Lyotard’s pedagogies of affect in Les Immatériaux

This paper explores the continuing relevance to education of ideas about art and resistance that Jean-François Lyotard signalled in his curated exhibition in 1985 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris entitled Les Immatériaux. The exhibition was for Lyotard the ‘staging’ of a resistance at the dawning of an information age that challenged the prioritisation of computerised ‘data’ through the very deconstruction of data as presented in artistic form. While the implications of this event for art exhibitions are still being theorised and debated, it is the insight Les Immat ériaux provides as pedagogical encounter that is the focus of this article. The paper explores the exhibition in the context of the immateriality of art and develops this argument towards a notion of artistic testimony that then culminates in an analysis for the pedagogical significance of the exhibition in the information drenched, highly networked context of contemporary education.