Melissammoore’s Weblog

The Lyotard reading struck me as an interesting and confusing interpretation for postmodernism; what it is and the opposition as well as defense for it . Lyotard begins with the bold statment, “From every direction we are being urged to put an end to experimentation, in the arts and elsewhere” (71). This statement caught my interest from the beginning because it is making serious accusations. Lyotard is able to back up this statement when further in the reading it states, “I have read from the pen of a reputable historian that writers and thinkers of the 1960 and 1970 avant-gardes spread a reign of terror in the use of language, and that the conditions for a fruitful exchange must be restored by imposing on the intellectuals a common way of speaking, that of the historians” (71). 

The ideas behind this statement are that we should not experiment with language but rather conform to one way of speaking, an exclusive way of speaking. I see this as a narrow minded way of thinking that attempts to exclude those outside of the intellectuals.

The explanation of Postmodern was that “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” (79). My understanding of this is that we define what is modern by the idea of no positive values. We determin that something is modern because it is not postmodern. Postmodern does not mark at the end of modern but rather in the state of beginning, which is always a constant.