dmariel, Lyotard

I found Lyotard to be confusing but at the same time extremely interesting. I had to read over many sentences numerous times to understand them, or at least to believe I understand them. What stood out most to me was Lyotard’s perception of capital power and the idea of ‘kitsch’ as the postmodern style of ‘anything goes’ as long as it yields profit. When he states that “Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonalds for fun lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo, and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong, knowledge is a matter for TV games”. I find that in our world today, there is so much available to us as consumers that this aspect of ‘anything goes’ has become a way of life not only for artists, but for any individual. He finishes off this paragraph by defining the very meaning of ‘kitsch’-- “As for taste, there is no need to be delicate when one speculates or entertains oneself”. This reiterated the importance not only of making a profit, but of personal entertainment. The idea of individual and specific taste is becoming less and less prominent with everything that we have easily available in our world. Why not venture out, eat all different types of food, wear all different types of clothes and perfume? Trying new things has led us to venture out in many different directions, definitely entertaining ourselves as there is almost no way to get bored with our consumer culture.
Lyotard describes modernity as the lack of realities with the invention of others. Adding to this is the idea that there is something that can be conceived, or thought of as an idea, but neither be seen nor made visual. By attempting to make these thoughts visible, I believe this is what Lyotard is referring to when he states that within modernity there is the invention of other realities. For example, “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 as painfully inadequate”. These ideas of the absence, or missing contents of realities leads us to the concept of Postmodernism. Unlike modernism, Postmodernism attempts to articulate in art the unpresentable by means of visible presentations. In conclusion, modernism is an aesthetic of the sublime, or the presentation of the unpresentable is missing contents. On the other hand, postmodernism puts forward the unpresentable in the presentation itself.