Date: Thu, 03 Dec 1998 09:36:40 -0800
Subject: Re: The Widening Gyre


Ed Atkeson wrote:

> 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?

This really isn't my picture of Lyotard.  I find him
inspiring and optimistic, a visionary, even utopian,
postmodern.  In the language of Nietzsche, he provides us
with a transvaluation of all values.  In Baudrillard and
others, there is a nostalgia for the old ways that seems
to me to be entirely missing in Lyotard, at least in the
later Lyotard.  I can gather a sense of the nostalgia
indirectly in Libinal Economy, maybe, and I suspect it is
there in some of his early work that I have not read.
But the Postmodern Condition is, in my opinion, very
visionary.

..Lois Shawver