Subject: Re: Paradigms Lost
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1998 10:54:41 -0600



Don Smith wrote:

Given what Lyotard has to say in section 13, “Postmodern Science as the
Search
for Instabilities”, it sees that he might be counted among those who believe
science has found a new paradigm. Consider the following quote from the end
of
the section in which he has just provided several examples of postmodern
research:

“ The conclusion we can draw from this research (and much more not mentioned
here) is that the continuous differentiable function is losing its
preeminence
as a paradigm of knowledge and prediction. Postmodern science - by
concerning
itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control,
conflicts characterized by incomplete information ‘fracta,’ catastaphies and
pragmatic paradoxes -is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous,
catastrophic, norectifiable and paradoxical.”

We pop-Kuhnians believe that the paradigm shift in science, which Lyotard
describes, helps undermine the metanarratives of determinism and ‘science as
truth’ which is part of the hegemony that spreads ‘terror’, to use Lyotard’s
term.


Thanks, Don

When I questioned the theory of paradigms, the argument was principally
aimed at those who use it in a reductive manner to see science as a social
construction and nothing but.  Neither Kuhn nor Lyotard use the term
paradigm in this manner, so possibly I am simply chasing a pomo straw man,
but nonetheless I persist in seeing science as more than social
construction.  Its unique characteristics include an accumulation capable of
absorbing revolutionary changes (paradigm shifts) in a way that goes way
beyond relativistic social fashions and its own rate of change continues to
expand exponentially.  In a word, this is not a paradigm.  It is a monster.

What describes this image of science best is not paradigm theory, in my
opinion.  Science/technology has now become nothing less than a
hyper-organism,  a machinic assemblage in a whirl of positive feedback that
sets its own agenda and establishes it own priorities.  We humans are simply
along for the ride.

What you quote above from PMC could perhaps be described as a paradigm
shift.  It is also the main basis in the text for what Lyotard describes as
the possibility as legitimation by paralogy.  Is it possible that this
nightmarish state of legitimation by performativity that we now must endure
is only a case of what McCluhan once described as "the original content of a
new technology is always that of the old"?

Is it possible that we nomadic cyborgs may link ourselves to these
newfangled molar assemblages of machinic desire and ride the wave out into a
new invisible future, or have I simply been drinking too much coffee while
looking at Wired magazine this morning?