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Information and Knowledge
Suhail Malik
N HIS now venerable ‘report on knowledge’, Jean-François Lyotard states
that technoscientific ‘transformations’ in ics, communication
Itheory, data storage and transmission, and so on, ‘can be expected to
have a considerable impact on knowledge’. This has of course e a
truism and a reality in the 20 years since the writing of The Postmodern
Condition, as has the specific determination of this ‘impact’:
[Knowledge] can fit into the new channels, and e operational, only if
learning is translated into quantities of information. . . . The ‘producers’ and
users of knowledge must now, and will have to, possess the means of trans-
lating into these languages whatever they invent or learn. . . . Along with the
hegemony es a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of
prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as ‘knowledge’
statements. ([1979] 1984: 4)
The transformation of knowledge into information demands its codification
into a ‘certain logic’, a certain, determinate, ‘operationality’. The movement
described here is from knowledge as a mental or ‘cultured’ human acqui-
sition to its ‘exteriorisation . . . with respect to the knower’. Knowledge
es systemic.
Although Lyotard stresses how this movement leads to knowledge’s
commodification and mercantalization in capitalism, and to its increasingly
central role in ordering power at every level, what it is also highlighted is
how this is a movement of knowledge’s instrumentalization. Knowledge will
itself continue to have meaning only insofar as it will be operational, which
is to say in keeping with means–ends and productive logics, categories and
functions; that is, insofar as it accords with certain rules, codes and
‘prescriptions’. Such a demand limits what knowledge can be; it is a reduc-
tive determination of knowledge. And, as is well established by the critical
de