Mongoose, Lyotard

In this article Lyotard attempts to uncover exactly what ‘postmodernism’ is; what does it mean and why it is happening. In his opening paragraph, Lyotard seems to imply that postmodernism is not simply building off of the ‘modern’ age but rather blowing it up and starting over, replacing ‘modernism’ with ‘postmodernism’. Some of these changes mentioned by Lyotard include: the architects abandoning the ‘bauhaus project,’ saying that it was ‘thrown out with the bathwater of functionalism’ (most likely referring to the switch to capitalism), a switch in religion to Judaeo – Christianity and the new notion that increased authority of the government is a good thing. He says that this is happening because many scholars, Jurgen Habermas for example, believe that modernity has completely failed and we are moving in a direction to rectify this failed attempt at enlightenment. One of the reasons that Habermas believed modernity failed was the ‘splintering of culture’ which occurred. He saw that areas of learning were becoming to specialized, meaning that ‘experts’ were only focusing on a specific area of learning and filtering this knowledge down to the regular individual. He saw this as a problem because individuals were not becoming well-rounded, instead focusing their learning in one direction.
The main focus of this article was on the area of art and its effect on postmodernism. Habermas believed that art was an area which could bridge the gap between all areas of focus, being a common ground where intellectual, ethical and political topics could all be covered. Art was an area which could “unify” society. The problem that arose was that art was being replaced by photography and thus losing its sense of realism and creative individuality. Lyotard related this back to Benjamin and his writings and to me this ties in to the discussion we had in class the other day. We talked about how different works of “art” have been reproduced so much that they lose their originality and value each time a new copy is made. Lyotard talked about the true value of a work of art is drawn according to its profits; if each time the piece of art is reproduced it loses value, then every time a copy is made, the profits go down and the original piece becomes less original.