- Jean-Francois Lyotard in
The Post Modern Condition: A Report on the Condition of
Knowledge, traces the direction of scientific,
philosophic and linguistic inquiry through the study of
language, linguistics, translation, information theory,
semiotics, physics, genetic coding, cybernetics and
knowledge storage. Lyotard observes that the proliferation
of information processing technology has changed the
nature of knowledge and its transmission by way of
capitalist economies.
- The increasing tendency to
commodify culture fosters the transformation of knowledge
into information merchandise. New theorists propose that
the coin of future discourse is the attention span of
knowledge users in what Michael Goldhaber terms the
“attention economy,” or what Guy Debord and the
Situationist call the “spectacle as commodity” or
the “cyber-spectacle”. Marketing and advertising
recognize the principle of diminishing attention. In
Web Studies (2002), George Goggin’s “Pay Per Browse”
portrays potential internet charge schemes.
- These cultural transformations
promote new bodies and agencies of political and economic
power that legitimatize and authenticate knowledge. As
Lyotard points out, the knowledge power paradigm has been
a fact of history since antiquity. Socrates is a case in
point. Lyotard proposes that the study of knowledge is
the study of language and he builds on Wittgenstein’s
game theory. Lyotard claims speech acts are language games
with three general rules: 1. rules for language moves are
based in the social contract which changes, 2. if there
are no rules there is no game and hence no communication,
and 3. speech acts or game moves are agonistic or
frictional. These agnostic moves alter exiting boundaries
and serve to keep the game moving by maintaining
discourse.
- Thus as Lyotard states; “the
observable social bond is composed of language moves”(6).
To discuss language is to discuss the transmission of
knowledge in the social condition. The status of knowledge
in discourse is continually challenged by new modes of
access and changing institutions of control. Contrary to
some poststructuralist, Lyotard does not see dissolution
of the self in the postmodern environment of technological
power. Although institutions constrain language moves by
imposing rules of discourse, such as politically correct
speech, and boundaries of context, organizations may
change when participants introduce counter or agonistic
language moves. Lyotard asks:
-
Does the university
have a place for language experiments (poetics)? .
. . The answers are clear: yes, if the limits of old
institutions are displaced . (11).
- William Carlos Williams in the
Embodiment of Knowledge claims that knowledge is lost in
the modern project of specialization. He calls poetry the
balancing response, like Lyotard’s countering agonistic
speech act. Williams states:
-
Nothing but poetry can
readjust the understanding to a reasonable view of the
world . . . It is, being at the base of knowledge, itself
neglected. Perverted. Avoided. Misunderstood.
daVinci’s last painting, depicts two
distinctive daVinci motifs: a mysterious smile and signifying
gestures. In this painting, the seated figure points toward
two perpendicular directions. A picture of a modern folding
keyboard is inserted into the lower corner of the painting, where
he points. His crossed legs and seated pose are in the shape of
the letter of ‘K’. The half-clothed and coyly smiling figure is
more reminiscent of Christopher Marlowe’s Shepherd, than the
ascetic John the Baptist of the painting’s title. He is a
congruent icon for Lyotard’s theory of knowledge transmission as a
game of language.
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