Enframing: Art’s Epoche and the Promethean Community

This essay takes as its point of departure a little known text by Jean-François Lyotard on art and its relation to global networks of telecommunication in order to explore the possibilities for social and political communities in the context of global capital. Borrowing Heidegger’s notion of an “enframing” (Gestell) of nature by technology, Lyotard inquires into a similar enframing of art, arguing that art, through the very fact that it is an unprogrammable kind of techne, has the power to “suspend” the programs of what he calls “capitalist technoscience,” and in so doing works against the loss of originality such programs produce. Linking this to Lyotard’s famous discussion of the avant-garde, I examine the potential political force of such a suspension or “epoche,” particularly with regard to the formation of possible publics in the absence of world historical “grand narratives” that would situate a universal human subject within a particular conception of historical progress. Lyotard argues that the Idea (in the Kantian sense) of totality no longer unproblematically provides the horizon for political thought. Any such cosmopolitan community is therefore problematic, communities can only be formed in the absence of necessarily shared qualities or traits. They must therefore be “promethean” in the sense of being creative, daring, and open to reinterpretation. Not only is this not something to be lamented, however, it is something that should be affirmed for the open possibilities it offers.