File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9812, message 9


Date: Wed, 02 Dec 1998 16:26:58 -0800
Subject: Re: The Widening Gyre


Ed Atkeson wrote:

> ...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.

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.  When
the databases are generally available and we can think
things through together in our paralogy, it is a better
world, a world not possible before we became disillusioned
with the marketed metanarratives that provided us,
once-upon-a-time, with our models of truth.

..Lois Shawver




   

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