File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9810, message 42


Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 14:48:40 -0800
Subject: Re: PMC:  What is Postmodernism:  A Demand


Bayard G. Bell wrote:

> Donald Turner wrote:
> >
> > What does art that presents a "stronger sense of the
> unpresentable" (p.81)
> > look like?  Are there examples of this today?

I think excerpting the full above gives us a clue to work
with.  The sentence that contains the passage you site
says:

"The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts
forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that
which denies itself the solace of good forms, the
consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share
collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that
which searches for new presentation, not in order to enjoy
them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the
unpresentable.  A postmodern artist or writer is in the
position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he
produces are not in principle governed by preestablished
rules, and they cannot be judged according to a
predetermining judgment, by applying familiar categories
to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are
what the work of art itself is looking for."

Consider this paraphrase:
"The postmodern would be that which that which denies
itself the solace of good forms, that which does not rely
on a consensus of taste.  If it did rely on a consensus of
taste, it could more easily share with the collective
sense of nostalgia for the unattainable, perhaps a past
economic dream, or a perhaps just a simpler time.  But the
postmodern does not use ready-at-hand devices to call
attention to that which is unpresentable because that
would be to pretend that the unpresentable is really
presentable after all.  Instead, the postmodern searches
for new ways of presenting things, new rules of grammar,
new concepts that will illuminate what has not been
illuminated before."

In other words, I believe that he is saying that the
postmodern is not concerned with that which is forever
unpresentable (as in pure thought thinking about itself)
but rather that the postmodern invents new and creative
ways to uncover what has been previously unpresentable.
That is why he says (p.79) that "Postmodernism thus
understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent
state..."  In other words, postmodernism takes an
undefined context and discovers new ways to make sense of
it.  Once it is made sense of, then this sense can be
institutionalized through consensus and good taste.  In
this way, we can become "witnesses to the unpresentable."
(p.82).

..Lois Shawver


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005