Toward a Social Medium: Meaning-making in Les Immateriaux, or, How to Have a Conversation Amid Information Overload

Drawing from a French Postmodernist tradition that examines a breakdown in grand historical narratives, the advent of novel telecommunication technologies, and the language games that underpin humanistic epistemology, as well an emergent strain of Art History preoccupied with landmark exhibitions as conceptual events, rather than individual object encounters, this thesis delves into the 1985 Centre George Pompidou show Les Immateriaux, curated by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. I argue that his groundbreaking and boundary-pushing employment of curatorial possibilities, including literary, filmic, and theatrical tie-ins, bespeaks a new intellectual paradigm: something I call the conversational model for humanistic interpretation, or the social medium.