CC- post class post 09/12/06

At first I was going to say that class really helped me work out some of the knots I had with Habermas and Lyotard, and this would be true. But at the same time it made me think about them a lot more (damn!), and then I got all jumbled up again. Well, first things first. I’m reminded of Hegel’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis. If Lyotard’s thesis is the antithesis of Habermas’ thesis, and I am sitting here trying to find a place of synthesis with these concepts… I might end up like the guy from Scanners with the blow up head. But that dialectic rule is probably not meant for considering two opposite works at the same time, I’m just getting the postmodern jitters.
But I do think I’d rather sit down to eat with Lyotard. I say that because I am more inclined to agree with him, but really I’d be too nervous around these guys to open my mouth! And Habermas intrigues me, but I still stick to my original thought that his theories are great for politics and probably not so much for art. My struggle at the moment, however, is that when I first read these two articles I saw them as representing two diametrically opposed ideas (and I suppose they do for the most part). But I do not understand how Lyotard can critique Habermas for politicizing art and then suggest “artists and writers need to be assigned the task of healing the community.” Others seemed to struggle with this contradiction in his argument and it made me sort of rethink this in a more postmodern way, without the notion of binary opposites. Bad, bad, postmodernist me! Instead I am reminded of what Roger said in class, sometimes it might be difficult to argue, but a lot of seemingly opposite arguments are essentially the same on a structural level. Indeed, that resonated with me when I thought about it, and I see it going on here.
Furthermore, I think I have a better grasp on Habermas’ critique of the avant garde. As I watched more of that Brak television show I came across an episode that had to do with media saturation and hegemony. I began to realize that everything they were making fun of, is something the show is guilty of itself. For example, you can go into any one of those god awful Hot Topic stores or a Suncoast and find Brak t-shirts and toys. The show that might have been avant garde at one time has been sucked into the system, made commercial. So, in a way, I think I find myself agreeing with Habermas more than I originally thought. If something is avant garde, it probably won’t stay that way for long. It will always get sucked into the system (either that or it will just be completely ignored by the system, thereby reducing its effectiveness to be subversive). So with those two fates in mind, I can see why an argument would be made against the avant garde. However, I still stand back from this one for a bit because I don’t really know if I agree that art has to be political.