File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0206, message 28


From: steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com
Date: Wed, 05 Jun 2002 20:58:57 +0100
Subject: Re: Paradox, Protagoras


Eric

I appreciate the argument that you are making for the understanding of the
text through Lyotard's concept of 'metanarratives' however it's not clear
that you can argue for the 'premature foreclosure upon the possibilities of
history' as straightforwardly as you appear to be doing. A number of
questions immediately need to be asked - has Lyotard been fair to
understandings of history and historians or is it that Lyotard is only, as I
suspect, addressing a specific and singular 'metanarrative of history' ?

If you substitute the colonial adventures of the late 19th C - I am thinking
of the history of the Indian Sub-continent - for Faurisson's fascist
revisionism it becomes clearer that the 'metanarrative of history' will
never be singular. With the consequence that we need to address the
immediate limit case that does not accept, at least in your reading, that
all history is plural. (For example: Venant, Dumezil and Foucault have all
as historians written of the same periods...  ) In the same way that
Faurisson, Levy, Agamben and Semprun have all written of Auschwitz, in ways
which are mutually exclusive, history in its plurality is conflictual from
this understanding. Can such diverse histories be anything but contested?
places and sites of struggle which cannot in themselves be 'judged'?

Where the issue of the 'infinite series' is raised this appears to be a
pre-relational understanding of time and space, more Newtonian than
post-Einstein - for in the age of Quantum mechanics it's by no means clear
that time is serial, the Arrow of Time appears to be uni-directional but the
physics is currently bi-directional. As a consequence where Lyotard refers
to "the historians's phrase 'will become part...' of the universe to which
it refers..." the metanarratives are not rendered problematic because they
position themselves outside of time (Newtonian physics) but are rendered
problematic because they are within time and history . The historian
understands that the '...phrase is part of its referent, history...'

How then does the '...case where the plantiff is divested of the means to
argue and becomes for that reason a victim...' enter into the discussion?

Is the use of the 'paradigm cases' a deliberate reference to Kuhn's
positivism....?

regards
steve

Eric wrote:

> At first glance the Protagoras Note appears to be something of an
> anomaly.  The open chapter seemed clear enough.  A differend is defined
> as a conflict that cannot be litigated because a common rule of judgment
> is lacking.  Then the reader is suddenly plunged into an abstract
> logical discussion of Russell's theory of types and the Liar Paradox.
> What is going on here?
>
> I think it is possible to interpret this note both in the context of
> Lyotard's stance regarding metanarratives as well as being a kind of
> foreshadowing of the final chapter entitled "The Sign of History".  In
> this first chapter, Lyotard certainly analyzes the differend, but what
> should also be noticed is the extent to which the differend emerges in
> the context of certain dogmatic judgments which refuse to be contained
> within the very history upon which they judge.
>
> The two paradigm cases Lyotard discusses are the historical revisionism
> of Faurisson concerning the Holocaust and the totalitarian standpoint of
> Stalinist communism.  What both of these judgments share in common with
> metanarratives is the basic position they take. It is the illusion of a
> standpoint outside of history able to judge it in totality without being
> judged in turn.  This is what leads to a kind of monopoly on the
> procedures for the determination of what is real.
>
> It is at this point that Lyotard interrupts to consider the paradox of
> Protagoras. Essentially, it turns upon the matter of self-reflexivity.
> If the judgment made by the individual is considered part of the series
> rather than outside of the series (Meta) then the series includes that
> judgment as well; and thus a paradox occurs.
>
> What eludes 'logic' and creates the paradox are time and the process of
> history itself.  The deictic "now' is both the origin of a series
> (before & after) as well as an element within the series.  This leads to
> the recognition that the "now", like the phrase itself, is a matter of
> linkage in an indefinite series and therefore without finality; yet,
> this now can also constitute the beginning of another series and
> therefore signify an event.
>
> One of the common misinterpretations of the metanarrative is that it is
> that it is something merely willful on Lyotard's part, a kind of
> premature foreclosure upon the possibilities of history. In this
> passage, I believe that Lyotard is attempting to show that any attempt
> to formulate a metanarrative of history will end in a kind of paradox of
> the "All Cretans are Liars" variety.  The metanarrative attempts to
> maintain objectivity by embedding its judgment in an exterior process
> called history and thereby forgets that this judgment is actually one
> made by the participant himself.  As Lyotard points out: "The history of
> the world cannot pass a last judgment. It is made out of judged
> judgments."
>
> The physics of moving objects (including phrases) which Lyotard evokes
> (see p. 7) is the attempt to constitute the generalized relativity of a
> universe in which metanarratives, including those of Faurisson and
> Stalin, are thereby rendered problematic. This is so because such
> metanarratives position themselves outside of time (the logic of
> history) rather than linking themselves onto it as a self-reflexive part
> of a continuing series. Rather than take responsibility for its own
> judgment, the metanarrative wants to pawn it off on history itself.
> This is what constitutes the bad faith of Geist.
>
> eric
>
>



   

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