Government 405 ADMMiclot 4 April 1995

Sedition in Lyotard’s Domus

Towards the end of his essay “Domus and the Megalopolis,” Lyotard investigates

the role of sedition in each of these social states. The domus, or domestic

community, is a lost community, looked upon a bit nostalgically from a vantage

point “from where [Lyotard] speaks, the human world become megalopolis” (L 194).

For Lyotard, there is no debate as to whether we have left the domus behind: we

inhabit now a megalopolis, a place where the natural laws which informed the

creation and practice of the domus are forgotten. The megalopolis features people

decontextualized from the world around them, people who have commodified

everything, including nature, the metaphysical, and eachother. Here, according to

Lyotard, “the regulation of things, humans, and capacities happens exclusively

between humans, with no nature to serve.” Ritual and tradition find themselves

either ignored or glibly sold out, and the inhabitants (hardly “citizens”) of the

megalopolis are left culturally bankrupt. Abstraction, rationalism, and meaningless

data overcome history, and the only memory is “a memory controlled by the

principle of reason, which despises tradition, where everyone seeks and will find as

best s/he can the information needed to make a living” (L 194). The individual,

unable to express himself in any distinct fashion, disintegrates, becomes an

abstraction or product of exchange for those around him. The domus, in its own

way, also robs the freedom of expression, since it relies on “natural law” and “love,

reconciliation, being-together as a whole, everyone in their place.” (L 195). The

only method of individuation, of any meaningful expression, lurks beneath the

surface of the domus: “a pain always new. In the lowest depths of the domus,

rumour of anti-nature, threat of stasis, of sedition” (L 195). Sedition is a means of

breaking down, of breaking out of a political state, whether domus or megalopolis.

1

The domus supervised, yet required, that element of anti-nature which

burgeoned within it. Unlike the megalopolis, the domus required an

unpredicability, an assurance that something unforeseeable might occur. (The

megalopolis, by contrast, relies on predictability, always searching for the code

which will transform all events into a coherent series of statistics.) “What

domesticity regulated — savagery — it demanded” (L 201), Lyotard argues,

suggesting that the domus could not survice without the feeling of incipience, of

future. Likewise, the phenomenon which held it together on a communal basis,

might be responsiblke for its undoing on the individual level. This phenomenon is

love. When the community feels love for itseld as a whole, then it becomes and

remains strong, out of service to itself. But when one person loves another, and

loves that person more than the community, individual priorities and values come to

the fore in the lovers’ minds. Love “has no concern for the regulation of services,

places, moments” (L 201). Such feelings chip away at the solid foundation of

community, therefore, maintains Lyotard, “All love is criminal” (L 201).

In the same way love detracts the individual’s attention from the domus, so

does solitude militate against notions of community and social concern. When the

individual has time to think of himself, he worries about his needs,m his concerns,

his liberty, and these thoughts are non-conducive to either societal stability or

progress. Solitude might one to aspirations of power, or (within the megalopolis, at

least) needs of the religious sort, needs unaddressed by a system geared towards

capital. In the domus, religion might be exploited as a means of suppressing

individuation, but a person who thinks of himself as possessing a transcendent

nature poses a threat to mundane concerns like performing required labor. Lyotard

observes that one form of solitude is particularly sediitious, namely that of the

adolescent, whose world is likely to revolve around the issue of loneliness,

uniqueness, self-expression, or desperate love. The adolescent is likely to view the

2

domus through the filter of lost love, or peer-exile, or whatever social malady might

persecute him, and resent it (the domus) all the more. In such cases, he will ignore

the benefits of community, and subsume his surroundings in a pit of adolescent

angst, caring too much for himself and not enough for everyone else. “The solitude

of the adolescent in the domus is seditious because in the supense of its melancholy

it bears the whole order of nature and culture,” writes Lyotard. Adolescent

misanthropy is a hotbed of anti-communal behavior in the domus. Seeking an

outlet, the youth turn to his pen, his secret diary, and there is born self-conceit,

sinful pride, and related vices, like aspiration. The diary becomes a medium of

sedition, even if only in the mind of the diarist.1 “In the secrecy of his bedroom, he

inscribes upon nothing, on the intimate surface of his diary, the idea of another

house, of the vanity of any house” (L 201). The domus, for the adolescent, takes on

the aspect of George Orwell colliding with Wendell Berr, the totalitarian, yet

purportedly “natural” state. Lyotard does not hesitate to liken such a youth to

“Orwell’s Winston” or to Kafka. The mention of Kafka brings to mind both Gregor

Samsa, of the Metamorphosis and Joseph K., of The Trial. In the former, a sensitive

young man conceives of himself as a ghastly creature relative to the homogeneity

surrounding him. Even with his thorax and exo-skeleton, he is expected to work at

his clerical job and carry on as if his problems meant nothing weighed against the

concerns of the community. Joseph K becomes jammed in a system which makes no

allowance for bureaucratic error. Truth, justice, or whatever are determined by

consensus, and K’s case is left to be inscribed in the “intimate surface” of a young

clerk’s novels.

The domus “regulates” the sedition, the savagery it demands. The whispers

of young lovers who “have nothing to tell” nonetheless must be accounted for,

1e.g., Anne Frank, perhaps. Or, to a lesser degree, Plimpton-like Renaissance Man, Ben Franklin.

3

controlled, mechanized, commodified. “Secrets must be put into circuits, writings

programmed, tragedies transcribed into bits of information…The secret is

capitalized.” In the megalopolis as it consumes the domus, even the sedition is

abstracted into meaninglessness. The megaloplis “has no idea…that the secret

should be a secret of nothing. Or rather, it has only the idea,” the idea of sedition,

but no real-world representation of what it means, or how one commits the treason

of significant expression.

4