Lyotard and The Postmodern
An excerpt from Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge:
"What, then, is the postmodern? What place does it or does it not occupy in the vertiginous work of the questions hurled at the rules of image and narration? It is undoubtedly a part of the modern. All that has been received, if only yesterday (modo, modo, Petronius used to say), must be suspected. What space does Cezanne challenge? The Impressionists'. What object do Picasso and Braque attack? Cezanne's. What presupposition does Duchamp break with in 1912? That which says one must make a painting, be it cubist. And Buren questions that other presupposition which he believes had survived untouched by the work of Duchamp: the place of presentation of the work. In an amazing acceleration, the generations precipitate themselves. A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
Yet I would like not to remain with this slightly mechanistic meaning of the word. If it is true that modernity takes place in the withdrawal of the real and according to the sublime relation between the presentable and the conceivable, it is possible, within this relation, to distinguish two modes (to use the musician's language). The emphasis can be placed on the powerlessness of the faculty of presentation, on the nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject, on the obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of everything. The emphasis can be placed, rather, on the power of the faculty to conceive, on its "inhumanity" so to speak (it was the quality Apollinaire demanded of modern artists), since it is not the business of our understanding whether or not human sensibility or imagination can match what it conceives. The emphasis can also be placed on the increase of being and the jubilation which result from the invention of new rules of the game, be it pictorial, artistic, or any other...[sic]...The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable."
Hence was born hip-hop, punk rock, avant-garde cinema, Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, Michael Barney, and the future of all good art to come, art that will do no less than re-create the world. -KWG
"What, then, is the postmodern? What place does it or does it not occupy in the vertiginous work of the questions hurled at the rules of image and narration? It is undoubtedly a part of the modern. All that has been received, if only yesterday (modo, modo, Petronius used to say), must be suspected. What space does Cezanne challenge? The Impressionists'. What object do Picasso and Braque attack? Cezanne's. What presupposition does Duchamp break with in 1912? That which says one must make a painting, be it cubist. And Buren questions that other presupposition which he believes had survived untouched by the work of Duchamp: the place of presentation of the work. In an amazing acceleration, the generations precipitate themselves. A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
Yet I would like not to remain with this slightly mechanistic meaning of the word. If it is true that modernity takes place in the withdrawal of the real and according to the sublime relation between the presentable and the conceivable, it is possible, within this relation, to distinguish two modes (to use the musician's language). The emphasis can be placed on the powerlessness of the faculty of presentation, on the nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject, on the obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of everything. The emphasis can be placed, rather, on the power of the faculty to conceive, on its "inhumanity" so to speak (it was the quality Apollinaire demanded of modern artists), since it is not the business of our understanding whether or not human sensibility or imagination can match what it conceives. The emphasis can also be placed on the increase of being and the jubilation which result from the invention of new rules of the game, be it pictorial, artistic, or any other...[sic]...The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable."
Hence was born hip-hop, punk rock, avant-garde cinema, Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, Michael Barney, and the future of all good art to come, art that will do no less than re-create the world. -KWG
posted by Kirk Walker Graves at 10/04/2006 04:23:00 PM
3 Comments:
Great post.
Lyotard's insight is compelling: that the post-modern always precedes the modern, that "what has been received" is always becoming, and that post-modernism, improperly labeled an Era, is instead an isthmus between the old and the new -- a precipitous state of mind, out of which the next generation posits its art, not merely as reaction, but as sublime evolution.
Yes, great post
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excellent post and concision, aristides, i wanted to offer another comment from david hopkins' "After Modern Art" in the fabulous Oxford History of Art:
p.198-199
"According to Lyotard, the 'grand narratives' that had informed Western societies since the Enlightenment...could no longer sustain credibility. These abstract systems of thought, by which social institutions validated themselves, were infused with ideals of 'social perfectibility' or 'progress.'...Societies now generated a profusion of 'language games.' Institutions and businesses spoke to differing social interests, diferring desires and concerns...These ideas chimed with the political changes of the period. The year 1979 saw Margaret Thatcher accede to power in Britain, followed, in 1981, by Ronald Reagan in America. The sharp swing to the political right heralded policies of economic deregulation and and an allied relativization of values..."
food for lunch, i mean thought!
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