File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9712, message 53


From: EricMurph <EricMurph-AT-aol.com>
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 1997 23:04:53 EST
Subject: Postmodern Fables is in your bookstores now!


Holiday Greetings, Everybody!

I’ve been very busy this past week and haven’t been able to keep up with all
the various postings.  There is certainly a lot of activity here lately. This
discussion on Foucault and power is a simulating one which has a lot of
applications, political and otherwise.

What I wanted to let everyone know, however, is this.  I was in a bookstore
this past weekend and guess what I discovered laying in wait for me on the
shelf - “Postmodern Fables” by Jean-Francois Lyotard.  A definite steal in
hardback at $17.95.  I’m letting everyone know in the hopes some others will
also get this book so we can discuss it here in greater detail.

In many respects this book picks up where “The Inhuman” left off.  It is a
collection of lectures and literary essays on assorted topics such as culture,
complexity, philosophy, and the postmodern.  Most of the essays were written
in the nineties.

Here are a few quotes just to whet your appetites:

“The destination of all the streams is the museum. They want singularities to
enrich the museum.  What museum?  The contemporary cultural world.  Do you
remember Lewis?
Cultural capital, which means the capitalization of all cultures in the
cultural bank.  This bank is humanity’s memory.  Every agency must be
saturated.  Most of it is already done.  They have saved and stored the caves
of Lascauz, the tombs of the upper Nile, the Aztec pyramids, as well as the
Maginot Line, and the tombs of Xian, Spinoza, and Agatha Christie.  Now we
must make archives for what is contemporary.  Not only great works, but the
ways of living, the means of preparing fish or arousing a woman, little
dialects, slangs, the fluctuations of the dollar over medium and long
durations, poster from the thirties.”

“The fable tells the story of a conflict between two processes affecting
energy.  One leads to the destruction of every system, of every body, living
or not, that exists on planet Earth and in the solar system.  Inside this
continuous and necessary entropic process, another process, contingent and
discontinuous, at least for a long time, acts in the opposite direction
through the increasing differentiation of these systems.”

“On Earth as elsewhere, entropy leads energy toward  the most likely state, a
kind of corpuscular soup, a cold chaos.  Negative entropy combines energy on
the contrary, into differentiated systems, more complex ones, or let’s say.
more developed ones.  Development is not an invention made by Humans.  Humans
are an invention of development.  The hero of the fable is not the human
species, but energy”

“The true (Heidegger’s authentic?) awakening come not from believing there is
a path to emancipation.  The awakening is situated is the unbearable feeling
(Heidegger’s anxiety?)  that there is no road to follow.”

“Philosophy is not in the city, it is the city in the process of thinking, and
the city is the agitation of thought that seeks its habitat even though it has
lost it, and lost nature.”

“That’s what notoriety is, an agitation surrounding a name”

Let me know if you get this book what reactions and agitations you have.

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005