Jean-Francois Lyotard: The Post-modern Condition

[Music] so [Music] one of the most important contemporary developments in post-structuralist and post-modern thought is the work of leotard and his book the post-modern condition crystallizes and essentializes some of the main themes in contemporary thought and since leotard himself is still alive his thought is still developing it's interesting to see what sort of take contemporary living thinkers are taking on the way in which post-modernity confronts the tradition of modern science modern politics and modern ethics leotard is what i would describe as an anti-essentialist anti-foundationalist thinker he rejects the idea that there's some fundamental reality that we can disclose through some sort of demythologizing procedure in this case his views are rather similar to those of bart or foucault all these postmoderns are united in what they don't like as opposed to what they do like what they don't approve of as opposed to what they do approve of and post modernism endorses the idea that we can't have totalizing discourses anymore we can't have one unified story which accounts for and legitimizes all our moral and political and scientific claims instead what leotard does this is one of the most interesting moves that he takes he has done a very close and thorough reading of ludwig wittgenstein which is quite remarkable given the kind of sealed off characteristic of 20th century continental philosophy there are only a few that have made the tremendous effort to try and accommodate the anglo-american tradition of first of all scientific realism but second of all the sort of pragmatic alternative to that that develops when positivism breaks down so what leotard does is take certain vikkenshinian ideas specifically the idea of the language game and uses that as his paradigm for knowledge and he uses that because it is the key to his idea of little narratives as opposed to big narratives or grand narratives um the goal of his thinking of his undermining or sabotaging of the modernist tradition of totalizing meta discourses is the liberation of human beings particularly the construction of a politics that would respect the as he puts it the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown certain things to emphasize there first of all the word desire right so our goal is to satisfy certain sorts of desires some desires rather than others particularly our desire for justice although leotard very carefully refrains from telling us exactly what justice is we just know that our politics is directed towards achieving that goal whatever it turns out to be and the second thing that's involved in that is a respect for our desire for the unknown and here the connection between post-modernity and the tradition of romanticism in the west the love of mystery the unknown uncertainty powerful sentiment powerful emotion one might be tempted to say that 20th century culture and certainly post-modern post-world war ii culture is romanticism revisited or a return of romanticism romanticism squared we emphasize heroic individuals performing their own indeterminate tasks with powerful internal activities and with an enormous amount of unrestrained narcissism so for all these reasons i would be inclined to say that this that post-modernity is nothing new oddly enough in fact what it is is a rehearsal and a reconstruction and a refurbishment of certain ideas characteristic of the criticism of the enlightenment which is being used in the same way that the romantics criticize the enlightenment in order to criticize the contemporary status of politics science and ethics so i would be intended inclined to say that postmoderns relate to moderns the way romantics related to the great scientific figures of the enlightenment and that's why they're perpetually in opposition and that's why they're perpetually discontented there was a time long ago when indignation was an emotion now it's a job it turns out then that what this is what this generates is a sort of philosophy of resistance a philosophy of negation and the advantage of this is it allows him to inquire into to interrogate the facts of the world the status quo the world as it is and to recreate that world on the basis of this small narrative interrogation also take note of the use of the word interrogation in post-modern discourse it crops up all the time and it is hardly an unbiased turn of phrase we interrogate criminals we interrogate those suspected of doing some evil post-modernism is not a logically coherent system it is a sort of organized set of emotions it is systematic distrust organized skepticism um systematic suspicion and what does it suspect it suspects all those sites of power in the modern world it distrusts science it distrusts politics it distrusts ethics it distrusts everything except itself right which again would link it back up to that romantic naivete of objecting to everything except romanticism right so there is a little cul-de-sac always pulled out from this domain of critical inquiry where postmoderns can rest among each other and don't end up criticizing or inquiring too hard or interrogating too closely other post-modern discourses the difficulty is is that while post-modernity claims to be a sort of generalized critique of the world in fact it's used by intellectuals for the purposes of intellectuals and i'll try and articulate that uh how that works a little bit later on but let's look at leotard's text the post-modern condition which has its goal the construction of this new politics first thing he wants to do is inquire into the status of knowledge the book itself was written at the behest of the quebec government right so it has connections directly to political life it's authorized by a governmental agency and what happens in his in leotard's deconstruction or his reinterpretation or his interrogation of the post-modern condition is that he finds that our modern paradigm of knowledge has disappeared cutting edge intellectuals can no longer take seriously the legitimizing grand narratives that had held together modern thought and modern science and modern politics and leotard emphasizes the fact that the legitimation of science and the legitimation of the state are always bound up in other words the condition of knowledge and the circumstances and the way in which we legitimize knowledge claims always has reference and connection to the way in which we legitimize political claims particularly claims about political coercion and its legitimacy so what leotard is doing in analyzing language uh knowledge and trying to find out what sort of mechanism what sort of mental activity holds it together he is also suggesting that if nothing holds knowledge and science together we can't legitimize that we are also unable to legitimize at least unable to legitimize in the usual way are political preferences and so this means that we have a vast empty field we have political life we exist as social animals and yet the old ways of legitimizing both knowledge and politics are over and that means that knowledge is indeterminate and uncertain and rather in a coed chaotic state now and so is our notion of political legitimacy so this is what he is what his long-term view is his goal is to talk about politics he's going to talk about politics through the means of an epistemological critique now let's take a look at some examples of modernism and science and politics and art which are characterized by their reference to these metanarratives things that leotard thinks he's gotten beyond for example hegelianism referring back to the career of the geist as organizing all of human history clearly a modern sort of an idea which can no longer be taken seriously along with the geist we're going to chuck out class conflict the marxist perspective the marxist totalizing narrative because that won't fit the bill either the folk right the idea of the various populist and or national socialism are generalizing totalizing meta-narrative which has purely mythic status no one can take that seriously anymore same sort of thing is going to apply to things like performativity which is what leotard calls the ideology or the ideological value structure of modern natural science i'll talk about that in some detail later on and also it's not possible for us to generate a totalizing meta-narrative around the idea of a communicative linguistic ethics and very clearly here he is taking a shot at habermas habermas as you know was the one of the last exponents or one of the final products of the frankfurt school of marxism and what he did was generate a kind of quasi-rationalistic idea that it was possible to reasonably legitimize moral judgment based upon the possibility of a rational consensus about ethics leotard objects to that idea he says first of all that it is not possible to legitimize our moral judgments with any kind of legitimizing meta-narrative so that's gone that's not even worth consideration second of all leotard thinks the idea of consensus is unjust he is opposed to consensus one of the characteristic post-modern moves is to try and systematically generate dissenses the more dissenses we get the more free we are the more we reach consensus the more we are under the secret and hidden constraints of totalizing meta-narratives so he thinks in other words that habermas project of founding an uh moral justice and legitimizing moral and political choices is based upon something that is ultimately totalitarian and modernist in the sense that it is outmoded that is not seriously a possibility for living intellectuals now so what he's saying then is that all of these grand narratives are gone and the question is what are we going to replace them with i mean how now will we go about legitimizing any political activity or any political utterance moral utterance scientific utterance second of all if what we mean by legitimizing something is referring back to a grand narrative and there are no grand narratives possible anymore it means in the earlier sense of legitimacy and legitimation it's just not possible and that raises a whole series of funny questions how is it possible to criticize political life and offer policy alternatives without implicitly making some affirmation in other words there's more than a little double dealing here and the same sort of move that we see with vuco a relentless and very powerful tendency towards negation with a relatively circumscribed and relatively underplayed and soft-pedaled commitment to the idea of affirmative propositions he has not figured out at this time anyway how we will go about affirming and legitimizing affirmative propositions about politics and ethics and things like that i'll go into detail and the problems that are generated here now here's where wittgenstein comes in wittenstein with his idea of language games says that the domain of the social practical use of language doesn't have one architectonic skeleton key that the positivists had longed for which would allow us to discern the truth value of every meaningful utterance just isn't possible instead what we have is an overlapping set of language games a sort of pragmatic interaction between the two where they don't positively line up they don't perfectly coincide and that's just the way the world is there is no skeleton key there is no uh string which leads us out of the labyrinth of language into one determinate system one archetype of what all language does so leotard's idea of little narratives as the alternative to grand narratives is in some ways a recapitulation of wittgenstein's idea of language games and what he's saying then is to is reinforces the wittgensteinian message that there is no essence to language there's just a set of social pragmatics connected to language and what this does is undermine as wittgenstein saw the claim of positivism to be a universal standard a universal litmus test by which we judge meaningful and meaningless communication what leotard does is realize that this idea undermines all such structures and by radicalizing this he ends up with a deeper and more profound set of philosophical problems philosophical skepticisms that wittgenstein ever had within schneid didn't take it nearly so radically nearly so far as leotard himself did all right now let's look at leotard's critical work here in this very short book you'd be surprised that for the amount of ground leotard covers and the amount of new and interesting ideas he generates it's surprising the book is about 100 pages long the post-modern conditions a remarkably transparent and lucid little book for those of you who have not had access to post-modern texts in the past i want to get a start on it i think that leotard is a very accessible start and the book is small it is not overwhelming it's not entirely loaded with neologisms although there are enough of them there and of all the texts on in the post-modern genre the post-modern tendency i would say this is the easiest most accessible and most digestible so i'd recommend to you if you want to start reading this stuff start with that it makes a lot of this stuff make more sense than it would otherwise now within this text let's look at the critiques the criticism that leotard offers of two leading thinkers whom he describes as being modernist and that means outmoded of course only someone who spent a lot of time in the academy would be able to describe modern things as outmoded all right think about it this way the first of these modernist targets is jurgen habermas and critical theory here what is what leotard is criticizing is the is habermas's idea of an ideal speech situation he says look although habermas wants to generate a cognitive linguistic ethics based upon this hypothetical perfect undistorted communication the problem is that that's not even possible in theory much less in practice and what you're really doing here in trying to generate a consensus is enforce a totalitarian stultifying uncreative myth on people who really have no grounds for generating this consensus in other words what leotard is saying is that consensus defies justice and undermines justice and the reason why it undermines justice is because it prevents other alternative discourses other alternative kinds of speech and thought from proliferating and blooming in other words what leotard is objecting to in the discourses of modernity is their totalitarian tendency if you are in possession of the absolute truth or the soul truth or the ultimate glyph of reality which allows you to discern the substantial truth beneath all the appearances well then that means that you should cut no one any slack and you should certainly allow for no alternative perspectives because that can only be mistaken and wrong leotard believes that that has been what's wrong with western culture since the time of plato it has been essentially totalitarian because all totalizing discourses gesture at the necessity of silencing all other discourses so they are what leocard calls terroristic so strangely enough jurgen habermas trying to revive and resuscitate the tradition of western rationalism the dignity of the hu of the human subject as it was traditionally thought of in the west is in fact complicit with the totalitarian polities policies of the modern age leotard wishes to lead us out of that wilderness towards the domain of human freedom towards a domain of real justice and towards a domain of human creativity where new kinds of speech new kinds of talk and new kinds of thinking can be accepted as legitimate will we resist the totalitarian modernist temptation to silence the other to silence the different as leotard describes it and he has a whole set of neologisms and a whole theory behind the discourses of the other it involves something called the different i'll explain that in a little bit but the point here is that we have to have what mouse had let a thou that 100 flowers bloom well leotard wants an infinite number of discourses to bloom and he says that's human felicity because among these discourses are the real intellectual breakthroughs of the intellectual achievements of tomorrow the more you systematically undercut these new and creative discourses the more you are truncating the domain of human freedom and limiting the domain of human possibility so this is a philosophy of resistance it is a philosophy of negation it resists and negates the modernist tendency towards subsuming all of thought under one aegis and the result of this is is that we end up with something like well something analogous to what freud called polymorphous perversity we end up with a polymorphous perversity of discourses some of them are what we might call orthodox science but others of them might be scientifically dubious astrology sociology is a soft science some of them might be things like oh i don't know alternative readings of aesthetic texts some of them perhaps very dubious but then again how can you tell what's dubious and what isn't you can only say that a text or reading or an approach to science or mathematics or any intellectual activity was dubious if you were in possession of the soul and real substantial truth suppose there is no such thing well then we would have good grounds for allowing this profusion of discourses and this would extend the domain of human activity and this is what is actually good for people this is in other words a new telos a new goal for political life our goal is to maximize difference this is the celebration of diversity which you hear so much about nowadays what he's saying is that diversity is an intrinsically good thing and the more of it you have the better it is and any attempt to restrict this to silence someone who is generating an alternative discourse is in fact to terrorize that person it is an unjust and oppressive activity so what he is trying to do is create a special space which legitimizes the discourses of difference which legitimizes alternative ways of looking at the world and this is if you think about it entirely consistent with this perspectival ontology and epistemology if there is no one unifying meta-narrative then the best we can do is have local vitkenshine and language games but as wittgenstein emphasizes and jumps to point out to us you can't use one of these language games as if it were a privileged domain from which to judge all the others they're all on the same level the old platonic and cartesian dream of a hierarchy of knowledge which we allow us to climb jacob's ladder into heaven is over we're not going to heaven we're stuck here on the earth and we're stuck with finitude and contingency and uncertainty and an infinite number of well mutually irreconcilable perspectives in some ways this is homage to nietzsche as well the perspectivalism that's characteristic of nietzsche's outlook of his ontology and epistemology is here in spades all right it's not so much this is new as it's more radical than we've seen before now in addition to criticizing habermas in the idea of a communicative linguistic ethics he also attacks nicholas lumen and nicholas lumen is one of the leading lights of systems theory which is an attempt to talk about the modern world as a large atylogical which is to say cybernetic system so it's derived from the theory of cybernetics but it is applied not just to the domain of computers but to all syst all systemic interactions which could include things like social systems or the system of your body your regula your the various circulatory and respiratory systems the interaction between systems and the formalization of these interactions is what systems theory is all about and what leotard dislikes about lumen and dislikes about systems theory is first of all the idea that it is deterministic right it is a closed system in that sense it is a modernist totalizing meta-narrative and he says first of all there is no such thing that is not intellectually respectable anymore second of all and this is the big point that leotard makes there is a hidden agenda built in to systems theory built into nicholas lumens project and that's the legitimizing of what leotard calls performativity this is a very important idea this guy has thrown around quite a bit nowadays performativity is the value that is built into advanced capitalism what performativity means is maximum output for minimum input in other words it's the ideology of efficiency right and all capitalist undertakings does within this sort of an economic and social system regardless of what people are trying to produce all genuflect towards that value whether you're producing cars or stereos or lectures on philosophy you want to get the most kicked out in the minimum amount of time and that efficiency is understood as being intrinsically rational and intrinsically logical and intrinsically self-justifying and leotard's point is that it's not it's an ideology it's an ideological construct which only can be taken seriously if you're willing to accept that as a totalizing meta-narrative the point is that we have no grounds for doing such a thing and we have good grounds good wittgensteinian grounds for rejecting such a thing so performativity which is the basic fundamental value of advanced capitalist society turns out then to be just another one of those coercive myths right and he's gotten to the bottom of it sort of until we get to the kind of scorpion sting at the end of this let's have a look at this criticism of performativity how are we going to get out from underperformativity should we be irrational in the sense of being inefficient ineffective should we counter performative hard to know what to do well what leotard formulates as the solution to this both scientific and political problem is he says look i have an idea let's give up on the theory of science because that'd be just another one of those totalizing meta-narratives no such thing no such thing as scientific method so he's borrowing a page from if you know the work of fire robin or even a perhaps a less radical formulation thomas kuhn saying look there's nothing is the scientific method there's one paradigm and there's another paradigm but it has no internal logical coherence right it's a set of pragmatic activities which works or doesn't work and gets accepted or doesn't get accepted nothing really holds them together key thing here then is if there is no method to science which holds it together how shall we investigate science and its claims to performativity and the connection between the legitimation of science and legitimation of the modern state and he says i have an idea instead of looking at the theory of science let's look at the practice let's look at what he calls the pragmatics of scientific activity to see the way in which the everyday concrete interaction of society biases science and alters its allegedly objective domain and activities and what he says is something like this he says that science has caught us up with this idea of performativity and the way out of this is to advocate what he calls parology in other words counter logos counter speech counter thought counter ideas or thinking in other words alternative systems of thought for science and for art and for politics and for ethics in this he wants an infinite plurality of perspectival stances none of which can make a an affirmative claim towards being better than any other and he says that performativity locks that idea out it resists that idea and in the process of resisting that it means that it is committed that modern science and the modern state are committed to silencing the different to silencing the other to systematically coercing people who want to create new and creative and alternative views of the world they are no longer able to articulate these views because these views have been delegitimized by a covert ideology which by itself has no sufficient or satisfactory claim towards universality okay so what he wants to do then is to give us a new goal for science that would be one way of thinking about it it used to be that this goal of science was the description of the world mimesis can't do that anymore that's old-fashioned now the goal of science is to manipulate and magnify and increase the number of alternative discourses about the world to give us the maximum kaleidoscopic view of the world so we have this sort of fly's eye view an infinite number of little images none of which are identical none of which can claim to be better than the other this is what perology means and that's what he's looking to do he's looking to create a paralogical science which in which no intellectual activity natural science or art or politics or anything will make any totalizing claims to being able to judge the other alternative discourses what this does is allows us gives us good reason to resist the terroristic modern tendency to silence the other if your goal in science is to generate the maximum diversity of discourses the maximum alternative of perspectives then here we have a new freeing liberating science which can help usher in the next age the next generation by making us open to the possibility that there are other legitimate ways of looking at the world and keeping these self-imposed blinders off are thinking about other alternative discourses in other words this will be the valorization of marginality which is a very important word nowadays it takes discourses that have been ignored and vilified and condemned and marginalized and says they're just as good as any other kind of discourse and what we want then is a pr it's a very democratic sort of a theory in the sense that it wants to say that what opinion is the same thing as knowledge because we have no way of gesturing at any substantial reality which would legitimize our knowledge so then there's just persuasion rather than being convinced because you can only be convinced by certain knowledge substantial reality and there's no such thing so we just have persuasion and some people are persuaded of some things some people are persuaded of others some people are persuaded to look at the world in one way some people have different life experiences different inclinations are persuaded to look at the world in another way but there is no ultimate ur stuff that we can gesture at which would give us good grounds for choosing one over another you can see how he departs radically from habermas here who thinks that the whole point of philosophy is to find some such thing elsewise it ends up being organized chaos now what he's trying to do then and it's an unfinished question in his book on post-modernism he wants to ask the question can perology legitimate politics of resistance in other words can we find a new way of legitimizing our political choices our moral choices and our scientific understanding of the world based upon this goal or idea of perology on this infinite profusion of discourses and perspectives we might want to say that perology that the status of being an outsider to the majority or to the mainstream of discourse is another way of talking about the condition which intellectual sometimes call alienation and if leotard wishes us to pursue parology as an end in itself i think that what he's telling us is that alienation is an intrinsically good state of affairs and that any real intellectual has to be alienated elsewise you're being coerced by the dominant regime of discourse so to be really free is to be constantly negating constantly saying no constantly saying no i don't think so i'm not willing to accept that in other words it means that naysaying negation rejection it means that undermining of established verities and suspicion has now become an end in itself it's not a means towards any substantial reality now it just gives us something to do all right so we really are gesturing in the void gesturing in the dark and at the dark towards god knows what for god knows what reason because there are no reasons to give and here we end up in a position where we're drifting in the direction of bart we're drifting in the direction of talking to ourselves right and not even that because it means that the rules of our language game will change not just from person to person but over time my language games now are very different from my language games when i was five but there's no real improvement i mean i adopted one set of linguistic rules then and i adopted another set now and you can't say that one is better than the other it's just different it is an exceedingly democratic and exceedingly self uh reassuring ideology because it means that everybody's right and that's basically impossible to be mistaken except of course if you're a modernist in which case it is possible although he never exactly explains how or what it would mean to be mistaken or how modernists could possibly be in some condition of misapprehension if post-modernity is right it seems to me that this criticism of totalizing meta discourses loses all explanatory force it's one of the great difficulties that's going to emerge here and i think we should look at our at leotard as being a postmodern gamester because it's a very playful element to this activity of criticizing everything just in the name of criticizing things and just in the name of creating this senses which he thinks is just intrinsically good the more alienated and angry and separate and apart intellectuals are from the dominant mainstream culture and from each other the more individual language games there will be and the more quasi communication or miscommunication or non-communication or whatever it is that goes on now in lieu of communication there will be so instead of going back to one universal paradigm of knowledge which made possible clear communication now we'll go to an infinite plethora of models of knowledge which leaves the status of communication in great doubt there's a whole series of problems connected with leotards post-modernity let's start with the beginning the first and biggest problem here is that if real uh or if accurate or satisfactory or just discourse you almost don't know what to say about this idea of paralogy if that is the way we should approach science and knowledge and thought and legitimate legitimation if there is an infinite number of language games with an infinite number of infinitely complex rules each of which is which is separate to every individual it generates the question of how is and to what extent is communication possible at all aren't we all playing our own language game and don't these language games change at every instant in time in which case aren't we just making noise doesn't this just change all of intellectual discourse into scat singing only the people who don't understand what scat singing is would actually ask well what do the lyrics mean the lyrics don't mean anything it turns out it's just a way of making noise and gesturing at the domain of your perspective and here we see it folding into that position of bart that that interiority that retreat to within the self and i think that there's a tendency not just in leotard but all of post-modernity to reject the external world because it gets in the way of our egocentrism so the idea that we can no longer have totalizing meta discourses and instead we're stuck with an infinite plurality of language games it seems to me undermines the possibility of communication at all and it makes it very hard to be sure what we're talking about and leotard doesn't make it any easier he says that justice is still an important value even though consensus is not but never tells us what justice is and not only that but it does beg the question of what do you now what do you mean by justice but is your justice the same as mine one assumes not so why do i have to pursue your justice what's it to me i have my own little discourse i don't need your help i can be confused on my own right so this activity of subjectivizing and radical relativism for both knowledge and speech and language ends up moving perilously close to solipsism and making communication impossible altogether and he has written a whole book on this theme a whole book on this problem and it's probably his greatest book it's called the different and what a different is is it's a sight and here i mean in a metaphorical not a literal sense a site of non-communication between incommensurable and untranslatable discourses and the problem with the different is that in the modernist conception of the world there should be no such thing if there is one big totalizing meta discourse that whenever people have a fundamental disagreement an untranslatable conflict about the nature of the world one of them has to be right one of them has to be wrong they can't both be right leotard says no the simple brute fact of the world is that there is no totalizing meta discourse it's not the truth that one of them has to be right both of them can be right or more precisely it doesn't mean anything to describe either of them as being right or wrong it's just what you like and what you don't like all right now look at the way this is going to work because when we look at the examples of it it becomes a lot clearer what he says is look there are certain systems of signs certain ways of describing and organizing the world and articulating the world which prejudge the answers to the questions it is going to ask and which are incommensurate and untranslatable with certain other discourses which claim to be describing the same thing and this leads us to certain verbal impasses and what it means is that plato was wrong the dialectic doesn't lead to truth it leads to a dead end at least people yelling at each other and then beating each other up take an example from contemporary politics abortion there's a group of people who are members of a linguistic community who regard the legality of abortion as a question of killing babies there is another group of people a separate community of discourse within the society that regards the legality of abortion as being a question of personal freedom and personal choice if you've now the question is from the modernist i guess what's the real answer well from the post-modern perspective there's just no real answer it's not that one side is right and the other side is wrong because they've adopted the right perspective what you have here is two untranslatable and in commensurate discourses constructed by people that just cannot talk to each other in other words and if you formulate your question about abortion within the confines of their linguistic system within the confines of their discourse you will have already presupposed the answer in other words there is no neutral middle ground in language we can dispassionately and objectively search for knowledge there's just an infinite set of perspectives so what this means then is that uh is that abortion is a good thing if you say um is freedom of choice for women a good thing well presupposes that the answer is going to be yes if you're going to ask is killing babies a good thing you're presupposing that the answer is no how do you translate those two propositions with both are generating gesturing at the same fact of social reality how do we find some neutral middle ground where we're not presupposing that there's leotard's point and it's a deep point we don't know how to do it and leotard has drawn the somewhat disconcerting inference that perhaps there's no way to do it and perhaps the longing to do it is an adavistic holdover from modernist totalizing discourses perhaps there's just no such thing and not only that perhaps the fact that we can't achieve a consensus about abortion or a great many other matters is a good thing because that's what ensures freedom that's what ensures a plurality of possible ways of looking at the world and that's what prevents totalizing discord whether that's where prevents discourse from becoming totalitarian we want to let a hundred flowers bloom and if you were able to reduce them all to one universal question and answer format where you get substantial reality that makes democracy superfluous so he says then that the only way to get beyond this is to construct a fictitious mythological totalizing discourse if you don't want to do that then perology is here to stay it's not something he recently invented he's just found a way of valorizing it and saying that he likes it of affirming it but it's been around all the time it's been around since the beginning of time a very interesting kind of an argument and you might want to go back and look at something like that say the conflict between i don't know plato uh socrates and any of the sophists that he talks to in the dialogues it's perology that they're based upon different assumptions about the world and they're talking past each other all right there's a deep fact about the social about social reality here that although we may long for some ultimate coherence to our discourses we don't know what that is and we don't have very good grounds for believing in such a thing it's an act of faith rather than an act of knowledge another question another problem that emerges and this emerges in a wonderful book that he wrote called just gaming which shows how playful how victinian it is the uh the obvious references to vikkishan and the idea of language games but what's nice about the english translation because i mean the french was called on justice just gaming means just in the sense of only gaming merely gaming and also fairly or justly or righteously gaming so it's a lovely play on words and of course this is the strong point of pomo writers right plays on words puns ambiguities that's their strong point so just gaming is a wonderful almost a better title than the original the french original and what we find out in just gaming is he wants to investigate the question of is it possible to use perology and the idea of keeping the different alive not silencing terroristically the different is it possible to use that as the source of a new legitimation for paralogical postmodern thought well it's a beautiful little discourse it's done in the sort of form of a platonic dialogue and it's done over seven days and there's different parts and lots of witty plays on words and he deals with the many of the important themes in the western intellectual tradition this very dense and interesting little book but the ending of the book is the most important and interesting part they never really achieve an answer to the question of can we legitimize politics and ethics and such with parology as a matter of fact he defines ethics as judgment without criteria something like a kierkegaard who has affirmed this world rather than the next so we have that agonizing jump into nothingness but he's decided to go in the opposite door from kierkegaard so criterionless choice criterionless judgments that's what ethics turns out to be and politics based upon parology seems can't legitimize itself either the way the book ends is most significant and most thoughtful it ends in laughter in others they stop talking altogether all leotard does in response to the question without really solving it is to laugh i would direct you back to plato's dialogue called the mino in the mino he's talking to a guy named mino who was taught by the greatest of the sophists named gorgius and in that dialogue it comes out that when gorgeous gets asked what human virtue is instead of answering he just laughs that's the answer gorgeous is the great practitioner of perology and what this does is dissolve the domain of communication into a sort of giddy self-indulgent laughter it means that this is a huge practical joke and you can see that this game is in fact both serious and facetious at the same time which is so post-modern it has both qualities simultaneously don't take it too seriously but then again don't ignore it either because it is simultaneously serious it sort of undoes the category does undoes all those binary distinctions which is a big post-modern project now a final objection or difficulty that's going to emerge in leotard it's not the only one but i think it's one of the most important this idea of terror and the idea of silencing the different as being a terroristic kind of politics now i'm pretty sure that we're supposed to think terror is bad get the idea i mean it's hard to think of the nice connotations of terror there aren't very many of them and yet what say the french revolution meant by terror or what the victims of nazi atrocities or the camerooge atrocities might have meant by terror is not what leotard means by terror because he's pomo what he means by terror is silencing the different which is a very unique and enigmatic use of the word terror and you wonder then what this terror means and who it applies to does it apply to everybody are we all terrorized if the different is silenced or is it just that this is this just leotard's way of saying that the silencing of the different makes him more worried and he decided to inflate that feeling to the status of a political principle and epistemological principle avoid terror what's terror it's the things it's the silencing of the different which leotard doesn't like let's think of some examples of this and this is where the nightmare comes in let's try something like singapore contemporary intellectuals hate singapore it's a technocratic government has very little use for the eternal verities of humanistic discourse the extension of rights and freedom and subjectivity and all that and what really irked contemporary intellectuals about it is the fact that the singaporeans really love singapore they seem to be happy and they resent that unbelievably because it gives the lie to all their claims about politics they should all be they should be a mass exodus from singapore and in fact they have to guard their borders to prevent people from coming in and that ought not to happen what a slap in the face so constantly i mean all intellectuals or almost all contemporary intellectuals really hate something like that now problem is this in singapore they have a certain degree of censorship of the press it's what i would call a soft authoritarianism authoritarianism that knows that real repression or excessive repression is real counterproductive and so they limit what can be put in the press and you know what i'm asked to believe by leotard these people are all terrorized because they don't have a completely free press they're silencing the different and you know what's even more strange the people in singapore don't seem to realize how terrified they are and they're remarkable a whole collection of people all of whom are under this terrible condition of terror and they don't even know it they don't want to leave they seem actually happy isn't it what is a powerful set of illusions except that what do you mean by an illusion how could they possibly be wrong why isn't that just another language game and the snake begins to eat its own tail and we find out that all this amounts to is that we have to avoid the things that worry mr leotard very much and this this this individual personal sentiment gets raised to the status of a political principle like one of those floats at the new york thanksgiving day macy's parade we carry in something much larger than life-size it's just an inflated image of something that's actually very human perhaps human all too human think about the fact that in contemporary america when we have presidential debates we don't have every party we don't have the friends of the moon fringe party in to debate with president clinton instead we have a limited domain of people that we are willing to extend free air time to apparently everyone in america is terrorized apparently you're terrified and the bad part of it is that so few people realize that it shows how benign and modernistic you are it gives the impression that you don't understand the fact that the different and the creation of dissenses is an end in and of itself you probably don't realize that to agree with other people and achieve some sort of consensus is just a way of being coerced by the modernist tradition so professor leotard offers to free us from this and to make us have feelings much more like his why it is we should be interested in doing that why we have some sort of obligation moral or otherwise since moral judgment is judgment without criteria he never really explains the sense that i come away with though is that leotard's reason for adopting post-modernism and post-structuralism is something like edmund hillary's for climbing mount everest because it was there uh if you know that movie by marlon brando where he's playing a motorcycle hood and he comes in and he's and somebody asks what are you rebelling against and marlon brando says what do you got well that's pretty much what post-modernism is what are your rebellions well what's here we're revealing against that we're opposed to it why there it is what sense does this make we find ourselves really interesting and we want to invent new discourses and look we have to get tenure somehow we got to write books so let's be against things that's what post-modernism amounts to it's a posture of studied suspicion a posture of exaggerated logical or intellectual scrupulosity and the result of this scrupulosity is not intellectual cleanliness it is intellectual sterility

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 12,180

Rating: 4.8666668 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Minds, Jean-Francois Lyotard: The Post-modern Condition

Id: Xdf41gsESTc

Length: 45min 43sec (2743 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021