infinitely powerful, painfully inadequate

For me, Lyotard’s Appendix, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” helps to clarify his argument about the status of knowledge in postmodern, “computerized” societies presented in the core of his book.

He conceives of a public that is collectively stagnated through the desire for order and totality at the expense of creativity and individuality. Lyotard depicts this trend through the realm of the art world, in which power emerges in the form of a set of established rules, which dictate artistic creation through the “call for order, for identity, for security, for popularity” (73). According to Lyotard, the artists which follow the “correct rules,” produce works that are able to fulfill their pacifying role and “reassure” the public only through the “deceit” of representing a fantasy of reality (74). Through this power structure, Lyotard perceives culture as contaminated by a sentiment of “slackening,” in which individual artistic taste is dissolved into the submissive consumption of “eclectic works” (76). Driving this epoch of “eclecticism,” the power of capital requires artists to skillfully market their works towards the target consumer population of the public, and therefore generate nothing that explores new, experimental forms. He equates this structure of power with terror, in which rules are enacted to encourage the dangerously misguided pursuit of totality. Similarly, Lyotard seems to realize this “terror” as a consequence of the legitimation of scientific knowledge by performativity. On 63 he states how, “The stronger the “move,” the more likely it is to be denied the minimum consensus, precisely because it changes the rules of the game upon which consensus has been based.” The player who tries to move outside the game is therefore silenced by the “terrorist” behavior of a power center that limits the generation of “inefficient” ideas.

I want to examine the new, productive power structure that emerges for Lyotard which will remove this threat of terror. In his appendix, he presents an alternative, “infinitely powerful” structure which reveals itself as “painfully inadequate” in its ability to be represented by reality (78). The productive pain that embodies an awareness of the incapacity to reach a unified coherence stands in direct opposition to the restraining terror that emerges from thinking that the representation of reality is possible. Lyotard, therefore, depicts a structure of power that drives a culture towards the exploration of what is unanswerable, as opposed to a power regime that requires the public dependence on its rule for easy, predictable answers. Similarly, Lyotard distinguishes Postmodern science as functioning more appropriately through a legitimation of paralogy, which introduces, “the existence of a power that destabilizes the capacity for explanation,” and does not presume the predictability of scientific discoveries (61).

It’s interesting to think about this power structure in juxtaposition to the other forms of power that Lyotard disparages. What might it mean for science or politics or a system of power to seek the unanswerable/ the instabilities, and to for-go predictable answers? Science tends to try and supply solutions to things, to answer problems..what would a power based on the unanswerable look like?