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International Congress of Aesthetics 2007 “Aesthetics Bridging Cultures”
Image, Form, Matrix: The Figural in the line of Lyotard
Vlad Ionescu, Doctoral Candidate, Belgium
Introduction - our discourse
Les choses réelles agissent esthétiquement par cette
multiplicité qui empêche d‟en finir avec elles par un
acte abstrait. Paul Valéry, Cahiers II.
The mainstream of contemporary continental aesthetics consists in a reflection on art as a
space resisting its recuperation by “discourse”, i.e. a rigid code that reduces art‟s
heterogeneity and density to the flatness of a set of invariants. This aesthetics is much
indebted to Adorno‟s unfinished Aesthetic Theory. In the light of Adorno, it is the very
suspension of dialectical thought that modern art turns into its theme. Jean François
Lyotard‟s aesthetics of the figural (as the theme of his Discours, Figure1) could be read
as a furthering of this Adornian project. Nevertheless, drawing the parallels – and most of
all, the serious difference - between Lyotard and Adorno would require a study on its
own.
The early aesthetics of Jean-François Lyotard opens, as Mikel Dufrenne emphasized, a
philosophy of absence and an „imperialism of desire‟, which means that it struggles with
the possibility of a return to a self-centred subject. Does not this type of aesthetics
actually acknowledge an art increasingly playing on absence, fragmentation and loss of
identification? But does not this aesthetics of absence and transgression, if exhausted as
the very theme of art, risk losing its force?
In the context of these questions, Lyotard‟s figural aesthetics is relevant to the conceptual
vocabulary of contemporary aesthetics. What follows is, firstly, a blueprint of Discours,
Figure‟s major concepts concentrating on the figural as a reconfiguration of the sign.
Secondly, possible conjunctions between the figural and other writings are worth
analyzing. Deleuze‟s Logique de la sensation and Paul Valéry‟s reflections on painting
are read through the spectrum of the figural. The trajectories drawn between these
thinkers are meant to propose the figural as a conceptual frame, as the stamina of various
concepts which try to answer one question: how can one account for the specificity of the
visual and its irreducibility to the domain of discourse? If aesthetic modernity shows a
dimension (of the figural) that escapes the rigidity of discourse, how can one theoretically
mark this transgression? With the figural Lyotard stresses the unbridgeable dimension
between the visual and the discursive. He also reconfigures aesthetics as a reflection
where the visual disturbs the regularities of discourse, one which crystallizes these
disturbances, no reconciliation intended. Aesthetics as a “bridge” between figure and
discourse is not excluded, yet this bridge would have to be the Tacoma Narrows Bridge
right before its collapse, during its convulsions: a fluctuating absorption of energy, the
wind oscillating its rigidity.
International Congress of Aesthetics 2007, “Aesthetics Bridging Cultures”
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The open space of designation – the figural
We shall explain the tension between discourse and figure trying to avoid many
references to the immense literary background that the book presupposes2. Discourse and
figure are two concepts that Lyotard conceives through his revision of the structuralist
model of language. “Discourse” is the outcome of a closed system of relations that
represents an object by submitting it to an order which functions following an invariable
set of rules. The meaning of a word depends, on the one side, upon the revelation of a
content when pronouncing the name of an object (signifier – signified relation). On the
other side, it depends upon the relation of opposition and exchange between the name of
the object and the coexisting, neighbouring terms. Subsuming a correlate under an
invariant relation of signifiers produces meaning. Discourse is the result of transferring
an exterior three-dimensional object onto the normative space of language. It is a text
(broadly speaking) on which terms are arranged according to a syntax where the value of
each terms is defined negatively by other terms. Uttering “This tree is green” involves a
sentence where the terms follow an order and the value of each term depends on a
differential relation to its neighbouring terms. This “immobile dialectic” at work in
discourse does not necessarily have to be of a linguistic nature – perspective in painting is
an example of discourse in visual arts, an arrangement of object according to the laws of
geometry.
In Lyotard‟s interpretation, this closed system represses its referential dimension,
meaning a “here” and a “now” of the body. Discourse forgets the fact that it keeps at a
distance that which it speaks of and it fails to completely assimilate this very distance
thus failing to perfectly convey the exterior object. The figural is the outcome of this
repression inside discourse of a negativity (meaning a distance in space, bodily) which is
no longer the same nature as the negativity of language (internal, differential, keeping
terms at invariable distances). Lyotard‟s target is obviously the structuralist model of
language which suppresses the “figural” understood as that which introduces variation
amongst the invariable intervals between terms. Lyotard hereby underlines the limits of
linguistic meaning and its radical difference from the non-linguistic significance. But
how do we arrive at the figural? Both vision and language share one common element:
negation. In vision, negation is the referential distance dividing and thus making possible
the two poles of representation, subject and object. In language, there is a constitutive
“no” at work giving value to terms: the value of each term is determined by negation of
other relating terms. Both dimensions – language and vision – try to grasp the exterior
object but none of them can perfectly achieve this. Perspective limits the visual field and
discourse too can never transparently denote an object. What is it that we lose in this
process when a close system subsumes the exterior and heterogeneous reality under a set
of invariables, i.e. discourse? After all, as he puts it, uttering that the tree is green will not
put the colour into the sentence.
The question Lyotard raises refers to a step previous to these two types of negation. Do
they not presuppose another, non-linguistic type of negation, or better said, a more
original, yet unfathomable, phantasmatic split? Language is the result of reference and its
denotation (Frege), but does not this distinction suggest a pre-linguistic unity? Language
is also the outcome of a negation interior to the linguistic system (Saussure), but is not
this negation the result of a rupture in a primary unity? It is this pre-linguistic unity that
International Congress of Aesthetics 2007, “Aesthetics Bridging Cultures”
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Lyotard accounts for through psychoanalytical concepts. The Entzweiung he refers to is
the original, pre-linguistic separation from the mother. This original schism between
subject and object is at the source of a discourse which tries to close the gap, to
recuperate in its structure this separation. The figural displays traces on the surface of
discourse of this tendency and resistance against the recuperation of the object inside the
discursive order. The Entzweiung not only produces the space between subject and object
but it also strongly determines all relation to the object according to the working of
desire. It is this new actor, desire, which determines the representation of an object. More
importantly for aesthetics, art is that form of expression which makes visible - in its
figures - the working of desire. The artistic in art is that element which dislocates what is
recognizable in a correlate and an aesthetic discourse is always a discourse on this
disruptive, trangressive element baptised “the figural”.
The figural is precisely that which disrupts the invariable rules of discourse and which
questions its pretension of transparent communication. Lyotard explains the working of
the figural (and the figural has to be understood as an element that “works through” the
art-work) following the mechanism of the dream-work. As in Freud‟s Traumdeutung,
displacement and condensation are the main axes on which the dream-work disturbs the
transparency of discourse. The secondary elaboration renders a visible image of what is
repressed in the dream. There is no initial clear form of the dream which the
interpretation, by clarifying the effects of displacement and condensation, brings back to
light. The dream work is rather a process where desire, read “the figural”, distorts the
representation. And this is the importance of Freud as Lyotard reads him: the dream
interpretation forces us to look at language, to conceive of meaning as a visible space
worked by desire and not merely signalling a chain of signifiers.
Discourse and figure do not relate to each other in a hierarchical manner. Lyotard avoids
subsuming any figural manifestation under the interpretative function of discourse. To the
contrary, the figural can be understood as an unexpected dislocation, a “fissure”, that
disturbs the regularity of discourse. If a discursive system functions according to a code,
i.e. an invariable set of rules, the figural is that element that disturbs the invariable
movement of its interior elements, dislocating the very regularity of the elements
composing it. No discourse can completely recuperate an exterior object into its own
structure and, when partially succeeding, the result is still marked by traces that betray
the reduction of a dense correlate to the discourse‟s binary logic. Every discourse is
figural from the “beginning” because it is always and already affected by the desire to
reconstitute the object, an attempt always incomplete.
On one side, the figural is the force that transgresses the regularity of the intervals
between terms. In this sense, it testifies of an “irrecoverable otherness” (“une alterité
irrécuperable”) of the object that discourse fails to account for. On the other side, if
discourse stands for meaning, the figural involves designation, an outward movement,
opening discourse to the “other of significance” (“l‟autre de la signification”), to a
dimension that discourse cannot completely reproduce. The figural makes visible the
forces involved in the formation of meaning. Over against the figurative, as the
representation and recognition of a correlate, the figural is critical because it freezes and
frames the trace of desire surfacing discourse. The figural is the sign on this surface, an
element pointing to an exterior object and to a desiring body that is motivated when
International Congress of Aesthetics 2007, “Aesthetics Bridging Cultures”
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signifying this object. This is the figural at the core of formation of meaning and here – as
we shall later see – Lyotard proposes a revaluation of the sign.
The figural as reconfiguration of the sign
On the one hand, the sign is accounted for as a signifier signaling a signified whose value
is determined by the negation characteristic to a closed system of language. On the other
hand, Lyotard tries to open the sign to the nature of the exterior object, in its density.
Vision is a field irreducible to the binary negation according to which discourse functions
and it is this irreducibility that changes the conception of the sign.
Firstly, the function of a sign cannot be reduced to signaling an exterior correlate. To the
contrary, the correlate becomes a sign at the very moment when it is denoted, revealing
some of its components, hiding others. Signs do not simply indicate objects; the latter
become objects through signs meaning that signs partially disclose the objects. Relating
to an object turns the object into a sign. Yet discursive predication always fails to entirely
convey its exterior correlate and that is because opacity is central to the sphere of
communication and to the exterior objects themselves. Language cannot assimilate an
exterior correlate inside its structure without directly transforming it, delivering one
façade and hiding others3. This thought is central to Discours, Figure and it is significant
to the theory of signs: words are not signs on their own, but they transform the designated
object into signs which at the same time disclose one side and conceal other sides:
“The opacity is in the object, neither in the word, nor in its distance from the object. Words are not
signs, but as soon as there is a word, the object designated becomes sign.”4
Secondly, the word itself as a sign is opened to a different value other than the signaling,
discursive one (as mere identification of a signified through a signifier). The word as
graphic appearance is something to be seen and it is to this material structure of the signs5
that Lyotard dedicates so many beautiful analyses. In this context, the figures are the
effects of the sign‟s materiality (sonorous or graphic) or, as Deleuze would put it, they
are:
“…the effects of the signifier itself, the formal elements of the signifier determined in relation to a
phonetic substance to which writing itself conferred a secret privilege.”6
Over against an account of the unconscious, of the dream work and of the artwork as a
chain of signifiers, the figural delivers images and forms that disturb this exclusive role
attached to the signifier understood in its signaling function and according to its binary
internal structure. The figural is not approachable exclusively from a linguistic
perspective. To the contrary, it splits open the discourse both externally (the sign is what
we make out of the designated object) and internally (art testifies of a figural that
introduces irregularity in the regular negation that makes discourse possible).
The figural responds to the dualism implicit in the nature of the sign. With the figural
Lyotard questions the structure of thinking the sign in terms of “form” vs. “content”,
“signifier” vs. “signified” or the “figurative” vs. “abstraction” where the former term
relates to the second by encompassing or “coating” it. The very dichotomy figurative –
abstraction belongs to representation as such. With Lyotard one has to see the abstraction
(as expression of desire) at the core of figurative representation and the sign as a process
of “making a sign” out of an already opaque exterior correlate. Lyotard proposes a
reconfiguration of the sign by tracing the specificity of vision, its effect and irreducibility
in the formation of meaning.
International Congress of Aesthetics 2007, “Aesthetics Bridging Cultures”
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The figural: image-form-matrix There are three dimensions of the figural: the figure-image, the figure-form and the
figure-matrix. These are three forms of perceiving the figural as a force that works the
pictorial surface. The figure-image stands for the blurring of the distinctive lines of
representation; these lines, discursive in the sense that they render a correlate in a clear
and distinct manner are distorted, multiplied or recomposed producing a disarray of form.
Marcel Duchamp‟s Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2) is an adequate example of the
figural as figure-image. The body affected by the figure-image is slightly faint but still
recognizable; the object of representation is still observable but also confused into the
space surrounding it, resulting in an indefinite appearance.
The figure-form accounts for a plastic space traversed by primary processes, intensive
forces that disregard any reference to the system of invariables according to which
discourse functions. Due to this suspension of any attempt to account for a unitary object,
the figure-form is the closest one can get to a pictorial expression of the energies
deployed in the artistic material. This form is abstract as a free flow of energy
disregarding the figurative aspect. This line can be felt (as it is not an issue of a figurative
representation) in the work of Jackson Pollock or Cy Thwombly.
The figural, as a concept questioning the very nature of representation and exposing the
inscriptions of desire, proves to be relevant when it comes to displaying the tensions at
work in contemporary art. The figure-form, or the “nervure of the visible”, is the
transgression of the figurative line as such. If in the case of the figure-image desire is still
fulfilled because it finds its pleasure in the recognition of the object, the revelatory line
disappears in the case of the figure-form. The trace is nothing but the testimony of
energy, discharging itself without any consideration for recognizability. The formless
movement of desire presses itself on the canvas signaling its free trajectory as in the
paintings of Pollock. The figure-form is a bad form, Dionysian, a force – like the
unconscious processes – indifferent to unity, to the Apollonian organization of space
according to the rules of Euclidean geometry.
Finally, the figure-matrix: invisible as such, it attempts to reveal the phantasm traversing
all spaces, be it the dream-work as in Lyotard‟s analysis or the pictorial space. The matrix
refers to an original split, an original disturbance that regulates the representative space.
Two Freudian concepts are at the basis of the matrix: the death drive and the pleasure
principle. The first accounts for psychic phenomena which tend towards the destruction
of the organism over against the second that preserves the organism. Whereas the
pleasure principle creates unity, coherence, regulates the structure of discourse, the death
drive disturbs this structure, unties the rhythmic pulse of energy. The intensity of an
artwork depends exactly on the effect of the death drive as Lyotard interprets it, namely
not as much as a destructive but rather as a creative principle. The figural is not an issue
of harmony and reconciliation but it is exactly that free, irregular energy that disrupts the
organic structure of representation. Take Luciano Berio‟s Sequenza III (A few words to
sing) to which Lyotard dedicated a whole essay7. Here the musical domain receives a
level of secondary, discursive organisation while language is presented as disturbed in its
phonetic form. There is a reversal of roles because “normally” music is perceived as less
rigid in its organisation than language. In Sequenza III the figural affects the libretto, in
its reorganisation as an unrecognizable space, where the soprano‟s laughter splits the
syllables of “the few words to sing”.
International Congress of Aesthetics 2007, “Aesthetics Bridging Cultures”
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If projected on the vocabulary of a figural aesthetics, the figure-form and figure-image
are the perceptible modes in which the figure-matrix manifests itself. The matrix is a
shifting source of investment of energy that refuses the transparency, stability and self-
sufficiency of a structure. As such, the matrix is recognizable in its projections, via the
configuration of figures which disrupt the consistency of the discursive order. Thus the
figural is a space recognizable on the surface of discourse where the movement of desire
inscribes itself in such a way as to transgress discourse‟s invariant intervals that the latter
requires in order to maintain its structure.
For Lyotard the agent of form in art is the death drive, never the pleasure principle. In
psychoanalysis dreams or phantasms open a space where one can deal with an original
loss and where the primary processes are the subject of a theoretical discourse. In the
artwork, or better said, in the working of art, the spaces of transgressions are the result of
the death drive that leaves traces of a figure-matrix that is irreducible to discourse.
Communicability or a return to reality is not an issue that regard art because the latter is
the source of questioning the possibility of transparent communication as such. Art,
through its formal transgressions, has no pretension to bridge differences as it is that very
form displaying the phantasm of reconciliation. In its most disruptive and heterogeneous
forms and materials (of which contemporary arts provide enough cases) it functions as a
principle that makes visible the dynamics of desire.
If we ask the question whether aesthetics can bridge cultures, then, with Lyotard, one
possible answer is that this is hardly the task of contemporary aesthetics, if by “bridge”
we mean reconciliation or dialectisation of opposites. Art makes visible the tensions at
the core of cultures without any ambition to pacify them – let that be the task of
politicians. Aesthetics as discourse on art, displays the convulsions interior to these
works, stressing the undialectical relation between vision and discourse, between what is
felt or seen and what can be signified. When referring to aesthetics the figure one has in
mind is, again, that of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge on the edge of its collapse. Just like
the figural is that moment which disturbs the invariant distance between terms, any object
caught on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (and the bridge itself) becomes figural, distorted,
on the limit of its own dissolution. Freud called “condensation” this disregard for the
space between terms and their rearrangement. According to Lyotard, the critical work
displays the condensation as such. Aesthetics as “bridging” cultures could be a reflection
on the figural inside cultures, their interior convulsions but also a reflection on the sides
that are opaque to cultures themselves and not only on those which one can signify in a
transparent fashion.
Proto-configurations of the figural: Deleuze’s Bacon
Deleuze‟s Logique de la sensation could be read as an extension of Lyotard‟ s aesthetics
of the figural, crafted along the tension between figurative representation and the figural.
The figurative is the rapport between an exterior correlate and its representation, an
image that encapsulates an exterior correlate belonging further to a network of other
images, all arranged in a “composed whole” (“ensemble composé”). Deleuze‟s terms
referring to “discourse” are the figurative, representation, narration and illustration. The
figural as the energy that disarrays the unity of images, is a mode of questioning the
figurative by isolating the figure. Deleuzian procedure: figural transgression by isolation
of the figure in order to fracture narration8. With Lyotard one could reformulate this
International Congress of Aesthetics 2007, “Aesthetics Bridging Cultures”
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gesture as such: isolation of the figure in order to break the regular rhythm of images
coordinated by the pleasure principle, a return to the partial drives as they are previous to
their unity.
We notice the figure-image in what Deleuze presents as the double function of the
contour, both as delimiting membrane and as common field between the figure and the
block of colour. The bodily contortions and their spasmatic movement mark the figure-
form that we interpret as the “source” of that movement. Deleuze accurately observes
how this dynamism originates in the body‟s desire to dissipate itself in the material
structure. In Lyotard‟s language, this spasm which turns the body inside out or its
tendency to disappear through a needle or a mouth marks the figure-form. The “corps
sans organes” as brute flesh and polyvalent formation illustrates the figure-form in
Deleuze‟s Bacon as the sign of the irreducibility to discursive, stable representation. Its
matrix is visible at the crossing of the figure-image and figure-form, marking the desire to
dilute the figure‟s membrane, the line that distinguishes it from other objects. The figural
is that energy that attenuates this membrane understood as the figurative function of the
line and that accentuates the impetus of a line of flight. The “corps sans organes” as a
force struggling against the organising function of the organism is another variation on
the figural and a clear example of an account of artistic form as the dynamics of the line.
The organism as a structured, self-centred and recognizable body is travelled by a force
(figural, disturbing) that deforms its discursive stability. Further traces of the figurative as
discourse and the figural in Deleuze are: the “bone” as structuring force in tension with
the “meat” as figure-image, as opaque zone. Also, Deleuze‟s “diagram”, his variant of the
figural as polyvalent force without identifiable significance, unfolds on the surface of the
figurative (discourse). The figural is not a nonsensical disruption of force but a presence
of forces dissipating the discursive dimension9.
Is this an innocent critical turbulence, symptomatic of French post-structuralism? The
figural as a critical concept (negatively) questions the stability of representation but also
(positively) proposes an open notion of form as linear variation of desire. Form is the
human imprint of a pathematic body marked by variation and movement. In this sense,
form has nothing universal and stable but its analysis commences from the individual
expression, its Kunstwollen, its desire to become form. When it comes to art, there is no
synthesis and Lyotard teaches this lesson time and again. The figural can thus function as
a model for aesthetics conceived as the result of a specific, particular investment of
energy. In this sense form is the figural as a particular figure-form which makes visible a
certain crystallisation of desire. This, of course, as opposed to any pretension of reducing
form to the reconciliatory, the recognizable, the unity and the pleasure-giving element in
which we can identify the outline of an exterior correlate.
Valéry and the figural in painting
Paul Valéry, the intellectual, shows a similar sensibility regarding the conception of
artistic expression. Doubtlessly, his intention was not to question the nature of the sign
and other intrigues of post-structuralism yet we deem worth analyzing his proto-
configuration of a figural aesthetics as delineated in his specific interest in the visual, the
tensions it involves and the stylistic effects that it brings about. Here is a relocation of
the plan “figure – discourse” in the aesthetics of Valéry concentrating on painting as
formation of meaning with its figural traces.
International Congress of Aesthetics 2007, “Aesthetics Bridging Cultures”
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In Degas Danse Dessin, Valéry distinguishes between merely seeing a thing and seeing it
in order to draw it, thus involving the movement of the hand. Like in Lyotard,
representing a thing implies its alteration, or, better said, an act of “making sign” out of
an object. Valéry on the signalling, signifying function of the eye:
“Up to that point the eye followed only as intermediary. It made us speak, think; it guided our
steps, our ordinary movements; sometimes it aroused our feelings…But drawing according to an
object gives the eye a certain command that our will sustains. Hence, in this case, one has to want
in order to see and this willed vision has drawing as its end and means at the same time. I cannot
make clear my perception of a thing without virtually drawing it, and I cannot draw this thing
without a voluntary attention which remarkably transforms what I firstly thought to have
perceived and known well.” 10
Connivance of discourse and figure, Lyotard would say. Drawing, in this sense involves
la volonté soutenue, a “sustained will”, it requires the unity of the organism. There is
incompatibility between drawing (as discourse) and the dream, says Valéry. One
stabilizes the object, it necessitates attention and wakefulness, the other disturbs it. The
retinal attention has to fight the seductions of the curve, to strive to form the “line”, the
style traceur, a “conservative” movement, a registration of the “displacements of our
eyes”, a conjugation of the “borders of regions diversely coloured”11
where the will
directs the hand. Nevertheless this subordination of the hand to the will is indirect.
Memory, says Valéry, intervenes. Each view of the eye on the model becomes a
mnemonic line and it is this line that inspires the movement of the hand on the paper:
“There is a transformation of a visual tracing in manual tracing.” 12
“Errors” enter the
picture because this operation is not fluent; there is no perfect parallelism between hand
and memory of an image. It is in these “errors”, in the dissymmetry between seeing and
the drawing hand that we recognize traces of the figural: with Valéry, drawing – read, the
sign – is already marked and transforms, even when attentive, the exterior correlate.
Later Valéry points out that the eye is never neutral, it “invents” because perception is an
elaboration of “all it gives as impersonal and definite result of observation.”13
If there is
place, in the aesthetics of Paul Valéry, for the figural as mark of desire that disturbs the
regulative line of the eye that the will directs, then it finds here a perfect formulation:
“The artist advances, moves back, leans over, winks, employs his body as an accessory of his eye,
becomes completely organ of sight, of marking, of adjustment, of developing.”14
An image reminiscent of Deleuze‟s Bacon: the artist who disappears through the eye, the
regulating force tracing the figure-image. If Lyotard arrived at the figural through the
opacity intrinsic to the formation of linguistic significance, Valéry marks the presence of
the figural though the dissymmetry between the “state of the patch” (of colour) and their
mnemonic presence that coordinates the hand and the “state of things or objects”:
“A whole series of mysterious operations between the state of patches and the state of objects
intervene, better coordinate brute incoherent givens, resolve contradictions, introduce judgments
formed since first childhood, impose us continuities, connections, modes of transformation that we
gather under the names of space, time, matter and movement. We imagine thus the moving animal
as we thought that we saw it; and maybe, if we examine with enough subtlety these
representations from a while ago, we would find the law of unconscious falsifications which
would allow to draw the movements of birds flying or horses running, as if we could have
observed them at ease: but these interpolated movements are imaginary. We attributed probable
figures to these fast movements, and it would not be irrelevant to comparatively research
International Congress of Aesthetics 2007, “Aesthetics Bridging Cultures”
9
documents to specify this sort of creation through which understanding fills in the gaps of what is
registered by the senses.” 15
Deferral of trace and exterior object, a delay that our understanding attempts to
reconstruct, an act of creation that gives us the sign as figural, not as stable presence
signalled by a signifier but as asymmetric interpolation of various signifiers. It is this
disequilibrium between a partially opaque correlate and its designation that marks the
figural in both Valéry and Lyotard. The figure-matrix, here a „law of unconscious
falsification‟, unfolds in a variety of figure-images and figure-forms. Desire plays for
both authors the central role: Valéry speaks of “desire to form”, (“désir de former”) and
of the visual world as a “continuous sensation” (“excitant perpetuel”): “everything arises
or feeds the drive to appropriate the figure or the form of the thing that the glance
builds”.16
Also, he distinguishes form from drawing: the latter is the manner of
perceiving the former where form is never the same in two persons - figural construction
of an irreducible object.
Final conjugation of the aesthetics of Valéry and Lyotard: this Venus lying in bed, says
Valéry, gathers a multiplicity of elements: both presentation of various bodily parts and a
diverse chromatic system. This multiplicity and its irreducibility to the one-
dimensionality of abstract thought (read, “discourse”) delineate artistic creation. The
material registration of a plurality of simple acts (the model, the chromatic composition,
the trace, etc) indicates the figural conceived as a material reconfiguration of exterior
elements functioning as “brute multiplicities”, des multiplicités brutes. The essence of art
is precisely the resistance of an object to abstract one-dimensional reduction:
“Real things act aesthetically by this multiplicity which prevents having done with them through
an abstract act. …. The same thing X confers the diversity a1 = f(X) ; a2 = φ(X) ; a3 = g(X) etc.
following that the observer becomes f, φ or g. This verse is melody, it is image, too; also, thought,
and f, φ or g are the devices in between which we can look for passages, modulation.”17
This is an important passage, representative for a figural aesthetics: as in Lyotard, the
sign is reconfigured according to (a) the position of the viewer, (b) the density of the
object itself and (c) the modulation between the two that remains materially inscribed in
the sign. Lyotard adds an explicit stress on the intrinsic opaque nature of the object itself.
At stake is a consideration for the nature of the sign that is irreducible to the binary model
of discourse, to an interior negation that produces meaning. A figural aesthetics radically
opens the discourse to its exterior other, shows the unbridgeable character of the two
dimensions and its material demarcation. The goal is less to oppose the figurative to the
abstract, but to trace how the visible works in representation.
Finally, the observer à la Valéry: f, φ, g are variable. This formulation articulates the
irresolution between the aesthetics of Lyotard and its most competent critique, signed
Mikel Dufrenne. The latter insists that any figural transgression has to return to the unity
of a subject – prerequisite of phenomenological order. Already in Valéry and to a greater
extent in Lyotard and Deleuze, it is this return to the identity of the subject that is
questioned. For Lyotard, the subject is always marked by modulations that make
impossible a return to the same. Even more, this return to the unity of the subject implies
a reduction of the multiplicity to sameness, dissolving the event into history, a problem
that Lyotard is aware of and which aesthetics tries to save.
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The Figural: an aesthetic of the irreducible in vision
Is it true that the figural is merely a concept for a philosophy of absence replacing a
philosophy of presence, as Dufrenne argues? Firstly, it is more than that: the absence that
it underlines is the sign of the irreducibility of the artistic experience and its expression,
(bodily, libidinal, irregular) to the discursive regular form. “Absence” is here to be read
as consideration for the opacity of the world and effects that this opacity brings about.
The concern for this irreducibility profoundly marks the figural and much of Lyotard‟s
philosophy. Plus, the figural as mark of transgression of the discursive transcribes in
critical terms the very attributes of aesthetic modernity. The latter, in its artistic
productions, as Adorno and Lyotard understood, can no longer be an affirmation of
presence and reconciliation. Hence aesthetic form as such is the figural inside discourse,
that which disturbs it. It is an embarrassing thought to even suggest verification of this
observation as every remarkable artist of aesthetic modernity proves it time and again.
The figural at work in the contemporary arts can be understood on the biological model
of the “lysis”, as the disintegration of the membrane of the cell as a unitary whole. By
extremely opening its methods and materials, by integrating elements that refuse any
formal stability contemporary arts dissolve their own limits and make this dissolution its
own theme. The figural in visual arts would be that very moment that makes visible this
dissolution, extension and transgression of the figurative line.
Secondly, one still has to admit the fragility of such an aesthetic concept. The figural
resists its absorption by discourse and yet, as a concept, it belongs to the theoretical
discourse. Here is the aporia of this project: it tries to save from discourse a moment of
singularity that is artistic, strenuous, libidinal. Yet, it is this very theoretical designation
of the figural that risks absorbing it into the discursive order. This point is valuable
because it marks the tension between two different and irreconcilable orders: the figural
as event and discourse as theory.
Finally, the tenure of the figural rests on an approach of art in as variable movement.
Fissure, absence, negation are not banal attributes of an “enfant-terribilism” but they
mark a consideration for the convulsive shifts of desire and their figural expression.
Transformation, reconfiguration, instability of form – these are attributes that characterize
the vertigo of aesthetic modernity. As Adolf Göller accurately notices, even “our pleasure
in the beauty of a meaningless form diminishes when its image becomes too clear and
complete in our memory.”18
When the singularity of a sensation is regulated and
discursively settled, art looses its effect. Göller refers to this as the Ermüdung, jading, a
weariness of the sense of form. In its refusal of stability, art intrinsically struggles with
this problem. An aesthetics of the figural tries to capture the form of this gesture and if
nostalgia surfaces in the aesthetics of Lyotard, then it is the nostalgia of the figural, of
attempting to grasp a sensation prior to its discursive recuperation (history) or to make
visible the event on the very surface of discourse. It is the nostalgia of trying to
momentarily touch the figural, namely this event without psychoanalyst, without
historian … yet.
1 Lyotard, Jean-François, Discours, Figure. Paris : Klincksieck, 1971.
2 The clearest analysis is the one of Alberto Gualandi, Lyotard. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999. The most
critical is signed Mike Dufrenne‟s Doutes sur la « libidiné » in L’Arc, 64, 1976. See also John Rajchman,
Jean-François Lyotard’s Underground Aesthetics in October, Fall, 1998.
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3 Lyotard refers to this as the radical difference between the “letter” as an essence that makes redundant its
material structure that signals it and the “line” as the singular gesture that renders irreducible the material
aspect in signifying an object. But a figural use of the “letter” is also possible: while the material façade of
the “letter” (the signifier) is irrelevant if it merely reveals a content (the signified), the “letter” as used by
Mallarmé in Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard displays the materiality of the signifiers, making
visible their “sensitive arrangement” that is otherwise forgotten. 4 Lyotard, 82. My translation. The original reads: « L‟opacité est dans l‟objet, non dans le mot, ni dans sa
distance à l‟objet. Les mots ne sont pas des signes, mais dès qu‟il y a mot, l‟objet désigné devient
signe… ». 5 Deleuze and Guattari call it « la douleur du graphisme », L’Anti-Œdipe. Paris : Les Éditions de Minuit,
1972, 241. 6 Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Felix, 288. My translation. The original reads: «… effets du signifiant lui-
même, les éléments formels du signifiant déterminé par rapport à une substance phonique à laquelle
l‟écriture même confère un privilège secret. » 7 Lyotard Jean-François, Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions,
Collection"10/18," 1973. 8 Deleuze, Gilles, Logique de la sensation. Paris : Seuil, 2002, 12.
9 Deleuze sees this process as an “intrusion”: “C‟est comme si la main prenait une indépendance, et passait
au service d‟autres forces, traçant des marques qui ne dépendent plus de notre volonté ni de notre vue. Ces
marques manuelles presque aveugles témoignent donc de l‟intrusion d‟un autre monde dans le monde
visuel de la figuration. Elles soustraient pour une part le tableau à l‟organisation optique qui régnait déjà sur
lui, et le rendait d‟avance figuratif.” Deleuze, 94. 10
Valéry, Paul, Degas Danse Dessin in Pièces sur l’art. Œuvres. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade, 1960, 1188. My translation. The original reads: « L‟œil jusque-là n‟avait suivi que d‟intermédiaire.
Il nous faisait parler, penser ; guidait nos pas, nos mouvements quelconques ; éveillait quelquefois nos
sentiments….Mais le dessin d‟après un objet, confère à l‟œil un certain commandement que notre volonté
alimente. Il faut donc ici vouloir pour voir et cette vue voulue a le dessin pour fin et pour moyen à la fois. Je
ne puis préciser ma perception d‟une chose sans la dessiner virtuellement, et je ne puis dessiner cette chose
sans une attention volontaire qui transforme remarquablement ce que d’abord j’avais cru percevoir et bien
connaître. » And following a more interesting analogy: the result is similar when we try to render a thought
in a more expressive way, « par une expression plus voulue. Ce n‟est plus la même pensée. » 11
Valéry, 1189. My translation. The original reads: « les frontières des régions diversement colorées ». 12
Valéry, 1189. My translation. The original reads : « Il y a transformation d‟un tracement visuel en
tracement manuel. » 13
Valéry, 1191. My translation. The original reads: « …tout ce qu‟elle nous donne comme résultat
impersonnel et certain de l‟observation ». 14
Valéry, 1189. My translation. The original reads: « L‟artiste avance, recule, se penche, cligne des yeux,
se comporte de tout son corps comme un accessoire de son œil, devient tout entier organe de visée, de
pointage, de réglage, de mise au point. » 15
Valéry, 1192. My translation. The original reads: « Toute une série d‟opérations mystérieuses entre l‟état
de taches et l‟état de choses ou d‟objets interviennent, coordonnent de leur mieux des données brutes
incohérentes, résolvent des contradictions, introduisent des jugements formés depuis la première enfance,
nous imposent des continuités, des liaisons, des modes de transformation que nous groupons sous le noms
d‟espace, de temps, de matière et de mouvement. On imaginait donc l‟animal en action comme on croyait le
voir ; et peut-être, si l‟on examinait avec assez de subtilité ces représentations de jadis, trouverait-on la loi
des falsifications inconscientes qui permettaient de dessiner des mouvements du vol des oiseaux ou des
galops du cheval, comme si on eût pu les observer à loisir : mais ces moments interpolés sont imaginaires.
On attribuait à ces mobiles rapides des figures probables, et il ne serait pas sans intérêt de chercher par
comparaison de documents à préciser cette sorte de création, par laquelle l‟entendement comble les lacunes
de l‟enregistrement par les sens. » 16
Valéry, 1212. My translation. The original reads: « tout réveille ou nourrit l‟instinct de s‟approprier la
figure ou le modelé de la chose que construit le regard. » An interesting reflection on the visual in Valéry
can be found in his Les deux vertus d’un livre (Oeuvres II. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,
1960). The essay is a reflection on the book as reading surface and as visual object. 17
Valéry, Cahiers II. Paris : Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1974, 942. My translation. The original
reads: « Les choses réelles agissent esthétiquement par cette multiplicité qui empêche d‟en finir avec elles
par un acte abstrait… La même chose X donne la diversité a1 = f(X) ; a2 = φ(X) ; a3 = g(X) etc. suivant
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que l‟observateur devient f, φ ou g. Ce vers est mélodie, il est aussi image ; aussi, pensée et les f, φ, g, sont
des dispositifs entre lesquels on peut chercher des passages, modulation. » 18
Göller, Adolf, What is the Cause of Perpetual Style Change in Architecture?” in Empathy, Form, and
Space. Problems of German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, introduction and translation by Harry Francis
Mallgrave. Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and Architecture, 1994, 204.