HOLLA! Lyotard

This was definitely a very dense reading, one in which I think I understand the basic premise of, but could also be misinterpreting its meaning completely. One thing that I can say I do understand about Lyotard’s reading is the examination of cinema and photography versus novels and paintings on the bottom of page 40. Lyotard goes on to say that, “the challenge lay essentially in that photographic and cinematographic processes can accomplish better, faster, and with 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” (40). Now this quotation is valid in the fact that cinema and photography are definitely on the track to being the new forms of communication and mass media. It is also true that cinema as well as photography can get a message across a thousand times faster than a novel or painting. If paintings and novels are completely replaced does that mean that realism will disappear? I’m not really sure if this is what Lyotard is trying to relay in this message or if he’s trying to keep novelist and artists from falling extinct to these new forms of mass communication of different meanings. Are we losing artists and novelists? I ask this question after Lyotard’s statement, “if they too do not wish to become supporters (of minor importance at that) of what exists, the painter and novelist must refuse to lend themselves to such therapeutic use. They must question the rules of the art of painting or of narrative as they have learned and received them from their predecessors” (41). Does cinema and photography not follow the rules of painting or narrative? Is this a concern of postmodernism? I honestly do not know the answers to either of these questions or if I am even asking the right questions. What I can say I took from this reading was that cinema and photography are the newer and more improved form of mass media and soon could completely replace novels and paintings.