The Ground of Meaning

In 1979, Jean-Francoise Lyotard realized that we had reached a crisis-point in the history of science. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard announced that this crisis will force a revision in the methodology used by science in contemporary society and on the cultural imperatives that are bringing about these changes. The postmodern individual, Lyotard says, is one who no longer believes in the grand narratives that have legitimized both the social basis of cultural basis of social knowledge and the epistemological basis of scientific truth. Converging postmodern philosophy with the history of science, Lyotard indicates that a historical shift begun in the works of Nietzsche calls on us to abandon conceptual systems founded on these grand narratives. Many previous writers and thinkers provided a foundational basis for a thesis such as this one. For instance, Hans Blumenberg says that the history of scientific thought illustrates the curious development of trends in thinking. In the history of science it is not uncommon for a single scientific proposition to emerge and over the course of time come to assume a status of force and truthfulness. As more and more scientific results adhere to a basic supposition, propositions that initially seemed strange and counterintuitive becomes unquestioned and axiomatic truths. This is the story of the development of the philosophy of science. In this way Lyotard's work may be seen as developing from Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1955), which conceives of the history of science as being a succession of paradigmatic shifts or revolutuions in seeing the world. Lyotard's viewpoint is also shared by thinkers such as Paul Feyerabend, who views the further development of scientific thought as being dependent on dissenting viewpoints and even outright anarchist forms of methodology. Benjamin Woolley acknowledges the possibility for a postmodern re-alignment of scientific knowledge when he says that under the influence of such modern viewpoints, the events that occur in physical reality become removed from the phenomenona associated from them. Woolley gives as an example recent events in international warfare, such as the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. According to Woolley, this war was so dominated by media coverage and critical analysis that the events of the war itself became, to use Jean Baudrillard's phrase, merely a simulcrum of the real. Baudrillard's condemnation of postmodernism, Woolley says, is a reaction to the postmodern conclusion that reality no longer exists, that life itself has become an image without reference to anything other than itself. The world where the real is abolished, suffocated out of existence by the advancement of manipulative images that can be altered by the free commerce of truth and illusion, is a world dominated by hyperreality; this is a world where the real becomes an aesthetic hallucination without origin or reference. According to Frederick Jameson, a basic feature of postmodernism is the progressive transformation of life into textuality, wherein the experience of the temporality of life is akin to the expereience of language. By this Jameson means that human existence and the experience of the passage of time are being re-conceptualized into, essentially, effects of language. To clarify his meaning, Jameson relates this statement to a reading of the poem "China" by Bob Perelman, where the experience of the real is not only mediated through signs, as in a modernist text, but in an example of a postmodern literary artwork, the only references made at all are to other images. In postmodern discourse, images refer to other images only; the intrusion of the real is not only prohibited, it is delegitimized, removed from the realm of the plausible and moved to the realm of the mythic. Unlike the modernist appreciation of the literary work in which unity is to be found within the text, in postmodern criticism this unity is re-located to the province of myth and insubstantial being, or what Jameson calls, "The bound unity of the absent book." Similar to the way Jameson views the literary text, Lyotard sees science as a narrative founded on myth. Lyotard targets those myths legitimize the methodology promoted by research institutions that insist on the continual drive for the new and the modern. Specifically, these myths are the liberation of humanity from the oppressors, which originates in the French Enlightenment, and the unity of all speculative knowledge, which derives from the Germanic and Hegelian traditions. Lyotard's text came as a reaction to the explosion of information which demanded the creation of a new medium for the dissemination of rhetorical discourse, one which could better accomodate the writings of the postmodern mind. Electronic hypertext, the internet and the world wide web make available a field of interconnections that were previously unbreached. A component of Lyotard's report of the epistemological uncertainty of the postmodern subject is a critique of the work of Jurgen Habermas. In particular, Lyotard distrusts Habermas' faith in an immanent social evolution within an intersubjective community. Such a belief, Lyotard says, is no more than a reconceptualization of those totalizing modernist belief-systems that expectantly awaited the development of a social, political and philosophical consensus. Rejecting such expectations, postmodernism repudiates Hegel's idea of a consensual culture in a world of absolute spirit, substituting in its place Marx's belief that the only consensus that can be arrived at will take place when we make ourselves at home in our alienated being. Lyotard observes a transformation in that status of knowledge that, he says, began at the end of the 1950s, occuring simultaneously with the end of post-war European rebuilding and with the emergence of a new stage in the logic of capitalism. The future outcome of history has been problematized to such an extent that predictions of future development are always highly uncertain. Lyotard recognizes that the leading sciences and technologies are based on language theory and are for the most part driven by language processing instruments. "In a society whose communicative component is becoming more prominent day by day," Lyotard says, "language assumes a new importance." This includes, of course, the computer, a machine whose data storage and retrieval capabilities make it the foundation of contemporary techne. While the future impact of the transformation of societal knowledge cannot be determined from the standpoint of the present, Lyotard suggests that these changes in the accessibility of knowledge will have social effects comparable to the increased access to knowledge at the time of the Renaissance. These changes include the dissolution of the directive inherited from the Greeks which commanded the student to 'know thyself' in order to acquire learning. Lyotard sees these old principles as swiftly becoming obsolescent in the face of the educational imperatives which see the education of students as being mutually exclusive from the development of character and individuality. The educational arena, once the province of a humanist liberalism that regarded free inquiry as the highest good, becomes a marketplace of information as, concomitantly, the logic of the commodity is carried over into the relationship between teacher and student, who adopt the roles of producer and consumer. With the restructuring of the values behind the economy of learning, knowledge comes to be manufactured according to its market value. The preeminent goal when knowledge is stripped of its use-value, says Lyotard, is exchange. Technocratic nations of the future will continue to place an emphasis on science and for this reason, the margins of difference between wealthy countries and impoverished countries will continue to increase, until an overwhelming abyss divides the postmodern and premodern worlds. He believes that information will continue to expand in stature and value until, like a precious resource, nation-stated will battle one another for rights of possession. The new stage in territorial warfare is the inevitable result of Lyotard calls "the mercantilization of knowledge." Revealing his Marxist roots, Lyotard predicts the withering away of the State dues to the ceaseless bombardment of messages circulating without ideological or epistemic reference. Who will know the truth in this world of multinational corporations and proletarian culture ? This is one of Lyotard's most resounding questions. Since the earliest advancements in Western civilization, scientific knowledge has found itself bound by narrative, that is, stories that serve to regulate and determine the projected course of history. These stories, once the grand recits of a highly productive and transformative worldview, have since faded into cultural memory, living on as the etiolating ghosts of a future history that failed to come into being. Lyotard notes that research in the 1960s exhibited a demoralized affect that corresponded to a slackening of revolutionary ambitions in both the human and natural sciences. Lyotard sees no place for revolution in the non-ideological postmodern age; the order of post-industrial society, while in a demoralized state, is nevertheless impervious to a sudden outbreak of revolutionary spirit. One area where support is lacking is that of legitimation, for the demoralized world finds self-legitimation to be a daunting and overwhelming task. In particular, postmodern society finds it difficult to organize and promulgate the normative laws set in place by the founders of modern society. This becomes a particularly difficult quandry when it comes to matters of science. Traditionally, the results of scientific research were scrutinized by a legislative body that. working within the carefully codified body of authorized discourse, determined whether or not a scientific statement was significant for the community at large. However, what happens when a statement can no longer be legitimized in the traditional manner ? If the right to determine the truth is, like the right to determine what is just, a subject open to multiple viewpoints, then once can forsee how Lyotard's vision of the future world burdened by a heteroglossic miasma of competing scientific bodies is in fact a possibility. In this scenario, the scientific world of the future is like today's political world, where an unyielding set of cultural prejudices leaves much of the globe in turmoil. Moreover, if knowledge and power are two sides of the same question, then the ruling classes have simply retreated to the next highest level, stacking the cards against the marginalized social groups that postmodernism seeks to liberate. Ironically, in this new age of computers and information superhighways, the questions that stand before us are the same ones we thought we had resolved. Lyotard admits as much, saying, "The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers." From the slave-owning societies of antiquity, to the large land-owners of the fuedal periord, to the bourgeois estate of the capitalist age, science has been integrated into to logic of the social world as a means to ensure the optimal rate of production. Marxism is directed by a different conception of knowledge; it does not privilege the same regime of values that the logic of capitalism does. On the contrary, Marxism perceives the world as fundamentally non-totalizable and dis-unified. The less radical forms of postmodernism believe that the modernist constructs are no longer applicable in the age of late capitalism, while the more radical views of postmodernism believe that these constructs, such as the individual bourgeois subject, never really existed at all. Such constructs are social and philosophical propagande designed to produce a sense of confusion over those who xcould radicalize the social world against the status quo. Lyotard's view of the postmodern individual exhibits many of the same qualities as Jameson's view of the postmodern literary object. The individual is not referred to a large chain of referents 'outside' of his own being but only to a self that moves around like Brownian particles, haphazardly and incessently. The self does not exist as an independent subject anymore but is bound in a concatenation of complex references, in a sequence of mobile identities. Although it may appear to the uncareful reader that Lyotard seeks to delegitimize the paradigm of contemporary science, in no way does he believe that the concepts of which the scientific tradition was founded on are now deprived of meaning. Rather, Lyotard makes a case that in order to institute the revitalization of scientific inquiry, deficient empty words and texts must be extirpated in order to arrive at the truth about science. "The war is not without rules," Lyotard says, "but the rules allow and encourage the greatest possible flexibility of utterence." It is equally important to understand Lyotard's conception of knowledge as the ground for a postmodern sense of meaning that is binary but not denotative. Postmodern knowledge is not merely a set of denotative facts; it is more than a simple fulfillment of criteria that are either true or false. In the educational institutions of the future, the categories of knowledge (episteme) will be further differentiated, no longer suspended in opposition between simple perception (aisthesis) or opinion (doxa). The Greek post-Socratics termed all of these statements -- evaluative, prescriptive, denotative and performative -- as expressing opinion. By extinguishing all traces of the narrative form in scientific discourse, Lyotard conceives of a future where episteme is again reconfigured. Made up of two sub-groups, postmodern episteme is composed of prescriptive knowledge or payment knowledge, which serves to increase technical skills and evaluative knowledge and investment knowledge, which serves to increase productivity. Where will we find the true knowledge of existence, the knowledge acquired through training in the liberal arts ? This type of knowledge has been abandoned for it has been judged as lacking adequate use-value. In the early scientific era, education was deemed an important factor in the establishment of social boundaries and for this reason it viewed itself as a rational, narrative knowledge. In the postmodern age, however, education no longer has this exclusive function and for this reason only denotative statements are valid; all other, Lyotard says, are excluded. The replacement of universities with schools seems to be a necessary corollary of Lyotard's philosophy. After all, schools are functional while universities are merely speculative. We might expect to see an early manifestation of the reorganuization of the educational institution in the United States, for this country was the first to implement the organizational system of the German university as the model for the foundation of their own system of higher education. The figure of scientific method is converted into a myth which lingers on in its ignorance, unaware that its two main pillars of support, dialectics and metaphysics, rely on beliefs in original reference and transcendental presence, both of which have been set aside by modernist philosophers. Lyotard attempts to re-historicize the concept of science by re-situating scientific knowledge in the context of the learning self. Postmodernism, which has developed from the proletariatization of society, has gained discursive power from the synthesis of the twin philosophies of existentialism and Marxism. By conflating these two systems into a single text, it allows them to manifest a more significant presence in our lives. In fact, this is one of the reasons why the grand narratives of science can be left behind, for the inauguration of a postmodern scientific outlook is contingent on the needs to liberate the bourgeois class from the traditional authorities. While postmodernism appears to announce the death of the God of scientific inquiry, I believe Lyotard calls on us to accept science of a new re-articulated basis. In this context, scientific knowledge can be seen as a network, simultaneously erasing and re-installing the ethical values of the demoralized sciences because it realized it could not provide a stable and transparent future. The foundation of the methodology of postmodern science, although similar in structure to both the scientific tradition that led to the catholic precepts of Copernicus and Galileo and to the splintering that took place at the time of Locke and Bacon, contains nethier dogmatism nor an easily recognizable code of morality. Postmodernism sees science as dead because contemporary society, with its logic of the commodity and its staunch emphasis on the culture of the individual, has entirely obfuscated the natural world. Postmodernism is about recovering voices that were once hidden and removed from view. Deriving inspiration from the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, postmodern theorists such as Lyotard are laboring in the scientific tradition and are working to re-legitimize the scientific paradigm. It has been said that his work is, essentially, an attempt to re-invigorate the scientific methodology that he feels has been subverted by a demoralized ethical training. Like Feyerabend's call for an anarchist ethics, Lyotard speaks of the need for a radical super-moral ethics for the seeker of postmodern scientific fact, smashing all the idols of Western civilization in his attempt to rationalized a non-totalizable universe. Postmodern theory represents an attempt at rediscovering the primal sense of scientific thinking which has been debased and forgotten. Yet there is another acute sense of the meaning of scientific reasoning, for postmodernists believe that tradition in unable to preserve the truth perpetually. Rather than promoting a scientific truth on the basis of an authentic rationality, postmodernism willfully conceals the accepted standards of scientific truth, permitting the real and original component of meaning to be lost in history, in the shift from futurology to the nostalgia of a future anterior. The ethical component of this change in the reorganization of knowledge is the shift from the legitimzation of denotative statements to the legitimation of prescriptive statements. In this way, statements that pertain to justice can be legitimized as the only ethical solutions valid for society's needs. Knowledge in the postmodern era is no longer a subject that is studied for its own sake, but is something that accrues its value in the application, its legitimacy arriving only when it allows the manifestation of the ethical face of morality. Working towards a joint resolution, the philosophies of Lyotard and Nietzsche implicitly predict the dawn of a new age and the emergence of a new type of individual subject, one who knows the secret complimnetarity of scientific truth and narrational fiction and, by preaching their unification, becomes a revolutionary in the deepest sense possible; this person is one who has moved beyond these grand narratives and has forged a new epistemological code through the strength of their rhetorical will.