Postmodernism
by Lyotard
by Jean-François Lyotard (1979)
Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is
altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures
enter what is known as the postmodern age.' This transition has been under way
since at least the end of the 1950s, which for Europe marks the completion of
reconstruction. The pace is faster or slower depending on the country, and
within countries it varies according to the sector of activity: the general
situation is one of temporal disjunction which makes sketching an overview
difficult. A portion of the description would necessarily be conjectural. At
any rate, we know that it is unwise to put too much faith in futurology.
Rather than painting a picture that would inevitably remain incomplete, I
will take as my point of departure a single feature, one that immediately
defines our object of study. Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse. And
it is fair to say that for the last forty years the "leading"
sciences and technologies have had to do with language: phonology and theories
of linguistics, problems of communication and cybernetics, modern theories of
algebra and informatics, computers and their languages, problems of translation
and the search for areas of compatibility among computer languages, problems of
information storage and data banks, telematics and the perfection of
intelligent terminals, to paradoxology. The facts speak for themselves (and
this list is not exhaustive).
These technological transformations can be expected to have a considerable
impact on knowledge. Its two principal functions - research and the
transmission of acquired learning-are already feeling the effect, or will in
the future. With respect to the first function, genetics provides an example
that is accessible to the layman: it owes its theoretical paradigm to
cybernetics. Many other examples could be cited. As for the second function, it
is common knowledge that the miniaturisation and commercialisation of machines
is already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made
available, and exploited. It is reasonable to suppose that the proliferation of
information-processing machines is having, and will continue to have, as much
of an effect on the circulation of learning as did advancements in human
circulation (transportation systems) and later, in the circulation of sounds
and visual images (the media).
The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of
general transformation. It can fit into the new channels, and become
operational, only if learning is translated into quantities of
information." We can predict that anything in the constituted body of
knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned and that the
direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual
results being translatable into computer language. The "producers"
and users of knowledge must now, and will have to, possess the means of
translating into these languages whatever- they want to invent or learn.
Research on translating machines is already well advanced." Along with the
hegemony of computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of
prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as
"knowledge" statements.
We may thus expect a thorough exteriorisation of knowledge with respect to
the "knower," at whatever point he or she may occupy in the knowledge
process. 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. The relationships of the
suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now
tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the
relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they
produce and consume - that is, the form of value. Knowledge is and will be
produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be
valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.
Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its
"use-value."
It is widely accepted that knowledge has become the principle force of
production over the last few decades, this has already had a noticeable effect
on the composition of the work force of the most highly developed countries and
constitutes the major bottleneck for the developing countries. In the
postindustrial and postmodern age, science will maintain and no doubt
strengthen its preeminence in the arsenal of productive capacities of the
nation-states. Indeed, this situation is one of the reasons leading to the
conclusion that the gap between developed and developing countries will grow
ever wider in the future.
But this aspect of the problem should not be allowed to overshadow the
other, which is complementary to it. Knowledge in the form of an informational
commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to
be, a major - perhaps the major - stake in the worldwide competition for power.
It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of
information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and
afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap
labor. A new field is opened for industrial and commercial strategies on the
one hand, and political and military strategies on the other.
However, the perspective I have outlined above is not as simple as I have
made it appear. For the merchantilisation of knowledge is bound to affect the
privilege the nation-states have enjoyed, and still enjoy, with respect to the
production and distribution of learning. The notion that learning falls within
the purview of the State, as the brain or mind of society, will become more and
more outdated with the increasing strength of the opposing principle, according
to which society exists and progresses only if the messages circulating within
it are rich in information and easy to decode. The ideology of communicational
"transparency," which goes hand in hand with the commercialisation of
knowledge, will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and "noise."
It is from this point of view that the problem of the relationship between
economic and State powers threatens to arise with a new urgency.
Already in the last few decades, economic powers have reached the point of
imperilling the stability of the state through new forms of the circulation of
capital that go by the generic name of multi-national corporations. These
new forms of circulation imply that investment decisions have, at least in
part, passed beyond the control of the nation-states." The question
threatens to become even more
thorny with the development of computer technology and telematics. Suppose,
for example, that a firm such as IBM is authorised to occupy a belt in the
earth's orbital field and launch communications satellites or satellites
housing data banks. Who will have access to them? Who will determine which
channels or data are forbidden? The State? Or will the State simply be one user
among others? New legal issues will be raised, and with them the question:
"who will know?"
Transformation in the nature of knowledge, then, could well have
repercussions on the existing public powers, forcing them to reconsider their
relations (both de jure and de facto) with the large corporations and, more
generally, with civil society. The reopening of the world market, a return to
vigorous economic competition, the breakdown of the hegemony of American
capitalism, the decline of the socialist alternative, a probable opening of the
Chinese market these and many other factors are already, at the end of the 1970s,
preparing States for a serious reappraisal of the role they have been
accustomed to playing since the 1930s: that of, guiding, or even directing
investments. In this light, the new technologies can only increase the urgency
of such a re-examination, since they make the information used 'in decision
making (and therefore the means of control) even more mobile and subject to
piracy.
It is not hard to visualise learning circulating along the same lines as
money, instead of for its "educational" value or political
(administrative, diplomatic, military) importance; the pertinent distinction
would no longer be between knowledge and ignorance, but rather, as is the case
with money, between "payment knowledge" and "investment
knowledge" - in other words, between units of knowledge exchanged in a
daily maintenance framework (the reconstitution of the work force,
"survival") versus funds of knowledge dedicated to optimising the
performance of a project.
If this were the case, communicational transparency would be similar to
liberalism. Liberalism does not preclude an organisation of the flow of money
in which some channels are used in decision making while others are only good
for the payment of debts. One could similarly imagine flows of knowledge
travelling along identical channels of identical nature, some of which would be
reserved for the "decision makers," while the others would be used to
repay each person's perpetual debt with respect to the social bond.
That is the working hypothesis defining the field within
which I intend to consider the question of the status of knowledge. This
scenario, akin to the one that goes by the name "the computerisation of
society" (although ours is advanced in an entirely different spirit),
makes no claims of being original, or even true. What is required of a working
hypothesis is a fine capacity for discrimination. The scenario of the
computerisation of the most highly developed societies allows us to spotlight
(though with the risk of excessive magnification) certain aspects of the
transformation of knowledge and its effects on public power and civil
institutions - effects it would be difficult to perceive from other points of
view. Our hypotheses, therefore, should not be accorded predictive value in
relation to reality, but strategic value in relation to the question raised.
Nevertheless, it has strong credibility, and in that sense our choice of
this hypothesis is not arbitrary. It has been described extensively by the
experts and is already guiding certain decisions by the governmental agencies
and private firms most directly concerned, such as those managing the
telecommunications industry. To some extent, then, it is already a part of
observable reality. Finally, barring economic stagnation or a general recession
(resulting, for example, from a continued failure to solve the world's energy
problems), there is a good chance that this scenario will come to pass: it is
hard to see what other direction contemporary technology could take as an alternative
to the computerisation of society.
This is as much as to say that the hypothesis is banal. But only to the
extent that it fails to challenge the general paradigm of progress in science
and technology, to which economic growth and the expansion of sociopolitical
power seem to be natural complements. That scientific and technical knowledge
is cumulative is never questioned. At most, what is debated is the form that
accumulation takes - some picture it as regular, continuous, and unanimous,
others as periodic, discontinuous, and conflictual.
But these truisms are fallacious. In the first place, scientific knowledge
does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition
to, and in competition and conflict with, another kind of knowledge, which I
will call narrative in the interests of simplicity (its characteristics will be
described later). I do not mean to say that narrative knowledge can prevail
over science, but its model is related to ideas of internal equilibrium and
conviviality next to which contemporary scientific knowledge cuts a poor
figure, especially if it is to undergo an exteriorisation with respect to the
"knower" and an alienation from its user even greater than has
previously been the case. The resulting demoralisation of researchers and
teachers is far from negligible; it is well known that during the 1960s, in all
of the most highly developed societies, it reached such explosive dimensions
among those preparing to practice these professions - the students - that there
was noticeable decrease in productivity at laboratories and universities unable
to protect themselves from its contamination. Expecting this, with hope or
fear, to lead to a revolution (as was then often the case) is out of the
question: it will not change the order of things in postindustrial society
overnight. But this doubt on the part of scientists must be taken into account
as a major factor in evaluating the present and future status of scientific
knowledge.
It is all the more necessary to take it into consideration since - and this
is the second point - the scientists' demoralisation has an impact on the
central problem of legitimation. I use the word in a broader sense than do
contemporary German theorists in their discussions of the question of
authority. Take any civil law as an example: it states that a given category of
citizens must perform a specific kind of action. Legitimation is the process by
which a legislator is authorised to promulgate such a law as a norm. Now take
the example of a scientific statement: it is subject to the rule that a
statement must fulfil a given set of conditions in order to be accepted as
scientific. In this case, legitimation is the process by which a
"legislator" dealing with scientific discourse is authorised to
prescribe the stated conditions (in general, conditions of internal consistency
and experimental verification) determining whether a statement is to be
included in that discourse for consideration by the scientific community.
The parallel may appear forced. But as we will see, it is not. The question
of the legitimacy of science has been indissociably linked to that of the
legitimation of the legislator since the time of Plato. From this point of
view, the right to decide what is true is not independent of the right to
decide what is just, even if the statements consigned to these two authorities
differ in nature. The point is that there is a strict interlinkage between the
kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics: they both
stem from the same perspective, the same "choice" if you will - the
choice called the Occident.
When we examine the current status of scientific knowledge at a time when
science seems more completely subordinated to the prevailing powers than ever
before and, along with the new technologies, is in danger of becoming a major
stake in their conflicts - the question of double legitimation, far from
receding into the background, necessarily comes to the fore. For it appears in
its most complete form, that of reversion, revealing that knowledge and power
are
simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and
who knows what needs to be decided? In the computer age, the question of
knowledge is now more than ever a question of government.
The reader will already have noticed that in analysing
this problem within the framework set forth I have favoured a certain
procedure: emphasising facts of language and in particular their pragmatic
aspect. To help clarify what follows it would be useful to summarise, however
briefly, what is meant here by the term pragmatic.
A denotative utterance such as "The university is sick," made in
the context of a conversation or an interview, positions its sender (the person
who utters the statement), its addressee (the person who receives it), and its
referent (what the statement deals with) in a specific way: the utterance
places (and exposes) the sender in the position of "knower" (he knows
what the situation is with the university), the addressee is put in the
position of having to give or refuse his assent, and the referent itself is
handled in a way unique to denotatives, as something that demands to be
correctly identified and expressed by the statement that refers to it.
if we consider a declaration such as "The university is open,"
pronounced by a dean or rector at convocation, it is clear that the previous
specifications no longer apply. 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, "performative,"
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 addressee, 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
around: 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.
A different case involves utterances of the type, "Give money to the
university"; these are prescriptions. They can be modulated as orders,
commands, instructions, recommendations, requests, prayers, pleas, etc. Here,
the sender is clearly placed in a position of authority, using the term broadly
(including the authority of a sinner over a god who claims to be merciful):
that is, he expects the addressee to perform the action referred to. The
pragmatics of prescription entail concomitant changes in the posts of addressee
and referent.
Of a different order again is the efficiency of a question, a promise, a
literary description, a narration, etc. I am summarising. Wittgenstein, taking
up the study of language again from scratch, focuses his attention on the
effects of different modes of discourse; he calls the various types of
utterances he identifies along the way (a few of which I have listed) language
games. What he means by this term is that each of the various categories of
utterance can be defined in terms of rules specifying their properties and the
uses to which they can be put - in exactly the same way as the game of chess is
defined by a set of rules determining the properties of each of the pieces, in
other words, the proper way to move them. ,
It is useful to make the following three observations about language games.
The first is that their rules do not carry within themselves their own
legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit ,or not, between
players (which is not to say that the players invent the rules). The second is
that if there are no rules, there is no game, that even an infinitesimal modification
of one rule alters the nature of the game, that a "move" or utterance
that does not satisfy the rules does not belong to the game they define. The
third remark is suggested by what has just been said: every utterance should be
thought of as a "move" in a game.
This last observation brings us to the first principle underlying our
method as a whole: to 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 won at the expense of an adversary -
at least one adversary, and a formidable one: the accepted language, or
connotation.
This idea of an agonistics of language should not make us lose sight of the
second principle, which stands as a complement to it and governs our analysis:
that the observable social bond is composed of language "moves." An
elucidation of this proposition will take us to the heart of the matter at
hand.
If we wish to discuss knowledge in the most highly
developed contemporary society, we must answer the preliminary question of what
methodological representation to apply to that society. Simplifying to the
extreme, it is fair to say that in principle there have been, at least over the
last half-century, two basic representational models for society: either
society forms a functional whole, or it is divided in two. An illustration of
the first model is suggested by Talcott Parsons (at least the postwar Parsons)
and his school, and of the second, by the Marxist current (all of its component
schools, whatever differences they may have, accept both the principle of class
struggle and dialectics as a duality operating within society)."
This methodological split, which defines two major kinds of discourse on
society, has been handed down from the nineteenth century. The idea that society
forms an organic whole, in the absence of which it ceases to be a society (and
sociology ceases to have an object of study), dominated the minds of the
founders of the French school. Added detail was supplied by functionalism; it
took yet another turn in the 1950s with Parsons's conception of society as a
self-regulating system. The theoretical and even material model is no longer
the living organism; it is provided by cybernetics, which, during and after the
Second World War, expanded the model's applications.
In Parsons's work, the principle behind the system is still, if I may say
so, optimistic: it corresponds to the stabilisation of the growth economies and
societies of abundance under the aegis of a moderate welfare state. In the work
of contemporary German theorists, systemtheorie is technocratic, even
cynical, not to mention despairing: the harmony between the needs and hopes of
individuals or groups and the functions guaranteed by the system is now only a
secondary component of its functioning. The true goal of the system, the reason
it programs itself like a computer, is the optimisation of the global
relationship between input and output, in other words, performativity. Even
when its rules are in the process of changing and innovations are occurring,
even when its dysfunctions (such as strikes, crises, unemployment, or political
revolutions) inspire hope and lead to belief in an alternative, even then what
is actually taking place is only an internal readjustment, and its result can
be no more than an increase in the system's "viability." The only
alternative to this kind of performance improvement is entropy, or decline.
Here again, while avoiding the simplifications inherent in a sociology of
social theory, it is difficult to deny at least a parallel between this
"hard" technocratic version of society and the ascetic effort that
was demanded (the fact that it was done in name of "advanced
liberalism" is beside the point) of the most highly developed industrial
societies in order to make them competitive - and thus optimise their
"irrationality" - within the framework of the resumption of economic
world war in the 1960s.
Even taking into account the massive displacement intervening between the
thought of a man like Comte and the thought of Luhmann, we can discern a common
conception of the social: society is a unified totality, a "unicity."
Parsons formulates this clearly: "The most essential condition of
successful dynamic analysis is a continual and .systematic reference of every
problem to the state of the system as a whole .... A process or set of
conditions either 'contributes' to the maintenance (or development) of the
system or it is 'dysfunctional' in that it detracts from the integration,
effectiveness, etc., of the ,system." The "technocrats" also
subscribe to this idea. Whence its credibility: it has the means to become a
reality, and that is all the proof it needs. This is what Horkheimer called the
"paranoia" of reason.
But this realism of systemic self-regulation, and this perfectly sealed
circle of facts and interpretations, can be judged paranoid only if one has, or
claims to have, at one's disposal a viewpoint that is in principle immune from
their allure. This is the function of the principle of class struggle in
theories of society based on the work of Marx.
"Traditional" theory is always in danger of being incorporated
into the programming of the social whole as a simple tool for the optimisation
of its performance; this is because its desire for a unitary and totalising
truth lends itself to the unitary and totalising practice of the system's
managers. "Critical" theory, based on a principle of dualism and wary
of syntheses and reconciliations, should be in a position to avoid this fate.
What guides Marxism, then, is a different model of society, and a different
conception of the function of the knowledge that can be produced by society and
acquired from it. This model was born of the struggles accompanying the process
of capitalism's encroachment upon traditional civil societies. There is
insufficient space here to chart the vicissitudes of these struggles, which
fill more than a century of social, political, and ideological history. We will
have to content ourselves with a glance at the balance sheet, which is possible
for us to tally today now that their fate is known: in countries with liberal
or advanced liberal management, the struggles and their instruments have been
transformed into regulators of the system; in communist countries, the
totalising model and its totalitarian effect have made a comeback in the name
of Marxism itself, and the struggles in question have simply been deprived of
the right to exist.' Everywhere, the Critique of political economy (the
subtitle of Marx's Capital) and its correlate, the critique of alienated
society, are used in one way or another as aids in programming the system.
Of course, certain minorities, such as the Frankfurt School or the group Socialisme
ou barbarie, preserved and refined the critical model in opposition to this
process. But the social foundation of the principle of division, or class
struggle, was blurred to the point of losing all of its radicality; we cannot
conceal the fact that the critical model in the end lost its theoretical
standing and was reduced to the status of a "utopia" or
"hope," a token protest raised in the name of man or reason or
creativity, or again of some social category such as the Third World or the
students - on which is conferred in extremes the henceforth improbable function
of critical subject.
The sole purpose of this schematic (or skeletal) reminder has been to
specify the problematic in which I intend to frame the question of knowledge in
advanced industrial societies. For it is impossible to know what the state of
knowledge is - in other words, the problems its development and distribution
are facing today - without knowing something of the society within which it is
situated. And today more than ever, knowing about that society involves first
of all choosing what approach the inquiry will take, and that necessarily means
choosing how society can answer. One can decide that the principal role of
knowledge is as an indispensable element in the functioning of society, and act
in accordance with that decision, only if one has already decided that society
is a giant machine.
Conversely, one can count on its critical function, and orient its
development and distribution in that direction, only after it has been decided
that society does not form an integrated whole, but remains haunted by a
principle of oppositions The alternative seems clear: it is a choice between
the homogeneity and the intrinsic duality of the social, between functional and
critical knowledge. But the decision seems difficult, or arbitrary.
It is tempting to avoid the decision altogether by distinguishing two kinds
of knowledge. one, the positivist kind, would be directly applicable to
technologies bearing on men and materials, and would lend itself to operating
as an indispensable productive force within the system. The other the critical,
reflexive, or hermeneutic kind by reflecting directly or indirectly on values
or alms, would resist any such "recuperation."
I find this partition solution unacceptable. I suggest
that the alternative it attempts to resolve, but only reproduces, is no longer
relevant for the societies with which we are concerned and that the solution
itself is stilt caught within a type of oppositional thinking that is out of
step with the most vital modes of postmodern knowledge. As I have already said,
economic "redeployment" in the current phase of capitalism, aided by
a shift in techniques and technology, goes hand in hand with a change in the
function of the State: the image of society this syndrome suggests necessitates
a serious revision of the alternate approaches considered. For brevity's sake,
suffice it to say that functions of regulation, and therefore of reproduction,
are being and will be further withdrawn from administrators and entrusted to machines.
Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the
information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right
decisions are made. 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. Even now it is no longer composed of the traditional
political class, but of a composite layer of corporate leaders, high-level
administrators, and the heads of the major professional, labor, political, and
religious organisations.
What is new in all of this is that the old poles of attraction represented
by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions
are losing their attraction. And it does not look as though they wilt be
replaced, at least not on their former scale, The Trilateral Commission is not
a popular pole of attraction. "Identifying" with the great names, the
heroes of contemporary history, is becoming more and more difficult. Dedicating
oneself to "catching up with Germany," the life goal the French
president [Giscard d'Estaing at the time this book was published in France]
seems to be offering his countrymen, is not exactly exciting. But then again,
it is not exactly a life goal. It depends on each individual's industriousness.
Each individual is referred to himself. And each of us knows that our self does
not amount to much.
This breaking up of the grand Narratives (discussed below, sections 9 and
10) leads to what some authors analyse 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.
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. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at
"nodal points" of specific communication circuits, however tiny these
may be. Or better: one is always located at a post through which various kinds
of messages pass. No one, not even the least privileged among us, is ever entirely
powerless over the messages that traverse and position him at the post of
sender, addressee, or referent. One's mobility in relation to these language
game effects (language games, of course, are what this is all about) is
tolerable, at least within certain limits (and the limits are vague); it is
even solicited by regulatory mechanisms, and in particular by the
self-adjustments the system undertakes in order to improve its performance. It
may even be said that the system can and must encourage such movement to the
extent that it combats its own entropy, the novelty of an unexpected
"move," with its correlative displacement of a partner or group of
partners, can supply the system with that increased performativity it forever
demands and consumes.
It should now be clear from which perspective I chose language games as my
general methodological approach. I am not claiming that the entirety of
social relations is of this nature - that will remain an open question. But
there is no need to resort to some fiction of social origins to establish that
language games are the minimum relation required for society to exist: even
before he is born, if only by virtue of the name he is given, the human child
is already positioned as the referent in the story recounted by those around
him, in relation to which he will inevitably chart his course. Or more simply
still, the question of the social bond, insofar as it is a question, is itself
a language game, the game of inquiry. It immediately positions the person who
asks, as well as the addressee and the referent asked about: it is already the
social bond.
On the other hand, in a society whose communication component is becoming
more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an issue, it is clear that
language assumes a new importance. It would be superficial to reduce its
significance to the traditional alternative between manipulatory speech and the
unilateral transmission of messages on the one hand, and free expression and
dialogue on the other.
A word on this last point. If the problem is described simply in terms of
communication theory, two things are overlooked: first, messages have quite
different forms and effects depending on whether they are, for example,
denotatives, prescriptives, evaluatives, performatives, etc. It is clear that
what is important is not simply the fact that they communicate information.
Reducing them to this function is to adopt an outlook which unduly privileges
the system's own 'Interests and point of view. A cybernetic machine does indeed
run on information, but the goals programmed into it, for example, originate in
prescriptive and evaluative statements it has no way to correct in the course
of its functioning - for example, maximising its own performance, how can one
guarantee that performance maximisation is the best goal for the social system
in every case. In any case the "atoms" forming its matter are
competent to handle statements such as these - and this question in particular.
Second, the 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 arc 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).
What is needed if we are to understand social relations in this manner, on
whatever scale we choose, is not only a theory of communication, but a theory
of games which accepts agonistics as a founding principle. In this context, it
is easy to see that the essential element of newness is not simply
"innovation." Support for this approach can be found in the work of a
number of contemporary sociologists, in addition to linguists and philosophers
of language. This "atomisation" of the social into flexible networks
of language games may seem far removed from the modern reality, which is depicted,
on the contrary, as afflicted with bureaucratic paralysis. The objection will
be made, at least, that the weight of certain institutions imposes limits on
the games, and thus restricts the inventiveness of the players in making their
moves. But I think this can be taken into account without causing any
particular difficulty.
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.
From this point of view, an 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 characterises the
discourse of the particular institution: there arc things that should be said,
and there are ways of saving them. Thus: orders in the army, prayer in church,
denotation in the schools, narration in families, questions in philosophy,
performativity in businesses. Bureaucratisation is the outer limit of this
tendency.
However, this hypothesis about the institution is still too
"unwieldy": its point of departure is an overly "reifying"
view of what is institutionalised. 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 a
cabinet meeting? Advocate a cause in the 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 institution are displaced.
Reciprocally, it can be said that the boundaries only stabilise when they cease
to be stakes in the game.
This, I think, is the appropriate approach to contemporary institutions of
knowledge.
Posmodern
condition,Jean François Lyotard, 1/12/2008,
http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/lyotard_text.htm