File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9706, message 117


Date: Thu, 12 Jun 1997 09:25:20 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Shawn P. Wilbur" <swilbur-AT-wcnet.org>
Subject: Re: Lyotard & Derrida


Lois says:

> This kind of question is one that Lyotard deals with specifically in, for
> example, Just Gaming.  Supposedly Lyotard's "ethics" is based on honoring
> the multiplicity of metanarratives, and our willingness to make judgments
> without criteria.  The question is, can one have an ethics and be
> incredulous of metanarratives?  Or is this an abuse of the term
> "ethics?"  Moreover, do we want to honor decisions made without criteria
> by labeling them "judgements"?  Why not just baseless decisions?  Or
> decisions made without ethical grounds?

And here is the point of contention, methinks: what would these "ethical 
grounds" consist of? How grounded can one be and remain in the realm of 
the ethical (as opposed to within some technology of correct living.) 

Isn't all of the search for rational, consensual systems precisely a 
search for spaces in which values would be given - and thus where ethics 
can be essentially evaded?

Is it possible to have ethics *without* incredulity to metanarratives?

> I think Lyotard's system makes less sense as an ethic than as a utopian
> vision.  He would like to see a world which is as he describes, but he is
> caught.  He cannot obligate us to share his vision because then he is
> denying the voice of those who would disagree with him.

Here again, i think, a desire for innocence, for a space in which we 
would not be implicated. Surely, tolerance is a partisan position. 
(Didn't (at least) Marcuse make that clear enough?) 

What would it mean to be "uncaught"? And does Lyotard, who, it seems to 
me, is very aware of his own implication, hold out any sort of 
"uncaughtness" as a possibility? Or is Lyotard's ethics finally related 
to Derrida's "politics of memory," a "system" by which one consciously 
shakes one's own ground? Perhaps this itself seems "impossible" or at 
least immediately impracticable - and perhaps there is a sort of 
"conscious utopianism" (a willingness to "ground" oneself in that 
"nowhere") in that, but it would certainly be far from the utopianism of, 
say, the "utopian socialists," for whom ethics were precisely something 
to be grounded in a system.

-shawn

   

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