PoMo - Tastes Great, Less Filling
In examining Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, I've found it useful to read around the man and his theories a little - partly at the recommendation of Professor Jackson, and partly to give me a better, almost triangulated sense of where to fit these debates. Happily, this has given me three main areas of interest, and questions I would like to pose, beyond the 'game rules' comment in Professor Jackson's earlier post. Responses to any, or all, are keenly anticipated.
Firstly, and to kick off with the central motivation of Lyotard's work - the suspicion of metanarratives. Lyotard says that
'... the price to pay for such an illusion [i.e. the modernist project] is terror. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience...The answer is: Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name' (pp. 81-82)
OK, so, we must break down - transcend, bypass - modernism and its metanarratives in much the same way as we should stay away from crystal meth and running chainsaws - because the're bad for us. Fine point as far as it goes, but it's a normative one, and we have no reason to adhere to normative constrains in the PoMo universe once all the metanarratives are gone. In fact, all we can turn to in such a world are the cold tenets of rational choice or Hobbesian anarchy. But that's neither here nor there as regards my first question, which is: how is the PoMo call to arms not a metanarrative in itself? It admits no counter-argument, it has universal ambitions, and it attacks not the output of competitors but (usually) their assumptions. Its usefulness is thus limited.
Right, moving along.
Sokal and Bricmont, in their Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectual's Abuse of Science (NY: Picador, 1998), have a variety of unkind words for Lyotard: specifically, that his grasp of science is shaky and that his use of physics to prove his gas-density argument amounts to a straw-man. I'm not enough of a physicist to pronounce on this, but one element of Sokal and Bricmont's argument intrigued me. There is the old joke that only a civil engineer could add two and two to get 'between three and five, whatever works'; Sokal and Bricmont point out that many of the so-called 'scientific revolutions' (quantum, chaos, fractals) that Lyotard pays lip service to are only likely to apply at arbitrary scales - the infinitesimally small (intra-atomic, or molecular) or the infinitesmally large (like butterfly wings 'causing' hurricanes). As for the rest of science - the 'human scale', as it were - clunky old Newtonian physics, fluid mechanics, and ke = 1/2mv^2 work just fine. My immediate response was something along the lines of 'and thus too in IR' - in other words, for me at least, the ostensible inability of positivist work to reliably explain events on the political equivalent of the subatomic level still needs to be convincingly problematized, given that the response of its proponents is likely to be 'What? It works fine.' And thus my second question: to what extent is arbitrary moves up and down the scale of examination problematic for the postmodern (or, post-structuralist) critique of mainstream/positivist work?
Lastly, and drawing from Janice Bially Mattern's Ordering International Politics: Identity, Crisis and Representational Force (NY: Routledge, 2005) and specifically her section on Lyotard, we find Lyotard's views harnessed into a conception of the fundamental constitutedness of a real-world event: the Suez crisis. OK, so 'Actors produce language and language produces "reality"' (p. 92) and the purpose of language wielded as a weapon is to compel you to accept the discourse thus presented. To interact is thus to accept the terminology of your opposite (BTW, this is post-constructivism, as Bially Mattern would have it, because straight constructivism has reality jointly constituted). This opens the field to Lyotard's concept of the differand, because if you don't accept this constitution, you begin to fight from your respective islands. Now: can Bially Mattern's theory survive the withdrawal of this concept, though? If you disregard (as I do) the idea that contestations of narrated reality create the interactive environment rather than simply articulate concrete elements of it, how would she go about convincing you? And thus my third question: where is the main 'body' of the postmodern movement? Scientism, like it or not, is like the mythical hydra in that other heads (routes of inquiry) are always on call to strike at tricky problems (refer back to my cholera example from two weeks ago). But pomo theorists, divorced from meta-truths, cannot do any more than name-check their predecessors in a vague enough manner that hoaxsters like Sokal are easily admitted. Roadblocks become dead ends. Is this an affiliation worth nailing one's colors to the mast of?
And that's my post. As an after-dinner mint, consider this quotation from Stephen Weinberg's excellent review of the Sokal Hoax in the New York Review of Books (Aug 8, 1996):
If we think that scientific laws are flexible enough to be affected by the social setting of their discovery, then some may be tempted to press scientists to discover laws that are more proletarian or feminine or American or religious or Aryan or whatever else it is they want. This is a dangerous path, and more is at stake in the controversy over it than just the health of science. As I mentioned earlier, our civilization has been powerfully affected by the discovery that nature is strictly governed by impersonal laws. As an example I like to quote the remark of Hugh Trevor-Roper that one of the early effects of this discovery was to reduce the enthusiasm for burning witches. We will need to confirm and strengthen the vision of a rationally understandable world if we are to protect ourselves from the irrational tendencies that still beset humanity.
Firstly, and to kick off with the central motivation of Lyotard's work - the suspicion of metanarratives. Lyotard says that
'... the price to pay for such an illusion [i.e. the modernist project] is terror. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience...The answer is: Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name' (pp. 81-82)
OK, so, we must break down - transcend, bypass - modernism and its metanarratives in much the same way as we should stay away from crystal meth and running chainsaws - because the're bad for us. Fine point as far as it goes, but it's a normative one, and we have no reason to adhere to normative constrains in the PoMo universe once all the metanarratives are gone. In fact, all we can turn to in such a world are the cold tenets of rational choice or Hobbesian anarchy. But that's neither here nor there as regards my first question, which is: how is the PoMo call to arms not a metanarrative in itself? It admits no counter-argument, it has universal ambitions, and it attacks not the output of competitors but (usually) their assumptions. Its usefulness is thus limited.
Right, moving along.
Sokal and Bricmont, in their Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectual's Abuse of Science (NY: Picador, 1998), have a variety of unkind words for Lyotard: specifically, that his grasp of science is shaky and that his use of physics to prove his gas-density argument amounts to a straw-man. I'm not enough of a physicist to pronounce on this, but one element of Sokal and Bricmont's argument intrigued me. There is the old joke that only a civil engineer could add two and two to get 'between three and five, whatever works'; Sokal and Bricmont point out that many of the so-called 'scientific revolutions' (quantum, chaos, fractals) that Lyotard pays lip service to are only likely to apply at arbitrary scales - the infinitesimally small (intra-atomic, or molecular) or the infinitesmally large (like butterfly wings 'causing' hurricanes). As for the rest of science - the 'human scale', as it were - clunky old Newtonian physics, fluid mechanics, and ke = 1/2mv^2 work just fine. My immediate response was something along the lines of 'and thus too in IR' - in other words, for me at least, the ostensible inability of positivist work to reliably explain events on the political equivalent of the subatomic level still needs to be convincingly problematized, given that the response of its proponents is likely to be 'What? It works fine.' And thus my second question: to what extent is arbitrary moves up and down the scale of examination problematic for the postmodern (or, post-structuralist) critique of mainstream/positivist work?
Lastly, and drawing from Janice Bially Mattern's Ordering International Politics: Identity, Crisis and Representational Force (NY: Routledge, 2005) and specifically her section on Lyotard, we find Lyotard's views harnessed into a conception of the fundamental constitutedness of a real-world event: the Suez crisis. OK, so 'Actors produce language and language produces "reality"' (p. 92) and the purpose of language wielded as a weapon is to compel you to accept the discourse thus presented. To interact is thus to accept the terminology of your opposite (BTW, this is post-constructivism, as Bially Mattern would have it, because straight constructivism has reality jointly constituted). This opens the field to Lyotard's concept of the differand, because if you don't accept this constitution, you begin to fight from your respective islands. Now: can Bially Mattern's theory survive the withdrawal of this concept, though? If you disregard (as I do) the idea that contestations of narrated reality create the interactive environment rather than simply articulate concrete elements of it, how would she go about convincing you? And thus my third question: where is the main 'body' of the postmodern movement? Scientism, like it or not, is like the mythical hydra in that other heads (routes of inquiry) are always on call to strike at tricky problems (refer back to my cholera example from two weeks ago). But pomo theorists, divorced from meta-truths, cannot do any more than name-check their predecessors in a vague enough manner that hoaxsters like Sokal are easily admitted. Roadblocks become dead ends. Is this an affiliation worth nailing one's colors to the mast of?
And that's my post. As an after-dinner mint, consider this quotation from Stephen Weinberg's excellent review of the Sokal Hoax in the New York Review of Books (Aug 8, 1996):
If we think that scientific laws are flexible enough to be affected by the social setting of their discovery, then some may be tempted to press scientists to discover laws that are more proletarian or feminine or American or religious or Aryan or whatever else it is they want. This is a dangerous path, and more is at stake in the controversy over it than just the health of science. As I mentioned earlier, our civilization has been powerfully affected by the discovery that nature is strictly governed by impersonal laws. As an example I like to quote the remark of Hugh Trevor-Roper that one of the early effects of this discovery was to reduce the enthusiasm for burning witches. We will need to confirm and strengthen the vision of a rationally understandable world if we are to protect ourselves from the irrational tendencies that still beset humanity.
posted by Pyrautomata at 12:23 AM
1 Comments:
First let me say that Dylan has done us a great service by being highly critical and reflective of the premises that lurk beneath the surface of many of Lyotard’s otherwise persuasive points. This is by far one of the most (if not the most) insightful and rich posts we have had yet in our technological nether-world (blackboard, blog) this year. Thank you birthday boy!
I will address the second question of scalability. First, much of the critique offered by Lyotard derives from the assumption of ‘language games’ and the fixing of boundaries, rules, and outcomes by participants.
Part of Wendt’s recent talk has utility (oh, did I use that evil word, shame on me) here. The wave/particle distinction and transition between the two would seem to offer a metaphor of the shift along Dylan’s hypothesized scale. Yes, at the macro-level the question is one of system change and dynamics, can butterfly wings cause hurricanes, angry Bosnians world wars, reborn Christians neo-imperialist adventures, etc. I am still drawn in the direction that even at the macro level there is a need for a discussion of system structure, the configuration of power/identity that enables (just as Waltz’s third image) local events to spiral, agency to haunt structure. This permissive condition can be framed as a language game and/or meta-narrative or it can be framed in terms of power relations. There is scalability in analysis (horizontal axis with poles: material and ideational) alongside a vertical axis (with poles: macro to micro). One can look at meaning constituted by a language game at a micro-level, say an organizational subculture. One can also look at the how the directions of global economic flows interacts with anti-globalization rhetoric or the actual direct violence of resistance (not as performative utterance, but an organized resistance polity), either as a language-game constituting meaning or in terms of political economy. Is it better to study the meta-narratives of anti-colonialism used by Mugabe to legitimate authoritarian rule or to study the institutional array of power he has mobilized to stiffle opposition? Both are valid and hence there is a division of labor in the field.
This leads me back to Dylan’s first question: there is a problem with the scale to the extent that post-modernism positions itself (implicitly) as a meta-narrative. It is a meta-narrative to say there is no meta-narrative; a story is still a story even if its plot is the rejection of the existence of unitary stories and its hero (or more aptly put anti-hero) is a non-existent petty being that only emerges in language (preferably slander of the anti-homonium variety). As much as Lyotard offers a scathing critique of the meta-narrative of modernity in the appendix, he builds an exit ramp in the foreword. For Lyotard, there is almost an infinite number of language games (language as an ancient city) which in turn give rise to institutions in patches, i.e. condition local determinism vs. universal determinism (p.xxiv). This is a balanced compromise. If we can conceive of systems of meaning, or the interaction of material and ideational components of a system as radically open, indeterminate (no universal condition other than, possibly, the search for dominion and power), it is still possible to speak of emergent local orders, determinism fixed within a context – the ‘objective possibility’ of a set of potential outcomes and their causal sources (as processes).
Last a note on power-language game interaction. Part of Lyotard’s Marxist past surfaces in the connection of power to these language games and the concept of power reproduction/knowledge reproduction in capitalism. This is the area where the post-modern argument becomes engaging at least for a grumpy old 19th century aspiring liberal elite with a materialist (read historical realist) bent like myself. Where post-modernism has traction and analytical value for my own research is where it engages the distribution and constitution of power – where it becomes a naked man in a public cafeteria questioning the legitimacy, use-value and truth of ‘clothes’ is when it seeks to radically delink this discussion of language-games and narratives from the material consequences (not necessarily source) of power.
12:13 PM
Post a Comment
<< Home