Lyotard, Post-politics and Riotous Music

Abstract

When the finger points at the moon, the IDIOT looks at the finger. Chinese Proverb--graffito on the wall of the Paris Conservatoire de Musique, May, 1968 (1) In the wake of the 'evenements' of May 1968, Jean-Francois Lyotard promised to write a history, or rather an 'antihistory', of the irreducibly singular energy-events he took them to be. His statement of intent survives with the subtitle: 'Unpublished introduction to an unfinished book on the movement of March 22' (the latter being the Nanterre University student movement that, so to speak, got the May ball rolling). (2) Lyotard never did write up his account of those events--unsurprisingly, given his construction of 'event' and 'history' as virtual antonyms. Perhaps he should have composed a piece of music instead, for the terms in which he approached the proper-named event of 'May '68' are much the same as those in which he approached music, but not just any music: not, for example, what he scorned as the market-driven eclecticism of much 'postmodernist' music, with its anything-goes-if-it-sells pseudo-aesthetic, nor even modernist music as he sometimes defined the term 'modernist', but what he more often preferred to call 'avant-garde' music. The irreducibly singular political event that forces a rethinking of politics tout court is Lyotard's model for the irreducibly singular musical event that forces a rethinking of music and sound itself. But perhaps we should invert that relation, acknowledging the primacy of the aesthetic instance in Lyotard's thought, since he accords avant-garde artists a kind of epistemological privilege over philosophers and political radicals as witnesses of 'events'. Lyotard had an investment in not understanding the phenomena of May '68. Disenchanted with organised Left politics and its 'representative' institutions, he thanked the student radicals (the enrages or 'young rowdies', as he called them) who caught Leninist doctrine unawares by showing that there can be a revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory--thanked them for staging the explosive energy-event which, he said, 'got him out of the impasse between militant delirium and scepticism', (3) changing his mood, which had been swinging between party-line dogmatism and impotent doubt, by showing him that newness could enter the world. Lyotard thus had a libidinal investment in not 'dissolv[ing] the delirium, the unjustifiability, and the passion of May '68 into a simple phenomenon to be understood'. (4) His aborted introduction to his unwritten account of the failed revolution of May '68 criticises History for forecasting the past: 'a history book always aims to produce a historian's knowledge ... a discourse ... in which the nonsense of the event will be rendered intelligible, fully signified, and thus in principle predictable', whereas the movement of March 22 had 'performed a work of unbinding, an antipolitical work, that brings about the collapse rather than the reinforcement of the system'. (5) Thus, for a Lyotard disillusioned with the bureaucratic politics of workers' representative organisations and with the Hegelian ends and Rousseauistic origins of grand narratives of emancipation and self-realisation, the key feature of the May '68 movement was the fact that it did not fulfil anyone's master-plan: 'No one', he writes, 'had thought about what the movement did. The movement turned out this way, caught everything established and all thought (including revolutionary thought) off guard, offering a figure of what this society represses or denies, a figure of its unconscious desire'. To try to make the movement 'take its place within a system of knowledge' would thus be to betray it; 'rather, one must try to show how it defeated the distribution of places imposed by the capitalist-bureaucratic system'--the system that assigns every event a place in its 'accounts'. (6) More particularly, Lyotard has a problem with representing May '68 because he wants to interpret it as a critique of representation itself, both as institutionalised in the political party or the labour union and in its broadest sense as 'the exteriorisation of activity', or 'the mise en spectacle' that turns actors into mere role-players and 'public opinion' into a mere spectator of events. …