Justice through Creativity...
LYOTARD: THE UNINVITED REFEREEClovice A. Lewis, Jr.
RS-8200-1.SP20: Post-Modern Theologies & Critical Theory May 17, 2020 n a midterm paper written for a class in postmodernism the author wrote, "So like an uninvited referee, postmodernism interjects itself between science and Christianity to declare that what “constitutes evidence or proof must be game relative: they will function as rules only for those who share the same paradigm or participate in the same language game.”[1] This paper further explores the "language game" of postmodernism referred to and how it has been so disruptive. In recent usage, the word "disruptive" has two somewhat paradoxical meanings: 1) describing something that is troublesome or causing disorder or, 2) describing something innovative or groundbreaking. Disruptive is a fitting description for postmodernism and its ilk. Just as it has caused innovation, particularly in the social sciences, it has wreaked havoc in many quarters touched by it. It is astonishing that a philosophical movement that sprang from musings forty years ago about the role of narratives and the death of rational thinking can be blamed for everything from vacant art to the ascendance of Donald Trump. Such is the power using a broad lens with which to see anew. To be sure, by the time Jean Francois Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in 1979 (in English in 1984), the changes he described were already well in progress. [2] His fellow French academics described what they saw as flaws in Modernist thought, especially that we all acknowledge the same truths, agree with the same facts, and share the same values. Postmodern ideas were both a weapon and a tool with which to destabilize power structures and assail the holy grail of objective truth. When promulgated by French theorists like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan it was bent towards a more relativistic direction. It is important to point out that Lyotard's famous work was commissioned by the Conseil des universités du Québec as a report on the influence of technology in exact sciences, and was primarily concerned with how technological transformations will impact the "status" of knowledge. At the time Lyotard was writing there was much speculation and concern about the impact of science and technology on future societies. Alvin Toffler, a futurist and businessman renowned for his writings about the digital and communication revolutions penned Future Shock in 1970 about the subject.[3] Another influential book was José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado's remarkable work, published in 1969 entitled Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilised Society. Controversial from the beginning, Delgado's book reached beyond his solid research on the use of electrical signals to evoke responses in the brain to speculate on philosophical and societal issues.[4] It makes some sense that Lyotard was asked to write the Report. His writings covered a wide variety of styles and a broad range of topics in aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. His interdisciplinary works are characterized by a central premise that reality is composed of singular events that cannot be represented, or symbolized, by rational conjecture. This central idea about the nature of reality became politically influential. In the Report he expounds on many themes common to post-structuralist and postmodernist ideas:
While Lyotard was certainly focused on the postmodern loss of "meta-narratives" his later works considered ways to imagine justice after the loss of these meta-narratives. In works such as Just Gaming (1979) and The Differend (1983), Lyotard breaks with the "anything goes" relativism offered by his contemporaries. In these works, he soberly addressed what Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) called a general "loss of authority" in traditional institutions.[6] G. H. F. Hazel's "progress of history" is contrasted against the Holocaust of World War II and found to be greatly lacking.[7] Lyotard held that all political systems fail when facing the devaluation of all values.[8] Coupling the postmodern rejection of meta-narratives with the notion that there is no absolute truth (only truths organic to particular "belief location" of an individual or a culture), the result was an occasionally unintended self-referential feast. Subsequently, the concept that different people can have legitimately different views about what is moral and immoral or what is right or wrong freed many to explore hitherto forbidden intellectual turf.[9] The "Truth" door was held wide open by the postmodernists, and intersectionality proponents stepped right in. It was not helpful that the door was held open by white men, who defined postmodernism from a typically Eurocentric, male-oriented subjectivity. Many observers point out this was often accomplished by victimizing or objectifying the Other by gender or ethnicity. Sara Delemont observes of the door holders, "The postmodernists who have argued for the past 30 years that there is no universalism, no objectivity, are themselves a subset of the white male intellectual elite who have broken ranks".[10] The postmodern origins of intersectionality happened following the "death of the Left" (civil rights, gay pride, and second-wave feminism that collapsed in the 1980s and 1990s), as economic neoliberalism took hold. In her 1991 article Mapping the Margins Kinberlé Crenshaw first popularized the term "Intersectionality".[11] Freeing themselves from white male definitions of the "Truth", Black feminists began to expose the interlocking systems that defined them. Although closely linked, it would be a mistake to dismiss intersectional movements, such as postmodern feminism, as not being intimately connected with the lived existence of women today, and the multiple oppressions they face. That said, many writers caution against what they call the "Myth of Original Uniformity" as far as the multiplicity of voices is concerned. Feminists of color rightly bristle at this tendency towards homogenization in feminist discourse. Eleazar S. Fernandez addressed this issue in Reimagining the Human when she wrote, "In contrast to the understanding that diversity is an aberration from the so-called original uniformity, I make the claim that diversity and differences are at the heart of things. Our "original blessing" is not uniformity but diversity and difference. We should not be scared of our rich diversity and difference, because that is who we are. Difference is a critical category not only to counter hegemonic practices but also for seeing the world."[12] Given the immense importance attached to the Report, and reference of the term "postmodern" outside of its origin in the arts, one might assume Lyotard considered himself a postmodernist. That might, however, be much like asking whether Jesus would consider himself a Christian. The fact is the Report was one of Lyotard's more minor works, with which he was not very impressed. The first chapter of the Report is entitled "The Field: Knowledge in Computerised Societies". In the second paragraph of that chapter, Lyotard wrote: "Scientific knowledge is 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, modern theories of algebra and informatics, computers and their languages, problems of translation and the search for areas of compatibility among computer languages, problems of information storage and data banks, telematics and the perfection of intelligent terminals, to paradoxology. The facts speak for themselves (and this list is not exhaustive)."[13] Here, we see Lyotard's intention might have been to generally "stay in his lane" and address only technological issues at hand. But his well-honed instinct was to dive deeply into the technology of knowledge. The philosopher polymath could not help but follow multiple paths leading to the profound questions he examined. A modern "technologist" can more easily see what others of his time perhaps could not. The clues are there in his description of the ascendance of a language of technology that he was convinced would eventually become detached from its creators. For example, his inclusion of linguistics and cybernetics are particularly interesting. Few people understood the significance of the fairly new transdisciplinary science of cybernetics, which explores human/machine interface and the structures, possibilities, and constraints of systems that regulate feedback. Lyotard's tip of the hat to Noam Chomsky's groundbreaking work in Neuro-Linguistic Programming belies his deep appreciation for the ever-increasing understanding of its role in our understanding of the nature of consciousness. Such fields were closer to Lyotard's area of expertise. Unfortunately, Lyotard's Report was hailed as the authoritative postmodern discourse on all the "natural" sciences from which Lyotard made pronouncements on developments in modern physics and mathematics. He extracted from this what he called "postmodern science", and offered it as a definitive subversion of scientific rationality. Years later (in 1987), Lyotard disclosed in an interview that he had made up most of what he wrote about science. He revealed his work as an intellectual fraud, admitting to the journal Lotta Poetica that The Postmodern Condition is "the worst of my books," in which "I made up stories, referred to a quantity of books I'd never read, apparently it impressed people."[14] By 1987 much damage had been done. Although many have found postmodernist methods useful in some fields Lyotard's language games in the Report are a blunt instrument when applied to science. He insisted there is a distinction between "narrative" and "science" and claimed that narrative and science have always been "at odds" in sections 6 and 7, but his explanation of this "fact" is never clear. Several such strands of misappropriated scientific theories converge in section 13 of the Report, where the practice and logic of modern science, now characterized in thermodynamic terms, provide source material for his language game. However, Lyotard blundered on, applying his methodology in a hit and miss fashion to co-opt physics and mathematics in order to bolster his claims about "science" and "narrative". The most significant damage to the "legitimacy" of the Report, as far as science is concerned, was the body blow delivered by Lyotard himself in 1987. Nevertheless, the Report continued to be canonized in postmodern academic circles. So the scene was set for a little poke from science, which came in the form of the famous send-up by Alan Sokal (now known as Sokal's Hoax). Sokal submitted a nonsensical article entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity to the (then) non-peer-reviewed flagship Social Text journal of postmodern cultural studies. The article was published in the journal's Spring/Summer "Science Wars" issue in 1996.[15] Sokal was able to pull off his hoax because he had mastered the postmodern lingo. The fatal flaw for the journal was the postmodern practice of reducing science to social construction and rhetoric... an absurdity that cannot be convincingly applied. Two other works by Lyotard, Just Gaming, and The Differend, are important texts on justice. In a series of short contemporaneous works (which critics argued lack a moral or political orientation), Lyotard maintained that we live in pagan societies that worship many gods. He asserted that the language games of art, science, sociology, and politics, facilitate this new way of worshiping. His main argument is that because there are no foundations for our claims for justice[16] that we "judge without criteria".[17] Lyotard stands, to many, as a symbol of the excesses of postmodernism. Although he assailed "realisms”, he never argued that all "language games" are equally valid, or that we are forever locked into them. The meta-narratives he illuminated relegated religion to just another narrative that competes with all others. The impact of postmodernism on Western religion has cut both ways: it can minimize religion while also challenging secularism by claiming that religious "truths" are just as valid as scientific ones. For writers like James K.A. Smith, Lyotard provides a convenient way to capitalize on the postmodern manner of legitimizing all theories of reality. Smith wrote in Who's Afraid of Postmodernism, "This book is an attempt to make off with postmodernism for the sake of the kingdom."[18] One way to "make off" with postmodernism is to use it to legitimize Christianity's "supposed" irrationality, "No scientific discourse (whether natural science or social science) simply discloses to us the facts of reality to which theology must submit; rather, every discourse is, in some sense, religious. The playing field has been leveled. Theology is most persistently postmodern when it rejects a lingering correlational false humility and instead speaks unapologetically from the primacy of Christian revelation and the church's confessional language." [19] Lyotard serves Smith by rendering modern rationality as just one more narrative myth while allowing Christianity to engage its narrative sources, "My point is not to suggest that Lyotard's analysis concretely helps to understand Christian faith; in other words, I am not arguing that we look to Lyotard for assistance in understanding Christian faith commitments. Rather, Christian thinkers should find in Lyotard's critique of metanarratives and autonomous reason an ally that opens up the space for a radically Christian witness in the postmodern world. [. . .] Lyotard relativises (secular) philosophy's claim to autonomy and so grants the legitimacy of a philosophy that grounds itself in Christian faith. [. . .] The exclusion of faith from the public square is a modern agenda; postmodernity should signal new openings and opportunities for Christian witness in the broad market place of ideas."[20] Smith represents a hopeful trend among Christian theologists that postmodernism can lead to a resacrilisation of society. A world without a God, in which sociological and psychological theories about religion or spirituality may not satisfy some, the notion of embracing a non-rational religious experience may be appealing. Ministry magazine featured an article in the May 2013 issue entitled Re-Imagining Evangelism in a Postmodern Culture in which they offer advice about how to appeal to a person suffering from postmodernism, "With the demise of absolute human reason and science, the supernatural is once again open to consideration. Because postmodernists see spirituality as closely connected to supernatural experience, Christians who have experienced the Holy Spirit possess a great opportunity to make friends among postmoderns and share the story of a personal God who does miracles in their lives. Intuition and emotions are another pathway where postmodernists can discover truth. As they experience various spiritual encounters, postmoderns will integrate into a new lifestyle when they find somewhere they belong. A personal invitation to ‘Try it’—i.e., the gospel—should be our message to them." [21] Some Christians fear their traditional standards of binary oppositions are threatened by postmodernism. Because postmodernism affirms relativity to all places, people, and time, it rejects the permanence of principles. Uncertainty reigns: there is no objective moral standard to base absolute judgment upon, and there is no difference between truth and falseness. Even more troubling is the fact that postmodernism does not treat the Bible as different from any other book. The persistent critique that postmodernism has subverted authority and produced disloyalty remains. In many quarters of Christianity, postmodernism is seen as a dangerous disease to both the individual so afflicted, and all of society. Professor Johan Malan offered this succinct assessment of the postmodernist in 2010, "...postmodern man regards himself as post-Christian and post-theistic. Some of them completely reject Christianity and follow a secular lifestyle. Others follow the way of drastically reforming theology in order to subject it to their own views. To them, liberal churches and other religious meetings are used as forums for the further deconstruction of evangelical Christianity." Among non-Christian religions, postmodernism is not a new development. The Japanese culture accommodates both Shintoism and Buddhism. In India, Buddhism and Hinduism co-exist with local tribal and regional religions. Contemporaneous to Lyotard's Report, Berger's concept of pluralism demonstrated that the theory of secularization is Eurocentric, and that many forms of religion flourish in all parts of the world. Postmodernists fail to account for the fact that religion is still practiced as something deeply identified with tradition and location.[22] It may be that the postmodern movement has already experienced an unremarked death. It ushered in an age when humanity realized that it could live comfortably with anime- like ambiguity. People do not need to be rescued from differing views of reality, especially since modern physics presents even whackier theoretical vistas. The uninvited referee between science and religion has exited the building and no one noticed its departure. Real gains were made for the world, as postmodernism helped much of humanity find a voice. On the other hand, it has produced startling harmful effects, such as neoliberalism and the culture war raging in the United States at present. Michio Kakutani addresses these effects barely two years before the COVID-19 pandemic in The Death of Truth: "It's safe to say that Trump has never plowed through the works of Derrida, Baudrillard, or Lyotard (if he's even heard of them) and postmodernists are hardly to blame for all the free-floating nihilism abroad in the land. But some dumbed-down corollaries of their thinking has seeped into popular culture and been hijacked by the president's defenders, who want to use relativistic arguments to excuse his lies, and by right-wingers who want to question evolution or deny the reality of climate change or promote alternative facts."[23] Although the postmodernism Lyotard helped to usher into the world was genuinely disruptive, it has evaporated in the era of world-wide pandemics and climate disruption that demand values, specificity, and authenticity. ----------------------- 1 (“Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture): James K.A. Smith: 9780801029189: Amazon.Com: Books” n.d.) 2 (Lyotard and Jameson 1984) 3 (Toffler 1984) 4 (Delgado 1969) 5 (Lyotard and Jameson 1984, Introduction xxiv) 6 (Arendt and Baehr 2003) 7 (Hegel 1861) 8 (Sim 2011, p. 145) 9 (“Postmodern Origins of Intersectionality | The Charnel-House” n.d.) 3 10 (Gratton 2018) 11 (“Mapping the Margins” n.d.) 12 (Fernandez 2004, p.22) 13 (Lyotard and Jameson 1984) 14 (“The Enlightenment Gone Mad (I) The Dismal Discourse of Postmodernism’s Grand Narratives | Arion” n.d.) 15 (“Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” n.d.) 16 (“Just Gaming” p. 44) 17 (“Just Gaming” , p. 14) 18 (“Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture): James K.A. Smith: 9780801029189: Amazon.Com: Books”, p.10) 19 (“Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture): James K.A. Smith: 9780801029189: Amazon.Com: Books”, p. 147) 20 (“Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture): James K.A. Smith: 9780801029189: Amazon.Com: Books”, p. 60-61) 21 (“Re-Imagining Evangelism in a Postmodern Culture”, p. 110) 22 (Berger 1979) 23 (“The Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani: 9780525574835 | PenguinRandomHouse.Com: Books”, p. 45) Bibliography Arendt, Hannah, and Peter R. Baehr. 2003. The Portable Hannah Arendt. Penguin. Berger, Peter L. 1979. The Heretical Imperative : Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation. Garden City, N.Y. : Anchor Press. http://archive.org/details/hereticalimperat00berg. Delamont, Sara. 2003. Feminist Sociology. SAGE. Delgado, José Manuel Rodríguez. 1969. Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society. World Bank Publications. Fernandez, Dr Eleazar. 2004. Reimagining the Human: Theological Anthropology in Response to Systemic Evil. St. Louis, Mo: Chalice Press. “Google Books Link.” n.d. Accessed May 11, 2020. https://www.google.com/books? id=PJHi444dlRcC. Gratton, Peter. 2018. “Jean François Lyotard.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2018. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/lyotard/. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1861. Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Henry G. Bonn. “Jean-François Lyotard.” 2020. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jean-Fran %C3%A7ois_Lyotard&oldid=939254229. “Just Gaming.” n.d. Book. University of Minnesota Press. Accessed May 12, 2020. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/just-gaming. Lyotard, Jean-Francois, and Fredric Jameson. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. 1st edition. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press. “Mapping the Margins.” n.d. Accessed May 10, 2020. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23242743-mapping-the-margins. “Postmodern Origins of Intersectionality | The Charnel-House.” n.d. Accessed May 9, 2020. https://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/02/02/postmodern-origins-of-intersectionality/. “Re-Imagining Evangelism in a Postmodern Culture.” n.d. Accessed May 12, 2020. https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/2013/05/re-imagining-evangelism-in-a-postmodern- culture. Sim, Stuart. 1997. Lyotard and the Inhuman. First Thus edition. Cambridge: Icon Books. Lyotard Dictionary. Edinburgh University Press. “The Dangers of Postmodernism.” n.d. Accessed May 12, 2020. https://www.bibleguidance.co.za/Engarticles/Postmodernism.htm. “The Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani: 9780525574835 | PenguinRandomHouse.Com: Books.” n.d. Accessed May 14, 2020. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/573029/the-death-of-truth-by-michiko-kakutani/. “The Enlightenment Gone Mad (I) The Dismal Discourse of Postmodernism’s Grand Narratives | Arion.” n.d. Accessed May 14, 2020. http://www.bu.edu/arion/the-enlightenment-gone-mad-i-the-dismal-discourse-of-postmodernisms-grand-narratives/. Toffler, Alvin. 1984. Future Shock. Bantam Books. “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” n.d. Accessed May 14, 2020. https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html#177. |