Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2003 17:59:13 -0700
From: Judy <jaw-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: a question of quotes - Marx, Lyotard and critique



Lois, all

Lois says
>Judy,
>
>Is this the section of Lyotard that you're talking about?  Where he says:
>
>"Knowledge is and will be produced
>in order to be sold, it is and will
>be consumed in order to be valorized
>in a new production: in both cases,
>the goal is exchange. (Chapter 1, p.4/5 )
>
>Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself,
>it loses its "use-value."


Yes, i was talking about the one you were talking about.


>
>I have read that part of PMC a hundred times.  I have heard people use it as
>evidence that Lyotard has become a capitalist, and I can read it that way.

To me, if anything, it sounds like Lyotard is not approving of this 
state of affairs. It sounds critical to me, a critical take on a 
particular historical condition, one where the critic hopes and scans 
for signs of exceptions.  Another reading.


>But I like to read it more metaphorically, as he uses the war metaphor
>metaphorically when he says, "it represents for Lyotard a new idea (for me
>at any rate) that people speak to sell their ideas in the marketplace of
>ideas.  They are bought in order to be part of their production.


Were you quoting someone here?

It seems in many ways that people don't choose to buy or not buy what 
others say, but that people either already share or don't already 
share the necessary presuppositions to understand and appreciate what 
the other says in the way the other desires.  If what I say 
influences those who come from an incommensurable place, their 
'understanding' of what i say is likely to be one that I will not 
comprehend.  Probably neither of us will be immediately (if ever) 
aware of this slippage.  It would be what you have called 'creative 
distortion,' although that concept might imply a conscious intention 
to distort that I am not embracing.  I don't know if that's something 
you want to say or not.

Also, creative distortion implies, among other things, that there is 
something to distort, as if a meaning is like an object.  This is an 
interesting metaphor to deconstruct, as we have done before.  I think 
it relates nicely to the idea that one owns one's meanings, one takes 
possession of a meaning and makes it one's own, or one produces a 
meaning which can be possessed, or sold.  Or the idea that someone 
uses the meaning of another in a way that is not "their own", as when 
you were referring to not speaking in one's own voice.


>At any rate, I am in the market for buying ideas here, which I will distort
>and put into my own production.
>  I take Lyotard's theory as "useful, in the
>same sense that any sophisticated theory is useful, namely as a generator of
>ideas" (PMC, p.60).
>
>..Lois Shawver



That last comment is Lyotard quoting Anatol Rapoport, an outside the 
box thinker (now in his 90s).   Here's another quotation from 
Rapoport that i just found on the web, a source was not cited:

"...One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as 
living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more 
in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses 
all interest in who will be champion..."

This echoes the main idea of the one book by Rapoport I've read, The 
Big Two: Soviet/American Perceptions of Foreign Policy (1971), that 
the arms race had a logic of never-ending escalation; thus, there was 
no solution to it, the logic of each side reinforced the logic of the 
other side in justifying continuing escalation, as long as one saw it 
in terms of these two groups, "Soviets" and "Americans", so Rapoport 
suggested a different perspective in terms of the relevant groups--he 
said that a solution becomes possible if the salient groups were seen 
as, on the one hand, the Soviet and American policy makers and those 
interests in their respective societies who gained power from the 
arms race, and on the other hand, all the regular people of the US 
and Soviet Union who pay heavily for the arms race, getting nothing 
of value out of it, and being placed in a state of terrifying threat 
in terms of their safety by the actions and agendas of the first 
group.  He called this "the solution of simultaneous equations."  The 
quote about chess could've come from that book.
Judy

HTML VERSION:

Judy,

Is this the section of Lyotard that you're talking about?  Where he says:

"Knowledge is and will be produced
in order to be sold, it is and will
be consumed in order to be valorized
in a new production: in both cases,
the goal is exchange. (Chapter 1, p.4/5 )

Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself,

it loses its "use-value."

I have read that part of PMC a hundred times.  I have heard people use it as
evidence that Lyotard has become a capitalist, and I can read it that way.

But I like to read it more metaphorically, as he uses the war metaphor
metaphorically when he says, "it represents for Lyotard a new idea (for me
at any rate) that people speak to sell their ideas in the marketplace of

ideas.  They are bought in order to be part of their production.

At any rate, I am in the market for buying ideas here, which I will distort

and put into my own production.

 I take Lyotard's theory as "useful, in the

same sense that any sophisticated theory is useful, namely as a generator of
ideas" (PMC, p.60).

..Lois Shawver