Technophany, A Journal for Philosophy and Technology

Lyotard and the 21st Century

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  Strategies of Resistance On Ambivalent Words in Jean-François Lyotard

  Futoshi Hoshino

  1－17

  This essay examines Jean-François Lyotard’s ambivalent use of the “sublime,” focusing on the intricate tension and complicity between capitalism and avant-garde art. Capitalism, while dehumanising and dematerialising individuals, generates avant-garde art that critiques these very processes. Lyotard’s use of terms such as “terror,” “inhuman,” and “immaterial” reveals their dual role: they function both as instruments of the capitalist system and as tools of resistance. By tracing Lyotard’s evolving thought from the 1970s to the 1980s, this essay explores how he argues that effective critique of capitalism must come from within its structures, a strategy that may be described as “mimetic adaptation.” Additionally, the essay highlights how Lyotard’s insights continue to be crucial for understanding the dynamics of power, resistance, and the potential for subversion in contemporary capitalist society, especially through the lens of aesthetic theory.

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  From the "Anamnesis of the Visible" to "Cartographic Anamnesis" Lyotard and the Postmodern Spaces of Representation

  Anna De Martino

  1－23

  The starting point of the article is that cartography can be used as an epistemological and relational device to visualize and rethink relations between human beings and the world in the contemporary era. To provide elements in support to this hypothesis, the contribution intends to read some Lyotardian notions, such as "anamnesis", "rewriting", "figural", "libidinal set-up", "interworld" in relation to the cartographic device and to issues related to postmodern spatial production in architecture and geography. The aim will be  to show how this pivotal concepts of Lyotard's aesthetics can be applied to think about a philosophy of technique and culture, which takes cartography as its object of study and investigation, particularly by soliciting the text Discourse, figure and by using the artistic and theoretical work of artists like Paul Klee and Gianfranco Baruchello, who are fundamental to lyotardian reflection.

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  The Exteriorization of Knowledge: Reporting on Knowing as a Distributed Practice.

  Maaike Bleeker

  1-16

  In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard observes that “technological transformations can be expected to have a considerable impact on knowledge,” including “a thorough exteriorization of knowledge with respect to the ‘knower’ at whatever point he or she may occupy in the knowledge process.” Lyotard’s observation anticipates new materialist elaborations on the entanglement of matter and meaning in practices of knowing, particularly Karen Barad’s understanding of knowing as a distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement. Using Mark Hansen’s media archaeological insights into the role of technology in “expansions of the sensible” beyond the human sensorium, I show how the shift towards the operationality of the system’s performance (its performativity) with regard to the legitimization of knowledge, as observed by Lyotard, and the shift towards performative alternatives to representationalism theorized by Barad are two different aspects of what Jon McKenzie describes as “the becoming performative of knowledge itself.”

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  A “Pagan” Anthropocene? Lyotard Beyond Postmodernism

  Gael Caignard

  1-20

  The article considers the notion of the Anthropocene in the light of several philosophical tools that we can draw from Jean-François Lyotard. At first, I consider Lyotard’s analysis on postmodern condition, in particular in respect of the process of legitimation and the crisis of grand narration. Then, I ask if the Anthropocene is itself a new grand narrative or if, on the contrary, another understanding of the Anthropocene can be proposed starting from Lyotard’s reflexions on paganism. After an analysis of some elements of Lyotard’s paganism, I search for the traits of a “pagan Anthropocene”, using several examples from the contemporary ecological studies. At the end, I argue that the notion of pagus proposed by Lyotard can work together with the idea of compost proposed by Donna Haraway, going in this way beyond the postmodern towards a shared dwelling with non-human entities in a terrestrial condition.

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  Involuntary phrases for the 21st Century: “No phrase is the first.” §184

  Kiff Bamford

  1－20

  In an interview in 1978, Lyotard was asked if he believed a “communication volontaire” is possible. The difficulty of translating this phrase—“self-directed” or “voluntary” communication?—is enhanced by the fact that such a notion seems oddly out of
  time. Lyotard’s reply invokes aspects of the strange and strained relationship between his most philosophical book, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, and his most popular, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, in particular the shift from
  Wittgensteinian ideas of “language games” to that of phrase regimen and its attending critique of anthropocentrism. Is there, in this shift, a move that echoes current aspects of ecocriticism and into which it might, in turn, feed? The possibility of a “communication
  volontaire” will be considered through the inter-relationship of both texts, Lyotard’s own response in relation to his teachings at the university of Vincennes, and through artworks which perform aspects of this voluntary process.

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  Retrieving the Lost Paths of Technology Facing Technological Singularism through Anamnesis

  Sergio Meijide Casas

  1-19

  Despite being one of the key figures in the philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century, Jean-François Lyotard’s ideas have not yet been properly explored. This article will start from some of the main misunderstandings surrounding his thought on history and technology in order to propose a broad reflection on the interest that Lyotard’s ideas still have for our present. To this end, some of the accelerationist interpretations of his work will be questioned.

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  System Failure (?)

  Ashley Woodward

  1-19

  This paper takes a retrospective look at Lyotard’s analysis of “the postmodern condition,” a century after his birth, and nearly a half-century since his highly influential book. Lyotard’s pessimistic view was that after the end of metanarratives, there is now no alternative to the liberal democratic capitalist “System,” which is governed by a technological-economic principle of “performativity.” Considering Lyotard’s thesis in the light of his own methodology of “signs of history,” I argue that it is no longer possible to hold this view. A number of key historical events point to massive fault-lines that have appeared in this System. Nevertheless, much of what Lyotard wrote in The Postmodern Condition about the growing influence of technology on social and political life has only been confirmed. The hypothesis this paper proposes is that the signs of system failure might at least open paths of resistance to technological hegemony.

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  Inhuman Infancy Lyotard’s Critique of Development in an Age of Infantilization

  Daan Keij

  1-20

  This article critically assesses Lyotard’s notions of development and infancy. In The Inhuman, Lyotard opposes development as the name for contemporary capitalism and infancy as source of resistance. However, after Lyotard, Bernard Stiegler diagnoses our contemporary situation as infantilized. This implies that infancy is no longer opposed to development, but its accomplice. Stiegler therefore calls for a new maturity, which he primarily understands as responsibility and critical thinking. I argue that this remains one-sided, because Stiegler’s inspiration—Kant’s essay on Enlightenment—leads him to a primarily negative notion of infancy. Stiegler’s call for maturity is valuable but must be supplemented with Lyotard’s notion of infancy: infancy as potentiality and affectivity. Especially Lyotard’s understanding of affectivity allows for thinking the source of those practices such as art and philosophy that do not immediately serve an external end, be it development’s end of increasing performativity or Stiegler’s end of maturity.

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  Lyotard’s ‘Brain’, and/or the Mathematical Universe

  Sunil Manghani

  1-36

  This article provides a reading of Jean-François Lyotard’s “A Postmodern Fable.” It explores the speculative narrative on the fate of human consciousness as the Sun dies in conjunction with a reading of contemporary artificial intelligence and the hypothesis of a mathematical universe. The analysis draws upon Lyotard’s layered concept of the ‘inhuman’, alongside accounts from engineer James Lovelock and physicist Max Tegmark, to interrogate the futures of intelligence and consciousness beyond anthropocentric frameworks. In conclusion, Lyotard’s Fable, benefiting from updated accounts of what he refers to as “all the research in progress” in contemporary science and technology, retains valuable insights; pre-inscribing an inevitable disinheritance of the Human, and/or the Brain’s mathematical array. Lyotard’s Fable potentially reveals itself an expression of an already existing mathematical function.

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