Lyotard pre class- fang

            Oy vey Lyotard, you make little sense. Everything until the first paragraph on page 40 is brutal. He does pay homage to Benjamin repeating his point that “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.” (40). He notes that reproduction makes the travel of art easier and that is why it is a commodity but now, artists are conforming to commercialism and capitalism which makes more art less pure. 

Lyotard does make sense on his postmodern assessment. He doesn't seem to see it as an answer to modernism, just a parallel. He notes "a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism as its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant." (44). Postmodernism is just the combatant of modernism.

As a whole, Lyotard’s piece moves in many different directions about the problem of inauthenticity and I am not too sure as to what he is fully getting at but essentially, Lyotard agrees with Benjamin and is worried about how capital-based our society now is.