Lyotard - What is Postmodernism? - PreClass Post

I found this reading by Jean-Francois Lyotard to be very difficult and complicated to comprehend. As I was reading I was continuously referring back to the question of “what is Postmodernism?” And so this is what I came up with according to Lyotard:

It is a period that wants to put and ‘end to experimentations’ (Lyotard 38). It is a ‘splintering of culture’ and its ‘seperation from life’ and this can only be solved, according to Habermass, ‘changin the status of the beautiful (aesthetic) experience when it is no longer primarily expressed in judgements of taste’. Habermas continues to state, that we can achieve a ‘unity of experience’ by bridging the gap between cognitive, ethical, and political discourse. Postmodernism is calling for order, a desire for unity, for identity, for security, or popularity (Lyotard 40).

I stopped at this quote by Lyotard when he says “But capitalism inherently possesses the power to derealize familiar objects, social roles, and institutions to such a degree that the so-called realistic representations can no longer evoke reality except as nostalgia or mockery, as an occasion for suffering rather than for satisfaction.” I linked this to what I read on page 43 when Kant is talking about pleasure and pain. And how he states, that “Pleasure derives from pain.” In our text it continues to talk about how the we can conceive the infinitely great, and the infinitely powerful but that whatever we try to present like that is painfully inadequate. We can never present in paintings or in words that what is infinitely ‘great’ to ‘all’ of us and therefore the absence of ‘things’ is what makes it beautiful. For example Kant also says that the ‘empty abstraction which the imagination experiences when in search for a presentation of the infinite.’ Therefore we are only ‘pleased’ only by causing pain.

I would like to point out the challenge between photographic and cinematographic processes, and painting and narratives. Photography and cinematography accomplishes better, faster, and with a circulation a hundred thousand times larger than narrative or pictorial realism.

Postmodernism searches therefore for new presentations, NOT in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.

AHC