Page 204 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

192 POSTMODERNISM AND THE ‘OTHER SIDE’

than seeking to embody universal values of truth, justice and right finding
the licence for such pretensions in the great meta-narratives (‘the pursuit of
freedom or happiness’ (10)), Lyotard recommends that we should instead
think of the human project in terms of ‘the infinite task of complexification’
(10). (‘Maybe our task is just that of complexifying the complexity we are
in charge of.’) This ‘obscure desire towards extra sophistication’ (10)
effectively functions within Lyotard’s most recent work as a pan-global,
trans-historical imperative assuming at times an almost metaphysical status
(although he does make a concession to the persistence of scarcity in the
Third World in the cryptic division of humanity into two (unequal) halves
one of which (that is, ours?) is devoted to the task of complexification, the
other (theirs?) to the ‘terrible, ancient task of survival’(!) (1986a:12).
Lyotard may have jettisoned the socialism which formed his preferred
option in the stark choice which he felt was facing the world in the 1950s
(S or B) but he remains alert to the threat of barbarism which he now
associates with a refusal to acknowledge and/or contribute to this eternal
complexifying mission (‘The claim for simplicity, in general, appears today
that of the barbarian’ [Lyotard, 1986a:6]).
Lyotard offers perhaps one of the most direct, most intricately argued
critiques of the utopian impetus within modern, Enlightenment and post-
Enlightenment thought but there are within the Gallic version of the Post
other variations on the (Nietzschean) theme of the end of the western
philosophical tradition (Lyotard ends by dissolving dialectics into
paradoxology, and language games). In some ways, those discourses from
Foucault to Derrida, from the Barthes of the Tel Quel phase to the Jacques
Lacan of the Ecrits might be said to be posited following Nietzsche on the
No Man’s land (the gender here is marked!) staked out between the two
meanings of the word ‘subject’ mentioned earlier (see ‘Against
totalization’, above)—a No Man’s land which is just that: a land owned by
nobody in the space between the enoncé and the enunciation where
questions of agency, cause, intention, authorship, history become
irrelevant. All those questions dissolve into a sublime, asocial Now which
is differently dimensionalized in different accounts. For Derrida in
grammatology that space is called ‘aporia’—the unpassable path—the
moment when the self-contradictory nature of human discourse stands
exposed. For Foucault, it is the endless recursive spirals of power and
knowledge: the total, timeless space he creates around the hellish figure of
the Panopticon: the viewing tower at the centre of the prison yard—the
‘voir’ in savoir/pouvoir, the looking in knowing. For Tel Quel it is the
moment of what Julia Kristeva calls ‘signifiance’: the unravelling of the
subject in the pleasure of the text, the point where the subject disintegrates,
moved beyond words by the materiality, productivity and slippage of the
signifier over the signified. And for Lacan, it is the Real—that which
remains unsayable and hence unbearable—the (boundless, inconceivable)