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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