from French Philosophy Since 1945, ed. Etienne Balibar, et al.

New York:
I i7(> I JEAN-FRANgolS LYOTARr)
The New Press, 2011.
of deriving the pictural object from its "real" model by way of a continuous
translation. Tbe trace on tbe figurative canvas is a non-arbitrary trace. Figura-
tivity is therefore a property relative to the relation between the plastic object
and that which it represents. It vanishes i f the function o f the canvas is no longer H E N R I M A L D I N E Y
to represent, i f it is it.self the object. The value of that object then depends .solely
on the organization of the signifier. That organization varies between two
extremes.
Gaze, Speech, Space

NOTE
' A n d r e Breton, Lesurrealisme et lapeinture (Paris: G a l l i m a r d , 1965), p. i . ,
^ • l o abstract is to extract from the arrhythmic world o f action elements
I capable of becoming excited and moving rhythmically.
-A. Abstraction is not a modern prejudice. It is the vital act o f Art. I t
represents that power of interiority and transcendence o f the visual plane w i t h -
out which art does not exist. Jean Bazaine was quite right to say that abstrac-
tion "is a function of a greater or lesser degree o f resemblance, not between the
work and external reality, but between the work and an interior world that
encompasses it and opens out until it reaches the pure rhythmic motifs o f be-
ing."' I f our era, for reasons stated earlier, has turned away from everyday ap-
pearances and domestic life, it was not to flee the world but to rediscover it at
another level, where we demonstrated our distinctive coexistence and "co-
birth" \co-naissance; c f connaissance, knowledge—Trans.J.
What, then, is this abstraction in the end.? It is transfigurative action, action
that reveals rhythm in the forms that embody it. Those forms gradually lose
the qualities that originally characterized them in practical vision only to reap-
pear (reborn) with more essential qualities bestowed on them by rhythm. More
than that, the purifying effects o f rhythm adapt those forms to the transcen-
dent world they are charged with expressing, the world that is present as style
in the initial sensation.
To choose some number o f active focal points of the real, whether located in
the curve o f a shoulder or the curve o f a hill, and to rediscover their profound
communication—not in the "already seen, already k n o w n " composition o f
their domestic economy but in a drive or instinct (pulsion) o f the world as a
whole, and in the only effective manner, the rhythmic mode. That is the essen-
tial task of Abstraction: to render each thing unto itself by transcending it in
the direction of its style.
Reality is not the sum o f the objects that surround us. It is situated at a more
elemental level, and it is the irruption o f that elemental level into the quotidian
tbat produces the surprise o f Reality. The Real is always that which we did not

Regard, parole, espace (Lausanne: Editions L'Age d'Homme, 1973), pp. i , 18-20, 124-25,
185-85, 152—64; trans. Arthur Goldhammer. ' <
13781 HENRI MALDINEY
expect.' Hence abstraction is not a matter of ebminating or, as one says, distort-
ing tbe world witbout changing it; it consists in transforming, in transposing,
forms tbat recount into forms tbat speak. Tbere are forms like old gossips tbat
recount all tbe incidents and accidents o f the everyday world. The forms we
must create are those that speak o f that transcendent reality toward which we
and the world proceed together, into our depths.^ Abstraction is another name
for creation. A n d the abstraction of modern art is one attempt to use rhythm to
wrench us away from the intellectualization and mechanization of modern
man and his world. It is true that in the process rhythm itself sometimes be-
comes mechanized and bogged down in spiritual algebra. But the fall of a swal-
low does not prevent the return o f spring.
There is no aesthetic except of rhythm.
There is no rhythm that is not aesthetic.
These two propositions are not converses o f each other, because the word
"aesthetic" does not have the same meaning in both.
In the second proposition, where the word is used in a broader and more
primitive sense, "aesthetic" refers to the Greek aLCT6T)CTL^ (= sensation) and
covers the whole field o f sensory receptivity. To say that every rhythm is aes-
thetic is to say that the experience of rhythm—in which we encounter it where
and as it "takes place"—is of the order of feeling (and of communication within
feeling). But an aesthetic o f rhythm or rhythms relates only to the dimension of
art and beauty, and its field is limited to artistic perception. Is this shift from
broad to narrow gradual and continuous.? Or is there rupture and leap (con-
sisting of one or more jumps) from one domain to the other, that is, discontinu-
ity and mutation between the sensory aesthetic and the artistic aesthetic?
Our thesis is: " A r t is the truth of the perceptible because rhythm is the truth
of aiaOtiai^."
What is rhythm, rigorously speaking?
One can and should determine scientifically the physiological, physical, and
psychological conditions of its appearance, variations, and disappearance, but
these will not tell us what it is in itself. Many will think the question is meta-
physical and the answer futile: anyone who experiences it won't care about
its essence. But that is precisely the point: rhythm is strictly speaking meta-
physical; it takes place beyond the physical phenomena that are its fundamen-
tal elements. Because it is "produced," concept and act are one. The essence of
rhythm gives rise to certain ambiguities, which are invariably also misunder-
standings of experience, the most common of which is the confusion o f rhythm
witb cadence. Classical, almost official, it dates from Aristotle, who defined
rhythm as order in time.
GAZE, S P E E C H , SPACE I 379 1
Contemporary musicians find it hard to liberate themselves from tbe mean-
ing tbat to them seems to correspond to the discontinuous, and witb it they try
to explain rhythm's two antithetical dimensions, continuity and discontinuity.
Pierre Boulez, like Karl Stockhausen before him, speaks o f rhythmic units that
can be multiplied and divided, of rhythmic systems based on objectively mea-
surable durations and tempi. Now, i f rhythm assumes (as anything other than
an obstacle to be removed) proportionality or even merely commensurability o f
durations as well as tempi, the unit in which it is measured is no longer time
aesthetically experienced but its projection onto an objective spatial image.
Even Stockhausen, who highlights the time of experience {Erlebniszeit), derives
it from objective universal time.
In fact, rhythm involves the whole destiny o f sonic space, which is deter-
mined by pitches as well as durations, intensities as well as tempi, textures as
well as timbres. Rhythm imposes itself on this complex whole: it is the genesis
of the plenitude of time right out o f the auto-movement of that space. To de-
fine it precisely, I shall begin with a study by Honigswald, the only philosophi-
cal work (except for a brief note by L . Klages) to take rhythm as the central
theme o f a crucial reflection.
Honigswald defines rhythm as the articulation of time by time, a temporal
articulation of time, as it were, in which Living and Lived are one. It is not
enough for the articulating moments to constitute an order; that order must
also comprise a temporal dimension. Since other writers have dealt or will deal
with rhythm in poetry and music, I shall limit myself to the plastic arts. Thus I
want to define rhythm where time is least apparent, in sculpture and painting.
I do so in the following terms: The rhythm of a form is the articulation of its im-
plied time. [. . .]
So.? So we must free ourselves from the theoretical illusion, the theoretical
illusion, that all human experience is structured by the subject-object polarity.
There is no denying the relation o f a subject that maizes the world an object for
itself and thereby distinguishes itself from the world. But this situation is sec-
ondary to the situation of perception. The relation Self-World in Feeling is not
reducible to the relation Subject-Object. "Feeling is to perceiving what the cry
is to the word."'' Now, the word is not the truth of the cry. Neither is perception
the truth o f sensation. Sensation is fundamentally a mode o f communication,
and in feeling we live our being-wZ/A-tbe-world in a "pathic" mode. The basic
elements o f rhythm belong to a world o f this sort, given in relation to commu-
nication (rather than objectification). They are not objectively posited as uni-
versal facts or phenomena. Nor are they simply material experiences reflected
in consciou.sness. They belong to that primal and primordial world in which
we deal witb reality for the first time and in each of our acts, for the dimension
of the real is the communicative dimension o f experience.
I 3«o I HENRI
At this point we confront a crucial question involving the contradictory re-
lations of art and Feeling. Sensation is a certitude that experiences its truth
without casting doubt on the reality o f the world with which we communicate
through it. Now, we posit something as real only after having considered and
resolved in a positive sense the possibility that it does not exist. This is the skep-
tical path o f doubt, of critique, and o f the mobilization o f evidence that can
MALDINEY
GAZE, S P E E C H , SPACE I I
most detailed possible way. Y o u think you know it. But when you see the things
themselves, the sensation is always different from that occasioned by the most minute
imagination of the scene. T h e real is what you did not foresee. W h a t isgiven to you. It is
what the Japanese call the " A h ! " of things.
' ' " . . . to re-create that transcendent reality toward which the individual evolves. (July the
living matters" (Tal Coat). "To know \connaitre\s to be born with \naitre avec\" (Paul
Claudel).

confirm or deny the initial certainty. It is the passage from certitude to truth. ' ' E . Straus, Kom iV«;; (/f/'5/«nf, p. 329.
'' Letter from Vincent Van (iogh to his brother T h e o , 24 March 1889.
Sensory certitude ignores the casting o f doubt. The Self-World relationship
^ J. Castjuet, Cezanne, p. 121.
is not subjected to the ordeal of the possibility of N o . The basic elements o f
rhythm are not posited in the strict sense of the word. They are—with no ac-
count being taken o f the possibility of not being. There is. This is. This yes does
not refute any no. The point is precisely this: these elements are posited in
rhythm. Rhythm is the milieu in which their being is freed from the possibility
of non-being, and of being-otherwise. Rhythm, because it is a form of presence,
an existential, is by itself a warrant of reality. I n it, real and possible coincide.
Through it art is not—as one says—an imaginary.
Here one ought to point out how we communicate in intimate contact with
feeling, in a pathic mode, not with this or that object but with the world as a
whole—but time is short. When Van Gogh speaks o f "the high yellow note" he
"achieved this summer" (in 1888),'' or when Cezanne, grabbing his coachman
by the shoulder in the wagon in which he was riding out to his "theme," cried
out in a sort of ecstasy that made an impression on his companion, "Look! The
blues . . . those blues over there . . . under the pines,"^ neither that yellow nor
those blues were colors of objects; they were rather introductions to the world,
encounters with the worlds of Van Gogh and Cezanne. They number among
"those confused sensations that we carry at birth." A n d for painters the prob-
lem is to make of those sensations a work in which the world functions. They
can simultaneously put them "to w o r k " and bring them "into the world" only
by putting them in rhythm. Whence the question: Is the relation between sen-
sation and rhythm one o f continuity or discontinuity.? We already sense that
there is discontinuity, a jump, because there is a transition from a certitude to a
truth.

NOTES
' Jean Bazaine, Notes sur la peinture, p. 37.
- T h e style of a thing is the style of the world of which it is the point of contact with us. It
is incompatible with isolation of the thing or object. "To join the women's curves to the
shoulders ot hills," said Cezanne.
' W h a t is the universal index of the real? Its singular unpredictability. T h i n k of the way in
which commonplace things suddenly appear real to us once again when we rediscover
them. A new light, never before seen, illuminates a familiar landscape. Y o u are surprised
to see that the landscape exists—other than as image. O r prepare for a journey in the