File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9811, message 46


From: "Eric  Salstrand" <eric_and_mary-AT-email.msn.com>
Subject: The Widening Gyre
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 22:36:46 -0600


Don & Ed,

Do you see Lyotard himself as one of those who is full of passionate
intensity, or simply as another rough beast slouching towards Academia?

Personally, I find it hard to envision him as the Anti-Christ of the gyres
who inaugurates the new historical cycle according to The Vision.  It seems
postmodernism breaks away from this idea of history entirely. We no longer
can envision ourselves as star puppets governed by the phases of the moon,
even though today perhaps the moon has become a better guide than the sun.
(the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.)

Flux is scarcely new with this generation either.  As has been acknowledged,
it goes all  the back to Heraclitus and then some.  The rate of change and
the heterogeneity that results from this crazy whirling dervish called
history is what is unprecedented. Is it really being full of passionate
intensity for us to acknowledge that this is now  the case?  Or would it be
better to retreat into some monolithic system that once served in another
time and hold on to it no matter what.  Neo-Thomism anyone?  The Masque of
Red Death?

When Yeats said the center no longer holds,  most readers of the poem
envision a new center that will one day emerge to take its place.  What if
this is merely based on a strong mis-reading?  Perhaps the real task today
is not to discover a new center, but to invent new worlds that eliminate the
need for only one.  Is it really that hard for us to envision a
multi-centric world?  Or is God, like the CEO of a fifties General Motors
corporation, an abiding metaphysical principle, rather than a historical
condition that now appears to be in the midst of passing away because it no
longer serves?

If your concern is for a philosophy that stays malleable in the face of
change, then isn't pragmatics and art, for that matter, more useful to us
than Plato?  Who can separate the dancer from the dance?








   

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