Lois Shawver's 
Paraphrase of the last two pages of
Jean-Francois Lyotard's
The Postmodern Condition
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What follows on this page is a paraphrase of Lyotard's writing. For simplicity of reading. I wrote it as though Lyotard was writing it, but you need to remember it is just a paraphrase, and every paraphrase is inevitably somewhat a distortion.  I decided to use paraphrase because Lyotard's last pages are hard to understand if you haven't read them in the context of the entire book.

There are some tools, here, however, to help you judge the accuracy of the paraphrase.  You can click on the endnote links that appear in brackets now and then. Use those to see what Lyotard actually said, then use your back arrow in your browser (such as Netscape or Explorer) to return to the paraphrase. 

At any rate, here is how I read the last pages of Lyotard's important book, The Postmodern Condition:

We must find some way to strive for justice without first having to agree what kind of law is just.[1]  To do this, I want to suggest two rules:

First, we need to recognize that there are many language games and it will not do to try legitimate one language game over the other.  That would be what I call a "politics of terror."  That is a politics of forcing others out of the conversation.  We do not want to eliminate people from the conversation, although we will want to arrange the conversation so that we can continue to have a voice, so that nobody can be forced out of the conversation. That's the first rule.

Second, we need to learn to define the rules of language within our local situation.  By local situation, I mean here at this table, for example, having coffee, or there in a specific online discussion.  For example, sitting here togehter I might (following this second rule) tell you that It will not do to define "resistance" with a general definition.  Somehow the language game of "resistance" needs to be settled upon and agreed to locally and provisionally within the present situation.  Only if we can agree on local and provisional rules will our conversation begin make sense to the postmodern ear. [2] 

I think this second requirement can lead us to become more responsible about establishing the local rules of our own language games[3].  It would mean we would explain our meaning instead of deferring to the authority of non-local references.  That is, we wouldn't depend on the authority of people who are not here with us.[4]  How do we decide how to define the rules of our local language?  We choose the rules that seems most able to foster our local paralogy, that is, the rules that generate new ideas within the community conversation (or the therapy dialogue).

It seems to me that computers will assist us in this paralogical process because  they can make more available the information we need to understand each other.  Also, the availability of information makes it less tempting to resort to suppressing each other's voice (i.e., terror).  I recommend, therefore, that everyone should have complete access to the data that can be made available to them through computers.[5]

If we can make our conversations more paralogical, more generative of new ideas that we find inspiring or satisfying, then we will never exhaust the fruits of our discussions.  Although there will always be a winning and losing of points, the process itself will generate new fruits of understanding forever, and continuously -- and that will be a winning situation for all of us who have become postmodern.

I want to call this paralogy a postmodern justice because it provides people what they deserve without requiring us all to agree.  We don't even have to agree before hand what we are striving for. It just happens if we do these two things.   Think of it like this:  Each win or loss occurs within the langauge game at hand and can be re-evaluated within other langauge games.  That is, there are no overall winners and losers, just won and lost points.  Such a practice not only satisfies our desire for justice, but it will help us make inroads into the unknown because the fruits of our paralogical discussion will not be merely a recycling of yesterday's understandings. 

"This sketches the outline of a politics that would respect both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown."(p.67)

Notes and References

1. "We must ... arrive at an idea and practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus. (p.66)" 

2. This is the "principle that any consensus on the rules defining a game and the 'moves' playable within it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation." (p.66)

3. "We should be happy that the tendency toward the temporary contract is ambiguous: it is not totally subordinated to the goal of the system, yet the system tolerates it.  This bears witness to the existence of anotehr goal within the system: knowledge of language games as such and the decision to assume responsility for the rules and effects. Their most significant effect is precisely what validates the adoption of rules - the quest for paralogy." (p.66, emphasis mine).

4. The paraphraser believes that postmodern ears require this kind of local pinning down of terms and rules.  Without it, we will fall victim to differends, so that only frustrating and endless dispute is possible within our conversation (cf. Shawver, 1998).

5. The line to follow for computerization...is quite simple: give the public free access to the memory and data banks.
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The movie is directed by Belgium director Ludo Gielen, produced by Paralogic Productions..

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