[-empyre-] The Hyper-Modern Condition

[Eric Kluitenberg <epk@xs4all.nl>]

Dear empyre list members,

It was my strict intention to enter the debate on the lingering  
legacy of modernism much earlier in the month. However, a flue has  
rendered me rather unable to work on anything intellectually  
demanding for the last two to three weeks, and even now I am  
struggling with the last cold symptoms. Apparently, a lot of people  
here locally (Amsterdam) have been taken down by this flue and have  
similar experience with intensity and length of this viral  
contamination....

I have followed some of the discussion on the list, though not all,  
and it seems there is a highly lively debate. However, I did not find  
the particular perspective introduced here that I originally  
suggested to Christina as a possible contribution to the discussion.  
So, what I want to do right now is to provide you with some basic  
notes on the topic I suggested. These notes follow below, plus  
further references. Although not much time is left for the current  
discussion, and my own time is severely under pressure after having  
lost a good two weeks of productive time, I welcome comments,  
criticism or remarks.

---------------------------------

The Hyper-Modern Condition

Cursory notes on the persisting legacy of modernism


Walter Benjamin seems to have said that there has never been an era  
that has not felt itself 'excessively modern'.

Almost thirty years after Jean-François Lyotard published his  
'rapport sur le savoir', "La condition postmoderne", the experience  
of modernity seems far from over. Lyotard himself observed that there  
is something that links the technosciences, the avantgardes and  
advanced capitalism together that defines this unique experience of  
the modern, and that 'thing' is a shared affinity with infinity  
("affinité avec l'infinité").

The technosciences exhibit the infinite ability of knowing (acquiring  
knowledge), the avantgardes exhibit the infinity of 'plastic  
invention' (the infinity of possible modes of representation), and  
advanced capitalism exhibits the infinite ability to realise. Thus,  
in Lyotard's formula the modern program can be summed up as "seeing  
all, knowing all, realising all". The horizon of modernity is that of  
all that is possible, and Lyotard reminds us, horizons recede into  
infinity as we move forward....

Now the problem of infinity vis-à-vis representation is, of course,  
that infinity itself is qua hypothesis unrepresentable, and can only  
be established, 'shown to exist', negatively, via an inverted sign, a  
sign that is a non-sign, a sign that points beyond itself through its  
negative (non-representational) form to hint at something  
unrepresentable. In this case it is easy to see that something  
without an end (something infinite) can never have a specific form -  
in the Kantian formula; can never be synthesised into unique form in  
space and time.

This specific understanding of the 'modern condition' of Lyotard,  
quite inescapably drives him into the direction of the aesthetics of  
the sublime, which he adopts from Kant's Kritik der Urteillskraft,  
but modifies substantially to integrate the avant-garde's use of  
negative signs to show that the unrepresentable exists. At some point  
(in his essay "la philosophie et la peinture à l'ere de leur  
expérimentation" of 1979 - the same year as his Postmodern Condition)  
he even states that it is the highest aim of (avantgarde) art today  
to show that the unrepresentable exists, and even that it is the only  
task worthy of a practice with a century of heroic 'experimentation'.

So, to make a mild understatement, it is clear that this is not a  
side-issue in his work. In fact the figure of the unrepresentable is  
at work in the Postmodern Condition as well. Here Lyotard states the  
incommensurability of language games, because a shared scale of  
measurement (of judgements) is absent these language games are  
untranslatable into one another. Conflicting judgements, especially  
epistemological and moral judgements, can therefore only be  
'resolved' by applying 'terror' to one or more of these conflicting  
language games if they are to reach a common ground of consensus.  
Consensus then is terror and therefore fundamentally suspect.

In "Le Differend" Lyotard develops this point in great detail and  
shows that even in the most gruesome case, the holocaust denial,  
conflicting judgements between incommensurable language games can  
never be resolved without the application of terror. It is this point  
more than anything else that locked Lyotard in a bitter dispute with  
Habermas in the 80s, which became widely known as the modernism /  
post-modernism debate. Today we see the lingering of these positions  
in the different stances that are taken on the debates of  
multiculturalism  versus integration, and the continental European  
debate on a "Leitkultur". Here the ambiguities of moral judgements  
between universalisms versus inextinguishable difference collide head  
to head in some of the most virulent and controversial socio- 
political debates and the policies that are based on the positions  
taken within those debates on immigration, integration, and  
segregation, in Europe but also elsewhere.

Now, going back to Lyotard's aesthetic theory (as I tried to show in  
some broad brush strokes intimately linked with his "post-modern"  
political theory), what puzzles me is that he coined the term "post- 
modern" for a particular condition he observed in the technosciences,  
society and culture. What this term suggests is something 'beyond'  
modernism'. While, especially in his aesthetic theory, and the use of  
the motives of the sublime, the unrepresentable, the negative sign,  
the negative dialectics of the image, he is using 'classically'  
modern concepts to discuss tendencies in contemporary arts and culture.

Furthermore, knowing that it was Lyotard's primary profession to be  
an aesthetician, rather than a philosopher of science or a political  
philosopher, and also knowing that he did indeed write some  
magnificent texts on contemporary artists of his time and made many  
invaluable contributions to art-theoretical discourse also in main- 
stream visual arts magazines, the use of these modern (modernist)  
concepts is in no way out of naiveté, or a lack of understanding of  
the contemporary context of art-theoretical and aesthetic discourse.

Thus the figure of the unrepresentable and the aesthetic reflection  
on that what is qua hypothesis impossible to give shape or form  
should be considered at the heart of Lyotard's philosophy and through  
his phenomenal influence on the modernity / post-modernity debate  
should also be considered one of the core themes of this debate per se.

That make sit all the more problematic that while the suggestion of a  
move beyond modernism / modernity / the modern experience is made, a  
curiously modern set of concepts and analytic strategies is employed  
to make this point. In fact the kind of program that Lyotard  
postulates for 'la peinture' in the age of its experimentation is not  
post-modern, but hyper-modern.

To stretch language a bit further here and use some Baudrillardian  
terms in a tongue-in-cheeks way, you could say that this discourse is  
not hyper-real at all, but instead 'really hyper-modern'.....


Why is this a problem?

OK - so if this argument I made would hold on closer and critical  
scrutiny I could maintain that I have shown that Lyotard's thought is  
no no way beyond the modern, but is instead hyper-modern. This would  
leave most of the debate on what is customarily understood as post- 
modern in philosophy / political science / cultural theory in tact.  
It also does not affect the furious debate on universalism versus  
inextinguishable difference, and it seems but a technical point - of  
interest for Lyotard adepts like myself, but rather less interesting  
for the rest of humanity....

But here is only where the trouble starts. Lyotard presents a  
magnificent framework that allows us to link up avant-garde art  
production, the techno-sciences and advanced capitalism in one  
analytic framework - that of a shared affinity with infinity. And the  
unrepresentable links up the debate in epistemology on the unknowable  
in an all too perfect way with the negative dialectics of the avant- 
garde and the incommensurability of language games. The second point  
Lyotard summed up in an interview in a theme issue of the German art  
magazine Kunstforum International as "The incommensurable is the  
unrepresentable" and thus his political and aesthetic theories are  
firmly interlocked in an ultimately condensed and clear formula -  
brilliant!

The problem arises from Lyotard's strict rejection of technological  
mediation. In 1985 he produced, together with Thierry Chaput a rather  
infamous exhibition at the centre Pompidou called Les Immatériaux,  
which tried to investigate the meaning of the fact of the 'new  
materials'. Rather than being strictly didactic exhibition it  
presented scenario's and situations that attempted to heighten the  
sensitivity of the audience for the things that were changing because  
of the fact of the new materials - materials that in a contradictory  
way were no longer materials for a project - thus the term  
'immaterials'. Here Lyotard connects his exploration of the  
technosciences, the avantgardes and advanced capitalism with the  
development of new materials en mediation techniques. The show seems  
ultimately positioned to question the difficulties and contradictions  
these new materials and mediation techniques bring about, but also  
their transformatory social potential, in a way their emancipatory  
potential.

Lyotard goes at great length to show that ever more complex  
technological arrangements place themselves in-between man and the  
reality that she/he tries to transform or work upon. We increasingly  
loose contact with the materials, and increasingly interact via  
'immaterials' that have placed themselves between man and (social /  
physical / material) reality. The decisive step is the moment when  
digital data were introduced, data without an analogy to their  
origin. "It is as if a filter has been placed between us and the  
things, a screen of numbers", Lyotard writes in the text on the  
concept of the show in the catalogue.

Once digital data start to circulate in electronic networks they  
dissolve every connection with the reality they seek or are supposed  
to represent. Any source-information is translated into a universal  
code (without analogy to its origin) and is subject to the  
possibility of endless circulation and complete malleability.  
However, what is crucial to understand about digital data (digital  
notation) is that its notation scheme is essentially finite and  
completely articulated. In it, Lyotard states in a later interview  
about the show, "everything becomes a message - even the silence,  
which strictly speaking does not tell anything, but generates meaning".

Already in an earlier essay that examines the advance of photography  
and its influence on the artistic practice of painting Lyotard  
critiques the "complete determinacy" of the technological medium.  
This is brought to its logical conclusion in the digital notation  
scheme and its application to electronic technologies (that operate  
in real-time). This complete determinacy leaves no space for the  
indeterminate, which is stamped out as a possibility of  
representation, but also can no longer be negatively represented  
within this notation scheme as everything within that scheme is a  
message, he maintains, Digital mediation then precludes the  
possibility of showing the unrepresentable to exist.

Art that relies on digital mediation then falls essentially short of  
the highest task that Lyotard has ascribed to art today, and equally  
as carrier of social discourse and debate digital mediation precludes  
the possibility to demonstrate the incommensurability of language  
games because it is itself a finite language game, defined by  
immutable rules: A matrix of perfect articulation.

If you would follow Lyotard's position that language games are  
incommensurable and subject to terror if one is to imprint a shared  
final position in a conflict of judgement between such  
incommensurable language games, then the universalist discourse of  
classical modernism must be understood to be essentially flawed.  
Habermas' position of communicative transparency must then for  
instance be understood as nothing else than the imposition of a view  
of dominant culture on to a less powerful culture through the  
application of terror (physical and/or cultural force). Personally I  
would reluctantly follow the argument and adhere to that position of  
Lyotard.

The emancipatory potential of digital mediation should then,  
following the same arguments outlined above, be considered nihil. The  
finity and complete articulation of the digital scheme precludes the  
possibility of the incommensurable difference between language games  
to emerge within that system of digital mediation, because the system  
itself is already predicated on a specific, finite and fully  
articulated language game. The use of digital media thus would not  
allow for any kind of bridging of cultural differences and/or divides  
but simply erase cultural difference within the finite and fully  
articulated scheme of digital notation.

Out with the system of digital mediation and more broadly  
technological mediation, which has been rejected by Lyotard because  
of its complete determinacy, also goes the possibility of  
intervention into the domain of technological mediation. However,  
most of social interaction today is carried by technological  
mediation, from print media to electronic mass media to internet, e- 
mail, discussion fora, blogs, mailing lists (like empyre), mobile  
phones, sms, 3rd and 4th generation wireless media, wifi networks,  
open source and free software systems and much much more. All of  
these simply serve the establishment of a dominant cultural code that  
extinguishes the very possibility of difference to enter the social  
arena, to manifest itself or to be invertedly demonstrated by  
negative signs that point to the infinity of possible language  
games / modes of representation / the infinity of plastic invention.

Lyotard's discourse thus becomes hermetic and locks itself in a dead- 
end street. Indeed in some of his latest writings he is utterly  
dystopian and considers 'the system' to have become all-encompassing  
(as afar as the social process goes) and without an external point of  
critique since everything, the social in its entirety is fully  
captured and completely immersed in 'the system' (technoscientific  
rationality and the infinite ability of advanced capitalism to  
realise). And this position is obviously completely unproductive if  
one still has any hope for social, cultural and political progress of  
whatever kind....


Being excessively hyper-modern and how to go beyond the hyper-modern  
condition...

What is amazingly striking about Lyotard's critique is that it  
pinpoints some of the most painful fallacies of modernist discourse  
and the social and political systems they give rise to, yet that the  
very same arguments lead Lyotard in classically modern trap. The  
critique of modernity comes from within (this is a bit like  
Tourainne), but it leads to a hermetic position that cannot escape  
the system from which it was produced, and still suggest a necessary  
outcome of 'historical' development, not an end of history, nor an  
'incomplete project', but rather a final endpoint of the modernist  
project, and all-encompassing system that no longer has any external  
reference point from which a fundamental or systemic critique could  
be successfully raised, since any critique is already subsumed in the  
system.

This leads to a dangerous fatalistic position: The only  
transformation of this all-encompassing system is its complete  
destruction by an incommensurable form of otherness. In more mundane  
terms, a clash of civilisations, the destruction of the west by  
what...?? The orient? The Islamic world? (whatever that may be...).  
By the 'global south'?

Digital / technological mediation in any case according to this  
formula would not be a possibility for starting some kind of  
dialogue, since it merely means the application of terror to any form  
of otherness not already subsumed in the cultural system that  
produced these technologies.

One way out might be to reject Lyotard's position on the  
incommensurability of language game and to re-approach the incomplete  
project of finding a communicative meta-level at which conflicting  
judgements between different language games can be resolved in terms  
of 'universal' human needs, concerns, and aspirations. But I must say  
that I just cannot see how such a universalist discourse would ever  
work, even if it is developed from a fundamental understanding of  
respect for the initial difference of these conflicting judgements  
and the cultural systems in which and across which they are made?

To take just a very simple example; how can a typically modernist  
aspiration as the quest for self-actualisation of the subject,  
ultimately be reconciled with a culture which is entirely predicated  
on family relations and where these family relations define the moral  
framework within which judgements about proper behaviour are made? We  
cannot erase that difference by going back to common biological and  
material determinants as this would inflict terror on all language  
games  / cultural systems - culture after all 'is' our nature....

Another option would be a regression to closed cultural systems, a  
reactionary move away from the modernist affinity with infinity, a  
rejection of the desire to see all, know all, and to realise all, and  
instead opt for deliberate restriction to a historically grown and  
fortified cultural framework, in which difference is not so much  
denied as it is evaded or ignored. That would indeed be a completely  
regressive and reactionary move that might work for somebody like  
Roger Scruton, but certainly not for me.

Overlooking this battle-field I cannot help but feel totally immersed  
in modernity and quite unable to escape it, even if its limitations,  
its implicit terror and its internal contradictions are blatantly  
clear to me, and as such I can no longer claim "I'm a believer!".  
Instead I feel hyper-modern, and in this case, and different from  
Lyotard, in a sense closer to the notion of the hyper-real that  
Baudrillard has suggested.

This could be summarised as being fully aware that what is  
circulating in the networks are the empty signifiers of failed modern  
project, the symbols of empty modernism, yet acknowledging that (in a  
society saturated by technological mediation) symbols is all that is  
left to act through in the social arena, in the public domain. When  
Naomi Klein wrote "From symbols to substance" she was dead-wrong,  
symbols is the only substance that is left for our social reality,  
which has scaled up so far beyond the face to face that any physical  
action only becomes socially meaningful in as far as it is  
technologically / symbolically mediated.

The approach one could take then to still act socially and in public  
is concrete action in this symbolical and technological mediated  
domain, for which the history and legacy of modernism and the  
avantgardes offers us all the conceptual and practical tools to  
deploy such actions.

--------------------------


I tried to explore some of these issues in the text "Transfiguration  
of the Avant-Garde" and I think that this text is still not  
satisfactory, also it links up quite exclusively to interventions of  
The Yesmen  in the second part of the text (though this material was  
developed way before they became a hype), and the analysis needs to  
be expanded along the lines roughly sketched above. You can find the  
text in various places on-line, a.o. here:

http://www.debalie.nl/dossierartikel.jsp?dossierid=13636&articleid=13798

Some more info concerning my biography, projects, texts, can be found  
here:

http://www.debalie.nl/persoon.jsp?personid=920


I hope this was / is of interest.

best wishes,

Eric