Lyotard on computerization · Wednesday November 22, 2006
Is Google actually an enabler of the ultimate Lyotardian (hah) paralogy, fostering language games of diverse and inexhaustible information, or a very wealthy tech company with a penchant for the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism?
“It [computerization] could become the ‘dream’ instrument for controlling and regulating the market system, extended to include knowledge itself and governed exclusively by the performativity principle. In that case, it would inevitably involve, the use of terror. But it could also aid groups discussing metaprescriptives by supplying them with the information they usually lack for making knowledgeable decisions. The line to follow for computerization to take the second of these two paths is, in principle, quite simple: give the public free access to the memory and data banks. Language games would then be games of perfect information at any given moment. But they would also become non-zero-sum games, and by virtue of that fact discussion would never risk fixating in a position of minimax equilibrium because it had exausted its stakes. For the stakes would be knowledge (or information, if you will), and the reserve of knowledge—language’s reserve of possible utterances—is inexhaustible. This sketches the outline of a politics that would respect both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown.”
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)
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