The Revolution of Desire: A Politics of Aesthetics

It is this de-differentation between the boundaries and specializations of modernism, between meaning and impact, surface and depth, high art and low art, and art and politics, which ultimately leads us into our discussion of poststructuralist anti-rational, anti-political, anti-critical thought. For in de-differentiating art from politics and politics from art, postmodernism ultimately leads to the preference of aesthetics over ethics, of image over text, not just in art but in all discourse, which inevitably leads to a distrust of the metanarrative, of depth, of the structural processes underlying and tying events together, of anything but the sensation of the present, which if you leave behind all your socially constructed morals, is really quite a show, all surface, totally cheap and rich.

The trouble with this aestheticization of everything, to repeat the quote from Berman, "is that it never developed a critical perspective which might have clarified the point where openness to the modern world has got to stop, and the point where the modern artist needs to see and to say that some of the powers of this world have got to go" (32). Berman's criticism here of postmodernisms nihilistic aesthetic touches the nerve chord of what this discussion. It raises the issue central to the debate between poststructuralists and critical theorists, whether or not to experience the sensations of society in a forever acceptant, malleable, and aesthetically sensitive way and be fully in it (without the auratic elitism of seperating oneself from the-way-it-is, which is a very "unpopulist" thing to do), or whether to draw a line in the sand, whereupon the increased number of homeless people one walks over each day isn't something to be struck in sublime awe at, but something to become disturbed by, to become angered and motivated to ask, "why the hell are they on the street? And what the heck can we do to get them off?" Central to this debate on whether to be or to become, is the question of whether one can employ and act upon an objective rationality to bring about change. Poststructuralists say no, critical theorists say yes.

Lyotard, a poststructuralist, views all discourse, whether in art, science, or politics, as language games which codify libidinal desires. Thus each statement becomes another "move in the game" adding to the "discursive economy of desire." But Lyotard, like Foucault (a poststructrualist) argues for a figural economy of desire in which the sexually perverse, mad, desiring, illogical unconscious isn't sterilized, repressed, and defined for us, but is given to us unmediated and pure. Lyotard and Foucault are in essence advocates of the "revolution of desire against any kind of structure, legality--whether bourgeois or proletarian, formal or substantive" (Lash, 106). They go so far as to disavow themselves of the belief in any kind of natural human rights to be defended. For, "if we understand rights in terms of the justified powers that are ascribed to individuals, then there must be a second and seperate instance, typically the state or political doctrines themselves--as in natural rights theory--that does the justifying" (Lash, 106). Foucault views any institution designed to defend natural rights as inevitably bound to end up as oppressive as the Soviet state. For Foucault and Lyotard, the only way to bring about an end to oppression, is through the "complete decodification of desire," in which signifiers don't take precedence over the signified, where the narrative and text doesn't take precedence over the image, where the mind doesn't take precedence over the body, and where ultimately rationality doesn't colonize the unconscious. In a sense, poststructalists in their call for the decodification of desire and the unconscious, are essentially calling for the decolonization of the mind as a means to decolonize the system.

Collective Critical Resistance

Postmodern Aesthetics

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