File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9812, message 41


Date: Sun, 6 Dec 1998 20:42:15 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re:  THE Metanarrative



>Don Smith Replies:
>Why isn't the hegemony that convinces the average person that corporitist
>oppression is in their own best interest considered a metanarrative? Why
>doesn't Lyotard consider the claim that system performance must be the guiding
>principle of a democratic society a metanarrative? He goes to some length
>explaining how it operates. I'm afraid I'm confused as to Lyotard's position
>on perfomativity.
>

I think he portrays it as crass and ultimately based on terror, that it was
an outgrowth of the old metanarratives that it rendered obsolete, and that
it has its own internal contradictions which lead to its self negation:
performativity or system efficiency logic is at odds with new technology it
has generated which privileges unsystematic chaotic and paradoxical
approaches to producing and transmitting knowledge. That's what I'm getting
so far.  I've been puzzled too by the way Lyotard mainly deals with one or
two metanarratives (I guess because he's addressing Habermas, and also
something to do with the time in which he wrote). But I have not taken him
to be ruling out  that the same implications apply to other metanarratives,
certainly not those of science which have been related so explicitly to
performativity (the legitimation narrative that we know it's true because
it works better than the alternative).
Judy








   

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