Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 10:51:44 -0800
From: hugh bone <hughbone-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: legitimation


Vadim Verenits wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 11 Dec 1998, Ed Atkeson wrote:
> 
> > mark:
> > >>> 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.
> > ------------
> > I follow your explanation I think. thanks for the words. And thanks to
> > Lois for her page and all, this is all pretty hard for me but
> > interesting, I read the Hatcher paper, but then couldn't find the
> > rebuttal when I went back, I learned to work with the vocabulary a bit
> > better anyway.
> >
> > In the quote above, do you mean performativity in the sense of peak
> > performance of western society?
> Why do you call it "peak performance of WS"? Performativity in Lyotard`s
> context has not chare anything common with performance ; except its
> grammatical meaning.
>  Where the performance of the system is
> > steered by everyone who is figuring the angles
> Is the figuration of angles quit the same with "definition of field
> research", "drawning of the access to the territory of legitime science"?
> 
>  to gather resources --:
> 
> > industry looking for profits,
> institutions looking for grants
> scientists looking for jobs --
>  An almost darvinistic point of view  , fight for resources, survival of
> the fittest.
>  In other words a kind of bottom-line
> > system?   Is this the overarching -- narrative -- determining the
> > prescriptives of the scientific game?
> > Thanks,
> > Ed  Atkeson
-AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT-

Well, Webster gives one meaning of legitimation as the process by
which a bastard can acquire the same status before the law as  
a non-bastard.

After our ancestors climbed down from the trees they used gods and 
myths to legitimize whatever they were going to do regardless.

This hasn't changed.

Science is our most powerful myth excepting only money.

Even with 6 billion souls to please, there is plenty of religion for
everyone, and there's money in it, just as there's money in poverty
for politicians and other bureaucrats.

But I think Lyotard was looking for legitimation of science in the 
history of philosophy, following the usual suspects, Plato, Kant,
Wittgenstein, whom he studied assiduosly and quoted copiously in
"Le Differend".

Ultimately, he seemed to be interested in the social bond and justice,
and how humans use language or language uses them in the pursuit of
such interests.

Paralogy seems to have been a name for an attempt to get out of the
rut of narratives, traditions, practice that do not fit the postmodern
condition.

Hugh