File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9811, message 52


From: "Eric  Salstrand" <eric_and_mary-AT-email.msn.com>
Subject: Re: The Widening Gyre
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1998 22:57:08 -0600


Ed Atkeson

>My concern isn't really coming into it. I'm just trying to figure out
>what Lyotard is saying.

I admit that I am rereading TPC for maybe the third or fourth time.  What I
find fascinating is the extent to which I am still learning new things from
the text.  Doesn't Borges say that each reading is new because even if the
book hasn't changed, we have.

So, to that extent, I am very much a beginner like you regarding this text.
I would encourage you to participate in the discussion of TPC as we go
through these chapters together.  If we continue to grapple with these
ideas, perhaps a breakthrough can occur in both our various understandings.

>    I think that "centers" are on the ebb. We've come from Ptolemy to
>The Pale Blue Dot.

I love this image, but what is the pale blue dot?

In anyone's lifetime, it seems like the center is not
>holding and that chaos is inevitable, but in fact, there is a gradual
>adjustment, the new generation does not go mad knowing what they know.
>We stand ever closer to the void, but you look around and existential
>terror doesn't seem to be a big problem.

"Ezra Pound & TS Eliot are fighting in the captain's tower
While Calypso singers laugh at them & fishermen hold flowers"
                                          -Bob Dylan (desolation row)

(Someday, the solid ground will
>disappear altogether, we will be floating in air, having finally found
>our potential, and we will be like Gods. The intuitions of the ancients,
>of the genetic material, will be realized.)

I wish you would expand on this topic.  What does it mean for you to be a
God?  (This is not a rhetorical question.  I would like to talk about this
topic and I suspect others may want to as well.)

>    So it's a gradual thing, but I agree with you that there is a
>breaking away with Postmodernism -- it is a discrete step, I think.
>There's not only a knowing too much (seeing through the skins of things,
>parsing not just words but the language itself) that's normal, but
>there's a knowing that you know too much. And when you know you know too
>much, you really know too much -- you get recursion.  By "knowing too
>much," I just mean that new findings cause stress with the grid of
>assumptions that is in place in any given generation.  Modernism was a
>try at a secular utopian assumption bundle, and we're abandoning that
>synthesis for one even more frail, but the really frightening thing is
>that we are now conscious of these structures themselves. We suddenly
>know the very effect of our knowing. Stress and discomfort is our fate
>though, it's who we are.

I like what you are saying here and agree.  Have you read White Noise by Don
DeLillo.  He evokes the same weird sense of fragility, terror. tenderness
and humor that you are referring to here in discussing the Postmodern.

When we crawled out on land it must have been a
>real problem breathing and getting around. Comfort, the center, is not
>that interesting -- you'll find us at the frontier, at the edge of some
>goddam terrifying whirlpool with the ground just giving way.


My experience is that many of us (including myself) have never left the
Ocean.  I agree, however, that Green Margins is the place to be.
Dry land is difficult and the earth is hard.

Eric











   

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