Ron Burgundy, Lyotard

This weeks reading from Lyotard was extremely challenging. In order to understand the concepts that were being explained you had to truly open your mind to new concepts and read everything as a whole, as each piece built upon the last opening up to the final idea. Although there were numerous interesting points made about the modern vs. the postmodern, I found one section in particular that seemed to click when I read it. This part of the article was when Lyotard was addressing the threat that the mechanical and industrial work posed to the original and handcrafted art. He explains that “industrial photography and cinema will be superior to painting and the novel whenver the objective is to stabilize the referent, to arrange it according to a point of view which endows it with a recognizable meaning” (Lyotard 40). This idea once again brought me back to my high school days when we would read a novel, discuss underlying themes within the text, then watch the movies and identify which themes were also present in the movie. Each time we did this type of exercise, the themes found from the book were always greater in number than those themes portrayed in the movie. This perfectly demonstrates the concept that Lyotard was trying to explain in the article. In a book there is more of the unsaid to be discovered and interpreted by the reader, or critic, as your conscious is not drawn to a central point of reference. This is opposite to the work in movies where the eye is drawn and focused on certain aspects of plot, etc. and led to believe or identify the themes that they want you to recognize. With focused shots on people, objects, etc. movies are able to “stabilize the referent” so that the audience identifies the same thing, that this one single idea is communicated with no real unsaid (Lyotard 40). This idea is unsettling as you think of the limits of interpretation and thought that exist therefore within a film vs a novel. It may be that this sort of concept is why when people read a book and then see the movie they are often disappointed. In the book their experiences interplay with the text creating a different experience than others, but in the movie selected referents are displayed, and these can hardly compare to our own experiences that occur with the unsaid in the book.