Lyotard & Informational Discourse

Context of the Readings
The syllabus itself functions as a sort of network.

Certain ideas are repeated but with a twist.

Between Lyotard and Hayles there is the shared idea of narrative, but the concept has been expanded.

The Postmodern Condition
Written for Quebecois government in 1970.

the government was largely led by a group of teachers.

In 1979, French was made official language of Quebec and empowered the francophones of Quebec.

As a result there was a flight of capital (all tied to anglophones) to Ontario.

Dedicated the book to University of Paris VIII -> Judith Miller, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard all teachers there

Responded to the ideas of May 1968.

Lyotard posits that society of 1980's:

Treated information as commodity, external to the person.

Society progresses within an environment full of free information.

Lyotard refutes:


 * 1) Scientific knowledge is not all knowledge
 * 2) A crisis of legitimation in the disembodiment of information.

Science advances through paraology, not efficiency of informational passage.

Paraology -> emphasized as the source/method through which meaning is advanced.

Language Games
Observable social bonds are constructed by language (games) interactions.

"To speak is to fight"
Lyotard challenges the neutrality of the message sender/receiver in Weiner's idea of cybernetic

The Seminar
As a language game/methodological approach: the idea is that the contributions of each creates a discourse "bigger" more powerful than the individual members.

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The Question of the Occident

Some questions:

1// What Metanarratives does Lyotard set up:


 * The Occident (vs. the Orient?)
 * Science
 * Western Civilization (different than the Occident)

2// Are the discussions of metanarratives just moves in a language game?

3// Is there a different kind of science?

"It is changing the meaning of the word knowledge, while expressing how such a change can take place. It is producing not the known, but the unknown."

Knowledge
How can we produced the unknown? Upon approaching the unknown, we begin to construct it in terms of the known. Which is to say that upon engaging nothingness, the only way it can be constructed as a something.

Postmodern Science is engaged in finding it's limits, what it cannot know, but in that does it create a way of knowing.

Science inverts its traditional approach of synthesization and begins to focus not on constructing systems of knowledge, but (un)knowledge.

Knowledge -> Lyotard differentiates learning from knowledge, and also how "knowledge" must include (but often does not) the idea of "know-how" "how-to" and "common sense"

Which is closely related to the ideas of Foucault outlined in "Society Must Be Defended" of a subjugated knowledge (disqualified by science).

Institution vs. Conversation
"an institution differs from a conversation in that it always requires supplementary constraints for statements to be declared admissible within it's bounds" (17).

gets back to language games -> science as multiplicious: different shapes

also seems that the institution is convention foisted upon conversation (relations).

Consider "meter" vs. "accent" distinction

Narrative & Science
pp. 22

"meter" and "accent": differentiates between emphasis on repitition (and thus rhythm) and narrative content (accent)

The Ending of PMC
Creation of binary future:


 * 1) "instrument for controlling and regulating the market system"
 * 2) "free access to the memory and data banks"

Can we really access information freely?

Intrinsic in the binary is the idea of the "value" of information and access to it?

Is information liberating in that it "devalues" information, or that it gives the value of information to all -> which returning to Language Games where use of information is strategic? Not a question of what? but which?

Does information of selection

Open Source -> critiqued as a reframing of totalizing knowledge