One point that did trouble me, relevant to Sinje's comment below, is that although most of the text seems descriptive of the postmodern times in which Lyotard finds himself, injected into this is a very prescriptive notion of the ways in which information should be treated and by which science and society should construct themselves (through little narratives, via paralogy, local rules, &c.). Although I'm easily enchanted by utopian visions of multiple narrative, decenteredness, and open access to information, it seems as though there is still in the State an imposing metanarrative. I don't know that Lyotard explicitly denies this-- in his arguments on power one can easily read politics and economics, but omissions like this make some of his grander ideas more difficult for me to seriously apprehend. He makes statements that are profoundly apt in today's society: "The games of scientific language become the games of the rich, in which whoever is wealthiest has the best chance of being right" (45); but then these fade away amidst some of his broader ideas.

So considered, perhaps a single place from which I might be able to better work through his theory as a whole is where he describes reality on page 47. Is this sentence a definition of reality, even if necessarily a local one? Or simply a comorbidity of it? Because his concept of reality here is important in structuring elements of his argument, whether he is in the very delineation of terms being descriptive or prescriptive is very important. That is, do we take him to mean: "since 'reality' [qua physical world experienced through senses, &c.] is what provides the evidence..." or instead that "reality" as a term is here meant to mean "that [abstract entity which] provides the evidence....". Which perhaps comes down to his notion of the real and thus circles in some way right back to descriptive/prescriptive....

Other things: I like paralogy as the model (you know, of course: 'model'-but-without-the-outside-ideal-ness-that-model-connotes,-albeit-more-groundedly-denotative-than-'metaphor'). Unrelatedly but also a neat potential point of discussion: Bill Gates's "creative capitalism" sprung to mind at several moments as I read this text, although whether it owes a lot to or makes a travesty of the relevant parts I'm yet undecided.

Also interesting is that although cybernetics, information, and computerization figure into Lyotard's ideas, I don't think he anywhere talks about computing machines or the physical objects of technology that are thereby implicated, other than the "memory and data banks" that would store I guess all information society knows to that point. Although I can speak only to the American and not French history of computers, in 1979, computers were far from common but they weren't exactly new. If anything, they were more expensive and less likely to be owned or even used by the average person than one might consider a computer today. So besides some of the power dynamic behind computers and programming that I'd like to consider further and maybe discuss in class, I wonder how Lyotard saw "free [public] access" to computerized information taking place.