4)

> I began to wonder if the entire list was a figment of my imagination.

All lists are figments of our imaginations, insofar as, as you amply make
clear below, what we read their texts to be can never be what anyone else
reads them to be.

> Ryotard seems to insist on the irreconcilability and incommensurability
of
> different genres of discourse, and that only local and context-specific
> criteria of validity can be formulated (this last bit is a 'politically'
> important part of his approach and one that has been significant in
> postmodernist discourse beyond 'language games')

Ryotard? Is that like a "Five Easy Pieces" deli sandwich? "I'll have a
pastrami on rye with mustard. Hold the pastrami."

I tried and tried Lyotard, but I could never shake the disquieting feeling
that he was, as is so much of contemporary discourse on language, trying to
do an end-run around the horror of Wittgenstein's fatalistic realism: i.e.
if you can build a schematic of discourse on the assumption that there is a
possibility of accurate discourse, then you don't have to buy
Wittgenstein's dreadful proposition that true discourse is impossible.

For myself, I accept Wittgenstein's proposition as valid (as who doesn't
who has been married for 35 years) and consider all utterance, mine and
what come to me, as mine own, to do with as I like.

Anyway, the truth, if any there is, is always hidden in the subtext.

The levels of understanding are beyond my means, so I just buy the Classic
Comics edition.

> Perhaps this is where the "polytheism of values" in which no one domain
of
> discourse and knowledge is privileged over others, and the politics of
the
> "temporary contract" (things he refers to elsewhere) come in?

That is truly abhorrent to me...Totally unacceptable.  As a good, card
carrying Hegalian I accept that there is a hierarchy of values, and the
highest level of values is an inclusive domain that a) requires a complexly
structured discourse, and
b) cannot be articulated through the artifice of a "temporary contract".
All discourse beneath that is reductive of that ur-structure, with
increasing possibility for ambiguity as you descend. Hence the total
openness the meaning of the grunt.

All of which is to say that most of the time most of us know full well what
the other guy means in the sense that the limits of our own internal
language structures evolve to be inclusive (savvy) of the possibilities of
meaning, and we intuitively filter utterances for the most likely
situational and contextual meaning. Failure rate 30%+ or - 3%.
Operationally acceptable, or we join Wittgenstein and shut up.

Do I contradict myself?

"And there we jolly well are, aren't we"- Lord Buckley