Bella Lyotard

Jean Francois Lyotard desbribed postmodernism as a period of “slackening”, and “the end of experimentation”(Lyotard 38). He says that artists and critics alike are being urged to smother their work, repackage it in new, less creative, machine-made, mass produced form. He described the “Splintering of culture and its separation from life”, and strives to unity in our culture. He is a complicated, confusing theorist, and takes much of his argument from the other authors we have read this semester. He says that most art is guided by rules and systems which “appear to them as a means to deceive, to seduce, and to reassure, which makes it impossible for them to be ‘true’” (Lyotard 41).
If being guided by rules makes something false, then wouldn’t our entire world collapse? (I think) Lyotard says that there is no such thing as true reality, and that “realism, whose only definition is that it intends to avoid the question of reality implicated in that of art, always stands somewhere between academicism and kitsch” (Lyotard 41
“Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games” (Lyotard, 42). To me, this seems like a mixture of globalism and eclecticism. Our culture disperses itself throughout the world, melding and transforming cross-culturally to create a new reality. I really feel like my analysis makes no sense, but I feel like further discussion in class will help to break down this text. Lyotard later wrote, “The sublime is a different sentiment. It takes place, on the contrary, when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept. We have the Idea of the world (the totality of what is), but we do not have the capacity to show an example of it. We have the Idea of the simple (that which cannot be broken down, decomposed), but we cannot illustrate it with a sensible object which would be a ‘case’ of it. We can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to ‘make visible’ this absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate” (Lyotard 43). Hopefully we will be able to discuss and elaborate on the “Idea” of greatness further in class.