Immaterials, Exhibition,
Acceleration
Robin Mackay
Les Immatériaux,1 the exhibition staged by design theorist Thierry Chaput and
philosopher Jean-François Lyotard at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1985,
confronted an accelerating cycle in which technological instruments afford
us a grasp of matter beyond the human perceptual gamut, decomposing the
structure of objects into systems of imperceptible elements which are then
recomposed, predominantly through the use of machine languages, into new
materials. (The term “immaterials” therefore refers to these new materials
and their retroactive effect upon our conception of matter as such; not to any
notion of the dematerialised, incorporeal or disembodied).
According to the proposition of Les Immatériaux, these new developments
disrupt the notion of matter as something destined for and subservient to
human projects. Rather than a stable set of materials ready for use, we are
faced with an unstable set of interactions that problematise apparently stable
polarities such as mind versus matter, hardware versus software, matter
versus form, matter versus state, and matter versus energy.
In its attempt to articulate this rupture and its repercussions in the form of
a public exhibition, Les Immatériaux can be regarded as a pivotal moment in
the convergence of philosophy, art and exhibition-making. It enables us to
take a critical look at a set of intertwined tendencies related to what we might
1
My acquaintance with Les Immatériaux has emerged over the course of many discussions, initially with composer Florian Hecker, and, more recently, with philosopher Yuk
Hui. This text is drawn from presentations made at several symposia during the course
of 2014: at the exhibition Speculations on Anonymous Materials at the Fridericianum in
Kassel, at 30 Years after Les Immatériaux at the Centre for Digital Cultures at the Leuphana University of Lüneberg, and at Megarave-Metarave at Wallriss in Fribourg.
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30 Years after Les Immatériaux
call “the postmodern moment”, which include the emergence of theoretical
and/or philosophical thought as a constituent part of exhibition-making and,
conversely, the emergence of the contemporary art exhibition as an international arena for (something like) philosophical discourse; exhibition-making
as a collective dramatisation of the contemporary conjuncture; and the
instrumentalisation of this practice as a mode of cultural capitalisation.
In the following, I first argue for the continuing relevance of the concept
of “immaterials” for us today, then go on to examine the exhibition itself,
detailing its historical and institutional context and scrutinizing Lyotard’s
philosophical and extra-philosophical motivations for entering into the
unknown territory of this crossover between disciplines and genres. I suggest
that the intentions and means of Les Immatériaux should be re-evaluated in
the light of the norms, politics and economics of the globalised contemporary
art scene that has developed since the time of Les Immatériaux, many facets of
which were anticipated by the 1985 exhibition. Finally, I ask whether the question of “accelerationism” emerging in contemporary philosophy today (which
is strongly linked to a certain turn in Lyotard’s thinking at the time of Les
Immatériaux) might provide a way to reorient the impulse of Les Immatériaux
outside of what have now become institutional constraints.
Immaterials Today
In the 1990s, working with a colony of narcoleptic dogs that had been bred in
captivity for several generations in a research facility in Stanford, scientists
finally identified the damaged gene responsible for their dynasty of sleepy
canines: these dogs lacked a receptor for a neurotransmitter chemical that
would later be named orexin. This chemical had been identified in the late
‘90s as having an appetite-stimulating effect, and had been earmarked for
future obesity research. The discovery at Stanford opened up a different
destiny for it, and suggested a novel approach to the development of sleep
drugs: whereas scientists had formerly aimed to find neurochemical agents
that would encourage the onset of sleep – something that a whole generation
of drugs had achieved only by adopting a crude “sledgehammer” approach –
research now became focused on blocking the reception of a chemical that is
instrumental in keeping the brain in a waking state.
The pharmaceutical giant Merck conducted a computer-controlled chemical
scan of a library of three million compounds, compounds which themselves
were the by-products of other (both successful and unsuccessful) research
projects. A sample of each of these compounds was introduced in turn into a
“cellular soup derived from human cells and modified to act as a surrogate of
the brain”. An agent was added that would react with orexin and glow if it was
present. This automated process was filmed automatically and, over three
Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration
weeks, the plates that failed to light up were reduced down to a few for further
testing. The resulting new drug is currently under review by the Federal Drug
Administration and is expected to come to market shortly. 2
This type of procedure is in more general use as a technique in materials
science called “high-throughput computational design”, which is expected
to replace the trial-and-error techniques previously used in developing new
materials. It combines the resources of massive computing power and a
growing knowledge of how desired properties such as hardness, conductivity,
colour, etc., can be attributed to quantum-level characteristics of matter.
Once they have identified the low-level configurations of matter that give rise
to a certain desired property – its “fundamental descriptor” – scientists at
the Materials Project at Berkeley3 can “access, search, screen and compare” a
database of tens of thousands of inorganic materials for candidates. A “golden
age of materials design” is anticipated: “[m]assive computing power has given
human beings greater power to turn raw matter into useful technologies than
they have ever had.” 4
A material is no longer an obstinate, opaque, natural given, ready to be
formed according to a specific human project. Materials are now coded
structures that are already the product of a generalised scanning and an
immaterial manipulation and production before they even enter the domain
of manufacturing. The total combinatorial space of possible configurations
(including compounds that do not occur naturally, and are even virtual and asyet inexistent) is available as a huge memory bank to be searched and probed;
increasingly, the same can be said for the neural space of the brain. Rather
than being the subject who masters the material object, or the destined recipient of its message, the human is the transmitter of automated discoveries,
and in turn is itself treated as a complex of coded, structured matter interfacing with other compounds both organic and inorganic.
Closer to the everyday world, consider the recent mass-market emergence
of the electronic cigarette: here the pleasure taken in the inhaling of the
smoke of the burning tobacco plant – a ritualised psychotropic act emerging
no doubt from a contingent encounter in human history – is analysed into its
component parts and simulated through the use of electronic components
and inorganic materials. The meanings with which tobacco products were
freighted are also disrupted through their transfer into this new, simulated
form. The synthetic process splinters the organic meaning of the act of
smoking: the neuroactive agent and its addictive properties are separated
from the evocations of fire, smoke and ash, with a nicotine-laden glycol-water
2
Ian Parker, “The Big Sleep”, New Yorker, December 9, 2013, p. 50–63.
3
See https://www.materialsproject.org.
4
Gerbrand Ceder, Kristin Persson, “The Stuff of Dreams”, Scientific American, December
2013.
217
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30 Years after Les Immatériaux
vapour offering a tactile and visual analogue for smoke; the potential to
tincture this base with multiple flavours opens it onto the space of the culinary
and olfactory arts, and introduces a disturbing parallel to candy (deplored as
either infantilising for adults or as a danger to children). In the new simulacra
of the aesthetic and – if we might say so – sublime or spiritual aspect of
smoking, with its connotations of nihilism or sacrifice, the fatal consequences
are attenuated (as far as we know), and the habit is welded to a new complex
of associations (the logic of the electronic gadget, that of hardware/software,
and, increasingly, that of “hacking”).
In meshing neurotropics with digital electronics (potentially Internet-connected, keeping in mind that vapestick batteries are charged by plugging them
into the USB ports of PCs), what is really created is a generalised platform for
the delivery of self-administered pharmaceutical compounds – something that
is already being explored by vape “modders”. It would not be stretching things
to imagine, a few years from now, that a wireless vapestick will sample its
owner’s saliva and, detecting imbalances or being programmed for a required
psychotropic state, will immediately synthesise and supply an appropriate
cocktail in vapour form, at the same time recording and consolidating the
data for mass analysis or crowd-based sharing, data which in turn could be
scanned and analysed to develop new products.
Even the time-honoured experience of duration involved in smoking a cigarette disappears, replaced by the temporality of “chainvaping”. The public
health (not to mention tax) implications are unclear, and so far the devices
exist in a kind of legal and statutory limbo. In short, here as elsewhere,
material innovation also constitutes a cultural event that has repercussions
across many different spheres.
As Lyotard surmised, then, “Immaterials” assemble a machine neoculture
whose developments are intractable to the discourses we inherit from
humanism and modern progressivism. With a prescient sense of the danger
that this revolution of materials could easily proceed uncomprehended by
philosophical thought, in staging Les Immatériaux Lyotard set himself up as a
(devil’s) advocate for immaterials:
Prisoners of the materialism of the industrial revolution, immaterial
materials suffer from their invisibility. But it is here that a culture is
fashioned, through images, sounds and words. 5
The few examples I have given – and of course there are many more – show
clearly enough that the question of materials has indeed changed register. As
Lyotard argues, with these developments we can no longer trust our intuitive
categorisation of objects, and their matter can no longer be understood
5
Les Immatériaux catalogue, Album, p. 10.
Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration
as a given that can be expected to correlate naturally with common-sense
language derived from our historical interactions with the world. New
symbolic machineries, whose rapid and dense operations we can no longer
fathom, shape the synthesis of these new “immaterials” that have become a
part of our lives; they confound natural language, confronting us with experiences we don’t yet have the words to describe, and in which our place as
creator–designer–user is significantly reconfigured by ubiquitous mechanisms
of abstraction:
“Immaterial” materials, albeit not immaterial, are now preponderant in
the flux of exchanges, whether as objects of transformation or investment, even if only because the passage through the abstract is now
obligatory… [A]ny raw material for synthesis can be constructed by
computer and one can know all of its properties, even if it does not yet
exist or no longer exists.6
According to Lyotard, the classic modern (Cartesian) conception of matter
sought to expel “secondary qualities” from matter-as-pure-extension; their
sensible reception would be only a “theatrical effect” of the body, the body as
a “confused speaker” which “says ‘soft’, ‘warm’, ‘blue’, ‘heavy’”.7 The science of
immaterials instead grasps and manipulates these qualities as the effects of
relative disparities between memory-systems (tellingly, Berkeley’s Materials
Project was formerly known as the Materials Genome Project). In turn, the
human mind becomes only one of a series of “transformers” that fleetingly
generate immaterials as they extract and contract flows of energy-information: “even the transformer that our central nervous system is … can only
transcribe and inscribe according to its own rhythm the extractions which
come to it” 8 – we are synthesisers among synthesisers, and not the destination
and arbiter of all matters:
the progress that has been accomplished in the sciences, and perhaps
in the arts as well, is strictly connected to an ever closer knowledge of
what we generally call objects. (Which can also be a question of objects
of thought.) And so analysis decomposes these objects and makes us
perceive that, finally, there can only be considered to be objects at the
level of a human point of view; at their constitution or structural level,
they are only a question of complex agglomerates of tiny packets of
energy, or of particles that can’t possibly be grasped as such. Finally,
there’s no such thing as matter, and the only thing that exists is energy;
we no longer have any such thing as materials, in the old sense of the
6
7
Ibid.
Jean-François Lyotard, “Matter and Time”, in The Inhuman (London: Polity Press, 1991), p.
37–38.
8
Ibid., p. 43.
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30 Years after Les Immatériaux
word that implied an object that offered resistance to any kind of project
that attempted to alienate it from its primary finalities.9
For Lyotard the historical moment of immaterials promises a deanthropocentricisation of culture even as it heralds the end of the progressive program of
modernity. Far from being simply emancipatory, however, the predicament
into which it draws us is profoundly ambivalent: “if we have at our disposal
interfaces capable of memorizing, in a fashion accessible to us, vibrations
naturally beyond our ken … then we are extending our power of differentiation
and our memories, we are delaying reactions which are as yet not under control, we are increasing our material liberty”; and yet this liberty comes at the
price of security, at the price of a counterfinality of technique and a “foreclosure of ends”.10
What the age of immaterials promises, then, is a complexification of matter
“in which energy comes to be reflected, without humans necessarily getting
any benefit from this”.11 And since immaterialisation, through its generalised
coding and redistribution of material affect, also reconfigures our relation to
the cultural and the aesthetic, it implies “a profound crisis of aesthetics and
therefore of the contemporary arts”.12 As a deliberate exacerbation of this
crisis, Les Immatériaux sought to create a “dramaturgy” of the new condition
of “interactivity”;13 to stage the uncertainty and ambivalence of this disruptive
moment in the history of matter, exploring “the chagrin that surrounds the
end of the modern age as well as the feeling of jubilation that’s connected with
the appearance of something new”. Most importantly, it sought “to activate
this disarray rather than to appease it”,14 by creating an experience that would
allow its audience to explore the “collective cortex constituted by machine
memories”15 (a formulation that no doubt sounded futuristic in 1985 but is
close to being a commonplace today).16
Legitimation, Intensification
It is a question, then, of “legitimation” or “vindication”, of allowing these new
materials their proper place in a culture yet to come, and thus of ushering in
this culture – an operation that simultaneously entails a calling into question
9
Jean-François Lyotard, Interview with Bernard Blistène, Flash Art, March 1985.
10
Lyotard, “Matter and Time”, p. 54.
11
Ibid., p. 45.
12
Ibid., p. 50.
13
“Interactivity” in the ambivalent and disquieting sense that Lyotard gives to it: see his
“report” in the present volume.
14
Lyotard, Interview with Bernard Blistène.
15
Lyotard, “Matter and Time”, p. 45.
16
For example Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, explicitly describes his
work in terms of the construction of a “synthetic neocortex”: http://www.33rdsquare.
com/2015/01/ray-kurzweil-is-building-synthetic.html.
Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration
of some of the most fundamental principles of modern thought. This
legitimation entails a kind of destabilisation of the human, an admission that
we inhabit a material culture that is no longer “ours”, is no longer straightforwardly “human” – or rather, one that gives us to understand that “human”
is no longer a straightforward matter. But how and why did Lyotard come to
employ the medium of the exhibition to make this disquieting truth felt?
The initial brief for the project (drafted before Lyotard was involved) speaks
of a situation in which the passage from an energy-intensive to an information-intensive society presents “new modes of perception, representation
and symbolisation, corresponding to new means of decision, conception and
production”.17 The origin and outcome of production processes, product and
raw material, are not straightforwardly distinct any more, and a “profound
modification of the duality design/production” is under way, creating a new
environment that escapes the symbolic order and the means-end configuration of modernity. For new technologies create their own symbolic
order – and a new social order and new modes of distribution along with it.
The authors find this process at an acute stage in which it is not yet fixed, and
where what is most widely shared is a perplexity, which is what they set out
to “dramatise” in the exhibition. Already invoked at this point is the idea of
an experimental scenography and alternative pedagogy, placing a series of
exhibits within the exhibition space according to a conceptual organisation
that would allow for multiple readings.
In taking charge of the conceptualisation of Les Immatériaux, Lyotard proceeds
to trace these questions to their fundamental roots – calling into question the
very notion of “creation” that was present in the initial title (“New Materials
and Creation”) and operating an (all told, rather idiosyncratic) conceptual
dissection of the meaning of “material”. The structure Lyotard devises for the
exhibition suggests that in modernity “the object in general is considered as
a sign”,18 but that the conclusion that therefore all matters are now matters,
materials, of communication, remains unexplored. He adapts a model of
communication taken from Harold Lasswell’s linguistic pragmatism to distribute the various declinations of the Sanskrit root mât (“to make with the
hand, to measure, to construct”) in accordance with this model of the various
elements involved in any instance of communication. In the first full proposal
for Les Immatériaux the semantic ambiguity of “material” already plays a role in
setting in motion slippages from one semantic zone to another: through shifts
in perspective, one and the same material can be seen to occupy various
different positions within the communicational structure.
17
Les Immatériaux catalogue, Album, p. 8.
18
Ibid., p. 17.
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30 Years after Les Immatériaux
Lyotard imagines that the dramatisation of this structural slippage (the content of one message may be the material support for another message and,
from another perspective, the recipient of yet another, etc.), dramatised
within the exhibition space, will produce a kind of disorientation. For “it is not
a matter of explaining”, a brief for the project tells us, “but of making sensible
this problematic … [Les Immatériaux] seeks to awaken a sensibility assumed to
be present in the public, but deprived of the means of expression. It wishes to
make felt the sentiment of the end of an era and of the disquiet that is born in
the dawn of post-modernity”.19 Throughout the development process Lyotard
carefully calibrates Les Immatériaux’s response to this challenge. Rather than
a judgement, it is to be a performative intensification that is as one with the
legitimation of immaterials invoked above: “[i]t is not a matter of making
apocalyptic pronouncements or, on the contrary, of affirming that nothing
has changed; it is a question of intensifying interrogation and, so to speak,
of aggravating the uncertainty that it makes weigh upon the present and the
future of humans.” 20
Before we broach the question of what Lyotard qua philosopher brings to the
new medium of the exhibition – and indeed what the change of medium offers
to the philosopher – we will first trace the history of the site within which this
“dramaturgy of interaction” was to be staged.
The Slaughterhouse and the Piazza
In 1955 the French government resolved to modernise the famous abattoirs
of La Villette on the outskirts of Paris, a late nineteenth-century monument
to rational industrial design and centralisation. 21 Work began in 1961, with the
cost of the project growing from an already enormous 245 million to 110 billion
francs, and with a great deal of these funds ultimately left unaccounted for.
The new abattoirs and auction market proved obsolete before they were completed. In conceiving of them as a prestigious municipal trophy, the authorities
had ignored the problems of situating a massive centralised facility in an
already congested city, at a time when decentralisation was the predominant
economic and logistical trend. The project proved totally maladapted to the
realities of industry. Work at La Villette was discontinued in 1967 and the
whole edifice was finally demolished, amidst great financial scandal. 22 With the
new slaughterhouse and market dynamited and pulverised, with a great deal
of public money having been squandered in the process, La Villette would lie
19
Ibid., p. 26.
20
Ibid., p. 17.
21
See Dorothée Brantz, “Recalling the Slaughterhouse”, Cabinet, Fall 2001, http://
cabinetmagazine.org/issues/4/slaughterhouse.php.
22
See “Les Autres Scandales”, Le Nouvel Observateur, September 28, 2001: http://tempsreel.
nouvelobs.com/opinions/00018896.EDI0001/les-autres-scandales.html.
Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration
dormant for a few years before eventually becoming the site of a “polyvalent
cultural complex”, a “City of Science and Industry”, including a new National
Museum of Science and Technology, the Cité de la Musique, and other cultural
centres: in effect, an early “cultural theme park”.
Georges Pompidou, who along with De Gaulle and Giscard d’Estaing had presided over this disastrous project, unbowed by scandal and having lubricated
the “settlement” of May ‘68, became president in 1971. 23 The neo-Hausmannian
zeal of this “managerial medici” 24 for remodelling and modernizing the city
continued with the razing of the Les Halles area and the construction of a
massively funded cultural centre – the famous building which (instead of the
ill-fated slaughterhouse) would take on his name.
Perhaps mindful of the fate of the centralised meat market, the Minister of
Culture of the time proclaimed the Centre Beaubourg to be une centrale de
la décentralisation. There is some truth in this, since it is an institution that
had to operate a capital concentration: it needed to figure disproportionately
large upon the national cultural scene because France was losing its political
gravitas in a globalised, decentralised world. The belief that this powerhouse
would reconsolidate some of that power through the cultural realm is indicated frankly enough in the title of the opening exhibition Paris–New York
(original entitled “Paris–New York–Paris”!).
Needless to say, the Beaubourg prefigures many subsequent trophy projects:
in a model to be followed worldwide, it was supposed at once to cement the
importance of culture as a dimension of national patrimony worthy of international recognition, and to kick-start the “regeneration” of an old area of
Paris into a quartier des arts, a “high-rent location for editorial offices, publishing houses, architects and boutiques” 25 all clustered around the PianoRogers “cultural warehouse”.
Cultural Space
The appearance of the Beaubourg is also contemporaneous with a certain
set of expectations demanded of public exhibition-making. The appointment of Pontus Hultén26 was a symbol of the institution’s determination
to at least be seen to be taking seriously the propositions and demands of
the broadened field of contemporary art emerging in the ‘60s within the
inherited institutional framework it sought to reinvigorate and capitalise
23
See Paul Jankowski, Shades of Indignation: Political Scandals in France, Past and Present
(Oxford, NY: Berghahn), p. 88.
24
Ralph Rumney, “Pompidou’s Multi-Coloured Dream-Machine: Or How They Opened the
£125m Art Refinery”, Art Monthly, February, 1977.
25
Nancy Marmer, “Waiting for Gloire”, ArtForum, February 1977.
26
Willis Domingo, “Pontus is Pilot: A Profile of Pontus Hulten”, Art Monthly, February 1977.
223
224
30 Years after Les Immatériaux
on. In Stockholm, Hultén had proved his ability to attract a non-traditional
audience through a festive programme of controversial happenings and
cross-disciplinary initiatives across the arts, sciences and pop culture. Upon
his appointment at the Beaubourg he spoke enthusiastically of the need to
“create new institutions”:
we are probably moving towards a society where art will play a very large
role… While waiting for art to be integrated with life and penetrate society
in its entirety, exchange (between artists and the public) must take place
in “museums” newly conceived. Such museums will no longer be simply
areas for the conservation of works … but places where artists encounter
the public and where the public itself can become creative… we must try
to open up the museums. 27
In Hultén’s words we find encapsulated the articles of faith of a new conception of art – and thus of the museum and the exhibition – that perhaps
have a different and less hopeful resonance today: the faith that the avantgarde dream of the unification of art and life is all but achieved, subject to
delivery through natural dynamisms at work in society; the anticipation of an
age in which “a greater part of the population no longer has to struggle every
day for survival” and will thus reclaim artistic creation from the elite; and an
affirmation of the role of the metropolitan arts complex in helping to break
down “cultural attitudes” and in “opening up” – vertically (to new audiences)
and laterally (to non-art disciplines) – the space of culture.
Hultén sees the space of the museum in terms of an urbanist logic: the
museum should be “in the form of a city”, a “system of rooms” that “communicate and interpenetrate”, so that the one would have the “chance of
losing oneself and reorienting oneself”. In the framework of this perpetual
mobility, in a building where even the director’s office is circumscribed by
temporary mobile wall panels, 28 and where transparency and porosity extends
from the external architecture to the configuration of the inner space and the
interaction of audiences, Hultén imagines, for example, the viewer of a Braque
collage having the option to press a button to bring down a screen upon
which five more collages are mounted – or not, if she doesn’t want to! Thus
technology is anticipated as a prop for the new museum’s aspiration to dream
in advance the deterritorialised free circulation of a new kind of society.
To what extent did the inscription of this prestigious multi-billion-franc project
within the narrative of an avant-garde unification of art and life succeed? In a
conversation between Hultén and Richard Rogers in 1981, it is impossible not
27
Ibid.
28
Richard Eder, “Beaubourg’s Director Reflects on his Reign”, The New York Times, February
22, 1981: http://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/22/arts/beaubourg-s-director-reflects-on-hisreign.html.
Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration
to notice a certain slippage, and a modulation of the original heady ambitions.
Rogers opines:
I think that the Beaubourg has democratised or popularised culture. It
gives all people of all classes and ages something to do on a Saturday
afternoon. You, as a specialist, can go to the museum; your grandmother
can go to the restaurant; and the kids can play in the square. 29
Which Hultén amplifies as follows:
Usually a museum … is just a museum. At the Beaubourg, you have a
whole series of overlapping things to do, and therefore the area becomes
much more active. It’s more like a railway station… It’s the theory of the
flexible magic box, which includes the piazza. Nothing is ever static, and
nothing is ever perfect. 30
In the same year but in less sanguine spirit, interviewed by the New York Times
on his departure from Paris, he says simply:
I wanted – it sounds stupid – to bring art and life together, something like
that. Rauschenberg said it better: the museum of the future is to be in the
little crack between art and life. It sounded very good at the time. 31
The success of the regeneration exercise now appears in a more ambivalent
light:
Society loves it. The artists don’t … The bohemian life that reigned in Paris
until the end of the ‘50s is gone. The artists [then] had more time to think,
to reflect. 32
By this time it was already tempting to read this gigantic culture machine as
a synecdoche for the generalised spaces of dynamic circulation, according to
whose exigencies a new city and a new society were indeed being formed;
spaces that formed a suitable receptacle for the “festive neoconservatism”
denounced by philosopher Gilles Châtelet, in which “cultural production”
is incited to be a facsimile or working scale-model of economic dynamism,
oriented towards an optimisation of the liquidity of all flows 33 – or, as Baudrillard has it, in what reads retrospectively like an ironic détournement of
29
“A Flying Start”, interview with Pontus Hulten and Richard Rogers, Images&Issues,
Summer 1981: http://s3.amazonaws.com/eob_texts-production/texts/127/1344579035_
IMAGES_ISSUES_PDF.pdf ?1344579035.
30
Ibid.
31
Eder, “Beaubourg’s Director Reflects”.
32
Ibid.
33
See G. Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market
Democracies, trans. R. Mackay (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic and Sequence Press,
2014).
225
226
30 Years after Les Immatériaux
Les Immatériaux’s proposed slippages between form, content and material
support:
Never has it been so clear [as at the Beaubourg] that the contents – here
culture, elsewhere information or merchandise – are merely the ghostly
support for the opposition of the medium whose function is still that
of beguiling the masses, of producing a homogeneous flow of men and
minds. The huge surges of coming and going are like the crowds of suburban commuters absorbed and disgorged by their places of work at fixed
hours. And of course it is work that is at issue here: the work of testing,
probing, directed questioning. People come here to choose the objectified
response to all the questions they can ask, or rather they themselves come
as an answer to the functional, directed questions posed by the objects. 34
An alignment of the radical extension of the avant-garde project with the
creation of a central–decentralised node of cultural circulation, at once a
prestigious asset in the soft power of the nation-state and a symbol of the
degradation of culture into a bargaining chip, all “while waiting for art to be
integrated with life and penetrate society in its entirety” – to whatever degree
this was a calculated risk, it was certainly a pioneering one, albeit on the part
of a statesman who had more than enough resources at his disposal to stake
on such a venture. As a profile of Hultén in Art Monthly in 1977 admits, “one
can only speculate that the man whose name the new cultural centre bears
was gambling that behind Hulten’s image in the French press as the ebullient
anarchist lies the potentially docile and productive reality of the jeune cadre
dynamique” – that is, that the reassertion of culture as a soft-power asset of
the nation-state would merely set the stage for the real economic game of
installing, in the surrounding remodelled streets (the “hygienic buffer zone”,
according to Baudrillard), the aggressive vanguard of an urbane, “nomadically”
precarious, networked and networking “creative class”. 35
The Project
It is in this context – albeit after the departure of Pontus Hultén and his
replacement by Dominique Bozo – that Les Immatériaux was conceived. Before
Lyotard’s involvement, the project had been brewing since around 1982, under
various titles, as an exhibition to be mounted “on the theme of new materials
and creation” by the Centre de Création Industrielle.
The Centre Pompidou was founded as a collaborative space of different
cultural centres, and, alongside the Modern Art Museum and IRCAM (the
34
Jean Baudrillard, “The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence”, trans. R. Krauss
and A. Michelson, October 20 (Spring 1982), p. 7–8.
35
See Châtelet’s biting satirical portrait of this “young nomad elite” in To Live and Think Like
Pigs.
Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration
generously-funded electronic music institute ordered directly by Pompidou to
bribe Boulez out of exile) the Centre de Création Industrielle (CCI) was formed
to represent the worlds of design, industry and architecture. The CCI’s early
years were marked predominantly by a failure to integrate happily into this
transdisciplinary family – perhaps owing to the continuing presence of “an
interior uptight with old values” beneath the “fluid commutative exterior”
(Baudrillard again): an exhibition on “The Factory” was viciously publicly
attacked by ministers; one on “Marginal Architecture in the US” was the
subject of controversy because of the inclusion of political texts (by Herbert
Marcuse, Jerry Rubin and Allan Ginsberg); and, most sensitively, a film scripted
by Henri Lefebvre about the problems caused by the “renewal” of the urban
fabric of Paris was banned by Robert Bordaz, Director of the Beaubourg. The
director and assistant director of the CCI departed soon afterwards, with
Bordaz himself temporarily taking over its directorship.
The CCI was finally closed down a few years after Les Immatériaux, so that
the show can be seen at once as its one signal achievement, and, as Anthony
Hudek has suggested, 36 also as a “hinge” in the history of the Pompidou itself;
at once the point at which its ideal cross-disciplinary post-museum status
was effectively achieved, and the last exhibition in which that ideal would be
seriously pursued.
Les Immatériaux certainly took full advantage of the open and indeterminate
space of the fifth floor, and its dazzling range of exhibits taken from industry,
art and commerce lived up to the promise of transdisciplinarity. Yet at the
same time it seemed designed to baffle its audience: the grey metallic meshes
hung from the ceiling blocking any overall perspective, the labyrinthine set
of “zones” impossible to navigate, the (often malfunctioning) audioguide that
switched from one soundtrack to another as the visitor moved through the
space. Far from Hultén’s slick vision of an audiovisual apparatus gliding into
view at the viewer’s command (or not, if she doesn’t want it to), for Lyotard
“interactivity” suggested a disorienting condition in which the visitor was
just one more interface relaying matter-information, subject to lines of force
and flows of energy that could never be satisfactorily integrated, a “rhizome”
of “generalised interactions” through which there was no “preferred path”.
Lyotard speaks of
processes of displacement in which man is but one node of the interface.
The exhibition would be one interface among others … [T]here should be
places where the visitor is no longer an actor … vague terrains, physical
frontiers or sonorous frontiers of fringes of interference. 37
36
Anthony Hudek, “From Over- to Sub-Exposure: The Anamnesis of Les Immatériaux”, Tate
Papers, Autumn 2009, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/oversub-exposure-anamnesis-les-immateriaux. In this volume, p. 74.
37
Les Immatériaux catalogue, Album, p. 13.
227
228
30 Years after Les Immatériaux
He explains this approach, at length, in terms of a deliberate violation
against the traditional space-time implied by the gallery. The gallery is “an
establishment of culture – that is to say of acquisition and assimilation of
heterogeneous data – within the unity of an experience which constitutes
a subject”; its spatial set-up is precisely designed in order to facilitate this
synoptic pedagogy. 38 Lyotard seeks with Les Immatériaux to overturn this
“modern-dominant” model of the museum gallery in which the visitor is
reduced to an eye moving through a perspectival perceptual space, in a
formative journey with a certain didactic finality. The development of an
alternative “postmodern” space-time, conceived by Lyotard on the basis of a
strange alignment of Diderot’s Salons with postmodern urbanists, architects
and sociologists, 39 recalls significantly Hultén’s urbanist conception of the
museum. Lyotard describes it more expansively in terms of driving from San
Diego to Santa Barbara, in a zone of “conurbation” where “the opposition
between centre and periphery disappears” and where “one must retune the
radio many times … it is a nebula, where materials are metastable states
of energy. The roads, the sidewalks, have no façade. Information circulates
through irradiation and invisible interfaces”.40 This conceptualisation of
the show was even extended to the catalogue, whose Album lays bare the
processes of development of the concept, while the Inventaire gives the reader
a set of loose-leaf representations of the “sites” within the show, which can be
reconfigured and reordered at will.
Les Immatériaux was no world’s-fair-type extravaganza, then. What is
noticeable in the first full brief of the project following Lyotard’s involvement, and even more so in the exhibition itself, is the way in which he injects
the excitement engendered by cutting-edge developments with a note of
chagrin – anxiety, sorrow or disappointment – from the hegemonic misdeeds
of the modern project across the world wars and the holocaust – central
subjects of his writings at the time. The exhibition opens not with flashing
computer screens but with the desolation of the body in five Beckettesque
scenarios, and with Joseph Losey’s sombre film Monsieur Klein. Thus, if Les
Immatériaux seemed in certain senses to satisfy the Pompidousian agenda,
it also introduced an abrasive approach to both content and form that was
apparently at odds with it. Indeed, these contradictions and ambivalences are
clear in the very conception of a project that adopts a proto-cybernetic theory
of communication as the armature for an experience that renders “clear” communication impossible. But at the same time, one also wonders whether its
conceptual interrogation was shielded from the political and economic context
within which it was produced.
38
Ibid., see also Lyotard, ”After Six Months of Work…”, in this volume.
39
Les Immatériaux catalogue, Album, p. 19.
40
Ibid.
Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration
At least one member of the CCI team admits to a concern that these latter
aspects were missing from the show’s “materials”. A press conference text for
Les Immatériaux declares: “Insecurity, loss of identity, crisis, are not expressed
only in the economy and the social, but also in the domains of sensibility,
of knowledge and of the powers of man … and modes of life”.41 In a contemporaneous interview with the CCI team, during a discussion of the “global”
point of view adopted by the exhibition, and the risk that it may be perceived
as a “reactionary … apology for technology”, Chantal Noël suggests that Les
Immatériaux should be seen as a “preliminary enquiry” leading to further
interrogations. Sabine Vigoureux replies: “One might all the same ask why,
from this preliminary enquiry, all economic and social analysis is excluded.
As if thought in its pure state were independent of these factors, when in fact
they also have an influence on thought. Personally, I saw this as a deficiency,
at the outset”; to which Nicole Toutcheff replies that these factors are indeed
present, but simply not systematically presented as such, and that the overall
conception of the show obviates such concerns, since “an interesting aspect
of this kind of philosophical discourse is that it does not try to organise these
scattered elements into a system”.42
Certainly none of the team – least of all Lyotard – could have been unaware of
the problematic context outlined above (Lyotard mentions ambivalently the
question of the Beaubourg’s “centrality” in his report during the last stages
of planning). 43 Baudrillard had issued his brilliant, withering analysis of the
“carcass of flux and signs” in 1981.44 But if we place it side-by-side with Baudrillard’s ferocious satire, we can perhaps see Lyotard as striving to counterinstrumentalise the space he had been offered: “if you had to have something
in Beaubourg – it should have been a labyrinth”, says Baudrillard;45 Lyotard
uses the reconfigurable space to build a darkened labyrinth on the fifth floor –
or something even less ordered than a labyrinth (for, as Lyotard notes, even a
labyrinth usually has one thread and restricts movement to particular paths). 46
“And they stampede to it… because, for the first time, they have a chance to
participate, en masse, in this immense work of mourning for a culture they
have always detested… The masses charge at Beaubourg as they do to the
scenes of catastrophes, and with the same irresistible impulse”, says Baudrillard;47 Lyotard tries to create an experience that heightens unease and
disquiet and confirms the demise of modern culture. “The only content of
41
Les Immatériaux catalogue, Album, p. 26.
42
“La Règle du Jeu: Matérialiser les Immatériaux”, interview with the CCI team, in E. Théofilakis (ed.), Modernes, et Après? “Les Immatériaux” (Paris: Autrement, 1985).
43
See Lyotard, “After Six Months of Work…”, in this volume, p.59.
44
Baudrillard nevertheless cooperated with the Centre Pompidou (notably on the journal
Traverses) for many years both before and after the publication of L’effet Beaubourg.
45
Baudrillard, “The Beaubourg Effect”, p. 6.
46
See Lyotard, “After Six Months of Work …”, in this volume, p. 62.
47
Baudrillard, “The Beaubourg Effect”, p. 8.
229
230
30 Years after Les Immatériaux
Beaubourg is the masses themselves, whom the building treats like a converter, like a black box, or, in terms of input-output, just like a refinery handles
petroleum products or a flood of unprocessed material”, says Baudrillard;
Lyotard invites the masses to experience themselves as material “transformers” alongside the immaterials they have come to explore, and looks into
installing electronic systems to involve visitors interactively by monitoring and
gathering data on their visits.
Les Immatériaux is undoubtedly more than just a symptom. As Lyotard
recounts at length in his report, 48 inside the project an acute struggle is taking
place with the conditions under which it was possible to make the exhibition
happen. Yet Les Immatériaux perhaps paid too little attention to the way in
which its elaborate sabotage of the space and conception of the modern
gallery risked being undermined by the problems of a postmodern space that
was designed precisely to supersede that classical-modern framework. When
Chaput reflects on this institutional problem, he seems to understand the
latter as simply an extension of the former:
I don’t think that there is any contradiction in the sole fact that
philosophical discourses change medium. The problems start when one
wishes to make it the object of mass consumption. Doing philosophy in
the framework of a public service (which Beaubourg is) is no straightforward matter. The whole “communication”, “mass”, “democracy”, “public
service” aspect has not been an easy fit with the innovative principles
of the exhibition… The “exhibition” medium, the Pompidou Centre, are
tools conceived as vehicles for a unique meaning and devices to share it
through successive capillaries as far as possible. Here, we do the opposite:
one product with multiple meanings, confided to the sensibility of
individuals. This is rigorously the inverse of traditional communication.49
This predicament is reflected in the sometimes baffled and ambivalent
responses to Les Immatériaux. A contemporary review by Kate Linker in ArtForum, 50 while convinced by the show’s conceit, judges that its execution
“banalised its central themes”, with “too much mechanical hokum – too many
light machines and holograms, too many buttons to push and atomisers to
squeeze”, with “technology occupy[ing] center stage”, “inevitably valorised,
and thereby mystified”. But if this “change of medium” for philosophy looks,
ironically, “better on paper”, she admits that its failure “raises the question of
whether profound shifts of a philosophical nature can be represented through
objects”.
48
Ibid.
49
“La Règle du Jeu”, p. 16.
50
Kate Linker, “A Reflection on Post-Modernism”, ArtForum, September 1985.
Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration
It is doubtless Les Immatériaux’s simultaneous success and failure – its contradictory status as both an expensive, technically-demanding, trailblazing
postmodern technological extravaganza and a sombre subversion of communication – that makes it interesting for us today. This ambivalence, as Linker
indicates, is owed at least in part to the difficulties involved in transfusing
philosophy into the medium of the exhibition. How, then, did Lyotard envision
this transfer, and what motivated him to attempt it?
A Medium of Resistance?
Chantal Noël, one of the team from the CCI who worked on Les Immatériaux,
speaks of “philosophy changing its media. It comes down to inscribing this
exigency in another space and with other means than those of the book”.
“Through the ‘exhibition’ medium”, she continues, “the cultural institution
becomes a site where certain reflections of a philosophical order can be
grasped.” 51 We might agree, but at the same time we need to acknowledge
that this proposition already gives rise to another set of questions: What is the
exigency of philosophy? Simply to create a state of wonder, or questioning? To
craft and communicate new concepts? To offer a glimpse of the resolution of
social or political problems? To shape intuitions or symbols that schematise
concepts? And what is the function of a “cultural institution” in relation to such
aims?
Moreover, what made this question of a “change of medium” appealing for
Jean-François Lyotard at the time of Les Immatériaux? It seems that he found
himself under pressure from two related movements: Firstly, at a distance
of a decade and a half from ‘68’s transdisciplinary delirium, he observed the
one-way drift of institutional philosophy back into a closed circle of scholars,
and an embattled one at that. At the time of Les Immatériaux, philosophical
activity in its traditional (university) setting was beginning to be challenged
by the edicts of neoliberal “pragmatism”, “communication”, and “efficiency”
(a process whose nadir seems to be in sight today). Outside the academy,
meanwhile, a new breed of professional public intellectuals – the nouveaux
philosophes – had emerged to proudly sweep under the carpet all of the conceptually violent, antihumanist enquiries of poststructuralist thought, railing
against its abrasive experimentalism, its uselessness for immediate practical
politics, and its nihilism, and seeking to reestablish thinking upon solid ground
with the human as a fixed point from which to assert, as Lyotard writes in
The Inhuman, “the authority to suspend, forbid interrogation, suspicion, the
thinking that gnaws away at everything”. 52 Yet at the same time, within the
most disparate of nonphilosophical spheres – biology, design, art and science,
51
“La Règle du Jeu”, p. 16.
52
Jean-François Lyotard, “Introduction: About the Human”, in The Inhuman, p. 1.
231
232
30 Years after Les Immatériaux
and everyday life itself, straining under the torque of technical developments
whose vocation had never been to “make sense” and whose deliverances
scramble the finalities of humanism and modernist optimism – philosophical
questions presented themselves not just as unavoidable, but in the form of a
generalised intense experience of disorientation.
The enlightenment institutions within which philosophy could traditionally
claim a rightful place are in decline, then, and yet a tacit appeal for philosophy
comes from every quarter. This, Lyotard says, is what gives rise to a
philosopher’s need to go outside the university; he states this explicitly as
one of the reasons for his involvement in Les Immatériaux: “A philosopher like
me is more inclined to think his interests lie in becoming involved in what
happens outside institutions; that he needs to get out of the university. Hence
my presence in the team planning Les Immatériaux… Beyond institutionalised
philosophy, there is a philosophy yet to come, one which corresponds to the
abolition of ‘disciplinary’ boundaries.”. 53
Refusing the clear and efficient communication commanded by the nouveaux
philosophes, Les Immatériaux would precisely not address its audience in any
illusorily straightforward way. In its dramatisation of philosophy, it set out to
resist the consensual stifling of the fundamental inquietude that constitutes
the being of the human, and would even aim to amplify the intensification of
this inquietude in an increasingly technicised environment.
It is worth noting here that this two-way resistance is no less pertinent today,
when there is little diffusion of academic philosophy outside the university
walls, and when, if “philosophy” ever does appear in a popular setting, it is
still more or less in the “communicative” form outlined above, or even worse:
philosophy as an alternative form of entertainment, distraction, therapy,
self-help, as a diversionary enrichment of one’s life, and so on. Moreover, any
attempt today to bring philosophy into the public sphere in the more indeterminate, challenging way that Lyotard prescribes will find itself in direct
competition with a more formidable claimant: increasingly, over the past 40
years, contemporary art has established itself as the primary cultural site
where a public thinking recognisable as philosophical takes place. This new
agora is all the more formidable a competitor in that, within it, participation
in contemporary thinking is said to take place not through a laborious study
and working-through of concepts, but through collective and individual experiences and happenings. Precisely the kind of “dramaturgy” of ideas that
Lyotard pioneered in Les Immatériaux has in effect become endemic. Thus,
as we look back on Les Immatériaux 30 years later, we can see it as one of the
first events in which philosophy and the art of the exhibition were brought
53
Jean-François Lyotard, Élie Théofilakis, “Les Petits Récits de Chrysalide” (interview), in
Théofilakis (ed.), Modernes, et Après?, p. 5–6.
Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration
together in such a way – with all the ambivalence entailed by that pioneering
status.
Les Immatériaux sought to make good the deficiencies of philosophy in
its public role by reasserting philosophy’s vocation: that of exacerbating
inquietude rather than issuing reassuring communications based on an
assumed common ground. And yet it was of course conceived as a project
that would gain a large audience. It at once embodied and challenged the
emerging model of the exhibition as a public spectacle – a model which, one
might argue, merely feeds into the communicative frenzy of accelerated
development. In this sense, too, Les Immatériaux can be understood as a
kind of hinge point: it seems to be poised on a knife-edge between satisfying
the Beaubourg cultural megamachine’s call for polyvalent cultural communication, on the one hand, and entirely sabotaging these demands with
disorientation, indetermination, and greyness (“philosophy paints its grey on
grey!”) on the other. As we shall see, the roots of this ambivalence must be
sought within Lyotard’s philosophical work of the time.
Inquietude and The Accelerationist Error
At the same time as Lyotard is tempted to undertake Les Immatériaux’s
experiment of pursuing philosophy “in another medium”, his writings attest
to a renewed commitment to philosophy “itself”. It is as if, during this period
– at least in the texts collected in The Inhuman (which, as Lyotard reminds
us, were largely delivered to nonprofessional audiences) – the philosopher
was undergoing one of those upheavals in which technical labour, and the
unfolding and elaboration of a programme of investigation, gives way once
again to philosophizing as such: indeterminate, ambiguous, puzzling and
open. (As he writes in The Differend, a “weariness with regard to ‘theory’”
means that “[t]he time has come to philosophize.” 54) All of this makes these
writings valuable for those of us who – naively, and counter to professionalisation, archivisation and exegesis – wish to take philosophy outside
of the academic cloisters and do philosophy not “by the book” but “from the
heart”. Perhaps we might legitimate such naivety by appealing to tradition and
saying that this heart is Augustinian: Inquietus est cor nostrum, says Augustine:
our heart – for Augustine, that of postlapsarian man – is unquiet, it can find no
rest; its inquiry into itself – the question I have become for myself – is not one of
patient, systematic exegesis, but something more like a continuous unease, or
even panic. This inquietude is a keyword that appears continually in Lyotard’s
vision for Les Immatériaux.
54
Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988), trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, p. xiii.
233
234
30 Years after Les Immatériaux
Augustinian inquietude is reprised by Pascal in the anthropology at the heart
of his fragmentary, agitated, exemplarily modern corpus: an anthropology
abbreviated in the Pensées’ terse formula: “Condition of man: inconstancy, boredom, inquietude.” 55 In Pascal as in Augustine, the attribution of
inquietude to man as a primordial condition is not understood merely as
descriptive, but as a normative and even programmatic demand: not only is
inquietude an inevitable aspect of human existence no matter how much we
may try to suppress it; it is to be acknowledged, exacerbated and intensified
– and this is the philosopher’s task. The philosopher’s job is to stir up trouble
in himself and his fellow humans, to expose the constitutive inquietude at the
heart of the human, which modern civilisation intensifies while supplying us
with endless distractions with which to repress and ignore it.
Nowhere is this inquietude stronger in Lyotard than in his departure from
Marxism. In his emotionally charged 1982 memoir of Pierre Souryi, 56 Lyotard
expresses exquisitely the pain of his inability in all conscience to accede to the
certainties required in order to commit himself to “the struggle”: his doubts
as to the inability of orthodox Marxism to describe the contemporary world;
his suspicion of the dialectic as a universal language (language-game); and
his conviction that capitalism has entered into an unprecedented phase, in
which the supposed certainties of its so-called “organic development” are
subverted. It is at this point in Lyotard’s work that we arrive at the question of
“accelerationism”. 57
The circulation of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s 2013 “Manifesto for an
Accelerationist Politics” 58 has led to a reconstruction and reappraisal of what
Benjamin Noys has retrospectively dubbed the “accelerationist” period in
French theory, a period which begins precisely with Lyotard’s (and Deleuze
and Guattari’s) break with Marxist orthodoxy:59
Galvanised by the events of May ‘68 and driven to a wholesale rejection
of the stagnant cataracts of orthodox party politics, in his text of 1972
Energumen Capitalism and 1974’s Libidinal Economy Lyotard suggests that
emancipation of desire be sought not through the dialectic, not through
the party, but by way of the polymorphous perversion set free by the capitalist machine itself. Errant forces are at work in the signs of capital itself,
he says. The indifference of the value-form, the machinic composition of
55
On inquietude in Pascal, see Alexandre Declos, “L’Inquiétude dans les Pensées de
Pascal”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 78 (2013), p. 167–184.
56
Jean-François Lyotard, “A Memorial of Marxism”, in Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New
57
On accelerationism, see R. Mackay and A. Avanessian (eds) #Accelerate: The Accel-
York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 45–75.
erationist Reader (Falmouth and Berlin: Urbanomic and Merve, 2014).
58
Ibid.
59
B. Noys, The Persistence of the Negative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p.
4–9.
Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration
labour, and their merciless reformatting of all previous social relations
is seen as the engine for the creation of a new fluid social body. It is the
immanence with universal schizophrenia toward which capital draws
social relations that promises emancipation here, rather than the party
politics that, no doubt, paled by comparison with the oneiric escapades
of ‘68. The credo of accelerationism is most explicitly formulated by Gilles
Lipovetsky in his reading of Lyotard: “‘[R]evolutionary actions’ are not
those which aim to overthrow the system of Capital, which has never
ceased to be revolutionary, but those which complete its rhythm in all its
radicality, that is to say actions which accelerate the metamorphic process
of bodies.” 60
Accelerationism in its contemporary form, on the other hand, while drawing
heavily upon this moment, introduces some different nuances; it is said to
consist in
[t]he assertion that the crimes, contradictions and absurdities of capitalism have to be countered with a politically and theoretically progressive attitude towards its constituent elements. Accelerationism seeks to
side with the emancipatory dynamic that broke the chains of feudalism
and ushered in the constantly ramifying range of practical possibilities
characteristic of modernity… [T]the focus of much accelerationist thinking
is the examination of the supposedly intrinsic link between these transformative forces and the axiomatics of exchange value and capital accumulation that format contemporary planetary society. According to accelerationism, then, the transformations wrought on the planet and on the
human by globalised technology, the corrosion of tradition and heredity,
the artificialisation of experience and the inextricably global reformatting
of the social are not deplorable ills, they are not only inevitable but
present an opportunity to extend the ongoing adventure of the human
project. And crucially, the claim is that to think this is not merely to acquiesce to capitalism but to speculate beyond it: that acceleration can be an
emancipatory vector of enlightenment.61
Before turning to this contemporary accelerationism, let us ask whether it
is possible that Les Immatériaux was also a part of Lyotard’s reckoning with
the “accelerationist” moment in his work. In several of his works from the
‘80s, Lyotard speaks of that period as a lapsus. First of all in Peregrinations –
where he talks about Libidinal Economy as his “evil book, the book everyone
is tempted to write”.62 And secondly, and more indirectly, in the introduction
to The Inhuman, where he seems to deplore the impulse behind this work and
60
Mackay and Avanessian, “Introduction” to #Accelerate, p. 11–12.
61
Ibid., p. 4.
62
Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1988), p. 13.
235
236
30 Years after Les Immatériaux
to regret the mistakes he made in the wake of his departure from the party
line. Lyotard’s key point here – one echoed by many critics of contemporary
accelerationism – is that the accelerationist error consists in a failure to draw a
distinction between two types of the inhuman:
The inhumanity of the system which is currently being consolidated under
the name of development … must not be confused with the infinitely
secret one of which the soul is hostage. To believe, as happened to
me, that the first can take over from the second, give it expression, is a
mistake.63
The fatal mistake of accelerationism was to believe that, on the horizon
of the deterritorialisation opened up by capital, there would be disclosed
an originary desire that could flow free of instituted structures of power.
Now, however, Lyotard takes a more sober view of the dangers involved
in capitulating to “the imperative to introducing ever more mediations,
of breaking down and modulating everything to assure more control and
more capacity and a ‘richer’ set of possible modifications” – a generalised
differentiation of which “new technologies and the media are aspects”, a
process which “is reproduced by accelerating and extending itself according
to its internal dynamic alone … assimilat[ing] risks, memoris[ing] their
informational value and us[ing] this as a new mediation necessary to its
functioning”.64 What he once saw as the revolutionary “metamorphic”
potential of capitalist deterritorialisation, he now sees as a process that, in
its inexhaustibility, “takes away the hope of an alternative”.65 What is more,
just as development does not entail emancipation, so the inhumanity of
the system does not preclude a banal humanism. The rise of the nouveaux
philosophes has proved that there is in fact no incompatibility between the
alienations of capital and the reinscription of an all-too-human mask from
which spout communicative homilies that act as a suitable emollient for
inquietude.
Given that the above description of “development” cited above is not dissimilar to Lyotard’s definition of the “immaterial condition”, let’s hypothesise that
the two are not unconnected, and that, in Les Immatériaux as in The Inhuman,
Lyotard is seeking a third option – neither socialism nor barbarism – and in
doing so, seeking to atone for his error. In Les Immatériaux, he continues to
interrogate the technosocial reformatting of the human through inhuman
material memory. He certainly does not erect any moral objection to it – in
fact, as we have seen, he constructs the notion of immaterials precisely so
as to let them speak, to legitimate them as an object of philosophical discourse, breaking them out of the modern paradigm and allowing them to be
63
Lyotard, “About the Human”, The Inhuman, p. 2.
64
Ibid., p. 7.
65
Ibid., p. 6.
Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration
expressed according to their proper nature. As we have suggested, this also
involves a “legitimation” of the inquietude they provoke. And, finally, it is this
inquietude that gives rise to the immanent demand for a non-institutional
philosophy conducted by other means. But what relation do these exigencies
have to Lyotard’s retreat from his accelerationist stance?
The attempt to legitimate immaterials without returning to his irresponsible
accelerationist stance generally gives rise to an advocacy of slowness. “To go
fast is to forget fast”, under the imperative “Be operational or disappear”,66
whereas “writing and reading which advance backwards in the direction of
the unknown thing ‘within’ are slow”.67 Lyotard here seems to rediscover the
theme of anamnesis as the “other of acceleration”.68 He recovers this classical philosophical term – the remembering of what was already within, the
immemorial non-self in the self, glazed over by doxa and by everyday habit
– as the name for a recovery of the “other” inhuman; a recovery that takes
place through an advocacy of immaterials that is not, however, a submission to
the vista of sheer acceleration they open up. The age of immaterials and the
demands it makes upon thought open a deep chasm within the human which
must be carefully distinguished from the promise of cheap accelerationist
thrills – the jouissance of which, precisely, would collude with “communication”
and “development”.
Lyotard links the immaterial closely to the immature;69 and the anamnesic
inhuman is the province not of the urban sophisticate but of the child. For
Lyotard, “the child is eminently the human because its distress heralds
and promises things possible” – that is, it attests to what is not yet securely
bound within the horizon of the human, and demands and makes evident
the incompletion of the labour of becoming human. Humanism conceived as
already achieved and complete (the smugly-assumed majority of the nouveaux
philosophes) is but a façade of maturity, a feigning of adulthood whose stance
is entirely compatible, ideologically speaking, with the merciless acceleration
of capital. But presumably accelerationism goes in the opposite, equally
undesirable direction, losing sight of the inquietude of the child as it gazes rapt
at the imagined spectacle of a deterritorialised future.
As Pascal tells us, we may create endless “diversions” in order to forget our
inquietude and the vacuity it alerts us to – and yet all this will achieve is to
deepen it. In Lyotard’s words: “the system has the consequence of causing
the forgetting of what escapes it. But the anguish is that of a mind haunted
by a familiar yet unknown guest which is agitating it, sending it delirious but
also making it think – if one claims to exclude it, if one doesn’t give it an outlet,
66
Ibid., p. 2.
67
Ibid., p. 2–3.
68
Ibid., p. 3.
69
See Lyotard, “After Six Months of Work…”, in this volume, p. 34.
237
238
30 Years after Les Immatériaux
one aggravates it.” 70 Inquietude therefore needs to be recognised, awakened
and intensified, an inquietude which – according to Pascal – stems from
our vacuity, from the fact that we do not know what we are. And, as Chaput
declares:
The proposition of Les Immatériaux is … to make felt, to show, troubledness, inquietude and madness.71
Lyotard’s accelerationism was really about the acknowledgement of the end
of the human project understood as a project of will, as the collective project
of enlightenment. Through technics, through the hegemony of the exchangeform of value, through the automation and autonomisation of the machine
of development, human projection into the future had been usurped by the
autonomic will of capital, a blind and infinite will-to-will, a purposiveness
whose only purpose is to produce more, to extract more, to mediate more –
what Lyotard now calls “development”. Clearly, the accelerationist error had
been to place faith in the emancipatory dynamic of this autonomic process.
Lyotards immaterialism, however, still corresponds to the renunciation of
the modern Cartesian vision of authorial projection, the free imposition of
a project conceived by the will upon a matter which is an indifferent patient
for the human agent. But it combines this renunciation with a recusal of the
accelerationist faith in capital’s futurity. It is in something like a state of shock
(to use Bernard Stiegler’s expression) that, while defiantly resisting any nostalgic reaction against the disquieting technical edifice of immaterials, Lyotard
seeks to undertake a “deeper reflection” that would discover their more
fundamental significance by way of anamnesis or the “other inhuman”.
It is difficult, however, not to see this contemplation without project as being,
also, a retreat. The risk is that it consigns philosophical thinking to an even
more confining sequestration, and that, moreover, it attests to a continuing
faith in an underlying reality of the (in)human, or of thought, that can be
extracted, recovered, and provide succour – even if this recovery is infinitely
deferred. At the same time as he wants to reflect that immaterials are transforming the human, Lyotard also wishes to move this reflection to a register that will effectively be a prophylactic against machinic contamination,
since it indicates that thought can maintain a reflective distance. And it is
the exhibition that then comes to stand for this free space in which we can
distance ourselves from the accelerative process and return to a thought
that “doesn’t have its place and time on the support of inscriptions” and that
“remains unknown to the breachings and scannings”.72
70
71
Lyotard, “About the Human”, p. 2.
Thierry Chaput, voiceover in the short film Octave dans le pays des immatériaux (dir. Paule
Zajdermann, 1985).
72
Jean-François Lyotard, “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy”, in The Inhuman, p. 55.
Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration
The intention here, after all, seems to be to reinscribe the machine within a
technical space that is lacking in being – which suggests that Les Immatériaux
stakes everything on a test which, on the basis of affective response, would
reinscribe the border between man and replicant.73 Although this “recovery”
will never be complete, the experience of inquietude furnished by the drama
of the exhibition in effect becomes proof of the human’s resistance to
absorption into the accelerative dynamic.
Exhibition and/or Laboratory
In general, cultural investment in the exhibition as a site for thinking has only
intensified since Les Immatériaux. Many contemporary art projects, often with
the imprimatur of a philosopher, and often mixing “non-art” objects with
artworks, promote the idea of a community of inquietude and indeterminacy
that exists fleetingly, fugitively, in the hidden corners of “the system of development”, in places of contemplation or collective fabulation, thus reconfirming
that some immemorial site remains for a thinking outside of it: this, it seems
to me, is precisely the hope of the contemporary form of public exhibition,
and of the world of contemporary art in general.
The aggressive drive to exacerbate inquietude present in Les Immatériaux,
however, seems to have given way to more anodyne forms. Wary of asserting
any purpose or project, retreating from the technosocial realm, cowed by
the dread that technology = rationality = mastery, many of these cultural
reflections are prey to a certain institutional calcification of the dogmas
of indeterminacy and sublimity. Their articles of faith are the community
of that which cannot communicate its community; the value of open, free,
nondetermined play, receptiveness, and indefinition; and the insistence that
we must build spaces in which not to conceptualise, explicate, project, plan,
assert, or produce. In the guise of sombre reflection, this distances both art
and philosophy from the forces and knowledges that shape the world. Moreover, when non-art objects are brought into the exhibition space, they are
precisely severed from these complex productive forces and rendered over
to a system of circulation that wrongly supposes itself capable of distancing
itself from them. Why does an artist take disquieting, vexing, puzzling objects
from the world of contemporary capitalism and place them inside this other
environment? Because these materials are what construct our technosocial
situation. With what purpose? The artist refuses to tell you, because his
value as artist is precisely to tear these objects away from their functional
integration into “the system of development” and to present them in a space
of indeterminacy, to enable us to reflect upon them in a deeper manner. To
73
On Lyotard’s post-accelerationist project as an extended Bladerunner-style “voightkampff test” see I. H. Grant, “LA 2019: Demopathy and Xenogenesis”, in Mackay and
Avanessian (eds), #Accelerate, p. 275–301.
239
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30 Years after Les Immatériaux
what effect? To aim at effects would be precisely to cede to the system – the
artist does not do this, because he is well aware that the modern idea of will is
compromised by the evils of capital, that accelerated development makes of
any human “project” an absurdity.
What is disturbing now, in short, is that the presentation of inquietude has
become indistinguishable from a certain quietism, and that “the gallery” has
once again become the “establishment of a culture”, albeit a distinctively
(post-)postmodern one. Perhaps the type of project anticipated by Les
Immatériaux is now fully integrated into the consensual politics proposed by
the nouveaux philosophes and by neoliberalism, as a sanctioned form of communication. It has found its proper place, as a passive contemplation without
project, which, at most, nurtures the forlorn hope of preserving thinking
intact within a sequestered space. The edifying function of inquietude is fully
integrated into the circulatory system of the culture and communications
industry that Lyotard had hoped his sombre grey labyrinth would delay or
obstruct. All of this means that we must look at Les Immatériaux not in a nostalgically indulgent mode, but from the point of view of a contemporary situation which it anticipates and which it played a part in creating, at the same
time as it set out to resist it.
Today’s exhibitions, with catalogues full of philosophers’ essays, and whose
eclectic exhibits sagely reflect on various “materials”, “objects” and “things”,
provoke some ambivalence as to “which inhuman” they serve: the troubling
reflection that erodes self-certainty and exposes us to immanent crisis, or
the accelerating circulation of messages quite capable of comforting and
reassuring us as they lubricate development and the extraction of surplus
value; the child who speaks in an alien tongue, or the infantilised adult of
consumer capital, a relay for platitudes of cultural literacy and self-satisfied “contemplation”? Just as Lyotard returned to his earlier “mistake”, the
dialectic within Les Immatériaux between acceleration and anamnesis should
be critically revisited in order to assess the context in which its producers
sought to stage this struggle through a dramatisation within the space of the
exhibition.
It is easy to pledge allegiance to our inquietude, to acknowledge the indeterminate nature of what it is to be human, without assuming the collective
responsibility to once more determine what we will make of ourselves. This
latter question is the one that contemporary accelerationism sets out to ask,74
insisting that the impossibility of fixing our place in relation to matter in terms
of an inherited concept of mastery does not have as its necessary consequence
that we must resign ourselves to merely contemplating our possible fate from
74
See Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics”, in Mackay and Avanessian (eds), #Accelerate, p. 347–361.
Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration
within a sheltered space. In its renewed optimism and advocacy of enlightenment, it reminds us that we have modes of thinking at our disposal that go
beyond Cartesianism mechanism and Laplacean determinism, and argues
that we have the means to orient ourselves speculatively within these new
spaces and to positively take hold of inquietude.75 Whether or not one finds
convincing the broad sketches set out so far by contemporary accelerationism,
I would argue that its basic impulse poses an appropriate challenge that today
invites us to reach beyond the stakes of Les Immatériaux: that of decoupling
the experimental exploration of the unknown spaces that immaterials open
up from the profit axiomatic, and of doing so beyond spaces of contemplation
and indeterminacy that present the fleeting illusion of shelter or dazzle us
with the sublime aestheticised spectacle of our own disorientation, within the
context of a culture industry whose productions are safely sequestered from
that of which they speak.
According to Srnicek and Williams,76 accelerationism is a matter of remaining
true to both inquietude and the avant-garde will to become inhuman, but also
of imagining ways to collectively undertake the reformatting of the socius,
to reorient the hegemony of sociotechnics, the extension of the “collective
cortex constituted by machine memories”.77 For isn’t the time for melancholy
and mourning – the “first state of shock”, in Bernard Stiegler’s words – now
over? Don’t we need to go beyond stupefaction, and doesn’t Les Immatériaux
ultimately still fall too much on the side of chagrin rather than jubilation? To
go further calls for a transformative anthropology rather than an apologetic
anthropology, and a constructive rather than a reflective immaterialism. It
calls for the involvement of philosophical thought across disciplines, certainly,
but in the register of design and production rather than exhibition and
reflection. The greatest problem of politics and of desire is the mismeasure
between possibility and reality to which technocapitalism constrains us. The
experiment is already being conducted upon us, but how do we break into the
laboratory? How do we mobilise that which is awakened by the inquietude of
the immaterial age yet which resists the system of development (the “other”
inhuman) in the direction of the construction of an immaterial future? This is
a task that arguably no longer belongs within the register of reflection or of
exhibition, even the surexposition that Les Immatériaux intended to operate.
For ultimately, if we are to take on the philosophical and political stakes that
Lyotard wished to bring to light in Les Immatériaux, perhaps the exhibition is
no longer the appropriate site for such a process.
75
As many contemporary accelerationists argue, science fiction should be an inspiration
here, as it turns fear and inquietude into excitement at unknown possibilities – let’s not
forget that Lyotard himself says the goal is “to move from melancholia to novatio, from
chagrin to jubilation”.
76
Ibid.
77
Lyotard, “Matter and Time”, p. 45.
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30 Years after Les Immatériaux
Despite the feverish hybridizing of contemporary philosophy and contemporary art, today we rarely see anything as acutely expressive as was
Les Immatériaux of the tension between the demands of neoliberal cultural
institutions and the will to use the exhibition as a medium for thinking. Rarely
do the two sit together in quite such open discomfort. At a time when we risk
creating a closed-circuit between theoretical production and contemporary
art, Lyotard’s heartfelt wish to use the “new support” of the exhibition for
philosophical thought in order to “dramatise ideas”, to reach an audience
beyond both academic philosophy and the art-museum audience, and to
do so by disquieting them, remains inspiring; yet its implicit critique of the
“modern gallery” needs to be extended into a consideration of the machine of
cultural circulation that is the contemporary exhibition; the conventions and
limitations of this institution of culture also need to be challenged, in order to
move toward a constructive immaterialism. As Lyotard says:
There is a gap between what is proposed to us for our little everyday lives,
and the enormous capacities of experimentation and their ramifications
in the social, opened up by technoscience. People are very aware of this.
Leading a dog’s life when one is at large in the cosmos, etc. … A laboratory
humanity, that is to say an experimental humanity, this would be the best
outcome of the crisis.78
78
Ibid., p. 11, and 13.