Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
This French philosopher argues that knowledge and information are being
profoundly changed in two connected ways. First, increasingly they are produced
only where they can be justified on grounds of efficiency and effectiveness or, to
adopt Lyotard’s terminology, where a principle of performativity prevails. This
means that information is gathered together, analysed and generated only when
it can be justified in terms of utility criteria. This may be conceived of as a
‘systems’ orientation which determines what is to be known, the ‘programme’ of
the ‘system’ insisting that information/knowledge will be produced only when
it is of practical use. In this regard information/knowledge takes on computerlike
characteristics (and is in addition translated wherever possible into data –
performance indicators – so that it can be most easily quantified and its performativity
most readily measured), the mechanism dedicated to ‘optimisation
of the global relationship between input and output – in other words, performativity’
(Lyotard, 1979, p. 11). Furthermore, like other systems, it features a
self-perpetuating loop: knowledge/information is required for it to perform, and
performance determines what knowledge/information will be generated.
Second, Lyotard argues – and here his (distant) Marxist background reveals
itself – that knowledge/information is being more and more treated as a
commodity. Endorsing a theme we have already seen to be prominent in the work
of Herbert Schiller, he contends that information is increasingly a phenomenon
that is tradable, subject to the mechanisms of the market that has a determining
effect on judging performativity.
The consequences of these twin forces are sufficient even to announce the
emergence of a postmodern condition. First, the principle of performativity when
applied means that information/knowledge that cannot be justified in terms of
efficiency and effectiveness will be downgraded or even abandoned. For example,
aesthetics and philosophy cannot easily be justified in terms of performance,
while finance and management are straightforwardly defended. Inexorably the
former suffer demotion and the latter promotion, while within disciplines research
in areas that are defensible in terms of use will be treated more favourably than
others. For instance, social science investigations of technology transfer have
practical implications for markets and hence are seen as worthy of support from
research funding bodies such as the ESRC (Economic and Social Research
Council), the ‘mission’ of which now requires that the research it sponsors
contributes to the competitiveness of industry. Conversely, the social scientist
whose interest is in the exotic or impractical (as judged by performativity criteria)
will be sidelined. As a government minister, Norman Tebbit, put it in the early
1980s when called upon to justify switching funds from arts, humanities and
social sciences to the more practical disciplines, money was to be taken away
‘from the people who write about ancient Egyptian scripts and the pre-nuptial
habits of the Upper Volta valley’ and given to subjects that industry thought
useful. Today this is the orthodoxy as regards funding social science research in
the UK.
Second – and a sign of the collapse of modernism – knowledge development
is increasingly shifting out of the universities where, traditionally, a cloistered
elite had been ensconced with a vocation to seek the ‘truth’. Challenging the
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