Gwatter06, Lyotard

If there is one thing that I am certain about after reading this excerpt by Lyotard is that Professor Casey is far from a liar. Lyotard’s diction and choice of words creates difficulty in comprehending all that he is trying to discuss. What I noticed is that he makes good connections to other writers and artists, but unnecessarily overloads his thoughts and ideas to come to a conclusion. Through all of the density of his words I was able to notice that he set up his explanation of postmodernism through a pattern and a process by first speaking of the demand for postmodernism, then speaking of realism and modernism, and finally making the connection to postmodernism at the end. This is important because I believe it helps the reader assimilate postmodernism as a whole if you can decipher all that’s in between. Lyotard cleverly links postmodernism with the concept provided by Habermas in saying, “Habermas considers that the remedy for this splintering of culture and its separation from life can only come from ‘changing the status of aesthetic experience when it is no longer primarily expressed in judgments of taste’…” (39) What I believe Lyotard is trying to say is that in the new age of postmodernism the public has grown away from conformity and is trying to embrace individualism steadily. This reminds me of a video we watched in CMC100 called “The Merchants of Cool,” which spoke about the cultures and sub-cultures who strived to be different and individual by doing things differently and when that thing was publicized, they would change again to once again be different. After embracing realism, Lyotard advances to postmodernism with a compelling distinction in saying, “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.” I thought this was the most intriguing and compelling concept that Lyotard addressed because it almost seems contradictory. What I understand from this statement is that postmodernism is not derived from the end of modernism as we would expect, but rather at the beginning or development of modernism in which later helps signify his notion that they are correlated. Finally, Lyotard also includes a piece on literature that I found intriguing by stating that, “A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment…” (46). This directly relates to what Barthes incorporates in saying that there aren’t any rules to literature anymore as Barthes explains that the writer cannot determine intent and tmesis. All in all it was a very interesting read and I am interested in shedding some light on the grey areas.