Acinemas by Jones Graham;Woodward Ashley;

Author:Jones, Graham;Woodward, Ashley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

DEAUTHORISATION: HYPERREALISM

It is possible that at least some of this ‘critical’ power survives the transition from the work on the libidinal to the work on the ‘postmodern’ and later.4 Let us recall Lyotard’s claim in ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, for example, that the task that academicism assigns to realism is to ‘preserve various consciousnesses from doubt’, to create images with readily recognisable meanings and thus to allow the individual ‘to arrive easily at the consciousness of his [or her] own identity’ (PC 74). What Lyotard here calls ‘industrial cinema’ completes the task of narrative literature in ‘rounding off diachronies as organic wholes’, just as photography puts the final touches on ‘the program of ordering the visible’ elaborated for painting in the quattrocento (PC 74). The avant-garde artist, however, resists the demand to paint, write or film with this end in mind, refuses to allow his or her work to be put to ‘therapeutic use’. And the stakes here are not so far from those described in many of the ‘libidinal’ texts: like the experimental filmmaker, the avant-garde artist more generally is described as being occupied with questioning the rules of representation or of narrative and with asking the question what is painting, writing, film, etc. But in so doing he or she also refuses to communicate, ‘by means of the “correct rules,” the endemic desire for reality with objects and situations capable of gratifying it’ (PC 75).

Nonetheless, there is a change, and perhaps this is revealed most clearly in the text from 1980 on ‘Two Metamorphoses of the Seductive in Cinema’, a text that, despite its title, is closer to the orbit of the ‘postmodern’ and the work on language games and phrase universes than it is to the libidinal. For while the reference to seduction would seem to invoke the register of desire, Lyotard is very clear that in discussing seduction in terms of language games, ‘we no longer scan the depths of desire and pleasure. We stick to the categories of linguistic pragmatics’ (TM 56). Following Gorgias’ description of tragedy as a deception able to produce a metastasis or displacement of the opinions of the listener, seduction here is a kind of ‘game’ played by both addressor and addressee. Rather than an appeal to desire or to libidinal drives, then, seduction ‘would be a case of the pragmatic efficacy of discourse’ (TM 56).

In what does this ‘efficacy’ consist? What is the nature of this metastasis or displacement? The effect of seduction, Lyotard tells us, would be to turn any discourse, ‘even if non-prescriptive’, into a ‘non-formulated prescription’ (TM 56). When a pragmatic situation obscures the place of the addressor and even of the addressee, the conditions are particularly ‘favourable’ to the transmission of such non-explicit prescriptives (TM 57). This is why he privileges narration, especially in so far as it has a high or even completely mimetic content: the perfect mimesis is the effacement of the writer, the presentation of an action or state of affairs as if there were no ‘intermediary informant’ (D 25).

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