File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9812, message 65


Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 20:54:15 EST
Subject: Re:  Re: Paradigms Lost


Don Smith wrote:
We pop-Kuhnians believe that the paradigm shift in science, which Lyotard

> describes, helps undermine the metanarratives of determinism and =91science as

> truth=92 which is part of the hegemony that spreads =91terror=92, to use Lyotard=92s

> term.
Someone replied:

That kind of hegemony does not spread terror ; first simply utilizates

last one.
Don Smith replies:
I thought my use of the word terror might get a response. I used the word as
Lyotard defines it, on page 63, "By terror I mean the efficiency gained by
eliminating, or threatening to eliminate a player from the language game one
shares with him. He is silenced or consents not because he has been refuted,
but because his ability to participate has been threatened."

One might argue that science per se does not utilize this type of "terror" but
as Lyotard wrote earlier in the PMC, pg 46, "The production of proof, which is
in principle only part of an argumentation process designed to win agreement
from the addressees of scientific messages, thus falls under control of
another language game, in which the goal is no longer truth but performativity
- that is, the best possible input/output equation. The state and or company
must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to
justify the new goal: in the discourse of today's financial backers of
research, the only creditable goal is power. Scientists, technicians and
instruments are not purchased to find truth but to augment power."

So, when I accuse science of providing the metanarratives which spread terror
through hegemony, what I mean is that the performative success of science has
legitimized the concepts of empiricism as the mirror of reality, and has
legitimized the concept of means/end rationality as the only way of thinking
to the extent that voices speaking from other places are silenced.

 Does this make sense to anyone but me? 


   

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