Most peoples trouble with math

I think most peoples trouble with math is not knowing the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing how something works.

This issue of the role and function of metanarratives in our discourses of knowledge is one that demands our attention. It works to ‘de-doxify’ the ‘doxa’ – what Roland Barthes called public opinion or the ‘Voice of Nature’ and consensus. But there is a catch here: because of its use of irony as a strategic discursive device, postmodernism both inscribes and subverts its target. From its first manifestations in architecture to the present, postmodern art has juxtaposed and given equal value to the inward-directed world of art and the outward-directed world of history and experience. The tension between these apparent opposites finally defines the paradoxically ‘worldly’ ‘texts’ of postmodernism. In response to the question of metanarrative, postmodernism’s stand is one of wanting to contest cultural dominants (capitalism, humanism, etc.) and yet knowing it cannot extricate itself completely from them: there is no position outside these metanarratives from which to launch a critique that is not in itself compromised. It is over this paradox of postmodernism’s complicitous critique of metanarrative where exposition may be the first step, but it cannot be the last. Nevertheless postmodern artists do share a view of arts as a social sign inevitably and unavoidably enmeshed in other signs in systems of meaning and value.

These concerns of historiographic metafiction betray not only a preoccupation with the conditions of textual production in literature, but also a concern to de-doxify the parameters of national narrative using textual strategies of post-colonial pastiche.

In a very real sense, postmodernism reveals a desire to understand present culture as the product of previous representations. What this means is that postmodern art acknowledges and accepts the challenge of tradition: the history of representation cannot be escaped but it can be both exploited and commented upon critically.

In The Politics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon continues this assessment of complicitous critique, taking into account the ways in which the formal elements of reflexivity, intertextuality and parody question the act of representation (on whichever level: fictive, historic, natural or real). By de-naturalizing and de-doxifying representations of the real in order to make the reader aware of the “ideological nature of every representation” and in order to show the way in which what is taken for “reality” is just as subject to construction as fiction, Hutcheon claims that, rather than degenerating into hyperreality, the very acknowledgment of the “constructedness” of reality can also give form to narrative.

Scientific knowledge is a discourse. The sciences and technologies have been about language: phonology, linguistics, problems of communication and cybernetics, modern theories of algebra and informatics, computer languages and the problems of translation and the search for areas of compatibility among computer languages, problems of information storage and data banks, telematics and the perfection of intelligent terminals, to paradoxology.

Even taking into account the massive displacement intervening between the thought of a man like Comte and the thought of Luhmann, we can discern a common conception of the social: society is a unified totality, a unicity. Parsons formulates this clearly: "The most essential condition of successful dynamic analysis is a continual and systematic reference of every problem to the state of the system as a whole... A process or set of conditions either 'contributes' to the maintenance (or development) of the system or it is 'dysfunctional' in that it detracts from the integration, effectiveness, etc., of the system." The technocrats also subscribe to this idea: whence its credibility, it has the means to become a reality, and that is all the proof it needs. This is what Horkheimer called the paranoia of reason.

This breaking up of the grand Narratives leads to what authors analyse in terms of the dissolution of the social bond and the disintegration of social aggregates into a mass of individual atoms thrown into the absurdity of Brownian motion. Even before he is born, if only by virtue of the name he is given, the human child is already positioned as the referent in the story recounted by those around him, in relation to which he will inevitably chart his course. Or more simply still, the question of the social bond, insofar as it is a question, is itself a language game, the game of inquiry. It immediately positions the person who asks, as well as the addressee and the referent asked about.

No one, not even the least privileged among us, is ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and position him at the post of sender, addressee, or referent. One's mobility in relation to these language game effects (language games, of course, are what this is all about) is tolerable, at least within certain limits (and the limits are vague); it is even solicited by regulatory mechanisms, and in particular by the self-adjustments the system undertakes in order to improve its performance. This system can and must encourage such movement to the extent that it combats its own entropy, the novelty of an unexpected "move," with its correlative displacement of a partner or group of partners, can supply the system with that increased performativity it forever demands and consumes.