Libidinal Technology: Lyotard in the New World by Arthur Kroker

When I think of Jean-Francois Lyotard what first comes to mind is Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and even more so Rick Hancox’s experimental film Moose Jaw.1 This association is entirely fitting since Lyotard prides himself on recovering local “minor voices” against hegemonic discourses, and on privileging “incommensurability,” “incongruities,” and “paradox” as key signs of the postmodern condition. This is only to say that beyond his brilliant writings on phenomenology and Marxism, beyond his retheorization of aesthetic theory, and even beyond the pragmatic ethics of all his “language games,” Lyotard is, in the end, the author of a philosophical Moose Jaw, and the best of all the “moose boosters” for the spirit of pragmatism as the primal of the postmodern condition.

The Moose Jaw Postmodern

Rick Hancox’s Moose Jaw is already a Canadian classic, not only in experimental filmmaking but also as a prophetic analysis and re-creation of the Canadian discourse. In this film, there is everything: Moose Jaw itself as a privileged scene for understanding the big crash that is postmodern society; a daring reveal of the practice of documentary filmmaking into a personal, and deeply existential journey into the interiority of Hancox’s own mind; and a seductive and violent reversal of all of the key categories of contemporary culture-nostalgia, childhood, voyeurism, and history. In Hancox’s cinematic imagination, we are simultaneously at the end of all things-the ten-year period that the film traces parallels the economic decline of Moose Jaw-and at the very beginning of something new. A meeting point of autobiography and history, Moose Jaw also speaks deeply and profoundly of absurdity as the very essence of the Canadian identity. Moose Jaw, then, as the first of the really existentialist cities where economic impossibility is met with stoicism, and sometimes with maniacal boosterism. A Don Quixote city on the prairies that likes to boast, “There’s a Future in Our Past” and where, in a fit of promotional enthusiasm, a gigantic moose (vandalized with fluorescent red balls) is placed on the Trans-Canada highway (three miles outside of Moose Jaw), with the predictable result that passing tourists stop for the obligatory Moose statue shot (like the Goose in Wawa or the Big Nickel in Sudbury), and then immediately get back in their cars to zoom on to the next photo opportunity.

There’s a Past in Our Future

Moose Jaw is not about Canada’s past, but about its future, where all the people have finally fled but where the empty machinery of neon signs on Main Street still whirs on in an indefinite circulation of images; where the economy has suddenly disappeared, imploded, but the local “Moose Boosters” suddenly intensify their advertising efforts on behalf of Moose Jaw as a new economic mecca (the biggest gambling casinos for a new Las Vegas of the north, the biggest retirement centre, the biggest transportation museum); and where the Canadian passenger railway (the famous “Canadian”) may have been terminated, but leaves in its wake powerful memory traces, a whole railway museum culture.

Everything here has its final destiny as a museum specimen. Not just the transportation paraphernalia, particularly the railroad cars with their frozen wax figures of conductor and passengers, but the abandoned and shuttered Eaton’s store with its two mythic dead crows rotting on the floor (“One crow sorrow. Two crows joy…”); and even the disappearance of Temple Gardens into yet another empty parking lot with a flashing neon sign (“This building will soon be gone, but the memories linger on”). Nothing is safe from museumization. Western frontier houses are carted down the highway to the “Prairie Pioneer Village Museum.” The school still operates, but half of its windows are bricked up as in in impatient anticipation.

When Hancox began the film ten years ago, there was a beautiful wooden sign in the railroad station that announced arrivals and departures of all the trains. By the summer of 1989, the very same sign had already made its retirement home as yet another fossilized item in the transportation museum. Indeed, even the filmmaker (most of all?) is not safe from the virus of museumization. In the latter part of Moose Jaw, Hancox actually becomes one of the wax figures in the railroad car in the museum, caught perfectly in the pose of the grotesque his face smeared against the window. Here, the museum has finally come inside; and the living bodies on the outside are only trompe l’oeil deflecting attention from their actual body possession by broken dreams, kitsch memory traces and ghost stories from childhood.

Eating Moose Jaw

This is also a film about “eating Moose Jaw,” about, that is, the disappearance of the contents of Moose Jaw, such as the detritus of the transportation industry, houses, signs, whole streets-into a cavernous museum of Western culture; and the disappearance of the identities of the “Moose Boosters” most of all into an always fictionalized past: dinosaurs with skin like throbbing gristle; reveries of what might have been (Hancox’s father says that when he first arrived, “They called Main Street ‘the flash’”); and panic schemes for what still might be-the revival of the Sulphur Springs for a new Banff on the prairies.

Perhaps it is just the opposite. Not Moose Jaw in ruins, but a thriving city that can be so intensely postmodern that it has passed into another qualitative stage of contemporary cultural experience-“bimodernism.” Indeed, Hancox’s Moose Jaw can be so seductive because it works by tracing a logic if imminent reversibility where all of the original signs are flipped. Thus, the signs of nostalgia are speed-processed at the beginning of the film almost as if to remind us that this is not a film about hystericized male kitsch (the old and boring search for boyhood dreams); and history (the shuttered buildings everywhere, and the Hopper-like Main Street) flips into always blinking tourist signs (long after the Grant Hall Hotel closed, its exterior neon signs still beamed, its telephones and lights functioned, and the rooms came alive at night, almost like the Shining); and the panoptic eye pf the observing camera is, halfway through the film, itself put under surveillance by the buildings it thought it was recording. Moose Jaw, then, as a possessed city of dreams where all of the old binary oppositions of modern Canada suddenly lose their force, and begin to short-circuit.

Hancox is conscious of this, and early on in the film he signs his awareness. On the train going out West, he reads on book on Crash Theory. And just in time. For Moose Jaw does not exist in this film, except as a surrealist site of the very first of Canada’s crash cities. A panic scene, that is, of our processing through technology to such a point of intensity that the catastrophe begins to slow down, to become inertial, to a point where we seemingly live in slow motion. And why not? Because here the surest sign of the passing violence of technology is its final appearance as the aestheticization of culture-the implosion of the city of broken dreams into a big museum. If Hancox can look so frantically and so long (ten years) for childhood memories: of his mother (the scenes of Eaton’s with the lost boy’s voice, “Over here dear”); of his old home; of his friend (the musician in Hollywood/Mexican simulacra); of his landscape (the snow scenes). Of the abandoned railway station; it is because there is nothing there. Hancox’s Moose Jaw has only a cinematic existence now, an empty sign onto which can be transcribed all of the flotsam of empty memory traces and dead desires. The memories have vanished into the spectral blue of the prairie sky, and what is left is a body and a time, that of a Canadian filmmaker, with no history, no autobiography, no determinate meaning. By the end of the film, Moose Jaw exists only fictionally as a parodic site for the inscription of Hancox’s lost childhood memories, for his obsessive search for some centre, some ground that never existed anyway. A decentered film, then, by a displaced experimental filmmaker, about a simulated prairie city in a radically disjointed Canadian culture. The particular brilliance of Moose Jaw is that there are finally no beginnings or endings, no sure meanings, just random bursts of energy and delocalized memory traces. The mood of the film is about melancholy, sadness and pathos to such a point of mania that it becomes parodic. In the end, who is really under surveillance? Who is the detached, alienated observer? Hancox or all those abandoned traces of buildings in Moose Jaw? Who is boosting whom? The “Moose Boosters” as cheerleaders for the flagging spirits of the people of Moose Jaw, or all those wonderful dinosaur machines, with their glittering teeth and dull roars, serving one last function to boost the drooping egos of the Moose Boosters?

And finally, is Moose Jaw a brilliant contribution to the tradition of Canadian experimental film, or something else? The body and mind of Rick Hancox, the filmmaker, is itself possessed by the enigma of Moose Jaw to such a degree of intensity that Hancox himself becomes the real subject of this film, an experimental site for playing out the existential drama of the Canadian absurd? Think about it: on the westward train, Hancox may read about crash theory, but on the way home, on the train down east, his splayed face made grotesque against the train window, the surrealistic camera movements, the flashlight searching in the dark for all of the kitschy signs of history, make of him the first of all the crash cinematographers. Hancox, then, as that rarity of filmmakers: an artist who sees so deeply that his filmic craft actually does a big flip, making of his body a certain sign that there is a little bit of Moose Jaw in the very best of us.

The Last and Best of all the Postliberals

The writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard are like Hancox’s Moose Jaw. If his mediations can be so deeply melancholic and tinged with nostalgia for a past that does not yet exist, it is because he is a crash theorist. His writings evoke culture in ruins. Not simply the postmodern absurd or the death of a small prairie city caught up in the technological maelstrom, but the death of western metaphysics under the impact of a technologically constituted virtual reality; and not only the death of a “metaphysics of unity,” but its melancholic slide into the listless rhetoric of language games. Indeed, Lyotard makes of himself a witness to technological violence. All of his writings are in the way of an intensely personal search for a new meditation point, a regulatory principle between the relativism of a “politics of opinion” and an ethical ground for political judgment. Just like Hancox, Lyotard is driven by the primal of ethics, and by the compelling artistic struggle for thinking the aesthetic grounds of capitalist society through to its moment of highest acceleration and possible distortion. A dualistic thinker, Lyotard is haunted by the traditional liberal problem of seeking a satisfactory synthetic principle for fractured experience: opinion versus rational terrorism, desire against inertia. But unlike Hancox, he has not yet passed beyond theory to the slime side of the filmmaker. He has not yet splayed his face against the window of culture, making of himself an experimental X-ray of events which were previous thought to be on the outside. Lyotard stands outside, and still remains independent of his object of study.

And why not? If his writings can be so popular in the United States, it is because he is the last and best of all the American pragmatists. Not really in the tradition of James, Dewey, and Pierce but in the more contemporary tradition of Rorty. A pragmatist of “language games” who seeks to do nothing less than rewrite Kant’s Critique of Political Judgment in the postmodern idiom: to construct, that is, the grounds for a prudential theory of political justice which would simultaneously absorb and withstand the “incommensurables” and “incongruities” of competing political discourses. That Lyotard is ultimately inconsistent in his quest for a pragmatic ethics is no dishonour since he is, after all, the theorist of paradox, ambivalence and “strange projections.” Indeed, the pleasure of “thinking Lyotard” is to be in the presence of an always “doubling discourse:” a phenomenologist in his refusal of the “grand recits” of modernism, yet a Marxist in his polemical defense of the Algerian popular revolution against French colonialism; s sophist in his insistence on constructing a “rhetoric of political justice,” yet a Nietzschean in his understanding of the artist, Duchamp, as the model for cultural inquiry in the third millennium; a transformation point for recuperating suppressed “minor languages” in contemporary politics, yet a nostalgic pragmatic who falls back repeatedly into the hegemonic language of all text, no sex, which typifies work ranging from Just Gaming and The Postmodern Condition to The Differénd.2 This is one thinker who can write an aesthetic theory of Driftworks as a direct autobiographical expression of his own philosophical drifting: across the entire spectrum of phenomenology, Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, Duchampian aesthetics, deconstructionism, and pragmatic language theory.3 All this is entirely brillaitn because at the centre of each of Lyotard’s philosophical excruses is a daring artistic maneuver: a ceaseless quest for the “hinge,” the “turning,” the “transformation matrix” that would make possible a “politics of the incommensurables.”4 Lyotard is the pioneer of postliberal ideology in the age of virtual reality.

To mediate on Lyotard, then, it to enter a big crash scene after the catastrophe where we live at the end of rational politics, economy, and culture. A twilight time where the “rational terrorism” of western metaphysics may stand unmasked, but we live ambivalently, uncertain of the language by which we may articulate a politics and an ethics in the absence of the grand recits of reason. Not a serene time, but an age of fantastic social turbulence and upheaval in which the residues of rational terrorism continue to maintain their stagnating hold on the human imagination, but challenged all the while by the insistent pressure of voices from the underground: the “minority” voices of the suppressed and excluded which seek to trace their signature across the “graphy” of the social text. A paradoxical time in which reality simply vanishes, becoming the nowhere space of technological virtuality, and yet historically specific and politically incommensurable discourses continue to be spoken. Consequently, Lyotard presents us with the paradox of a postliberal subjectivity that is lived at the edge of a “Moose Booster” (for a “pragmatics of obligation”) and the tragic sensibility of a memoried artist.5