Pre-class, Lyotard

I have to agree with the last post; this piece by Lyotard was extremely difficult to understand. I am still not sure what his overall objective was in writing this. Skimming back through it, I can’t even pick out a thesis or any kind of structure at all. He poses the question, simply: what is postmodernism? However, he never gets around to out-rightly answering this question. Lyotard states: “A work can be modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and that state is constant” (44). I also saw this in the previous post from meg143. What I took from this statement was that modernism and postmodernism are not set eras, but auras, as we have discussed in class. They are not time periods set in stone, but ways of doing things. This is why postmodernism does not refer to the end of modernism. I have to disagree with the previous post and say that it most definitely does come after modernism; it is a response to modern thinking and process. However, modernism as a way of thinking and doing is still in the “nascent state,” that is, it still has a future. Now when he says that a work can only be modern if it is first postmodern, I have had difficulty unpacking that statement. Postmodernism is a response to modernism, so I do not believe he is saying anything as arbitrary as postmodernism came first. Perhaps he is saying that because of postmodernism, it is no longer possible to create a work that is strictly modern. This of course goes back to Jencks and the concept of concept of borrowing from the past and from other styles, themes, and thought structures.