Lyotard and The Fi Gural in Performance, Art and Writing: Kiff Bamford

Lyotard and the figural in
Performance, Art and Writing
Kiff Bamford
Continuum Studies in
Continental Philosophy
9781441167071_FM_Rev_txt_prf.indd iii 3/29/2001 7:30:35 AM

Introduction
Like everyone else, I have problems with the words performance, performer.
On the other hand, a phrase like ‘Duchamp as a transformer’ seems to me
comprehensible.1
The word performance is certainly not the appropriate term to describe the work
of Daniel Buren. [. . .] Performance is the transformation of a situation. This
performance is unique and brief. Installation is also a unique, but lasting, trans-
formation of a situation .2
It might appear that these two comments by French philosopher Jean-

François Lyotard, given at different conferences on performance in 1976
and 1980 respectively, do not bode well for a book which sets out to show
the relevance of Lyotard’s thought to performance art.3 But it is this unwill-
ingness to accept terms and practices as given which makes his thought
both provocative and urgent in any attempt to consider aspects of per-
formance today. This book is primarily concerned with the writings of
Lyotard, specifically those on art and how his ideas are useful when think-
ing about performance art and its documentation – including writing and
re-performance. It is prompted in part by the curious position of Lyotard’s
work within the context of English-speaking art historical discourse and
how his reception through translation has led to an emphasis on certain
aspects of his work and the neglect of others. By shifting the focus to the
‘figural’, a key feature of that work which has been overlooked, the rel-
evance of Lyotard’s later writings and their pertinence to writings on art
and performance will become clear.
Art and Theory
The relationship of contemporary art to its bedfellows in theory has a long

and turbulent history, witness the scars born by the association of Lyotard
with the postmodern debates of the 1980s. In the Anglophone art world
the name Lyotard still connotes The Postmodern Condition or the sublime
9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 1 3/29/2001 7:31:15 AM

2 Lyotard and the figural
and is firmly associated with the Eighties, a decade whose nostalgic reprise
began with the fashion world’s ‘Back to the Eighties’ label and has been fol-
lowed by museum blockbusters, such as Postmodernism at the V&A museum
(2011).4 I do not want to go back to that debate but aim to reinvigorate
other aspects of Lyotard’s thought and enter the debate which I hope
will be prompted by the English translation of his 1971 book, Discours,
figure [Discourse, Figure] and the significant five-volume project initiated
by Leuven University Press: Jean-François Lyotard: Writings on Contemporary
Art and Artists.5 In the French context it is different: I attended a confer-
ence on postmodernism in Paris where the only mention of Lyotard came
from a North American scholar, while the French organizers and speakers
referred repeatedly to the US cultural theorists Frederic Jameson and Hal
Foster.6 This difference of cultural reception is important to this study and
I will pay attention to both the sequence and context in which Lyotard’s
work was translated and the reciprocal relationship Lyotard himself had
with contexts exterior to France, in particular North America.
Another relationship that is central to this book is that of writing to
art, though this is never without problems. The uneasy attitude of con-
temporary art to philosophy and other theoretical areas is described by
Ilona Blazwick, Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, as being
‘magpie-like’:
For while the contemporary art world picks out – with magpie-like
unconcern for academic propriety – the sparkly bits from the oeuvres
of political philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, cultural theo-
rists and even art historians, things can go wrong when those who have
been temporarily lured into the ambit of contemporary art try to return
the compliment.7
Blazwick is here writing of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s

involvement in a conference at Tate Britain, Undoing the Aesthetic Image, and
warns that a reciprocally beneficial relationship between the worlds of art
and philosophy cannot be assumed, concluding that ‘ultimately, for these
public intellectuals, the realm of contemporary art evaded their reach’.8 In
contrast, my own research into Lyotard and his relationship to the art about
which he wrote permits me to argue strongly for the case that Lyotard was
not only personally drawn to a varied range of modern and contemporary
art – evidenced in the 20-plus catalogue essays he wrote – but that his think-
ing on aesthetics was integral to much of his wider philosophical writing
and thinking. Furthermore, there are many aspects of Lyotard’s thought

Introduction 3
which ask new questions about the experience of art, questions that this
book will respond to through a specific consideration of performance art.
Why Performance Art?
The role and status of performance within the context of fine art produc-
tion and display has changed significantly since the latter part of the twen-
tieth century. Many artists now employ strategies of performance, whether
live or ‘live to camera’, as one of several media currently available. This
broadens further the already problematic concept of performance as a
category within fine art and necessitates its address by institutions, both
in terms of its accommodation, preservation and documentation. These
have been the focus of several significant exhibitions including: Out of
Actions: Between Performance and the Object , at the Los Angeles Museum of
Contemporary Art (1998) and Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance
at Tate Liverpool (2003). A different, though not unrelated phenomenon
is that of the re-performance of ‘historical’ pieces from the era which is
widely regarded as the crucible of performance in its contemporary sense:
the late 1960s and early 1970s. These include re-performance projects ini-
tiated by curators with the participation of artists, such as A Little Bit of
History Repeated (Kunstwerke, Berlin, 2001) and A Short History of Performance
(Whitechapel, London, 2002–6) and artist-initiated projects, whether indi-
vidual re-enactments by the first performers, such as Yoko Ono’s Cut piece
(1964/2003), or younger artists presenting new interpretations, for exam-
ple Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s 2005 version of Vito Acconci’s Walk-over.
In addition, Marina Abramović ambitiously combined re-performance of
her own work and the work of other key ‘historic’ pieces in her project Seven
Easy Pieces for the Guggenheim in 2005. The most commonplace explana-
tion for this phenomenon is anxiety, whether anxiety over the appropri-
ateness of existing records or wider issues of preservation and posterity.
However, the very attempt to address these issues results in further ques-
tions and uncertainty. It would be easy to interpret Abramović’s projects,
including the durational re-performances of her ‘back catalogue’ by other
artists in her 2010 Museum of Modern Art, New York retrospective, as moti-
vated by egocentric concerns but equally this can be interpreted as a con-
cern for performance art itself, particularly the durational brand for which
she is best known. Certainly she is one of the most active and provocative
advocates of the need to address the future of performance which, for her
at least, has been kept away too long from the bastions of cultural power.9

Performance and its historical legacy is an important topic of debate,

the interest in which is demonstrated by the rise in the number of publica-
tions which refer to performance art and the alternative categorizations
of body art and live art. RoseLee Goldberg’s histories are no longer the
only versions readily available, the earlier account of La ‘Body art’ e storie
simili by Lea Vergine, initially published bilingually in English and Italian,
was republished in 2000 by Skira. Also, popular art history and contempo-
rary art series include titles which either emphasize the broad nature of
performance in contemporary art, such as Perform – published by Thames
and Hudson in 2005 as part of their Art Works series – or adopt means of
categorization which focus on the themes of identity and the body rather
than the medium of performance, the explanation given by Amelia Jones
for her choice of ‘body art’ in her academically important study Body Art:
Performing the Subject (1998). This term refers back not only to its use by Lea
Vergine but also to that of French art critic François Pluchart, whose 1974
exhibition was titled L’art Corporel , and it is subsequently mirrored in the
compilation of texts and images Jones co-edited with Tracey Warr in 2000
for Phaidon, The Artist’s Body.10 This collaboration between an art histo-
rian and a curator and academic who taught for many years at Dartington
College of Art, well known for its innovative work in theatre, also indi-
cates the extent to which performance art has not only been increasingly
embraced by fine art but has also bridged the artificial divide between dis-
ciplines, crossing over most notably into theatre but also aspects of experi-
mental dance and music.
Performance as an interdisciplinary field is best exemplified, in the
United Kingdom at least, through the term Live Art and its specific mani-
festation in both the Live Art Development Agency, founded in 1999, and
the National Review of Live Arts, a platform for events since 1979 whose
annual festival, currently based in Glasgow, has become the focus for
much live performance across Europe and North America. This event was
recently described as the ‘trade show’ for performance art, a comment
which reveals the extent to which some artists reject the ‘Live Art’ label
and the fetishization of presence implied by the term.11 There is something
missing in contemporary approaches to performance, whether in the man-
ner in which it is brought into the category of sculpture and its expanded
field or in its role as the experimental edge of theatre. The issues of docu-
mentation and re-performance, for example, have a different role in the
work of performance studies when it is aligned more closely to theatre or
anthropology.12 In this brief summary of the field of performance I have
placed an emphasis on the difficulties which are particularly pertinent to

Introduction 5
the field of art history in order to outline some of the terrain to which I sug-
gest Lyotard’s thought can be applied, not as a medicinal therapy or cure
but as a provocation, sometimes irritating. The disruption of presumptions
that Lyotard terms the figural is what is needed at this time, coupled with
the particular nuance which Lyotard’s writings on affect, sublime and the
event can bring to current understandings and considerations of perform-
ance. In this book the term affect refers to unfamiliar and contested feel-
ings which, unlike emotion, escape definition; early Freudian uses of the
term by Lyotard refer to an economy of affective discharge that accompa-
nies repressed ideas and memories while in Lyotard’s later writings terms
such as ‘affect-phrase’ relate to the unarticulated which cannot be com-
municated through language. It is a term with a particular resonance for
this book and its desire to respond to performance. The following section
will address the manner of the performance to which the title refers and
ask the question: ‘Why Lyotard?’
Why Lyotard?
‘Why should we still be interested in Lyotard?’ asked Amelia Jones in

response to my research proposal. It was a deliberately provocative
remark, from an art historian whose 1994 publication Postmodernism and
the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp drew heavily, if not uncritically, on
Lyotard’s own 1977 book on Duchamp: Les Transformateurs Duchamp.13
But Jones was right to question the need for new research into Lyotard,
now. There is a lack of engagement with Lyotard’s work within art history,
where his relevance is regarded with the same passé disdain as the works
of postmodernism with which he is (unfairly) associated. When embark-
ing on the research that has led to this book I found that Lyotard was all
but forgotten: have we not ‘moved on’ to other thinkers the philosophy
and art theory bookshelves seemed to groan, offering instead a diet of
Deleuze and Rancière. But, once having been warmed again by the glow-
ing embers which remain, I found that there is an interest among con-
temporary scholars and the steady flow of new publications of Lyotard’s
work attest to the fact that we have, perhaps, ‘moved on’ too hastily.14 It is
because Lyotard’s importance as a philosopher with a long-standing inter-
est in aesthetics – in its least conventional sense, that which David Carroll
calls ‘paraesthetic’ – has not been recognized by the English-speaking
world that this book will deliberately pay attention to aspects of his work
which have not been readily accessible through existing translated work.15

It is necessary to reconsider now those writings by Lyotard which have

been neglected and also to use them to reinvigorate our understanding
of those unrepresentative texts, including those on the sublime, which
have entered the canon of art theory only as examples of a past era and
its debates. Necessary because Lyotard’s work is able to trouble the still
waters of complacency which surround an academic field which seems
able to suck the life blood from many philosophical interventions without
reciprocating the dynamism of their challenge. Questioning through dis-
ruption remains the only constant throughout Lyotard’s writings on art,
provoking an unsettling refusal to accept the stabilization of thought. This
incessant questioning and refusal of predetermined formulae is taken
as the approach to this study – together with the inherent paradoxical
implications of such a claim – prompting the manner in which Lyotard’s
own work is read and brought to bear on questions beyond those directly
addressed in his writings. At a time when performance art is attempting
to write its own history – while tempted by the demand for capitalist legiti-
mation that Lyotard, ironically, calls performance – Lyotard’s demand to
hesitate, to bear witness to the event is crucial.
Within the English-speaking arenas of art history, interest in Lyotard
has barely survived the surfeit of attention which dominated the late 1980s
and early 1990s. Interest peaked in 1985–6 with the postmodern debates
that followed the publication of the English translation of The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge in 1984, and the publication of several
articles by Lyotard in US art journals. The specific context and sequence
of these publications will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4 in relation to
Lyotard’s writings on the sublime; it is sufficient here to highlight the fact
that Lyotard’s legacy in terms of Anglophone art history and theory is con-
centrated on a very few texts from this period, represented in anthologies
such as the important collection Art in Theory 1900–2000 which includes
the 1982 essay ‘Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?’ or The
Continental Aesthetics Reader which includes the 1984 Artforum essay ‘The
Sublime and the Avant-Garde’.16 In each case the attempt is to reproduce
texts which are representative of a period and its theoretical debates rather
than to proffer their content as ripe for reconsideration or as having perti-
nence to art history today. In contrast, Jacques Derrida has been well used
by art historians and those analysing visual culture, but Lyotard’s interest
is visual and sensory in comparison to Derrida’s which remains primarily
textual. This can be demonstrated by their differing approaches to the
Italian-born artist Valerio Adami. Derrida’s famous study was incorporated
into The Truth in Painting (1978) and drew attention to the philosophical

Introduction 7
implications of the boundary between art and theory, philosophy and its
object through the study of the framing devices which are central to its
study yet infrequently considered. David Carroll summarizes Derrida’s
book: ‘These essays are not, really, as much on art as on the difficulties the
major philosophies of art and art itself have in fixing the border between
theory and art.’17 While Derrida looked at the boundaries of works, includ-
ing the frames within Adami’s drawings, Lyotard’s response to the work
of Adami focuses on the line itself, drawing out the complex comparison
inherent in writing of that line – with what appeared to be the same line –
but which simultaneously figured the irreconcilable difference between
the artist and the writer. Lyotard meditates on the desire for unity where
there can be none, a relationship which is also mirrored in the relationship
of performer and viewer; an irreconcilable difference which, according to
Philip Auslander, is ‘predicated on the distinction between performers and
spectators. Indeed the effort to eliminate that distinction destroys the very
possibility of performance’.18 Lyotard writes poetically of this inevitable
separation with reference to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as the bor-
der between the conscious and the unconscious, responding to Adami’s
works in a manner that Mary Lydon describes as ‘a figurative reflection or
echo of them in literary form’.19
The tendency to focus only on Lyotard’s writings associated with the
postmodern and the sublime is great, and the exceptions sufficiently few
in number to permit a brief introduction here. In addition to Amelia
Jones, others referring to Lyotard’s writings on Duchamp include
Rosalind Krauss in The Optical Unconscious and David Joselit’s Infinite
Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941, both published by MIT Press. Krauss
also makes extensive use of Lyotard’s writings on the figure-matrix from
Discourse, Figure in her discussion of ‘a pulse or beat, that the modernist
artist senses all too well as the enemy of his craft’ which is part of her
analysis of Picasso’s objection to the Duchampian instability of form.20
Krauss also refers to the same passage in her catalogue for the exhibition
L’Informe : mode d’emploi co-organized with Yve-Alain Bois at the Pompidou
in 1996. Through the wide dissemination of the English-language ver-
sion, as Formless: A User’s Guide , Krauss’ usage is significant as an adop-
tion of Lyotard’s figure to a particularly influential interpretation of
art history. Joselit draws unusually on Lyotard’s visceral descriptions of
the body in his 1974 book Economie Libidinale , and its ‘disintensification’
through the production of signs. This libidinal aspect of Lyotard’s writ-
ing is the focus for the 1998 publication The Assassination of Experience by
Painting – Monory in which two essays by Lyotard on the painter Jacques

Monory are published as parallel texts in French and English together

with an introductory essay by Sarah Wilson which contextualizes the
painter, largely unknown to Anglo-American audiences, and the writer
in the cultural context of the two essays written in 1972 and 1981. This
book is part of the ‘revisions’ series, edited by Wilson, which aims to
restore the artistic contexts in which many key European thinkers have
written but whose writings have become decontextualized in their trans-
atlantic dissemination. Wilson succinctly summarizes the situation as
follows: ‘. . . despite his extensive engagement with the arts, a Lyotard
solely of the word, the discours , not a Lyotard engaging with the image,
the figure , is the Lyotard discussed in philosophy and literature depart-
ments throughout the world’.21 It is this Lyotard – of the figure – that is
the focus of this book.
Performing the figural
Through focusing on the different means by which Lyotard performs and

can be made to perform in the contemporary context, this book will not
only consider aspects of performance and its attempts at historicization
but draw attention also to Lyotard’s own struggle with the written medium,
made manifest through the multiplicity of voices he adopted in order to
avoid any sense of a static, complete ‘theory’. The intention of the title:
Lyotard and the figural in Performance, Art and Writing, is to draw attention
to performance as a central, though not unproblematic, tenet of the study
while also highlighting the ‘figural’ as exemplary of the neglected aspects of
Lyotard’s thought. Lyotard’s doctoral thesis, published in 1971 as Discours,
figure, is a complex, radical and largely undiscovered book; the diverse are-
nas in which translated sections have been published testify to the breadth
of its concerns but have also minimized its impact.22 I have titled the first
chapter ‘The figural’ partly to signify the importance of Discourse, Figure to
this study but also in order to explain my extended use of the term as the
characteristic disruptive questioning which is a feature of Lyotard’s work,
even when the term itself is no longer used. For example, this chapter intro-
duces an important question posed by Lyotard in The Differend (1983), the
question of Arrive-t-il? [Is it happening?]. The Arrive-t-il? is a figural sense of
time that can help us rethink the role of time and presence with regard to
performance art, its reception and the role of documentation. Abramović’s
Seven Easy Pieces, particularly her re-working of Acconci’s infamous Seedbed ,
is used as a point round which to debate the current attempts to engage

Introduction 9
with the history of contemporary performance. In the course of this book

a variety of terms used by Lyotard to connote that which I am terming the
‘figural’ will be used to drag his ideas out from under the stifling weight of
the postmodern; the resulting reconfiguration of the figural will be made
to work on the problems that performance practice presents to art histori-
cal discourse.
The figural shares with contemporary performance and body art the
trace of the seismic events of 1968: it is a disruptive force which lends itself
to questioning assumptions with regard to time and presentation – in some
respects a philosophical equivalent of performance that aims to transform
a situation. Initially there may well be echoes in the reader’s mind of other
philosophers who have been termed post-structuralist; the nature of phil-
osophical and artistic discourse means that the overlay and interplay of
thought is always to some extent the result of the discussion rather than
a singular clearly defined bell sounding sonorously above the collective
noise. However, two other key figures from the same grouping of ‘French
philosophers’, Julia Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze, will be considered at vari-
ous points in this book in order to highlight the specificity of Lyotard’s
approach at times when Lyotard’s proximity to these figures may belie their
differences. This approach is taken in Chapter 2: ‘The Libidinal’ where the
many points of congruence between Lyotard’s writings of the early 1970s
and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus contribute to an understanding
of their significantly different approach to the role of absence, whether
conceptualized as lack or negation, the implications of which are demon-
strated through aspects of Lyotard’s later essay on Adami and Deleuze’s
writings on Francis Bacon.
In addition to the postmodern and sublime texts of the mid-1980s which
have entered anthologies, there is another aspect of Lyotard’s oeuvre that
has recently gained near-canonical status within museum and curatorial
studies: the 1985 exhibition co-curated at the Pompidou under the title
Les Immatériaux . This exhibition gives the title to Chapter 3 but my consid-
eration of this exhibition as a dramatic performance is introduced by the
subheading: ‘What is Lyotard’s Attitude to the Body?’. Lyotard referred to
the exhibition as a dramaturgy and showed a particular interest in the ways
in which the new materials – which he termed the immaterial – relate to
the body of the viewer. The sensory experience of Les Immatériaux is cer-
tainly performative but it does not adhere to theatrical conventions – the
only performers are the visitors, for example. For a comparison I turn to
performance art and the example of another show in Paris, in 1972, where
Vito Acconci was not physically present but his body is alluded to through

alternative sensorial means. This emphasis on alternative modes of com-

munication relates to Lyotard’s most philosophical work, The Differend , in
particular the concern for that which cannot be phrased. This brings to
light an aspect of Lyotard’s thought which is particularly pertinent to con-
siderations of performance, where the impact on the body resonates in
a manner that cannot be articulated. This ‘inarticulate affect’ opens up
Lyotard’s unusual discussion of sexual difference for which the recent col-
lection Gender after Lyotard has been a valuable resource.23 That Lyotard
refers to aspects of this affective communication as ‘feminine’ ensures that
gender remains highlighted at the opening of the next chapter, Chapter 4,
which discusses Lyotard’s essays on the sublime for which, in terms of aes-
thetics, he is best known in the Anglophone world. This chapter gives par-
ticular attention to the context in which Lyotard’s essays were published in
the United States, considering the history of the art journals October and
Artforum and the context of postmodern art in the early 1980s. I emphasize
the unusual reference made by Lyotard to the work of Edmund Burke,
whose understanding of the sublime as an intensification resulting from
privation has a particular relevance for a consideration of performance art
which refuses theatrical transcendence. This distinction must be empha-
sized in order to counteract assumptions that Lyotard, in writing about the
sublime, can be positioned with the modernist formalism of Michael Fried
and Clement Greenberg. The intensification of which Lyotard writes –
whether sublime event or affect – is not one of enlightenment or transcend-
ence but destabilization. This reconsideration of Lyotard’s discussion of
the sublime focuses on the aspects of uncertainty – described by Burke in
relation to the elapsing of time – thereby opening a discussion of temporal-
ity which can be described as figural, following the staccato pulse of the
figure-matrix from Discourse, Figure.
The final chapter of the book, Chapter 5, returns to aspects of tempo-
rality, arguing for the immediate, affective potential of the performance
art document as a feeling to which we are called to respond. This call is
prompted by Lyotard’s discussion of Emmanuel Lévinas whose ethical obli-
gation challenges fixed notions of both communication and time, a call
which prompts my reconsideration of Lyotard’s essay on Barnett Newman,
‘Newman: The Instant’. In exploring those aspects of communication that
elude articulated discourse – the figure, the sublime, the affect-phrase and
their temporal position with regard to the Arrive-t-il? – this chapter and the
conclusion that follows will argue for that which art historical discourse
struggles to recognize and the role that Lyotard’s work can play in prompt-
ing the necessary transformations.

Introduction 11
Secondary Literature
While the paucity of reference to Lyotard’s oeuvre in recent art history has
been indicated above, it is important to highlight the continuing impor-
tance of works on Lyotard written in the 1980s and 1990s and the extent
to which debates have continued since. The secondary literature written by
Anglo-American academics – mainly in departments of comparative litera-
ture and French studies – includes key works which have been important
reference points for this study, while more recently there have been several
publications relating to Lyotard, particularly from Departments of English
and Philosophy in the United Kingdom. I will highlight first three publica-
tions which appeared in the wake of Lyotard’s success in the mid-1980s.
Lyotard: Writing the Event was published in 1988 while its author, Geoffrey
Bennington, was a Lecturer in French at the University of Sussex; he is also
known as a Derrida scholar and moved from Sussex to Emory, Atlanta in
2001. As joint translator of The Postmodern Condition , Bennington was well
placed to write the first major introduction to Lyotard’s work in English
and although Bennington is particularly concerned with the implications
of Lyotard’s thought for literature, as the title indicates, he shows a sensitiv-
ity to Lyotard’s philosophical approach and its paradoxes:
Introductory books in general (and this one is no exception) rely on

a host of well-meaning pedagogical assumptions (‘pedagogical, there-
fore very stupid’, as Lyotard says in an unpublished conversation with the
painter René Guiffrey), which do not necessarily make them helpful to
those for whom they are ostensibly written.24
Bennington works with the knowledge of these limitations and gives an

insight into the wider range of Lyotard’s writings including those works
which are not available in translation, except through extracts scattered
through various journals. Bennington includes chapters titled ‘Libidinal
Economy’, ‘Discourse, Figure’ and ‘Le Différend’ each corresponding to
the books of those titles but also referring to the additional books and essays
which surround these publications. In 1991 Bennington jointly translated
the collection of essays The Inhuman: Reflections on Time which had been
published in French in 1988 and published occasional essays and book
chapters on Lyotard through the following decade, though, by his own
admission, failing to keep up with all the new material that Lyotard wrote
or which was translated by others in the 1990s, an oversight he comments
on and goes some way to redressing in the 2005 collection Late Lyotard .

Writing another introductory text on Lyotard in the wake of Bennington’s

book prompted Bill Readings, then of Syracuse University, New York and
subsequently the Université de Montréal until his early death in 1996, to
structure his 1991 volume Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics according to
a different approach: ‘. . . if Bennington offers an account of Lyotard, I
try, at times impatiently, to pose the question “Why Lyotard?”’ and in so
doing Readings introduces Lyotard’s thought to ‘the discourses of Anglo-
American cultural criticism’. It is still a largely literary approach, the art in
its subtitle referring to literature and theatre rather than the visual arts,
but Readings’ attempt to make Lyotard’s thought work is certainly closer
to the approach that I desire for this book. Readings describes how his
approach is different to Bennington’s: whereas the latter’s strategy is to
‘ape’ the work of Lyotard in an attempt at repetition, in the English sense
of the word, Readings responds in the French sense of repetition as ‘. . .
performance, as in the French répétition – which may refer to each singular
rehearsal or staging of a drama’.25 This subtle distinction between French
and English exemplifies the means through which Lyotard’s performance
of singularity attunes one to the important differences within repetition
and the pulsating rhythm of the body. My own approach, taken in this
book, is one of tension: wanting neither to follow too closely the rigid deliv-
ery of information parcelled ready for digestion, which can constitute aca-
demic writing, nor wishing to destabilize the reader too much – losing
them in a mire of Lyotardian parody – but rather to offer sufficient suste-
nance of ideas and language flavoured with the manner of Lyotard that a
little indigestion will be tolerated.
The third significant publication from the era of Anglo-American
Lyotard fever does come from closer to the realm of visual art, Paraesthetics:
Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida (1987) by then French professor at California,
Irvine, David Carroll. Carroll takes a different approach again through an
examination of the critical strategies put forward by the three French phi-
losophers – who best represented what the Anglo-American world termed
‘French Theory’ – within a largely Nietzschean context and with the focus
clearly on art and literature. Carroll’s account of Discourse, Figure remains
the most frequent overview referred to by writers in English.
The gulf between the French artistic context from which Lyotard and
other ‘French theorists’ were writing and the sites of their reception in
Anglophone contexts is expertly recounted by François Cusset in French
Theory: How Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United
States : ‘This great French-American story deals with the joy of becomings,
the power of effects, the surprises of unexpected uses’.26 Cusset does not

Introduction 13
attempt to correct any misappropriation but rather revels in the unex-

pected phenomenon, an approach which is in keeping with Lyotard’s own
sensibility; the lack of control an artist or author is able to exercise over
their work is continually recognized, and at times celebrated, by Lyotard.
For example, The Lyotard Reader, edited by Andrew Benjamin in 1989, lacks
any contextual information in order to allow the texts to ‘drift’ to their
new contexts. The reproduction of a painting by Adami on the cover of this
book reminds us once more of the seemingly disparate reach of Lyotard’s
artistic interests, one which finally forces us to admit the specificity of our
own cultural horizons. In addition to the lack of detail regarding the con-
text of the various materials selected for The Lyotard Reader its obfuscating
‘Foreword’ by Lyotard is also indicative of the allure that Lyotard held for
the English-speaking audience at the time. This is also demonstrated by the
comparative speed with which Le Différend (1983) and L’inhumain (1988)
were translated, appearing in 1988 and 1991 respectively, in contrast to
the earlier work: Economie Libidinale (1974) was translated into English in
1993, after a delay of almost 20 years, while Discours, figure (1971), as we
have already noted, was finally published in 2011. In contrast to the largely
decontextualized Lyotard Reader of 1989, the 2006 collection The Lyotard
Reader and Guide is published to an audience perhaps less willing to indulge
in the ‘drift’, thankful instead for the clear exposition of Lyotard’s range
of concerns; the introductory essay on ‘Art-events’, for example, highlights
the breadth of his involvement:
Lyotard is much more than an art theorist, philosopher of art or art

critic. His philosophy is written in conjunction with art, in particular
painting, to the point where it is more accurate to speak of a ‘co-creation’
rather than a ‘theorising-about’.27
Both the editors, Keith Crome and James Williams, are members of philos-
ophy departments in the United Kingdom and their books on Lyotard are
referred to in this book, as are the works of many other academics whose
writings have contributed to the ongoing scholarly discussion in the light
of new publications and translations, particularly since Lyotard’s death in
1998. In addition the works of scholars publishing in French are referred
to when their writings give a particular insight into Lyotard’s writings on
art, including essays by Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Jean-Louis Déotte,
both academics at the University of Paris 8 where Lyotard taught. Lyotard’s
writings on art have always been taken seriously in France, a 5th edition of
Discours, figure was published in 2002 and his 1987 book Que peindre? [What

to paint?] was re-issued in 2008. Que peindre? is itself part of a return to

questions which were first addressed in Discours, figure under the rubric of
the figural but are here worked through a varied vocabulary, elements of
which will be introduced slowly through the course of this book. One late
term that I will mention in advance, because of its pertinence to perform-
ance, art and writing, is ‘affect-phrase’: it is a term that Lyotard does not
use until the last decade of his life but which reiterates a sensitivity to that
which language is unable to present and therefore has a close proximity
to the figural.

Chapter 1
The figural
The body is being used as an art language by an ever greater number of

contemporary painters and sculptors, and even though the phenomenon
touches upon artists who represent different currents and tendencies,
who use widely differing art techniques, and who come from a variety of
cultural and intellectual backgrounds, certain characteristics of this way
of making art are nonetheless to be found in all its manifestations.1
—Lea Vergine, 1974.
Every time I try to write about the body, the writing ends up being about
language. This is not because I think that the body is reducible to lan-
guage; it is not. Language emerges from the body, constituting an emis-
sion of sorts. The body is that upon which language falters, and the
body carries its own signs, its own signifiers, in ways that remain largely
unconscious.2
— Judith Butler, 2004.
Yingmei Duan
A darkly painted space: dark, dark blue with dimmed, shaded spotlights from above.
She is naked and enwrapped in her own world, sometimes close to the wall – touch-
ing, feeling her way along its surface as though clinging to the shadows – while hum-
ming slowly to herself a melancholic, but not mournful, tune and slowly caressing
her body: her thighs, breasts, stomach. Slowly, ever-so-slowly rocking and moving in
sliding steps as though caressing the floor – head down, eyes closed with an intense
expression and furrowed brow – she moves towards a visitor, clad in a white coat.
The medical overtones are accentuated by the contrast to her nakedness. Sensing the
person’s presence she begins to tour the body at a close proximity; very close, with no
sense of private space, moving rather into the space between which becomes her own
through the strange movement and murmured humming. It is not a serenade in
9781441167071_Ch01_Rev_txt_prf.indd 15 3/29/2001 7:25:45 AM

the romantic sense but a seduction of another type, a sensory beguiling of the space
between bodies. This is it and this is its importance, its steadiness, her almost imper-
ceptible progress round the space through the energy fields of the visitors.
A newspaper review likened her pose to Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of
Eden and the pose is very close, yet the comparison goes only so far – it is not a shame-
filled, crime-ridden angst but a gently soporific pulling of the viewer . . . I grapple
for parallels . . . Odysseus and the sirens. But it is too still and the suggestion of the
female ensnaring the visitor does not gel; there is no subjugation here and it is the
participants who will the artist to involve them.
Her movements are gentle, a rhythmic swaying – back against the wall, arms by
her side, head down and chin pressed to herself – turning one way then another while
her feet begin moving slightly, slowly, shoulders angled. This shuffling forwards
prompts the viewers to move away or steady themselves for the approach of slow,
deliberate steps. Again, feet sliding or transferring weight very deliberately in a single
movement – like the slow walk undertaken by visitors to Marina Abramović’s ‘drill’,
the initiation to durational performance that prefaced this performance. Her face is
peaceful, though the slight ‘cough, cough’ interrupts the music of her internalised
hum and deepens her furrowed brow. One hand is on a breast, the other on her belly.
She turns and feels one shoulder as though embracing herself in sorrow or peace,
sadness or intimate meditation. I keep thinking of the title: Intimate distance, not
knowing if the Blanchot reference is deliberate or helpful but the connotations of the
unbridgeable divide between subjects is effective. There is desire here: desire on the
part of the artist to be close to the other, the clothed figure who has come to observe and
who has made the effort to stop. In turn the viewer is rewarded somehow by her atten-
tion – her slow circling absorbing the viewer’s aura; an energy transformation occurs
and often the visitor responds, closing eyes to join in the intimacy and avoid the gaze
of others left outside the experience: they are in the art work, in the performance, it is
their body which has drawn the others into the space and caused them to linger.
The first few evenings there were not many prepared to linger and the artist stayed
near to the walls, but confidence has grown. The naked body slowly tours the proxim-
ity of the other’s white coat and breaks the barrier between observer and performer,
between subject and object – it is an intertwining in action, the tension is palpable,
and the willingness of visitors once approached to remain for the duration of the
encounter is almost without exception.
They are informed it is over by a gentle pushing of shoulders, leaving the naked
artist alone and humming to herself once more: the recipient is left swaying and in
shock, though often smiling.
Lyotard articulates in his heuristic ‘Foreword’, written for the collection
of his writings in English in 1989, the inability of the writer to occupy the
same time as the reader: ‘Sometimes you do listen to yourself writing. That

The figural 17
is not the same thing as hearing yourself writing’. Lyotard supports an overly
cautious, self-conscious – more hesitant – approach to writing because it
‘indicates that you are not sure of your direction, unsure of where you are,
or completely lost’. Whether through overwriting or a style that feigns non-
chalance the result is that it ‘annoys the reader’.3 Such disdain is not for the
reader per se but for their presumptions; it is to undo these presumptions
that Lyotard took up a variety of writing styles and approaches, includ-
ing the attempt at a ‘zero-degree style’ in The Differend and its prologue, a
‘Reader’s Dossier’, which allows ‘the reader, if the fancy grabs him or her,
to “talk about the book” without having read it’.4 Lyotard’s acerbic disdain
is for the ceaseless drive to ‘gain time’, a trend that he termed ‘performativ-
ity’ in The Postmodern Condition as the quantifiably efficient realization of a
measured output, usually within a system. Here Lyotard shares something
with Marina Abramović in her mission to teach the art of slowing down and
shift perceptions away from systematized ocular-centric forms. Their meth-
ods are different but the connection is worth the wait. The intention here
is not to annoy the reader but neither to force clarity where its avoidance
is a deliberate attempt to acknowledge that which escapes systematization.
Today I saw Yingmei crawl: carefully bending down to place both hands on the
floor one after another and then, approaching a couple sitting at the edge of the
space, she prowled round them like a big cat, moving arms and legs in synchronicity
and nearly touching the couple before coming to rest beside them where she tucked up
her knees to make a ball, coughing softly before continuing round the edge of the room
in the same manner. I became aware that all the observers were also sitting – perhaps
she had reduced herself to our level and altered the piece in doing so, taking on a
feline presence. The strains of music from the other pieces, especially Nat King Cole’s
Mona Lisa, made the humming less audible today. But it was there.5
Defining the figural
Discourse, Figure opens with a disagreement: the poet and dramatist Paul
Claudel suggests in Art Poétique (1941) that the visible is readable and that
the assembling of elements, whether images or words, follows a logical pat-
tern to form a ‘readable phrase’. Lyotard replies that:
. . . the given is not a text, it possesses an inherent thickness, or rather a

difference, which is not to be read, but rather seen; and this difference,
and the immobile mobility that reveals it, are what continually fall into
oblivion in the process of signification.6

Lyotard questions the implication that one can comment on the visual
only when a ‘point of view’ is found that allows one to regard it as a text.
Therefore, when the visible is represented, what is not signified is the
mobile element which reveals it – the mobility of the eye. Already, we have
the adequacy of a representational system brought into question and the
suggestion that translating one representational system to another results
in a loss – thus when a visual artwork is discussed there is always something
that is omitted from that discourse, not only because of this translation but
also because of the existence in the visual of that untranslatable element
which Lyotard will go on to designate the figural. The restriction of a text
is its lack of physical depth: we cannot physically move in front of a text to
seek alternative viewpoints – such movement is restricted to the metaphori-
cal – and yet the sensible world remains the principal frame of reference
for all analogies. The suggestion that through the creation of a scene the
visual representation ‘flattens’ physical space and therefore draws it into
the realm of the textual is refuted by Lyotard, emphasizing the lack of
equivalence in the position of a surface: the textual is written on a flat, hor-
izontal surface rather than the vertical screen of the visual. Here, sitting in
front of a computer screen, the same screen which is the surface of many
visual manifestations, it may seem that this comparison has less clarity, and
indeed the world of the digital screen is the focus for David N. Rodowick’s
discussion of the figural in relation to new media, but the contrast of hori-
zontal to vertical is merely a visualization of a point of difference between
the two modes of communication which are not actually reliant on the
position of their surfaces.7 What is key is the means by which the eye reads
the text or image, the physical proximity of the eye to the textual page does
not allow for the meaning to be altered – once the characters are in focus
their meaning usually flows independently of the visual whereas the physi-
cal visual surface of a drawing, painting or photograph asks to be regarded
at different levels of proximity and with differing elements of experience
offered by each (and here the screen of new media does not operate in
the same way: there is little revelation or pleasure gained from increased
pixilation or optical blindness of the digital screen). Given this distinction,
Lyotard explains his objection to ‘reading’ the image: ‘One does not read
or understand a picture. Sitting at the table one identifies and recognizes
linguistic units; standing in representation one seeks out plastic events.
Libidinal events.’8
This initial valorization of the plastic, the spatial and thus the bodily
realm of gestures, movement and matter which are brought together in
the realm of the figural is an important one for this study and contrasts

The figural 19
with the idea of the body as a language implied in the quotation from
Lea Vergine which prefaced this chapter. Vergine’s description could be
misunderstood as the adoption of movement, gesture, performance as a
language that can be readily decoded by an audience – but for many of
the artists grouped by Vergine under the term ‘Body Art’ in 1974 it is the
potential of the body as a site of resistance to such codifications which fired
their exploration of the body as an ‘art language’. However, this attention
to the body is only part of that which Lyotard designates the figural. Here
I must attest to the paradox inherent in the aim of this section because the
figural escapes definition. This can be witnessed in Lyotard’s own use of
the term throughout Discours, figure, where there is no static explanation
of the term as a fixed concept; rather it is posited in one section only to
be modified and reconfigured elsewhere. In this sense, Lyotard activates
aspects of the figural in the book itself, describing it as:
. . . a dislocated body whereupon speech impresses fragments that in

principle can be rearranged in various configurations, but which the
constraints imposed by typographic composition – those belonging to
signification and ratio – force to present in an immutable order.9
For 40 years the body of Discours, figure was not so much dislocated as
ripped apart in its translation into English; prior to 2011 only five extracts
had been translated which together amounted to a fifth of the text. Mary
Lydon, formerly of the University of Wisconsin, was involved in the transla-
tion of the whole and before her illness and premature death published
two significant sections for literary journals in 1983; others have trans-
lated sections which appeared in the following publications: the 1984
Semiotext(e) collection Driftworks, the Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader in
1993 and the introductory section ‘Taking the Side of the Figural’ was
published in the 2006 Lyotard Reader and Guide. The full English transla-
tion of Discours, figure, published by the University of Minnesota Press in
2011 as Discourse, Figure, was a long-overdue event and as it incorporates
Mary Lydon’s translations together with the work of translator and Lyotard
scholar Anthony Hudek it also indicates some of the troubled history of
the books’ journey into English. This skilfully crafted translation helps the
English reader to appreciate the deliberate dislocated arrangement of the
whole: described by Lyotard as being a compromise between the author’s
intentions and his pragmatic restrictions.10 Being a book of philosophy,
not an artist’s book, the physical arrangement of the book does adhere to
some norms; it is not a ‘good book’ in Lyotard’s terms and refrains from

the further destabilization that Lyotard would desire in order to disrupt

‘the time of the reader’ and a sense of progression through the work. The
clearest division of the book’s concerns, and the operation of the figural,
is a preoccupation with phenomenology at the outset and a shift to the use
of Freud as the main theoretical reference point in the later parts. Briefly,
Lyotard initially uses phenomenology to justify the seemingly straightfor-
ward argument described above, that the visual cannot simply be read: the
mobility – which is central to Merleau-Ponty – is employed to demonstrate
the necessary depth or thickness [épaisseur] of the visual experience which
is denied in an essentially two-dimensional reading. Initially it appears
that Lyotard is himself setting up a binary opposition between the visible,
aligned to the figure, and the textual, corresponding to discourse; yet this
is a methodological move which is later unpicked and any such clear dis-
tinctions are removed.
The initial critique of discourse is a specific reflection on the role of
language in philosophy and politics where discourse follows premeditated
patterns and structures, swallowing up anything different and reducing
alterity to the same. In contrast, the figural is a realm of the unexpected,
mediated not through communication but through intensities: systems
and signification are disrupted to open up space for that which discourse
disallows. Lyotard’s particular focus for attack is structural linguistic dis-
course – Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson in the first part and
later Jacques Lacan – reminding us that Discourse, Figure is the result of
Lyotard’s thinking in the late 1960s – a time when structuralism was still
the method of choice for many French intellectuals – making Discourse,
Figure one of the first in the turn away from, and questioning of, structural-
ist linguistics.
The system of structural linguistics, based on the work of Saussure, and
propagated by the posthumous publication of Cours de linguistique générale,
approaches the study of language through an emphasis on underlying
structures. Saussure explains the operation of language through a system
of differentiation: the sign functioning only in relation to that which it is
not, thereby creating a closed system which relies on the whole in order to
function. Lyotard criticizes the semiological method – prevalent in France
at the time – as a flat field of discourse which does not allow for ‘thickness’
and denies the presence of the figure In this context ‘figure’ is the trace
that indicates the presence of something which escapes presentation, that
is it does not fit the system of representation in use, which is outside repre-
sentational space and therefore relies on the figure to indicate its presence.
The example that Lyotard gives from Merleau-Ponty is the mobility of the

The figural 21
eye that is rendered inexpressible in a discourse which assumes a fixed

position and a system of differentiation which is configured on a binary
logic of signified / not signified, with the latter having no form in com-
munication – if a sign is not understood by its recipient then communica-
tion is deemed to have been unsuccessful. This is the preoccupation which
features again and again in Lyotard’s work; even after the term ‘figure’ is
dispensed with, it is the same preoccupation which can be identified in his
concern for the différends which remain unphrased, the role of the body in
Les Immatériaux and also the role of negation which dogs the affirmative
intensities of his libidinal philosophy.
The figural is the transgression of signification which shows that alter-
natives to established forms of discourse – not only language and critical
philosophy but also visual methods – are possible. It is not a romantic or
nostalgic search for that which language is unable to say but rather draws
attention to the need to find a mode of presentation for that which has
been repressed – an inevitably unending search which confronts the para-
dox that the unsignifiable aspect of the figure is changed through attempts
to make it ‘present’. The effect of this attempt, however, displaces the
assumed preconditions of the view, disturbs notions of fixed address and
resists assimilation to established orders, forms and means of signification.
The ambivalence of Lyotard’s own position and manner of approach is
one example of how the figural attempts (but fails) to present in discourse:
the figure cannot be presented yet its presence must be pointed to. It is
in response to this challenge that my own extended conceptualization of
‘figural’ is used in this book to highlight attempts to ‘point to’ that which
exceeds signification and where the connection to the affect-phrase – from
Lyotard’s late writings – is particularly helpful.
It is important to remember that the first examples of the figure given by
Lyotard in Discourse, Figure, which associate the figural with the visual and
its resistance to what is signified, are part of a wider strategy to demonstrate
the workings of figure in both art and discourse. The figure is not exclusive
to art; critical philosophy, for example, can find the figural within its dis-
course by opening up to uncertainty. Lyotard gives an example of this in
Merleau-Ponty’s ‘sur-réflexion’ (from The Visible and the Invisible), describing
‘painting and drawing with and in words’ in order to keep ambiguity and
unforeseen connections open, drawing on metaphor and figure to expose
lateral not manifest meanings.11 A close connection is drawn to both
poetry and dreams, particularly the operations which Freud terms ‘dream-
work’ which make language bent and distorted, not to the extent that ref-
erence is removed altogether but to displace it through a disordering of

language – ‘vibrating until it disjoins’.12 There can be no model to follow,

however, that would be to replace one set of rules with the constraints of
another; Lyotard’s references to ‘sur-réflexion’ and ‘deconstruction’ are
used to highlight the existence of alternative approaches which show that
figure exists in discourse as well as art.
Later in Discourse, Figure Lyotard revises the figure once again through its
tripartite division as figure-image, figure-form and figure-matrix, thereby
further complicating the means by which the figural can present in dis-
course. The figure-matrix is invisible and troubles both the visual and
discourse equally; it is the force of desire that is unbound, manifest eve-
rywhere and destroys established orders through its energetics. As such it
cannot ‘present’ in discourse but its workings can be seen in the disregard
for significations or temporal placing, as in Freud’s account of the uncon-
scious given in Civilisation and its Discontents or his account of the analysis
of the phantasy ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, where the shift of subject, action
and addressee ‘presents’ the work of the matrix as a ‘transformation’. It is
a similar attention to displacement and transformation that preoccupies
Lyotard’s interest in art, particularly evident in those writings that have
been termed the ‘libidinal’ which will be dealt with in Chapter 2.
As an epigraph to this chapter I included a quotation from Judith Butler
whose phrase – ‘The body is that upon which language falters’– describes
one aspect of Lyotard’s figural which will run throughout this book. Like
Butler, we are by necessity drawn back to language when discussing art –
we cannot paint our responses – and it is for this reason that Lyotard draws
attention to the operation of the figural within language, as the element
which threatens to destabilize established structures of meaning. It is by
forcing language to hesitate, to draw attention to the thickness of the line
in the letter, that a sensitivity to the figural elements of language might be
made apparent and its graphic elements become something other than
arbitrary signifiers in a closed system. Lyotard questions the function of the
letter as a mere support to enable rapid, comprehensible signification and
writes of the value that the same graphic mark can gain when it appeals to
‘the capacity of corporeal resonance’.13 When the line in the letter inscribes
itself in a plastic space it is responding to the space of the figural and the
plastic libidinal intensities which are otherwise rendered only as a trace,
through the figure, in discourse. However, drawing attention to the visible
element of graphic linguistic signifiers and the hidden resonance of their
arrangement in space – as demonstrated in Discourse, Figure through exten-
sive analyses of the visual arrangement of type in examples by Stéphane
Mallarmé and Michel Butor – is but one part of Lyotard’s argument that

The figural 23
discourse and figure are inseparably enmeshed yet radically different. It is

my suggestion that a sensitivity to the figural – as that which is present to
signification despite its absence as a signifiable element – necessitates an
approach to art which responds to Donald Preziosi’s call with regard to art
history:
The task of the art historian today would entail a re-engagement with
the discipline’s most fundamental dilemma: the uncanny power of art-
istry or artifice to both fabricate and problematize mooted social realities and
institutions; to both empower and disempower; to delight and thwart,
simultaneously entertain and contain.14
The largely unedited account of my time spent in the performance space

of Yingmei Duan, which opened this chapter, is part of the same search for
the figural that I identify in Lyotard’s writings on art. Contrary to my initial
castigation of art history in my introduction, this is not a lone search: the
same, potentially contradictory, desire for proximity and a self-conscious
critical appraisal of the structures within which discourse operates is the
subject of Preziosi’s reflections on the disciplinary aims of art history. In
the 1998 edition of The Art of Art History Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors graces
the cover, its famous example of anamorphosis acting also as the principal
metaphor in Preziosi’s introduction to the revised 2008 collection which
endeavours to reveal ‘otherwise hidden perspectives’ while also keen to
keep the artifice of art history in focus. Replete with paradoxes, these aims
might be termed incommensurable – according to Lyotard’s lexicon – like
the two seemingly incompatible spaces of Holbein’s ambassadors and the
skull which lurks, extended and incomprehensible, at their feet; and yet it
is in the space of incommensurability that the figural is at work, refusing
to be subsumed under a single system. Lyotard’s own reference to anamor-
phosis, including Holbein’s Ambassadors, emphasizes the implications for
representation:
In the case of the anamorphosis, the signifier itself is under siege,

overturned under our own eyes. The threatening objects depicted in
the representational artwork belong to a space one could call graphic,
as opposed to that of representation. These objects are inscribed on
the ‘sheet of glass,’ making it visible instead of crossing it on their way
to the virtual scene. The eye thus ceases to be taken and is given over to
the hesitation of the trajectory and site, while the artwork is given over
to the difference of spaces, which is the dualism of the processes.15

This is an example of the figural at work: it cannot be seen but by inducing

hesitancy into the usual flow of representation, its construction is shown.
Is my account of Yingmei Duan’s performance only description? Does the
eye stop its automatic scanning of the lines which form the text – not in
a material manner which might be the typographer’s answer – but in ‘the
corporeal resonance’ of the figural trace, that space which Lyotard terms
‘plastic’ as opposed to ‘graphic’?16 It is a response which attempts at imme-
diacy but fails to acknowledge the constructs of such experience and the
staging of its effects. Am I so preoccupied with revealing a ‘hidden perspec-
tive’ – in my search for presence – that the staging of the view is left unques-
tioned? In Discourse, Figure the figural is discussed predominantly in spatial
terms and consequently the temporal implications seem less explicitly con-
sidered. In the following section I want to draw attention to the impor-
tance of arresting the eye’s automatic scanning, of hijacking signification
through hesitancy and destabilizing the forward thrust of time: these are
aspects of the figural whose relation to time will be reiterated through ref-
erence to Lyotard’s later writings and his discussion of presence.
Presence
This present introduction to the figural and my extended usage – to refer to

Lyotard’s texts beyond the confines of his specific application of the term –
will now jump forward chronologically in order to draw out aspects of the fig-
ural which are not as explicitly formulated in Discourse, Figure, beginning first
with the term ‘presence’. As with many of the terms used by Lyotard in rela-
tion to art and aesthetics – sublime, event, affect, postmodern – presence is
replete with connotations. Some of these associations, such as Heideggerian
ideas of presence and event [Ereignis], are openly discussed by Lyotard, while
others are not: the art-historical tradition of modernist formalism – Michael
Fried and Clement Greenberg in particular – belongs to an Anglo-American
tradition that was predominantly ignored by philosophers and art historians
in France at this time.17 It is an uneasy task, therefore, to draw attention to
Lyotard’s discussion of presence without acknowledging the art-historical
discussion to which he does not directly refer. My intention here is first to
outline Lyotard’s 1987 essay ‘Presence’ in the context of the figural as I am
using it in this book, second to relate this discussion to Lyotard’s writings on
the work of Daniel Buren – including Lyotard’s discussion of Buren’s work as
‘not performance’ – and finally to contextualize this discussion in relation to
Fried’s famous essay ‘Art and Objecthood’.18

The figural 25
‘La présence ’ opens Lyotard’s 1987 collection Que peindre? Adami, Arakawa,
Buren; the book is, however, more than simply a collecting together of the
pre-existing essays which Lyotard had written on the three artists, Valerio
Adami, Shūsaku Arakawa and Daniel Buren, between 1978 and 1985. The
book is a careful reconfiguration and editing of material into seven chap-
ters, allowing Lyotard to reconsider both aspects of his earlier work in
Discourse, Figure and the problematic interrelationship of art to commen-
tary, the latter being visualized in part through the numerical references
in the text’s margins which refer to an accompanying volume of plates.19
In his preface to the 2008 re-edition of Que peindre? Bruno Cany refers
to the work as one of the ‘heights of Lyotard’s thought’, but one which
remains ‘little known to many’.20 Perhaps its fate will be changed by the
planned republication as a parallel French / English text by the University
of Leuven Press. At present, English translations of some parts do exist,
including the majority of La Présence and I will refer to this translation,
‘Presence’, in the following summary.21
In common with all parts of Que peindre? the essay ‘Presence’ adopts the
form of a dialogue between fictional characters – in this case ‘You’ and
‘Him’ – that puts forward propositions regarding the role of presence in
contemporary painting. ‘You’ begins by proposing that despite best efforts
the painter can only apprehend sensible presence as deferred, that even
in the moment of apprehension deferral has occurred – being by neces-
sity a departure from the realm of presence. Reflection is similarly to be
regarded as constitutive of a different temporal realm: ‘On reflection the
least glance appears laden with presuppositions’.22 The resulting scepticism
with regard to any idea of an ‘immediate presence’ is demonstrated by the
work of the three painters – Adami, Arakawa and Buren – who variously
show only the absence of presence, following what ‘you’ considers to be the
legacy of Cézanne’s doubt. For example, what is important is not the pres-
ence of Buren’s work but rather its consequence on the ‘view’ of the mind
whereby the staging of representation is revealed and henceforth the mind
is destined to ‘show the falseness of presence’.23 Beginning in 1965 Daniel
Buren’s working method consisted of predetermined elements: vertical
stripes measuring 8.7 cm and alternating colour and white; the application
of these elements to a variety of surfaces – billboards, banners, architec-
tural features, even children’s sailing boats and the uniforms of museum
guards – was the consistent feature of his practice for 30 years.24 The aim of
Buren’s work – outlined in the accompanying texts, essays and interviews,
published in three volumes in 1991 – is continually to draw attention to
the means and structures of presentation. In contrast, the figurative work

of Valerio Adami takes a comparatively traditional approach to painting

yet similarly, according to Lyotard, effaces the time of the present: ‘The
here and now drip everywhere with another time and another place.’ Not
then the time of the event – the here and now – but of time displaced
through anamnesis: ‘He plunges us in an anamnesis, rather than into an
event.’25 Joined by Arakawa’s contemplation of blankness – which Lyotard
likens to the better known work of Robert Ryman – the three painters are
linked together through their call to reflexivity, a preoccupation which
Lyotard’s voice describes as ‘putting the last touches to the aesthetics of
Romanticism’.26 Part of this tradition of reflexivity is that of commentary
as integrated into the work of the three artists, to differing extents: most
explicitly in Buren’s extensive writings – though these predominantly come
after the production of the visual elements – but also in the stories to which
Adami’s work refers and the texts inscribed on Arakawa’s surfaces: ‘Having
once been configurated. Being able to be configurated’ is written on the
painting titled There is no space but the viewer (1986). All incite reflection
rather than visual pleasure, and extend through narration to the spread
of stories which exercises a control of time through desire: ‘Yet desire does
not know presence.’27
The narration of ‘You’ in Lyotard’s essay is not without interjections:
‘Him’ attempts to assert that something did take place, that there was a
break in space-time caused by an event, ‘The sensible event, if you like’, but
he struggles to express ‘this timbre’ of which he speaks, and doubts him-
self: ‘I don’t know, an event, this blue, this morning’. But perhaps the first
significant argument delivered by ‘Him’ comes in his reference to ‘the fig-
ure’, an unusual but significant return of the term from Discourse, Figure :
What I provisionally call the figure escapes like a snapshot in this dura-
tion, whose course will infallibly bend back to its source, and which
imparts its rhythm both to recitation and to diegesis. Figure opens out
another space-time which isn’t yet, not already, caught up in the rhyth-
mic rule of before and afterwards. It doesn’t matter if it is, as they say,
figurative, or abstract, ‘good’, or bizarre. The figure is there now, and it
blocks the course of the tale by putting a sort of sigh in its way, something
between breathing in and breathing out. It is not the presence of the
figure itself.28
This blockage, the bodily metaphor and the interruption of its rhythm –
a sigh – is redolent of the multitude of different ways in which Lyotard
expresses his concerns, about art and its commentary. It also contrasts

The figural 27
greatly in terms of style with The Differend which, despite its measured,
almost analytic use of language and explicitly philosophical concerns is a
key component to Lyotard’s thinking and its applicability to considerations
of performance.
I am now going to block the progress of my own story and temporarily
abandon the proposed three stages of this section on presence, moving
instead to the hesitation which is named ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ in The Differend . This
will permit a consideration of the time of event: the ‘now’ which, together
with the spatializing designator ‘here’, featured in Lyotard’s attack on
structuralist linguistics in Discourse, Figure. The ambiguous indicators of
‘here’ and ‘now’ cannot be fixed or anticipated, they link to an unknown.
This is the chink in the structuralist’s armour which is exploited by Lyotard
to show the inadequacies of Saussurian linguistics and to demonstrate the
limitations of a theory which takes communication at a level that ignores
the depth that is clearly central to all but the most perfunctory of commu-
nication: expression.
‘Arrive-t-il? ’ ‘Is it happening?’
The book which Lyotard considered his major philosophical work is called
Le Différend (1983). It is an analysis of language and communication in
which he talks of ‘phrases’ – this would translate directly as ‘sentences’ but
in the English translation by George Van Den Abbeele the word ‘phrase’ is
kept in order to indicate the particular pragmatic usage by Lyotard where
a phrase consists not only of words: gestures and even silence also consti-
tute a phrase. Each phrase presents a ‘universe of phrases’ which consists
of the instances by which it is defined and may include one or more of the
following: addressor, addressee, referent and sense. But it is worth noting
that ‘The universe presented by a phrase is not presented to something or
to someone like a “subject”. [. . .] A “subject” is situated in a universe pre-
sented by a phrase.’29
According to Lyotard each phrase follows a previous phrase and is poten-
tially open to be linked onto in different ways – through a phrase of rea-
soning, questioning, showing, describing, ordering etc. However, Lyotard
argues that the previous phrase carries with it the rules of the type of dis-
course (the genre) to which it belongs, and therefore the linkages are not as
open as might be thought – each type of discourse, each genre has certain
goals for example to teach, to seduce, to justify, to evaluate: and to attain
these goals a particular type of linkage is necessary. ‘Event’ is when the link

to the next phrase has not yet been determined, when it remains contin-
gent: it is ‘The suspense of the linking’, the question of ‘Arrive-t-il? ’.30
Event cannot be anticipated, otherwise its linkage is predetermined.
Event takes place in the ‘Now’, before it is linked, before what it is has been
established, before it is given a definite article. As soon as it is linked onto,
it is subject to significant alteration: it is rendered the referent of a phrase
and therefore it loses its singularity and stops being ‘event’ but becomes
‘the event’ – a referent in past time – or ‘an event’, thereby made similar
to other events. Only in its event of questioning while it is still contingent
can it be ‘event’ or occurrence with the potentiality and radical nature of
the undecidable. For Lyotard, it is opening up this question of ‘Arrive-t-il? ’
which is the objective for art.
Before returning to Lyotard’s three painters and his essay on ‘presence’
I want to address questions of duration and the ephemeral in the work of
Vito Acconci and Marina Abramović, in order to begin considering the
implications of Lyotard’s question: ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ for performance art.
Marina Abramović’s Seven ‘Easy’ Pieces
We are dealing here with an ephemeral state, one which may easily (per-
haps too easily) be thought of in terms of wider art historical processes: as
that which has yet to be categorized, explained, contextualized and there-
fore subjected to the processes which capture the ephemeral. Of course,
that is a limited, stereotypical and regressive characterization of art history
and the process of the museumification of thought which sometimes takes
place. Yet it is exactly that which Marina Abramović, it would appear, is
anxious to ensure for the future of performance art.
Marina Abramović is one of the most significant figures in performance
art. She started performing in Yugoslavia in the early 1970s and many of
her performances have become canonical, in what is a very recently estab-
lished canon. I want to consider an aspect of her project Seven Easy Pieces,
which was performed at the Guggenheim, New York in 2005. Over a seven-
day period she performed a different piece each evening: five pieces were
re-performances of seminal works from the 1970s by other artists (Bruce
Nauman; Vito Acconci; Valie Export; Gina Pane; Joseph Beuys); one was a
re-performance of one of her own works from this period and the series
ended with the performance of a new piece. As a project it is a fascinating
engagement with the issues raised by the ephemeral nature of perform-
ance – it is, in itself, an exploration of the means by which performance

The figural 29
can be both re-performed and documented – but I want to point out

what may be a paradox, by highlighting that which is motivating her desire
to re-enact the chosen works from the early 1970s. She speaks of regret – a
regret that she had been unable to witness many early performances and a
further regret that there was a tendency at the time to shun documentation,
in order that the performance itself be the whole work. As she writes:
I lived in Yugoslavia and it was very difficult to get information about per-
formance events from abroad. All I could get at the time were Xeroxed
images. Occasionally, there were also bad quality pirate video record-
ings. Most of the time, testimony was just word-of-mouth from witnesses
who claimed they saw the performance or said that they knew somebody
who had seen it.31
I remember a performance by Abramović, in a grand baroque palace in the

centre of Madrid, not in the 1970s but in 1992. At least, I think I remember
a performance – I remember the feeling of the performance, at least my
reaction to what I was told happened.
In retrospect I realize that what was described to me was her piece from
1973 Rhythm 10 which involved Abramović splaying her hand on a table
top, taking a kitchen knife and rhythmically stabbing the spaces between
her fingers, increasing the rhythm of the stabbing and the risks which were
involved.
But what I really remember is the anticipation, the atmosphere – I can
find no record of which performance took place – certainly she performed
the following week when the same festival had its second leg in London –
but not in Madrid. I now think she didn’t perform, or if she did I arrived
too late and missed it.
And yet the memory is so powerful, mixed with what was presumably
someone else’s account of Rhythm 10 and which they probably never saw
either; and yet it wasn’t ephemeral for me: it is very much alive and present –
just in the same way that those performances which Abramović never saw
have carried the question of contingency – the ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ – and driven her
to this series of re-performances.
Abramović reiterates the extent to which early 1970s performance worked
on hearsay and whisper:
If everybody who claimed to see the performances had actually been

present, then thousands would have witnessed body art events. [. . .]
Most of the time there were only about four or five friends there. The

unreliability of the documents and the witnesses led to the total mystifi-
cation and misrepresentation of the actual events. This created a huge
space for projection and speculation.32
It is this very ‘space for projection and speculation’ which, I want to argue,
is central to the power which performance can exert. Because its partial,
inexact forms of documentation create a situation where a lack of certainty
reigns, it is a realm that is conducive to the contingent. Therefore the
destabilizing effect, which was the aim of many of these performances,
can be continued – one which the drive to exhaustive documentation,
which Abramović proposes, may stifle. The conditions which she suggests
for re-performances are as follows:
Ask the artist for permission.

Pay the artist for copyright.
Perform a new interpretation of the piece.
Exhibit the original material: photographs, videos, relics.
Exhibit a new interpretation of the piece.33
These conditions, she suggests, will give performance ‘. . . a stable ground-

ing in art history’ but in doing so won’t these prescriptive demands fet-
ishize the original performance still further, stabilize it as a referent of any
re-performance and minimize the contingency of linking?
As part of Seven Easy Pieces Abramović re-performed her own interpreta-
tion of Vito Acconci’s 1972 piece Seedbed .
Seedbed
Seedbed was part of an exhibition by Vito Acconci at the Sonnabend Gallery,

New York, which consisted of three performance situations, each of which
needed the presence of the artist to be ‘activated’. In Acconci’s performance
the gallery space was subtly altered to incorporate a sloping ramp under which
the artist was secreted. As Acconci was hidden from view in the performance
space there was some uncertainty as to the whereabouts of the artist – his voice
was relayed to the visitor through the single speaker but even then, as Acconci
himself acknowledged, some may have thought that the sound was a tape. In
Abramović’s performance in the Guggenheim, a separate circular structure
was built as a performance area under which the artist was clearly located and
onto which the audience could ascend. This purpose-built structure removed
the ambiguity of ‘presence’ that was part of the original set-up.

The figural 31
Acconci’s Seedbed was specifically about exploiting the ‘space of projec-

tion and speculation’ of which Abramović talks. I am suggesting that at
the heart of Abramović’s re-performance is the paradox that drew her
to this history in the fi rst place: the instability of the referent in these
early pieces: the possibility of the question mark, of the ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ and
the contingency of ‘event’ before it is linked onto as ‘the event’. This
is something wholly supported by the inexact ways in which Seedbed has
been documented. Starting with the edition of the magazine Avalanche
dedicated to Acconci in 1972, the date of the performance is widely mis-
reported as 1971, an error repeated by RoseLee Goldberg in 2001 and
Melvin Carlson in 2004. The French art magazine Art Press , in an edition
from 1972, misprinted the date as 1973 but the most wildly inaccurate is a
French history of performance art by Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, published
in 1988, which gives Seedbed the date 1979. In the catalogue for Seven
Easy Pieces , the dates are correctly recorded as 15–29 January 1972 but
in the transcript of Abramović’s monologue – spoken while re-perform-
ing Seedbed and busy creating what she termed ‘heat and moisture’ – the
date slips once more: ‘I’m doing Vito Acconci piece, the Seedbed , what he
made in Sonnabend Gallery in 73, masturbating under the floor of the
gallery.’
Similarly, the reports of the hours of ‘activation’ vary even in contem-
porary reviews, in 1972, from ‘two afternoons a week’ (Pincus-Witten)
to ‘whole days’ (Schjeldahl) and the Acconci archive seems to positively
promote the mystification – three confl icting press releases were exhib-
ited together as part of the show of his work in Liverpool in 2005 and
are variously reproduced in recent publications without necessarily
acknowledging the confl icting information.34 The 2001 monograph by
Gloria Moure reports ‘9 days, 8 hours a day, a 3 week exhibition’ whereas
Kate Linker’s monograph from 1994 opts for the more dramatic ‘for the
duration of the exhibition’. Martha Buskirk (2005) shows a canny wari-
ness when writing of Seedbed in The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art
and states that ‘By his own description he was under the ramp two or
three days per week for the duration of the exhibition.’35 There can be
no more contingent object than the document of a performance piece,
it would seem, particularly one which deals with such ‘intimate activi-
ties’. Without doubt the various manners in which the piece is reported,
whether colourful or coy, adds to the tension which exists in the piece
itself, as these quotes show:
. . . in his work Seedbed, 1972, under a [floor] in a public space, a New

York gallery, he performed a most intimate act of the body.36

The most notorious involved a large, closed wooden ramp under which
Acconci spent whole days in determined solitary sex while, as a wall label
asserted, fantasizing about people present in the gallery.37
Within this wedge, Acconci passed 2 afternoons a week in a ‘private sex-
ual activity’, stated bluntly, in masturbation.38
In room A (Seed Bed ) Acconci lay hidden beneath a room-sized, slanting
plywood false-floor intoning words of love to the women walking over
him, masturbating and moaning into a microphone.39
Acconci was playing his part while playing with his parts.40
Installed under a ramp in New York’s Sonnabend Gallery for six hours
a day, five days a week, Acconci is said to have masturbated at intervals
throughout.41
Seedbed (1971), performed at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York, became
the most notorious of these works. In it Acconci masturbated under a
ramp built into the gallery over which the visitors walked.42
I am particularly drawn to the difference between the last two quotations

from two different publications by RoseLee Goldberg which move from
‘Acconci is said to have masturbated’ to just accepting that he did. The dura-
tion, intensity and description vary to such an extent that the performance
remains in flux and, contrary to my initial fears, Abramović’s re-performance
adds similarly to this effect. The way in which Abramović documents the
work acknowledges Acconci’s own regret that he never taped the audio – so
in her performance she tapes everything meticulously and includes a tran-
scription in the book – she also makes an attempt to record the reactions of
the audience, and the transcripts of conversations from seven roving micro-
phones are also included. This is particularly interesting in relation to the
Acconci re-performance because the audience is making comparisons to a
work about which there is already so much myth, speculation and ambiguity.
There is a sense of uncertainty as to how they ought to react, a sense which
is clearly in keeping with the idea I am working with in relation to Lyotard’s
event, and my fear that contingency might be closed down is not borne out.
I had feared that the preceding phrase would determine the type of
linkage and limit contingency: that knowledge of the piece might lead to
expectations being fulfilled not frustrated. Yet, rather than fulfilling expec-
tations and linking in the expected manner, the members of the audience
find themselves reacting against the mis-match with their expectations:
the transfer of the work into the huge institution of the Guggenheim, for

The figural 33
example, means that many struggle to find the intimacy or confrontation

they expect and consequently they begin to reflect on what they know (or
think they know) about the ‘original’ in order to locate their frustration.
This example is certainly paradoxical: I am suggesting that those emo-
tive aspects of presence, expression and affect – which are traditionally
the central issues of performance – form the universe of phrases onto
which an audience expects to link with their respective emotive responses.
However, in fulfilling such an anticipated linkage there would be no event
in the sense of creating a hesitation in the linkage – hence my fear with
regard to the set-up of Seven Easy Pieces. But it is in the unfulfilment that
the uncertainty might occur, a feeling that relates to Lyotard’s concern in
The Differend regarding the presentation of a feeling as a phrase: ‘Feelings
as a phrase for what cannot now be phrased.’43 Yet does this feeling of
uncertainty not constitute one of the emotive responses expected from
performance? Perhaps it is a question of intensity and temporality: if event
produces a feeling that cannot be phrased it is not a consciously recog-
nizable emotion and as it can exist only in the now it will always remain
ephemeral and consequently, to return to Lyotard’s terminology in the
essay ‘Presence’, deferred.
‘Something between breathing in and breathing out . . .’
If the ‘here and now’ of ‘event’ might be equated with what Lyotard refers
to as ‘presence’, is it similarly only to be apprehended as deferred? Yes, and
no. Both ‘event’ and ‘presence’ are experienced in the ‘here and now’ but
their ephemeral nature escapes attempts to record and evaluate, except
through the manner in which Lyotard describes the function of presence
in the work of Daniel Buren – presence in this case being used only to show
the falseness of presence. Does this suggest that presence can be manipu-
lated in a manner that is anathema to the nature of event as we have just
described it? Not necessarily: the manner in which Buren’s work operates,
according to Lyotard, is to question ‘the situational conditions which affect
the way art is seen, but he questions them situationally, and through an eye
that is itself conditioned by situation’.44 This is not a manipulation of either
presence or event but the disclosure of its absence through an unmasking
of the illusion of presence.
Although Lyotard’s first writings on Buren were not published until 1978,
ten years after Buren’s first works in situ , the extent to which artist and phi-
losopher were dealing with the same concerns contemporaneously, coming

from the same revolutionary milieu, is made clear in Lyotard’s ‘Notes

on the critical function of the work of art’, a text based on a discussion
presented to students at the University of Paris, Nanterre in March 1970.
Lyotard’s tone reveals much about the student body that invited Lyotard to
speak and about the politically charged atmosphere of the times:
The function of a revolutionary art is thus very precisely determined.

What art does – what it ought to do – is always to unmask all attempts
to reconstitute a pseudo-religion; in other words, every time the recon-
stitution of a kind of writing, a ‘graphy’ – a set of forms that produces a
psychic resonance and reproduces itself – is undertaken, the function of
anti-art is to unmask it as ideological; in the Marxist sense of the term, to
unmask it as an endeavour to make us believe that there are in our socie-
ties ‘primary’ modes of communication of this type, which is not true.45
It is this unmasking of illusion that Lyotard later recognizes in the work of

Buren – in this case the unmasking of the illusion of presence – and the
assumption that event or presence can be either constructed or anticipated
by the organizing structures which present ‘art events’. I want to clarify here
two points relating to my use of the term ‘event’ in the previous section that
referred to performance and re-performance. First I want to reiterate that the
‘Arrive-t-il? ’ of the Lyotardian event does not necessarily equate to the time
of the ‘art event’ – the happening or performance – but that ‘event’ could
be as likely to occur in the gap opened by the non-representative aspects of
its documentation or a double-take at a re-performance, and consequently
it brings into question the privileging of ‘liveness’. Secondly, I introduced
the ephemeral as being short lived and suggested that the event is analogous
to the ephemeral, but it is important to stress that according to Lyotard,
‘Arrive-t-il? ’ does not belong to chronological time but to its own time of the
now and therefore its duration can only be ascertained once it enters the net-
work of linkages. This means that ‘Arrive-t-il? ’ may open up a duration which,
rather than being short lived, does not find a linkage for some time – but
only when it is linked can its ephemeral status be reflected upon.
When Lyotard describes the effect of Buren’s work in the essay ‘Presence’
as being not in the viewing of the work but in ‘the view it is destined to
become’, could it be that in this subsequent view the event occurs? Usefully,
Lyotard’s ‘Him’ follows a similar line of thought, asking ‘You’ to admit that
‘something took place; I don’t say some one thing, an object, but an event
which isn’t a thing, but at least a caesura in space-time and that that’s what
must be “rendered”’.46

The figural 35
The tentative means by which the counterarguments are put forward by

‘Him’ recall also the hesitant approach to writing that Lyotard describes in
his foreword to the Lyotard Reader : a sense of feeling a way forward like that
of a child, not the innocent pre-conceptual sensation that Merleau-Ponty
describes but one which irrupts out of language, not prior to it.47
In the unravelling of their argument the two voices of ‘Presence’ begin to
drop suggestive allusions to presence: touch, re-touch, colour, vowel, a vowel
without a voice – the timbre, an immediate occasion – but not the religios-
ity of speaking with God’s timbre (that follows a set pattern of intent – the
universe of phrases leading to religious persuasion) but, rather, that which
‘has gone missing in the prepared linking’.48 The challenge of mysticism is
anticipated and that of formalism – following Kant – is contested, but there
is no definitive answer: I cannot fast-forward to the end of the essay to tell
you the ending, the punch line, the decisive definition, except to recall
the frequency with which it echoes Discourse, Figure like a call across time,
perhaps in the same way in which the talk of presence and deferral initiates
an echo of Derrida in the ear of any self-respecting Anglophone scholar –
particularly to his ‘way out’ West: the 1966 colloquium at Johns Hopkins
University, generally regarded as the starting point of what became the
phenomenon of deconstruction in American Literary Studies.49 In his
critique of the metaphysics of presence, Derrida writes of the process of
deferral – particularly evident in language – whereby every sign is obliged
to defer to another for its meaning in a continual avoidance of an elusive
origin and the ‘determination of Being as presence’ on which the history
of metaphysics has been centred.50 In Lyotard’s account presence is not
linked to metaphysical presence or the fulfilment of desire – ‘[it] isn’t the
“presence of being”’ – but is rather what stops the continual process of
deferral, challenging commentary by questioning presence.51 It is not a
‘way out’ in the manner that the West has looked for an exit in the philoso-
phy of Buddhism, says Lyotard. Neither can it be a stopping like death, or a
return to presence in an ontological sense, because there is no subject who
is being addressed. It is, rather, a hesitating over the presumed linkages:
‘. . . it is, I think, all articulated thought which presence interrupts’.52
Buren Is Not Performing
On 3 January 1967 Daniel Buren and three other painters working collab-
oratively as the group BMPT made four equally sized paintings carrying
their signature format: Buren’s stripes, Oliver Mosset’s single circle, Michel

Parmentier’s broad horizontal stripes created by folding and spraying the

exposed pleats of a canvas, and Niele Toroni’s evenly spaced marks applied
with a No. 50 brush. During the time of the paintings’ creation a loudspeaker
advised the public visiting the Salon de la Jeune Peinture – held at the Musée
d’Art Moderne in Paris – ‘to become intelligent’. An accompanying pamphlet
explained what they thought was wrong with painting and why, therefore,
they did not consider themselves painters.53 At the end of the day the paint-
ings were removed and replaced by a banner which read: ‘BUREN, MOSSET,
PARMENTIER, TORONI, N’EXPOSENT PAS.’ In June 1967 BMPT organized
a ‘manifestation’ at the lecture theatre of the Musée d’Art Decoratifs, Paris. A
photograph of the event, reproduced in Tony Godfrey’s book Conceptual Art,
shows a surprisingly well-filled lecture theatre and the display of four equally
sized paintings – similar to those exhibited for the day in January of the same
year – forming a quadrant, hanging above the stage. After an hour, a text
with a straightforward description of the four paintings was handed round,
prompting the remark from audience member, Marcel Duchamp, ‘What a
frustrating happening: one couldn’t have done it better!’.54 Catherine Millet’s
book Contemporary Art in France opens with a full-page, close-up photograph
of Duchamp in the audience at the same event, seemingly in the act of speak-
ing her version of those words: ‘as frustrating happenings go, you can’t get
better than that’.55 The slight variation in the translation of this spoken com-
ment highlights both the transitory nature of the present and opens up the
differing contexts in which each becomes placed. On the one hand Millet
uses the figure of Duchamp to highlight a struggle within the Parisian con-
temporary art scene in the late 1960s, between those following the legacy
of Dada: Yves Klein, Ben Vautrier, Daniel Spoerri and the more explicitly
political approach of painters for whom Duchamp represented an outdated
form of individualism, powerless to respond to the events in Vietnam. On the
other hand Godfrey suggests that Duchamp would have been better to talk
of ‘intervention’ rather than ‘happening’: ‘The word he should have used,
rather than “happening”, was “intervention”. Stella’s dictum of “what you see
is what you see” had been taken to its logical conclusion [. . .] For all their
seeming dumbness they had a political significance.’56 This reference to the
minimal approach of American painter Frank Stella refers us to an interna-
tional (or Trans-Atlantic) context, within which the place of French art needs
some further consideration.
There is a tendency and temptation to assimilate artistic activities in
France from this time to the art-historical discourses which have become
the accepted modes of thinking about post-war developments in sculpture
and painting – namely the dominance of formalist abstraction and the

The figural 37
reaction against its hegemony through the rise of conceptual and perform-
ance work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One consequence of such an
assumption is to render the varied artistic preoccupations of writers such
as Lyotard seemingly arbitrary or incomprehensible: he writes on Daniel
Buren and Valerio Adami, Joseph Kosuth and Jacques Monory. It is for this
reason that the differing contexts of France and the United States will
be highlighted here, using the figure of Marcel Duchamp as a means to
articulate some of the differing positions.
Duchamp in France
Though born in France, Duchamp had been resident in the United States
since before the Second World War. He took up US citizenship in 1955
and his entry into the bosom of the art world was confirmed by the retro-
spective at the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1963. His position in France,
however, was somewhat different. Duchamp was little known to the general
French public in the 1950s and 1960s despite the fact that the legacy of
Dada was clearly evident among many artists working in Paris, whether
through the adoption of a Duchampian persona, as with Yves Klein, Piero
Manzoni or Ben Vautrier, or the various adaptations of the strategy of the
found object, as with Arman and Daniel Spoerri. There were some sig-
nificant events during this period which furthered the dissemination of
Duchamp’s ideas and work among artists in France: his collected writings
Marchand du Sel and the first monograph Sur Marcel Duchamp by Robert
Lebel were both published in Paris in 1959.57 The role of Robert Lebel
as Duchamp’s biographer has an additional significance for developments
in the Parisian art scene as it was his son, the artist Jean-Jacques Lebel,
who was to play a significant role in the development of happenings in
France, a position that has been likened to that of Allan Kaprow in the
United States. Jean-Jacques Lebel orchestrated the first performance of
Carolee Schneemann’s seminal event Meat Joy in Paris in 1964 at the ‘Free
Expression Festival’ and the connection to Duchamp via his father’s circle
and his own often Dada-inspired performances links such developments
to the legacy of Surrealism in Paris.58 This connection is charted by Alyce
Mahon in her study Surrealism and the Politics of Eros 1938–1968, where she
writes: ‘In short, Lebel’s ideas were suffused with Surrealist ideas, ambi-
tions and terminology. Members of the Surrealist group recognised this
and supported his new direction: Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Max
Ernst went to see Lebel’s Happenings and praised them.’59 This history

of Surrealism’s legacy describes a preoccupation with sexuality and bod-

ily excess which makes an interesting context within which to consider
Lyotard’s libidinal politics and his writings on Duchamp, collected as Les
Transformateurs Duchamp in 1977, the same year that Duchamp was the sub-
ject of the first major show at the Pompidou Centre.60
In contrast to this acceptance of a Duchampian tradition there was a ten-
dency among some young painters in Paris to reject Duchamp’s political
quietism, interpreting his refusal to speak out on political matters as indica-
tive of a bourgeois conformism prevalent within the Parisian avant-garde
tradition. This became increasingly manifest as an anti-American agenda
by the mid-1960s when opposition to US involvement in the war in Vietnam
was coupled with the bitter reaction to the dominance of American mod-
ern painting, realized for many by the success of Robert Rauschenberg at
the Venice Biennale in 1964.61 A dead-pan, non-expressionistic approach to
figurative painting was used by several younger artists as a means to articu-
late their concerns, an approach which was promoted by art critic Gérald
Gaissot-Talabot under the name ‘Narrative Figuration’ at an exhibition in
Paris in 1965.62 The focus of much attention at this exhibition was a collabo-
rative series of eight paintings Vivre et laisser mourir, ou la fin tragique de Marcel
Duchmp [Live and Let Die, or the tragic end of Marcel Duchamp] painted
by Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo and Antonio Recalcati in 1965, which
demonstrates both political disenchantment and also the extent to which
Duchamp, as the famous émigré to the United States, represented a figure
to kick against for a generation of painters. In the series Duchamp is shown
being ‘stripped bare’, beaten up, thrown downstairs and finally buried in a
coffin draped with the Stars and Stripes. The exhibition of the series pro-
voked outrage, and the extent of the resulting defence of Duchamp marks
not only his importance but also the role he now played as a signifier for a
particular position within the debates in France at this time.63
Within this context of Duchamp’s presence in France, the position
of Daniel Buren is a curious one as he was continuing aspects of the anti-
art tradition while also critiquing its limitations. Jill Carrick traces the asso-
ciations between Buren and the Narrative Figuration artists through the
involvement of BMPT in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, the committee of
which included Gilles Aillaud as President, Eduardo Arroyo as Secretary and
Antonio Recalcati as a jury member, and Buren’s subsequent declarations
that it was insufficient to replace the art object with an everyday object if the
conditions for viewing the work remained unchallenged. In a text from 1969
he wrote that ‘A considerable number of works of art (the most exclusively
idealist, e.g., Ready-mades of all kinds) “exist” only because the location

The figural 39
in which they are seen is taken for granted as a matter of course’.64 The
most striking example of Buren’s solo attempts to confront the frame of the
institution also became an ‘intervention’ into the dominance of the United
States as the cultural torch-bearer for the ‘free’ Capitalist world. Buren’s con-
tribution to the sixth Guggenheim International exhibition became one of
Buren’s most notorious interventions as a result of the institution’s response
to the piece. Initially conceived in two parts: one large characteristically
striped canvas was to be hung in the famous spiral atrium of Frank Lloyd
Wright’s landmark building and a second smaller version was to have been
installed, perpendicular to the first, on a building outside the museum in
an adjacent street. The first 20 by 10 metre, blue and white striped fabric,
was hung for only one day and removed before the exhibition was opened to
the public, the second was never installed. The debate is well documented
and included objections by some of the other artists in the exhibition –
most famously Donald Judd, who referred to Buren as a ‘Parisian wallpaper
hanger’ – that the visual dominance of Buren’s piece obscured views of other
works.65 Buren called the objections censorship and suggested that the true
motivating factors were a desire to maintain the architectural dominance of
the museum over the works it purported to preserve and display. As a result
Buren’s intentions to reveal the museum as a container ‘which irremediably
subjugates anything that gets caught / shown in it’ were unrealized in the
intended format but the controversy which surrounded the event demon-
strated the ideological issues with which Buren was playing.66 Guy Lelong
suggests that the decision of the Guggenheim demonstrates the cultural
power held by Judd, Michael Heizer and Dan Flavin – the small group of
‘censuring artists’ – within the New York Art scene at the time; Lelong also
argues that Buren’s work highlighted the extent to which the work of these
artists was radical only within the context of the formalist debate which had
dominated the US art world in the late 1960s. The seemingly innocuous
requirement of art to be ‘interesting’, given by Donald Judd, represented
the literalness of the everyday that Duchamp’s readymades had ushered in.
This was anathema to the position of modernist formalism, most famously
represented by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, who wished to save
the sanctity of art from that which Fried famously termed ‘theatricality’.
Fried on Presence
Michael Fried’s polemical essay ‘Art and Objecthood’, first appeared in

an issue of Artforum devoted to American Sculpture in Summer 1967

alongside essays and statements by artists associated with that which is now
termed Minimalism: Robert Morris, Sol Lewitt and Robert Smithson. The
issue was an effective staging of the contemporary debate and the reaction
against the dominance of formalist criticism, which Fried and Greenberg
had espoused, and the Modernist sculpture and painting they had effec-
tively promoted throughout the post-war period both in the United States
and as representative of the US abroad. Fried’s essay is a clear attack on the
new tendencies of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, but his detailed con-
sideration of the work and interrogation of why its modi operandi opposed
modernist values have been used as a key reference in the subsequent his-
tory of those movements in order to support their very difference from the
formalist, modernist approach that Fried sought to defend.67 At the crux
of the essay is Fried’s objection to that which he terms the ‘theatricality’
of the minimalist work and its staging of ‘presence’. Aspects of such stag-
ing include a conscious use of objects sized to relate to the ‘beholder’ and
the deliberate controlling of the whole situation, including the beholder’s
body:
Something is said to have presence when it demands that the beholder

take it into account, that he takes it seriously – and when the fulfilment
of that demand consists simply in being aware of it and, so to speak, in
acting accordingly.68
Fried does not dismiss the potential effect of the work but is concerned
that its effect is not specific to art, and is not therefore attributable to an
aesthetic effect and the criteria of judgement that are part of that tradi-
tion. Drawing on the example given by the sculptor Tony Smith in an inter-
view published in Artforum the previous year – of driving at night on an
unfinished road – Fried describes Smith’s account as ‘compelling’, refer-
ring to the clear emotional impact of the ‘experience’ and its ‘endless’,
personal nature before turning to the threat that such a preoccupation
with the duration of time presents to art. The fear that ‘authentic’ modern
art was being ‘corrupted and perverted by theatre’ led Fried to adopt a
tone of outrage which has made him an easy target – often reduced to rep-
resenting an outdated, conservative approach – yet the subtle understand-
ing of the apparent similarities between the differing approaches reveals
a deep understanding of the impact that this turn away from the object
represented for the traditions of art criticism and aesthetics.69 For exam-
ple, Fried’s consideration of time in the final section, quoted below, might

The figural 41
initially seem to correlate with that of Lyotard’s description of event – as

having ‘no duration’:
It is this continuous and entire presentness, amounting, as it were, to the

perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantane-
ousness : as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely
brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the
work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it.70
However, neither Lyotard’s event nor his discussion of presence presumes

that such insight is possible: it may result in emotional intensity but is
closer to the endlessness that Tony Smith experienced in the dark of the
unfinished New Jersey turnpike, than the transcendent grace of modern-
ist ‘presentness’. In his opening epigraph, which talks of the presentness
of God, Fried foregrounds the spiritual implications of his argument for
the particularity of art. What Lyotard does share with Fried is a belief that
art has a particular function, but unlike Fried Lyotard argues for an art
which transforms, not transcends. Lyotard’s position is clearly closer to
the anti-modernists who have reversed Fried’s narrow prognosis in order
to embrace the theatricality and interdisciplinarity which Fried feared, but
Lyotard does not simply reject the tradition of painting; rather, he acknowl-
edges the different means by which artists strive in their task.
How Lyotard defines the task of art in the most frequently referenced
English texts of the mid-1980s has led to the frequent use of misrepresenta-
tive sound-bites that circle round the notion of the unpresentable. The
publication history of these texts will be dealt with in detail in Chapter 4
but I will outline here those points which relate to the discussion of time
and presence. In the widely circulated ‘Answering the Question: What is
Postmodernism?’, included as an appendix to the English translation of
The Postmodern Condition , Lyotard makes three important points which
have a bearing on the task of art:
I shall call modern the art which devotes its ‘little technical expertise’
(son ‘petit technique’ ), as Diderot used to say, to present the fact that the
unpresentable exists [. . .]
The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the
unpresentable in presentation itself [. . .]
Post Modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of
the future (post) anterior (modo).71

It is useful to highlight that Lyotard’s use of the term postmodern refuses

the sense of a linear chronology implicit in the term itself and the specifi-
city of Lyotard’s approach in this regard is generally acknowledged. What
have been misunderstood in several contexts, however, are the subtleties
surrounding the idea of the unpresentable, leading to a frequent use of the
phrase ‘presenting the unpresentable’ which is not used by Lyotard. Among
the most surprising is that of Hugh Silverman – Professor of Philosophy
and Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University – whose use of the
phrase affects the argument he puts forward regarding Lyotard’s sublime
and the role of ‘Arrive-t-il? ’. I will briefly explain the consequences of this
mistranslation with reference to Silverman’s essay and conclude with some
initial remarks on the extent to which Lyotard’s use of terms such as pres-
ence connects with the figural. Silverman misquotes: ‘Lyotard states that
the postmodern is “the presentation of the unpresentable in presentation
itself”’ which concurs with neither of the published English translations
nor the original French: ‘Le postmoderne serait ce qui dans le moderne allègue
l’imprésentable dans la présentation elle-même’.72 By rendering ‘allègue ’ as ‘the
presentation’ rather than ‘puts forward’ or ‘invokes’ (used in an alterna-
tive translation), Silverman renders the phrase both tautological and para-
doxical and in so doing fails to highlight the most significant aspect of
that which Lyotard is describing as postmodern – the event that cannot be
presented, which has no means of being presented and can therefore only
be invoked.73 As there is no suitable idiom in which the unpresentable can
be put forward it is the subject of that which Lyotard terms a différend – a
conflict that cannot be resolved without exercising a wrong, owing to the
absence of a rule of judgement which could be applied equally to both par-
ties. When a suitable idiom is found then it can be considered as a presen-
tation but, contrary to the implications of Silverman’s statement, it will no
longer be event. It is not, therefore, merely a pedantic point but one which
begins to expose the gap between Lyotard’s reception in the Anglophone
world and the complexity of his thinking that this reception has often been
unable to present. In 1982, Artforum published an essay by Lyotard under
the title ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime’ which connotes the
same paradoxical propositions as highlighted above; Lyotard made it clear
in a later interview that the title was not his – ‘It was not my title and I could
never have written it,’ he said; the essay was re-titled as ‘Representation,
Presentation, Unpresentable’ when it was collected in The Inhuman.74
To what extent does this notion of the unpresentable mesh with that
of ‘presence’ and the term that initiated this chapter, the figural? First,
we can reiterate Lyotard’s explicit refusal of any spiritual overtones in his

The figural 43
approach to aesthetics – as made evident in his objection to Paul Claudel’s

vision at the opening of Discourse, Figure – and therefore we should approach
his writings on presence and the sublime as a figural working of existing
aesthetic traditions, in order to undo ‘the presumption of the mind with
respect to time’, operating in a manner closer to that of Buren’s in situ
interventions, rather than the ‘instantaneousness’ of Fried’s writings.75
What is less clear, however, is the extent to which Lyotard’s preoccupation
with questions of temporality – discussed here in relation to the Arrive-t-il?
and his dialogue on presence – indicate a move from the largely spatial
concerns of the figure in Discourse, Figure. In fact the figure-matrix, the
instance of the figural briefly outlined above, is the figural of unconscious
desire and its libidinal force that, following Freud, knows no time. It is not,
then, that temporality does not concern the figural, but that the figure –
like event – fissures chronological time under the force of desire; not the
desire responsible for the delay in Duchamp’s Large Glass but the force of
the figural that Lyotard describes as ‘difference itself’.76 It is significant
that when Lyotard writes of Buren it is not in comparison to Duchamp –
the libidinal transformer – but to Cézanne: ‘There is – there, in the work
of Buren, a sort of paradox: to make seen the invisible of the visible which
is inscribed in the Cézannian problematic.’77 This comparison links Buren
back to the figural of Discourse, Figure where Cézanne’s struggle is one of
desire: not to represent a scene but to shatter the search for signification,
allowing the fluidity of the figural, the discord of event and its unpresent-
ability. But desire is not fulfilled in the work: it is the error of psychoana-
lytic interpretation of art work, Freud’s included, to suggest this. Rather,
Lyotard emphasizes at the end of Discourse, Figure, desire is unfulfilled in
the work; this is the role of all art; it concerns unfulfilled signs – in the
process of disruption and transformation.78

Lyotard and The Fi Gural in Performance, Art and Writing: Kiff Bamford

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Lyotard and the ﬁgural in

Performance, Art and Writing

9781441167071_FM_Rev_txt_prf.indd iii 3/29/2001 7:30:35 AM

It might appear that these two comments by French philosopher Jean-

Art and Theory

The relationship of contemporary art to its bedfellows in theory has a long

9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 1 3/29/2001 7:31:15 AM

Blazwick is here writing of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s

9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 2 3/29/2001 7:31:15 AM

Why Performance Art?

9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 3 3/29/2001 7:31:15 AM

Performance and its historical legacy is an important topic of debate,

9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 4 3/29/2001 7:31:15 AM

‘Why should we still be interested in Lyotard?’ asked Amelia Jones in

9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 5 3/29/2001 7:31:15 AM

It is necessary to reconsider now those writings by Lyotard which have

9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 6 3/29/2001 7:31:15 AM

9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 7 3/29/2001 7:31:16 AM

Monory are published as parallel texts in French and English together

Performing the ﬁgural

Through focusing on the different means by which Lyotard performs and

9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 8 3/29/2001 7:31:16 AM

with the history of contemporary performance. In the course of this book

9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 9 3/29/2001 7:31:16 AM

alternative sensorial means. This emphasis on alternative modes of com-

9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 10 3/29/2001 7:31:16 AM

Introductory books in general (and this one is no exception) rely on

Bennington works with the knowledge of these limitations and gives an

9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 11 3/29/2001 7:31:16 AM

Writing another introductory text on Lyotard in the wake of Bennington’s

9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 12 3/29/2001 7:31:16 AM

attempt to correct any misappropriation but rather revels in the unex-

Lyotard is much more than an art theorist, philosopher of art or art

9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 13 3/29/2001 7:31:16 AM

to paint?] was re-issued in 2008. Que peindre? is itself part of a return to

9781441167071_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 14 3/29/2001 7:31:16 AM

The body is being used as an art language by an ever greater number of

9781441167071_Ch01_Rev_txt_prf.indd 15 3/29/2001 7:25:45 AM

9781441167071_Ch01_Rev_txt_prf.indd 16 3/29/2001 7:25:45 AM

Deﬁning the ﬁgural

. . . the given is not a text, it possesses an inherent thickness, or rather a

9781441167071_Ch01_Rev_txt_prf.indd 17 3/29/2001 7:25:45 AM

9781441167071_Ch01_Rev_txt_prf.indd 18 3/29/2001 7:25:45 AM

. . . a dislocated body whereupon speech impresses fragments that in

9781441167071_Ch01_Rev_txt_prf.indd 19 3/29/2001 7:25:45 AM

the further destabilization that Lyotard would desire in order to disrupt

9781441167071_Ch01_Rev_txt_prf.indd 20 3/29/2001 7:25:45 AM

eye that is rendered inexpressible in a discourse which assumes a ﬁxed

9781441167071_Ch01_Rev_txt_prf.indd 21 3/29/2001 7:25:46 AM

language – ‘vibrating until it disjoins’.12 There can be no model to follow,

9781441167071_Ch01_Rev_txt_prf.indd 22 3/29/2001 7:25:46 AM

discourse and ﬁgure are inseparably enmeshed yet radically different. It is

The largely unedited account of my time spent in the performance space

In the case of the anamorphosis, the signiﬁer itself is under siege,

9781441167071_Ch01_Rev_txt_prf.indd 23 3/29/2001 7:25:46 AM

This is an example of the ﬁgural at work: it cannot be seen but by inducing

This present introduction to the ﬁgural and my extended usage – to refer to

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9781441167071_Ch01_Rev_txt_prf.indd 25 3/29/2001 7:25:46 AM

of Valerio Adami takes a comparatively traditional approach to painting

9781441167071_Ch01_Rev_txt_prf.indd 26 3/29/2001 7:25:46 AM

‘Arrive-t-il? ’ ‘Is it happening?’

9781441167071_Ch01_Rev_txt_prf.indd 27 3/29/2001 7:25:46 AM