File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1996/96-12-19.214, message 76


Date: Tue, 9 Jan 1996 21:50:55 -0800 (PST)
From: Lois Shawver <rathbone-AT-crl.com>
Subject: paralogy




I'm trying to understand the concept of "paraology" from perhaps Derridean
reading.  All quotes below are from "The Postmodern Condition".  It seems
to me that paraology is the social deconstruction of a paradigm that holds
us captive with the purpose of freeing up our imagination to find other
ways of conceptualizing.  Would you agree?  And the purpose of paratology
is not to find a better concept that will imprison us, bewitch us with its
imagery, but to learn to get outside the prison of our paradigm. 

Thus, Lyotard speaks of the "differential or imaginative or paralogical 
activity"...(p.65)  "Paralogy must be distinguished from innovation: the 
latter is under the command of the system...; the former is a 
move...played in the pragmatics of knowledge." (p. 61)  

So then is "innovation" a solution to a problem in normal science, as 
Kuhn might say?  Whereas a parology breaks the paradigm?  Within normal 
science one has "consensus" in the sense that we share a vocabulary for 
defining and interpreting the data.  Breaking out of that vocabulary, 
imagining a new language game that shows us new ways to see (as 
Wittgenstein talks of "seeing as"), is that parology?

"[I] have shown in the analysis of the pragmatics of science, consewnsus 
is only a particular state of discussion, not its end.  Its end, on the 
contrary, is paralogy."(66)

So the purpose, as Lyotard suggests it here, is to create a culture in 
which new paradigms emerge?  This is paraology?  

"Consensus has become an outmoded and suspect value." (p.66)

And a culture in which new rules emerge?

"[There is ]...[a] goal within the [current] system: knowledge of 
language games as such and the decision to assume responsibility for 
their rules and effects.  Their [Language games'] most significant effect 
is precisely what validates the adoption of rules -- the quest for 
parology." (p.66)

In his foreword, Jameson says of this concept:
"Lyotard's ultimate vision of science and knowledge today as a search, 
not for consensus, but very precisely for 'instabilities,' as a practice 
of 'paralogism', in which the point is not to reach agreement but to 
undermine from within the very framework in which the previous 'normal 
science' had been conducted." (xix)

But the purpose is to create a discipline in which this instability is 
exploited?  In which we avoid defining variables in terms of a 
pre-established and accepted paradigm?

"Wittgentein's strength is that he did not opt for the positivism that 
was being developed by the Vienna Circle, but outlined in his 
investigation of language games a kind of legitimation not based on 
performativity.  That is what the postmodern world is all about." (p.41)

He is dreaming of a world in which we are guided in the construction of 
knowledge not by our limited access to "information" but by our ability 
to rethink this information?  to arrange it in new ways?

"Data banks are the Encyclopedia of tomorrow.  They transcend the 
capacity of each of their users.  They are 'nature' for postmodern man.
   It should be noted... that didactics does not consist in the 
tramsmission of information...It is a commplace that what is of utmost 
importance is the capacity to actualize the relevant data for solving a 
problem 'here and now,' and to organize that data into an efficient 
strategy...[I]n games of perfect information, the best performativity 
cannot consist in obtaining additional information...It comes rather from 
arranging the data in a new way...This new arrangement is usually 
achieved by connecting together series of data that were previously held 
to be independent.  This capacity to articulate what used to be separate 
can be called imagination.  ....Given equal competence...what extra 
performativity depends on in the final analysis is 'imagination,' which 
allows one either to make a new move or change the rules of the game.(51-52)"

"Postmodern science...is changing the meaning of the word 'knowledge', 
while expressing how such a change can take place.  It is producing not 
the known, but the unknown.  And it suggests a model of legitimatio that 
has nothing to do with maximized performance, but has as its basis 
difference understood as paralogy." (60)

Why do we want to destabilize the system?  Because that is intrinsically 
good?  Can we control that?  Is that paralogy?

"[C]onsensus is only a particular state of discussion, not its end.  Its 
end on the contrary is parology." (66-67)

Or is that we simply want to break out of the prisonhouse of the paradigm 
we have to legitimate knowledge?  The terror of being confined to create 
knowledge within the power structure?

..Lois Shawver



   

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