File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9812, message 55


Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1998 17:22:29 -0800
Subject: Re: Paradigms Lost


Eric Salstrand wrote:

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As a reader of "pop" science, and most recently of the little critter 
on whom 10 years was spent mapping its genome, I suggest that "dark"
matter, genetics, science of "chaos", artificial life (in computers)
discovery of a "magentar" which disrupted satellite communications,
and long-established quantum physics, all contribute to scientific 
uncertainties.  

Other items such as gobal heating, pollution, nuclear and
bio-weapons of mass destruction, the great view of cometary fragmenta
causing craters on Jupiter the size of Earth, cause a bit of uneasiness.

Hugh 

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> 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?


   

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