Knowledge
daVinci, Leonardo. Painting, John the Baptist. 1513-1516.
Photographs, Folding Keyboard and Qwerty Keyboard
Poem, “Killer Kool”. 2002.
Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Post Modern Condition: A Report on the Condition of Knowledge, traces the direction of scientific, philosophic and linguistic inquiry through the study of language, linguistics, translation, information theory, semiotics, physics, genetic coding, cybernetics and knowledge storage. Lyotard observes that the proliferation of information processing technology has changed the nature of knowledge and its transmission by way of capitalist economies.
 
The increasing tendency to commodify culture fosters the transformation of knowledge into information merchandise. New theorists propose that the coin of future discourse is the attention span of knowledge users in what Michael Goldhaber terms the “attention economy,” or what Guy Debord and the Situationist call the “spectacle as commodity” or the “cyber-spectacle”. Marketing and advertising recognize the principle of diminishing attention. In Web Studies (2002), George Goggin’s “Pay Per Browse” portrays potential internet charge schemes.
 
These cultural transformations promote new bodies and agencies of political and economic power that legitimatize and authenticate knowledge. As Lyotard points out, the knowledge power paradigm has been a fact of history since antiquity. Socrates is a case in point. Lyotard proposes that the study of knowledge is the study of language and he builds on Wittgenstein’s game theory. Lyotard claims speech acts are language games with three general rules: 1. rules for language moves are based in the social contract which changes, 2. if there are no rules there is no game and hence no communication, and 3. speech acts or game moves are agonistic or frictional. These agnostic moves alter exiting boundaries and serve to keep the game moving by maintaining discourse.
 
Thus as Lyotard states; “the observable social bond is composed of language moves”(6). To discuss language is to discuss the transmission of knowledge in the social condition. The status of knowledge in discourse is continually challenged by new modes of access and changing institutions of control. Contrary to some poststructuralist, Lyotard does not see dissolution of the self in the postmodern environment of technological power. Although institutions constrain language moves by imposing rules of discourse, such as politically correct speech, and boundaries of context, organizations may change when participants introduce counter or agonistic language moves. Lyotard asks:

 Does the university have a place for language experiments (poetics)? . . . The answers are clear: yes, if the limits of old institutions are displaced. (11).

William Carlos Williams in the Embodiment of Knowledge claims that knowledge is lost in the modern project of specialization. He calls poetry the balancing response, like Lyotard’s countering agonistic speech act. Williams states:

Nothing but poetry can readjust the understanding to a reasonable view of the world . . . It is, being at the base of knowledge, itself neglected. Perverted. Avoided. Misunderstood.

daVinci’s last painting, depicts two distinctive daVinci motifs: a mysterious smile and signifying gestures. In this painting, the seated figure points toward two perpendicular directions. A picture of a modern folding keyboard is inserted into the lower corner of the painting, where he points. His crossed legs and seated pose are in the shape of the letter of ‘K’. The half-clothed and coyly smiling figure is more reminiscent of Christopher Marlowe’s Shepherd, than the ascetic John the Baptist of the painting’s title. He is a congruent icon for Lyotard’s theory of knowledge transmission as a game of language.   

Top of Page