2. Science, Reason and Truth

Final session 1. Looking back: When we began this reading group, I attempted to set out what I thought we ought to try to do in 10 two hour sessions. I suggested that “[t]he aim is simply to give [postmodernist] thought and thinkers a ‘fair wind’. … The intention of the meetings [being] not to “seduce” members into so-called ‘irrationalist’ ways of thinking, but simply to offer a relatively unbiased basis for discussion of postmodern theory in its critical relationship to the limitations of scientific thinking, modernist rationality and the theories of the individual self against which they are posited.”

I wanted to call into question the appallingly bad press, misrepresentation and trivialization that postmodernist thinkers have received over the last 40 years. For instance, as John Caputo writes, it is not uncommon to portray Jacques Derrida, together with Michel Foucault, the most frequently referred to postmodernist thinker, “as the devil himself, a street-corner anarchist, a relativist, or subjectivist, or nihilist, out to destroy traditions and institutions, our beliefs and values, to mock philosophy and truth itself, to undo everything the Enlightenment has done – and to replace all this with wild nonsense and irresponsible play”.i Such comments are not confined to Derrida alone, or even Derrida and Foucault but to the two other thinkers, Lyotard and Deleuze, as well as their predecessors Nietzsche and Heidegger whose work we have discussed during these ten sessions, as well as those we have not been able to cover in this time. This list includes Rorty, Baudrillard, Lacan, Sollers, Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous, Butler, Hassan and Vattimo, just to mention a few. Each one has suffered from unfair and frequently misinformed criticism and/or personal attacks on their integrity and even sanity.

Of course you may by now have decided that such criticism is justified, at least in part! I have myself been quite critical of the heritage which Derrida has left us, but this is not to dismiss his thought out of hand, or vilify him personally and indeed I have tried to acknowledge his considerable contribution to philosophical thinking as a much needed ground clearing exercise to counterbalance my possibly misplaced concerns.

1 2. Science, reason and truth In my introductory talk, you may recall, I said that for well over two and a half centuries, reason, science and its technological offshoots based on testable and re-testable evidence – “the facts” – have been increasingly held to offer the only viable bases of “truth” and “meaning”. To put it baldly, it is understood that science dispels superstition (including religion), reason conquers ignorance, order can be instituted over disorder or chaos, and “progress” will inevitably result. Such underpinning universal assumptions, and the values which they generate, dominate our ways of thinking in the “West” today, despite – or even because of – the virtually insoluble problems which they have and continue to generate. Frankly, we don’t know where to turn and believe that we have nowhere and nothing else to turn to other than what we already “know” to be “true” – as such we are bound to repeat and compound our earlier errors. These assumptions and concomitant values, our assumptions and values, generally accepted as just plain “commonsense”, are fundamental to recent and contemporary western societies, to modernity and the Enlightenment project from which they stem.ii Postmodern thinkers may or may not be pointing us to new and better ways of looking at our problems but, even if their thinking is just another dead end, they surely alert us anew to the fact that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”, and not just Denmark!

Like it or not, extol, accept, ignore, resist or simply grumble about it as we may, we are part and parcel of the continuing Enlightenment project. Postmodernist thinkers such as Derrida whilst attempting to resist and subvert it are well aware that we are unable to free ourselves, as yet, for its implicit assumptions and values constitute our very language and imagery, mould our thoughts, construct our identities, govern our politics and continue to hold out to us the illusory ideal of universal progress, individual self-constitution and personal advancement. Yet, as Walter Benjamin told us well over 60 years ago: A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating.iii His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught

2 in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.iv

Yet, we believe with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, “New Labour” and all of the other democratic parties and politicians vying to occupy the “centre ground”, that we must “modernize or die”, “progress”, compete and win at all costs in the market place, beat down the opposition – be it that of the huge and growing economic might of China or India or the continuing strength of the USA economy. We simply must compete with the rest of the developed and rapidly developing world by making the most technological progress possible otherwise we perish. There is no option in this stark and all pervasive view. We cannot damn or even blame the politicians for this. Their beliefs are our beliefs, their experiences and knowledge are ours too, we’re all in the same boat. We all share the same underpinning beliefs – to a greater or lesser extent it’s true – but share them we must do, it’s an essential part of living in a modern society.

Thus, “education , education, education” is vital to achieve this ever receding goal of making more “progress” more rapidly than the rest of the world – so it must rationally be technical education we have to have, education strictly tailored to economic ends – we can’t afford to deviate one jot and indulge children or young adults with time wasting studies like literature or philosophy, unless they can be shown to be economically productive.v Our concern about the environment and the absolutely essential action needing to be undertaken now is therefore watered down and overshadowed by concerns about economic competitiveness. Thus, the destruction of the Amazon rain forest can be fully and rationally justified on economic grounds, despite its absolutely evident catastrophic consequences. The poor people in the area need productive work to raise them out of desperate poverty. Once cleared the forest previously commercially unproductive provides excellent ground, at least for a year or two, for growing soya beans. Far more cattle can be reared world wide as a consequence. This allows Mcdonalds and other fast food multinationals to expand their markets world wide through increased sales of beefburgers. In turn this creates more counter jobs for more teenagers, so that everyone can “Have a nice day”! The devastating effect on the environment, non-

3 human species of animals, birds, reptiles, insects, fish and the personal health of humans through the guzzling of huge quantities of fat drenched red meat is not an issue. A rational solution appropriate to the benevolent hidden hand of the market has been achieved. QED.

Equally so our ethical foreign policy is inevitably tempered by the need to sell our goods abroad. The recent furore over the state reception of the Saudi Royal family and the arms deal which preceded this is just the latest example as we set aside ethical issues including torture, beheadings, hacking off of limbs and human rights in general in order to stay competitive, after all if we didn’t sell the Saudi’s arms the unscrupulous French, or USA manufacturers would. So goes the “commonsense” rational argument. Economic “progress” is absolutely vital to maintaining our life styles we all know. We don’t really need to have it dinned into us by politicians, we just know it to be true. We may or may not feel uneasy but we know that it’s futile to protest, let’s just turn a blind eye.

Furthermore, we must not only produce the goods the rest of the world wants – or can be induced, to buy – we must also buy and consume them in vast quantities ourselves to keep the economy “healthy” and booming, and the entire system ticking over. Food of course, preferably in excessive amounts, and alcohol and drugs to drown our growing apprehension – our fears and sorrows – but, even so we must of course keep personally healthy otherwise how can we keep on working? It’s common sense after all. So we certainly must not get obese and overburden the NHS hospitals as a result. Indulge ourselves? Yes, as an economic , and seasonal, necessity, certainly, but then we must crash diet and exercise as a personal necessity. It’s all quite rational really. Then, all we have to do is repeat the cycle, keep things going.

Cheap air travel, foreign holidays in abundance, also at the cheapest rates, a second car – but we mustn’t pollute the environment further, we’ve got to save the planet for our grandchildren – credit cards of course and then borrow madly, up to five times your income, to get that unaffordable but essential house, if you haven’t yet got your foot on the housing ladder already. After all you aren’t stupid are you? But, note of caution, don’t

4 get into the “sub-prime housing market” borrowing category and be dispossessed when interest rates rise to stop your “excessive” borrowing, borrowing so recently encouraged, though previously of course discouraged after prior encouragement – and so on and so forth. Everything must be subject to calculation, as you know, all decisions be taken rationally: keep a weather eye cocked for pending interest rate changes, watch the stock and housing markets, never take your eye off the monetary ball or relax for a moment or become blasé, always buy cheap and sell dear, consume to order and in the end never forget that everything, just everything, is based on that all important bottom line, profit, cash value and the all pervasive global market. Is this rationality or madness? Never ask that question, it’s taboo.

From this perspective, any view which radically questions these universal assumptions, and the values which they generate is likely to come in for very severe criticism. Postmodern theory challenges many of the underpinning assumptions and implicit values of ‘Western’ belief systems. Such belief systems range from liberal democracy and free market economics to Marxist, socialist or anarchist alternatives, and even the validity of scientific thinking itself – outside of a narrow range of understanding. It is not surprising that postmodern radical thinking has attracted a great deal of dismissive contumely as a result, with that of the scientific community, of course, held to be conclusive.vi

I concluded my first talk by suggesting that rather than condemn out of hand the radical challenges to our accepted belief systems offered by postmodern thinkers, we might better take into account the comments of Frederic Jameson who argues that: In place of the temptation to denounce … postmodernism as some final symptom of decadence … it seems more appropriate to assess [it together] with the social restructuring of [global] capitalism as a system. … we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is impossible.vii

It is this suggested line of enquiry which I have tried to abide by throughout our time together. Yet, it seems to me that facile repudiation continues apace “postmodern theory itself … buffeted by attacks on its internal absurdities ... [has been] less replaced than lost sight of …”.viii

5 3. What do we need to urgently recall from these ten sessions to get a rounded picture and relate it to the above debate? In order to get things in perspective, I think we probably need to recap on the early rather than the later sessions as hopefully the last five sessions, out of ten, on Derrida and Deleuze respectively, are still relatively fresh in our minds. We don’t want to overemphasise their contributions massive as they undoubtedly were.

In the first session, ‘Modernity, modernism and the Enlightenment project’, we looked at the project of modernity formulated in the eighteenth century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. They were trying to develop a package of objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art divorced from the sacred. We read and discussed Kant’s essay ‘What is Enlightenment’, a central, short but definitive, statement of the ideals of Enlightenment highlighting reason, which postmodernists variously claim to be exhausted, dangerous, redundant or in need of revision. This first section included Foucault’s response to Kant, an essay also entitled “What is Enlightenment”, which characteristically attempts to refute Kant’s arguments.

In the second session, ‘Friederich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and the critique of the “self”’, we looked at a central conception of modernist belief systems: the Cartesian/ Kantian “self” and the concomitant belief in a “personal individual identity”, which it engenders. We approached the question of the “autonomous self” by first addressing Descartes’ “philosophical foundationalism”ix and “intuitional normativism”x and questioned these concepts through Friederich Nietzsche’s 1873 essay “On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense”.xi Nietzsche argued that a concept such as “the [unified] self” is necessarily a falsification of what it purports to represent, as the world itself is radically fragmentary and contingent”, and this world both contains and constitutes this fragmented “self”. This essay of course foreshadows my focus on Deleuze’s Nietzschexii as the reading of “pure difference” into the latter’s “eternal return” which occupied us in both the September and October sessions.xiii Foucault was the first major postmodernist thinker whose work we addressed.

6 4. Michel Foucault Foucault was a committed Nietzschean, and we read the concluding pages of The Order of Things xiv in which he states that just as the grounds of Classical thought crumbled at the end of the eighteenth century, if the foundations of modern rational thinking are similarly undermined, then the very concept “man” as the centred creation of a unique set of historical contingencies, a consequence of certain relationships of power, a figment of discourse, will simply disappear. He states that “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” when the tide comes in. That tide is of course seen as the postmodern tide in an era of postmodernity.

This is possibly the most radical and unnerving of Foucault’s claims; by “man” Foucault means of course the (by his account) relatively modern idea of man as a self-contained rational agent, that knowing subject assumed by rationalists, and triumphant in the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. For if, as he claims, we can trace the moment that “man” came into existence, so we can predict his end. And with the death of man, so might perish the urge to classify, dominate, exclude and exploit, which derives from that idea, an idea that has caused such havoc in our modern age.

Foucault was perhaps the single most influential theorist to have emerged from the transformation of the great post-war structuralist programme into the postmodern theoretical world. More even than his contemporary Roland Barthes and possibly even Jacques Derrida, Foucault has inspired whole schools of thought, moulding philosophers of science, literary critics, sociologists and cultural historians to his own distinctive form of discourse analysis.xv Whenever the term “discourse” is mentioned, whenever a reference is made to “the body” as an object of control or coercion, we can find there Foucault’s ghostly presence.

Thus, Foucault’s oeuvre consists of a series of historical investigations into particular institutions, or “discourses”. A discourse being the matrix of texts, the specialized languages and the networks of power relations operating in and defining a given field. He

7 returns always to the relationship between power and knowledge which, for him, amount to very much the same thing. The first of Foucault’s major studies, Madness and Civilization (1961),xvi examines the treatment of the insane from the end of the Middle Ages, a period of relative freedom, through the “great confinement” of the Age of Reason, to the superficially more enlightened policies adopted towards those who were now considered mentally ill after the French Revolution. The Birth of the Clinic (1963)xvii is a similar “archaeological” project, focusing on the new type of observation, or “gaze” that began with the first modern teaching hospitals, attended by the bedside physician, the eyes through which the state monitored its subjects’ health. The Order of Things which established Foucault’s critical reputation, and became a bestseller in France, is a more general-study of how, from the seventeenth century, the disciplines of psychiatry, medicine, biology, linguistics and economics came to define their “proper” subjects, carving the world into ordered, controllable units, fixing each into a rigid structure.

Foucault defined the methodology governing these early works in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).xviii In distancing his approach from that of conventional historians Foucault leans heavily on the concept of discontinuity. For the traditional historian, discontinuity was both “the given and the unthinkable”; the past is made up of innumerable instances: “decisions, accidents, initiatives, discoveries” which the historian must annihilate by moulding them into a continuous narrative. In contrast Foucault stresses the fact that certain forms of knowledge (about the human mind and body, about biology, politics or language), after periods of stability in which the fundamental processes of a discourse remain largely unquestioned, undergo rapid transformations. During these transformations (which bear some resemblance to Thomas Kuhn’s scientific “paradigm shifts”)xix there is not only a change in the content of a discourse, but also a fundamental change in what might count as knowledge itself.

In Discipline and Punish (1975),xx Foucault describes the transformation from the brutal treatment of criminals under feudal regimes to the more diffuse, and yet more effective, forms of social control in modern society. Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” (a design for a penal institution in which prison cells were arranged around a central watchtower)

8 becomes a metaphor for these insidious forms of policing. Never knowing for certain at any time whether or not they were subject to the penetrating gaze of the guard, the prisoners come to regulate their own behaviour.

Foucault’s last great project, unfinished at his death, was The History of Sexuality. xxi In the first of the three published volumes he seeks to undermine the “repressive hypothesis”, the commonly held belief that the freedom of discussion about sex in the modern age represents a radical and positive departure from the Victorian world of repression and silence. Foucault argues that, on the contrary, the Victorian age saw an acceleration in the multiplication of discourses aimed at delineating, explaining and ultimately controlling sexual behaviour. The modern “sciences of sex”, including psychoanalysis, are simply the continuation of the Nietzschean will to power in the form of the demand to know (i.e. The “will to truth”).xxii The second and third volumes, The Uses of Pleasure and The Care of the Self xxiii, present a series of fascinating case studies showing how sexual behaviour developed from the classical obsession with boy love to the early Christian concern with marriage and heterosexual relations. If he does little to advance the argument of the first volume, Foucault at least gives ample evidence to demonstrate his case against the view that there is anything inherently “natural” about any particular form of sexual intercourse: sexual relations are always governed by complex societal codes, strict rules about what can and cannot be done.

4.1. Foucault’s politics Foucault’s brand of political activism was closely allied to his intellectual position. After an early flirtation with orthodox Marxism, he came to believe that the grand causes and class-based politics advocated by the traditional left in France were as oppressive as the bourgeois establishment they wished to overturn. In places of these meta-issues, Foucault advocates a local, small-scale but tenacious resistance to power. His primary objective is to provide a critique of the way modern societies control and discipline their populations by sanctioning the knowledge claims and practices of the human sciences: medicine, psychiatry, psychology, criminology and sociology. The human sciences have established certain norms and these are reproduced and legitimized through the practices of teachers,

9 social workers, doctors, judges, policemen and administrators. The human sciences have made man a subject of study and a subject of the state. There has been an unrelenting expansion of rationalized systems of administration and social control.

Although Foucault’s earliest thought, influenced to some extent by the revisionist Marxist Louis Althusser, concentrated on monarchical, judicial, repressive and top-down conception of power, xxiv his later major works such as Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, when he found his own voice, give us his mature conception of power. In these later work Foucault focused on the view that individuals are constituted by power relations, power as the ultimate principle of social reality.

Foucault’s final thesis is that subjects are constituted by power and he derives this directly from Nietzsche (who remarked that an internalized moral control of behaviour can only be inculcated through threats and violence).xxv In doing this he moved away from his previous adherence to Marxism and noted that Nietzsche’s contemporary presence is increasingly important. It was Nietzsche who specified the power relation as the general focus, whereas for Marx it was the relation of production. Nietzsche is the philosopher of power, a philosopher who managed to think of power without having to confine himself within a political theory in order to do so. It is, of course, the interdependence of power and knowledge (pouvoir-savoir) that constitutes the strategic fulcrum of Foucault’s later work.

4. 2. Foucault on power. Traditionally, power has often been thought of in negative terms and been seen as an essentially judicial mechanism: as that which lays down the law, which limits, obstructs, refuses, prohibits and censors. It presupposes a sovereign whose role is to forbid. In other words to have power is to say ‘No’. Consequently, the challenging of power thus conceived can appear only as transgression. Foucault accepted this view without question in his early work. However, he later realized after reading Nietzsche that this view was unsustainable and the entire issue of power needed to be reformulated. He then replaced a judicial, negative conception of power with a technical and strategic one. Modern power

10 operates through the construction of ‘new’ capacities and modes of activity rather than through the limitation of pre-existing ones. In his earlier writings Foucault saw coercive forces and practices as dominating selves and power as “repressive”. Later he dropped the concept of repression because “repression is quite inadequate for capturing what is precisely the productive aspect of power ... (and) this (repression) is a wholly negative, narrow conception of power”.xxvi Following Nietzsche closely, Foucault now saw power as productive, it creates or makes people, it can be positive and not merely negative and it is this latter positive notion of power which is to be found in his later writings.

Thus, he argues that power is not a possession or a capacity. It is not something subordinate to or in the service of the economy. In the later works he insists that relations of power do not emanate from a sovereign or a state; nor should power be conceptualized as the property of an individual or class. Power is not simply a commodity which may be acquired or seized. Rather it has the character of a network; its threads extend everywhere. (One can see here the relationship between his thought and that of Deleuze and Guattari in their concepts of the “rhizome” and “the plateau”). Foucault suggests that an analysis of power should concentrate not on the level of conscious intention but on the point of application of power. In other words, he wants to shift attention from questions such as “Who has the power?”, or “What intentions or aims do power holders have?”, to the processes [the Deleuzian “becomings”] by which subjects are constituted as effects of power. Thus, Foucault rejects analyses which locate the source of origin of power within a structure or an institution at a centre or summit. His view calls into question the Marxist notion of conflict between a ruling class and a subordinate class. He states that the mechanisms, techniques and procedures of power were not invented by the bourgeoisie, were not the creation of a class seeking to exercise effective forms of domination; rather they were deployed by the bourgeoisie from the moment that they revealed their political and economic utility for them.

4. 3. Knowledge and power For Foucault, then, conceiving of power as repression, constraint or prohibition is inadequate. It is power which “produces reality” (one might see an instance of this in the

11 well known expression “only the victors write history”, and it is the victors version alone that we get). Power consequently “produces truth”. The exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new knowledge(s). Conversely, the knowledge thus created induces the effects of power. It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power. Foucault’s constant emphasis on power and on discourse provides a unifying core to his work. He argues that power no longer operates through a straightforward “top-down” mechanism where those in authority exert various forms of coercive restraint upon the mass of more or less compliant subjects. In his view complex differential power relationships extend to every aspect of our social, cultural and political lives, involving all manner of (often contradictory) “subject- positions”, and securing our assent not so much by the threat of punitive sanctions as by persuading us to internalize the norms and values that prevail within the social order.

4. 4. The Foucaldian subject Foucault asserts that we should not view the subject as the knowing, willing, autonomous, self-critical or “transcendental” subject of Kantian discourse. We should now understand the subject as a locus of multiple, dispersed or decentred discourses. For Foucault, the death of the “transcendental subject” removes the very ground of truth- telling moral authority that Noam Chomsky and Jean-Paul Sartre claimed to occupy. Foucault is highly critical of such intellectuals with their universalist aspirations seeking to act as the intellectual conscience of their age. This goes with his belief in the micro- politics of localized struggles and specific power relations.

In Foucault’s view, we have to acknowledge that the Enlightenment was one particular historically dated and culture specific discourse whose truth-claims and values amounted to no more than a transient episode in the modern history of ideas. History is often used to describe a homogenizing approach to the past and is often associated with a master narrative. (Here he is in agreement with Lyotard as we will see). In contrast, Foucault adopts a Nietzschean or genealogical perspective which treats all truth-claims as products of the ubiquitous “will-to-power” within language, discourse or representation.

12 Following Nietzsche, yet again, Foucault analyses the transition from a state of overt violence and brutality to a condition of internalized restraint. He argues that the physical confinement and repression that occurred in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries left a greater power and freedom to madness than modern methods of treatment, which aim at transforming the consciousness of the insane.xxvii Where formerly there had been the “free terror of madness” there now reigns the “stifling anguish of responsibility”. This regime of incessant observation and judgement forms the conditions for the internalization of morality. As Peter Dews has observed, what Foucault is really talking about here is not the specific regime of the modern asylum but the makings of modern subjectivity.xxviii

Foucault is against the philosophical tradition which takes for granted that human subjects are responsible and autonomous. He is critical of the notion of the subject as a self-contained responsible individual throughout his work. In Discipline and Punish Foucault wrote that the Panopticon creates subjects responsible for their own subjection. Self-enslavement is the moment of horror. The book can be read as a parable about human subjectivity. At one time the ruler was individualized and the mass was anonymous. Now the bureaucracy is anonymous and the subject is individualized. In Foucault there are many separate, individual prisoners who are subject to “the look” or “the gaze” of bureaucracy. He believes that ideology will not end in the future, that there will never be a transparent society. The inmates in the Benthamite circular building (the Panopticon) do not know when they are being observed from the central tower, and so they tend to behave as if they are always under surveillance.

4. 5. Foucault and humanism Foucault is an anti-humanist as humanism was then understood.xxix Some of the characteristic features of humanism include the Cartesian notion of the subject: ‘I think, therefore I am. I have intentions, purposes, goals, therefore I am the sole source and free agent of my actions.’ Humanism is associated with ‘methodological individualism’ (the idea that societies consist only of individuals), and is often accompanied by the belief that social relations in an ideal society will be transparent. Foucault argues that such

13 unconditional emancipation, whether that of communism, socialism, or liberalism, is a dangerous fantasy. He regards humanism as an error. In his anti-humanist, anti-liberal attitude he pinned his revolutionary beliefs upon a micro-politics exercised as resistance.

5. Nietzsche and Heidegger The importance of Friederich Nietzsche’s thought in underpinning postmodernist thinking, and that of Foucault in particular, has been a key feature of my presentations, as indeed has the later thought of Martin Heidegger, with particular respect to Derrida, and I have attempted to trace their influence on these postmodernist thinkers – as well as the influence of Nietzsche on Heidegger himself.xxx I do not intend to look at either Derrida’s or Deleuze’s work again in this final paper as we have just spent the previous two sessions assessing the latter’s work and the three prior to this on Derrida. Time is unfortunately limited. Not only have they perhaps deservedly taken up half of the 10 sessions but their work should, hopefully, be fairly fresh in your memories unlike the thinkers we tackled well before the summer break: Foucault and Lyotard. I will just remind you though that Deleuze’s philosophy can be summarized as an experiment in thinking differently, “beyond” the re-presentations or representation inherent in as he sees it a commonsensical, re-presentational lack of thought. His project offers us a “new image of thought”, one in which process and becoming, invention and creativity, are privileged over stasis, identity and recognition.

6. Jean-François Lyotard Lyotard famously described postmodernist thinking as “an incredulity towards metanarratives”. In Lyotard’s view, we have now seen through grand (or meta-) narratives and realize that their claims to authority are false or unsustainable. Thus in The Postmodern Condition, a seminal work of postmodernism,xxxi he echoes this and many other arguments of Nietzsche. Lyotard describes such grand narratives as theories which claim to provide universal explanations and trade on the authority this gives them. Religions, for example, offer an all-embracing grand narrative to fit their particular schemes as a total explanation of human history. Lyotard’s contention is that such schemes are implicitly authoritarian, and that nowadays they have lost all claim to

14 authority over individual behaviour. It is part of living in a postmodern world that we can no longer rely on such grand narratives but must construct more tactically oriented “little narratives” instead if we wish to stand up against authoritarianism, he argues. Such little narratives may possibly be equated with Foucault’s advocacy of local, small-scale but tenacious subservice resistances to hegemonic state power.

A good example of an Enlightenment era grand narrative is Marxism, which Lyotard was particularly committed to prior to the événements of May 1968 and the failed revolution in France.xxxii Lyotard condemned the Marxists for failing to follow the initiative seized in the streets, and split definitively with them, the bitterest fruit of which can be seen in his Libidinal Economy.xxxiii Marxism is now seen by him as just another totalising “grand narrative” which allows for no deviations or other explanations by processing all human history and social behaviour through its theory of dialectical materialism. As such it is highly reductionist only allowing for one perspective and one explanation of everything. Thus, according to dialectical materialism all human history has been the history of class struggle, and it denies the validity of all other explanations and lays sole claim to the truth. The ultimate goal of human history is the “withering away of the state” achieved through the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, at which point class struggle has been eliminated for the common good, individuals are no longer exploited and history effectively comes to an end in the workers’ Utopia.

6. 1. Daniel Bell, the ‘end of ideology’ and a postmodern politics.xxxiv The collapse of this particular grand narrative is what provoked Lyotard to adopt the analysis of the ‘end of ideology’ proffered by the politically right-of-centre theorist of post-industrial society, Daniel Bell.xxxv But it also led him to proclaim the dawn of a postmodernity in politics: a consistent and extended rewriting of politics, its goals, its methods and its ideals, that has resulted in his own philosophical return to ‘Kant after Marx and Freud’, and in his rejection of the hegemony of Marxist political and Freudian libidinal economies in favour of analyses of the potentialities for thought and action offered by the raw materials of the social bond found in language and the exchange of words. This philosophical ‘back to basics’ campaign, reached its fullest philosophical

15 statement in The Differend,xxxvi and may be initially seen as paradoxical. Why return to the arch advocate of reason when the so-called “Masters of Suspicion”: Marx, Freud and Nietzsche had comprehensively undermined Kant’s arguments according to postmodernist thinkers in general, and provided the basis for their thought?

6. 2. Lyotard’s Kantian return: “the sublime”. Lyotard replies that for Kant, the sublime is that which exceeds all our powers of representation, an experience for which we can find no adequate sensuous or conceptual mode of apprehension. It differs from the beautiful in so far as it affords no sense of harmonious balance or agreement between these faculties. The sublime figures for Kant as a means of expressing (by analogy) what would otherwise be strictly inexpressible.xxxvii Lyotard believes that the Kantian sublime points to the impossible or incommensurable differences between various discourses, “forms of life”, or language games. This means for him that the aesthetic “arena” (Lyotard tended to think in warlike terms) is distinct, separate and opposed to the techno-scientific language game. Science cannot be aestheticised in other words, nor can aesthetics be subjected to scientific analysis.

6. 3. The Postmodern Condition: Language and communication today. In his best known work, The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard argues that during the last half century the leading sciences and technologies have become far more concerned with language than ever before: computers and their languages, AI, problems of translation, information storage, data banks, theories of linguistics and problems of communication across various scientific and technological fields are now increasingly important. The unstated and perhaps unconscious aim is to homogenize language, and all other language games, and hence knowledge in total and reduce it to computerised communication. Consequently, he argues that whatever knowledge cannot be computerised must be rejected as worthless.

6. 4. Lyotard and Wittgenstein

16 The ‘linguistic turn’ which Lyotard’s thinking took was influenced in large part by his exposure to the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Philosophical Investigations,xxxviii rather than the semiotics of the Swiss structuralist de Saussure,xxxix whom the deconstructionist postmodernists Derrida, de Man and Roland Barthes as well as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan reacted against but to whom they remained ultimately indebted. After the Tractatus,xl in which he saw language as picturing reality, Wittgenstein became more and more troubled by aspects of language which simply did not fit into his schema. He now saw that his picture book theory of language was deficient, as a whole variety of language games existed, each with their own individual and often distinct rules. (This was the incommensurability between language games and areas of discourse which Lyotard was seeking to highlight. They could not be brought together or reconciled. Here again we see distinct parallels between Foucauldian discourses and Lyotard’s approach.) The underpinning rules of individual language games do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are objects of contract between participants, and may well be incompatible with other language games. One thing is certain though each game must have its own rules. Without rules no game can exist.

6. 4. 1. Wittgenstein and ‘Private Language’. By dismissing the very idea of a ‘Private Language’, Wittgenstein’s concept of a society linguistically and therefore conceptually and practically composed of ‘language games’ underpins much of Lyotard’s thinking in The Postmodern Condition. In using Wittgenstein’s thought he concludes that far from flattening out the field of postmodern events and enclosing them within the horizons of linguistic possibilities, as Derrida and particularly his follower de Man have often been held to do,xli linguistic events come to form the “particles in Brownian motion”xlii that unpredictably coalesce into extremely heterogeneous series of social, political, aesthetic, scientific and technological phenomena, allowing his own philosophy to explore everything from the minutiae of the narrative organization of modern philosophies to the fate of thinking and humanity after the death of our system’s Sun.xliii 6. 5. Multi-national corporations, big government and language games.

17 Yet, Lyotard is deeply concerned about the restrictions on the development of new games being perpetrated by financial pressures imposed by multi-national corporations and big government, just as he is concerned about the subsuming of all knowledge within the techno-scientific language game. Thus, he distinguished the denotative or scientific language game in which what is relevant is truth or falsity and the technological game in which the efficient/ inefficient distinction is paramount, from the many prescriptive or narrative games in which morality or the just/ unjust distinction appertains.

As Lyotard sees it in today’s world the narrative or prescriptive language games which preserved our traditional cultural and social mores and moralities and told us how to behave and think through myths, legends, tales and popular stories, are being increasingly replaced by a combination of the denotative and technological games in which the goal is performance, that is, the best possible input/ output equation, as the abstract, logical and cognitive procedures of science are increasingly allied to the technological efficiency criterion of technology through multi-national and governmental requirements and capitalistic funding pressures. Moreover, scientists, technicians and instruments are in effect purchased as commodities not to find truth, but to augment the power of these funders. Since performativity increases the ability to produce required proof, it also increases the ability to be right; the technological criterion cannot fail to influence and even override the truth criterion.

6. 6. Lyotard on education. The shift of attention from ends of action to its means, from truth to performativity, is also reflected in present-day educational policy. It has been clear for some time that educational institutions are becoming more functional; the emphasis is on technical skills rather than ideals. It is probable that in the near future knowledge will no longer be transmitted en bloc to young people, once and for all; rather it will be served ‘a la carte’ to adults as a part of their job retraining and continuing technical education.

To the extent that learning is translatable into computer language and the traditional teacher is replaceable by memory banks, didactics (teaching) will be entrusted to

18 machines linking traditional memory banks (libraries, etc.) and computer data banks to terminals placed at the students’ disposal.

The question now being asked by the student, the state or the university is no longer ‘Is it true?’ but ‘What use is it?’ In the context of the mercantilization of knowledge, more often than not this question is equivalent to: ‘Is it saleable?’ And in the context of power- growth for the multi-nationals: ‘Is it efficient?’ Thus, Lyotard points out that it is clear that education must provide for the reproduction and progression of skills above anything else. Therefore training must be given in all the procedures that can increase one’s ability to connect the fields once jealously guarded from one another by the traditional organization of knowledge. What is vitally important for students to have is the capacity to actualize the relevant data for solving a problem here and now, and to organize that data into an efficient strategy for progress. Data banks are the encyclopaedia of tomorrow; they have become the raw material of ‘nature’ for postmodern men and women. What is important is arranging the data in a new and productive way. This capacity to articulate what used to be separate can be called imagination. It is imagination which allows one either to make a new move (a new argument) within the established rules or to invent new rules, that is to say, a new language game.

6. 7. Maintaining the scientific and technological status quo. Yet, Lyotard writes that countless scientists have seen their invention of new rules ignored or repressed, sometimes for decades, because that invention too abruptly destabilized the accepted positions, not only in the university and scientific hierarchy but also in the discipline itself. The more striking the invention, the more likely it is to be denied the minimum consensus, precisely because it changes the rules of the game upon which consensus had been based. Lyotard argues that such behaviour is terrorist. By terror he means the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from one’s language game. He is silenced or consents, not because he has been refuted but because the other players’ ability to participate has been threatened: ‘Adapt your aspirations to our ends – or else ...’. Again we see the parallels here between Deleuze’s thought on re-presentation/ representation of the same as denying thought, and Lyotard’s

19 argument.

In many respects Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition published nearly 30 years ago in 1979 has proven to be a highly prescient text, pointing out the way in which techno- scientific thinking would come to dominate the postmodern world and how traditional ideas of a liberal education would be increasingly erased by the technological education demanded in the global market place. His return to Kant was not intended as a return to Enlightenment rationality but through employment of the Kantian “sublime” as a means of differentiating the various language games or discourses as essentially incommensurable and incapable of being subsumed within a rational techno-scientific discourse. The state and big business pressure to emphasise the techno-scientific language game as the only one worth pursuing, a trend which has evidently increased since Lyotard’s time,xliv is contested in his philosophy.

6. 8. Lyotard, Marx and postmodern politics.xlv Lyotard constantly returned to the question of the political bite of his analyses. He recognised that nothing has replaced the critical and imaginative power of the Marxist narrative. Yet at the same time he is aware that his rejection of the Marxist programme is more compelling still. This dichotomy lies at the core of Lyotard’s understanding of postmodernity: our modern programmes are refuted, yet there are no successors. He concludes that Postmodernity is a period without a programme, where we must work over philosophically the accumulated debits of Modernity while experimenting with its fundamentals to invent another. (Again it is the conception of inventing or creating new thought which aligns Lyotard with the Deleuzoguattarian concept of thinking “pure difference”). It is in this sense that postmodernity for him comes not at the end but at the beginning of modernity. Thus, postmodernism precedes modernity and prepares its re- emergence in some new and historically unexpected flowering of what was once new in ‘High Modern’ literature and art. This possibility of an aesthetic remaking of the self clearly echoes Nietzsche’s thinking, despite an apparent rejection of it.xlvi

20 i John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p.36. ii The Enlightenment project: A broad trend within European philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, associated mainly with Locke and the British deists, Voltaire, Diderot and the French Encyclopedists, and the critical philosophy of Kant. The period is often described as the Age of Reason. An important aspect of the Enlightenment period is the compilation of the first modern encyclopedias which claimed to provide a compendium of the whole of human knowledge.

Enlightenment philosophy is critical of all forms of traditional authority, and particularly of those associated with religion and feudalism. It seeks to replace fear and superstition with consent and truth and looks forward to the establishment of a social order based upon reason and natural law. Once the particularisms of local customs and beliefs are stripped away, a universal humanity will be revealed, and that humanity will be capable of infinite perfectibility. Kant famously defines the Enlightenment as man’s emergence from a self-incurred immaturity and writes that the motto of Enlightenment is ‘Sapere aude: have courage to use your own understanding’ (1784). The forty-eighth etching in Goya’s Los Caprichos (Caprices) series of 1799 supplies an icon to match Kant’s motto. A writer or philosopher has fallen asleep over his manuscript, and the air is filled with bats, owls and other nightmarish creatures. The caption reads: “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos” (“The sleep of reason produces monsters”).

Philosophers such as Kant regarded the Enlightenment as a linear and irreversible process, but later writers such as Adorno and Horkheimer argue that it was a “dialectic of Enlightenment” with frequently contradictory and sometimes dangerous effects. A wakeful reason, that is, can produce monsters of its own. The precise nature of the Enlightenment, the supposed universality of its values (rationality, tolerance, equality of rights) and the worth of its grand narratives of emancipation continue to be debated in discussions of the origins of modernity involving thinkers as diverse as Habermas and Foucault. For Lyotard, skepticism about the Enlightenment’s grand narratives, which promise that humanity will be liberated by rational knowledge, is one of the hallmarks of the age of postmodernity. iii Klee’s painting can be viewed on the internet at: http://www.leedstrinity.ac.uk/depart/media/staff/ls/WBenjamin/Angelus.html iv Walter Benjamin, “Ninth thesis” from “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations ed. by Hannah Arendt (London and New York: Fontana/Collins, 1992), pp.255-269. v Though I’ve noticed that first degree philosophy courses are frequently advertised in the following terms nowadays: “If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A., study philosophy instead”; “The Office of Career Planning and Placement reports in ‘A Comparative Study by Major of Law School Admission Test Performance’, that the average Law School Admissions Test score for a philosophy major at that school was approximately 15 points higher than the average for any other major. In addition, the American Medical Association conducted a study in which they found philosophy majors had the third highest acceptance rate into American medical schools”. (University of Virginia’s web site). vi Alan D. Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998); Francis Wheen, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions (London: Harper Collins and Fourth Estate, 2004); Timothy Bewes, Cynicism and Postmodernity (London and New York: Verso, 1997); Roger Scruton, ‘Whatever Happened to Reason?’, City Journal, vol. 9. (New York, Spring 1999); Richard Dawkins, ‘Post- Modernism Disrobed’, Nature (9 July 1998); Mary Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ethics (London: Duckworth, 1998); Raymond Tallis, ‘The Shrink from Hell’, The Times Higher, October 31 1997; etc. vii Frederic Jameson, ‘Theories of the Postmodern’, in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 (London and New York: Verso, 1998), pps.29, 30. viii For example, Julian Stallabrass eschews the term postmodern art in his Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), holding that “… culture has thoroughly assimilated the discourse of a tamed postmodernism … art’s very lack of convention has become entirely conventional”, and “ Postmodern theory itself … lost its critical and ethical force .. buffeted by attacks on its internal absurdities .. it was less replaced than lost sight of …”, etc., etc. pp.53-54. ix “Philosophical Foundationalism” relates to Descartes’ famous method whereby all genuine knowledge must be built upon some indisputable first truth, such as the cogito, as the unquestioned foundation of the self, and that everything that follows if soundly reasoned will be valid. x “Intuitional normativism” or Descartes’ empiricism assumes that reality is in effect transparent and that if we are perspicacious in our observations we shall see the world as it truly is. xi Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense’, in The Nietzsche Reader, eds Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp.114-122. xii Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983). xiii Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London and New York: Verso, 1994). xiv Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock Press, 1974). xv Discourse analysis is the study of the use of language as it flows or unfolds, as opposed to the rather atomistic sentence-based focus of stylistics or traditional linguistics. It is associated primarily with the philosopher Paul Grice (H. P. Grice, Aspects of Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); The Concept of Value (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005)) who stressed that speakers make sense of utterances because they are embedded within a hinterland of assumptions and expectations about what speech is and how it functions. Every community shares a body of knowledge which is implicitly activated by any one semantic exchange. This body of knowledge shapes the norms of intelligibility which will determine whether or not a statement is perceived as true, clear and relevant.

Grice was influenced by J. L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), who distinguished between two main types of utterance. A performative speech-act performs an action, such as naming a ship, or legally pronouncing some couple to be ‘man and wife’. In contrast, a constative speech-act is a simple statement of fact, such as ‘This is a big ship’. While constatives can be true or false, truth criteria are not applicable to performatives: they can only succeed or fail. What, then, determines the success of a performative? Austin’s answer was: context. It is the surrounding social frame that governs appropriateness or ‘felicitousness’. Austin was at pains to separate ordinary language from what he called the ‘parasitic’ uses of language to be found in fiction, poetry and drama. He argued that these utterances were never intended to succeed or fail in relation to the performance of an action, and so should be treated as exceptions to the rule. A challenge was made to this model by the post-structuralist Jacques Derrida in his paper ‘Signature, Event, Context’ (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988) delivered at a French colloquium in 1971. Derrida disputes that context is sufficient to ground a performative utterance. Indeed he claims that speech is parasitic upon writing. The iterability (repeatedness/ frequency) of the written word through print undermines the power of context to make sense of utterances by referring to a located speaker. xvi Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A history of insanity in the Age of Reason trans. by Richard Howard (London: Routledge, 2001). xvii Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: an archaeology of medical perception, trans. by A. M. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2003). xviii Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2003). xix Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962). xx Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). xxi Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1980). xxii Or as Nietzsche put it “the will to truth”. xxiii Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol. 2: The Uses of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1986); The History of Sexuality vol. 3: The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage, 1988). xxiv Michel Foucalt, ‘Two Lectures’, in Power/ Knowledge, ed. by Colin Gordon(New York and Brighton: Harvester Press/ Pantheon, 1980), pp.93-95. xxv Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality. xxvi Michel Foucalt, ‘Truth and Power’, in Power/ Knowledge, ed. By Colin Gordon (New York and Brighton: Harvester Press/ Pantheon, 1980), p.119. xxvii Foucault, Madness and Civilization. xxviii Peter Dews, ‘Power and Subjectivity in Foucault’, New Left Review, vol. 144 (March-April 1984), p.72. xxix Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An essay in Antihumanism , trans. By Mary Cattani (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,1990), pp. 68-121; but see Jack Grassby, Postmodern Humanism: A Rough Guide to Belief in the Twenty First Century (Washington, UK: TUPS Books, 2005) and his more nuanced paper “A Postmodern Humanism: A Rational Relative Perspective”, given to the Café Philosophique of The Newcastle Philosophy Society on Saturday, 20th October 2007 and available on their web site: http://www.newphilsoc.org.uk/ xxx In session four we began to get to grips with Heidegger’s philosophy, or philosophies, for there are many different Heidegger’s and, moreover, his outlook changed and developed over the years. However, the overall aim of these sessions was not to examine in depth the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger – philosophies which we have seen have been most influential on postmodernist thinkers – but to look at those aspects of their work which have had a significant impact on postmodern thinking. xxxi Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). xxxii For 15 years Lyotard was a militant in a small left wing group called Socialisme ou Barbarie. This Trotskyist group developed a critique of Soviet bureaucracy. It argued that both the USA and the Soviet Union were state capitalist countries. xxxiii Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. By Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Continuum, 2004). xxxiv See also 6.8 below. xxxv Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973); The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978). xxxvi Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). xxxvii Central to Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern is the Kantian notion of the sublime as confirming the incommensurability of taking reality as pure Idea and then treating it as a concept which can act as a tool of human understanding. This is in contradistinction to the beautiful which has the effect of seeming to affirm a realisable correspondence between internal and external orders. Sublimity, for Kant, is that experience of an object which invokes an idea of pure reason, but one which is radically indeterminate and cannot be formulated or known. Kant suggests that the imagination, in this mode, can excite in us ideas which cannot be realised in sensory form, though the experience in itself liberates us into a sense of the magnitude of the human mind. Lyotard’s sublime is a self-consciously postmodern mode in which all striving for correspondence between the Real and concept is abandoned: the aesthetic is to be preserved in the form of a non-utilitarian autonomy. Thus, in his seminal works on postmodernity, The Postmodern Condition and The Differend, he contradicts what most critics assume to be central to all Postmodernisms: the Nietzschean aestheticisation of politics, knowledge and ethics. xxxviii Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958). xxxix Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. R. Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983). xl Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1961). xli Jacques Derrida (in)famously said ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-text’ or ‘There is no outside text’ (Of Grammatology (Baltimore, 1976), p.158). This has been frequenly misquoted by his enemies as ‘There is nothing outside the text’, rather than ‘the text/ language is self-contained’. In this he was merely echoing de Saussure’s linguistic focus and Derrida has always denied this nonsensical misinterpretion which indicates that he believed only language existed. xlii ‘Brownian motion’: The ceaseless irregular motion of dust particles which is observed in liquids and gases. This observation provided early evidence for the random heat motion of the underlying molecules which occur on a much finer scale. xliii Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Here he spells out he threat of AI, AL( Artificial Life), and ‘Artilects’ – Artificial Intellects composed of massively poweful AI systems. xliv Lyotard died in 1998. xlv See above 6.1. xlvi In The Postmodern Condition and The Differend.