Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition

October 18, 2021

Some annotated extracts from Jean-François Lyotard’s often cited (though perhaps less often read) monograph The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Lyotard, 1986).

Several things jumped out for me while reading this. First, the figure that looms largest over these pages is the later Wittgenstein—rather than leaning on structuralist frameworks, as one might naively expect, Lyotard mostly mobilises conceptual tools from analytic philosophy, notably ‘language games’ and speech act theory.

Second, Lyotard uses these tools to approach the question of knowledge in a unique way: by foregrounding the pragmatics of legitimacy. This makes Lyotard’s analysis feel contemporary and relevant. As with others from this period, it almost feels as if he is talking about Twitter.

Third, Lyotard’s own position is ultimately both positive and optimistic: his vision of ‘postmodern knowledge’ is not merely what knowledge becomes once assimilated by the market, but something that stands in opposition to it. In this respect, the Lyotard of this moment is one of a handful of people who has actually treated the term ‘postmodernism’ as something to be affirmed.

On Language Games

Lyotard’s introductory remarks on language games don’t necessarily breach new territory in themselves, but his way of articulating them, and the examples he appeals to, are worth reproducing here, if only to contextualise the uses to which he later puts this machinery.

[C]onsider a declaration such as “The university is open,” pronounced by a dean or rector at convocation[.] Of course, the meaning of the utterance has to be understood, but that is a general condition of communication and does not aid us in distinguishing the different kinds of utterances or their specific effects. The distinctive feature of this second, “peformative,” utterance is that its effect upon the referent coincides with its enunciation. The university is open because it has been declared open in the above-mentioned circumstances. That this is so is not subject to discussion or verification on the part of the adressee, who is immediately placed within the new context created by the utterance. As for the sender, he must be invested with the authority to make such a statement. Actually, we could say it the other way round: the sender is dean or rector—that is, he is invested with the authority to make this kind of statement—only insofar as he can directly affect both the referent, (the university) and the addressee (the university staff) in the manner I have indicated. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 9)

The term ‘performative utterance’ refers to a speech act that effects a change in social relations through its very enunciation. An important point comes at the end, when Lyotard notes that the performativity of an utterance always involves a certain structure of authority, or legitimacy, and moreover that we can unpack this legitimacy in purely causal or de facto terms: the speaker has this authority if and only if their utterance has its performative effect on social relations. When I say “the pub is open” I am merely describing the world; when its landlord says “the pub is open” they change it. In this case it is transparent, but in general the structure of legitimacy at work in a language game may be other than what its players take it to be.

On the agonistic dimension of language games:

[T]o speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics. This does not necessarily mean that one plays in order to win. A move can be made for the sheer pleasure of its invention: what else is involved in that labor of language harassment undertaken by popular speech and by literature? Great joy is had in the endless invention of turns of phrase, of words and meanings, the process behind the evolution of language on the level of parole. But undoubtedly even this pleasure depends on a feeling of success one at the expense of an adversary—at least one adversary, and a formidable one: the accepted language, or connotation. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 10)

For Lyotard, the foregrounding of agonistics sets the language game approach to social structure apart from the cybernetic approach.

[T]he trivial cybernetic version of information theory misses something of decisive importance, to which I have already called attention: the agonistic aspect of society. The atoms are placed at the crossroads of pragmatic relationships, but they are also displaced by the messages that traverse them, in perpetual motion. Each language partner, when a “move” pertaining to him is made, undergoes a “displacement,” an alteration of some kind that not only affects him in his capacity as addressee and referent, but also as sender. These “moves” necessarily provoke “countermoves”—and everyone knows that a countermove that is merely reactional is not a “good” move. Reactional countermoves are no more than programmed effects in the opponent’s strategy; they play into his hand 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 an unexpected “move” (a new statement). (Lyotard, 1986, p. 16)

The claim here is that the cybernetic approach—which appeals to non-linear causality as opposed to classical linear models of causality—nevertheless still misses the extra dimension which is added when the ‘nodes’ of the network are understood as reasoning agents. The cybernetic model places social structures in the same frame as other natural structures—organic or inorganic—seeing nodes as purely causal systems, reliable responders to input stimuli. Lyotard’s amounts to the claim that this model fails to capture the salient features of social structure, because those features are only visible at a finer grain of analysis, specifically, in the acausal interactions that occur when nodes are agents capable of anticipation, deception, and strategy. (Including all the weird temporality that flows from this—e.g. Roko’s Basilisk, or Žižekian time paradoxes.)

What emerges from this is a concept of power appropriate to general agonistics: power consists in the ability to force one’s opponent to only ever play reactional moves.

In the ordinary use of discourse—for example, in a discussion between two friends—the interlocutors use any available ammunition, changing games from one utterance to the next: questions, requests, assertions, and narratives are launched pell-mell into battle. The war is not without rules, but the rules allow and encourage the greatest possible flexibility of utterance.

In a reciprocal agonistics, then, the rules contain what could be called an ‘open’ texture—they allow players to make moves which alter or change the rules themselves. This contrasts with agonistics defined by an institution, in which the rules are fixed by non-player factors.

[A]n institution differs from a conversation in that it always requires supplementary constraints for statements to be declared admissible within its bounds. The constraints function to filter discursive potentials, interrupting possible connections in the communication networks: there are things that should not be said. They also privilege certain classes of statements (sometimes only one) whose predominance characterizes the discourse of the particular institution: there are things that should be said, and there are ways of saying them.

Of course, in reality most situations fall somewhere between these limits.

However, this hypothesis about the institution is still too “unwieldy”: its point of departure is an overly “reifying” view of what is institutionalized. We know today that the limits the institution imposes on potential language “moves” are never established once and for all (even if they have been formally defined). Rather, the limits are themselves the stakes and provisional results of language strategies, within the institution and without. Examples: Does the university have a place for language experiments (poetics)? Can you tell stories in cabinet meetings? Advocate a cause in a barracks? The answers are clear: yes, if the university opens creative workshops; yes, if the cabinet works with prospective scenarios; yes, if the limits of the old institutions are displaced. Reciprocally, it can be said that the boundaries only stabilize when they cease to be stakes in the game. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 17)

The final point makes it clear: the rules becomes ‘institutionalised’ at precisely the point at which contesting them is no longer taken to be a valid move in the game, i.e. they are no longer on the table as stakes in the game. Here we might think of fetishism—the divine right of kings is an ‘institution’ only to the extent that people take the king’s authority to be a natural fact of their birth, rather than a mutable social relation which can be revoked or challenged (see my Note on Fetishism).

(This point also recalls Baudrillard. Open texture—in which the rules of the game are part of its stakes—is a characteristic feature of symbolic exchange, which is marked by its ‘ambivalent’ and rivalrous, or in other words agonistic, quality. Our political economy of the sign is one in which the rules of the game have been abstracted in the form of a code and taken off the table as stakes within it—in Lyotard’s idiom, they have become institutionalised. Baudrillard’s claim that all agency lies in the code asserts the disempowering nature of this situation: when the code is no longer at stake between the players and is controlled by a third party, there is a sense in which all moves are reactional. Power lies in the hands of the third party, just as true power in a referendum lies with whoever gets to write the list of options and interpret the results.)

On Narrative Knowledge

The two language games that Lyotard draws a contrast between are those corresponding to ‘narrative knowledge’ and ‘scientific knowledge,’ each with its own structure of legitimation. The first is illustrated with an example:

[A] Cashinahua storyteller always begins his narration with a fixed formula: “Here is the story of—, as I’ve always heard it told. I will tell it to you in my turn. Listen.” And he brings it to a close with another, also invariable, formula: “Here ends the story of—. The man who has told it to you is— (Cashinahua name), or to the Whites— (Spanish or Portuguese name).”

A quick analysis of this double pragmatic instruction reveals the following: the narrator’s only claim to competence for telling the story is the fact that he has heard it himself. The current narratee gains potential access to the same authority simply by listening. It is claimed that the narrative is a faithful transmission (even if the narrative performance is highly inventive) and that it had been told “forever”: therefore the hero, a Cashinahuan, was himself once a narratee, and perhaps a narrator, of the very same story. This similarity of condition allows for the possibility that the current narrator could be the hero of a narrative, just as the Ancestor was. In fact, he is necessarily such a hero because he bears a name, declined at the end of his narration, and that name was given to him in conformity with the canonic narrative legitimating the assigment of patronyms among the Cashinahua.

The pragmatic rule illustrated by this example cannot, of course, be universalised. But it gives insight into what is a generally recognised property of traditional knowledge. The narrative “posts” (post, addressee, hero) are so organized that the right to occupy the post of sender receives the following double grounding: it is based upon the fact of having occupied the post of the addressee, and of having been recounted oneself, by virtue of the name one bears, by a previous narrative—in other words, having been positioned as the diagetic reference of other narrative events. The knowledge transmitted by these narrations is in no way limited to the functions of enunciation; it determines in a single stroke what one must say in order to be heard, what one must listen to in order to speak, and what role one must play (on the scene of diagetic reality) to be the object of the narrative.

Thus the speech acts relevant to this form of knowledge are performed not only by the speaker, but also by the listener, as well as by the third party referred to. The knowledge arising from such an apparatus may seem “condensed” in comparision with what I call “developed” knowledge. Our example clearly illustrates that a narrative tradition is also the tradition of the criteria defining a threefold competence—“know-how,” “knowing how to speak,” and “knowing how to hear”—through which the community’s relationship to itself and its environment is played out. What is transmitted through these narratives is the set of pragmatic rules that constitutes the social bond. (Lyotard, 1986, pp. 20-21)

In this language game, legitimacy is not a question of the faithfulness of the content of speech, but rather the adherence to a particular form of speech. The structure of legitimacy is accordingly a reciprocal one, with the speech acts constituting this form of knowledge distributed across its various roles (speaker, listener, referent). In this respect the question of the legitimacy never comes up, just as the question of the legitimacy of rules of chess never comes up, because to disregard those rules is simply to no longer be playing (or in the case of Cashinahua storytelling, it is to exit the social bond). This form of knowledge commands legitimacy to precisely the extent that players recognise one another as such—in this sense it is immediate.

Lyotard points out some implications of this for collective memory and the experience of time:

A fourth aspect of narrative knowledge meriting careful examination is its effect on time. Narrative form follows a rhythm; it is the synthesis of a meter beating time in regular periods and of accent modifying the length or amplitude of certain of those periods. This vibratory, musical property of narrative is clearly revealed in the ritual performance of certain Cashinahua tales: they are handed down in initiation ceremonies, in absolutely fixed form, in a language whose meaning is obscured by lexical and syntactic anomalies, and they are sung as interminable, monotonous chants. It is a strange brand of knowledge, you may say, that does not even make itself understood to the young men to whom it is addressed!

And yet this kind of knowledge is quite common; nursery rhymes are of this type, and repetitive forms of contemporary music have tried to recapture or at least approximate it. It exhibits a surprising feature: as meter takes precedence over accent in the production of sound (spoken or not), time ceases to be a support for memory to become an immemorial beating that, in the absence of a noticeable separation between periods, prevents their being numbered and consigns them to oblivion. (Lyotard, 1986, pp. 21-22)

Now there must be a congruence between this lethal function of narrative knowledge and the functions, cited earlier, of criteria formation, the unification of areas of competence, and social regulation. By way of a simplifying fiction, we can hypothesize that, against all expectations, a collectivity that takes narrative as its key form of competence has no need to remember its past. It finds the raw material for its social bond not only in the meaning of the narratives it recounts, but also in the the act of reciting them. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 22)

Historicity—the explicitly representation of the past as referent—is something that would be expected only where narrative is displaced as the dominant form of knowledge in society. Where narrative reigns, cultural memory has been externalised in the form of discursive practice (or technique) to such an extent that it no longer needs to be represented explicitly as a discursive content.

Scientific Pragmatics and Legitimation

Contrasting with narrative, the characteristic feature of scientific pragmatics is that this is the language game in which the legitimacy of a statement is explicitly represented as a contestable content.

There is, then, an incommensurability between popular narrative pragmatics, which provides immediate legitimation, and the language game known to the West as the question of legitimacy—or rather, legitimacy as a referent in the game of inquiry. Narratives […] determine criteria of competence and/or illustrate how they are to be applied. They thus define what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question, and since they are themselves a part of that culture, they are legitimated by the simple fact that they do what they do. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 23)

Scientific knowledge requires that one language game, denotation, be retained and all others excluded. A statement’s truth-value is the criterion determining its acceptability. Of course, we find other classes of statements, such as interrogatives […] and prescriptives […]. But they are only present as turning points in the dialectical argumentation, which must end in a denotative statement. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 25)

In scientific pragmatics, the structure of legitimation is no longer reciprocal, but unilateral: it is the speaker who is required to prove the validity of their statements, and this validity is not given as a formal condition of participation in the game.

Scientific knowledge is in this way set apart from the language games that combine to form the social bond. Unlike narrative knowledge, it is no longer a direct and shared component of the bond. But it is indirectly a component of it, because it developes into a profession and gives rise to institutions, and in modern societies language games consolidate themselves in the form of institutions run by qualified partners (the professional class). The relation between knowledge and society (that is, the sum total of partners in the general agonistics, excluding scientists in their professional capacity) becomes one of mutual exteriority. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 25)

But this unilateral structure creates a problem of infinite regress—the resources one marshalls to justify a statement can only be other denotative statements in the language game, each subject to the same demand for legitimation as the first. Ultimately, the regress can only come to a stop at the point that the listener acknowledges some justifying statement(s) as immediately legitimate (i.e. they simply stop asking the question of legitimacy). But this is to recourse to precisely the reciprocity excluded by these pragmatics. Insofar as scientific statements do command a de facto legitimacy, then, it is only because this legitimacy is ultimately grounded on a reciprocal structure (something with the form of narrative knowledge). This must be left tacit with respect to the self-representation of the scientific language game, whose official stance is to disregard such narrative structures as pre-scientific.

It is not inconceivable that the recourse to narrative is inevitable, at least to the extent that the language game of science desires its statements to be true but does not have the resources to legitimate their truth on its own. If this is the case, it is necessary to admit an irreducible need for history understood, as outlined above—not as a need to remember or to project (a need for historicity, for accent), but on the contrary as a need to forget[.] (Lyotard, 1986, p. 28)

Science is then left in a precarious position—since its de facto legitimacy is dependent on structures it cannot explicitly acknowledge, if these structures are undermined then it will have no way to respond to the erosion of its own legitimacy.

It is, of course, understandable that both capitalist renewal and prosperity and the disorienting upsurge of technology would have an impact on the status of knowledge. But in order to understand how contemporary science could have been susceptible to those effects long before they took place, we must first locate the seeds of “delegitimation” and nihilism that were inherent in the grand narratives of the nineteenth century. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 38)

Here Lyotard locates primary blame for the erosion of scientific legitimacy not in capitalism, but in currents of 19th century thought which began to apply scientific questioning to its own foundations. Though most did so with the specific aim of providing that grounding legitimacy, they ultimately opened the door to its delegitimation.

If this “delegitimation” is pursued in the slightest and if its scope is widened […] the road is then open for an important current of postmodernity: science plays its own game; it is incapable of legitimating the other language games. The game of prescription, for example, escapes it. But above all, it is incapable of legitimating itself, as speculation assumed it could. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 40)

This inability of science to legitimate itself represents a certain vulnerability, allowing it to become subsumed under a new language game that accompanies the rise of post-war capitalism.

Efficiency and Power: the Performance Principle

As various aspects of cultural production become marketised in the post-war era, the truth principle becomes subordinate to the profit principle, and profitability is dependent on the capacity to produce effects.

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 the control of another language game, in which the goal is no longer truth, but performativity—that is, the best possible input/output equation. The State and/or company must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new goal: in the discourse of today’s financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 46)

This functional subsumption of the scientific game by another has very real consequences for the organisation of social institutions:

For in addition to its professionalist function, the University is beginning, or should begin, to play a new role in improving the system’s performance—that of job retraining and continuing education. Outside the universities, departments, or institutions with a professional orientation, knowledge will no longer be transmitted en bloc, once and for all, to young people before their entry into the work force: rather it is and will be served “à la carte” to adults who are either already working or expect to be, for the purpose of improving their skills and chances of promotion, but also to help them acquire information, languages, and language games allowing them both to widen their occupational horizons and to articulate their technical and ethical experience. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 49)

Lyotard then makes the crucial point that once the truth criterion has been subsumed by the performance criterion, the whole system becomes self-legitimating:

[T]he fact remains that since performativity increases the ability to produce proof, it also increases the ability to be right: the technical criterion, introduced on a massive scale into scientific knowledge, cannot fail to influence the truth criterion. The same has been said of the relationship between justice and performance: the probability that an order would be pronounced just was said to increase with the performance capability of the prescriber. This led Luhmann to hypothesize that in postindustrial societies the normativity of laws is replaced by the performativity of procedures. “Context control,” in other words, performance improvement won at the expense of the partners constituting that context (be they “nature” or men), can pass for a kind of legimation. De facto legitimation. (Lyotard, 1986, pp. 46-47)

This is how legimation by power takes shape. Power is not only good performativity, but also effective verification and good verdicts. It legimates science and the law on the basis of their efficiency, and legitimates this efficiency on the basis of science and law. It is self-legitimating, in the same way a system organized around performance maximization seems to be. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 47)

Science is legitimated not by truth (which creates a problem of regress, only terminable by some tacit appeal to narrative) but by effectiveness, i.e. by its technical applications. But conversely, since effective procedures can channel more resources into the production of proofs, there is also a legimation in the other direction—the most effective procedures also receive the most proof. This second movement is parasitic on the original scientific language game—in this respect, Lyotard’s point is not dissimilar to Baudrillard’s assertion that the 2nd order of simulacra (the apparatus of truth, reality and appearance) is absorbed by the 3rd (pure operationality) as its alibi.

But what makes all this possible is a breakdown in the tacit narrative structures that originally supported the de facto legitimacy of science. The postmodern condition consists in this breakdown, and the corresponding reconfiguration of the social incentives driving knowledge transmission, acquisition, and production.

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. But it is probable that these narratives are already no longer the principal driving force behind interest in acquiring knowledge. If the motivation is power, then this aspect of classical didactics ceases to be relevant. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 51)

It should be noted, however, that didactics does not simply consist in the transmission of information; and competence, even when defined as a performance skill, does not simply reduce to having a good memory for data or having easy access to a computer. It is a commonplace that what is of utmost importance is the capacity to actualize the relevant data for solving a problem “here and now,” and to organize that data into an efficient strategy. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 51)

Gödel, Paralogy, and Postmodern Science

Everything up to this point concerns the postmodern condition; in the final section of the text Lyotard turns to something he calls ‘postmodern science.’ By this he means a form of science adequate to the postmodern condition, i.e. one which can survive the delegitimation brought on by the erosion of narrative forms of knowledge without being subsumed by the (capitalistic) performance principle.

The original problem for science was that its own question of legitimacy presses it to seek justification for its own foundations, yet the unilateral nature of this structure leaves it incapable of providing them. What is required of a postmodern science is a new structure of legitimacy in which the legitimacy of a particular domain of science does not depend on the legitimacy of its foundations.

It is natural, then, that Lyotard turn for inspiration to 20th Century work in the foundations of mathematics, specifically to Gödel’s incompleteness results, which thwarted Hilbert’s program to establish both an axiomatisation of the foundations of mathematics and a proof of its consistency.

By what criteria does the logician define the properties required of an axiomatic? Is there a model for scientific languages? If so, is there just one? Is it verifiable? The properties generally required of the syntax of a formal system are consistency […], a syntactic completeness […], decidability […], and the independence of the axioms in relation to one another. Now Gödel has effectively established the existence in the arithmetic system of a proposition that is neither demonstrable nor refutable within that system; this entails that the arithmetic system fails to satisfy the condition of completeness.

Since it is possible to generalize this situation, it must be accepted that all formal systems have internal limitations. This applies to logic: the metalanguage it uses to describe an artificial (axiomatic) language is “natural” or “everyday” language; that language is universal, since all other languages can be translated into it, but it is not consistent with respect to negation—it allows the formation of paradoxes.

This necessitates a reformulation of the question of the legitimation of knowledge. When a denotative statement is declared true, there is a presupposition that the axiomatic system within which it is decidable and demonstrable has already been formulated, that it is known to the interlocutors, and that they have accepted that it is as formally satisfactory as possible.

Obviously, a major shift in the notion of reason accompanies this new arrangement. The principle of a universal metalanguage is replaced by the principle of a plurality of formal and axiomatic systems capable of arguing the truth of denotative statements; these system are described by a metalanguage that is universal but not consistent. What used to pass as paradox, and even paralogism, in the knowledge of classical and modern science can, in certain of these systems, acquire a new force of conviction and win the acceptance of the community of experts. (Lyotard, 1986, pp. 42-43)

The old structure of legitimacy presupposed a complete and consistent metalanguage, in which any legitimate statement could be demonstrated in principle. We now know this is impossible—indeed, this is precisely why this structure was unable to ground itself. In the new structure suggested by Lyotard this presupposition is abandoned: rather than legitimacy being a question of demonstration in a prior and universal metalanguage, in postmodern science legitimating a proposition is rather a case of creating a new metalanguage which demonstrates it retroactively. This new metalanguage will be consistent but not universal, since the only universal language is an inconsistent one. Ultimately, the criterion of legitimacy of postmodern science is novelty—a new discourse is legitimated to the extent that it allows us to say things that it was impossible to say before.

[T]he aim is to demonstrate […] that the pragmatics of postmodern scientific knowledge per se has little affinity with the quest for performativity. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 54)

Science does not expand by means of the positivism of efficiency. The opposite is true: working on a proof means searching for and “inventing” counterexamples, in other words, the unintelligble; supporting an argument means looking for a “paradox” and legitimating it with new rules in the games of reasoning. In neither case is efficiency sought for its own sake; it comes, sometimes tardily, as an extra, when the grant givers finally decide to take an interest in the case. But what never fails to come and come again, with every new theory, new hypothesis, new statement, or new observation, is the question of legitimacy. For it is not philosophy that asks this question of science, but science itself. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 54)

What I find interesting about Lyotard’s vision is that it preserves the central importance of the question of legitimacy, whose explicit development is the definitive feature of scientific reasoning. But where classical science interpreted this question as a matter of supplying foundations—a task we must now admit is doomed—Lyotard envisions a different role for it: the question of legitimacy is what compels us to find the inevitable holes in those implicit foundations, taking the form of undecidable statements whose explicit discovery makes practically possible the re-description of the (always incomplete) foundations into a new meta-language—equally incomplete, but differently so.

What is outdated is not asking what is true and what is just, but viewing science as positivistic, relegating it to the status of unlegitimated learning, half-knowledge, as did the German idealists. The question “What is your argument worth, what is your proof worth?” is so much a part of the pragmatics of scientific knowledge that it is what assures the transformation of the addressee of a given argument and proof into the sender of a new argument and proof—thereby assuring the renewal of scientific discourse and the replacement of each generation of scientists. Science develops—and no one will deny that it develops—by developing this question. And this question, as it develops, leads to the following question, that is to say, metaquestion, the question of legitimacy: “What is you ‘what is it worth’ worth?” (Lyotard, 1986, p. 54)

[T]he striking feature of postmodern scientific knowledge is that the discourse on the rules that validate it is (explicitly) immanent to it. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 54)

In this sense, science has always been postmodern, even if its meta-discourse has historically been unable to recognise this. Furthermore, it is this very ‘paralogical’ quality of scientific process which reveals its deep tension with the ‘quest for performativity.’ Performativity depends on the kind of controlled novelty inherent to prediction and control, producing only that novelty which can be reliably anticipated on the basis of manipulation of a pre-existing system. In this way, performativity is restricted to the recombination of what was already present, the endless production of variations on existing themes. Paralogy is incompatible with this criterion since it pivots around the point which is the formal blindspot of the old system—this kind of novelty is ultimately the only true novelty precisely because it cannot be predicted on the basis of resources already present in the old system, and for that same reason can never be incentivised as the target of a predictive efficiency calculation—it’s value can be seen only in hindsight.

The problem is therefore to determine whether it is possible to have a form of legimation based solely on paralogy. Paralogy must be distinguished from innovation: the latter is under the command of the system, or at least used by it to improve its efficiency; the former is a move (the importance of which is often not recognized until later) played in the pragmatics of knowledge. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 61)

Extras

A brief dig at Baudrillard (a footnote makes explicit reference to Baudrillard’s In the Shadow of Silent Majorities):

This breaking up of the grand narratives […] leads to what some authors analyze in terms of the dissolution of the social bond and the disintegration of social aggregates into a mass of individual atoms thrown into the absurdity of Brownian motion. Nothing of the kind is happening: this point of view, it seems to me, is haunted by the paradisaic representation of a lost “organic” society. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 15)

The following quote is also worth holding onto, for sake of comparison with Baudrillard:

If it is generally accepted that nature is an indifferent, not deceptive, opponent, and it is upon this basis that the distinction is made between the natural and the human sciences. In pragmatic terms, this 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 one another. In the human sciences, on the other hand, the referent (man) is a participant in the game, one that speaks and develops a strategy (a mixed strategy, perhaps) to counter that of the scientist: here, a kind of chance with which the scientist is confronted is not object based or indifferent, but behavioural or strategic—in other words, agonistic. (Lyotard, 1986, p. 57)

References

  1. Lyotard, J.-F. (1986). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester University Press.

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Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition - October 18, 2021 - Divine Curation