the reproduction of the known and the inherent repetition of inequities that accompany the already articulated in education. In formulating the affect-phrase with Freud, Lyotard was able to provide a name to the unpresentable in politics and art in his work as a first and empty shock that does nothing other than appear (as anxiety, as disturbance, as remainder). In education that task needs extrapolating, as this chapter has shown. However, the work of affect in an educational context lends itself now to an engagement with two dimensions of Lyotard’s thinking that push this analysis even further toward a radical reframing of the educational and pedagogical. The notions of ‘silence’ and ‘presence’ that are taken from the formulation of the affect-phrase are two interesting pedagogical resources that emerge from Lyotard’s engagement with affect. For Lyotard, the inarticulate culminates in silence, but this silence is itself a presence, after Freud, that is manifest as affect. In education, silence is viewed either as a waste of productive time (in that students are not being seen to be active in their learning), or it is engaged with as a blanket form of oppressive discipline. However, Lyotard’s use of Freud makes silence an integral part of the educative endeavour as the affectphrase in action. Honouring and testifying to this presence as it occurs—and it is a given that this is not always the case in the daily running of a classroom—requires a pedagogical approach that clears space for silence and embraces the inarticulate: in speech, thinking, and meaning, at all times. This then, is a pedagogical that orientates

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students and teachers to face, and be open to receiving what they do not know, as the very condition for what they do know, and lending an ear to the inaudible, to what is being articulated. In this rich vein of affect theory, the affective inhabits silence as the phrasing of affect and is the very substance that has the potential to make education transformative.

References Bennington, G. (2000). The same, even, itself... Parallax, 6(4), 88–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/135 34640050212653 Locke, K. (2017). Lyotard’s pedagogies of affect in Les Immatériaux. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(13), 1277–1285. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2017.1350934 Lyotard, J.-F. (1988). The differend: Phrases in dispute [Le Différend] (G. Van Den Abbeele, Trans. Vol. 46). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1983). Lyotard, J.-F. (1990). Heidegger and “the jews” [Heidegger et “les juifs”] (A. Michel & M. S. Roberts, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1988). Lyotard, J.-F. (1991). The inhuman: reflections on time [L’Inhuman: Causeries sur le Temps] (G. Bennington & R. Bowlby, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1988). Lyotard, J.-F. (1992a). The postmodern explained to children: Correspondence 1982–1985 with an afterword by Wlad Godzich [Le Postmoderne Expliqué aux Enfants] (D. Barry, B. Maher, J. Pefanis, V. Spate, & M. Thomas, Trans. 4th ed.). Power Publications. (Original work published 1988). Lyotard, J.-F. (1992b). That which resists, after all: Jean François Lyotard and Gilbert Larochelle. Philosophy Today, 36(4), 402–417. Lyotard, J.-F. (1993). Libidinal economy [Economie libidinale] (I. H. Grant, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1974). Lyotard, J.-F. (1999). Freud, energy and chance: A conversation with Jean-François Lyotard. Teknema: Journal of Philosophy and Technology, 5(Fall), 15. http://tekhnema.free.fr/5Beardswo rth.html Lyotard, J.-F. (2002). Emma: Between philosophy and psychoanalysis (M. Sanders, R. Brons, & N. Martin, Trans.). In H. J. Silverman (Ed.), Lyotard: Philosophy, politics, and the sublime (Vol. VIII, pp. 23–48). Routledge. (Original work published 1989). Lyotard, J.-F. (2006). The affect-phrase. (K. Crome, Trans.). In K. Crome & J. Williams (Eds.), The Lyotard reader and guide [La Phrase-Affect: D’un Supplement au Différend] (pp. 104–112). Edinburgh University Press. (Original work published 2000). Lyotard, J.-F. (2020). Discourse, figure (A. Hudek & M. Lydon, Trans.). University of Minessota Press. Nouvet, C. (2007). The inarticulate affect: Lyotard and psychoanalytic testimony. In C. Nouvet, Z. Stahuljak, & K. Still (Eds.), Minima memoria: In the wake of Jean-François Lyotard (pp. 106– 122). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2003). Nouvet, C., Gaillard, J., & Stoholski, M. (2016). Introduction. In J. Gaillard, C. Nouvet, & M. Stoholski (Eds.), Traversals of affect: On Jean-François Lyotard (pp. 1–17). Bloomsbury Academic. Tomiche, A. (1991). Lyotard’s Freud. L’esprit Créateur, XXX, I(1), 48–61. Tomiche, A. (1994). Rephrasing the Freudian unconscious: Lyotard’s affect-phrase. Diacritics, 24(1), 42–62. Van Den Abbeele, G. (1991). Algérie l’intraitable: Lyotard’s National Front. L’esprit Créateur, XXX, I(1), 144–157.

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Zymbylas, M. (2020). On the unrepresentability of affect in Lyotard’s work: Towards pedagogies of ineffability. Educational Philosophy and Theory 52(2), 180–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/001 31857.2019.1619172

Chapter 3

Infancy and Childhood in Education: Lyotard’s Pedagogies of the Possible

3.1 Introduction “To educate is to lead out.” So says Lyotard in the Foreword to Michael Peters’s edited collection of essays on education and postmodernism (Peters, 1995, pp. xix–xx). In this poignant, short piece with the whimsical title Spaceship, Lyotard talks directly to education and teachers about what education does—it is a vehicle, in this case a spaceship, that transports the child from one place to another. In the conventional sense, Lyotard seems to be tracing the modern assumption of education as involving a process that leads the student from darkness to enlightenment, from ignorance to knowledge, from inarticulacy to articulacy. But Lyotard is far from conventional as we know, and this is confirmed in the sentences immediately following the opening statement: The moderns have stressed the efforts necessary to lead and let oneself be led out of nature toward language. But “out” is possibly not “outside.” It is no doubt within, far inside. One cannot reach it by uprooting oneself but by plunging deep within toward what is most intimate, where lies desire. (Peters, 1995, p. xix)

At first glance, this passage suggests that education, for Lyotard, is a case of leading someone without language to a place where they acquire language. However, the trajectory of Lyotard’s ‘spaceship’ is not exactly a straight line. Rather, in this short excerpt Lyotard is suggesting that to become ‘educated’ is a process that involves some kind of doubling back on oneself. The spaceship seems not to leave Earth and land on the Moon, but instead remains in a state of anticipation, always poised for imminent travel. “Out” is certainly not “outside”, Lyotard continues. But what does this mean, and what is Lyotard saying about education by intimating a kind of leading ‘out’ that travels nowhere and plunges deep at the same time? In this tiny passage we have the kernel of one Lyotard’s most fascinating and intriguing constructs that is variously labelled as both childhood and infancy, depending on a Freudian (in the case of infancy) and aesthetic (in the case of childhood) inflection. Using the figure © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Locke, Jean-François Lyotard, SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97491-6_3

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of the infant, Lyotard reframes education as a process with childlike characteristics of incompleteness, the unknowable, and a precarious openness to knowledge and experience. To return to the small excerpt at hand, the spaceship travels inwards, by ‘plunging deep’ into a state of childhood where predestinations are neither known nor sought and mastery is neither the goal nor necessary to the means. Instead, we need to remember and somehow celebrate the sense of childhood within us as the most enticing dimension to what it truly means to be ‘educated’. Further, Lyotard looks at these qualities of the child as a pedagogical device that adults need if the full vitality and vibrancy of life is to be appreciated. Lyotard’s thinking around infancy and childhood is related to his wider critique on assumptions of continuous development, progress, and growth that are framed by efficiency and performativity (Lyotard, 1984). Correlated to the notion of the adult as the destination and purpose of childhood in the human lifecycle, Lyotard insists on the power of the inverse of this equation. Rather, he posits, perhaps in what is not fully grown and developed lies the potential to challenge the narrative of forward and inevitable development and maturation. Throughout this chapter you will see Lyotard using the infant and the childhood that envelops these meanings as a metaphor for resistance to discourses of mastery and growth that so propel a capitalist system capable of absorbing all forms of differentiation. However, the metaphorical capacities of the child and infant are extended in Lyotard’s use to sketch out a zone or area of fragile fecundity that sits ‘inside’ the human but remains also always somehow separate, distant and even inhuman, as will be discussed further in this chapter. As the motor that propels this mysterious zone that has the potential to disrupt and trip the efficient running of any system, Lyotard mourns the loss of our childishness through entry into adulthood, the way we start to dampen and control the unbridled enthusiasm of happiness that we have as children, the way we start losing the magic in our stories, and perhaps stop believing in the mystical tales of faraway lands. Quite apart from this being a loss to our subjective health, Lyotard goes a step further and positions the qualities of the infant as those that serve to remind us of our humanity through their inherent lack of maturation and development. Lyotard articulates these undeveloped qualities in the following description: Shorn of speech, incapable of standing upright, hesitating over the objects of interest, not able to calculate its advantages, not sensitive to common reason, the child is eminently the human because its distress heralds and promises things possible. (Lyotard, 1991b, pp. 3–4)

Lyotard is tracing here a line between that of the child as being undeveloped and somehow lacking in various human qualities of control and mastery, to the point where the lack is what constitutes the very conditions of our collective humanity. In an innovative, and slightly strange, turn, Lyotard takes these qualities of childhood and turns them into a kind of subjective positionality in which the openness and unguarded dimensions of the child become the very elements that allow engagement with the unknown. It is the unfettered, unadorned openness to the unknown that Lyotard sees as the ‘zone’ of childhood embedded deep within us all that is the true gift the child, and the metaphor of the child and infant, gives. This subjective receptivity is further explicated by Lyotard in the poignantly tender passage:

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The effect is a childhood that knows all about as if , all about the pain of impotence and the complaint of being too small, of being there late (compared to others) and (as to its strength) of having arrived early, prematurely – childhood that knows all about broken promises, bitter disappointments, failings, and abandonment, but which also knows all about dreaming, memory, question, invention, obstinacy, listening to the heart, love, and real openness to stories. (Lyotard, 1999, p. 149)

This version of Lyotard’s notion of childhood is obviously darker and more granulated than conventional meanings of the developmental stage of childhood, allowing room for the aspects of our collective childhoods that, despite all the love and care in the world, still contain elements of intense loss, utter betrayal, and crippling sadness. Lyotard wants to translate this absolute engagement with the intensities of life to that of all of us, to the adult hardened by knowing too much, refusing to get lost in the surprising elements of daily existence, forgetting what it means to be truly, deeply excited at what a lived life can entail. For Lyotard, this intense engagement is also temporal, accessed through precarious pathways in which childish openness is also aligned to the bursts of creativity that push the subject into the unknown. The ‘as if’ quality of childhood described in the passage above, is the imaginary power of wonderment and the willingness to think the fantastical. In this way childhood, for Lyotard, is also fleeting in its immediacy, but accessible only laterally, artistically, inventively. Education, for Lyotard, is therefore the space to think the ‘as if’ of childhood as the very condition of learning and as such, Lyotard’s thinking on childhood and infancy offers a highly unique point of entry with which to engage with the richness and generative potential inherent in education. This is only the case, however, if we frame education, not as a process toward mastery and skill-building, but as encounters where we confront the unknown.

3.2 Infancy and Childhood in Lyotard’s Philosophy To delve into Lyotard’s use of infancy and childhood and its relevance to education, it is helpful to place this part of Lyotard’s philosophising in context. The theoretical trope of infancy is particularly strong in Lyotard’s later oeuvre, with a dedicated set of essays published in French as Lectures D’enfance (1991) that stand as an emblematic example of Lyotard’s thinking. As Bill Readings states, this set of essays deals with Lyotard’s approach to thinking infancy and childhood that less directly theorises a specific meaning and instead brings the concept to: … name the predicament of language: that communicational discourse is haunted and deconstructed by another, wordless, voice to which it owes a debt that cannot be spoken and yet which must be witnessed to. (Readings, 1992, para. 2)

Here again, as in chapter two, is the driver of Lyotard’s thinking which involves attesting to an unexplainable excess, in this case focusing on a literary rendering of infancy and childhood. Here the figure of infancy is framed as an ontological and epistemological obligation to attest to something that cannot ever be fully articulated.

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For Lyotard, this obligation is in response to the ‘debt’ we have as humans—who must acknowledge our individual and collective inability to fully recall and articulate this infancy and childhood that is itself constitutive of adult articulation. Indeed, Lyotard’s explication of infancy in these essays attests to a haunting of this silent excess to articulated discourse as the affective dimension to the areas of literature, psychoanalysis and politics. As an indication of the enduring interest in Lyotard’s use of infancy and childhood, this set of essays was released in English in 2021 (Lyotard, 2021). However the figure of childhood can also be seen elsewhere throughout Lyotard’s essayist career, for example in the (ironic) first edition title of the book The Postmodern Explained for Children: Correspondence 1982–1985 in which each of the presented essays is addressed as a letter to a child of Lyotard’s fellow colleagues and various interlocuters of the postmodern (included in this group of children are his own son and grandchildren). As is pointed out by Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard’s interest in infancy and childhood can be tracked alongside a career-wide preoccupation and attachment to “signifying the other of signification” that ran, at the very least, and even if not fully acknowledged as such, as a theme or motif, as an “evasive configuration” throughout Lyotard’s entire corpus of writing (Bennington, 2011a, p. 57). From the ‘libidinal band’ in Libidinal Economy, the ‘figure’ of Discourse, Figure, the ‘unpresentable’ in the works of the postmodern, and the ethically incommensurable and heterogeneous language idioms and games in The Differend, Lyotard ‘finally’ arrives upon infancy articulated by Bennington as “less a self-present state, still less a period of life that is to be brought to presence … and more a mute … accompaniment or lining of all my more adult-seeming utterances, accessible always only indirectly or laterally, inventively, ‘artistically’, in ‘writing’” (Bennington, 2011a, p. 58). Here, infancy is seen not as chronologically prior to adulthood, but more as a baffling and un-graspable zone that inhabits all things considered fully developed such as the artwork, the adult, the piece of literature, even politics and culture. As a clandestine visitor, direct access is never granted, but must be creatively coaxed out of hiding. Infancy, as Lyotard has it, does not answer to direct demands. Traversed in these later writings are the artistic ‘names’ of this silent infancy that are invariably endowed with a certain negativity. Arakawa’s ‘blank’, Paul Klee’s ‘uncolour’ grey, Pascal Quignard’s mute death rattle are referred to alongside other literary and theoretically inspired ‘names’ such as Jacques Lacan’s ‘Thing’ as la chose and Samuel Beckett’s ‘unnameable’. These infant modalities are delicately filigreed throughout Lyotard’s writing, and into his renewed engagement with psychoanalysis that informs this writing. The focus of these late writings shifts more to the silence of the differend, the concept Lyotard created to look at the asymmetry of articulating justice, to the affective dimension that emerges from the differend (something Lyotard spoke of in conversation as being the ‘supplement’ to this eponymous book) (Lyotard, 1992b). The gap between signification and presentation is never (and must not be) resolved and is the condition of silence that marks itself as a differend. This notion of infancy articulated by Lyotard in the later writings, bears on the silent affect provoked by the differend, and aligns with the destitution and misère of the infant encounter as incomplete, inarticulate, ungraspable and unprepared.

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In the set of essays collected under the title of The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1991b) Lyotard’s focus intensifies around the figure of the infant as articulated through a notion of a childhood that is delineated alongside an indebtedness that is impossible to ever fully pay off. “This debt to childhood is one which we never pay off”, Lyotard warns repeatedly throughout the book (Lyotard, 1991b, p. 7). Recalling Fynsk’s (2007) proposition of speaking of the passage between an infancy of the body to an aesthetic mode of encounter, these writings emphasise a critical approach to a humanism that seals off childhood as a past period of the life cycle. However, Lyotard warns that it is precisely through the traits of indeterminacy and un-preparedness that the creative impetus (or drive, “trieb”) emerges, and that these qualities make their appearance in their ‘childish’ guise of distress, anxiety and fair. In line with the questioning of the human in this set of essays, Lyotard maintains that this distressed childhood as a figure of infancy ‘appears’ and haunts the human long past the end of this supposed anthropological determination and by doing so, heightens the very possibilities of existence. The child is human for Lyotard because of the qualities that make it less than human (or ‘inhuman’), and it is this delay from entering humanity that makes this infant figure so potent. Lyotard continues, “Its initial delay in humanity, which makes it the hostage of the adult community, is also what manifests to this community the lack of humanity it is suffering from, and which calls it to be more human” (Lyotard, 1991b, p. 4).

3.3 Radical Temporalities and Resistance Through Infancy and Childhood When viewing Lyotard’s difference in meaning between the empirical and biological notion of childhood as the unsophisticated and ‘immature’ time before the maturity and ‘completeness’ of adulthood, Lyotard emphasises childhood as “the transcendental sense of a radical before” (Bennington, 2007, p. 200). This ‘before’, of course, displays the hallmarks of Freud’s affect-phrase, but Lyotard furnishes this notion in his own language away from Freud’s clinical description. Mirroring the temporality of Freud’s affect-phrase as outlined in chapter two in this book, Lyotard offers this definition of his notion of childhood as a radicalised ‘before’ in the following: By childhood, I do not mean, as rationalists have it, an age deprived of reason. I mean this condition of being affected at a time when we do not have the means – linguistic and representational – to name, identify, reproduce, and recognize what it is that is affecting us. By childhood, I mean the fact that we are born before we are born to ourselves. And thus we are born of others, but also born to others, delivered into the hands of others without any defences. (Lyotard, 1993, p. 149)

Childhood, in this sense, is a ‘state’; one of being born (or ‘thrown’ as Heidegger might say) into an environment, culture, and way of being that is constitutively unknown and unrecognisable to the ‘unformed’ (and uninformed) ‘child’ (having arrived ‘too late’). Instead, childhood, Lyotard continues, infers a state of infancy that

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is necessarily positioned to be spoken of, and for, by the language and actions of others ‘before’ articulation and knowledge mastery are granted in their own right through the entry into adulthood. Here the child is “born later, with language, precisely on leaving childhood” (Lyotard, in Smeyers & Masschelein, 2000, p. 151). As an insight and provocation to the aspect of Kant’s thinking about knowledge acquisition and its relation to immaturity, Lyotard tells the story of how, in ‘Answering the Question: What is the Enlightenment?’, Kant “defines the Enlightenment as the emergence of mankind from its self-imposed immaturity … If childhood persists after childhood,” writes Lyotard, “it is [quoting Kant] ‘laziness and cowardice … it is so easy to be immature’” (Kant, in Lyotard, 1993, p. 152). Lyotard’s tactical move to address his letters to children in The Postmodern Explained, however, differs from this notion of childhood as somehow inferior to that of adulthood and instead points to a view of childhood as being the privileged space of unprepared-ness, of susceptibility and openness ‘before’ enlightenment. Lyotard’s response to Kant is given in his own essay entitled ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism’ (Lyotard, 1984), where Lyotard describes the ethical necessity of finding resistance to the modern trope of development where everything is absorbed into the grand narrative of development and progress. We can see, from this perspective, the ethical role that Lyotard is hinting at with his formulation of infancy and childhood. To get to this point, however, Lyotard elaborates (in The Inhuman) on the qualities of childhood that may remain into adulthood. Lyotard asks the question: What shall we call human in humans, this initial misery of their childhood, or their capacity to a “second” nature which, thanks to language, makes them fit to share in communal life, adult consciousness and reason? That the second depends on and presupposes the first is agreed by everyone. The question is only that of knowing whether this dialectic, whatever name we grace it with, leaves no remainder. (Lyotard, 1991b, p. 3)

Here the child is seen as needing to be ‘saved’ from its status of immaturity and lack of development, to be initiated into the life of the adult that is endowed with language, knowledge and certainty. However, Lyotard questions whether any trace of childhood might not linger within adulthood. “Born children”, Lyotard asserts, “our task would be to enter into full possession of ourselves”, a possession that occurs only within the realms of adulthood (Lyotard, 1993, p. 148). His concern though, is whether or not this full and total maturation into adulthood can really be seen as complete. Could there not be some traces of childhood left ‘behind’ in adulthood? Lyotard deals with this question by investigating and delving into the ‘before’ that signals childhood as the space before thought is cognisant, before experience is looked back on as such, and before adulthood replaces innocence. Lyotard instead critiques the notion of developing into an adult (with the concurrent acquisition of knowledge and sophistication), as requiring a certain degree of ‘forgetting’ and ignoring of a potential openness and susceptibility that childhood incorporates. Such a forgetting of childhood, Lyotard further critiques, is framed within a discourse of freeing oneself from a state of incompleteness and uncertainty to the more stable state of mastery and control. This, Lyotard notices, is what the Western doctrine of Humanism, and its conjoint Enlightenment principle of emancipation, seems to signal (as Kant’s comments on childhood as immaturity depict). Here,

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Emancipation consists of establishing oneself in the full possession of knowledge, will, and feeling, in providing oneself with the rule of knowledge, the law of willing, and the control of the emotions. The emancipated ones are the persons or things that owe nothing to anyone but themselves: Freed from all debts to the other. (Lyotard, 1993, p. 150)

Childhood, however, challenges the certainties and assumptions that freeing oneself presupposes, and this is where Lyotard insists upon a recognition of the illusion of certainty that is offered by a discourse of emancipation. The consummate example to the humanistic rule of emancipation is, of course, education. In relation to Freud, Lyotard’s notion of childhood and infancy belongs to the realm of the inarticulate and unpresentable as “a state of lack” (Lyotard, 1993, p. 152) and it is this ‘lack’ that emancipating oneself means to escape from (“the dream of having done with my lack, with what I lack, with what made me lack, what made me have lack” [ibid.]). In education, this lack is what drives the need for children to be initiated into the adult world of knowledge as a necessary condition of their childhood. “That children have to be educated”, reminds Lyotard “is a circumstance which only proceeds from the fact that they are not completely led by nature, not programmed. The institutions which constitute culture supplement this native lack” (Lyotard, 1991b, p. 3). This has resonance with Lyotard’s engagement with Freud, where the affectphrase as the unmitigated event of the ‘first blow’ of Nachtraglichkeit becomes the moment of infancy that exceeds biological labels of maturation to that of a general state of “incapacity”. The first blow or shock precedes signification, it just happens, and as such is the moment of “prematuration” (Lyotard, 1990, p. 17) in the psychic apparatus—the ‘infancy’ of the phrase as an affect ‘before’ articulation and meaning can be ascribed. This, according to Tomiche, is “a hypothesis [retrieved from Freud] based on the notion of the prematuration of the psychic apparatus and elaborated in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and On Narcissism: An Introduction” (Tomiche, 1991, p. 59). This, for Lyotard, is the infancy of the affect-phrase, an infancy “which would not be a period of the life cycle, but an incapacity to represent and bind a certain something” (Lyotard, 1990, p. 17); an infancy that is inherent to thought as that which exceeds thought as an event. “This”, Lyotard implores, “is the constitutive infirmity of the soul, its infancy and its misery” (ibid.). Furthermore, infancy as affect is ‘impossible’ to detect, but that does not preclude the necessity of trying to find it, trying to remember it, trying to ‘bear witness’ to it. Infancy and childhood, as traces of an indeterminacy, for Lyotard, present us with a debt that cannot ever be finalised or realised.

3.4 The ‘Labour’ of Childhood In an essay dedicated to his own son in the collection of essays to children in The Postmodern Explained (1992a), Lyotard extols to the infant David and the readers he knows will come later, to “extend the line of the body in the line of writing” (Lyotard, 1992a, p. 96). This essay, entitled ‘Gloss on Resistance’, draws on George Orwell’s 1984 and the resistance posed by the lead character Winston’s diary entries as the

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only moments in which freedom could ever be exercised within the oppressive and totalitarianism system he inhabited. Here the infancy ‘within’ Winston as indeterminacy and lost memory is extended to the infancy of language in the creative labour involved through Winston’s diary entries. Despite every aspect of life as prescribed and controlled, Lyotard sees Winston’s desire to express himself in ways that escape the confines of the system as the most potent form of resistance; Winston’s childhood is his alone. No matter how ubiquitous and controlling the society around him is in the present, this childhood can never be erased. For Lyotard, Winston’s writing is a labour “allied to the work of love but it inscribes the trace of the initiatory event in language and thus offers to share it, if not as a sharing of knowledge, at least as a sharing of a sensibility that it can and should take as communal” (Lyotard, 1992a, pp. 96–97). This sharing of a sensibility is far more important to Lyotard, in that everyone has their own, singular, expression and occurrence of infancy and childhood. The ‘facts’ of these childhoods are not important; it is the fact that everyone has a childhood at the very least in terms of an unknown past or area of indeterminacy that is of importance. For Lyotard, Winston has his ‘real life’ equivalents in the form of Adorno and Benjamin. The childhood that Lyotard ascribes to the writings of these two writers cannot be captured and remains elusive while still providing the impetus for new beginnings. In story-like manner befitting the subject matter, the reader is initiated to this open sense of childhood: Let us recall – in opposition to this murder of the instant and singularity – those short pieces in Walter Benjamin’s One Way Street and A Berlin Childhood, pieces Theodor Adorno would call “micrologies.” They do not describe events from childhood; rather they capture the childhood of the event and inscribe what is uncapturable about it. And what makes an encounter with a word, odor, place, book, or face into an event is not its newness when compared to other “events.” It is its very value as initiation. You only learn this later. It cut open a wound in the sensibility. You know this because it has since reopened and will reopen again, marking out the rhythm of a secret and perhaps unnoticed temporality. This wound ushered you into an unknown world, but without ever making it known to you. Such initiation initiates nothing, it just begins. (Lyotard, 1997, pp. 90–91)

This quote illustrates that the passage between a childhood that outlines a nonrepresentational oblivion of infancy as constitutive of a negative-ontological mode of being, arrives at a creative encounter of infancy as a ‘remainder’ unable to be ‘assimilated’ by discursive and representational forms of signification. Infancy, in Lyotard’s lexicon at this point, is one of radical encounter that engenders an enigmatic silence that both appends itself to, and distends, discourse. It is in this radical excess that Lyotard’s particular formulation of infancy pushes past the limits of a specifically psychoanalytic theory to a position of ethical listening that honours the inaudible infancy to words, speech, theory, and art (and in the next chapter, music). To listen for the enigmatic silence of the infant figure is, for Lyotard, the acknowledgment of the wound that infancy inflicts on the maturation of thought, discourse, and aesthetic matter; we write against words, we compose music against silence, we paint against the visible (see Locke, 2012). Infancy haunts, but it does not speak. Exploring how this ‘haunting’ inhabits the process, space, and temporality of education is the task Lyotard sets us, and it is to this educative task that the rest of the chapter is devoted.

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3.5 The Poverty, Renewal and Inventiveness of Infancy in Education The qualities of infancy that have been explicated in the above text provide an unsettling point of entry with which to view learning, growth and development in education. Things are made particularly problematic when talking of infancy and childhood in these unsettling ways that Lyotard explains when considering that the ‘subject’ of education generally involves the child, with adults positioned primarily as ‘masters’ in the pedagogical relationship. However, it is important not to conflate the metaphor of infancy and childhood with the human child-subject and Lyotard is careful not to romanticise children and childhood when thinking about the figure of infancy. Rather, what has been demonstrated thus far in the chapter is the powerless vulnerability and the unyielding inventiveness that Lyotard attributes to the figure of infancy. These characteristics coalesce around a meaning of infancy that presents as an existential condition with the power of renewal (regardless of biological age). From what has been outlined in this chapter thus far, we are now at the point where three key points that come from Lyotard’s infancy can be elucidated and joined specifically to a pedagogical argument. These three points are that Lyotard’s infancy has the capacity for constant renewal and indeed infancy per se makes it possible to initiate thought, infancy involves an unsettling process where we become other to ourselves so that growth and development are possible, and infancy as encounter involves a temporality that is singularly contingent and unknowable in destination. What Lyotard gives us, then, is a figure of infancy that is the very condition for learning, for teaching, and for what we could provisionally call the ‘educative encounter’ or event. As such, infancy cracks open the possibilities of education broadly conceived, and I will now focus on each one of these dimensions in education in turn. When considering Lyotard’s infancy as the condition for learning, we can refer to the characteristics of openness and curiosity that are discussed at the front of this chapter. Infancy is the state of exposure that demands of the subject to let go of all certainties about cognitive destinations and egoist attempts at mastery (and even references to any ‘masters’ who may hold authority over the direction of thought). This provides meaning to Lyotard’s references to the ‘lack’, ‘poverty’ and ‘misery’ of infancy that so demands the unravelling of a subject’s certainties and the coordinates to navigate known criteria in advance. As Rachel Jones (2014) describes, this formulation of infancy from Lyotard is the moment “when we are returned to an indeterminacy for which we are unprepared, and when a searching curiosity is all that is left us, prompting a questioning that has be proceed without ready-made criteria” (p. 190). This state of exposure from Lyotard’s infancy is one that asks students to enter into a classroom with openness and curiosity but, also, crucially, to enter into the educative encounter with no preconceptions about what it is that is to be learnt. This is a radically demanding formulation of learning that strips the learning ‘event’ to its bare core tenets of exposure and curiosity, as previously stated, but also creativity and inventiveness. To return to Rachel Jones, “[i]nfancy is the impoverishment that

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demands we judge in the absence of the law, and the inventiveness that makes it possible to do so” (2014, p. 190). Infancy as the condition of learning as such, brings forward the Freudian affectphrase that occupied Lyotard for the latter part of his career and which is outlined in this chapter. To truly learn, to truly conjure a state of exposure so that learning can happen, is to be estranged or divided against oneself. This is the tricky temporality of the affect-phrase that Lyotard turns to Freud to extrapolate, and in the context of learning intimates a time ‘outside’ of what the learning subject is conscious of and can directly access. Translating this affect-phrase into the classroom places emphasis on the kinds of learning encounters where what is being learned has to mobilise an imaginative and creative modality with which the learning subject can engage. Lyotard’s infancy is the reminder that true learning is when we get ‘lost’ in the moment, when time stands still and the crossover into the unknown has been made. This has relevance to the nature of education as infant encounter that will be discussed shortly. However, a fundamental aspect to infancy as the condition of learning is the reciprocal relationship the learner has to their surroundings and especially to the ‘teacher’. Lyotard’s infancy, then, is relevant to the condition of teaching or pedagogy in the reciprocal relationship created in the educative encounter. To teach in, and through, infancy is to gently support the students to embrace the fragility and vulnerability of learning to unlearn and to initiate an unravelling of subjective and disciplinary certainty. In many fundamental ways, Lyotard’s notion of infancy in teaching resists the conventional approaches to teaching that insist on transparency of meaning and very clear information transference, as has been elucidated in the previous chapter. However, bringing in the notion of infancy pushes this pedagogical style even further by insisting on the teacher ‘leading’ the students without knowing in advance exactly where the learning ‘destination’ might be. Rather, infancy as the condition of teaching promises a constant state of renewal where students learn to begin to think as a necessarily iterative process. As such, this kind of teaching in infancy is the “work of recommencement” (Lyotard, 1992a, p. 102) and of new beginnings where “the season childhood, the seasons of the mind’s possibilities” (p. 100) can be constantly renewed. The necessity for constant renewal as the condition to initiate thought and learning through teaching brings us now to the point to consider the educative encounter in the terms Lyotard sets out in the notion of infancy. This means that education ‘as’ encounter is one that is, by necessity, creative and inventive, and infancy is the educative ‘zone’ where anything is possible. However, the corollary to the possible is the educative necessity to embrace failure as one of the key dimensions to learning. As Geoffrey Bennington points out, “[e]xperimentation and invention in Lyotard’s thought and practice are also always a repetition of necessary failure, an affirmation affirmed as always harbouring the darker secret of its impossibility” (Bennington, 2010, p. 221). Repetition of failure, in this context, is the price to pay for initiating thought and the capacity for thinking again. Although the educative encounter in this perspective is imbued with the creative impetus to begin to think, this beginning must in some way always ‘fail’ to reach a destination in meaning that leaves no room for

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further invention. Education as infant encounter, then, is the impetus for educators to find ways for their students to activate inventiveness, creativity and curiosity. As in the argument set out in chapter two, this necessarily means resisting attempts in teaching and learning to follow set pedagogical and learning criteria and, to a very real extent, to allow students to follow their own sometimes meandering paths toward knowledge acquisition. Education predicated on failure is the one to ensure the spark of starting anew can be constantly renewed. Finally, as Lyotard so poignantly depicts in his piece on education in The Spaceship, infancy may well harbour darkness and loss but it also harbours the magic of learning and the promise of a type of education that encourages students to develop and embrace the feelings of desire and curiosity that drive and propel us toward the unknown. The ‘trick’, of course, is not to let the promise of the spaceship erode with our adult tendencies for certainty. As Lyotard writes: When are we educated? When we know more or less which is the far-off planet that we desire, and when we do all that we can to set off for it. If adults are often tough and sad, it is because they are disappointed. They do not listen well enough to the invitation to grace which is in them. They let the spaceship rust. (Lyotard, 1995, p. xx)

References Bennington, G. (2007). Childish things. In C. Nouvet, Z. Stahuljuak, & K. Still (Eds.), Minima memoria: In the wake of Jean-François Lyotard (pp. 197–218). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2001). Bennington, G. (2011a). Figure discourse. Contemporary French Civilization, 35(1), 53–72. https:// doi.org/10.3828/cfc.2011.35.1.4 Bennington, G. (2011b). Translation in the dark. In H. Parret & J-F. Lyotard (Eds.), Sam Francis, Leçon de ténèbres [Sam Francis lesson of darkness] (pp. 216–223). (Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists; Vol. II). University of Leuven Press. Fynsk, C. (2007). Jean-François’s infancy. In C. Nouvet, Z. Stahuljak, & K. Still (Eds.), Minima memoria: In the wake of Jean-François Lyotard (pp. 123–138). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2001). Jones, R. (2014). Re-reading Diotima: Resources for a relational pedagogy. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 48(2), 183–201. Locke, K. (2012). Lyotard’s infancy: A debt that persists. Postmodern Culture, 23(1). https://doi. org/10.1353/pmc.2013.0018. Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/ v023/23.1.locke.htm Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). Answering the question: What is postmodernism? (R. Durand, Trans.). In The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (pp. 71–84). Manchester University Press. (Original work published 1982). Lyotard, J.-F. (1990). Heidegger and “the jews” [Heidegger et “les juifs”] (A. Michel & M. S. Roberts, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1988). Lyotard, J.-F. (1991a). Lectures d’enfance. Galilée. Lyotard, J.-F. (1991b). The inhuman: Reflections on time [L’inhuman: Causeries sur le temps] (G. Bennington & R. Bowlby, Trans., pp. 1–7). Stanford University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1992a). The postmodern explained: Correspondence 1982–1985 with an afterword by Wlad Godzich [Le Postmoderne Expliqué aux Enfants] (D. Barry, B. Maher, J. Pefanis, V. Spate, & M. Thomas, Trans.; 4th ed.). Power Publications. (Original work published 1988).

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Lyotard, J.-F. (1992b). That which resists, after all: Jean François Lyotard and Gilbert Larochelle. Philosophy Today, 36(4), 402–417. Lyotard, J.-F. (1993). The grip [Mainmise]. (B. Readings & K. P. Geiman, Trans.). In Political writings: Jean-François Lyotard (pp. 148–158). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1989). Lyotard, J.-F. (1995). Spaceship. In M. Peters (Ed.), Education and the postmodern condition (pp. xix–xx). Bergin and Garvey. Lyotard, J.-F. (1997). Postmodern fables [Moralités Postmodernes] (G. Van Den Abbeele, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. (Original work published 1993). Lyotard, J.-F. (1999). The survivor. In R. Harvey & M. S. Roberts (Eds. & Trans.), Toward the postmodern (pp. 144–163). Humanity Books. Lyotard, J.-F. (2021). Readings in infancy: Jean-François Lyotard. (R. Harvey & K. Bamford (Eds). Bloomsbury. Peters, M. A. (Ed.). (1995). Education and the postmodern condition. Bergin and Garvey. Readings, B. (1992). Review of Jean-François Lyotard, Lectures d’enfance (Galilée, 1991), 158 pp. Surfaces, 2. https://doi.org/10.7202/1065245ar Smeyers, P., & Masschelein, J. (2000). L’enfance, education, and the politics of meaning. In P. A. Dhillion & P. Standish (Eds.), Lyotard: Just education (pp. 140–156). Routledge. Tomiche, A. (1991). Lyotard’s Freud. L’esprit Créateur, XXX, I(1), 48–61.

Chapter 4

Lyotard’s Musical Pedagogy: Listening for the Inaudible Gesture in Education

4.1 The Fable as Pedagogic Device First published in French as Moralités Postmodernes in 1993, the Anglophone reception of the set of essays from which ‘Music, Mutic’ emerges in the form of the book Postmodern Fables did not take place until 1997; one year before the death of their author Jean-François Lyotard. The texts of this collection would have been conceived singularly as essays written for various art journals or, as is the case with ‘Music, Mutic’, edited books on aesthetic themes all published between 1985 and 1993. Within Lyotard’s extensive oeuvre, these essays perform a symbolic digression and can be seen as contributing to a repositioning of recurring themes that had begun to surface in a more self-consciously ‘literary’ form in his later writings (e.g., with the biographical novel Signed, Malraux first published in 1996 and the posthumous The Confession of Augustine first published in 19981 ). Themes such as the duplicitous nature of representation, the opacity of meaning and knowledge, the event, the unrepresentable, and the possibilities for resistance, here are ‘stripped’ of their philosophical (and overtly intellectual) bearings and presentations and are, instead, hewed into small stories intended to be received with the same wonder and awe as that of the child. Thus, through the medium of the fable, Lyotard is pointedly looking askance at the accepted form of knowledge transmission in academia by both insisting on the indeterminate reception of knowledge that governs ‘childhood’ (we know nothing, and we must remain open to this indeterminacy), and through actively deploying his own methodological stance of the postmodern ‘petit récit’ (Lyotard, 1984). The fable then, becomes an important methodological tool for Lyotard to redefine the common misconception of postmodernity as a separate and defined period and 1

Signé Malraux published in English as Signed, Malraux (Lyotard, 1999) and La Confession d’Augustin published in English as The Confession of Augustine (Lyotard, 2000).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Locke, Jean-François Lyotard, SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97491-6_4

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artistic movement, to that of an ethico-political process of ‘re-writing’ modernity. For Lyotard, ‘This has nothing to do with the use of parodies or quotations of modern or modernist works as we can see it happening in architecture, painting or theatre’ (1991a, p. 34). Rather, the diagnosis of the collapse of the grand narratives articulated in The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard, 1984) has now evolved into a celebration of the ‘local tale’ as a form of resistance that the modern condition demands. This is a subtle shift of strategy that continues the theme of the legitimation crisis in knowledge developed in The Postmodern Condition, yet distances Lyotard from the more austere use of the term in his previous texts. Instead, Lyotard ‘re-writes’ his own position on the postmodern and asks of the fable, ‘not that it be believed, only that we reflect on it’ (1997, p. 101). In this way, the fable treats truth as suspicious, but it points to some kind of truth that escapes the clutches of knowledge and is only real in as far it is felt or sensed as a trace that is left behind and discovered in excess of the storytelling process. In this light, the fable in Lyotard’s rubric of rewriting modernity is to be seen as locally determined, fleeting, and not as ‘a critical discourse, but merely imaginary’ (1997, p. 100). Lyotard uses the fable as a symbolic representation of facts as he sees them, within a pedagogically framed device that incorporates in its structure a temporality where the ‘lesson’ being learnt is contingent to its occurrence as presentation. The fable of interest in this chapter, ‘Music, Mutic’ is positioned in The Postmodern Fables under the enigmatic title of ‘Crypts’ (Lyotard, 1997). This takes some explanation as, once again, Lyotard is deliberately intentional with his pedagogical stance to ensure the reader takes an active role in interpreting the pluralistic dimensions of meaning and comprehension. The word ‘crypt’ points to some kind of tomb, a burial chamber or solemn place of reflection. There is shrouded around the word a sense of mystery, as a crypt also is a secret recess or hiding place. Within the wider organisation of each of the fables, Lyotard uses ‘crypts’ to talk about what it is that makes works of art artistic. It is in the darkness of the crypt then, that we are invited to listen to Lyotard speak more directly about the aesthetic nature of art through fables that position the art of music as the ‘pedagogic’ focus where the hidden, affective power of sound can be learnt. The metaphor of the crypt as secret, mysterious and as a burial place then comes into play with Lyotard’s notion of the enigmatic artistry that music and art evoke. Importantly, the pedagogic affordances such an evocation stimulates are, for Lyotard, a ‘lesson’ on the limits of human understanding, mastery and dominance. This pedagogic dimension will be developed in the chapter to provide insight to the ways Lyotard’s thinking can inform what we might provisionally call a ‘musical’ pedagogy. First, however, the chapter outlines Lyotard’s engagement with music and the inaudible so that a ‘return’ to education can be made in the final sections of the chapter.

4.2 A ‘Reverie on the Shadows of Sound’.

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4.2 A ‘Reverie on the Shadows of Sound’2 There are very few instances where Lyotard deals with music as a main topic of enquiry, and without exception, none of what could be called his ‘major’ works deal in any sustained fashion with music specifically. This is not surprising given that Lyotard was not a musician himself; however, music does occupy a privileged position in relation to a broader theme of aesthetics that is persistent as a theoretical motif throughout his wider repertoire. Lyotard instead preserves the smaller narrative structure of the essay (here incorporating the fable) in order to deal with a certain aesthetics of music. The essay, ‘A Few Words to Sing’ (Lyotard, 1998), is a notable exception and is one of the rare texts that deals exclusively with music throughout. This particular essay analyses a piece of music written by the avant-garde composer Luciano Berio in which Lyotard questions the spatiality of the text and the temporality this creates. Another text appears in the online journal, Surfaces, entitled ‘Musique et Postmodernité’ (Lyotard, 1996) written in honour of the late Lyotardian scholar Bill Readings (with the translation of the essay into English released in 2009). Many of the essays in the collection entitled The Inhuman (Lyotard, 1991) also deal with aesthetic questions of music (and painting), although not exclusively. There is also an account of how important music was to Lyotard by a fellow compatriot, Michel Butor, who describes evenings with Lyotard listening to Scarlatti sonatas (Butor, 2001). This section is organised into four sections under the headings ‘Gesture’, ‘Breath’, ‘Affect’ and ‘Sonorous Matter’ that are worked through in this chapter under Lyotard’s approach to consider music through what he describes as a ‘reverie on the shadows of sound’ (Lyotard, 1997, p. 230). These headings shed light on the aural shadows of artistry in music that produce the affective, sensorial response that Lyotard attributes to an inaudible ‘power’ that is unable to be grasped or captured and is, instead, simply felt.

4.3 Gesture The essay ‘Music, Mutic’ (Lyotard, 1997)3 is divided into five sections that, in keeping with the structure of the fable, perform a didactic function that allows Lyotard to weave his explorations on what is artistic in the work of art, and what it is that makes music musical. The opening paragraph to the first section outlines a summary of the entire work and provides us with the first hint of how this argument will be developed with the statement that, ‘it is a grave and common error to impose a classification by periods or schools on works of art’ (p. 217). Immediately, Lyotard is positioning himself in opposition to conventional notions of historicising art, and 2 3

(Lyotard, 1997, p. 230). Hereafter, unless otherwise stated, the page numbers refer to this text.

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already in this first statement there is a clear opposition defined against the grand narrative of the Western European canon that has as its fundamental premise the classification of artworks. Instead, Lyotard considers the notion of ‘time’ in relation to this classification to be unreliable. Time can be measured only against certain events, ‘observable phenomena of historical reality’ (p. 217), and artworks can only be classified in relation to these events. What it is that is art in these works of art, Lyotard insists, is ‘independent of these contexts’ but paradoxically ‘shows itself only within those contexts and on their occasion’ (p. 217). Here we have the first indication of Lyotard’s separation of the art object, with the art that appears when artwork is judged as an object; an art that Lyotard is quick to point out can only happen (occur, or emerge) within the object in which we consider art to reside. The paragraph ends with what will thematically thread all five sections of the fable together with Lyotard’s notion of the art gesture: ‘[t]he art of the work of the art is always a gesture of space–time-matter, the art of the musical score, a gesture of space–time-sound’ (p. 217). The Latin root of the word ‘gesture’ is gerere, which means to ‘bear, wield, or perform’, and is helpful when understanding Lyotard’s notion of the gesture of art. This can be seen in two senses: the first is the example of the musical score as a gesture of space–time-sound in which Lyotard evokes the notion of the score as being a passage to something that exceeds the physical; the score wields a gesture of art that then affects space–time-sound. Second, the gesture, the wielding or bearing of the gesture that allows the emergence of art(istry) is not only excessive of the work of art, it is also independent of it in that ‘the gesture is not the author’s doing’ (p. 217). The composer of the score partly wields the gesture, insofar as the composer opens a passage for the gesture of art to emerge, but the composer’s job ends there; what happens to the art inside the work of art is independent of any one ‘self’. The use of gestures when talking is also to express emotions and feelings that are in excess of what is being stated; here, in music, the gesture expresses an ‘excess’ that Lyotard hears as art. Lyotard likens the emergence of the gesture to that of giving birth to a trace ‘within the audible, of a sonorous gesture that goes beyond the audible’ (p. 218). The ‘excess’ is what allows music to be heard as an ‘inaudible’ or ‘mutic’ sound that occurs, paradoxically, alongside the audible ‘matter’ we hear as music. Lyotard explains this paradox at some length: A twin paradox: a sonorous matter, first of all, which is not heard since it surpasses the audible, and which is nonetheless, if I may say so, already a sound. And then a gesture in and of this matter, and hence also in and of the space-time it deploys by this very gesture, a gesture that is not the doing, of a conscious subject, namely, the composer. Like the woman … in labor, the composer lets a passageway be opened through which something can happen that has not yet happened, a child, one’s past, in this case a musical phrase, and that is nonetheless already potential human life, possible memory or eventual sonority. (p. 217)

Here, the theme to be developed throughout the fable that is first introduced in this opening section, is that the work of art can never be reduced to its cultural or empirical context—there is a ‘timelessness’ that cannot be measured in the usual chronological

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manner in that it occurs ‘already’ as a sort of constant but forgotten memory (what Lyotard in other contexts terms as immemorial). There is a promise in the art gesture that is also timeless, and it is a promise that something will occur, that there will always be a response ‘not to answer, but to address and carry forward’ (p. 229).

4.4 Breath Lyotard disrupts the seemingly smooth surface of the fable in the second section by interposing another story within the main frame of the fable being told—one that also serves to decentre the temporal layout of the story-telling process as onedimensionally chronological. The small narrative that Lyotard introduces is by the French author Pascal Quignard; it is called ‘Languages’ and is itself part of a larger work entitled ‘Small Treatises’ (Petite Traités) (1997). By juxtaposing this text inside his own text, Lyotard highlights the spatiality of the fable and, in doing so, turns the text into something of the passage that performs a link to another world and, in this case, voice. Someone else’s ‘breath’ is creating a sound that we cannot hear, that intermingles with our own breath as we read, and yet creates meaning in excess of the storytelling process. Lyotard has used this device before in the fable ‘Marie goes to Japan’ (Lyotard, 1997) in which the narrator (a woman called Marie) ‘speaks’ as if Lyotard himself is speaking. The voice in this fable is deferred, as its speaker could be either Lyotard, or a fictional character called Marie. In ‘Music, Mutic’, Lyotard alters this approach slightly by splicing his text and inserting the entire text of Quignard’s ‘Treatise’ inside the body of his own work in the fable. There is no confusion over whose voice we are listening to, despite a deliberate merging of themes that blend from one author to the other. Lyotard turns to Quignard to explore, in poetry, the inaudible in music to explain ‘the enigma of artistic beauty, where conceptual discourse soon reaches its limit’ (p. 220). Even within the fictional frame of the fable—or because of it—Lyotard takes the liberty to borrow from the literary field because, as he explains, ‘it is not unprecedented…for philosophy to go to poetry school and to profit from it’ (p. 220). Here Quignard writes of the enigma within spoken languages that enables Lyotard to draw an analogy between the paradoxical heard and unheard sounds of music, ‘since, you understand, it is a question of sonority’ (p. 221). Quignard speaks of a sonorous depth, sonorous horizon, and sonorous scent that emit from the spoken species in a language of sounds that is primordial and based on the breath of loss and fear. He likens humans to beasts that are in constant denial of their death but, also, because of this, are in a constant state of lament that is ‘heard’ through the collective breath that living entails. The action of breathing is both physical and metaphysical. For Quignard (through Lyotard) the breath can only be heard within a language beneath languages (a sound within a sound, the inaudible within the audible) ‘always lying latent beneath the audible but never covered over by it, this breath does not speak,

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it moans, it mutters’ (p. 224). This moaning and muttering, however, and here lies a key paradox, is not heard but still makes a sound as an ‘unheard exhalation of fright’ (p. 225). It is here that Lyotard explains his use of the word ‘mutic’ in the title of the fable as a sound that cannot be heard, but is made or performed, nonetheless. Here the art in music is aligned with Quignard’s unheard breath as a primordial lament of loss and fear. Lyotard explains, ‘[n]o matter how clear the phrases of the clearest music might be, they bellow forth fright in secret’ (p. 225). It is this paradoxical ‘mute bellowing’ that Lyotard draws from Quignard’s text— described as a bestial lament that organises people into groups, into the ‘sonorous scent of the flock’ (p. 225) that inscribes a community based on the fear of death and loss and which is articulated through spoken and unspoken (forgotten) dread of death. For Lyotard, music ‘gets its beauties and emotions from the evocation of this condition of abandonment that is loud and mute, horrified, moist with a promiscuity without alterity’ (p. 226). In this way, music, like Quignard’s language beneath language, is not ‘other’ or separate to sound and to the spoken species—it is instead integral to and always present, a ‘mutic beneath music’ (p. 226).

4.5 Affect Lyotard states, ‘Music labors to give birth to what is audible in the inaudible breath’ (p. 228) and, in this context, breath can also be heard/seen as an affect on sonorous matter; the breath affects. In music, Lyotard differentiates between the sonorous matter of the audible heard as the type of sound that emerges (what we could call the timbre of the sound), and the sonorous matter that is inaudible, heard only as the ‘sorrow of being affected’ (p. 230) through Quignard’s analogy of the breath of lament. This ‘affection’ is the hidden threat of being ‘abandoned and lost…[that] clandestinely inhabits the audible material, the timbre’ (p. 230), and is what phrases heard sound into musical sound. For sonorous matter to be heard in this way, Lyotard continues, the breath of affect is heard through the ‘hallucinated ear’ that entails a certain openness or ‘passibility’ in the form of a heightened sensitivity and receptiveness. The body is threatened with loss through this openness, and passibility, because the body ‘has doors and they are open. What enters through the body, sensations, aesthesis, is not just the form of an object, it’s the anguish of being full of holes’ (p. 231). For Lyotard, music is a sonorous gesture of matter that is penetrable to the body and is a constant reminder that the ‘holes’ are, in fact, what let emotion, feeling, excess, as matter ‘in’ to the very core of being. To suffer through the receptiveness of this sonic matter, is to be. The self is defined by its loss as a body of holes, as a body that, through acknowledging these holes, acknowledges its own fallibility. Lyotard explains further: If the work of art is, it is because it bears witness to something in excess of what the body can sense, of what is sensible and circumscribed by the (biological, cultural) institutions of the body… This excess is already at the very origins of sensation. Sensation is not only the reception of useful contextual information, it is also in its immediacy the reminder of a

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threat. The body does not belong to you, it is sensible only insofar as it is exposed to the other thing, deprived of its self-distinction, in danger of annihilation. It is sensible only as lamentable. (p. 233)

Music ‘modalizes’ the lament of loss, the emotions we have of being extinct and inconsequential, and is what both individualises and communalises the self as part of a group with death in common. It is through the lament heard in music that ‘all the languages of the world seem secondary with regard to this lament of hunger, distress, loneliness, death, and danger’ (p. 224). Music gives this lament its form.

4.6 Sonorous Matter For Lyotard, music as sonorous matter is inscribed through the art gesture and this, in turn, is what ‘gives its emotional power to the opus’ (p. 224). Furthermore, it is Lyotard’s notion of a sonorous matter that enables the body to sense something in excess of the culture and context to which it belongs. Just as the body is filled with holes, Lyotard seems to want to plug these holes with the sound matter that he links to making the body ‘sensible’—in that it senses anything at all. While this is based on a primordial feeling of loss and fear, another interesting perspective worth mentioning is from Reni Celeste (2005) who describes this body as being defined within its senses through a lack. While Celeste is interested in the way music in film is what makes possible the sound of silence, Celeste also incorporates Lyotard’s insights by positioning music as sonorous matter as the lack itself . Celeste considers sound as the first sense, through the heartbeat in the mother’s womb, and this performs ‘the first drum roll of loss. The sound of a silence escaped and yet to come. In this sense, the first loss is the loss of loss itself. Music is this sound’ (Celeste, 2005, p. 120). This analysis also aligns to Lyotard’s idea of music as a sonorous matter that is affected outside of chronological time. Like Celeste’s idea of the interiority of music as the first sense, Lyotard considers the affection of sonorous matter, let’s say Celeste’s felt heartbeat, as a type of ‘modalizing’ of affects that ‘is already to put this noise to music, to make affection speak in shapes’ (Lyotard, 1997, p. 227). Lyotard continues: That being is lacking and does not lack lacking makes for a panic rumor. Despite itself, this rumor of non-being gives music the immaterial matter of the apparitions, of gestures, that are transformed in phrased appearances. (pp. 229–230)

Sonic matter, as music, then speaks in shapes, appears in phrases, and is both audible (in that it occurs only when matter is affected through the gesture), and inaudible (in the very process of its labour). For Lyotard, this is the testimony of art and this ‘is not perishable either. It transcends through historical conjunctions, as the breath of being down-beat glides across the beats that segment sonorous space and give music its materials’ (Lyotard, 1997, p. 233).

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4.7 Music in/As Education ‘Music, Mutic’ raises some interesting issues in relation to how we consider music in postmodernity and, by inference, how we consider music in education. What this fable does not deal with directly is Lyotard’s ongoing critique of modernity and his analysis of the implications this has for the conditions of the postmodern. However, his suggestion of an excess, an extra, to the condition of music itself alludes to a wider theoretical engagement with the modern tendency to eliminate the unknown as excess and nuance in both theory and society. As mentioned in the opening passage to this chapter, these fables, of which ‘Music, Mutic’ is one, are placed in a later body of work that deals with literary forms administered as a type of ‘re-writing’ modernity. Rather than aligning himself along the populist notions of the postmodern, Lyotard, by the time of the fables, is referring to re-writing modernity as the condition of postmodernity itself. Here the crucial issue of temporality comes into play as Lyotard actively pursues a type of Freudian working through in the notion of re-writing that has a central tenet of the way this act unfolds through time. As part of the process of re-writing, Lyotard positions writing, painting and music to be especially important as realms that incorporate a temporal body of lived time. This is a crucial form of resistance to a system that Lyotard considers is trying to collapse the temporal through an arresting of time as something to be harnessed and saved or sped up. The self-perpetuating engine of technological development that now controls modern society, according to Lyotard, affects our relation to time and to matter. Time is music’s basic requirement. What it is that is art that Lyotard describes in ‘Music, Mutic’ is the inaudible affection of sonorous matter and is utterly incapable of being swallowed by any modern technologies of time. What is art in music cannot be controlled or mastered, because it can only ever occur as a challenge to any attempt to measure chronological time. Lyotard considers the new technologies (of time, of development and of modern society in general) to have the sum effect of trying to erase any element of the lived experience that is mysterious, enigmatic and unable to be inscribed into computerised data. Through the very process of writing a fable on precisely this imprecise phenomenon that occurs as an inaudible sound that accompanies the audible, Lyotard is articulating a site of resistance through his writing, and through preserving the indeterminacy and mystery of music. Lyotard considers our relations to time and matter to be transformed in modern society and as such there is an implicit concentration on the role education plays as a form of resistance to these transformations. Music entails the radical rethinking needed through the spatiality of bodies that breathe life into the time of the musical event. The temporality of the music is a temporality that provides ‘artistic’ time that bears witness to what remains to be resisted in the time of modern development. Whereas the self-perpetuating and self-consolidating nature of the ‘system’ for Lyotard has no need for human experience—the indeterminacy offered by music as embodying nuance and grain challenges the performativity of the system consolidating itself in the name of development.

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4.8 Lyotard’s Musical Pedagogy However, Lyotard’s strange little fable has resonance beyond the explicit use of music in education and can also be turned towards a broader pedagogical orientation that further develops the recurring theme characteristic of Lyotard’s oeuvre, in one way or another, of the inarticulate excess that lies beyond articulation, comprehension, mastery, and all forms of (claims to) complete finality. While Lyotard would recoil from such a direct statement, his work in the fable allows us to take from this context a possible pedagogical blueprint that positions educational pedagogy as oriented towards the inaudible gesture as inextricable to the ‘event’ of learning and teaching. To do this, we will need to turn back to the notions outlined earlier in the chapter of the inaudible gesture, breath, affect, and sonorous matter and place these ideas in conversation with what is explicitly ‘educational’ in their analysis. Where we ‘end’, if there is such a possibility, is a point that signals a musical pedagogy as emergent from this process. When considering the musical gesture as an element that affects learning, Lyotard provides an interesting point of entry to think about the act of teaching as producing, or inducing, something in excess of what is being articulated verbally. That the performative act of teaching is accompanied by a gesture that is not articulated draws attention to the temporaneous dimension to education that emerges in a temporal framework that is contingent to the act of teaching. This may sound slightly circular, but it brings into relief an important element to teaching and that is the transmission of ‘data’ to the students that lies underneath the performative act of communicating information. Lyotard’s work on the musical gesture in the fable is consistent with his critique of a postmodern tendency to narrow information and knowledge to the extent that nuance and affect are lost in favour of the logic of performativity as the most efficient input/output equation. By separating the musical gesture from music, but simultaneously tying it to the temporal ‘event’ of its occurrence, Lyotard is able to isolate the ephemeral and affective artistry that makes music musical as the inhuman, or more than human dimension that breathes life into music as an art. When separating the gesture from its educative apparatus or moment of delivery, Lyotard opens up the possibility of exploring what it is that is educational in education in the same way he explores what is musical in music. To extend this argument further, the gesture in education is not necessarily a corollary of knowledge—but it is what makes learning possible. There is some irony to this, though, and that is the way the gesture in education is precisely what cannot be measured as a learning outcome. It simply is the affective imprint on the body that occurs in the event of education, and this temporal contingency of the educative gesture to the performative ‘act’ or ‘event’ of teaching and learning is precisely the element that resists the logic of inputs and outputs that characterises the education system’s drive for efficient performance. As such, the gesture is timeless in that it both delineates the ‘time’ of education as proof that education is happening, and also ‘out of time’ to any formal record of learning. The gesture, then, is evidence that something educative is happening but it is also the occurrence of the necessary undoing of

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ontological certainty—it instead is responsible for suspending any consciousness and intentionality of a student learning. In previous iterations of this ontological unravelling in previous chapters, this suspension of intentionality is framed as the precursor to certainty and mastery. In Lyotard’s musical argument, however, the gesture is the unheard ‘lament’ of loss and fright. This brings us now to an engagement of the inaudible or ‘mutic’ notion of ‘breath’ that Lyotard explores in relation to Pascal Quignard’s inaudible terrors of affective life. Lyotard’s ‘reverie’ provides a pedagogical frame with which to focus on the rather unusual dimension of ‘breath’ as an indispensable element in education. Using Lyotard’s turn to Quignard, the awareness of a breath that works beneath the language of communication opens a perspective on many aspects of teaching and learning but here we will traverse two key points. The first is the important relational dimension that a focus on breath brings into relief. Quignard’s depiction of humans as ‘beasts’ whose breath is the inaudible reverberation beneath a collective will to assert desire and life can be ‘pedagogical’ in the sense of the human necessity to connect with others in a sociality of learning. This relational dimension speaks to the connectedness of learning and teaching that renders ‘breath’ as the common condition to the pedagogical relationship; it is, using Lyotard, the possibility from which ‘education’ can occur. This both brings in to focus the importance of human-to-human contact in the ‘physical’ classroom and clears space from which digital and online iterations of teaching and learning can emerge. Breath, as the underlying condition of relationality in education, is what broadens the transmission of information—in whatever medium it is ‘exhaled’—to a deeper engagement with knowledge. What further distinguishes the focus on breath as the second educational point, however, is Lyotard’s analysis of music that is accompanied by the inaudible breath as the ‘matter’ that affects the sensual body. This is more directly linked to the nature of knowledge itself as something that works on the body of the learner. The evocative reference to the body as being full of holes that sonorous matter can ‘fill’ provides another variation of Lyotard’s preoccupation with affect and the ‘undoing’ of subjectivity that occurs, in this case in the affective ‘event’ of learning. However, it is Lyotard’s unusual linking of a body penetrable to matter as the condition that initiates the threat of loss and potential death that is most interesting from a pedagogical perspective. This ‘bestial’ imagining of the human raises the stakes of education to something that takes seriously the terror, pain and labour that is associated with truly learning and engaging with knowledge outside of what is already known. Furthermore, this ‘terrible’ process inherent in education is contingent on the unknown in both process and destination—to control the educative process, for Lyotard, is to rob the educational from education because it closes off the possibility of the pedagogical necessity of discovery and exploration. This is, according to Lyotard, the feeling of the ‘and with no hold…the vertigo of the final phrase’ (Lyotard in Bennington, 2010, p. 221) that in education, leaves students and teachers always teetering on the edge of what they know. Finally, ‘Music, Mutic’ demonstrates Lyotard’s interest in music as reaching far beyond a merely acoustic phenomenon. The concept of the inaudible, as a mutic ‘sounding’ within the gesture of musical sound, paired with the notion of timbre as

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the intransitive artistry of this gesture, opens an interesting space in which to consider a pedagogy that listens, and incorporates this musicality into its approach. There is something deeply pedagogical about Lyotard’s fascination with art and music, and the way the inaudible awakens and arouses ways of thinking that are fertile and rich with possibilities to think again, and to think some more. Working within and alongside the ‘system’ that takes, as its working rule, the forgetting of what is human, does not mean that it is impossible to sense the mute bellowing and lament of death that is the accompaniment of the living condition. The link between music and thought, when placed in the ambit of the inaudible, gives access to our interiority, as a memory so deeply embedded that it remains always present. A musical pedagogy is one that honours the gesture of education and the affective silence that accompanies the chorus of learning.

References Bennington, G. (2010). Translation in the dark/La traduction au noir. In J-F. Lyotard (Eds.), Ecrits sur l’art contemporain et les artistes/Writings on contemporary art and artists (pp. 208–223). Leaven University Press. Butor, M. (2001). Recollections on Jean-François Lyotard. Yale French Studies, 99, 6–9. Celeste, R. (2005). The sound of silence: Film music and lament. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 22(2), 113–123. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509200590461828 Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (10th ed.) (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). Manchester University Press. (Original work published 1979). Lyotard, J.-F. (1991). The inhuman: Reflections on time [L’Inhuman: Causeries sur le Temps] (G. Bennington & R. Bowlby, Trans., pp. 1–7). Stanford University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1996). Musique et postmodernité. Surfaces, VI(203), 4–16. Lyotard, J.-F. (1997). Postmodern fables [Moralités postmodernes] (G. Van Den Abbeele, Trans.). University of Minnesota. (Original work published 1993). Lyotard, J.-F. (1998). A few words to sing (L. R. Lawlor, Trans.). In A. Krims (Ed.), Music/ideology: Resisting the aesthetic (pp. 15–36). G+B Arts International. Lyotard, J.-F. (2009). Music and postmodernity [Musique et postmodernité]. New Formations, 66(Spring 2009), 37–45. https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF.66.02.2009 Lyotard, J.-F. (1999). Signed, Malraux (R. Harvey, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (2000). The confession of Augustine (R. Beardsworth, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Quignard, P. (1997). Petite Traités 1,11. Folio.

Chapter 5

Mattering Lyotard: From the Postmodern to the Sublime as the Condition of Education

5.1 The Sublime and the Postmodern Collide As readers familiar with Lyotard’s work will know, the prominence of the essay, ‘The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’, precipitated the Anglo-American reception to Lyotard in a way that his previous, and arguably later, work did not. It is true that Lyotard was travelling to the United States in the 1970s, but it was when this text was translated into English in 1984 that momentum and appetite grew for his intellectual presence and relevance outside of France. The heightened appreciation was mutual and, as Sarah Wilson explains, Lyotard’s entrée into American culture and life that began in the 1970s with sojourns into the California desert with the artist Jacques Monory, served to ‘explode’ his intellectual gravitational position that orbited around the European Enlightenment and French Revolution. ‘Lyotard’s Umwelt – his reference world and comfort zone’, Wilson continues, ‘now oscillated between the paradigms offered by California and Paris’ (2021, p. 58). The French and German philosophical traditions that had structured Lyotard’s thought and philosophy which had, arguably, been displaced alongside his abandonment of Marxist political activism in the European geographical and philosophical ‘zone’, were again revisited under the unremittingly bright glare of the Californian desert sun. While the grand narrative of Marx would be decisively left behind, this revisitation was particularly the case for Lyotard’s return to the Kantian notion of the sublime. For Lyotard, this alteration to the sublime that shifted the Kantian naturalistic formulation of nature’s awe-inspiring power that exceeds imagination and provokes ‘“astonishment” but also “brooding melancholy”’ (Kant in Wilson, 2021, p. 52), moved to an aesthetic encounter that involved ‘magnitude, force, quantity in its purest state, a “presence” that exceeds what imaginative thought can grasp at once in a form’ (Lyotard, 1994, p. 53). Sarah Wilson makes the case that it was the Californian experiences accompanied by Lyotard’s written engagements with

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Jacques Monory’s paintings in 1981 that drives his future philosophical and essayist preoccupation to demonstrate the political force of what exceeds representation. Importantly, this moment in Lyotard’s thinking is accompanied by the immediate reception of The Postmodern Condition. Lyotard’s turn to the sublime that happened simultaneously with the AngloAmerican embrace of his work as framed and articulated in The Postmodern Condition at this time in the early 1980s, performed a convergence of the contingent with the eternal in a way that foreshadowed a future preoccupation with Freud’s ‘double blow’ (see chapter two in this book). The book’s focus on the constellation of fragments that are attempted to be woven into the fulfilment of a universal historical narrative, always to be thwarted in a postmodern era of ‘incredulity’ (1984, p. xxiv), was what Lyotard’s ‘new’ intellectual public latched onto at the same time as Lyotard’s philosophical development of the sublime. While the latter concept of the sublime could be seen as the interpretive explanation of a rupture too large to be accounted for in language, Lyotard’s focus on the performativity of knowledge as the binding force of the present seemed to tap into an excitement and anxiety aimed at the prospect of enormous technological change. Therefore, Lyotard’s thinking in The Postmodern Condition has, until very recently, eclipsed much of his wider corpus in Englishspeaking contexts and in educational research specifically. Yet, as Professor Lyotard continued to be hosted primarily in the comparative literature departments of the US from this point, his work on the sublime and the ethical, political and cultural force of the inarticulate and unpresentable continued. This chapter offers a challenge to the normative responses and analyses of The Postmodern Condition by extracting the notion of ‘matter’ that is tangentially articulated through a linguistic framework that the chapter then extends to a consideration of matter as applied to Lyotard’s cognate concept of the sublime. While The Postmodern Condition is framed as a more explicitly educational text, it is my contention that an extension of the pedagogical in the context of Lyotard’s thinking on the nonrepresentational is worth exploring beyond this text. Specifically, it is the notion of ‘presence’ and the pedagogical force of such a notion, that brings the conversation about the immateriality of matter to educational relevance. The following sections trace the notion of matter, first through the performativity of information in The Postmodern Condition and then through a diffracted reading of the sublime that traverses Lyotard’s art writings on the subject to reach a discussion about presence in education. The destination of the chapter is the summons of the educational to conversations about education, as that which is both unrepresentable and thoroughly pedagogical in spirit.

5.2 Performativity and the Narrowing of Education Despite the wider fame this book awarded him, Lyotard expressed frustration at the Anglo-American focus on The Postmodern Condition. Indeed, Dhillon and Standish (2000) point out that, in the field of educational research, it is this book that is most

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often cited and used in relation to Lyotard’s thought in ways that eclipse any substantive engagement with the wider oeuvre. There are countless scholarly engagements that call on this work and most will point out the ‘bare facts’ of the book: Lyotard was commissioned by the Quebec government council of universities to write a report at the close of the 1970s that engaged with the changing and contemporary state of knowledge in developed societies. As Kiff Bamford (2020, p. 19) points out, the original title provided by the president of the council of universities, Report on the Problems of Knowledge in the Most Developed Industrial Societies was abbreviated into the subtitle of Lyotard’s book: A Report on Knowledge. Lyotard wrote the book quickly and outside of his philosophical and aesthetic essayist style, with the task of describing this state of knowledge in a ‘postmodern’ condition. ‘But’, Lyotard explained in a later interview, ‘I said this “state” was a movement, that something was shifting and had not stopped shifting. What was in question was the representation of and use of knowledge, since that was the object of the report that had been requested of me’ (1992, p. 414). Nesting this purpose in the framework of the report, Lyotard’s use of the term ‘postmodern’ contextualised his focus on the changing circumstances of the way knowledge was engaged with, particularly in the fledgling moments of the computerisation of information in the late 1970s. To engage with the position Lyotard considered information and knowledge to hold in this contemporary societal climate where forms of computerised technologies were starting to define a cultural ‘moment’, the notion of what is meant by Lyotard as ‘postmodern’ needs refining. For Lyotard, the postmodern was not to be viewed as a historical epoch that followed modernity, but rather a condition of existence that exemplified an erosion of universal ideas about humanity and progress that had structured modernity. As Sarah Wilson articulates, the difference in cultural articulation between the European and American responses to a postmodern formulation rests upon the responses to the Holocaust and its implications for human history. Lyotard may well be viewed as a traveller-philosopher who encompassed different timeframes and cultures but, on the point of the Holocaust, his European background comes to the fore in ways that bring meaning to two important elements of his conception of the postmodern. The first, that recourse to any universalising meaning-making construct or ‘grand narrative’ is no longer tenable in the wake of history-breaking events such as the Holocaust that overtly utilised the modern grand narrative of progress to justify terror. ‘Simplifying to the extreme’, Lyotard states, ‘I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. xxiv). The second, without recourse to grand narratives as the legitimating dimension to the universalistic dimension to modernity, societies instead base their legitimating tendencies and needs on the quest for efficiency and optimal performance. ‘[T]he goal’ Lyotard continues in another aphoristic quote, ‘is no longer truth, but performativity – that is, the best possible input/output equation’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. 46). Before any quick judgement can be made about the second point, and in contrast to many readings of Lyotard that mistake a ‘diagnosis’ of the postmodern as cause for celebration, optimal performance and its articulation as performativity also leads to terror: ‘The application of this criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a

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certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear’ (p. xxiv). It is necessary at this point to make comprehensible Lyotard’s formulation of the postmodern through a methodological framework that emerges through linguistic philosophy and which explains the reference to ‘games’ in the earlier quote. Describing the postmodern as a condition brought into being through ‘a pragmatics of language particles’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. xxiv), Lyotard was able to diagnose the erosion and ‘incredulity’, referred to earlier, towards the grand narratives of modernity. These grand narratives are described in another oft-repeated quote from Lyotard as ‘the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth’ (1984, p. xxiii). Referencing the work of the language philosopher J. L. Austin in The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard explodes the narrative form into different speech acts that have particular rules that apply to each category of speech. In applying this language theory to his conception of the postmodern, Lyotard (1984, p. xxiv) continues: The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements–narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable.

As can be seen in this excerpt, Lyotard draws from the pragmatics of language, and applies this atomistic view of language to a description of how the postmodern condition was one where any attempts to unify and universalise ‘statements’ were impossible (and at best, only temporary). However, the unifying thread of each category or group of statements, such as denotative or prescriptive statements, is that each category has its own internal set of rules. These rules apply only within each separate category, with no meta ‘rule’ that is capable of dictating all possible utterances; the rules apply only within the confines of their articulation. Lyotard turns to Wittgenstein to describe the way that each person, when using language and the many different forms of statements and utterances, engages with language in the same way as playing a game—where rules are followed, and where new statements move the perimeters of the game to a new setting and a new set of rules. These speech acts, explains Lyotard, are to be placed ‘within the domain of the\agon (the joust) rather than that of communication’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. 88) and further, ‘to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics’ (1984, p. 10). The ‘problem’ for thinking and living in the postmodern condition, for Lyotard, is the way that the performativity criterion as the most efficient or ‘best’ performance takes the place of the modern grand narrative as the most significant force for legitimation. As such, performativity ignores singularity and instead subsumes all meaning within the criterion of efficient performance. So, while Lyotard describes the postmodern condition as involving the necessary elements of dissensus, questioning and openness given to us through ‘clouds’ of language particles or, put another way, the ‘matter’ of language, it is always at the same time under threat of the performativity criterion that negates and erases this openness. This is the challenge

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for education in the postmodern condition for Lyotard—we must acknowledge these particles of language pragmatics as holding the ethical promise of what it means to learn, while also always resisting the reductive forces involved in education when knowledge, learning and the constituent parts of the educative process are submitted to performativity (see for example, Locke, 2015). However, as Sarah Wilson observes in her essay about Lyotard and the various philosophical recalibrations he made when considering the postmodern climate and the role of the sublime, Lyotard’s thinking at this time is very much shaped by the cultural shifts that were occurring alongside technological change. When again referring to Lyotard’s Californian visits with Jacques Monory in the 1970s, Wilson considers the challenge to Lyotard’s ‘past-orientated philosophical repertoire of the European great and the good’ posed by the collision of ‘new scientific and epistemological horizons’ (2021, p. 50). Referring to the juxtaposition of two ‘zones’ that framed Lyotard’s intellectual and aesthetic development and the epistemological confrontation of the past with the present (and future), Wilson also frames Lyotard’s preoccupation with the dissolution of matter to the digital in the following: Silicon Valley, Death Valley’s vital opposite, sprawled over the ground. Named in 1971, it signified a whole region of space-age experimental computer laboratories with their link to the military-industrial capitalist complex and vast US state budgets. On a macro-level, space exploration continued here: on a micro-level the microprocessor and internal circuits driven by binary numbers with their on-off 1 or 1 ruled… With matter dissolved into numbers; the human became merely a computational interface between “micro” and “macro”. (2021, pp. 58, 59)

Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition engages directly with the technological developments referenced earlier and the impact these changes have on the production of new knowledge. The formulation of ‘matter’ in this work is tied to the performativity criterion of efficient performance where, as Wilson intimates, the human condition is digitalised and transposed to digital matter. The ‘terror’ this imposes is through the direct assault on the intangible, non-representational and affective dimensions to the lived condition, with the constant spectre of all that is not measurable, communicable, productive and ‘knowable’ under threat of deletion. Lyotard would develop this notion of matter towards a more explicitly artistic manifestation, as demonstrated in the exhibition he curated at the Centre Georges. Pompidou in 1985 entitled Les Immatériaux (in English: The Immaterials). Importantly, the time between The Postmodern Condition and the staging of the exhibition marks Lyotard’s philosophical development of the sublime towards its aesthetic transposition to art (Locke, 2017). This development has its educational significance and relevance in the way that Lyotard formulates the aesthetic encounter through the concept of the sublime as a riposte to performativity, and it is to a more focused discussion of the sublime that we now turn.

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5.3 The Temporal Matter of the Sublime Lyotard’s prognosis of education within a postmodern condition that is always vulnerable to the logic of performativity in the absence of the legitimating processes of the modern grand narratives, arrived on the Anglo-speaking scene at a time that anticipated many of the educational reforms that sought to justify the purpose of education in economic or productive terms. The narrowing of education to the ‘suffocating busyness of performativity’ (Lyotard, 1999, ‘The Survivor’, para. 64) where any form of creative inventiveness must be quantifiably productive in a system that cannot tolerate openness without a known destination, in many ways shifted the landscape of education in the societies which The Postmodern Condition was addressing. However, as has been observed already in this chapter, it is at this point that engagement with Lyotard in educational research usually stops. This next section continues with Lyotard past this point in his oeuvre to look at the way education can be viewed more expansively through a focus on matter, temporality and presence. To do this, we now need to venture into Lyotard’s engagement with Kant and the sublime—and the application of this philosophy to artistic contexts. For Kant (1952), the sublime encapsulates the most intense of all aesthetic experiences where human faculties of perception and meaning struggle to make sense of an encounter which presents itself as infinite to the knowing subject. The examples given by Kant are from nature, such as vistas of endless mountain ranges and vast ravines form awe-inspiring horizons. For Kant, these demonstrate the sublime by exceeding human capabilities to absorb apparently infinite and boundaryless forms of perception. The awe-inspiring feeling conjured from such an experience is that of the sublime, and part of what renders this feeling of awe and infinity is precisely that which must remain beyond the human faculty of representation (in art, epistemology and meaning), lest the quality of infinity be tamed and domesticated through a capacity to be defined, known and representable. Enticed by the political and aesthetic potential of the slippery and fleeting quality of Kant’s sublime experience to elude representation, Lyotard mounts an even more radical challenge to the rational subject by zeroing in on the non-representational quality of the sublime encounter. Lyotard’s sublime nourishes this feeling of the unpresentable but, unlike Kant, the endless horizons of mountainous valleys are intimately transposed into the smallest and most subtle of sensations that could be as miniscule as an emergent bead of perspiration on the surface of the skin; a catch of breath in fright. Any attempt to define and grasp such minute sensorial affects for Lyotard must fail, precisely because of their temporally contingent occurrence—any ‘repeat’ would never be able to occur at the exact time again; any attempt to present such an occurrence remains impossible and irreplaceable. The political power, for Lyotard, lies in the singularity of the material event which involves a temporary subjective mode of incapacitation where to ‘know’ something has occurred must be acknowledged only after the fact. The moment ‘of’ the sublime is unknowable and is therefore the state at which we are open to the singularity of the event. Kant wants us to think the infinite and make meaning of what is awesome and magnificent in order

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to stretch and refine our cognitive capacities and faculties. Lyotard instead frames the moment of incapacitation as the political gesture of remaining astute and open to the singularity of the event, to its nuance and ‘timbre’: …a singular, incomparable quality – unforgettable and immediately forgotten – of the grain of a skin or a piece of wood, the fragrance of an aroma, the savour of a secretion or a piece of flesh, as well as a timbre or a nuance. All these terms are interchangeable. They designate the event of a passion, a passability for which the mind will not have been prepared, which will have unsettled it, and which it conserves only the feeling – anguish and jubilation – of an obscure debt. (Lyotard, 1991, p. 141)

In this typically layered and evocative excerpt that marks his writing on aesthetics particularly (contrasted with the stylistic shift of The Postmodern Condition), Lyotard frames the sublime moment of incapacitation as holding within it the ethical promise that what is unpresentable is precisely so because it is incomparable in its unique singularity and utterly irreplaceable within the instant of its occurrence. The political weight of this promise lies in the obligation to bear witness to such qualities, to seek them out through a willingness to cede control and be unsettled by the materiality of the sublime as event. However, Lyotard is clear that the intensity of the sublime experience, no matter how miniscule, renders the subject incapacitated and thus incapable of intentionality—sublime receptivity is openness to the immateriality of matter, because it is formless ‘“immaterial”, an objectable, because it can only “take place” or find its occasion at the price of suspending these active powers of the mind’ (1991, p. 140). Through this ‘formless’ incapacitation, Lyotard’s version of sublime is timeless, ‘the aesthetic grasp of forms is only possible if one gives up all pretension to master time through a conceptual synthesis’ (1991, p. 32). The importance of ‘time’, as it is conceived within this sublime state of incapacitation now brings us to an example of Lyotard’s engagement with art as a demonstration of such incapacitation and deprivation in artistic terms. This brief encounter with Lyotard’s artistic transposition of philosophy to the realms of visual art in this chapter will then allow us to bring these thoughts on the sublime into conversation with their relevance to education in the final section.

5.4 The ‘Time’ of the Sublime: Newman and the Instant As exhibited through his texts on art, the sublime is marked for Lyotard by the feeling of the differend 1 as the pain of the mind’s failure to grasp (and represent) the concepts of the imagination, thereby creating a schism or abyss between feeling and its cognitive representation. To get to this point, however, Lyotard would need a long and detailed excursion through Kant’s Critique of Judgement with an intense engagement and critique of the section ‘The Analytic of the Sublime’ as evidenced in his Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (Lyotard, 1994). This would be the 1

Lyotard’s philosophical concept (1988) of the radical heterogeneity of language and the ethicopolitical impossibility of articulating universal statements that preserve multiplicity.

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platform that Lyotard elaborates ‘the analysis of a differend of feeling in Kant’s text, which is also the analysis of a feeling of differend, and to connect this feeling with the transport that leads all thought (critical thought included) to its limits’ (Lyotard, 1994, p. x).2 The important quality stated here is of reaching the limits of something, of ‘breaking’ the mind and rendering it immobile by its incapacity to represent concepts in their magnitude and vastness. Lyotard explains: In his Critique of Judgement Kant outlines, rapidly and almost without realizing it, another solution to the problem of sublime painting. One cannot, he writes, represent the power of infinite might or absolute magnitude within space and time because they are pure Ideas. But one can at least allude to them, or “evoke” them by means of what he baptizes a “negative presentation”. (Lyotard, 1991, p. 85)

It is here that Lyotard re-appropriates the sublime in the services of art, which is particularly evident in his analysis of the artistic processes of the avant-garde. ‘Newman: The Instant’ (Lyotard, 1991) deals with the art of Barnett Newman and outlines Lyotard’s use of the sublime and its relation to (and against) measurable time. At this point Lyotard is interested in the way Newman (explicitly driven by and belonging to ‘the aesthetic of the sublime’) evokes time as an event within the artwork, and through this (painterly) evocation isolates ‘different “sites of time”’ (Lyotard, 1991, p. 78). Newman’s ‘work of art’ in Lyotard’s analysis deals, not only with art as an object, but also the process in which Newman delves in the production of art and the way the artworks collaboratively with, and on, the viewer. According to Simon Malpas (2002), Lyotard’s interest in Newman is not merely coincidental or fortuitous (unlike many other artists Lyotard wrote for). Newman was not only a leading figure in American abstract expressionism but was also an accomplished and informed theorist on aesthetics who had published essays on the sublime (among a raft of other aesthetic issues) in various art journals throughout the post-war period until his death in 1970.3 Lyotard, however, clearly found in Newman an artist whose aesthetic and theoretical impetus was very much in concert with his own theoretical trajectory. Both, in their own areas and idiosyncratic ways, could also be seen to be outsiders among outsiders, relentlessly following their own creative pathways and blazing their own artistic trails irrespective of fashion and societal expectations. The question of time, ‘an obsession shared by many painters’, was not the most compelling dimension to Newman’s art for Lyotard. Rather, it was ‘the fact that it gives an unexpected answer to that question: its answer is that time is 2

Geoffrey Bennington tells of the amusing story of Lyotard’s lectures at the University in Vincennes in Paris, filled with smoke and packed with eccentrics all wanting to hear more of the scandalous Lyotard of Libidinal Economy. However, these lectures take place in 1979 and Lyotard has once again moved beyond a conceptual model and in this case is pre-empting the differend. The gathered crowd, however, are not pleased and people start yelling for more talk of the libidinal. Lyotard doesn’t seem to mind at all. Bennington continues: ‘A few months later, in the summer of 1980 the whole place will be bulldozed by the French Government and moved out to St. Denis. Lyotard’s class starts happening on Saturday mornings, reading Kant; henceforth there are not twenty of us in the room … He’s still always happy and amused: thinks we might now finally get some work done’ (Bennington, 2011, p. 33). 3 Newman’s contemporaries in this area were painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothco.

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the picture itself’ (Lyotard, 1991, p. 78). Time, in this ‘dimension’,4 is experienced ‘sensationally’. As the issue of time for both Lyotard and Newman was intricately linked to that of the sublime, Lyotard’s commentary on Newman’s work as the manifestation of time felt as sensation within a rubric consisting of space and time (and thus awarded a ‘presence’), was particularly significant. As an exemplary demonstration of Newman’s ‘sensation of time’, Lyotard comments on the series entitled Stations of the Cross (exhibited at the Guggenheim in 1966) are revealing. The subtitle to this work is the line uttered by a despairing and bewildered Jesus, ‘My God, why hast thou Forsaken me?’ presented here in the Hebrew, Lama Sabachthani. At this moment Jesus is left desperately clamouring for meaning, and his distraught and almost frenzied plea to God to put an answer, a meaning, to his anguish resounds in a desolate and despairing void of silence. Newman’s blocks of oppressive black paint, interrupted by an almost surgically precise vertical line of white evoke this void, slamming the spectators’ unwitting gaze into a confrontation with an evocation of an ‘instant’ in time that is suspended in a state of abject horror. Newman considered the question Jesus cried out (commonly referred to as Christ’s Passion) to be the question of humankind; ‘the cry of man, of every man’ (Newman in Tate Online, 2002, para. 4). Lyotard notes that Newman’s Passion is the Hebrew version in that ‘the reconciliation of existence (and therefore of death) and signification does not take place’ (Lyotard, 1991, p. 87). Instead, Newman leaves us waiting for the Messiah to bring meaning by leaving the work with no fixed signification and realist representation so that any historical reference to this drama is buried within the abstractionist approach. Instead, we are left with the abstract, but pulsing, event of the black and white painting ‘saying’ nothing but this void. There is no Christ, there is no cross, and there is only the raw black on white canvas, there to evoke the ‘instant’ of Christ’s anguish, which becomes ‘our’ anguish. Newman writes: Lema Sabachthani – why? Why did you forsake me? Why forsake me? To what purpose? Why? This is the Passion. The outcry of Jesus. Not the terrible walk up Via Dolorosa, but the question that has no answer… This question that has no answer has been with us so long – since Jesus – since Abraham – since Adam – the original question. Lema? To what purpose – is the answerable question of human suffering. The first pilgrims walked the Via Dolorosa to identify themselves with the original moment, not to reduce it to a pious legend; nor even to worship the story of one man’s agony, but to stand witness to the story of each man’s agony: the agony that is the single, constant, unrelenting, willed – world without an end. (Newman in Malpas, 2002, p. 208)

Lyotard and Newman would have been in agreement that this lack of meaning and signification is, in fact, a symptom of humankind being ‘abandoned’ by meaning in modernity. Further to this, Malpas considers Newman’s depiction of Christ’s anguish in his art to be an intentional move away from a mythology that Christianity so exemplifies. Instead, Christ’s instant of anguish becomes our permanent (Lyotard would say immemorial, and therefore constant) state of anguish: meaning is impossible now 4

In fact, this paper was first presented in the catalogue of an exhibition entitled ‘Time: looking at the fourth dimension’ that exhibited in Brussels, Geneva, Vienna and London from 1984–1986.

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that myth has been destroyed. This is presented in Newman’s work without imitating ‘reality’, but through evoking the raw materials of emotion. What Lyotard hears in Newman’s painterly void is ‘not the Know why, but Be’. Referencing another philosopher of the sublime who influenced and was critiqued by Kant, Edmund Burke, Lyotard continues: It has to be understood that this Be is not concerned with the resurrection in the sense of the Christian mystery, but with the recurrence of a prescription emanating from silence or from the void, and which perpetrates the passion by reiterating it from its beginnings. When we have been abandoned by meaning, the artist has a professional duty to bear witness that there is, to respond to the order to be. The painting becomes evidence, and it is fitting that it should not offer anything that has to be deciphered, still less interpreted… [and] is an allusion to Burke’s terror, to the terror that surrounds the event, the relief that there is. (Lyotard, 1991, p. 88)

Even though Newman found him rather strange (“surreal” is how he describes the writings), Lyotard notes that the threatening qualities of privation and terror that Edmund Burke wrote about (in 1757) as constitutive of the sublime feeling, were very much ‘present’ (albeit negatively) in Newman’s work. ‘Certain “sensations”,’ implores Lyotard, ‘are pregnant with a threat to our self-preservation, and Burke refers to that threat as terror’ (Lyotard, 1991, p. 84). Newman evokes this terror, through Lyotard’s analysis, by removing all explicit modes of signification and instead insists on the painting as a representation of nothing but the colouring sensation itself. Newman’s evocation of ‘shadows, solitude, silence and the approach of death may be “terrible” in that they announce that the gaze, the other, language or life will soon be extinguished’ (Lyotard, 1991, p. 84). But also, for Lyotard, this evocation produces an emptiness that is bereft of meaning but paradoxically brimming with the fear that nothing will ever happen again, that we will be left to flounder in Newman’s ‘nothingness’. Burke’s sublime feeling however, through Newman’s paintbrush and Lyotard’s pen, conjures the feeling that, out of this abject deprivation of sense and meaning, ‘that something will happen despite everything, within this threatening void, that something will take “place” and will announce that everything is not over. That place is mere “here”, the most minimal occurrence’ (Lyotard, 1991, p. 84). Newman demands that we dwell in the present artistic ‘instant’ as the event of the ‘here’. ‘The feeling of the instant’, Lyotard explains of Newman’s artistic achievement, ‘is instantaneous’ (Lyotard, 1991, p. 80). Lyotard traverses what Newman means by his quest in and through art as the sublime experience, the ‘now’ of the sublime, through an interrogation of the ‘unnameable’ in the Torah, and Augustine’s ‘temporal “ecstasies”’ (Lyotard, 1991, p. 90). Newman’s ‘now’, or ‘instant’, runs against a notion of time that is constitutive of a (human, rational, ‘Enlightened’) consciousness from Husserl onwards. Instead, Newman’s sublime (and Lyotard’s) is a feeling held in abeyance between the past and the future in a state of pleasure that is tainted with the pain of not happening again. For Lyotard, this produces the questioning sensation of ‘Is it happening, is this it, is it possible?’ and is an event or occurrence that is ‘approached through a state of privation’ (p. 90). Within the painterly event, Lyotard considers Newman’s approach to exemplify the expression of the threat that the ‘it happens’ of the event

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of the painting, the ‘now’ and ‘instant’ of the painterly occurrence, might not happen again. What is sublime in Lyotard’s analysis of Newman’s work is the way that, through evocation rather than realist representation, his painting demands of the viewer a capacity to appreciate the ‘here and now’ dimensions that are present in the work of art. ‘Not elsewhere, not up there or over there, not earlier or later, not once upon a time. But as here, now, it happens that…and it’s this painting. Here and now there is this painting, rather than nothing, and that’s what is sublime’ (Lyotard, 1991, p. 93). Newman’s approach is, for Lyotard, constitutive of the avant-garde question as to what is ‘at stake’ in painting, and in the context of this argument what we will apply to the stakes of education. Rather than meaning, historical accuracy, signification and nostalgic representation, the avant-garde instead ask the question: what does it mean to paint? In the realm of the visual art their role, according to Lyotard, is ‘to make seen what makes one see, and not what is visible’ (Lyotard, 1991, p. 102). Where the sublime feeling enters, is the way the avant-garde impose upon their audience and in their art a state of privation in terms of form and structure by inscribing ‘the occurrence of a sensory now as what cannot be presented and which remains to be presented in the decline of great representational painting’ (Lyotard, 1991, p. 103). The avant-garde work with the feeling of the sublime within this state of privation by denying what Lyotard previously refers to as the ‘solace’ of clear and ‘good’ forms. Rather than imitating the beauty in reality, the avant-garde instead try out unusual and sometimes shocking combinations in order to move beyond the beautiful and to beyond the expectations and cultural norms of art and thinking. The disarmament of imitation, of reality, of mimesis, in art disarms in the same way that consciousness is disarmed without the binding powers of meaning (Locke, 2016).

5.5 Lyotard’s Pedagogy of the Instant: Experiencing Education ‘Sensationally’ Lyotard’s work on the postmodern, the sublime and the application of both these concepts to the visual, provides an interesting opening to extend this thinking beyond art and philosophy to education specifically. It is clear that, by framing education with the performativity criterion of efficient performance, Lyotard was signalling a warning about the emptying out of the educative experience in favour of productivity, known outcomes and destination, and measurable indicators of learning and progress. Finding ways to resist performativity is the point of education for Lyotard, but the ways to do this are not to be found in his writing on education but through his philosophical and aesthetic writings that focus in different ways on what eludes capture and representation. What I attempt here is to transpose Lyotard’s thoughts on the sublime as outlined in this chapter to education and, particularly, a re-evaluation of what it is that is educational about education.

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Lyotard’s extensive writings on the sublime offer the opportunity to re-evaluate educational experience ‘sensationally’ and a key dimension to a focus on the sensorial elements to education is the notion that the sublime feeling is one that intuits there is more than what is simply offered in the moment of pedagogical instruction. Beginning with Lyotard’s dictum that ‘to think is to have ideas, and ideas exceed the given’ (2012, p. 345), the hint of something ungraspable and unknowable that lies just beyond cognition, articulation and representation, introduces the notion of an excess that flows over the pedagogical event and, in Lyotard’s parlance, evokes a presence that is temporal and affective. The example of Newman’s work above provides us with a way of approaching Lyotard’s meaning in educational presence by incorporating the sublime feeling of incapacitation as a state that is in the ‘instant’. It is Lyotard’s analysis of sites of different time, and of educational time as being experienced as an event, where discussion of what it means to bring the sublime to the educational space can begin. The first observation is that Lyotard’s language of terror, privation and incapacitation that is used to describe the sublime is not the type of language we would usually associate with education and teaching young people to learn. It goes without saying that the point Lyotard is making is not to inflict such experiences on anyone, let alone children and students in our care. It is, however, useful to remind ourselves of the act of engaging with the unknown in all its full breadth of embodied emotion. Learning something we do not know is painful. The struggle of being initiated into new knowledge takes effort and no small amount of concentrated commitment, and it can really ‘hurt’ when we grapple with something that seems to lie just out of our cognitive reach. Lyotard’s sublime encounter occurs in this ‘instant’ that he describes earlier in relation to Newman’s painting, when the as-yet-unknown has not been translated into the conceptual and symbolic frameworks that allow us to ‘read’ and understand the world around us. Following Lyotard, this is a state in education that provides the very condition for thinking, and it is one that involves sensitivity to this fragile encounter by the teacher in a way that is markedly different from pedagogical narratives of mastery and authority. The sublime encounter demands both teacher and student enter into a relationship with the unknown in a way that avoids deliberate moves to absorb and resolve this state into ‘measurable’ time and knowable concepts (Locke & Yates, 2015). Rather, Lyotard’s thinking on the sublime signals a form of pedagogical ethics where the aim is to feel time sensationally without being subsumed under an over-riding learning outcome to control it. The sublime encounter then, is one where the pedagogical import for teacher and student lies in the capacity to remain in abeyance in this state. This approach is resonant with Lyotard’s notion of infancy, where teacher and student both must learn to unlearn so as to be creatively and inventively open to the journey of whatever question is being asked. This state of unlearning is also linked to Lyotard’s double reference to the notion of ‘terror’, where the state of abeyance that is constitutive of the sublime experience holds within it the dual feelings of pleasure and pain; the pleasure of reaching forward into the unknown at the same time as feeling the possible terror of nothing happening again. There is a difference between this abyssal terror of the sublime and the abject terror inherent to performativity where all knowledge and

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experience that is not immediately productive can be deleted and therefore annihilated. This latter point may again sound inappropriate to bring into discussion with education, but it is precisely this form of abject terror in the context of education that provides the stark reminder of the ‘stakes’ of education and the constant threat of narrowing the educative experience to the engagement of activities and experiences that can only be quantified and measured as ‘learning’. However, these observations on bringing the sublime experience to the site of education have thus been predicated on the human subject and the necessity of letting go of conceptual knowledge as the condition for renewing the activity of thought and as the setting for bringing new knowledge into play in education. The final part of this argument that Lyotard leads us to, particularly in his writing on Newman that demonstrates the timelessness of the sublime, is to a focus on the immaterial and its presence in education as to where a true pedagogical force can be found. Lyotard considers ‘matter’ to become immaterial at the ‘sublime’ point of the incapacitation of the mind, where any attempt to grasp the sublime sensory event and to make it present, will inevitably fail. The extension to this argument goes beyond what Lyotard ever articulated and moves us to a comment on the ‘intelligence’ of matter itself to adapt and be self-organising as opposed to something that is inert and only ‘active’ in the hands of a thinking subject/human. This brings into focus the notion of educational ‘presence’ as that which occurs, perhaps, when not only we are open to the sublime experience as illuminating the not-as-yet known, but also being open to a notion of matter bringing its intelligence to bear on the ways education works on us as subjects. This not only takes into account a way of subjective being that is constitutive of the educational experience, but also incorporates many seemingly mundane inanimate features of our education realities as well. It is to this material intelligence that Rachel Jones alludes in the following passage, where a fuller engagement of what education could entail is here placed in her argument about the materiality of creative practices in the following passage: Material intelligence would then belong neither wholly to human beings nor to matter, but would emerge in the space between them. It is this space between perhaps – where an acceptance of not knowing allows human intelligence about matter to be coupled with the guiding intelligence of matter – that the creative practices of art and thought can take place. (2009, p. 6)

With reference to this ‘space between’, perhaps it is in reframing the site of education in its spatial, embodied, and conceptual frameworks that the reciprocity between humans and matter can be re-evaluated as the place in which education can be awarded the pedagogical power of letting something unforeseen emerge. It is to his non-representational theory, of which the notion of the sublime is emblematic, that Lyotard’s relevance to arguments about what is educational in education remains pertinent.

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