April 5th: Lyotard's
The Postmodern Condition

Leading Class Discussion

Let's have Lidia come up and lead the class discussion on Lyotard.

After her presentation/discussion, we'll talk a little about the Rhetoric/al Project (due 4/26) before moving on to 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. Also, all of you are pros at this stuff now, so it's easy to draw connections. I screwed up on the moodle prompt, but the posts didn't seem to suffer. We might bring Lyotard's "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?" next week or the week after.

I particularly like Lyotard's contributions to the rhetoric of science (and technology), which we'll discuss a little tonight.

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 WW1 and WW2; 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
• cybernetics: the study of structured systems and networks
• positivism: the theory that science and scientific views reign; one can directly access the natural world through one's senses (or technologica protheses)
• Kant's categorical imperative: an ehtical philosophy that motivates a person's action (or inaction) based on presummed duties (see also deontology)
• positive science: value free or neutral science; how things are in absolute terms
• 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.

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
  • Narrative
  • 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
• Who defines "important" researchurn 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
• My path to teaching
• Insider information on moving through the academy
• Habermas and the "public sphere"

Anything else?

Next Week's Readings

We're not just going to get "real" next week; we're going to get hyperreal. Your three readings are on moodle.

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