Comments on Lyotard and the Concept of Tradition from Just Gaming

1.) Tradition is not that which maintains the same. It is the continuity of difference.

1.a) Tradition is a limiting context as are the rules for a specific language game. Tradtion rests on "variations," but not variations of the same as in the theory of Levi-Strauss (34).

1.b) "I would say that people get into language not by speaking it but by hearing it. And what they hear as children is stories, and first of all their own story, because they are named in it" (35). What they hear also is the "before" which obligates them to pass on not what they hear but the act of listening itself; it is "a repetition of their narrational etiquette" (34). There is a wisdom in this, a wisdom that goes beyond mere competence.

2.) Tradition is the possibility of rusing, of renaming or performing the self. Tradition is the context, the social bond, within which the self happens. Lyotard's fathers here are T.S. Eliot ("Tradition and the Individual Talent") and Harold Bloom (The Anxiety of Influence).

2.a) Tradition is the consquence of the privileging of the pole of the listener. Tradition marks "the only site in which the social body can hold" (37). Tradition is a Social Compact (42), and, therefore, it is pagan (33).

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