Date: Thu, 03 Dec 1998 10:45:42 -0500
Subject: Re: The Widening Gyre


> ...there is a splintering of the social tree when you remove shared assumptions. It's not just freedom and self-directed, locally-valued thinking you get, but there's also a devastating uneasiness to deal with. A lostness. Enormous stress.

Lois Shawver:
>>> This sounds more like Baudrillard to me that Lyotard.
Listen to Lyotard:

That is what the postmodern world
is all about.  Most people have lost
their nostaliga for the lost narrative.
It in no way follows that they are reduced
to barbarity.  What saves them from it
is their knowledge that legitimation can
only spring from their own linguistic
pracice and communicational interaction
[or paralogy]. (Lyotard, PMC, p.41]

I think an argument can be made that Lyotard is a
visionary postmodern as opposed to the nostalgic
postmodernism of people like Baudrillard.  Myself, I
identify with this visionary sense of postmodernity.  
-----------------
yes, ok, me too, but I'm just trying to get the whole picture. 
Does Lyotard talk about this at all? the societal scuff, loss of
comfort, stress caused by the dismantling of the big assumption grids? 
thanks, 
Ed Atkeson