Petit Récit

From a paper comparing chaos to catastrophe theory. One being an invention of science journalism and the other a branch of mathematics. In my peroration I get quite polemical.

Reconciliation with nature, chaotic or otherwise, is the avatar of a theocratic theme and it cannot serve to legitimate either science or criticism in a postmodern age. Hayles's hostility to Lyotard now becomes understandable. He is a prime critic of meta-narratives of legitimation. And his is a secular, wholly secular, use of paradox.

She sees his work as contributing to "a cultural metanarrative, and its peculiar property is to imply incredulity not just toward other metanarratives but toward narrative as a form of representation. It thus implies its own deconstruction." (Chaos bound: orderly disorder in contemporary literature and science (Cornell University Press, 1990)

But didn't Lyotard advocate for localized narratives?

Furthermore, there's a distinction to be made between the skeptical and the cynical. Not all challenges are to be read as reductio ad absurdum deconstructions.

And so for day 1976
11.05.2012