aveyourfaveblogger, Lyotard

Hello Blog! 

I resonated more with Lyotard’s ideas than Habermas, and I enjoyed the way that he poked fun at "Modernity - An Incomplete Project."

I’m going to work backwards and dissect the last quote because I found it to be particularly striking: 

“The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name” (Lyotard, 46). 

In the previous paragraph, Lyotard brings forth the idea of the unpresentable and the ways in which modernism and postmodernism display the unpresentable. He explains that modernism gives us the “missing contents” of the unpresentable, and we still get pleasure from it because it is comfortable and follows the binaries our capitalist society has created. Postmodernism is meant to reject these molds. Modernism establishes a meaning and serves it to us on a platter, but Lyotard insinuates that postmodernism embraces the fact that there is no meaning to anything unless we define that meaning ourselves using our own perspectives. It reminds me of the example Benjamin used: theatre and film are so different because in film, the camera tells us what they want us to see, whereas in theatre, the audience’s eye can go anywhere and interpret whatever it wants. 

On this topic (and to use another example), my brain keeps going back to “4’33”” that we watched in class the other day. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it - it’s genius. John Cage’s work was truly ahead of its time. It makes us question reality because the thing being presented is the unpresentable idea of "silence." I say"silence" in quotations because the reality is that there is no such thing as complete silence - it is an unpresentable idea. This piece compliments Lyotard's ideas very well, especially because it breaks those forms, pleasures, and expectations set by the audience, society, and ultimately, modernism. 

So, when Lyotard says “let us activate these differences” I think he is talking about both of the opposing ways the unpresentable is shown. As for the line, “save honor to the name,” I think he is talking about the name of postmodernism. After all, Lyotard’s piece is a response to Habermas’ critique of postmodernism. 

Until next time blog, 

aveyourfaveblogger