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Lyotard,
Jean-Francois. (1993).
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (Translation from the
French by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi) Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press. Chapter
1. The
Field: Knowledge
in Computerised Societies
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. Chapter 2 The
Problem Legitimation 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. Chapter
3. The
Method: Language Games 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. Chapter
4. The
Nature of the Social Bond. The Modern Alternative 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."
Chapter 5 The
Nature of the Social Bond: The Postmodern Perspective 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.
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