Date: Thu, 08 Jul 1999 23:04:57 -0500
From: Mary Murphy&Salstrand <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Defending culture


colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net wrote:

> Lois,
>      This competition, though, always occurs within the enormous horizon of Capitalism, on the terms set by it. 

Hello World,

I signed on to the internet tonight and there were 44 messages.  

Has Lyotard risen from the grave?  Does his spectre again haunt these
spaceless lands?

A few random thoughts on Lyotard and politics, postmodernism and
capitalism, chess and butterflys.

1.  Does Lyotard prescribe or describe postmodernism, whatever this
lovely chameleon might be?  Personally, I would vote for the latter.  In
the PMC, he is analyzing a condition.  He is not playing cheerleader for
the Jetsons.

2.  Is Lyotard political?  Well, how many Lyotards can dance on zippy
the pinhead of history?  This is a man who says he wanted to be a monk
and lived like a monk, spending years with the group Socialisme ou
Barbarie with Castoriadis et al, wrote on the war in Algiers,
participated in May 68, spoke out against Heidegger and the Nazis etc.

Is there a single book he has written which is devoid of politics?  

Even in a book like Duchamp's TRANS/formers there are political
questions being raised.

3.  When Lyotard defines postmodernity as incredulity towards
metanarratives, is he clucking his tongue autobiographically?  Perhaps,
he is (among all those many other things whose name is legion)
expressing his own incredulity over Marxism, the loss of his
post-boyhood faith.  Like Nietzche's famous watchman, Lyotard proclaims
that Marx is dead and asks how we may practice politics in daddy's
absence.  When the howlers taunt that he is therefore apolitical,
Lyotard realizes that like the watchman he has come too early.

4.   There is a ruling metanarrative today which did not exist with the
same force when Lyotard wrote the PMC.  It is free-market capitalism,
which has become the one true fundamentalist religion of our time.  When
I ride the subway, I see so many who are now reading Atlas Shrugged.  It
reminds me of China and Mao. Europe and the bible.  If you disagree, you
are an infidel.

5.   The news of the end of history is greatly exaggerated.  When
Capitalism becomes the only game in town, it is already in decay.  To
paraphrase Lyotard how do we speak of the triumph of global capitalism
after Russia, Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan. These names
already tell against its claims to truth.  

The current situation is ripe for dissent, refusal, impiety and
opposition. In a word, politics. This should not be confused with
writing out another metanarrative.

6.  Modernist capitalism was tied to a myth or metanarrative of
emancipation: the big words for which so many died. Freedom, Democracy
and Progress are the billboards of our shame. Postmodern capitalism is
more cynical.  Greed becomes the great dispositif.  Only Americans are
naive enough to believe that thing are otherwise. To paraphrase
Heraclitus, America is a great child, playing video games with eternity.

7.  Chess is a sopisticated game that allows for an infinite number of
variations, based on a limited set of finite rules.  As such, it is
something like Chompsky's theory of language.  Art, politics, life are
much more complicated games, building bridges to ubermench and various
other points of departure.  

These games operate in the following manner. There is a paralogical act
which transforms the environment in which the animal finds itself
illogically placed.  This gives rise to a new environment in which the
splintered fragments which remain must then adapt by means of new
paralogical acts which again tranform the new environment. Repeat.

8.  Consider the butterfly.  It changes into a thousand and one various
colors of the rainbow, mimicking leaves,twigs and deadly creatures. It
also transforms itself by way of metamorphosis, giving us the image of
both Kafka's beetle and the luminous stars.  (Kubrick's child in 2001 is
perhaps amerika reborn) 

What does becoming a butterfly feel like to you?

9.  Come to the edge she said
    We said we are afraid
    Come to the edge she said
    We came she pushed us &
    We flew

 (apologies to Appollinaire)

10.  "Though makes lavish use of analogy.  It does this in scientific
discovery too of course 'before' it operativity is fixed in paradigms. 
On the other hand its analogizing power can also return, bringing into
play the spontaneous analogical field of the perceiving body, educating 
Cezanne's eye, Debussy's ear, to see and hear giveable, nunces, timbres
that are 'useless' for survival, even cultural survival."

The Inhuman pp 22-23