Date: Sun, 08 Nov 1998 21:56:19 -0800
From: Lois Shawver <rathbone-AT-california.com>
Subject: Re: PMC: What is Postmodernism? A Demand


To me, the challenge is not merely to discover the
intended meaning of Lyotard when he used a term like
"paralogy."  The challenge is to find a reading of his
text that makes the most interesting sense of it.

I believe you will make the most sense of his text if you
understand paralogy to be an engaging conversation in
which the contributors do not strive for consensus, but
rather the growth of a culture, or social bond, in which
there can be the cultivation of new ideas, new ways of
thinking, through a reorganization of the old.  Such a
conversation, I believe he tells us,  will not refer to
metanarratives in order to legitimate itself.  It
legitimates itself by its own worth.  Any rules that guide
paralogy negotiated in a local context to assist the local
purpose.  This engaging  paralogy will flourish most in a
context in which information (computer databanks) are
freely available and the moves in the language game are
not controlled by the treat of removal from the game
(i.e., "terror").

I think, for Lyotard, "This 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 interction." (PC,
p.41)  Paralogy is, for example, what we do here in this
forum when it generates new ideas for us.

Whereas research"that takes place under the aegis of a
paradigm tends to stabilize" in order to have new ideas we
must posit a force that destabilizes our beliefs and our
frameworks.  I believe that is paralogy, that paralogy is
the "power that destabilizes the capacity for explanation"
and results in the proposals for new rules that are
locally determined (PC, p.61).  Paralogy defers consensus
(61).  It is the ongoing reorganization of old ideas in
ways that inspire us to think things through in new ways.

"The function of ...paralogical activity...is to point out
these metaprescriptives...and to petition the players to
accept different ones.  The only legitimation that can
make this kind of request admissible is that it will
generate ideas..." (65).

Paralogy is a quest for the postmodern, what we desire.
It always involves the operation of destabilized
conclusions with a variety of perspectives agonistically
expressed (in argument). It is not that paralogy, however,
serves some performative end (such as helping us reach
consensus).  Paralogy is a quest because it is an end in
itself.  Whereas "consensus is only a particular state of
discussion, not its end. It's end, on the contrary, is
paralogy."

See also footnote 207 (postmodern condition) referenced on
p.60 for more on the notion or reorganizing old knowledge.

..Lois Shawver