Lyotard!

 (He looks awfully happy for how confusing he can be.)

Reading through Lyotard for the first time definitely threw me for a bit of a loop. Our class discussion really helped me pull it all together. What I grabbed most from the reading was Lyotard’s point that postmodernism alludes the reader to think certain things and I could connect with this in comparing it to Written on the Body. As a postmodern text, Winterson is constantly trying to allude the reader and the end of the book is probably the best example of that. The reader is left wondering whether or not Louise is really there and its completely left open for the reader’s interpretation.

What I really got stuck on in this reading were things like:

• “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern” (79).
• “Postmodernism [as] the nascent state, and this state is constant” (79)

After our class discussion, however, it all became clear how with the help of the concept of a metanarrative, postmodernism can occur before and after modernism and allude the reader without focusing on any type of end product or whole. Could it be that easy? I’m going to have to say no. What I’m still really caught up on is how reality and capitalism fits in completely with this.

Lyotard writes,

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 (74).

This was something I was really curious about and we never got to it in class. So, I’m still wondering how capitalism fits into the whole scheme of postmodernism and nostalgia and so on. Perhaps it connects with the unpresentable and the nostalgia of the unpresentable. Because postmodernism is attempting to allude to the unpresentable which in turn creates nostalgia for a particular form….I’m confusing myself on how capitalism applies here….