Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 21:37:46 -0700 (PDT)
From: Lois Shawver <rathbone-AT-crl.com>
Subject: Re: metanarratives and paralogy




Eric,

What a great frame this paragraph you wrote was for creating the frame 
for your last post:

> Let me suggest here that we are playing a language game.  Perhaps we should
> entitle it: "What is happening in Lyotard?"  Aspects of the game include:
> "What is a metanarrative?" and "What is the paralogical?"  The goal of the
> game is to increase our understanding, perhaps even to discover joissance in
> the midst of this discussion.

Isn't this forum amazing?  Who would have known I would find a group of 
cyberbuddies here who would like to think about these big issues with 
me?  The Lyotard list has been quiet for so long, then, suddenly it has 
burst to life. Glad to have all these minds weaving their throughts 
together. 

The question was: What is a metanarrative?  And you answered it very 
paralogically, pulling it into a local discourse, defining it in 
conformity with Lyotard but still tying it to your awareness that you are 
probably giving it your own twist.  Now I want to listen paralogically, 
try to see it your way, and I may, if it seems appropriate, let you know 
if I succeed, or if my own system of thought "demands" that I differ.

You said:

> To answer the question of how I would define metanarrative, my answer is that
> it's basically a story with pretensions to totality.  Pulp fiction
> masquerading as World Literature.  It claims at some level to offer a theory
> for everything under the sun.  It strikes me that any language game has
> genetic tendencies which may move it in this direction, given the right
> circumstances.  Even if the game has a limited scope, those who play it are
> often presume it to have such importance.  The player presume expert status;
> Magister Ludi.

I am following right along with this.  Metnarratives strike me as 
pretensions, too, but we are both revealing our postmodernism here, our 
incredululity.  They are, even in this postmodern epoch, those who 
consider them sacred law.  The modern and postodern exist together.

I am not well read when it comes to fiction, but I do remember Magister 
Ludi, but perhaps it is fresher in your mind.  I recall that Magister 
Ludi was master of a bead game, and the bead game was to arrange beads on 
a form in some appreciated fashion.  I recall that it had the quality of 
an art, but also the quality of chess.  Each person, if I have it right, 
did it alone, but others watched and appreciated it.  Is that the model?

If so, then this might be a model for the petite narrative.  No?  And one 
that individuals take to be highly important.


> Two people may play the same language game together.  Since each of them has
> his or her interpretation of the rules of the game and the meaning of the
> content, a differend will emerge between them within the very structure of
> the game itself.  This differend marks out the space that falls between their
> differing interpretations.
> 

Yes.  In this regard, let me throw in an excerpt from Lyotard:

       The differend is the unstable state and instant of language
       wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases
       cannot yet be. ...A lot of searching must be done to find new
       rules for forming and linking phrases that are able to express
       the differend disclosed by the feeling [that is wordless], 
       unless one wants this differend to be smothered right away
       in a litigation and for the alarm sounded by the feeling to have 
       been useless.  What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy
       in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding 
       idioms for them.
       Lyotard, The Differend, p.13
       bracketed comment mine

So, yes, we might call the differend a kind of wordless space, a feeling 
that has yet to be put in words.

> By exploring this space, each party come to realize the limitations of his or
> her own interpretations: the failure of the proud and pious claim to express
> totality.  Along with this recognition comes a sense of the sublime.  The
> player realizes that what was thought to be knowledge was merely a partial
> explanation which only served to obstruct or hide the fuller reality which
> was always already at hand.
> 

Yes, when we were modern, we thought that someone wise knew the truth, 
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or, at least, that someone 
wise could eventually discover it.  Sometimes we dreamed that we could do 
that, and that even if we could not discover all truths, we could 
discover one pure and unadulterated truth and capture it in language so 
it would no longer be a wordless differend.  In our disillusionment with 
that dream, we postmoderns have come to sense the sublime.  I take the 
sublime to be all that we cannot articulate -- whereas the differend is a 
feeling in the moment that will be snuffed out if we do not enshrine it 
in words.

> This is the place where the paralogical enters.  I agree that there is a
> certain sense in which it can be willed, but it is willed only to the extent
> that we allow the basic process to occur.  Give it the permission to happen.
>  We open the door to let the weirdness it. We never know in advance what
> shape the weirdness will take.  This is what makes the paralogical an event;
> one that can sometimes shatter all our expectations.

I agree with all of that.  Although it strikes me that some people (being 
a therapist) may have skepticism about its possibility and hence not 
foster it, not allow themselves to hope for it.  Perhaps we all have a 
little of that.  We know paralogy does not always happen.

> 
> Thus, the paralogical involves an aspect of suspense or uncertainty.  Unlike
> knowledge, which is something we securely own like money in a wallet, the
> paralogical places us in a position where we must risk transformation, never
> knowing in advance what the process will bring, or where we will be placed
> afterwards.  It is the coin of the dark realm we must pay to the ferryman as
> we enter the hidden stream to be baptized or drown.  Every attempt at the
> paralogical is such a journey into a underworld where the river Lethe gives
> us a partial cure for our metanarratives.  There is no final cure.

Well said!  The paralogical is not something we own as we own knowledge.  
We who choose to allow ourselves to be paralogical always risk 
transformation.  Those that are paralogical with us, give us a gift of 
risking their own transformation.  

And, yes, it is a partical cure for our loss of metanarratives.  As a 
postmodern, I would say, however, that I am no longer nostalgic for 
metanarratives.  Still, I need something there, something to allow me to 
speak, some way to engage other minds.  Is cure the word you want here?  
I find myself resisting that metaphor, wanting something to portray a 
differend that your message brought into my mind.  Are you still with "cure"?


> 
> Here, I must confess, I am now in a place where I no longer know what the
> paralogical is.  I have sacrificed my representations in order to enter the
> sacred grove.  Let a god or goddess touch me and leave an indelible mark upon
> my soul; tattoo my skin with the trace of life; this strange ENERGY which I
> feel, but whose name I shall never know.
> 

Well, I was following you.  Since we are all gods and goddesses in the
realm of the petite narrative, let me return to the differend that you
elicited for me and try to put it into some kind of language.  My
challenge now is "invent allusions to the unpresentable which cannot be
presented (The Postmodern Condition, p.81)" 

The petite narrative is not JUST a cure for our loss of metanarratives. 
The metanarrative, being unbelieveable, is something worth losing. It is 
a spell that was cast on us when we lived in the realm of modernity.  It 
is a substitute.  But not just a substitute, because calling it a 
"substitute" implies it is not as good as the original.  It is a 
replacement.  No, better, the petit narrative is the "conceptual heir" of 
the metanarrative.  It takes the place of the metanarrative and, in the 
minds of postmoderns, is better than metanarratives, for:

   That is what the postmodern world is all about.  Most people 
   have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative.  It in no way 
   follows that they are reduced to barbarity.  What saves them 
   from it is their knowledge that legitimation can only spring
   from their own linguistic practice and communicational interaction.
   (The Postmodern Condition, p.41)

In otherwords, what saves us postmoderns from falling into barbarity in 
when we became incredulous about the authoritarian truths, the 
metanarratives, is that we believe that we can find truth paralogically 
in our petite narratives.  

Does that reading make sense?

..Lois