File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9812, message 53


From: "Eric  Salstrand" <eric_and_mary-AT-email.msn.com>
Subject: Re: legitimation
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1998 10:15:06 -0600


Mark wrote:

>I want to keep coming back to legitimation and its place within language
>games, since Lyotard sets out on a very specific heading in PMC. Within a
>domain of language games, legitimation would be a kind of presupposition
>of how to play a given game--what moves are permissible. In re: science,
>Lyotard takes this point up in section 7, pp 23-24. On p. 24 there's a
>particularly interesting passage that addresses legitimation and language
>games. He's discussing the somewhat recursive relation between statement
>and referent in scientific knowledge:
>
Thanks, Mark.  You make excellent points and raise some important questions.
I agree that legitimation is central to the PMC and would like to see
further discussion of this topic.  One issue in particular that I would like
to discuss is this.  In the PMC, Lyotard talks about two possible modes of
legitimation in the postmodern context.  One of these is legitimation by
performativity (power) which nows seems very familiar to all of us, even
though it merits further discussion for that very reason.

The other mode is legitimation by paralogy, about which, alas, Lyotard's
remarks are all too brief.  Unfortunately in his later work he proceeds to
follow other tangents and the issue of legitimation by paralogy is never
really explored in detail.  I believe this remains an open topic capable of
new development today.  What would be characteristic of a politics that
respects both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown?  I
would welcome a discussion that talks in greater detail about these
postmodern possibilities. It is not altogether clear to me what Lyotard
means here. Can we flesh out his suggestions?


>So you make a statement about the world and try to put it into play
>within the langauage game of science. As the addressee of your statement,
>and thereby legislator (given the quirks of the denotative language game
>that science subsumes) I can respond:
>
> a) the statement meets criteria as legitimate move. I accept it
>    as scientific.
> b) the statement breaks the rules. I reject it as "unscientific"
> c) the statement makes a "new move": no rules are broken, but it
>    sets up an agonistic relation with existing moves. I accept it (and
>    if I am buying into Kuhn, I would deem it revolutionary)
>
I would only suggest that we expand point c as follows:

On page 43 of the PMC, Lytotard writes:

"there are two kinds of progress in scientific knowledge:

c)  one corresponds to a new move (a new argument) within the established
rules;

d) the other, to the invention of new rules, in other words; a change to a
new game"

Anyone care to furnish examples that illustrate the difference between c and
d?


>Note that "true" has no place in this approach, although science claims
>the authority to map the real/true as its referent.
>
>What Lyotard tracks in this book is the emergence of performativity as
>the dominant prescriptive. To make a move in this game becomes about
>communication, efficiency, context control.


What are the chief characteristics of legitimation by paralogy?




   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005