Utopia or Bust

Posts Tagged ‘Lyotard

Sad, Sad, Sad

Posted by: lettrist on: June 20, 2008

“Man is the only animal that blushes … or needs to.”
–Mark Twain

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) affects 15 million Americans, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Anxiety Disorders as a whole affect 40 million Americans, according to the institute. Drug companies, eager to expand their markets, are now spotlighting the disorder and advertising medications [...]

Lyotard’s Naive Game Theory

Posted by: lettrist on: April 24, 2007

Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition gives us a kind of naïve game theory about micro-narratives. It is not sufficiently developed in his essay, yet it would not be difficult to reconstruct his ideas using microeconomic theory to talk about micro-narrative “fighting” strategies, i.e. micro-narrative communication.
Postmodernity is characterized by the end of meta-narratives and has a [...]

Economic Freedom and "The State" as a Meta-narrative

Posted by: lettrist on: April 24, 2007

Lyotard talks about the ideology of communicational “transparency,” where we are able to see what the economic powers are doing with our information, and which goes hand in hand with the commercialization of knowledge. He argues forcefully that the economic powers will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and “noise.” It [...]

Lyotard on Language Games

Posted by: lettrist on: April 24, 2007

Lyotard claims that we have now lost the ability to believe in meta-narratives, that the legitimating function that grand quests once played in society has lost all credibility. The question then becomes, what now forms the basis of legitimation in society if there is no overarching meta-narrative? For Lyotard, the answer lies in the philosophy [...]

Lyotard’s Justice Within Language Games

Posted by: lettrist on: April 20, 2007

The term ‘language game’ is used to refer to:

Fictional examples of language use that are simpler than our own everyday language.
Simple uses of language with which children are first taught language (training in language).
Specific regions of our language with their own grammars and relations to other language-games.
All of a natural language composed of a family [...]

Why Lyotard Rejects Meta-Narratives

Posted by: lettrist on: April 20, 2007

Of the three most influential postmodernist philosophers, Lyotard is the least popular. He argued that our age (with its postmodern condition) is marked by an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives‘. Some have used the word “sensibility” to refer to the postmodern taste, or distaste for these meta-narratives. Sometimes ‘grand narratives’–are grand, large-scale theories and philosophies of the [...]

Notes on the Postmodern Condition

Posted by: lettrist on: April 19, 2007

Ideas from Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition.

“The ideology of communicational ‘transparency,’ which goes hand in hand with the commercialization of knowledge, will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and ‘noise.’” It is from this point of view that the problem of the relationship between economic and State powers threatens to arise with [...]

Lyotard on Legitimization

Posted by: lettrist on: April 19, 2007

The postmodern condition is the fundamentally different outlook on knowledge that has arisen after the Enlightenment, and particularly since World War II in Western post-industrial, information-based society. In the Report, Lyotard makes a variety of claims and recommendations about how knowledge, particularly computerized knowledge, in the postmodern condition must be legitimated and made accessible in [...]

The Field of Knowledge In Computerized Societies

Posted by: lettrist on: April 19, 2007

The postindustrial and postmodern age we now live in is marked by language-enhancing technologies. Scientific knowledge is also a kind of discourse. And it is fair to say that for the last forty years the “leading” sciences and technologies have had to do with language: phonology and theories of linguistics, problems of communication and cybernetics, [...]

Wikipedia and its Critics

Posted by: lettrist on: October 17, 2006

When Nature Magazine published a study which suggested Wikipedia is far more reliable than is commonly believed, fist-waving librarians were all over the Slashdot scene with their criticisms. The study gave reviewers a blind test to examine a parallel sample of articles from Wikipedia and Britannica, and demonstrated that the average number of errors in [...]