AsToldByGinger, Lyotard

In Lyotard’s reading, he brings up many different theories of many theorists we have already read. He questioned them in an attempt to bring to light certain points that I don’t feel I completely understand. For example, Lyotard states that “Habermas thinks that if modernity has failed, it is in allowing the totality of life to be splintered into independent specialties which are left to the narrow competence of experts while the concrete individual experiences ‘desublimated meaning’ and ‘destructured form’, not as a liberation but in the mode of that immense ennui which Baudelaire described over a century ago” (39). Lyotard then goes on to pose his own question, “My question is to determine what sort of unity Habermas has in mind. Is the aim of the project of modernity the constitution of sociocultural unity within which all the elements of daily life and of thought would take their places as in an organic whole? Or does the passage that has to be charted between heterogeneous language games - those of cognition, of ethics, of politics - belong to a different order from that?” (39). Although I understand that Lyotard is attempting to create his own opinions on the subject, I’m not quite sure if he ever answers them or the direction that he is taking.

Later in the reading though, Lyotard references another theorist, Kant, and states “Kant himself shows the way when he names ‘formlessness, the absence of form’, as a possible index to the unpresentable” (44). This statement reminded me of the Macherey reading, in which he talked about intertextuality and the importance of the gap - that which is not seen.

Although I could relate this statement back to previous knowledge, I had a hard time comprehending the reading as a whole and to understand Lyotard’s central point. I look forward to Wednesday’s discussion and connecting the points that he is making.