Poststructuralism, aesthetics and events

Jean-François Lyotard's poststructuralism is distinctive due to its emphasis on aesthetics and on art. He seeks to introduce aesthetic events into structures, subjects and objects. Structure is infused with emotion and a troubling materiality. Wherever the detachment of structure is relied upon, Lyotard injects feelings associated with art and with other felt events (a political act or feeling, a use of language, a passionate caress, a burst of enthusiasm).

Events are important because they undermine and transform linguistic structures and their relations to things. Aesthetic events, such as the feelings associated with artworks – the events of an encounter with art – also transform and are part of things. This means that there is no independent reality. There are transforming relations between matter, feelings and language (structure). These transformations are events. They can be forgotten, hidden, repressed or ignored, but they are there at work, nonetheless.

Lyotard does not believe that language or discourse, a connected subset of language, can capture events. Instead, deeply felt encounters show the structures of discourses to be insufficient for accounting for events. More profoundly, discourses depend on feelings and on the disturbance they cause. There is no discourse without the intensity of feelings.

Language and discourse owe their significance and evolution to events, defined as relations between feelings and matter. It is not about what you know about love, or even about what that knowledge allows you to do. It is about love-events, their shaping of knowledge, and the way they always escape the net that knowledge or subsequent decisions throw over them.