File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9710, message 2


Date: Fri, 03 Oct 1997 13:09:49 -0700
From: hugh bone <hughbone-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: posmodern informaticized societies


Jorge Macias wrote:
 
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jorge,
 
You can search HotBot and others.  Probably most info at UCI, University
of California at Irvine where he used to teach.  He may still be at 
Emory in Georgia, in an Administrative Dept., perhaps as cover.

"Le Differend" is an interesting work, having to do with language, and
how it it works, rules, how and why we communicate with words and 
silences, or are unable to do so, and all that.

Still trying to understand it, but it led me to the following:


WHO WE ARE

I. GOD AND GODS AND MEN AND MYTHS

God truly came alive
when wily priests

pointed to the heavens:

"up there!"
they said,
"beyond the stars"
"invincible, omniscient, almighty"

conveniently invisible ...this god

earthbound gods
of stone or clay,
failing worshipers,
got smashed to bits,
priests too

believers shelter God
in their personal
interior universe

when death comes wholesale
...fires floods and plagues...

priests bow down
get new readings
from on high
preserve the values
of their flocks
with words

one day the world
thought God had died
and Nietzsche said:
"yes, oh yes, God's dead", he said.

and "man, the measure of all things"
sought out a new divinity
to be a god himself......
Yet he was Nature's child

a Being different
from Nature's other children...
or so he claimed.

the tribes of Men
make myths and gods...
mould their own Masters
in myriad forms
down all the ages

in civilized centuries
we: Homo Sapiens
king of species
rain Death upon
our kind

our fragile selves
a tiny mote
in cosmic space
and time


II. WORDS

infants first
use body language

thrashing limbs
smiles and screams
then words

mothers and fathers
talk to infants
infants talk to themselves

language informs
consciousness and memory
creates a self...

situated

in the flux of humanity
the biological world
the inanimate cosmos

language is strange
invades our brains
enables thought

does my cat talk to himself?

language precedes
each generation

contains rules
and rules for
making rules,
and valuating

we come to language
as we come to food
an institution
already here
language is...

awaiting newborns

they arrive.....


III. OBLIGATION

language conveys
ancestral obligation...
sleeping in genes?

one day a voice says:
"you ought"
binds us to duty

knowing right
knowing wrong

conscious and aware...
of a personal universe
not wholly private
being obliged...


IV. BEING HUMAN

what happens?
what just arrived?
what goes on inside
our conscious being?

the only being we KNOW!

ask language;
ask all the languages
of the body, of the arts...

I could not talk to myself
had others not talked to me

children raised by animals
have human form,
human senses, human perception
not "human" being


V. OBJECTIVE TRUTH

Science discovers,
Employs instruments
disciplines
technologies
to find,
define,
objects
of discourse

Science
states,
asserts
describes
theories and facts,
the "truth"
the "being real"
of  objects.

the Brain,
all about the Brain
tissue, cells,
currents of electricity
neurons, synapses....

but,
inside consciousness
the content of a word?
two hundred fifty nine definitions
of "self"

simple four-letter words:
love, hate, and fear,
science can't penetrate
doesn't know about

(the spoon within the soup
  knows not its flavor)_


VI. RELIGION AND ART

Religion, art, aesthetics,
provide first-hand reports
on the singular contents
of consciousness and memory
of lived experience

Artists are ever
trying to express
the reality of being human
'midst people and things

the score is not the music,
the canvas not the painting,
the performance not the play

music, paintings, drama
we, one-by-one
in heart.
and mind.
make real.

poetry and dreams......
souls of the living
souls of the dead

Other species,
other brains,
know other realities

we think...

what really happens
when we talk to ourselves
and others?

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<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<"""">>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Also I went to your home page, BIG BANG and SINGULARITIES.

Cheers,
Hugh


   

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