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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