ENGL 6166: Rhetorical Theory » April 6th: Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition

April 6th: Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition

“It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.” (Lyotard, p. 81)

Leading Class Discussion

Let’s have Hannah lead the class discussion on Lyotard. (For an origin of the name Hannah, check out this page.)

After this presentation/discussion, we’ll talk a little about the Rhetoric/al Project (due 4/27) and the readings for 4/20–you don’t have to read all of them–before moving on to the rest of today’s fun.

Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition

Although I wouldn’t claim Lyotard is an easy read, he is certainly more accessible than others we’ve read. Well, perhaps that bar’s height is relative. Anyway, all of you are pros at this stuff now, so it’s easy to draw connections. Before we get into the details of The Postmodern Condition, I’d like us to consider his essay “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” I have a page devoted to that essay.

I particularly like Lyotard’s contributions to the rhetoric of science (and technology), but there’s also the idea of, well, postmodernism. Let’s talk about the term for a bit. I have a page devoted to it from another class, so let’s take a look. Remember, you aren’t expected to get a handle on it in one night, one reading, one lifetime…well, it’s not that difficult, but it’s a concept that requires work.

Terms to Define

The following terms are important to Lyotard’s discussion:

  • technocracy: the condition of regulating society (and its institutions) to reflect the spirit of the late Industrial Revolution and 20th century efficiency values
  • modernism: turn of the last century “condition” that observers and scholars claim influenced Western civilization; key attributes of art, architecture, and life are
    • sense of alienation
    • mass public; masses
    • drive for efficiency
    • apotheosis of technological solutions
    • militarization
  • high modernism: the period between WWI and WWII; often considered a more mature modernism than that of the historical avant-garde movements of Futurism, Vorticism, Imagism, Rayonism, and others of the 1910s
  • praxis: putting theory into practice
  • paralogy: against an established way of reasoning
  • pragmatics: linguistic field studying how context mediates/contributes to meaning
  • dialectics: dialogue, discourse, discussing between two, usually opposing, speakers attempting to come to truth through reason or (what’s considered established, valid) logic
  • didactics: having to do with instruction; pedagogy
  • positive science: value free or neutral science; how things are in absolute terms
  • positivism: the theory that science and scientific views reign; one can directly access the natural world through one’s senses (or technological protheses)
  • cybernetics: the study of structured systems and networks
  • Kant’s categorical imperative: an ethical philosophy that motivates a person’s action (or inaction) based on presummed duties (see also deontology)
  • catastrophe theory: mathematical study into the nature of how changes can or cannot effect the equilibrium of a system

There are probably more, but this is a good list to start with.

What’s this got to do with Rhetoric

I’m glad you asked. Rhetoric, as we’ve discussed, is about understanding the way(s) information is conveyed, how meaning is mediated by language and culture. Lyotard is mixing the two–language and (the subculture of) science. Here’s an important quotation on this:

  • “The scientific solution….is dialectical or even rhetorical in the forensic sense: a referent is that which is susceptible to proof and can be used as evidence in a debate….as long as I can produce proof, it is permissible to think that reality is the way I say it is.” (p. 24)

Discussion Questions/Points

Lyotard has lots to say in a pretty short space. I’ve come up with a few themes we ought to consider:

  • Legitimation
    • Pragmatics of Narrative (p. 21)
      • The 3 speech acts that constitute the social bond:
        1) of the speaker
        2) of the listener
        3) of the party referred to
      • The 3 compentencies
        1) know-how
        2) knowing how to speak
        3) knowing how to hear
    • Pragmatics of Scientific Knowledge
      • “Sender should speak the truth about the referent” (p. 23)
      • “The addressee…[may] give (or refuse) his [or her] assent to the statement [heard]” (p. 23)
      • “The referent…is supposed to be ‘expressed’ by [the speaker’s] statement in conformity with what it actually is” (p. 24)
    • What is false, non-legitimated narrative or scientific knowledge?
  • Technocracy
    • What makes our culture technocratic?
    • What are some examples of a technocratic worldview mediating decisions or life, in general?
    • What can we say about ideology and technology?
  • Performativity
  • Access to information
    • Who has access?
    • Who creates knowledge?
  • Who defines “important” research of the last century “condition” that observers and scholars claim influenced Western civilization; key attributes of art, architecture, and life are
    • sense of alienation
    • mass public; masses
    • drive for efficiency
    • apotheosis of technological solutions
    • militarization
  • Education (time permitting because I doubt we’ll have much to say…)
    • Student’s role…in the presence of the master!
    • My path to teaching
  • Insider information on moving through the academy
  • Jameson’s introduction: “non-class formations such as bureaucracy and technocracy” (p. xiv)

Anything else?

Key Points in the Text

We could discuss this work for several class periods. I’m hoping the above is a way to get a handle on it, but we can also pick key quotations and run with them. Time permitting…

  • p. 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.”
  • p. 11: “The true goal of the system, the reason it programs itself like a computer, is the optimization of the global relationship between input and output–in other words, performativity.”
  • p. 14: “Access to data is, and will continue to be, the prerogative of experts of all stripes. The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers.”
  • p. 26: “A statement of science gains no validity from the fact of being reported. Even in the case of pedagogy, it is taught only if it is still verifiable in the present through argumentation and proof.”
  • p. 39: “Stripped of the responsibility for research (which was stifled by the speculative narrative), they limit themselves to the transmission of what is judged to be established knowledge, and through didactics they guarantee the replication of teachers rather than the production of researchers.”
  • p. 46: “Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power.”
    • p. 47: “This is how legitimation by power takes shape….It is self-legitimating, in the same way a system organized around performance maximization seems to be.”
    • p. 47: “the criterion of performance is explicitly invoked by the authorities to justify their refusal to subsidize certain research centers.”
    • Guess what types of “research centers” are being funded now? Let’s come up with some key words.
  • p. 49: “the ‘democratic’ university…which was modeled along the principles of emancipationist humanism, today seems to offer little in the way of performance.”
  • p. 57: “In pragmatic terms, [the idea that nature is indifferent] means that in the natural sciences ‘nature’ is the referent–mute, but as predictable as a die thrown a great number of times–about which scientists exchange denotative utterances constituting moves they play against on another.”
    • From IEP: “The “denotative” is an utterance which attempts to correctly identify the object or referent to which it refers (such as ‘Snow is white’).” (b. “The Postmodern Condition,” para. 3—http://www.iep.utm.edu/lyotard/#H4)
  • p. 60: “We no longer have recourse to the grand narratives–we can resort neither to the dialectic of Spirit nor even to the emancipation of humanity as a validation for postmodern scientific discourse.”
  • p. 63: “Rights do not flow from hardship, but from the fact that the alleviation of hardship improves the system’s performance….the system seems to be a vanguard machine dragging humanity after it, dehumanizing it in order to rehumanize it at a different level of normative capacity.”

I don’t think we should conclude that Lyotard calls for an anti-science nihilism. Instead, he (and others) are arguing against replacing devotion to a deity with devotion to a Grand Narrative of Science–an institution that answers all questions and leads to truth. Be aware of the game of science, but don’t dismiss the fact the sea levels are rising!

Next Week’s Readings

We’re not just going to get “real” next week; we’re going to get hyperreal. Your two readings are on Canvas: Umberto Eco’s “Travels in Hyperreality” & Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation.”