Gillian B. Pierce

Department of Foreign Languages
Ashland University
gpierce@ashland.edu

 

Review of: Jean-François Lyotard, Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics. Trans. David Harvey. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001. (Originally published in French under the title Chambre Sourde: L’Antiesthétique de Malraux.Paris: Editions Galilée, 1998.)

 

Soundproof Room, the final completed work by the cultural philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, reads like a crystallization of the essential elements of his 1996 biography of André Malraux, entitled Signed, Malraux (and also translated into English by David Harvey). Soundproof Room is rich in references to that text, but abandons the “junkyard writing” of the earlier work–a style that purportedly “apes” Malraux’s own writing–to return to the dense, poetic style more familiar to Lyotard’s readers.¹ Although Signed, Malraux is a narrative of Malraux’s work and the life that is indistinguishable from it (and this from one who famously declared himself suspicious of “grand narratives”), Lyotard creates a new genre he calls “hypobiography,” declaring in effect that postmodern biography will be scenic, much as Malraux’s own work has often been called cinematic for its syncopated rhythms evocative of physical sensations. In Soundproof Room, subtitled “Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics,” Lyotard clearly strives to elucidate the relationships between Malraux, politics, aesthetics, and Lyotard’s own body of work. The biographical concerns of Signed, Malraux are further condensed into moments or scenes of ontological questioning that beautifully, if stridently, illustrate the central concerns of periodization in art and the fragile status of the individual political or aesthetic gesture that have animated all of Lyotard’s work.

 

Robert Harvey’s facing-page translation makes it convenient to consult the original French, which is useful for a text that rests so heavily on Lyotard’s previous work on Malraux, and on his own prior writings on aesthetics, notably in The Inhuman. For in positing the work of art as a soundproof room, as an “empty trachea […] in which silence might stir,” Lyotard further develops his fascination for the inhuman in art, for the way in which the work of art bears witness to the unpresentable, the “it happens” of the sublime developed throughout his oeuvre. Malraux as historical individual is subsumed; voice and ego are eclipsed, having gone over to the side of the third person, and out of this death comes an account of the renewal of the rise of the work of art. As Lyotard writes, “man is only that which exceeds the inhuman of artwork” (38).

 

Malraux is not the first thinker Lyotard has adopted from an earlier period in the service of postmodernism: He is indebted to Kant (in The Differend and Lessons in the Analytic of the Sublime), Freud (in The Libidinal Economy), Diderot, Newmann, Duchamp, and even Rabelais–and yet it would be wrong to accuse him, as some have, of “modernist” tendencies. Postmodernism is a non-periodizing concept for Lyotard, one that arises out of a differend or irreducible heterogeneity, and must be viewed as a critical stance. Language is insufficient to convey an incommunicable content, and the postmodern arises out of this incommensurability. Malraux, in his life and work, repeatedly comes up against precisely this kind of a differend in which death (Lyotard’s La Redite, which Harvey renders as “the Redundant One”) appears as the only possible outlet. Lyotard has always interpreted postmodern politics and thought in terms of this sort of aesthetic formulation, and in Soundproof Room he reduces the biography of Malraux to its aesthetic heart: the quest for the limits of experience and the eclipse of the first person of biography by the annihilating, redundant force of death.

 

Why should one talk about “anti-aesthetics” in Malraux? Aesthetics refers to the analysis of things perceived by the senses, to material forms, and has further come to connote a response to the beautiful in art or in nature, “taste” deriving from the Kantian sensus communis. But for Lyotard, as for Malraux, art evokes the sublime. There is no community of feeling or of like-minded connoisseurs, no recourse to reassuring forms. In The Inhuman, Lyotard writes, “we find sublime those spectacles which exceed any real presentation of a form” and “these works appear to the public of taste to be ‘monsters, ‘formless’ objects, purely ‘negative’ entities,” deliberately using the Kantian terms for the occasions that provoke the sublime sentiment (113, 125). An anti-aesthetics, then, would refer to the negative presentation of the sublime; that is, one can present merely that there is an immaterial absolute that can be thought beyond material representation. Throughout Soundproof Room, Lyotard will use the term “stridency” to refer to this monstrous apparition beyond the harmony of accepted forms, and he sees throughout Malraux’s life and work (as the two become indistinguishable, one “signing” the other) the attempt to bear witness to this unpresentable content.

 

Soundproof Room follows no linear argument and develops instead according to the elaboration of a concept or theme in each chapter–for example, “Lost Voice,” “Scene,” “War,” “Stridency,” and “Throat”–just as Malraux himself rejected chronology in favor of the development of “scenes” in his writing. The first chapter, “To End, To Begin,” addresses precisely this question of linear development. Ending for Lyotard always implies continuation; the “break” of the end always presupposes the thinking of an “after,” a “post” (leading him to state that “modernity is constitutionally and ceaselessly pregnant with its postmodernity” [Inhuman 25]). In this proposition of the “post” Lyotard sees two heterogeneous levels: “the one on which things take place, and the one on which they are recounted” (4). In the words of Malraux’s Lazarus, “one has no biography except for others” (42). The modern, with its impulsion to exceed itself, upsets the principle of this gap to privilege the present, and for this precarious present moment Lyotard introduces the idea of “voice,” thereby summarizing the history of twentieth-century politics:

 

The voice is incarnated and promises ultimate fulfillment through redemption from the pain of enduring. Such is the Christic mystery elaborated by Saul of Tarsus and Augustine and propagated by the West across two millennia of Western thought and practice. The diverse modernities that follow this initial move repeat the incredible gesture: Here is my body, says the voice, here and now. [...] In the American and French Declarations, the same ostentation: Here we are, free peoples. And in the Bolshevik Revolution: Power to the Worker's Councils (Soviets), right away and here. (6)

 

Against the immediacy of the voice, Lyotard (with Malraux) locates the redundant and inexorable motion of history that dooms each of these narratives (or meta-narratives) to the pourrisoir or “rotting pit” of history. The voice is extinguished repeatedly and becomes inaudible, as “the West is condemned to this obscenity of repeating the gesture of beginning” (10).

 

Lyotard situates Malraux’s work within the tradition of “writing at the limit of writing” (10) that includes Céline, Bataille, Artaud, and Camus:

 

To append Malraux's oeuvre to this group is what I intend to do here. Despite some compositional shortcomings, a tendency toward the epic, a public speaker's eloquence--all of which caused it to be underrated--his work plunged no less than the others into the ontological nausea, was no less anxious to understand and to show how the miracle of artworks can arise. (10-12)

 

In Signed, Malraux Lyotard fully demonstrates the theme of decay in Malraux’s life and work, in which death is not an end, but an endless recurrence of the same (l’éternelle redite). For in that work Lyotard concludes that the relationship between the living body (the bios) and the writing (the graph) are intertwined in such a way that Malraux’s life is “written” for his oeuvre, an oeuvre that draws so much from it. And life has no meaning for Malraux other than constant contact with death, which he defines in turn as a moment of life which can be metamorphosed into an artwork. This moment of creation is privileged by both Lyotard and Malraux.

 

In a lengthy passage from Malraux’s The Royal Way, Lyotard demonstrates the continuity of the cycle of decay and regeneration in the oneness of the Khmer forest:

 

Claude [...] had given up trying to distinguish living beings from their setting, life that moves from life that oozes; some unknown power assimilated the trees with the fungoid growths upon them, and quickened the restless movements of all the rudimentary creatures darting to and fro upon the soil like march-scum amid the steaming vegetation of a planet in the making. Here what act of man had any meaning, what human will could conserve its staying power? Here everything frayed out, grew soft and flabby, assimilated itself with its surroundings [...]. (14)

 

This moment of ontological doubt in fact has its analogue in Lyotard’s thinking on the sublime, and his debt to Kant becomes clear. For out of the dissolution of the self and its assimilation into the surrounding landscape comes the reassertion of being through language. As Lyotard writes, “in the ostensibly mute swamp where everything gets engulfed, larvae stagnate by the billions, fomenting renewal. Plants, animals, humans, cultures: everything will begin again. Plots resume” (12).

 

A central question of Lyotard’s book, then, concerns the state of first-person subjectivity in the face of death and so many “isms,” both political and artistic, doomed to decline, sameness, and assimilation. “What ‘I’ would still dare to introduce itself as master of narrative when the promise of final freedom that it proffers instantly runs aground on the inextricable and restrictive perversity of the language in which it is formulated?” (32) Malraux is acutely aware of the precariousness of the subjective voice, as evidenced by his interest in Jewish history and the “recounting of the forgotten voice” (26). Further, Lyotard sees a correspondence between Malraux’s psychology of art and the validity bestowed upon artworks and “this unforgetting of forgetting and listening to the inaudible whose is paradox is sustained in the Jewish tradition” (28). Malraux’s theory of art, his “anti-aesthetic,” may therefore be summed up by his realization that the artwork simply is without reference to a voice, an author, a reader, or a hero. It is authorized by no voice, and aims at no end.

 

Art, for Malraux as for Lyotard, takes on the status of event, a birth outside of narrative in the face of the disappearance of the ego, at the very moment when it is no longer capable of “hearing its own voice” (36). The subjective element (ego) dissipates, making way for an absolute writing. At this moment “a ‘there, now’ oblivious to history slices the interminable ebb and flow with the thinnest of wires” (38). In this sense, the artwork means nothing, but is rather a singular arrangement of its constituent elements. It does not serve as self-expression or expose the subjectivity of its author, hence its “inhuman” stature. As Lyotard writes, “the artwork breaks with convention, with the commonplace, with the flow. It is obtained through a conscious and conscientious labor that relentlessly endeavors to lay bare the ego. Through art the human bends its will to strive toward this inhuman that sometimes forces it wide open” (50).

 

What Lyotard admires in Malraux is his repeated gesture to transform the “staged idleness” of Europe in the 1920’s into an artwork, to take the raw material of life and impose on it a style. For it is the act of metamorphosis or rebellion that is valuable for Lyotard/Malraux more than the result of any such act. Human endeavors are doomed to redundancy at the hands of history, but something in the artwork resists this motion; the artist “plants his claw right into the event, and signs it” (64). The artwork thus produced is “reality gashed, short-circuited at a given moment on itself, a wounded mouth gaping over the void” (64). Following the logic of simulation, by substituting another world for the paucity of reality the work of art in fact forces the real world to confess that it is an illusion, an idea that Lyotard elaborates with respect to Diderot’s Salons in an earlier essay. For Lyotard, the act of metamorphosis (or the act of rebellion on the political plane) is essential as an assertion of being, whether or not it is doomed to failure. The gesture is born of nothing (“idleness,” or “the void,” to use two other of Lyotard’s formulations), and makes war with this nothingness; as such it is an indispensable affirmation of being or presence.

 

The metaphor of war is central to Malraux’s life as well as to his art. Not only is life a continual war with death, but artistic creation is a war with nothingness. Lyotard contends that wars and revolutions are opportunities for Malraux to come to terms with the limits of experience and to demonstrate that “we die and write for nothing” (66). And writing does entail a kind of death, that is to say the eclipse of the ego in favor of a different “I”: the monstrous “I without a self.” For this reason, Lyotard contends that “war is not the confrontation one thinks it is” and the battlefield is not a place so much as an internal struggle between ego (le moi) and the “I” of writing (le je d’écriture) (68). The image recalls Baudelaire’s image of the artist as escrimeur in “The Painter of Modern Life,” his essay on Constantin Guys: “c’est un moi insatiable du non-moi” (552). This same impulse causes Lyotard to ask, in his introduction to The Inhuman, “what if human beings […] were constrained into, becoming inhuman?” (2). War, indeed, is a differend.

 

The thesis of the “I-without a self” in Malraux and throughout Soundproof Room refers to the dimension of a self that is not within life–one might say the inhuman. According to Lyotard, “it evokes a closure, a deafness, but also the insistence of an anguish that biographical time, which resists it, does not sweep away in its flow” (86). Having written extensively about visual artists and art throughout his lifetime (Duchamp, Monory, Adami, Newmann), Lyotard nonetheless introduces an aural metaphor to describe this anguish: “painting is not for seeing,” writes Lyotard; “it demands this listening: the eye listens to something beyond the harmonious music of the visible” (100). This “something” is what Lyotard calls stridency, a sound lacking bearing and restraint through which “the unheard-of is exhibited, in a flash, at the threshold of the audible.” (76).

 

We don’t hear ourselves through our ears, according to Malraux, but rather through the throat. The figure of “hearing through the throat” also leads Malraux to a figure for communion, since “one hears that other whom one loves, if one loves him like a brother, with one’s throat” (86). For Lyotard, this is the central intuition of Malraux’s theory of aesthetic creation as elaborated in his numerous essays on the psychology of art. This is the essence of Malraux’s anti-aesthetics, in which what is left of subjects communes through what cannot be shared–something like the return to the ineffable in art, a response to the work of art as event or happening in all its singularity. Art is thus an expression of stridency, the unheard-of, a violent act of giving form to the formless, with all of its parallels in the Kantian sublime.

 

The Kantian sublime resists the sensus communis and the “good taste” of the beautiful, but Lyotard’s formulation of the “it happens” of aesthetic experience seems to offer the hope of communion, albeit of a limited sort: “just as we are lovers or brothers through fusion of airtight throats, the artwork places absolute solitudes in communion with each other and with the stridulation of the cosmos” (102). And yet there is no hope for mediation or dialogue between or among these solitary entities. “Singularities fuse only to the extent that they cannot exchange or hear each other” (102). The outer form of the work, its facies is a mere simulation, or dissimulation; the “soundproof room” of its empty inside “allows the mask to pick up the truth–nothingness–in the form of strident apparitions” (104).

 

In the final chapter of Signed, Malraux Lyotard evokes Malraux’s concept of a museum without walls, a “place of the mind” impossible to visit that rather inhabits us (304). For Lyotard, as for Malraux, great works of art are sublime epiphanies, “brush strokes of the absolute” (303). A precarious museum that lives within, apart from the corrupting narrative of art history, Malraux’s gallery exists in limbo, in this zone of the ineffable. The museum without walls represents what Lyotard calls “a perpetual disturbance”; no institution can be established based upon it. Art offers the promise of escape (rather than escape itself), and an intimation of truth as stridency.

 

The question of biography and the dynamic by which a body of work can “sign” a life and vice versa surface at the end of the philosopher’s life in Signed, Malraux and Soundproof Room. The idea of an inhuman art that regenerates beyond the grave is therefore all the more pressing. Lyotard’s works have asked the most provocative questions of postmodern theory: From “What is the Postmodern?” to “Can Thought Go on Without a Body?,” Lyotard persistently returns to questions of presence and the status of the human, often expressed in terms of an irreconcilable differend. Soundproof Room is an important culmination of this body of writing and necessary reading for theorists of the postmodern in art and politics.

 

Notes

 

1. Robert Harvey has commented on the heterogeneity of Lyotard’s writing, and thus characterized the style of Signed, Malraux, following Lyotard’s own characterization of Malraux; see Harvey 99.

 

Works Cited

 

• Baudelaire, Charles. “Peintre de la vie moderne.” Oeuvre completes. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968.
• Harvey, Robert. “Telltale at the Passages.” Yale French Studies 99 (2001): 102-16.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991.
• —. Signed, Malraux. Trans. Robert Harvey. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.