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POSTMODERN CONDITION Two prominent related phenomena of Lyotard's postmodernism are what he calls the differend and the unpresentable (Lyotard, 1988) DIFFEREND Lyotard defines the differend as "a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments" (Lyotard, 1988:xi). Conflicts can arise when people are engaged in discourses that are incommensurable. Because there are no rules that apply across discourses, the conflicts become differends. To enforce a rule in a differend is to enforce the rule of one discourse or the other, resulting in a wrong suffered by the party whose rule of discourse is ignored. THE UNPRESENTABLE To bear with the postmodern condition, to cope with it, there is a need to limit the amount and extent of wrongs. To satisfy this need is to ensure that the unpresentable is somehow presented. Thus, the ethical problem for postmodernity is to present the unpresentable, or as Lyotard puts it, to "bear witness to differends" (1988:13), to be witnesses to the unpresentable. According to Lyotard, we have to face this ethical problem with the utmost urgency, because as he warns us in his essay "Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?" that "we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror"(1984:82). So how does one present the unpresentable? In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard advocates learning from literary geniuses such as Proust or Joyce, whose works "allude to something which does not allow itself to be made present" (1984:80). Our task is to search "for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable "(p.81), because "it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented." We have a great deal to learn from the experts in the art of allusion-from literary geniuses. Another group of artistic geniuses we can learn from, according to Lyotard, are the avant-garde artists.. What the literati and the artists have in common is their power of imagination. With imagination, we can invent allusions to the conceivable, or invent possibilities. With these possibilities, we can get a sense of what is not presented in our discourse. With imagination, we have a hope of presenting the unpresentable, thus minimizing the wrongs of differands, minimizing the possibility of the return of terror. IMAGINATIVE KNOWLEDGE There is an urgent need for imaginative knowledge. Without it, we risk oppression, violence, and terror. In Lyotards own words, a child who was asked, as homework, to build on Erhardt Dietl's imaginative flight to a distant planet is fortunate. "When are we educated?" asks Lyotard and answers: "When we know more or less which is the far-off planet that we desire, and when we do all that we can to set off for it. If adults are often tough and sad, it is because they are disappointed. They do not listen well enough to the invitation to grace, which is in them. They let the spaceship rust" (Lyotard 1995). REFERENCES
Lacan attempted to rethink Freudian developmental theory in terms of structural linguistics, and Lacanian social theory tries to account for the humanization of biological individuals, the role of language and representation in positioning human subjects in specific ideological discourses. Probably the most basic notion in Lacan's reading of Freud is that the subject is decentered. Rejecting traditional ideas of the self as a unified locus of thoughts and emotions, Lacan insisted that the human subject is split, without a center, and characterized by lack. Freud noted that poets and artists have intuitively known that the "I" of a sentence is split from the "I" who emits it. However, most of us accept the commonsensical that we each have an identity. Lacan's view posits that, despite what we experience and what we like to believe, the commonsense self-image is meconnaisance, a misrecognition of ourselves. We are not to trust the ego, or conscious "I," because the ego is formed on the basis of an imaginary relationship of the subject with his own body. The ego has the illusion of autonomy, but it is only an illusion, and the subject moves from fragmentation and insufficiency to illusory unity. DESIRE With Hegel, Lacan said that, when one desires not a specific thing but desire of another, one has become human. For Lacan, the subject is structured in an intersubjective relationship with the Other. The Other has several meanings in Lacan's work. It is the Other that creates an unfillable lack in the subject, thereby ensuring that desire will remain unsatisfied, because its aims perpetually are out of reach. Lacan's term means variously a father, a place, a point, any dialectical partner, a horizon within the subject, a horizon beyond the subject, the unconscious, language, the signifier. Language is the medium through which the subject is constituted: "What I seek in speech is the response of the other. What constitutes me as a subject is my question. ... I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object." Desire is understood by Lacan in more than one way. First, desire is not directed toward a thing but toward yet another lacking desire, the desire of another. Second, objects are loved only if they appear to promise the filling in of the subject's lack; desire is, thus, narcissistic, the unachievable struggle for wholeness. Demand, in turn, is the address to a specific other person for a specific thing; it is a signification of desire. The subject wants not only to have the object but also to be the object of another's desire to be desired or recognized. Because we have (biological) needs and desire (for love), every intersubjective act is ambiguous, demand is perpetually repeated, forever incompletely addressed. Desire, then, exists chronologically between need and demand. At birth, the infant has certain biological needs. Later, the child realizes the incompleteness of the mother and of herself and desires what is missing. This desire is expressed as demand or repression. All our demands are symbolic representations of our desire to be whole; our lack is in regard to an original state of oneness, of undifferentiated bliss. The subject-Other relationship is constituted by desire. In the encounter with the Other, the subject continually is remade; it is from the Other that the subject receives even the message that he emits. REAL, IMAGINARY, SYMBOLIC Lacan proposed three orders or planes of existence: the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. Language is prior to the unconscious. When the human subject enters language (langue, not parole), he is fitting into an extant Symbolic order that mediates the desire of said subject; drives are channeled by language. For Lacan, in the beginning was the word. The Real is that which is neither Imaginary nor Symbolic. Lying beyond language, it is the reality to which we cannot have direct access, although we must assume that it exists. Our experience of it is only via the mediation of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The real is that which is unspeakable. Lacan described the realm of the Imaginary as a preverbal. Realm of alienated fantasy. The imaginary is characterized by identification and duality; it is narcissistic and fusionary. Imaginary for Lacan derives from "image," not from "imagine." The Imaginary includes fantasies, images, and nonlinguistic structures. By contrast, the Symbolic is not narcissistic, it is social; it is not a duality but a triangularity. The Symbolic refers to language, the means through which desire is expressed. For Lacan, the psychical developmental sequence is as follows: drives (need), desire (lack), unconscious (repression). This is all subsumed under the workings of id. The unconscious is continually voluble, demanding to be heard. However, the content of the unconscious is unacceptable to the subject and to the social order; when it reveals its existence in dreams, slips, symptoms, jokes, or fantasies, it is rejected as foolish, repugnant, or of little importance. The unconscious itself, that region of repressed thoughts, is the signifying chain along which desire passes; it is the discourse of the Other, and language is an endless tautology. It is not only human mind that operates through language; human culture itself is representational, and these representational structures precede us and determine our fates. THE PATH OF THE SIGNIFIER Lacan employed what structural linguistics says are the basic binary elements of all symbolic systems, signifier and signified. Lacan saw the two parts of the sign S/s as being related not in a stable and predictable way, but where the signified (lower case letter) is separated from the signifier (upper case letter) by the bar that indicates disjunction, repression. Signifiers are not free-floating; they are linked in some way to each other and to the signified. The bar is permeable. But we can never get at the signified. If we look for the deeper, hidden meaning of the figures appearing in a dream, we blind ourselves to the latent dream-thought articulated in it. For Lacan, nothing for the subject exists separate from language. Lacan produced a model of intersubjective relationships whereby the subject's movement toward the Other (or real) is continuously diverted by the axis o o', the relationship between the ego and its mirror image; we experience the social world through the Imaginary. Thus from Lacan we learn about the unavoidably fragmentary nature of subjectivity, how the subject lives with the alienated confrontation with his or her lack. Not only is the subject lacking, so is the Other. The unconscious attempts to speak of what is forbidden jouissance and death; language, intonation, dreams can only indirectly represent what is in the end inexpressible desire. REFERENCES
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