From: "Eric  Salstrand" <eric_and_mary-AT-email.msn.com>
Subject: Chapter 5: The Nature of the Social Bond: The Postmodern Perspective
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 1998 08:25:23 -0600


Lyotard finds the partition solution between positivist knowledge and
hermeneutic knowledge to be unacceptable.  It is a type of oppositional
thinking that is out of step with the most vital mode of postmodern
knowledge.

1) The functions of regulation and reproduction are being withdrawn from
administrators and entrusted to machines.
2) Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to
the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the
right decisions are made.
3) The old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties,
professions, institutions and historical traditions are losing their
attraction.

The Post-Modern Shift:

1) Each self exists in a fabric of relations that is now more mobile than
ever before…located at “nodal points” of specific communication circuits,
however tiny these may be.
2) The system can and must encourage such movement (language games and
self-adjustments of the system in order to improve its performance) to the
extent that its combats its own entropy; the novelty of an unexpected
move…can supply the system with that increased performativity it forever
demands and consumes
3) There is no need to resort to some fiction of social origins to
establish that language games are the minimum relation required for society
to exist.  The question of the social bond, insofar as it is in question, is
itself a language game, the game of inquiry.
4) The human child is already positioned as the referent in the story
recounted by those around him.  It immediately positions the person who
asks, as well as the addressee and the referent asked about: it already is
the social bond.

Critique of Communication and Cybernetic Theory

These theories are often used as the paradigm to describe the change to the
postmodern. They are problematic, however, for several reasons:

1) Considering messages only as the communication of information overlooks
the various types of language games – denotatives, descriptives,
evaluatives, performatives etc.
2) The trivial cybernetic version of information theory misses the agonistic
aspect of society.

What is needed if we are to understand social relations in this manner … is
not only a theory of communication, but a theory of games which accepts
agonistics as a founding principle.

Everyone knows that a countermove which is merely reactional is not a good
move.  Reactional countermoves are no more that programmed effects in the
opponent’s strategy; they play into his hands and thus have no effect on the
balance of power. That is why it is important to increase displacement in
the games, and even to disorient it, in such a way as to make an unexpected
move (a new statement).

Some have argued that bureaucratization tends to limit the scope of language
games. However, these limits are never imposed once and for all. Rather, the
limits are themselves the stakes and provisional results within the
institution and without.  The war is not without rules, but the rules
encourage the greatest possible flexibility of utterance.