0.5 Digital humanities 2.0: a report on knowledge

Thirty years ago, the French philosopher and literary theorist Jean-François Lyotard published a prescient “report on knowledge” called The Postmodern Condition . Originally commissioned by the Conseil des Universités of the government of Quebec, the report was an investigation of “the status of knowledge” in “computerized societies” (3). Lyotard's working hypothesis was that the nature of knowledge—how we know, what we know, how knowledge is communicated, what knowledge is communicated, and, finally, who “we” as knowers are—had changed in light of the new technological, social, and economic transformations that have ushered in the post-industrial age, what he calls, in short, postmodernism. Much more than just a periodizing term, postmodernism, for Lyotard, bespeaks a new cultural-economic reality as well as a condition in which “grand narratives” or “meta-narratives” no longer hold sway: the progress of science, the liberation of humanity, the spread of Enlightenment and rationality, and so forth are meta-narratives that have lost their cogency. This itself is not an original observation; after all, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, and others have variously shown where the fully enlightened world ends up. What sets Lyotard apart is his focus on how knowledge has been transformed into many “small” (and even competing and contradictory) narratives and how scientific knowledge in particular has become transformed into “bits of information” with the rise of cybernetics, informatics, information storage and databanks, and telematics, rendering knowledge something to be produced in order to be sold, managed, controlled, and even fought over (3-5). In these computerized societies (remember this is 1979: the web didn't exist and the first desktop computers were just being introduced), the risk, he claims, is the dystopian prospect of a global monopoly of information maintained and secured by private companies or nation-states (4-5). Needless to say, Google was founded about twenty years later, although ostensibly with a somewhat different mission: to make the world's information universally accessible and useful.

Lyotard articulated one of the most significant contemporary struggles—namely, the proprietary control of information technologies, access and operating systems, search and retrieval technologies, and, of course, content, on the one hand, and the “open source” and “creative commons” movement on the other. Beyond that, he drew attention to several other changes that have affected what he considered to be the state of knowledge in postmodernism: first, the dissolution of the social bond and the disaggregation of the individual or the self (15); second, the interrogation of the university as the traditional legitimator of knowledge; and third, the idea that knowledge in this new era can only be legitimated by “little narratives” based on what he calls “paralogy” (a term that refers to paradox, tension, instability and the capacity to produce “new moves” in ever-shifting “language games”). While I will not evaluate Lyotard's argument extensively here, I do think it's worth underscoring these points because, perhaps surprisingly, they apply just as much to 2009 as they did to 1979. After all, the social bond today is fundamentally realized through interactions with distributed and equally abstracted networks such as email, IM, text messaging, and Facebook that are accessed through computers, mobile phones, and other devices connected to “the grid.” It has become impossible to truly “de-link” from these social networks and networking technologies, as the self exists “in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before . . . located at 'nodal points' of specific communication circuits. . . . Or better [Lyotard says] one is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass” (15).