Answering the Question: What is postmodern by Jean-Francois Lyotard

     Jean-Francois Lyotard is a French philosopher best known for his ideas about post-modernism. In this essay, lyotard strongly doubts the idea of Habermas about the incomplete project of modernity. He disagrees with habermas in his attempt to bridge the gap between cognitive, ethical, and political discourse and opening a way to a unity of experience. He opines that Habermas ideas of the writers getting back into the bosom of community and society is ill one. This kind of writing that Habermas favours is realism. But Lyotard says realism intends to avoid the question of reality implicated in art; furthermore realism always stands somewhere between academicism and litch. This search of reality should be broken to let the art survive. Lyotard has mentioned have that there are two types of realists subjectivists and objectivists. James Joyce, Virginia a wolf are subjectivists. They believe that our own consciousness determines the reality. It is the self that determines reality for them. Marx, Darwin and naturalists are the objectivists. Marx says, material reality is the ultimate reality which determines our consciousness. For Darwin evolutionary is the final reality.
     Laotard opposes these concepts and believes that reality as such is not there. Reality is just an representation or an illusion of reality so lyotard claims that the function of modernist is to create the illusion of reality but not the reality itself. He urges to stand against reality. Modernity, in whatever age it appears, can not exist without shattering of belief and without discovery of the ‘lack of reality’ of reality, together with the invention of other realities. Instead of reality Lyotard focuses on sublime. He writes ‘it is in the aesthetic of the sublime that modern art finds its impetus and the logic of avant-gardes finds its axioms.’ Modernity unable people to see something only by making it impossible to see, it caters pleasure only causing pain and makes an illusion to the unpresentable by means of visible presentation. Lyotard asserts that Habermas confuses Kantian sublime with Freudian sublimation by connecting aesthetics with the beautiful. Kantian sublimity may be pleasant or pain which can not be described exactly in words. In the similar fashion an attempt to define post-modernism is to present what is presentable, undesevibable. It is only felt and experiences but can not be expressed in words. he says that both modernism and post modernism exist by shattering the tradition. To be post-modern is to be modern earlier. Post modernism is a modernism in the nascent state. The postmodernists realize the lack but they do not try to feel the lack. In a sense, modernity expresses a sense of loss. Post modernism is a kind of enjoyment with a philosopher whose works a texts are not formulate their own rules. The postmodern work itself looks for the requires rules and principles. So the job of a postmodern writer is not to supply reality but to explore allusions to the conceivable which can not be presented. Lyotard specially sees postmodernism as a social condition, a cluster of metanarratives of emancipation. He is more concerned with knowledge and thinks that now it has come out of the narrow university premises. Thus, now knowledge has become productive and from the position of legtimization it has come to the language games. Consequently, metanarratives have last their previous and the commodification of aesthetic has been encountered.
Main points of postmodernism
1. Postmodernism is a sense of a new cultural epoch and critique of the assumptions of enlightened modernity.
2. It is the rejection of metanarratives and metatheories.
3. No space for final truth and truth-effects.
4. Leaving the eternal it highlights the fragmentary and chaotic.
5. It acknowledges the others and minorities.
6. Attentive community.

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