Pre-Class with a splash of Post Class

In Jean-Francois Lyotard’s writing “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” He attempts to answer the question that is the title, however the only question that is answered is what postmodernism is not. Lyotard say’s “postmodernity imposes on the thought of the Enlightenment, on the idea of a unitary end of history and of a subject.” After this statement I think there is a gap missing where he should explain what postmodernity does do. The writing was overall very confusing, and hard to follow Lyotard’s overall hypothesis that should be as simple as what is postmodernism? One quote I thought was interesting was from the end of the writing. Lyotard says, “Finally, it must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented” (46). What I took away from this is that he is trying to say that anyone who is writing for the postmodern, is not writing what they think is the truth, rather write alternatively about something that is not possible but seems to be true in their eyes. (Even trying to explain this quote confuses me). I think the reading needs to be explained further in class tomorrow…

As far as what we spoke about on Tuesday, I thought that the quote “In principal, a work of art has always been reproductable” (19) was interesting because even though we have artists who make original pieces, there are also thousands of artists who emulate those who make what we consider “high art”. I don’t think that the artists who try to emulate other artists should be in anyway discredited, even though sometimes we call these people copycats. The other way to look at this quote is saying that we have always had some way of reproducing pieces of art, even in the time before the printing press.