File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9811, message 68


Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:29:45 -0500
From: "Smith, Donald S" <Donald.S.Smith-AT-usa.xerox.com>
Subject: RE: The Widening Gyre


Lois wrote:
<<<Consider the possibility that Lyotard is not calling for
anything.  He is noticing a condition of our knowledge and
noticing that many of us no longer are credulous about
metanarratives, the oversold, decontextualized,  modernist
stories.  Instead, we negotiate our narratives in local
contexts, with locally defined rules and vocabularies.
This is postmodernity.  What he finds is that wherever
these postmodern conversations take place, we have
paralogy, a kind of ongoing shifting of meaning and
emergence of new ideas together with a growing social bond
in the community.

And, it is not that this should happen in some ethical
sense, that he is calling for it happening, but that it is
happening.  The impulse to do things this way is already
existing.  Paralogy is already in process, even here.>>>

Don Smith Replies:
I guess that's possible but consider the last lines from this book, "Let us
wage a war on totality; let us be witness to the unpresentable; let us
activate the differences...." He doesn't sound neutral to me.

PS: You seem to have a good grasp of parology. I like your description.
Don



   

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