Modern Post-Modernity

Just a few quick thoughts on Lyotard. 

First, I think that his analysis of higher education might be a little too hasty. There is a kind of truth to the statement made on page 48 that education functions to create actors within specific fields. In our current political climate, I think that that is in some part the criticism that is lobbied towards educational initiatives such as "No Child Left Behind". Rather then teaching for the sake of precisely a sort of humanist emancipation, education is being turned towards the creation of functional societal actor to be inserted into technical and vocational fields. I mean that this type of educational structure is strictly correlative with post-modernism. This type of training structure has been around, I would argue, as long as any sort of teaching has existed. In fact, within the modern education structure, the university is precisely the place where this type of pedagogy is contested. If anything this split within pedagogy is precisely what would prevent the transformation of professors into information banks and processors. 

Second, on the idea of the legitimation of scientific knowledge, specifically the ideas on page 61 pertaining to Kuhnian paradigms. I think that Lyotard makes a really good argument concerning the nature of narratives. However, I do think that he is missing one type of function, that of predicability that seems to be missing from his narrative survey. At any rate, the denotative, prescriptive, and performative are things that are exterior to knowledge yet act upon it. Predicability seems however, to be the internal meta-condition for scientific legitimacy. This is why I feel that his analysis of paradigms and scientific knowledge is overly simplistic. Legitimation requires the interplay of interior and exterior factors. This is I think the point Kuhn makes in relation to Galileo. It was the complex interplay of cultural mores and the need for newer predicability problematics that defined the advent of that paradigm. 

Third, the last point that Lyotard makes on 67 appears to be his only regression to a kind of emancipatory statement. Yet, there is again a need for a further delineation between software and hardware in terms of access. Yes, free access to knowledge would be good. However, knowledge doesn't exist in cloud. It's access is barred and constrained by not just a variety of corporate and statist factors but also the very material constraints of hardware access. As such, I don't think that Marxist analysis of real existing conditions can be thoroughly discounted. 

Additionally, Section 5.1 of Licklider made me laugh. It illustrates, I think, a somewhat truism concerning both science-fiction literature and scientific writing. On one hand the futures predicated still seem quite far-fetched. Realistically, we are still far from Neuromancer or a true man-machine symbiosis. On the other hand, something like the iphone could have conceivably blown Licklider's mind. Also, the answer is of course 42.