Critiquing Lyotard

In the first chapter of his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard makes the by now familiar observation that “the miniaturisation and commercialisation of machines is already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited”. His continuation is worth quoting at length: “The nature of knowledge,” he argues, “cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation. It can fit into the new channels, and become operational, only if learning is translated into quantities of information. We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language. The ‘producers’ and users of knowledge must now, and will have to, possess the means of translating into these languages whatever they want to invent or learn.” Of course, I don’t agree, and the notion of translatability – as if the form and content of learning were easily separable; as if language were the transparent vehicle of thought – is only the first of many problems with this passage.

It’s interesting, though, to see where Lyotard takes this train of thought. He continues: “We may thus expect a thorough exteriorisation of knowledge with respect to the ‘knower,’ at whatever point he or she may occupy in the knowledge process. The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training (Bildung) of minds, or even of individuals, is becoming obsolete and will become ever more so. The relationships of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume – that is, the form of value. Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.” Ultimately, “Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its ‘use-value.’” Interesting stuff, no? Here’s my difficulty: I’m having a really hard time sorting out the fact that I disagree with him on ethical grounds (this is something that should not happen, I want to say) from an argument with him on logical grounds (this is something that cannot happen, I wish I could conclude). One obvious problem with what Lyotard is saying is the ceci tuera cela aspect of his argument: clearly, this does not have to kill that, and commodified knowledge can coexist with knowledge for its own sake.

I think it’s interesting that both Lyotard and Derrida – so often castigated for the revolutionary or radical nature of the ideas they proposed – seem so fundamentally classicist and antiprogressive in their views of the world of ideas, once one reads enough of them. It makes me think of Eliot and The Waste Land, which seems so innovative in its form that generations of undergraduate English majors continue to completely miss its deep and thoroughgoing conservatism.

Anybody out there care to point me towards some useful critiques of Lyotard’s views on technology? He’s on to so many of the things I’m looking at – technology, commodification, education – and such a canonical figure that I really can’t afford to ignore him, but at the same time, I very much want to take issue with so many of his points.

Comments

Curtiss Leung 19 February 2004

Possibilities for critique:

**Nit-picking:** Lyotard's statement that knowledge will lose its use-value is cited as coming from a work by Habermas, **Knowledge and Human Interests.** I don't know if that's an accurate statement of what Habermas says there, but it might be worth chasing down. I rather doubt it, however, since a commodity (commodity in the Marxian sense) always has a use value; it just isn't **the reason** for its production. That falls to the exchange value of the commodity. I think somebody like Habermas could keep this straight. But even if he couldn't, saying that knowledge would lose its use-value simply because it is an input to a production process that valorizes capital would be like saying Gold loses its physical properties whenever it's used in investment-grade jewelry.

**Habermas himself on "the Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm" in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity:** There's a short essay in the above named collection of lectures with the jaw-breaking title "Excursus on the Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm," where Habermas makes the argument that a theory that tries to make normative claims about society cannot take material production as the ground of all social phenomena; if I understand him correctly, it shouldn't even be able to describe social institutions without performing some sort of slight-of-hand (the young Marx, for example, is supposed to have "smuggled in" the "aesthetic experience of romantic art.") If you buy this, then what Lyotard is doing in this passage amounts to mistaking a fundamental insufficiency of the "production paradigm" for its radical transformation.

**Note that Lyotard Conflates the Encoding of Text with the Commodification of Knowledge:** Here's a little science fiction thought experiment: say I have today's stock prices on a flash memory device with a USB connector. Bent on making a killing, I set the way-back machine for 1989, get in, and emerge—only to realize that...my God, serial means RS-232! (Cue Rod Serling's narration —Submitted for your approval, a man who would be rich but for the want of a faster peripheral interface, a compatibility issue that can only be resolved in the Twilight Zone....) OK, so it's not Hilary Putnam's twin-earth thought experiment—it has the virtue of being shorter. My point here is that Lyotard treats the commodification of knowledge as if it were a consequence of technological developments. It's not. Why? Because the encoding of text (ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc.) is not the commodification of knowledge: the various representations of texts are objective entities while knowledge is a subjective phenomenon. And how can a subjective phenomenon be commodified? Through the products of labor power that require such knowledge as their necessary condition (Habermas would probably accuse me of smuggling something in here, but the hell with him.) So examples of the commodification of knowledge are not to be found in Lyotard's "databanks," (not to say that the cost of access to information is not a problem, but that would reduce Lyotard to doing something other than philosophy...) but in the workers in the call-centers outsourced to the Phillipines or the software developers in India. Tell them that they don't have "minds" or are not "individuals" and what watch happens to you.

Deploying these:

If commodities retain their use-values (and they do), then the either-or, one-kills-the-other scenario Lyotard puts forward is just bunk. Specifically, if knowledge retains its use-value (aside: is the use-value of knowledge an end in itself? Either Goethe or Nietzsche says somewhere that whatever does not stimulate the creative faculty is to be shunned), then knowledge cannot be "de-fanged": companies can't just teach their cheap knowledge workers...er...knowledge, and not expect them to possibly use it against them. I imagine it's just a matter of time before foreign call center workers, software developers, etc., get it in their heads to organize. And boy oh boy, will they have the tools...

This is trickier. Maybe you have to drink all of Habermas' communicative action Kool-Aide to deploy this critique. Maybe not. Either way, if a social theory based on material production cannot account for knowledge—since it can't account for the social forms and institutions that contain knowledge—then the "commodification" of knowledge is just a confusion.

My favorite, since you get to abuse Lyotard as if you were an analytic philosopher and a pro-Situ!

Personal note: I read The Postmodern Condition a number of years ago when I was first under the influence of Adorno and Debord, and I hated, Hated, HATED, HATED it. I felt he was trying to dress up an apology for crude neo-liberalism (although the term probably didn’t exist then) with philosophical terms. Because of your post, I’ve briefly revisited the book, but I can’t say I’ve found anything to change my mind.

Mike (author) 26 February 2004

Wow. Excellent, helpful insights. 1 and 3 strike me as most helpful, and this is foundational stuff that I think can make it into my first chapter, where I talk about the economic underpinnings of the way people in computers and composition look at the intersection of technology and education.

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