jl0630 - 2/12

“What is advised… is to offer works… that the public will recognize what they are about, will understand what is signified”
We talked about this Lyotard-ian concept in class and I could not agree more that in order to sell things you need to tell people things they already know. We used examples like best seller help books saying that they would not be best sellers if they were telling people things they wouldn’t understand because it would be confusing. I went to go see He’s Just Not That Into You this weekend, and I also read the book, and I would argue that this is a perfect example of what Lyotard is saying. The book is a series of chapters with real-life stories about women, men, and dating – and an advice column that all boils down to one answer, ‘he’s just not that into you.’ This advise, leads into the next quote we talked about in class, “there is no reality unless testified by a consensus between partners over a certain knowledge and certain commitments” (42). What this is saying essentially, is that the ‘he’s just not that into’ reality is not an actual reality until someone tells you or you read it. Even though you may already think it, it takes that second party to set it in stone.
In the movie one of the subplots is about a woman named Gigi who, by the books, is doing everything wrong when it comes to men and relationships. It takes a friend/second party Alex, however, to explain the repeatedly misinterpreted signs she is getting from men about how interested – or lack of – they actually are.
Bringing it back to the earlier quote, both the movie and book got such great reviews people could/can relate to it. They make sense and provide us with familiar concepts that apply to us individually – either first hand or not. The beauty of a best seller is that it tugs at your emotions and makes you feel like you are a part of it, which is also a concept we talked about in our previous classes about verisimilitude.