Ticket to a New Decor
Jean-François Lyotard
Copyright, No. 1

From "Ticket to a New Decor," by Jean-François Lyotard, in Copyright, No. 1, the first issue of a biannual journal published at Harvard University. The issue is devoted to articles about the coming millennium. Lyotard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, has written his article in the form of a letter to a child. Translated by Brian Massurni and W.G.J. Niesluchowski.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thought and action were governed by the idea of the emancipation of humanity. This idea was elaborated at the end of the eighteenth century in the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Progress in science, technology, the arts, and political liberties, it was said, would free all of humanity from ignorance, poverty, lack of education, and despotism. People would not only be happy but, due in large part to education, would become enlightened citizens and masters of their destiny.

All of the political currents of the last two centuries, with rare exceptions such as reaction and Nazism, derive from this source. The divergences, however violent, between political liberalisms, economic liberalisms, Marxisms, anarchisms, and socialisms are insignificant compared with their unanimity regarding the goal to be reached. For all of them, the promise of freedom lies on the horizon of progress. All of them lead, or believe they lead, to a transparency of humanity to itself.

These ideals are on the decline in popular opinion in the so-called developed nations. The discourse of the political class is still based on the rhetoric of emancipation, but it cannot heal the wounds that the "modern" ideal has suffered during the last two centuries. What has made possible total war, total itarianisms, the growing gap between the wealth of the North and the poverty of the South, unemployment and the "new poor," the general deculturation accompanying the education crisis (in other words, the crisis in the transmission of knowledge), and the isolation of the artistic avant-gardes is not the absence of progress but, on the contrary, techno-scientific, artistic, economic, and political development itself.

All these wounds can be given names. Their names are strewn across the field of our unconscious like so many secret obstacles to the quiet perpetuation of the "modern project." Under the pretense of safeguarding that project, the men and women of my generation in Germany imposed on their children a forty-year silence about the "Nazi interlude." This interdiction against remembering stands as a symbol for the entire Western world. But can there be progress without remembering, without an act of anamnesis? Anamnesis constitutes a painful process of working through, a work of mourning for the conflicting emotions, loves and terrors, associated with these wounds. Perhaps the process is beginning. I marvel that the government saw fit to dig into the utopian lawn of the Washington Mall a gloomy, candle-lit trench named the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We have only gotten as far as a vague, apparently inexplicable, end-of-the-century melancholy.

This decline of the "modem project" is not, however, a form of decadence. It is accompanied by almost exponential techno-scientific growth. There is not now, nor will there ever be again, a loss or turning back of forms of knowledge and know-how, barring the destruction of humanity. This situation is unique in history.

Technical or scientific discovery has never been subordinated to the demands dictated by human needs. It has always been animated by a dynamic that functions independently of what people may judge desirable, profitable, or comfortable. Humanity has always lagged behind the capacities to understand ("ideas") and to act ("means") made available to it by inventions, discoveries, research, and chance happenings.

There are three current trends worth noting. First, there is a fusion of techniques and sciences into an enormous techno-scientific apparatus. Second, there is a revision under way in all of the sciences, not only of hypotheses or even of "paradigms" but of modes of reasoning and of systems of logic considered "natural." Contemporary theories in mathematics, physics, astrophysics, and biology abound with paradoxes. Finally, there is a qualitative transformation brought on by the new technologies: The machines of the present generation carry out operations of recall, of reference, of calculation, of grammar, rhetoric, and poetics, and of reasoning and judgment. They are prostheses for language-in other words, for thought.

In retrospect, it is obvious that the work carried out by the artistic avant-gardes for over a century is following a parallel process of complexification. This complexification involves sensibilities (visual, auditory, motor, linguistic) rather than forms of know-how or knowledge. But the philosophical impact of this work is no less important in the realm of receptivity or "taste" than is that of techno-science in the area of intelligence and practice.

Looming on your century's horizon is an increase in complexity in most domains, including daily life. This suggests a decisive task: making humanity capable of adapting to extremely complex ways of feeling, understanding, and doing. At the very least, it implies resistance to oversimplification, to simplifying slogans, to demands for clarity and ease, to the desire to restore solid values. Even now it is readily apparent that simplification is barbarous, reactive. The "political class" will have to, must already, take stock of this necessity if it wants to avoid falling into obsolescence and dragging humanity with it when it goes.

Slowly, a new decor is being put in place, in broad outline: the cosmos is fallout from an explosion; the debris is still scattering from the initial thrust; stars transmute the elements as they burn; their days are numbered, as are the sun's; the chances that the synthesis of the first algae would take place in the earth's water were infinitesimal; the Human is even less probable; the human cortex is the most complex material organization ever known; the machines human beings engender are an extension of it; the network they will form will be like a second cortex, only more complex; it will be necessary to find a way to evacuate humanity from the earth before the sun dies; the process of selecting those who will be able to leave and those fated for the implosion has already begun, using the criterion of "underdevelopment."

The ultimate affront to humanity's narcissism: humanity is in the service of complexificatinny. This decor is being set up in the unconscious of the young, in yours, beginning now.