We need artistic experimentation 'bigly'

After reading Jean-Francois Lyotard’s piece tonight, I felt I had to watch the first Presidential Debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump before I could blog. I re-read the piece after the debate and its entire message came across to me as completely different.

Lyotard’s first few words in his first sentence of this piece were, “This is a period of slackening” (Lyotard 1979, 38). On that same page, he mentions Habermas’ stated opposition between modernity and neo-conservatism. And MAN is that relevant right now. In my blog entitled, “Modernity is dead,” I compared Habermas’ idea of anti-modernism to Donald Trump and sentiment around our country around ideology that, in my opinion, doesn’t want us to advance – or wants us to revert to old, less evolved or less considered, ways of doing things.

In that same blog, and the weekly reflection that followed it, I discussed the so-called ‘digital generation,’ and our responsibility to set the standard for the digital generations that follow. Trump’s anti-modern sentiment and our responsibility are inherently intertwined.

When Lyotard wrote this in 1979, like most of the theorists we’ve read, he had no idea of the digital revolution, and now political evolution, that has followed. Yet, he wrote this sentence: “But in the diverse invitations to suspend artistic experimentation, there is an identical call for order, a desire for unity, for identity, for security, or popularity” (Lyotard 1979, 40). The artistic experimentation, in my interpretation, is the advancement of society – those who experiment with the norms of society to advance us towards areas we may never have considered. Those things being called for by people who oppose such advancement – order [see ‘Law and Order’ – called for multiple times tonight], a desire for “unity,” identity [ego], security [a wall] and popularity [see Celebrity Apprentice] – are all ideas which Mr. Trump, a candidate for the highest office in our country, possesses.

And guess what? He is simultaneously calling for the suspense of artistic experimentation – otherwise known as, the suspense of the advancement of society, or the suspense of pushing boundaries we didn’t know were there.

I sometimes wonder what we, as a society, are doing wrong, that future generations will admonish us for. I would think, at some point, people must’ve thought it was alright to own slaves – now we would publicly shame someone for thinking such a thing. I think the fact that we would now do that is the result of artistic experimentation – where people open their minds to new ideas and push through their existing thoughts. This is exactly what Donald Trump is pushing against – more than any other candidate for President in history.

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Now, to move on to the other side of this argument – my generation, the ‘digital revolution,’ and what Lyotard calls, “slackening” (Lyotard 1979, 40). Lyotard uses said phrase in the context of art, but I think it applies ‘bigly,’ as Mr. Trump might say, in this argument. Here’s the quote that’ll show you how: “Artists, gallery owners, critics, and public wallow together in the ‘anything goes,’ ad the epoch is one of slackening” (Lyotard 1979, 42). Anything has gone in Donald Trump’s campaign this year. He has said one thing one moment and the complete opposite the next, yet people support him, often ignoring the reasonable signs to retreat and not support such instability in a leader.

Yet he has leagues of devoted supporters. Why?

I think it has a lot to do with the major theme of Lyotard’s piece. In our postmodern, digital, society, we’re all know-it-alls, whether we like it or not. For many, devices are attached to us 24/7, even while sleeping – and they can provide us answers we want – to fill in the knowledge gaps that may have been filled by critical thinking skills previously. Mr. Trump counts on this – and claims himself to be the ultimate know-it-all in many instances – like where he announced he knew “more than the generals” about defeating ISIS.

Taking a break from my admitted post-debate rant, Lyotard major theme is how he defines modernity: “to present the fact that the unpresentable exists” (Lyotard 1979, 42). We, and symbolically, Mr. Trump, try not to acknowledge the unpresentable anymore – we want to leave as little open-ended as possible – and we can, since our devices can tell us nearly anything we want to hear. Maybe this is one reason so many people feel compelled to support Mr. Trump – because he is a symbol of our society in a sense – moving away from artistic experimentation and critical thinking, in place of our own facts and realism to fill in the gaps.

Peace (is possible... seriously),
-UA191