Introducing Lyotard by Bill Readings;

Author:Bill Readings; [Readings;, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0203002237
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

3

Politics and ethics

(A) THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

This work has avowedly twisted its reading of Lyotard towards the problematics of the literary critical academy. It has sought to emphasize the rhetoricity of Lyotard's concern with the figural and to understand his interest in the postmodern as an issue of cultural criticism. It may seem ironic that a third chapter on ‘politics and ethics’ appears to demand no such distortion on my part. In order to understand the apparently immediate (unmediated) significance of the political for literary theory, we should remember the rule of the political as metalanguage in the realm of literary theory that we discussed in Chapter 2. To be blunt, ‘theory’ in the literary academy has become a cloak for the political policing of literary texts, in that the ultimate meaning of all theoretical insights is held to be political. This is hardly surprising, since it shares absolute continuity with the long tradition of literary humanism—except that now the ‘ultimate significance’ of a text is named as a ‘political’ rather than ‘transcendental’ or ‘essentially human’ truth. It is in this light that the justification and relevance of literary theory has been as an interpretative tool to allow us to decode accurately the literal political meaning of texts. Thus, deconstruction has been welcomed insofar as it offers a sophisticated analytical mode that awakens us to the ‘hidden’ political meanings of binary oppositions in cultural texts, dismissed if it tends to undermine our assurance of the decidable reality, the non-rhetorical nature, of political meaning.

The importance of Lyotard's work is not that it gives post-structuralism a decidable political dimension that it had otherwise lacked. Rather, Lyotard's refusal to think the political as a determining or determinate metalanguage, as the sphere in which the true meaning of false metalanguages (such as ‘aesthetic value’) is revealed as ‘political effects’, pushes him towards a deconstruction of the representational space of the political. As we shall see, this induces a shift from the political to the ethical, in the sense that the instances of dispute conventionally determined as political are seen to be more justly considered as sites for indeterminate judgment. Let it be clear that this is not an ‘aestheticization of the political’ in the sense of the Fascist project. In Fascism, as Benjamin has demonstrated, the political remains as site of determinate judgment, by analogy with the determinant judgments of the beautiful which may be made about art.1 The political is conceived in terms of criteria which are claimed to be drawn from art (the ugly should be eliminated). For Lyotard, the aesthetic and the political are both sites for indeterminate (ethical) judgment without criteria. To find the grounds of the political in the aesthetic is simply to replay moments such as the Futurist praise of Fascism and war as more beautiful than democracy and peace. That is to say, the aesthetic is not simply the determining ground of the political.

Just as the aesthetic cannot provide the legitimating grounds of the political, so the political cannot legitimate the aesthetic.

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