Bildung

In the 12th section of his book, Lyotard poses that in the postmodern age of technocracy, "what we are approaching is not the end of knowledge--quite the contrary. Data banks are the Encyclopedia of tomorrow. They transcend the capacity of each of their users. They are "nature" for postmodern man." (p. 51)

The argument is that an essential transformation has occurred within the university as an institution of legitimation. Under the stressors of new technological development, namely information technologies, the university has necessarily had to reorient itself in order to maintain its position as a bildung project. Given the ability to access vast stores of information, a collective memory of sorts, it becomes the student's imperative to be able to 1) access and navigate this information, and 2) formulate new connections between this data, what Lyotard calls "imagination." (p. 52) The "Spirit of speculation" of Humboldt's university model was sought after in a regimented fashion, but this Spirit has now become a spectre--what matters to the postmodern student is the ability to transcend barriers in creative ways. What is also augmented is the bildungsroman project as it is traditionally understood.

This project was traditionally composed of two currents unified by the Spirit: the acquisition of learning by individuals, and the training of a "fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society." (p. 33) Bildung could be seen as a tool of the state, that is, as a nationalist process that aimed to endow new generations of its population with the necessary tools and skills to perpetuate the nation. Lyotard rejects this notion, however, in stating that thinkers such as Humboldt held up the speculative spirit as outside of authoritarianism. The postmodern condition changes this, for a rejection of such grand-narratives forces a crisis in the bildung project: science is removed from the game of self-legitimation by technology. This allows the process of the "growth of power, and its self-legitimation... taking the route of data storage and accessibility, and the operativity of information." (p. 47)

The bildungsroman project has changed from the personal growth of an individual resulting from that individual trying to find her/his place in a homeostatic society, to that of the postmodern bildungsroman wherein the protagonist finds her/himself constantly displaced as the narrator within the stores and flows of information which constitute a dynamic society. Yet it maintains a distinct bourgeois character: the first carried assumptions about the relative autonomy and integrity of the self (individualism), while the second is embedding within the material culture of aristocratic access. What has changed, however, is the means and the ends of the narration. For postmodern, cyborg subjects, the bildungsroman is about learning what it means to be human, a process mediated by technologies--the process is paralogical.

Lyotard argues that paralogy avoids terror, or the arbitrary removal of certain voices from discussion. It also operates on locality, thus allowing for an individualist ethos to surface: it privileges the "here and now," a product of the university's attempt to stimulate imagination. What endangers the bildungsroman of the postmodern error is precisely its bourgeois nature: the danger of people being left out of loop, of being unable to participate--thus Lyotard's request on the closing page of his essay to "give the public free access to the memory and data banks." (p. 67) It cannot be assumed that those without access to technology are incapable of producing "local statements," therefore the material nature of technology has to be worked through before paralogy can become a useful tool of new knowledge production.