Date: Tue, 03 Jun 1997 15:26:04 -0400
From: mab207-AT-psu.edu (Mark Bower)
Subject: Re: Lyotard's politics


hb writes:

>As a sender of a message we assume the translation will be be
>received, will be understood.
>
>As a receiver of a message we assume what we receive and understand
>is what the sender intended.
>
>But we never "know" the consciousness of another.  Gaps and
>distortions occur in the communications of those couples
>(addressor/addressee) who have the greatest competence.
>
>Like life itself, communication is provisional and temporary, and
>to use a well-worn phrase, "The rest is silence."


I have understood Lyotard's use of the addressor/addressee as a way of
resisting the dominant understanding of communication as exchange
(domination by the economic genre).  It is a way of resisting the notion
that there is an agency that is the originator of phrases by thinking of the
addressor and addressee as instances marked by the phrase.  Though I don't
have the texts at hand, I think this can be found both in the Differend and
in an interview with Lyotard entitled "That Which Resists After All."  

At the same time his idea of an agitated judging without criteria seems to
presuppose this sort of agency.

When I said that TQM was a candidate for a metanarrative I was making a
judgment, though I did supply criteria.  If consensus on these criteria is
impossible,  should I care if I am understood? Or is the point of judging
without criteria for me to discover the rule of what I am already thinking? 


Mark Bower