• Back to Dissertation
• Back to DissertationCompsList
• Back to DissertationNotes

Just Gaming Notes

• “That depends on the direction of the answers. One can try to give answers by getting back from the externality, the foreignness, of the ground to which once has been led, to the familiarity of known ground, by showing that this is but another way of speaking, and that it is really the same thing. On the other hand, one can answer by trying to change, that is, by saying: Yes this is a question I had not thought of, and here is what I feel like saying about that, without at all caring whether or not it is coherent or consistent with something that I have already written. / At such a moment, one gives up one’s master and one speaks in undigested fashion” (7).
• “What is at stake in artistic language today is experimentation. And to experiment means, in a way, to be alone, to be celibate” (9). Suggesting that in modernity, thanks to economic networks, one can no longer know one’s readers before hand. I think this relates to the concept of “gaming” in the title: language games as experimentation.
• “Yes, it [(humor)] is characteristic of the experimenter, of any experimenter” (12).
• Lyotard seems to be suggesting on 12-13 that chance is a fundamental characteristic of the modern artistic work, as to introduce a work into the economic networks of contemporary life is to fundamentally see if an audience will crystalize, if it worked.
• “It is decided, that is all that can be said. We are dealing with judgments that are not regulated by categories. History itself provides no help in their formulation, at least not on the spot. For it to do so, one would have to presuppose that history proceeds by concepts, dialectically. Whereas it guides us only after the fact” (15).
• “There is no politics if there is not at the very center of society, at least at a center that is not a center but everywhere in the society, a questioning of existing institutions, a project to improve them, to make them more just” (23).
• “The question of justice for a society cannot be resolved in terms of models” (25).
• “The judge is in the same sphere of language, which means that he will be considered just only by his actions, if it can be seen that he judges well, that he is really just. And he will really be just only if his actions are just” (28).
• “Paganism admits readily that there are some people more just than others because they have often judged justly” (29).
• On Paganism: “The subject of enunciation makes no claims of autonomy with respect to his discourse” (33). For Lyotard, Paganism is about tradition and an acknowledgment that the speaking subject is both spoken by narrative and narrating previously spoken words. L calls this position heteronomy and opposes it to autonomy (33-36).
• “Why are there variants? Is it a matter of entropy or experimentation?” (34).
• “Tradition is that which concerns time, not content. Whereas what the West wants from autonomy, invention, novelty, self-determination, is the opposite—to forget time and to preserve, acquire, and accumulate contents. To turn them into what we call history, and to think that it progresses because it accumulates” (34).
• “This is the ideal of games and masks: the awareness that the relationship between the proper name and the body is not an immutable one. This bars the way to the very notion of a subject identical to itself through the perpetia of its history” (40).
• “It is not a question of conquest at any price; rather it is a matter of making a show of force, a show of one’s strength instead of conquering. Instead of reducing the opponent to silence, it is better to have him acknowledge that one is subtle” (41). Lyotard is suggesting amongst more traditional, non-Western socities, the notion of conquest is absent, as the idea that one can supplant the gods is absent. Instead, there are ruses and attempts to be clever.