An excerpt from Media on Media: Returning to Jean-François Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux
Printed in Pidgin, Issue 32
2024
In The Postmodern Condition, first published in 1979, Lyotard presented a formulation of “postmodernism” as a cyclical phenomenon returning after periods of “modernism.”1 The book was, notably, commissioned by the Quebec government as a response to a French report, L’informatisation de la société by Simon Nora and Alain Minc, issued two years earlier. The Postmodern Condition, though formally an account on technology in post-industrial society, also deliberated upon the changing status of knowledge, perceptions of legitimacy, and modes of authorship.
Reflecting the periodicity of Lyotard’s postmodern condition, the exhibition drew upon the neoclassical tendencies of postmodern architecture, borrowing the classical archetype of the labyrinth. Designed by architect Philippe Delis, the space was shaped by a series of passageways of translucent mesh partitions, appearing as shimmering webbing or opaque depending on the light. Their erratic plan resulted in a series of corridors that compressed and expanded, creating an interior without end. To shape the labyrinth, Delis designated spaces of interaction into “sites,” areas of encounter, and “deserts,” the circulation spaces in between, creating a dramatic staging for aesthetic experience. This parcours widened and narrowed space, providing a kind of somatic manipulation or sense of being lost. This postmodern turn to the labyrinth, now purely formal, exchanged the stone of myth for a fabric, textile geometry without poché. This rendering of the labyrinth reflected the poststructural ethics of Lyotard’s postmodernism, a material change enacted upon classical form.
1 Lyotard’s theory of a periodic ontological condition, rather than a finite period, was distinct from Guy Debord and Henri Lebevre’s popular definitions of postmodernism by “spectacle” or “consumption.” See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), vii.
