Super!Geek, 2/4, Lyotard

As the semester progresses, the question of 'what is postmodernism' becomes more and more vexing, even though that is the topic upon which we engage each week. For our upcoming class, we're approaching that question through the mind of Jean-Francios Lyotard. Lyotard seems to present some of the most understandable interpretations of post-modernism and some of the most confusing. The section of the reading that seems to highlight this point comes at the end of page 40 when Lyotard states, "The challenge lay essentially in that photographic and cinematographic processes can accomplish better, faster, and with a circulation a hundred thousand times larger than narrative or pictorial realism, the task which academicism had assigned to realism: to preserve various consciousnesses from doubt." Essentially, this presents a common conflict of understanding and excepting post-modernism. Because images, or media, are now readily accessible, the authority of the academic to determine the value of virtually anything is supplanted by the viewers ability to reason with the text him or herself. Academicism therefore has to re-evaluate its aims in order best preserve realism.

Lyotard transitions from fairly straightforward rhetoric on the topic however in the span of a period with the following:"Industrial photography and cinema will be superior to painting and the novel whenever the objective is to stabilize the referent, to arrange it according to a point of view which endows it with a recognizable meaning, to reproduce the syntax and vocabulary which enable the addressee to decipher images and sequences quickly, and so to arrive easily at the consciousness of his own identity as well as the approval which he thereby receives from others—since such structures of images and sequences constitute a communication code among all of them. This is the way the effects of reality, or if one prefers, the fantasies of realism, multiply." Maybe it is just the language in this paragraph, but it feels as if Lyotard muddles his own point. He speaks on how the addressee is tasked with the role of deciphering and assigning meaning to the images, in terms of realism, but he does not seem to offer a relevant mechanism for this. Then again, post-modernist seem to shy away from telling you how to do something, and focus more on why you should.

Now, this of course comes with my usual disclaimer of I could be very very wrong with my interpretation of the reading, but hopefully, I'm at least treading the line of being sort of right. Oh, and it's kind of cool to read an author and get the references he is making, like his reference earlier in the paper to Walter Benjamin.