Lyotard, Readings, and the “Ruined” University
Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition
Key Terms: Language games, meta-narratives, legitimation, delegitimation, performativity, displacement/dissensus,
Key Points/Pages:
- Offers a definition of po-mo (xxiv)
- Failures of Marxism and the Critical Tradition (13)
- Tensions between Narrative knowledge and Scientific knowledge
- traditional knowledge (18-19)
- science’s myopic interest in denotative language games (25)
- Science’s inability to divorce itself from narrative (27–the return of the narrative to the non-narrative)
- Two dominant narratives: German Speculative [Capitalist] and French Emancipation [Socialist, Communist]
- Capitalism transforms the German Speculative narratives interest in truth into a concern for efficiency, performativity. (techno-science, 46)
- From the “production” of Truth to the lure of perfomativity and techno-science lies in its easy accountability (46)
- Present precedes the past (22) (Similar–Said’s Orientalism)
Some Greatest Hits:
- “The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training (Bildung) of minds, or even of individuals, is becoming obsolete and will become ever more so” (4)
- “Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange” (4)
- “… who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided?” (9)
- “… to speak is to fight” (10)
- “A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before” (15)
- “Reactional countermoves are no more than programmed effects in the opponent’s strategy; they play into his hands and thus have no effect on the balance of power. That is why it is important to increase displacement in the games, and even to disorient it, in such a way as to make an unexpected “move” (a new statement)” (16) *Compare to Readings below. **Think of Satan and Oklahoma.
- “In a sense, the people are only that which actualizes the narratives” (23)
- “This unequal relationship [between traditional narratives and scientific Truth] is an intrinsic effect of the rules specific to each game. We all know its symptoms. It is the entire history of cultural imperialism from the dawn of Western civilization [Plato / Isocrates–Athenians and barbarians]. It is important to recognize its special tenor, which sets it apart from all other forms of imperialism: it is governed by the demand for legitimation” (27)
- “The “people” (the nation, or even humanity), and especially their political institutions, are not content to know–they legislate” (31). Here another connection to Latour and his depiction of the tensions between Socrates and Callicles (Plato’s Gorgias dialogue), between right and might, between Science and Politics
- “Most people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative. It in now way follows that they are reduced to barbarity. What saves them from it is their knowledge that legitimation can only spring from their own linguistic practice and communicational interaction.” (41) Mourning the lost unity.
- “…the question of proof is problematical since proof needs to be proven”
- “The production of proof, which is in principle only part of an argumentation process designed to win agreement from the addressees of scientific messages, thus falls under control of another language game, in which the goal is no longer truth, but performativity–that is, the best possible input/output equation” (46)
- “The question is to determine what the discourse of power consists of and if it can constitute a legitimation” (46)
- “Whenever efficiency (that is, obtaining the desired effect) is derived from a “Say or do this, or else you’ll never speak again,” then we are in the realm of terror, and the social bond is destroyed” (46). Recall Carl von Clausewitz–“War is the continuation of Politik by other means”
- “Research sectors that are unable to argue that they contribute even indirectly to the optimization of the system’s performance are abandoned by the flow of capital and doomed to senescence” (47)
- “In the context of deligitimation, universities and the institutions of higher learning are called upon to create skills and no longer ideals–so many doctors, so many teachers in a given discipline, so many engineers, so many administrators, etc. The transmission of knowledge is no longer designed to train an elite capable of guiding the nation toward its emancipation, but to supply the system with players capable of acceptably fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by its institutions” (48)
- “It is only in the context of the grand narratives of legitimation–the life of the spirit and/or the emancipation of humanity–that the partial replacement of teachers by machines may seem inadequate or even intolerable” (51, see also the death knell for the age of the Professor, the Yoda of the emancipation narrative). MOOCS and the future of competency-based degrees.
- “Postmodern science–by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, “fracta,” catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes–is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical. 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. And it suggests a model of legitimation that has nothing to do with maximized performance, but has as its basis difference understood as paralogy” (60)
- “Those who refuse to reexamine the rules of art pursue successful careers in mass conformism by commuicating, by means of the ‘correct rules,’ the endemic desire for reality with objects and situations capable of gratifying it. […] Duchamp’s ‘ready made’ does nothing but actively and parodistically signify this constant process of dispossession of the craft of painting or even of being an artist. As Thierry de Duve penetratingly observes, the modern aesthetic question is not “what is beautiful?” but “what can be said to be art (and literature)?” (75)
- “A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art is itself looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. […] (81)
Some resonances with other theorists:
- Compare to Latour’s critique of critique, especially 14; compare to Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, 27. Science, imperialism, and the tyrrany of legitimation.
- Compare discussion of networks (14) to Foucault’s theory of disciplinarity and institutional power. See also Hardt and Negri’s extension of Foucault in the networked age (Empire).
- Levinas: Lyotard frames Levinas as continuing the delegitimation project that calls into question the equivalency of the True (from Science’s language game) to the Just. See 40.
- Derrida and hauntology–the specter of Unity and teleology (see 15, 26, 41). Similarly, the discussion of Heidegger and unity on 37
Readings, University in Ruins
Chapter 6, “Literary Culture”
Understanding the role of the University as the arbiter of Culture: “painting and poetry share the task of providing the objects around which communities of understanding form and sustain themselves” (73). That is, we can understand them rhetorically as epideictic objects. “If literature is the language of national culture, the written proof of a spiritual activity beyond the mechanical operations of material life, then the liberal education in intellectual culture, through the study of national literature, will produce the cultivated gentleman whose knowledge has no mechanical or direct utility, merely a spiritual link to the vitality of his national language as literature” (77-78).
Chapter 8 “The Posthistorical University”
How to resist what Lyotard identifies as performativity, what Readings recasts as “excellence” (criteria without referent):
“This does not mean that those in the University should abandon critical judgment, become passive observers or even eager servants of capital. As I shall argue, the question of value becomes more significant than ever, and it is by raising value as a question of judgment that the discourse of excellence can be resisted. Evaluation can become a social question rather than a device of measurement” (119)
Echoing Lyotard on the ineffectiveness of critique (“reactional countermoves” above)–“rather than posing a threat, the analyses performed by Cultural Studies risk providing new marketing opportunities for the system” (121). It can, to recall Lyotard above, be packaged and sold.
Like Lyotard, drawing from Derrida, Readings is concerned over how to dwell in the ruins of the University while resisting the temptation to reconstitute it–to supply it with a singular, unifying raison d’etre.
“Hence I shall argue that, far from community being the locus of unity and identity, the question of the proximity of thinkers in the University should be understood in terms of a dissensual community that has relinquished the regulatory ideal of communicational transparency, which has abandoned the notion of identity or unity. I shall attempt to sketch an account of the production and circulation of knowledges that imagines thinking without identity, that refigures the University as a locus of dissensus. In these terms, the University becomes one place among others where the question of being-together is posed, rather than an ideal community” (127; see also the passage on thought, pragmatism, and thinking without alibis– 129)
“Thought is an addiction from which we never get free” (128).
Chapter 9: “The Time of Study: 1968”
“Students in 1968 decathected by revolting; nowadays they do not cathect in the first place. I am not talking about dropout rates so much as about the widespread sense among undergraduate students in North America that they are ‘parked’ at the University–taking courses, acquiring credits, waiting to graduate. In a sense, this is their reaction to the fact that nothing in their education encourages them to think of themselves as the heroes of the story of liberal education, embarking on the long voyage of self-discovery” (138).
Teaching in the post-1968 university: “Rather the pedagogic relation is dissymetrical and endless. The parties are caught in a dialogic web of obligations to thought. Thought appears as the voice of an Other that no third term, such as ‘culture,’ can resolve dialectically” (145).
Chapter 10: “The Scene of Teaching”
“In place of the lure of autonomy, of independence from all obligation, I want to insist that pedagogy is a relation, a network of obligation. In this sense, we might talk of the teacher as rhetor rather than as magister, one who speaks in a rhetorical context rather than one whose discourse is self-authorizing. The advantage here would be to recognize the legitimation of the teacher’s discourse is not immanent to that discourse but is always dependent, at least in part, on the rhetorical context of its reception. The rhetor is a speaker who takes account of the audience, while the magister is indifferent to the specificity of his or her addressees” (158).
Chapter 11: “Dwelling in the Ruins”
“If my preference is for a thought of dissensus over that of consensus–as I shall argue in the next chapter–it is because dissensus cannot be instutionalized” (167).
“Institutional pragmatism thus means, for me, recognizing the University today for what it is: an institution that is losing its need to make transcendental claims for its function” (168).
“Nor does continuing to believe this story keep the light on if I cannot afford to pay my electricity bill. Enlightenment has its costs” (171)
“…how one might dwell in the ruins of the University without belief but with a commitment to Thought…” (175)
“Rather, it seems to me, recognizing the University as ruined means abandoning such teleologies and attempting to make things happen within a system without claiming that such events are the true, real, meaning of the system” (178)
Chapter 12: “The Community of Dissensus”
“I cite the problem of families in a non-normative way to make the point that we never really ‘grow up,’ never become fully autonomous and capable of cognitive determination. As a resulte, we can never settle our obligations to other people. There is no emancipation from our bonds to other people, since an exhaustive knowledge of the nature of those bonds is simply not available to us. It is not available because the belief that we could fully know our obligation to the Other, and hence in principle acquit that obligation, would itself be an unjust and unethical refusal to accept our responsibility.”
“The desire to know fully our responsibility to others is also the desire for an alibi, the desire to be irresponsible, freed of responsibility. Our responsibility to others is thus inhuman in the sense that the presumption of a shared or common humanity is an irresponsible desire to know what it is that we encounter in the other, what it is that binds us. To believe that we know in advance what it means to be human, that humanity can be an object of cognition, is the first step to terror, since it renders it possible to know what is non-human, to know what it is to which we have no responsibility, what we can freely exploit. Put simply, the obligation to others cannot be made an object of knowledge under the rubric of a common humanity.”
“We are left, then, with an obligation to explore our obligations without believing that we will come to the end of them. Such a community, the community of dissensus that presupposes nothing in common, would not be dedicated either to the project of a full self-understanding (autonomy) or to a communicational consensus as to the nature of its unity [that is–it falls under neither Lyotard’s speculative or emancipatory traditions]. Rather, it would seek to make its heteronomy, its differences, more complex. To put this another way, such a community would have to be understood on the model of dependency rather than emancipation. We are, bluntly speaking, addicted to others, and no amount of twelve-stepping will allow us to overcome that dependency, to make it the object of a fully autonomous subjective consciousness. the social bond is thus a name for the incalculable attention that the heteronomous instance of the Other (the fact of others) demands. There is no freeing ourselves from the sense of the social bond, precisely because we do not come to the end of it; we can never totally know, finally and exhaustively judge, the others to which we are bound. Hence we cannot emancipate ourselves from our dependency on others. We remain in this sense immature, dependent–despite all of Kant’s impatience.” (189-190)
Heidegger
