Talk:The Postmodern Condition

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AI?? Machine translation??

I'm sure Lyotard didn't write anything at all about AI nor computers used to translate languages...

Wittgenstein / Language games

Lyotard later admitted that he had a 'less than limited' knowledge of the science he was to write about, and to compensate for this knowledge, he 'made stories up' and referred to a number of books that he hadn't actually read. In retrospect, he called it 'a parody' and 'simply the worst of all my books'.[3] Despite this, and much to Lyotard's regret, it came to be seen as his most important piece of writing.

I would like to have this corraborated by another source, or perhaps simply leave it out since it doesn't have much relevance in the real-life study of Lyotard's writing. Amanniste 17:48, 3 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure I see why an author's estimation of his own book shouldn't go in the Wikipedia article on the book. --Delirium (talk) 15:49, 16 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"The result is a plurality of language games (a term coined by Wittgenstein) ..." - Did Lyotard actually reference Wittgenstein, or is this a summary by the Wikipedia editor? -- 201.51.222.169 23:57, 10 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Lyotard actually references Wittgenstein in his section entitled 3. The Method: Language Games.(I made this comment a long time ago, and I just now figured out how to sign my posts....)Dirtbike spaceman (talk) 20:07, 29 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

relativism

Can we just get rid of his sentence "The Postmodern Condition has often been interpreted as an excuse for unbounded relativism, which for many has become a hallmark of postmodern thought." This is a complete misinterpretation of what Lyotard is saying and of postmodernism in general. Maybe we can replace it with something that is more true to what postmodernism really is and does. For example: "The Postmodern Condidtion has often been interpreted as an excuse for unbounded relativism, but this interpretation is incorrect. Postmodernity as Lyotard suggests would say that there is an objective truth, but because of the limited amount of knowledge that humans can understand, humans will never know this objective truth. A better way to describe this is that there is no certainty of ideas, but there are better and worse ways to interpret things." I don't know, my analysis, probably isn't the best ever, but to convey the best truth we need to make some changes to this.Dirtbike spaceman (talk) 20:59, 24 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That seems reasonable. I would maybe say something along the lines, "The Postmodern Condidtion has often been criticized as an excuse for unbounded relativism. However, Lyotard suggests that there is an objective truth, but because of the limited amount of knowledge that humans can understand, humans will never know this objective truth. In other words, Lyotard advocates that there is no certainty of ideas, but rather there are better or worse ways to interpret things."

It's been a little bit since I've read this. Isn't there something about truth being determined by insitutional control or is that another theorist?--Ducio1234 (talk) 00:57, 25 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, your analysis of postmodernism in relation to relativism is great, much better than anything I would write. As for as the question of truth being determined by institutional control, I think you may be thinking of someone else. Lyotard mentions the institution on pages 17, 48, and 53, It doesn't seem that Lyotard is saying that or anything to that magnitude in any of these cases. Lyotard always seems to be talking about the institution or university in terms of the purpose of "producing knowledge" or what we would call research. So I think that this would be a good change to make. Dirtbike spaceman (talk) 00:19, 26 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It looks good. Thanks for making the swtich.--Ducio1234 (talk) 22:01, 26 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

hauntology

It would be nice if this article referenced Berman's discussion of Klee's "angle of history" http://delicious.com/roreo/klee [garden-as-cemetery] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.31.174.196 (talk) 21:49, 11 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

i have absolutely no knowledge of Klee. How do their philosophies intersect?Dirtbike spaceman (talk) 20:45, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Science's grand narrative

There is this sentence in the article:

"At the same time, the goal of truth in science is replaced by "performativity" and efficiency in the service of capital or the state, and science produces paradoxical results such as chaos theory, all of which undermine science's grand narrative."

What is this "science's grand narrative"? I have seen some internet opinions bashing postmodernism for not believing in science, but this view seems to me as a misinterpretation. However, here I see this sentence and wonder what does it mean. Maybe a few specifying words would do. Pedestrem (talk) 19:59, 28 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

As We May Think

This is a long shot, I realize, but does anyone know if Lyotard was aware of the writings of Vannevar Bush, and in particular his 1945 monograph, As We May Think? Imho, there are some striking commonalities in Bush's visionary writings about information and computers, and some of the things Lyotard has to say in The Postmodern Condition. Mathglot (talk) 20:05, 12 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I still don't know the answer to that question, although he guest lectured all over the U.S., and given his interests, I'd be surprised if he didn't read it. In any case, I'm not the first one to make this connection (big surprise there. Not.). Here's Oels & Porombka (2002)^[1] :

Lyotard is by no means the first to define the new era in terms of the computer, and to recognize complete information games as its foundation. But he is the first one who labeled it "Postmodern", and proclaimed the end of the great Western narratives and supplanted them with a new form of narration.

Lyotard's fantasies have been known since the first attempts to create electronic calculating machines.^[9] In 1945, it was Vannevar Bush, who in his visionary essay As We May Think conceived of a database – still analog in design – named Memex, in which the entirety of existing world knowledge as well as all future knowledge would be stored and retrievable.^[10] This knowledge would be decomposed into individual small documents in order to have them interconnected with users. In this way, Bush wanted to create an associative "mental map", a knowledge network in which the whole – as Lyotard conceived of it later – was repeatedly recombined by rearrangement and linking of data rows to make new ones.

There are other sources (including in English) that discuss this as well. I wonder if it's worth discussing Bush (and others) in a "precursors" section? By 1979, information theory was three decades old (Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication came out in 1948), time-sharing mainframe and minicomputers were well established, and Jobs' Apple I was three years old, so it was part of the Zeitgeist; Lyotard didn't come out of nowhere, after all.

As an interesting side note and metanarrative for this very post, my ability to connect Vannevar Bush and Lyotard's thoughts in The Postmodern Condition via a 2002 German reference has everything to do with Bush's vision, and Lyotard's conception of it. I feel like I just popped out by the side of the freeway after going through the wormhole in Being John Malkovich. Mathglot (talk) 22:18, 12 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ Oels, David; Porombka, Stephan (2002). "Netzlebenslinien, Probleme der Biographie im digitalen Zeitalter [Web Life lines, Problems of Biography in the Digital Age]". In Klein, Christian (ed.). Grundlagen der Biographik [Foundations of Biography] (in German). Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler. pp. 131, 138. ISBN 978-3-476-01904-2. OCLC 6901880932. Die Phantasien, von Lyotard sich dabei leiten lässt, sind seit den ersten Versuchen, elektronische Rechnenmaschinen zu realisieren, bekannt.^[9] 1945 var es Vannevar Bush, der in seinem visionären Aufsatz As We May Think eine – noch analog gedachte – Datenbank Namens Memex entworfen hat, in der das gesamte bestehende und entstehende Weltwissen eingelagert und abrufbar gehalten werden sollte^[10] Dieses Wissen sollte in einzelne kleine Dokumente aufgelöst werden um diese dann durch den Nutzer miteinander vernetzen zu lassen. Bush wollte auf diese Weise eine assoziative Mental Map entstehen lassen, ein Wissennetz, in dem das Ganze – wie Lyotard es sich später gedacht hat – durch Anordnung und Verknüpfung von Datenreihen immer wieder rekombiniert wird, um neues herzustellen.

Game theory

I think the idea of complete information games was central to some of Lyotard's formulations, and I don't see anything at all about that here, or maybe just some hints about it, without actually saying anything concrete. This needs to be added, imho. Mathglot (talk) 23:33, 12 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

[Oels-2002-1] Oels, David; Porombka, Stephan (2002). "Netzlebenslinien, Probleme der Biographie im digitalen Zeitalter [Web Life lines, Problems of Biography in the Digital Age]". In Klein, Christian (ed.). Grundlagen der Biographik [Foundations of Biography] (in German). Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler. pp. 131, 138. ISBN 978-3-476-01904-2. OCLC 6901880932. Die Phantasien, von Lyotard sich dabei leiten lässt, sind seit den ersten Versuchen, elektronische Rechnenmaschinen zu realisieren, bekannt.^[9] 1945 var es Vannevar Bush, der in seinem visionären Aufsatz As We May Think eine – noch analog gedachte – Datenbank Namens Memex entworfen hat, in der das gesamte bestehende und entstehende Weltwissen eingelagert und abrufbar gehalten werden sollte^[10] Dieses Wissen sollte in einzelne kleine Dokumente aufgelöst werden um diese dann durch den Nutzer miteinander vernetzen zu lassen. Bush wollte auf diese Weise eine assoziative Mental Map entstehen lassen, ein Wissennetz, in dem das Ganze – wie Lyotard es sich später gedacht hat – durch Anordnung und Verknüpfung von Datenreihen immer wieder rekombiniert wird, um neues herzustellen.

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