Jean François Lyotard is organising the exhibition "Les Immatériaux", which will be held at Centre Pompidou in Paris in March. Bernard Blistène has asked the French philosopher about the concepts underlying the show.

Jean-François Lyotard: The idea of "immaterials" or "non-materials" was a little bit different at first, since I'd been asked to do the exhibition under a different title. It was supposed to be call3d "Nouveaux Matériaux et Creation" - New Materials and Creativity. But then I slightly shifted the subject by trying to give it a somewhat different range; I said to myself, "Creativity? What is that supposed to mean?" And again, "What is 'new' supposed to mean?" Thinking about "materials" today, I thought, "But what does that imply for an architect, or for an industrialist?" I came to the conclusion that all of these words have undergone considerable shifts in meaning, and I thought that the question had to be approached from a different point of view.

BB: But what can we say about the philosopher who decides that his job is to give us something to look at?

JFL: Everybody knows that books are going through a period of crisis as instruments for the diffusion of ideas, and that this is a part of the general crisis of intellectual life today, here in what we could call a kind of democratic despotism that makes for the world we live in. And of course, there's no question of maintaining the superiority of any kind of aristocratic power, but the both of us know very well that the philosopher experiences a very grave problem with respect to the writing or recording of what he has to say, and there is a problem of the shortcomings of the philosopher with respect to the available modes of writing and recording, or of what I would call "inscription". As far as I myself am concerned, my acceptance of the idea - to use the words with which you've stated it - of becoming "the philosopher who decides that his job is to give us something to look at" is something very simple and not even particularly original. I accept myself as a philosopher, and it seems to me to be important for the philosopher to be able to record what he thinks through the use of instruments that don't have to be restricted to the instrument f the book. It's just that simple. New and different things are at stake today, even though they're not totally new, and we have to try to understand the things that are being offered to us.

It's as though one were now to decide to restrict one's interest in art to the question of the pleasure of the contemplation of the beautiful. Surely you'll agree that it's not that sort of thing that's most important and pertinent. It's as though we were to think about the romantic aesthetic of the sublime and then to back down from dealing with Duchamp. And I mention Duchamp because we know very well that his aesthetic had nothing to do with the sublime, that it leaves the sublime behind it, and so today we have to ask ourselves what's now at stake in art. It's a question of limits, and one finds such questions everywhere, including the field of the sciences. And are the scientists still concerned with talking about "the truth of the object"? Everything is different now that the Anglo-Saxon epistemologists have begun to stress the idea of "non-falsification". Like philosophers in general, these people are now interested in questioning the transitional finalities of the work they do. And that has always been the distinguishing trait of philosophy, which is to say that philosophy has always investigated the rules of the field of philosophical thought, and never been able to define them.

BB: Could we say that you're attempting to establish a relationship between scientific and artistic modes of thought?

JFL: Undoubtedly. The idea of artistic creation is a notion that comes from the aesthetics of romanticism, the aesthetics of the idea of genius. And I'm sure you'll agree that the idea of the artist as "creator" is, to say the least, of strictly limited utility in our world today. That's no longer where we really are. We're no longer concerned with the philosophy of subjective genius and all the "aura" that goes along with it. With Duchamp, we already find ourselves in an area that has an aspect of bricolage, there's that side where you think of him as an "inventeur du temps gratuit".