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December 25, History. A short summary of this paper. Much of the text yields important thinking about truth in the postmodern age, but it is the way in which Lyotard challenges the ontology the what is of education that makes this text essential for educationalists.
The example of the university is given by Lyotard, although his argument could extend to schools too. What is transmitted? To whom? Through what medium?
In what form? For example, are the transmitters of knowledge the teachers and policy makers, or something more structural and historical? Because language game rules are different in scientific and narrative knowledge we cannot know what is valid in either by applying standards of the other.
It's not clear that this is true in the first place, and no argument is presented for it. Then describes how scientific knowledge looks dismissively at narrative knowledge and states that this is related to cultural imperialism since the dawn of western civilization, as if western civilization invented imperialism.
He says western imperialism has its own distinct tenor: it is governed by the demand for legitimation. This is not true. Legitimation has been a feature of most conquering cultures and nations for all of history, east or west.
Lyotard not only has a bad grasp of scientific thought, but apparently of history as well. Offers anecdote about scientists trying to explain their discoveries as epics when they are non-epic by now the 50th time he has used words erroneously and without trying to explain what he means with these terms, since he is clearly using them incorrectly , but does not cite a single example of this occurrence.
Says the state spends a lot of money to pass science off as epic, so the public will give the consent the decision makers need. At this point it is beginning to sound like a conspiracy theory.
Lyotard is hoping to show that there are big incompatibilities or differences between scientific and narrative knowledge and faults the blending of the two in science popularization. But his entire dichotomy is artificial, concocted by him apparently, and without justification. So after erecting this needlessly false separation of these kinds of thinking without justifying why they should be seen as wholly distinct, he uses this assumption of difference and incompatibility to criticize the moments where they appear to blend.
Not even clear he is criticizing because his thoughts are never clear. Science is not conscious and does not assert that narrative knowledge is not knowledge. He then says it presupposes its own validity which is begging the question. This entire mess of word salad is an artificial problem Lyotard has invented from his ignorance of basic scientific thought and his obsession with narratives.
So, Lyotard, since you apparently see your own form of knowledge separate from scientific, then it must fall under narrative. And since you are attempting to teach, to narrate, to those who read your work, and since you have clearly not done your research on the very topic you are writing, you must not believe that the same standard must be applied in narrative knowledge that must be applied in scientific knowledge.
This fits in well with his theory. The narrative form of knowledge is not concerned with truth, but with justice. So he seems to envision his own kind of knowledge sharing not as an attempt at elucidating some truth, but suggesting some form of justice.
Talks about how the problem with scientific legitimation is such that truth is only defined by the rules of science which are determined as good only by consensus of experts. This is a gross misunderstanding of basic science. Has he read any science book in his entire life? Repeats this same wrong assumption in the last few pages. Discussion of opened and closed door, look at the outlandish stream of consciousness dribble that he lets fly. Repeats his confusion about proofs, stating that proofs need to be proven, as though there must be some new language to validate the proofs to those who cannot understand them.
This is a thing scientists have done for a long time, since before he wrote this book. He asks what scientific observation is. Mere sense is not sufficient for an observation. He pretends not to know this, or he really is deeply ignorant and out of his element. He acknowledges technology used for this end but frames it as another language game and loses his focus and his point.
Tries to show that this technological dependence then leads to greater importance on money, no money - no proof, so then only the rich can get the tools to generate the proof, and somehow through magic he equates wealth with truth, claiming truth is then decided by the wealthy. In reality it only means those with the funding are given the resources to find the truth, not that they get to decide what truth is, or that their claims of truth are then immune to scrutiny and legitimization.
Remarks on private companies funding research are not wrong but the details are not entirely accurate. Pure research institutes do receive less funding because their research is not commercial. What Lyotard neglects is fundamental: none of this knowledge is itself commercial or sensitive to commercial interests or wealth or technology.
The knowledge is separate from all of these, it is only enabled by these. This does not affect the nature or character of this knowledge, it affects how the knowledge might be employed by those who have it or see its value.
He is misunderstanding huge things. And he portrays the boundaries between different scientific disciplines as being far more defined and strict than they ever have been. In his view, all scientific knowledge is now produced in an effort to augment power. His simply states this, he does not back it up. He shows his disdain toward the notion of proof, which is fitting, as he seems to subscribe to no standard for the truth of his own sentiments.
He presents no examples, not even anecdotes, no ideas of what he could be speaking of. Instead he is operating in pure abstraction divorced from reality.
Ironic then that he is so fueled up about examining the knowledge of science. He seems to let most of this hinge on his earlier insistence that we look at science as a language game and as these games as agonistic. There was no valid reason for him making these assertions pages ago, so a reader would be left wondering why he did so. It is now, only based upon these unfounded assertions, that he is able to attempt to color his present diagnosis as being based on any sound rationale.
We can see what he has done: it is what I call reverse philosophizing. This is like reverse engineering, when you see the final thing you want to build, and you learn how to build it by taking it apart and working backwards. He instead begins with a desired conclusion, and works backward from that to see how he can get there. Then, once he has seemingly achieved this, he presents it in a forward manner and pretends to have undertaken an honest process of following the reasoning to the reasonable conclusion.
Motivated reasoning. A sign of this kind of thinking is the questionable and unqualified starting point, such as stating that science is an agonistic language game completely separated from the rest of human understanding, with some sort of disdain for every other knowledge except itself.
That he assumes this at all should have one questioning his thinking. He has reached the conclusion that science is not about knowledge but about power by starting from faulty premises like the agonistic language games heuristic, and bouncing along aimless trajectories unconnected to every segment that came before, arriving at something that none of these trajectories could logically lead to. Over and over again we see Lyotard's method of argument is to start from a political position treated as an axiom, and to use that vantage point to color his "philosophy".
This is backwards. Throughout the book is this thread of political discontentment about relationships between the system and the individuals who make it up, about a controlling shadow entity the university, the state, the system, the corporation, science, capitalism, games and its use of its human subjects for the furtherance of its own ends.
It ties into this questions of legitimacy of decisions made for or by the collective. This is never expanded on or explained, never discussed in detail, it remains as a present but obscure thread that he constantly tugs on when he needs to make a point that his normal routine is unable to.
Where does all of this leave us? Lyotard himself, long after publishing it, came to see it much like I see it now: Not very good, ignorant of science, filled with fabrications, reading like a parody.
It is intellectually empty. This can only inspire bad, sloppy, useless thinking. View all 5 comments. Sep 13, John rated it really liked it. Lyotard spends the far majority of the main work describing society's move away from the two modern metanarratives: speculation and emancipation, representing the twin desires of knowing the unknown and knowing justice.
The modern, scientific world has drawn on one or another of these two narratives in an attempt to legitimize its knowledge of the world, only to find that it cannot do so within itself. In other words, the modern world has been so concerned with creating a tight, logical totality Lyotard spends the far majority of the main work describing society's move away from the two modern metanarratives: speculation and emancipation, representing the twin desires of knowing the unknown and knowing justice.
In other words, the modern world has been so concerned with creating a tight, logical totality of knowledge, never realizing that such a project is impossible to attain. The postmodern world then is that which seeks to present the unpresentable. There's an inherent kind of humility in the approach, a recognition that all knowledge is not available to us, that we will constantly be reforming our perspective on our world.
So Lyotard concludes then with a call to eschew totality and "activate differences. Feb 09, g rated it liked it Shelves: spring The Postmodern Condition is about the dominance of scientific knowledge over that of narrative, and the related death of meta-narratives. The performativity principle underlined by late capitalism plays a crucial role in the subordination of the narrative form simply because narration is not instrumental in creating capital. Lyotard argues that narration seeks to consume the past and generate a way of forgetting, while on the other hand, scientific knowledge focuses on the prevalent shortages of The Postmodern Condition is about the dominance of scientific knowledge over that of narrative, and the related death of meta-narratives.
Lyotard argues that narration seeks to consume the past and generate a way of forgetting, while on the other hand, scientific knowledge focuses on the prevalent shortages of the contemporary and strives to fill in the gaps, thereby becoming a significant source of profits. Yet how does this shift in the shape of knowledge contribute to the postmodern condition?
Is the break between the modern and the postmodern really about the forms of knowledge? The argument that this transformation of knowledge is a departure from the modern fails to be convincing.
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. This, however, is a process that has been going on for a long time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in it merely a "symptom of decay," let alone a "modern" symptom.
It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it impossible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing. This concomitant symptom that Lyotard continues tracing does not emerge after modernity. It is a symptom that becomes apparent with the rise of Reason and the demise of religion, and is characteristic of s.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
The mourning modernity of s is marked by secularism, and hence is a eulogy for the death of religion per se. Thus Marxism and anarchism remain alternative realities for the people of s, even though they cease to be credible for the frustrated generation of revolutionaries that Lyotard is a part of.
It is in this era that capitalism acquires a truly global shape and the emergence of post-Fordist production relegates the dreams of the proletarian revolution. In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard is mourning not for the death of religion, or tradition, but for the removal of hope from the world.
Yes, the proletariat has taken a different shape with post-Fordism, but the power dynamics that effected Marxism are still present, and it is these power dynamics that have to be attended to.
Sep 09, John Pistelli rated it liked it Shelves: philosophy , literary-criticism-theory , nonfiction , politics-history , science , twentieth-century.
What is postmodernism? Is it, whatever it is, still occurring or have we moved on to something else—metamodernism, the New Sincerity, neo-modernism, etc.? Is it an artistic movement or a state of society as a whole? Is it a left- or right-wing political phenomenon?
Is it a form of Marxism or the most thorough and intense version of anti-communism? Is it the logical terminus of Enlightenment rationalism or the triumph of irrationalist counter-Enlightenment?
Is it a good or a bad thing? Answering t What is postmodernism? Answering these questions and more would require open-ended interpretations of complex phenomena across innumerable domains; in truth, they can't be answered convincingly by any one person. But surely reading one of the key early books on the subject will provide us some clues in the cultural labyrinth. Of this particular book, a report on the state of scientific knowledge written at the request of the Quebec government in , its author, according to Wikipedia , later admitted that he had a "less than limited" knowledge of the science he wrote about, and to compensate for this knowledge, he "made stories up" and referred to a number of books that he hadn't actually read.
In retrospect, he called it "a parody" and "simply the worst of all my books". Which confession makes me feel less inadequate for never having found this brief, dry, dense treatise— almost every sentence of which is footnoted with references to all those books neither Lyotard nor I have read—very comprehensible. It does start with a veritable slogan, though, which helps: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives.
They are the stories modern science or its philosophical and political partisans have told to legitimate itself before the public, i. They are meta narratives because they provide a narrative justification for science, which is not itself narrative but a set of procedures for producing statements about physical reality that correspond to that reality. Lyotard singles out two such Enlightenment metanarratives, the political and the philosophical.
In the political story, humanity through education becomes more and more informed about the truth of the world and therefore more and more able to govern itself as a free citizenry in a free society.
The philosophical narrative is the political narrative spiritualized, as it were, in Hegel and other idealist philosophers, who believe in the progressive self-conscious realization of our own capacity for freedom.
These metanarratives, however, did not result in the promised liberation. Instead, they promulgated what Lyotard, with a backward glance at the Jacobins, calls the "terror" of silencing all dissent and exterminating all alternatives; they lead, in other words, to imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism. But this isn't the only reason to abandon them and take up "incredulity" instead, nor even the main reason Lyotard gives in this book, though it is the most ethically and politically consequential.
The actual practice of science, he writes, as well as the economies of the developed nations, are more and more devoted to language, in the form of computer code, cybernetics, informatics, fractal geometry, and the like, all fields requiring the production, manipulation, or analysis of sign-systems to operate. With recourse to the later Wittgenstein, Lyotard argues that as these scientific fields define more and more of our lives, we will come to recognize not one single metanarrative but rather a plurality of "language games," each with its own rules, as defining the future.
In this technological pluralism is implied a corresponding social and cultural diversity, a thousand flowers blooming in the cracked edifice of Enlightenment.
These language-games will be justified not by metanarratives but by what he calls "pragmatics" or "performativity," by which he means their ability to accomplish certain ends. What the metanarratives of science have suppressed—narrative itself, for one, which Lyotard argues oriented traditional and indigenous cultures in their cosmos without the need for progressive teleological metanarratives—can re-emerge and the terror of silencing may be a thing of the past.
All manner of previously authoritative institutions will likewise collapse; he foresees, for example, the demise of the traditional university—itself the inaugural seat of idealism's philosophical metanarrative—in favor of a hub where students can be taught to access relevant information and compose their own codes. Whether these are positive or negative developments, he doesn't fully say. On the one hand, his evocation of indigenous narrative vs. In a more polemically written afterword, entitled after Kant's epochal essay on Enlightenment "Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?
If The Postmodern Condition dwells, sometimes incomprehensibly not to mention fraudulently , on science, its afterword more credibly discusses art.
Montaigne's essays, he says, are postmodern, while Schlegel's fragments are modern, presumably—he doesn't elaborate—because Montaigne playfully writes his own uncertainty into the text while Schlegel portentously evokes the totality of which his discourse is only a scattering.
Malevich with his solemn God-shaped hole of a black canvas is a modernist, Duchamp with his witty interrogation of the art institution a postmodernist; Hegel and his syntheses are modernist, Kant and his antinomies postmodernist. In the lengthiest comparison, he gives us Proust the modernist—nostalgic for a lost paradise written up in a still-referential and stylistically unified prose—and Joyce the postmodernist—exposing the inadequacy of all signs in a language calling constant ludic attention to its performance.
He concludes with the force of a manifesto: Finally, it must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented. But Kant also knew that the price to pay for such an illusion is terror. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience.
The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name. If I have summarized this difficult and somewhat hoaxing book persuasively, how does it help us with our opening questions? On the political coordinates of postmodernism, Lyotard's argument, for all its voguish cyber-talk, is remarkably congruent with Cold War anti-communism and the even older traditions of moderation out of which it grows; with the disparagement of "terror" and warnings about abstract idealism, we might be reading a more up-to-date Albert Camus or Hannah Arendt, not to mention Edmund Burke, but without the crucial dimension of these thinkers' recourse to art and nature and the civic, which Lyotard replaces with the unrepresentable sublime of a world no mind can apprehend.
The valorization of self-consciously pluralized language-games in the name of the "silenced" is a sentimental post-'60s multiculturalist take not only on Wittgenstein but on Nietzsche's rather colder perspectivism and aestheticism. None of this is objectionable, since the experiences of imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism should make us cautious about totalizing political and technological initiatives.
But at this strange crossroads where Burke's exaltation of "little platoons" meets Toni Morrison's elegy for "discredited knowledges," Lyotard gives away too much. For as illegitimate as one may find the modern state, it's more accountable than its would-be replacement in the multinational corporation, and its laws are the only guarantors of pluralism besides sheer force in the form of rights. William Gibson exposed Lyotard's pitch for cyber-diversification in the global company town as dystopia only a few years after The Postmodern Condition was published; we confirm its disadvantages—censorious, manipulative, exploitative, surveillant—every day of our 21st-century lives.
Finally, for someone who wants to "wage war on totality" and make fun of Stalinist criticism, Lyotard is suspiciously eager to pass definitive judgments, as if there were not other ways to read Hegel, Proust, or Joyce.
Despite its reputation as helping to put the concept of "postmodernism" on the conceptual map, Lyotard's book is probably too idiosyncratic to be exhaustive. But on its evidence, we might say that postmodernism was a partially justified conservative revolt that unfortunately ended up emboldening authorities who threaten to become as totalitarian as those it criticized; that we are still postmodern insofar as it names the condition of a corporate, digital, and at least officially pluralist society; and that its assault on the modern was too indiscriminate, striking through imposition and terror to cut down order and beauty too.
Jul 22, Derek Brown rated it really liked it. A new problem appears: devices that optimize the performance of the human body for the purpose of producing proof require additional expenditures. No money, no proof-and that means no verification of statements and no truth. The games of scientific language become the games of the rich, in which whoever is wealthiest has the best chance of being right. An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is th "By the end of the Discourse on Method, Descartes is already asking for laboratory funds.
An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established. But the argument with Habermas is like, the whole book. So the foreword tells you that the book is misguided, but thankfully saved by Jameson's foreword. What a piece. Apr 05, Z. Aug 08, VII rated it really liked it. It seems like post-modernism is a current that I am beginning to enjoy. The only problem is that they can't help becoming sociological studies with proposals about what should happen, while I usually like my philosophy more abstract and more focused on the individual.
This book aims to deal with the status of knowledge in postmodern societies, by focusing on the narratives that run through it and which without them, scientific knowledge is basically blind. It's basically the old idea that scienc It seems like post-modernism is a current that I am beginning to enjoy. It's basically the old idea that science is a tool that has to be guided by values. He argues that the narrative of our age is supposed to be perfomativity efficiency , but that this idea is mistaken or at least that science can't proceed with that value.
I enjoyed a lot his analysis but I have some reservations about his constructive part and some arguments. Nevertheless, it's pretty impressive how close his predictions were for some things, even though he wrote in , using terms like terminals and data banks. For Lyotard, postmodern societies lead towards the computerization of knowledge and to its exchange as a commodity.
However, besides what we know as knowledge; scientific statements, there is another form of knowledge that science needs: the narrative. It's the problem of legitimization or of values. It's asking why that's good or why it's a worthy goal. This used to happen with narratives that show us what's good, provide variation with their non-denotative statements and bypass the problem of legitimation because for them, to repeat the story the way you have heard it in the past is enough for earning legitimacy.
On the contrary, with scientific knowledge the person who listens can reject the statements if the proof is not good enough and there is never a proof of a proof but simply consensus.
And these two forms of knowledge are both necessary without a narrative, science is begging the question but also incompatible because they use different criteria.
It's not that in narrative knowledge there is an embryonic form of scientific knowledge. And the loss of meaning people are lamenting about is the loss of narratives. After a brief period of positivism when there was an attempt to abandon narratives, science made the problem of legitimation not a problem but a part of the scientific game; a heuristic drive of it.
Before that it rested in two grand narratives, one more political, one more philosophical. The first is knowledge as emancipation.
It's the idea that knowledge will set humans free, so we should have basic public education for all. The other is closer to Hegel's spirit. It creates a meta-narrator, knowledge itself that will determine not only science, but also ethics and politics. For this tradition positivistic knowledge free of values is not knowledge. The first was eventually more successful. It views knowledge as showing what's possible but it is up to the people to decide what to do.
But neither of those narratives work now. What actually defines a postmodern society is suspicion towards narratives. For the philosophical narrative to work we need to presuppose there is a spirit and without it it's nonsense.
For the other, there is no way to convert a denotative statement what is to a prescriptive one what to do. Now the problem of legitimation is solved by performativity.
As mentioned, legitimation involves making arguments and finding proofs and it's now part of science itself. In other words the criteria that make an argument acceptable and the axioms that we take are part of the discussion. And progress is either making a move in the established game of science Lyotard likes Wittgenstein's terminology that describes everything we do as language games or changing the rules of the game.
So the principle of a universal metalanguage is replaced by a principle of plurality. Proofs also require some agreement with reality but with what method can we observe the supposed fact?
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