Lyotard’s Future: Figure, Event, ＂Space Shivering＂

Here I argue that, rather than asking about the possible role of ”literature” in our age of globalization, one could also ask about the possible meaning of ”our age of globalization” when this-the notion of a ”current age of x”-is viewed from the perspective of ”literature” (or more broadly of ”art”) as Lyotard understands it. For the (”journalistic”) theory of our ”current age of x” is after all a sort of grand narrative, a linear-temporal narrative of an emerging historical period, whereas Lyotard's (literary-artistic) petits récits move through the force of an incommensurable ”figuration”-a metaphorical, linguistic-spatial jump ”across time”-to enact the trans-temporal ”event.” Thus the disrupted narrative of postmodernism, which (working through the force of figure-event) expresses the simultaneity of past-present-future, ”engulfs” the modernist grand narrative of an emerging present, the Zeitgeist-narrative of globalization. After reviewing Lyotard's theory (in books like ”The Postmodern Condition”, ”Pagan Instructions” and, for the ”figuration” in/of Freud's dream-theory, ”Libidinal Economy”) of poetic figure and narrative event, I look at his ”Postmodern Fable”-set in a remote, trans-human future- about the end of the world, exploring the ways in which the ”fabulous” poetic and narrative techniques serve here to undermine the significance of our own (or of any) ”emergent” or ”present age,” indeed the significance of such terms as ”human” or ”story” or ”history.”