Response 26: "Answering The Question: What is postmodernism?"

Derrida  and deconstructionists would have approved of Lyotard’s “incredulity towards metanarratives” (202).

The definition of reality as not “simply a reelection the writing or painting, of the world as it is” but rather “realism is shown to be a way of representing the world as it should be” and the example of the Nazi party’s favor of “realistic” art depicting “sculptures of Aryan white muscular males heroically building the Third and Final Reich: the ethnically cleansed utopia that in fact was being built via the death and destruction of the Holocaust” showed an extreme danger of this “realism” that is aspired to (202). It reminded me of Lacan’s mirror stage, and in this example, it is a bit alarming the extents they went to achieve this mirror stage (not an individual mirror stage, but a mirror stage of society). Strangely enough, it also reminded me Lord Farquaad from Shrek banishing all the fairytale creatures in an attempt to create the perfect kingdom, and then later aspiring to marry a princess fit the ideal definition of a king as defined by the magic mirror.

I also liked Lyotard’s statement of creating text or work that is not “governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement” and that “Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for” (204). This encouragement of exploration also rejects following an established metanarrative of the central established guidelines on how to create art.