 |
Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witness to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.
Deconstruction is only the negation of the negation, it remains in the same sphere, it nourishes the same terrorist pretension to truth, that is to say the association of the sign — here in its decline, that's the only difference — with intensity. It requires the same surgical tampering with words, the same split and the same exclusions that the lover's demand exacts on skins.
The artist and the writer are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that work and text have the character of an event; hence also, they always come too late for their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put into work, their realization always begins too soon. Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).
The sublime feeling is neither moral universality nor aesthetic universalization, but is, rather, the destruction of one by the other in the violence of their differend. This differend cannot demand, even subjectively, to be communicated to all thought.
Jean-François Lyotard
Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its use-value.
Jean-François Lyotard
Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major-perhaps the major-stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.
Jean-François Lyotard
We may thus expect a thorough exteriorization of knowledge with respect to the 'knower'.
Jean-François Lyotard
A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at 'nodal points' of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be. Or better: one is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass.
Jean-François Lyotard
What is needed if we are to understand social relations in this manner, on whatever scale we choose, is not only a theory of communication, but a theory of games which accepts agonistics as a founding principle.
Jean-François Lyotard
The social subject itself seems to dissolve in this dissemination of language games. The social bond is linguistic, but it is not woven with a single thread. It is a fabric formed by the intersection of at least two (and in reality an indeterminate number) of language games, obeying different rules.
Jean-François Lyotard
Narratives, as we have seen, determine criteria of competence and/or illustrate how they are to be applied. They thus define what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question, and since they are themselves a part of that culture, they are legitimated by the simple fact that they do what they do.
Jean-François Lyotard
Scientific knowledge requires that one language game, denotative, be retained and all others excluded … Scientific knowledge is in this way set apart from the language games that combine to form the social bond.
Jean-François Lyotard
The return of the narrative in the non-narrative … the recurrence of the narrative in the scientific by way of the latter's discourses of legitimation.
Jean-François Lyotard
I have said that narrative knowledge does not give priority to the question of its own legitimation and that it certifies itself in the pragmatics of its own transmission without having recourse to argumentation and proof … . The scientist questions the validity of narrative statements and concludes that they are never subject to argumentation or proof. He classifies them as belonging to a different mentality: savage, primitive, underdeveloped, backward, alienated, composed of opinions, customs, authority, prejudice, ignorance, ideology … . This unequal relationship is an intrinsic effect of the rules specific to each game. We all know its symptoms. It is the entire history of cultural imperialism from the dawn of Western civilization. It is important to recognise its special tenor, which sets it apart from all other forms of imperialism: it is governed by the demand for legitimation.
Jean-François Lyotard
The mode of legitimation we are discussing, which reintroduces narrative as the validity of knowledge, can thus take two routes, depending on whether it represents the subject of the narrative as cognitive or practical, as a hero of knowledge or a hero of liberty.
Jean-François Lyotard
All we can do is gaze in wonderment at the diversity of discursive species, just as we do at the diversity of plant or animal species. Lamenting the 'loss of meaning' in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact the knowledge is no longer principally narrative.
Jean-François Lyotard
In contemporary society and culture — postindustrial society, postmodern culture — … the grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation.
Jean-François Lyotard
That is what the postmodern world is all about. Many people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative.
Jean-François Lyotard
The sublime … takes place … when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept…We can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to 'make visible' this absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate.
Jean-François Lyotard
I shall call modern the art which devotes it little technical expertise … to present the fact that the unpresentable exists.
Jean-François Lyotard
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 ataste 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.
Jean-François Lyotard
Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and "retro" clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works.
Jean-François Lyotard
|
