Literary Canon

Origin:

“The origin of the term ‘canon’ are in authority and control…it has to be noted that the initial meaning carried by the Greek word ‘kanon’ was a ‘right measure’(standard unit in architecture). Over time, the term canon developed to encompass ethics and justice, expanding the application of standardization to a metaphysical domain. This historical use of canon has created the framework in which the modern literary canon exists: it is an authoritative mechanism that places value upon literature; however there is significant dispute over the teleology of the canon and its contents.” – Joseph Kronick.

The term ’canon’ was originally applied to those books of the Bible deemed to be both genuine and authoritative. The religious terminology of the word was later extended to secular works; canonical status was afforded to a number of books from the classical to the modern period. Canon is also defined as “the books of the Bible officially recognized by the church”, and the idea of a literary canon also implies some such official status.

Just how far back the literary canon can be traced is a matter of some debate. Richard Jerry dates the canon back to the late sixteenth century, while Dean Kolbas maintains that the English literary canon actually began to unite during the seventeenth century. Certainly, the canon achieved its definitive shape in the mid eighteenth century when we see more evidence of it in the form of literary history – for instance, Thomas Warton’s ‘History of English Poetry’(1774-81) and Samuel Johnson’s ‘Lives of the English Poets’ (1779-81).

Definition:

“The term ‘literary canon’ refers to a classification of literature. It is a term used widely to refer to a group of literary works that are considered the most important of a particular time period or place.”

One popular definition of a literary canon refers to religious validity, implying that the canonized works are officially recognized by a church, and are considered religiously appropriate. Within this definition, however, the canon remains a basis for judgement, a standard that must be met for canonization of a literary work to be considered. In this way, regardless of the exact definition of a literary canon, or the works of which it is comprised, the canon still implies an ‘otherness’ to works it excludes, and an authority to works it includes. One must not overemphasis the rigidity of canon, since works included in canon constantly changes.

Canon-Formation:

(i)                 Subjectivity:  Ofcourse, there are many ways in which literary works can be classified, but the literary canon seems to apply a certain validity or authority to a work of literature. When a work is entered into the canon, thus canonized, it gains status as an official inclusion into a group of literary works that are widely studied and respected. Those who decided whether a work will be canonized include influential literary critics, scholars, teachers and anyone whose opinions and judgements regarding a literary work are also widely respected.

For this reason, there is no rigid qualifications for canonization, and whether a work will  be canonized remains a subjective decision. Literary canon, like the works that comprise them and the judgements of those who create them, are constantly changing.

(ii)               Reflection of the Age- Form and Content:

Literature, therefore, changes in the context of changing experience and thought. This context is important to the make-up of a literary canon. More often than not, it is those works that are considered contextually relevant hat gain entry into the canon. This means that the literary canon is relevant to ongoing trends or movements in thought and art or address historical or contemporary events, etc.,

Often, the popularity of a literary work is based not only on the quality, but the relevance of its subject matter to historical, social and artistic context. A popular or respected literary work usually deals with what people are most interested in, and this interest weighs in on whether or not the work is conanoized.

The literary canon of a country or a group of people is comprised of a body of works that are highly valued by scholars and others because of their aesthetic value and because they embody the cultural and political values of that society. The process of canon formation and evolution is influenced by cultural and historical changes, for an instance in the 1960’s when sweeping cultural change brought the concerns of women, minorities, gays and Marxist liberals to the forefront of literary study.

(iii)             Extrapolation of Meaning:

While the text of a literary work does not change over time, the meaning extrapolated from it by readers, and thus the attention paid to a literary work may change. As people’s thoughts and experiences change, a literary work may move in and out of interest and contextual relevance. Over time, literary canon will reflect these changes, and works may be added or subtracted from the canon. The changing inclusions of literary canons, can be credited to subjectivity.

(iv)             Cultural\literary hegemony:

Until recently, national cultures were predicated on the idea of a canon, a set of texts that everyone knew. In the case of Britain they included the Bible, Shakespeare and the great novels. The existence of a canon is essential to a culture. It means that people share a set of references and resonances, a public vocabulary of narratives and discourses. An understanding of the canon is necessary to understand society because it has organically come to represent the society’s values. This shared intelligence is now being destroyed by multiculturalism and technology leading to ‘canon anxiety’.

Literary histories enable us to forge a fundamental link between the twin concepts of ‘canon’ and ‘nation’. This is because they respond to an explicitly nationalistic desire to ‘fix’ of ‘formalise’ a literary heritage – to “invent a tradition”, as Eric Hobsbawn puts it, a tradition with enormous political ramifications. Indeed, the invention of a British literary tradition enables Britain to become, to use Benedict Anderson’s words, “an imagined political community”, able to establish boundaries between itself and other nations. A ‘nationalistic’ impulse was certainly the driving force behind the publication of Johnson’s ‘Lives’, Shakespeare’s History Plays, etc.,

In ‘Literary Theory’, Eagleton suggests that the “great literature” of the “national literature” has to be recognized as a construct.” Any canon has deliberately crafted to serve the hegemonic interests of its creator, and it is therefore unreasonable to ascribe timelessness to an intrinsically arbitrary entity.

The differing perspectives on the nature of the canon provide a general image of the controversy: either one accepts the innate worth of the existing canon or one views the canon as a social construction.

FEMINST THEORY- ELAINE SHOWALTER

Feminism is more to do with the history of ideas about gender. Historically, thinking about gender happens in cultures where gender configurations--the social meaning systems that encode sexual difference--undergo changes or shifts. The same is true with thinking about race (that race as a construct becomes apparent when ideas of race are shifting) or economics, or politics, etc.: all of these concepts are reevaluated when social practice (i.e. what people do) shifts. So gender, or masculine and feminine qualities, or male/female social roles, comes up as area for analysis whenever gender roles are shifting. One can trace this back to medieval times (Chaucer's Wife of Bath is certainly an example of questioning gender configurations--note too that questions of gender roles not limited solely to women thinkers and writers). And because gender roles seem to shift in just about every time period, in relation to all kinds of factors (war, for instance, or economics, or notions of morality), gender is often a major focus of thought and writing, in popular culture and in theory.

Certainly in the nineteenth century, in Britain and the United States, gender was a matter for much public discussion and debate. "The Woman Question," as it was called, focused on whether gender should be a factor in granting or limiting rights, like voting rights; it also focused attention on men and male social roles, asking questions about the nature and function of gender. Is gender innate and biological? Is it the product of socialization and environment? Is the family structure (one father, one mother, and kids) eternal, universal, divinely-ordained, natural--or socially constructed and thus variable? These were--and are--central questions, not only for politics and economics, but for anthropology, psychology, and all of what we now call the social sciences. So. Why is gender important? The simplest answer is because it's there. "Gender," meaning the differentiation, usually on the basis of sex, between social roles and functions labeled as "masculine" and "feminine," is universal: all societies known to us in all time periods make some sort of gender distinctions. As a central feature of all cultures, gender seems worth some attention.

Gender is so ubiquitous as a topic of study in part because of our capacity, in the twentieth century, to "deconstruct" gender categories, to defamiliarize what has previously been seen as natural (men are naturally masculine, women are naturally feminine). At some point (or at several points) what Derrida would call a "rupture" occurred: a moment (or moments) when it became possible to think about gender as a construct, not as a natural or eternal category. Thus our thought systems, philosophies, and world views had to think of gender as a variable system, as something created and alterable, not as a given. And, as Derrida tells us, when our culture is able to think of constructs, to foreground as construction what previously was kept in the background as "natural", as assumed--we do.

Definition of feminism would be in three parts.

1). A "feminist" is someone who is interested in studying and understanding gender as a system of cultural signs or meanings assigned (by various social mechanisms) to sexually-dimorphic bodies, and who sees these cultural signs which constitute gender as having a direct effect on how we live our individual lives and how our social institutions operate.

2). Secondly, a "feminist" is someone who sees the gender systems currently in operation (in our culture and in other cultures) as structured by a basic binary opposition--masculine/feminine--in which one term, masculine, is always privileged over the other term, and that this privileging has had the direct effect of enabling men to occupy positions of social power more often than women.

3). A "feminist" thinks this (points 1 & 2) is wrong, and should be changed.

This definition makes feminism into a kind of academic pursuit, where feminists just sit around studying gender relations. And this is an important part of feminism, the idea that one CAN study gender relations that gender exists as a signifying system, as sets of cultural signs that can be, and are, manipulated just as any set of signs is. So, what one calls "politics" is the understanding of how cultural texts--be they literary, philosophical, or physical (in the sense that gender codes are "texts" written on our bodies and in our psyches)--shape our everyday lives. And an understanding of how reading texts, and writing texts, and interpreting texts, can be a means of changing (or reaffirming) the ways in which we understand our world and make decisions about our lives.

Elaine Showalter’s ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’ does a survey of the history of feminist tradition within the ‘wilderness’ of literary theory and criticism. This essay is one of the most useful summaries of trends in feminist criticism. Elaine Showalter describes the development of feminist theory as having a number of phases: (i) the feminist critique: where the feminist reader examines the ideologies behind literary phenomena (women as mere readers); (ii) gynocritic :  where the’ woman is the producer of textual meaning’ including the ‘psychodynamics of female creativity, linguisitics and the problem of female language, the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career and literary history’; (iii) gender theory: where the ideological inscription and the literary effects fo the sex/gender are explored.

To Showalter, the feminist writer exists as two separate entities: as reader and as author; however, the male reader and male author of course taint this division. There are two modes of feminist reading:

(i) the feminist as ‘readers’  - offer feminist readings of texts which studies the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omission and misconceptions about women in criticism and woman as sin in semiotic systems  - feminist reading\critique of the representation of women in literature – Revisionary Reader :  the reader as a female or a female reading of the text concerned with discovering the suppressed patriarchal voices presented in the text. How does the reader respond to the text which inscribes the subjugation and subordination of women – the image of women, the canon formation of literary text ;

(ii) Feminist Criticism has gradually shifted its center from ‘revisionary reading’ to a sustained investigation of literature by women – the study of women as writers. The aim of gynocritics is to read the lot written by women to show what characterizes the literature of women as woman. One of the major assumption if gynocritics is that writing by women is always dominated by a gender consciousness. The subjects of gynocritics is but “the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women; the psychodynamics of female creativity, linguistics and the problem of female language, the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career and literary history.

Feminine critical discourse employs the concept of 'gynocritics': what is the difference of women's writings? – 'ecriture feminine'(they argued that the female has particular style of writing not merely a feminine consciousness) – the inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text; a significant theoretical formulation in French feminist criticism (how the literature is characteristically female and how it is different from characteristically male writing). Theories of women's writing presently make use of four models of differences: biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic and cultural. This discussion by Showalter examines timeless questions about the differences between men and women and the obvious resulting competition and argument. Showalter quotes Woolf "A woman's writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; at its best it is most feminine; the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine". This quote begs the answer, which came first, the discourse on feminist literature of the creation of feminist literature?

Biological\Organic criticism is based on: 'anatomy is textuality'. In 'The Madwoman in the Attic', Gilbert and Gubar structure their analysis of women's writing around metaphors of literary paternity, - the texts author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic, patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis. Lacking phallic authority, women's writing is profoundly masked by the anxieties of this difference: 'if the pen is a metaphorical penis, from what organ can female generate texts?  Feminist criticism in the biological perspective generally stresses the importance of the body as a source of imagery. The difference of women's literary practice must be sought as in Millet's words in 'the body of her writing and not the writing of her body'.

Linguistic and textual theories of women's writing ask whether men and women use language differently; whether sex differences in language use can be theorized in terms of biology, socialization or culture; whether women can create new language of their own; and whether speaking, reading, and writing are all gender-marked.

The women's use of language is an exciting area in gynocriticism, as it is through the medium of language that we define and categorize areas of difference and similarity, which in turn allows us to comprehend the world around us. The appropriate task for feminist critics is to concentrate on women's access to language; on the available lexical range from which words can be selected, on the ideological and cultural determinants of expression. The problem is not that women have been denied the full resources of language and have been forced into silence, euphemism or circumlocution. Women's literature is still haunted by the ghosts of repressed language and until we have exorcised those ghosts, it ought not to be in language that we base our theory of difference. ( the feminine style of writing is different from man. They said that chronology and orderliness are there in male, but the linearity is not there with female. The female writing is open-ended, non-linear and associative in style. In female writing there is lapses and gaps, breaks and broken syntaxes. So the female practice of ecriture feminine paves the way for the development of definite female consciousness.

Psychoanalytically oriented feminist criticism locates the difference of women's writing in the author, psyche and in the relation of gender to the creative process; and it incorporates biological and linguistic models. Showalter's essay calls into question theories on biological differences between men and women that have effects on writing. In reality, however, it is the very discourse of the relationship between males and females that creates gender roles(pseudo-patriarchy) and forces them apart. According to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, two theorists of the psychological movement, these gender roles obligingly compel the male and female – their action, their work, their behaviour and their relationship - towards blatantly different ends of the gender spectrum. Women become defined by their relationship with other women and men are defined by what women are not.

Showalter says, "A cultural theory acknowledges that there are important differences between women as writers: class, race nationality, and history are literary determinants as significant as gender. Nonetheless, women’s culture forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women writers to each other over time and space". According to the discourse, this is unsurprising as women are inextricably linked through their sameness, emotional continuity, social responsibilities, bodies and thought; through the lenses of the 'gynocritics': of the biological, the cultural, the psychoanalytic and the linguistic. Most notably, we gain further awareness of gender roles – omnipresent in every facet of life from household duties to the employment industry, from general behaviour and beyond – and we are privy to the essential difficulties of women throughout history to conform or defy these functions, attitude and responsibilities. In the end, we still remain in the 'wilderness', without clear definition or absolute insight into the spilt, between males and females, and its effects on women's writing.

 SUPPLEMENTARY STUDY MATERIAL: LYOTARD’S ‘THE POSTMODERN CONDITION – A REPORT ON KNOWLEDGE’

                                                                                                                       

Towards the end of the 1970s, Lyotard was commissioned to write a report by the Council of Universities of the Provincial Government of Quebec, the French-speaking province of Canada. The subject of this report was the state of knowledge in the world’s most highly developed societies (i.e., the First World countries) at the end of the twentieth century. In other words, what Lyotard was asked to report on was the ways in which different ways of knowing about and dealing with the world – science, technology, law, the university system, etc. - are understood and valued in contemporary society. The book is referred mainly for its definition of postmodernity, along with the descriptions of contemporary culture and politics. While Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives and the proposed switch to language games has characterized the postmodern debate, his ambiguity about the development of science and the university under the condition of neoliberalism(open gates of universities for all) appears to have been given much less consideration by his followers.

A REPORT ON KNOWLEDGE:

Probably the best place to begin trying to discover what ‘The Postmodern Condition’ is about is by looking closely at its subtitle: ‘A Report on Knowledge’. As with all of Lyotard’s work, it is just as important to pay attention to the ‘way’ in which he writes, as it is to understand what is written ‘about’, and the subtitle of the book immediately gives crucial clues about both its form and content. First, it is described as a ‘report’. Generally, a report is a formal statement of the results of an investigation into a specific subject, usually undertaken by experts, that draws together the range of available evidence in order to set out specific conclusions. The Postmodern Condition’s status as a report is evident in the way it is written. One of the several things that are noticeable on reading the text is the amount of evidence that is presented in the footnotes, of which there are over 200 referring to an even larger number of other books, essays, lecturers and government documents from many European and American countries. The Postmodern Condition provides a summary account of documents mentioned in its notes. Its aim is to discover underlying trends and relationships between the different sources, and to trace out as clearly as possible the development of knowledge in contemporary western societies. The other key term in the subtitle is ‘knowledge’. Lyotard states that he is studying the ‘condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies’. But, what does it mean to report on the ‘condition of knowledge?’ It is not summary of recent developments in fields but its sake is much more fundamental, and much more important. According to Lyotard, the focus is the ‘nature’ and ‘status’ of knowledge: what knowledge is, and how it is generated, organized and employed in contemporary societies. In other words, ‘The Postmodern Condition’ is a report about the ways in which advanced societies treat education, science, technology, research and development. Lyotard investigates which sorts of knowledge count as valuable, how that knowledge is communicated, who has access to it and what it is used for, who determines and controls the flow of knowledge, and how it shapes our lives and experiences of the world.

The central question of The Postmodern Condition’s ‘report on knowledge’ is thus, how are the lives and identities of people constructed by contemporary structures of knowing? According to Lyotard, this is fundamental question because ‘the status of knowledge is altered as our societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age’.

THE POSTMODERN KNOWLEDGE:

Lyotard argues that the advances in communications that have taken place since the Second World War have affected not just how knowledge is transmitted but also the status of knowledge itself. It is not just that we can store more information on computers, and send messages across the world quickly by post, telephone and now email. It is also that these changes in storage and communication are transforming how we can use and value knowledge: ‘the miniaturization and commercialization of machines is already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made available and exploited’. In other words, in what Lyotard calls the ‘postmodern condition’, knowledge itself has changed.

Lyotard demonstrates that knowledge has  become a commodity that is bought and sold on the market, and is also the basis of power in society: ‘knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major – perhaps the major-stake in the worldwide competition for power’.(Knowledge is Power)

After a quick view of those theories and areas of knowledge, Lyotard arrives at some pretty strong conclusions. “It (knowledge) can fit into the new channels and become operational, only if learning is translated into quantities of information.” Lyotard ‘predicts’ that “anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way (digitalization) will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer languages.”  - i.e. the computerization of society will have inevitable consequences on the world of ideas – “along with the hegemony of computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of prescriptions determining which statement are accepted as ‘knowledge statements’. While this may or may not be true, or at least an interesting question to be thought about in all its consequences, sometimes Lyotard appears to fall victim of narratives about technoscientific progress, for instance when he writes that “research on translating machines is already well advanced” – thereby implying that machine intelligence will soon be able to replace human intelligence in certain areas. Such an “exteriorization of knowledge”, Lyotard claims, renders obsolete “the old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training of the minds”. Knowledge will not only increasingly become a commodity, which loses its use-value. “Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power”, Lyotard observes, would be the major stake in the world wide competition for power. The author even predicts that nation states might one day fight for the control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory.

TWO MAJOR TYPES OF DISCOURSES:

In Postmodern Condition, Lyotard differentiates between two major types of discourse: scientific knowledge and narrative knowledge. He argues that ‘scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to … narrative’. For Lyotard, narratives are the stories that communities tell themselves to explain their present existence, their history and ambitions for the future. Although the term ‘narrative’ is commonly associated with literary fiction, all forms of discourse employ narratives to present their ideas.  Examples of this might include History that constructs narratives of the past, Psychology that tells stories about the self, or Sociology that depicts different social formations and their effects on individuals. In the same way, scientific statements are presented through types of narratives that describe the physical world. In order to explain and justify their discoveries, even mathematical sciences are forced to turn their equations into narratives that explain the implications of their findings. In this way, narrative stands at the basis of human experience and society: it tells us who we are, and allows us to express what we believe and aspire to.

LANGUAGE GAMES AND LEGITIMATION STATEMENTS:

Of course, the different types of narrative used in different discourses follow different rules. The different discourses that make up a society’s knowledge – be the physics, chemistry, literature, laws, customs, or even gossip – all have different sets of rules for what count as legitimate statements. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard refers to these different discourses as ‘language games’, a term he draws from the highly influential Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Drawing this notion of language games from Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Lyotard makes three observations about them. First, that the rules of a language game are ‘the object of a contract, explicit or not, between the players’.  This means that the rules of a particular language game like poetry or biology are not natural but determined by a community. Second, that ‘every utterance should be thought of as a ‘move’ in a game’. And third, that ‘if there are no rules there is no game, that even an infinitesimal modification of one rule alters the nature of the game’. In other words, that all language ‘moves’ obey rules, but the game of which they are a part are open to change and influence by other games or even as the result of the moves themselves.

Lyotard argues that the outcome of these three observations is that the ‘social bond is composed of language ‘moves’’. The very structure of society is made up of the statements made in it and the rules it develops to decide whether particular moves are legitimate or illegitimate.

The organization of knowledge in society thereby determines the identity – the self-image, the ideas and aspirations – of the people that make it up. A question immediately arises: how do we understand this ‘organisation of knowledge’? How are the different language games related to each other in society? How is their importance to that society decided? And why do different societies have different ways of organizing the language games that make them up? For Lyotard, the organization of the narratives and language games is performed by metanarratives.

METANARRATIVES:

As the term implies(the prefix, ‘meta’, denotes something of higher order – so, for example, in linguistics a metalanguage is a language used to describe the workings of another language), a metanarrative sets out the rules of narratives and language games. This means that the metanarrative organizes language games, and determines the success or failure of each statement or language ‘move’ that takes place in them. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard presents a number of metanarratives, and describes the different ways in which they organize knowledge. The basis of modernity is, for Lyotard, a certain type of metanarrative organization. In order to understand why he defines the postmodern as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’, then, it is useful to come to terms with what these metanarratives are and how they work.

Lyotard argues that from the earliest human societies right up until the present, narrative has continued to be the ‘quintessential form of customary knowledge’. As an example of the most traditional form of narrative organization, Lyotard introduces the Cashinahua, a tribe from the upper reaches of the Amazon in South America. The stories of this tribe follow a fixed formula for narrating the adventures of their people. They begin with the phrase, ‘Here is the story of-, as I have always heard it told. I will tell it to you in my turn. Listen.’ In this way, the story is always one handed down from the past, and is passed on in the present to the community. At the end of the story comes another formulaic statement: ‘Here ends the story of-. The man who has told it to you is – (Cashinahua name), or to the whites- (Spanish or Portuguese name)’. With this statement, the story teller links himself with the ancestral here: the two names appear together as a bond between past and present.

This form of storytelling organizes the rituals and structure of the Cashinahua society. They share their historical knowledge through the tales, construct their identity as a group, and order their society through the rules about who is allowed to tell and listen to be the stories. According to Lyotard, ‘The knowledge transmitted by these narrations…determines in a single stroke what one must say in order to be heard, what one must listen to in order to speak, and what role one must play…to be the object of a narrative’. Each member of the community is given a place in the system as speaker, audience or hero of the tales, and their identity and desires are shaped by it.

According to Lyotard, this is the sort of metanarrative organization that is common in pre-modern cultures. In contrast to this form, which is based on the relationship between past (the stories themselves) and present (their narration), Lyotard describes another form of metanarrative: the grand narratives of modernity. For Lyotard, modernity is defined by its reliance upon grand narratives that depict human progress. Their difference from traditional metanarratives is that they point towards a future in which the problems facing a society (which is most often thought of as all of humanity) will be resolved. He identifies two key types of modern metanarrative in The Postmodern Condition: the speculative grand narrative (refer Hegel’s works) and the grand narrative of emancipation (or freedom).

In Hegel’s writing , modernity finds its clearest and most powerful formulation. For Hegel, the world is capable of being comprehended by philosophical thought. This thought, called by Hegel the ‘speculative dialectic’, presents reality and history as rationally explicable through a system of ideas. Hegel’s dialectic process describes a process of constantly overturning the relations between ideas and material reality.

Think Globally and Act Locally:

Lyotard believes that cybernetics has come to dominate society and economics since World War II. He believes that the status of knowledge has changed profoundly in this period. The major question that interests him is how knowledge gets legitimated in cybernetic society, and the nature of the legitimation itself. Lyotard maintains that whatever principles society uses to legitimate knowledge must also be the principle that is uses to legitimate decision-making in society, and consequently government, law, education, and many other basic elements of society. Legitmation in the Enlightenment was tied to what Lyotard calls metanarratives, or grand narratives. Metanarratives are total philosophies of history, which make ethical and political prescriptions for society, and generally regulate decision-making and the adjudication of what is considered truth. Metanarratives roughly equate to the everyday notion of what principles a society is founded on. They form the basis of the social bond. The metanarratives of the Enlightenment were about grand quests. The progressive liberation of humanity through science is metanarrative. The quest for a universally valid philosophy for humanity is an example of a metanarrative. The problem is that when metanarratives are concretely formulated and implemented, they seem to go disastrously awry. Marxism is the classic case of metanarrative based on principles of emancipation and egalitarianism which, when implemented, becomes perverted to totalitarianism under Stalin in the Soviet Union.

Lyotard claims that we have now lost the ability to believe in metanarratives, (no longer one could make generalized statements) that the legitimating function that grand quests once played in society has lost all credibility. The question then becomes, what now forms the basis of legtimation in society if there is no overarching metanarrative. For Lyotard, the answer lies in the philosophy of Wittgenstein, which analyses the way sub-groups regulate their behavior through rules of linguistic conduct. If we have rejected grand narratives, then what we have fallen back on are little narratives. Little narratives are Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’, limited contexts in which there are clear, if not clearly defined, rules for understanding and behavior. We no longer give credence to total philosophical contexts like Marxism which ostensibly would prescribe behavior in all aspects of life, rather, we have lots of smaller contexts which we act within. We are employees, we are students. These roles legitimate knowledge and courses of action in their limited contexts.(Think Globally and Act Locally). By fragmenting life into a thousand localized roles, each with their particular contexts for judging actions and knowledge, we avoid the need for metanarratives. This is the nature of the modern social bond. Our effectiveness is judged in the context of how well we perform in each of these many limited roles. We may be a good employee but a poor driver, etc. Therefore, what legitimates knowledge in the postmodern condition is how well it performs, or enables a person to perform, in particular roles. This criterion forms the basis of Lyotard’s ‘performativity’ legitimation of knowledge and action. In a cybernetic society, knowledge is legitimated by how perfomative it is, if it is, if it effectively minimizes the various required inputs for the task and maximizes the desired outputs. This is an intuitively compelling notion of our current society. Knowledge and decision making is for the most part no longer based on abstract principles, but on how effective it is at achieving desired outcomes.

PARALOGY:

Lyotard develops a concept by first reviewing a variety of non-traditional scientific areas which have proved fruitful in recent years, including chaos theory, fractal mathematics, and quantum mechanics. The key feature of these areas of research which Lyotard believes provides their special strength is that, unlike the incremental and theory-bound work of most areas of the sciences, they actively and imaginatively seek out instabilities and anomalies in current theories. This search for anomalies and paradoxes echoes the type of move that Lyotard previously identified as compelling in language games generally, and he seizes on the concept to form the basis of his legitimation grail. Since the most effective(performative) strategy for achieving advances in both scientifically based and narratively based fields of research is the search for imaginative new insights into existing theories by noting anomalies and paradoxes, he coins a neologistic term: paralogy. Paralogy here does not have the dictionary meaning of ‘false reasoning’. But captures the elements of this individualistic search for new meaning in old language games.

Bibliography:

Simon Malpas. ‘Jean-Francis Lyotard’.2005.Routeledge.London