Postmodern Culture

Everything you want to know about postmodernism, postmodernity, and postmodern culture. Your guide to achieving postmodern literacy from The Notorious Dr. Rog and the class of ENG 335 at Rollins College.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

AS, Lyotard

Wow, um, wow. I’m not sure I understand anything anymore. I'm not comfortable with that -- but this theory is anything but comforting. There is massive paranoia in Lyotard’s description of postmodernity, as well as a cry to rebellion. Postmodernists are called to “wage a war on totality” and “be witnesses to the unpresentable” in order to “activate the differences and save the honor of the name.” Uh, okay.

This stuff brings to mind Barthes’s discourse on the presence in the absence. There is the great unknown (the unpresentable) that modernist artists strive in vain to represent -- an approximation of reality. Vain being the operative word: it connotes the sheer egotism of creative assumption and the inherent failure of those attempts. The pain/pleasure (to an extent, jouissance) lies in not revealing the unrevealable, but in highlighting the impossibility of presenting the unpresentable. What can be conceived but that can’t be presented is meant to challenge and unsettle the human mind…to worry it regarding its own limits. Postmodernity is playtime with your imaginary friend.

I picture pomo as the geeky kid sitting alone at lunch, wanting to capture and reproduce the angst and loneliness and confusion of the images in his head but who can’t execute the reality of his concepts. Simply can’t do it…ragged chaos translates as a bunch of half-assed zigzags on a torn three ring binder. The impotence of inherent limitation must be choking -- until it is realized that the lack of expressional form is what blows the mind, then the forms that fail to convey myriad concepts become in and of themselves celebrated representations of how surreal any attempt at realism is.

You want comforting representations, go buy yourself an apple pie candle and imagine that mom is in the kitchen baking something yummy and all is right in the world. You want truth/reality, well, tough.

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