ix Lyotard

It's interesting to see that Jean-Francois Lyotard, in "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism," comes to very similar conclusions about capitalism as Jameson did in our last reading--granted, there are some differences.

Though capitalism did not have such an integral role in (post)modernism for Lyotard as it did for Jameson, he still saw its influence on society. Lyotard felt that capitalism possessed inherent "power to derealize familiar objects, social roles, and institutions to such a degree that so called realistic representation [could] no longer evoke reality except as an occasion for suffering rather than satisfaction" (40).

Lyotard also considers capitalism as an influence, though not the only influence, on art and comes up with the title "When power is that of capital" in order to distinguish it from the other power he finds in (post)modernism, the political power/influence, dubbed "When power assumes the name of party" (41,42). For Lyotard, it is a sad state of "anything goes" in art when power is that of capital: "one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner (...Taco Bell), wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and 'retro' clothes in Hong Kong," thus "art panders" to this eclecticism "which reigns in the 'taste' of patrons" (42). A very accurate statement on most occasions though i can't bring myself to believe in the "absolutism" that art always panders just to make money. Maybe the "art" comes first in some rare occasions, and profits follow.

Though Lyotard seems to agree with Jameson and his view of capitalism's role in postmodernism--actually it's probably the other way around because this article was written in '83, so Jameson is the one who technically is agreeing with Lyotard's positing--there are some significant differences. For Lyotard, his assertions about capitalism and its relation to postmodernism is only a part of the "explanation," whereas for Jameson, capitalism is at the crux of his argument. The core idea for Lyotard though, is the Kantian notion of the sublime, which he proposes (post)modernism calls forth as the "unpresentable (here conceived as the inconceivable complexity and heterogeneity of the social-linguistic world...)" and attempts to represent it through the aesthetics of art, thus gaining pleasure in the creation while dialectically feeling the pain of knowing the creation is "painfully inadequate" (A Companion to Aesthetics 291, Lyotard 43).