I'm not sure how I became quasi-Marxist, but I have been wondering how capitalism intersects with the questions we've been exploring of technology, information, media, bodies, control. Lyotard seems to raise this issue most tantalizingly, explicitly drawing the socioeconomic domain into his analysis without necessarily offering convincing conclusions or prescriptions. First of all, he traces a capitalist trajectory that is fully intertwined with his narrative of postmodern knowledge and legitimacy:
a) "The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume -- that is, the form of value... the goal is exchange" (4): as an opening axiom, the knowledge relation becomes fully correlative to and subsumed into market relations in the contemporary system. Indeed, this premise is basic to the sociopolitical definition of postmodernism.
b) "It is widely accepted that knowledge has become the principle force of production over the last few decades... The notion that learning falls within the purview of the State, as the brain or mind of society, will become more and more outdated... It is from this point of view that the problem of the relationship between economic and State powers threatens to arise with a new urgency" (5): not only is knowledge produced and consumed as a commodity, it is increasingly the privileged commodity with the greatest payload of surplus value. Within the context of a generalized crisis in the hegemony of the nation-state, demonstrated concretely by the rise of multinational corporations (5) under globalization and neoliberal privatization, the result is a mounting challenge from economic quarters to state control over learning and information. In the age of "computer technology and telematics... [and] data banks" (6), knowledge increasingly converges with capitalist production and distribution.
The above are is the crux of Lyotard's initial "working hypothesis," which he then disclaims as a "strategic" intervention in the language game he is engaged in, recommended by its "fine capacity for discrimination... [of] effects it would be difficult to perceive from other points of view" (7). As such, it "makes no claims of being original or even true," and Lyotard objects to it on the basis that "it fails to challenge the general paradigm of progress in science and technology" (7). Nevertheless, his hesitations aren't directed at the accuracy of his proposition, which has, he says, "strong credibility," as "there is a good chance that this scenario will come to pass" (7). Therefore, I take it as part of the historical foundation of his account.
Later, socioeconomic concerns return as the pivot of Lyotard's thesis about postmodern scientific legitimacy:
c) "[technologies] for the purpose of producing proof require additional expenditures. No money, no proof... An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established. What happened at the end of the eighteenth century, with the first industrial revolution, is that the reciprocal of this equation was discovered: no technology without wealth, but no wealth without technology... It is at this precise moment that science becomes a force of production, in other words, a moment in the circulation of capital" (44-5): this is essentially a more specific rendition of aspects of (a) and (b) -- very simply, contemporary science, and thus scientifically legitimate truth, is extremely expensive, necessarily yoking it to the capitalist regime. Moreover, it is these investments in science and technology that, in turn, drive innovation and profit, completing the circuit that weds knowledge and the market.
d) "Capitalism solves the scientific problem of research funding in its own way... Nation-states, especially in their Keynesian period, follow the same rule: applied research on the one hand, basic research on the other. They collaborate with corporations through an array of agencies" (45): I include this to emphasize again, along with Lyotard, that the State, the corporation, and the university and other institutions are learning are in more and more convoluted and contested relations with each other.
e) "the goal is no longer truth, but performativity -- that is, the best possible input/output equation. The State and/or company must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify a new goal: in the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power... The question is to determine what the discourse of power consists of and if it can constitute a legitimation" (46): here we arrive at the punchline of this thread of Lyotard's analysis -- given the convergence of knowledge and economics with its technological/performative logics, as detailed in (a)-(d), we have reached a point where narratives of legitimacy that don't align with capitalism are no longer effective. The remainder of his discussion concerns the nature of an alternative, postmodern legitimacy.
f) "By reinforcing technology, one 'reinforces' reality, and one's chances of being right increase accordingly. Reciprocally, technology is reinforced all the more effectively if one has access to scientific knowledge and decision-making authority... Thus the growth of power, and its self-legitimation, are now taking the route of data storage and accessibility, and the operativity of information... Research funds are allocated by States in accordance with this logic of power growth" (47): this is Lyotard's answer to the above question. As per (c), there is a powerful complementarity of technology and capital, which translates into a horizon of mutual legitimation. Because, under this scheme, information is the key to performativity, information technologies become the hub toward which nation-states, institutions, and corporations all direct their energies. This points toward the computer age, which is the ever-present context of Lyotard's book.
Alongside this historical outline, Lyotard touches on a methodological critique of Marxist interpretive rubrics. In his foreword, Jameson notes "the difficulty of articulating cultural and informational commodities with the labor theory of value, the methodological problem of reconciling an analysis in terms of quantity and in particular of labor time (or of the sale of labor power in so many units) with the nature of 'mental' work and of nonphysical and nonmeasurable 'commodities' of the type of informational bits or indeed of media or entertainment 'products'" (xv). Certainly, Lyotard is cognizant of this implication of the postmodern junction of knowledge and capital that he details, and he expresses a corresponding critique of the waning effectiveness of Marxist thought: "everywhere, the Critique of political economy (the subtitle of Marx's Capital) and its correlate, the critique of alienated society, are used in one way or another as aids in programming the system" (13). Jameson also suggests, however, that Lyotard doesn't address this methodological impasse successfully: "to avoid one possible and even logical resolution to the dilemma, which would consist in becoming, like Daniel Bell, an ideologue of technocracy and an apologist for the system itself... [Lyotard] transfers the older ideologies of aesthetic high modernism, the celebration of its revolutionary power, to science and scientific research proper... The dynamic of perpetual change is, as Marx showed in the Manifesto, not some alien rhythm within capital... but rather is the very 'permanent revolution' of capitalism itself" (xx). In other words, Lyotard's purported political challenge is in fact easily incorporated into the vitality of the hegemonic regime itself.
This identifies precisely a personal and, I think, widespread anxiety that goes along with doing postmodern criticism: given what we now understand to be the intense flexibility of capitalism, its ability to adapt to and encompass any friction, its lack of an 'outside,' what would constitute meaningful resistance and meaningful theorization of resistance? Lyotard may recognize that "there is no question here of proposing a 'pure' alternative to the system: we all now know, as the 1970s come to a close, that an attempt at an alternative of that kind would end up resembling the system it was meant to replace" (66), but it's then not clear that he manages to propose any coherent alternative at all. Jameson, as well, remarks that the "global private monopoly of information... can be challenged only by genuinely political (and not symbolic or protopolitical) action" (xx) -- but leaves the definition (much less materialization) of said action entirely mysterious. The fact that Lyotard's concluding prescription -- that we should "give the public free access to the memory and data banks" so that we might have "[language] games of perfect information" (67) -- seems to fall back on the rhetoric of communicational transparency (albeit in the context of agonistic games rather than Habermasian consensus) is symptomatic of the lingering tangles in the analysis and critique of information capitalism.
[see also: David's response]
