Jean-François Lyotard

Simon Malpas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134520060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Jean-François Lyotard is one of the most celebrated proponents of what has become known as the 'postmodern'. More than almost any other contemporary theorist, he has explored the relations between knowledge, art, politics and history, in ways that offer radical new possibilities for thinking about modern culture.
Simon Malpas introduces students to issues at the heart of Lyotard's work, including
*modernity and the postmodern
*the sublime
*ethics
*history and representation
*art and the unpresentable
*knowledge, the university and the future.
Lyotard's work is impossible to dismiss or ignore for anybody who is serious about contemporary literature and culture, and this guide provides the ideal companion to the wide variety of his critical texts.

THE POSTMODERN
CONDITION

English-speaking readers most often associate Jean-François Lyotard's name with the term ‘postmodern’. This chapter explores his contribution to the debates about postmodernism that began in the 1980s by examining his most influential intervention, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. It sets out the key arguments of that book in order to provide a way into the text for first-time readers, and then explores the implications of Lyotard's analysis for the ways we might think about and act in the contemporary world.

Towards the end of the 1970s, Lyotard was commissioned to write a report by the Council of Universities of the Provincial Government of Quebec, the French-speaking province of Canada. The subject of this report was the state of knowledge in the world's most highly developed societies at the end of the twentieth century. In other words, what Lyotard was asked to report on was the ways in which different ways of knowing about and dealing with the world — science, technology, law, the university system, etc. — are understood and valued in contemporary society.

The book that emerged at the end of this project in 1979 is The Postmodern Condition. It very quickly became Lyotard's most widely read, culturally significant and influential text, and also one of his most controversial works. Since publication, it has drawn commentaries from writers in a range of disciplines including Philosophy, Art History, Sociology, Politics and Literary Studies, and has set the tone for many recent accounts of postmodernity and postmodernism. In each of these areas, it has generated debates and discussions that have impacted upon the ways in which those disciplines have conducted their work. However, although many writers refer to The Postmodern Condition for its definition of postmodernity, the book's descriptions of contemporary culture and politics have also come in for a great deal of criticism — not least from Lyotard himself in his later writings. It is a book whose arguments we should not ignore, but whose conclusions we might wish actively to question. In order to do so, however, we need to get to grips with the detail of Lyotard's report.

The most frequently quoted and discussed assertion of the book is its definition of the postmodern as an ‘incredulity toward meta-narratives’ (Lyotard, 1984: xxiv). This description has frequently been treated as a sound bite and all too often has been misunderstood. Rather than simply offering a brief definition of what Lyotard might be getting at when he uses terms like ‘postmodern’ or ‘meta-narrative’, it is important to work out how this statement emerges from the book as a whole. The aim of this chapter, then, is to provide a basis for an understanding of what Lyotard means by describing the postmodern as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’.

A REPORT ON KNOWLEDGE

Probably the best place to begin trying to discover what The Postmodern Condition is about is by looking closely at its subtitle: A Report on Knowledge. As with all of Lyotard's work, it is just as important to pay attention to the way in which he writes, as it is to understand what is written about, and the subtitle of the book immediately gives crucial clues about both its form and content.

First, it is described as a ‘report’. Generally, a report is a formal statement of the results of an investigation into a specific subject, usually undertaken by experts, that draws together the range of available evidence in order to set out specific conclusions. The Postmodern Condition's status as a report is evident in the way it is written. One of the first things that is noticeable on reading the text is the amount of evidence that is presented in the footnotes, of which there are over 200 referring to an even larger number of other books, essays, lectures and government documents from many European and American countries. Lyotard synthesises this vast range of material in a text that is often abstract and contains only relatively few concrete examples of specific events. In other words, the main text of The Postmodern Condition provides a summary account of the documents mentioned in its notes. Its aim is to discover underlying trends and relationships between the different sources, and to trace out as clearly as possible the development of knowledge in contemporary Western societies.

The other key term in the subtitle is ‘knowledge’. Lyotard states that he is studying the ‘condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies’ (1984: xxiii), but what does this mean? The idea of a report on, for example, the state of the public transport system in London or a child's progress during their first year at school is quite straightforward. In both cases there is obvious evidence that can be called upon to support the conclusions: the lateness of the average bus, perhaps, or the marks awarded in end of year maths tests. But what does it mean to report on the ‘condition of knowledge’? Clearly, this isn't a question of how much we know nowadays: The Postmodern Condition is not just a list of the recent developments in physics, zoology or computer science. What is at stake is much more fundamental, and much more important.

According to Lyotard, the focus is the ‘nature’ and ‘status’ of knowledge: what knowledge is, and how it is generated, organised and employed in contemporary societies. In other words, The Postmodern Condition is a report about the ways in which advanced societies treat education, science, technology, research and development. Lyotard investigates which sorts of knowledge count as valuable, how that knowledge is communicated, who has access to it and what it is used for, who determines and controls the flow of knowledge, and how it shapes our lives and experiences of the world.

The central question of The Postmodern Condition's ‘report on knowledge’ is thus, how are the lives and identities of people constructed by contemporary structures of knowing? According to Lyotard, this is a fundamental question because ‘the status of knowledge is altered as our societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age’ (1984: 3). This is the main hypothesis of the book, and the aim of the text is to test whether it is correct and to describe its implications.

POSTMODERN KNOWLEDGE

Lyotard argues that the advances in communications that have taken place since the Second World War have affected not just how knowledge is transmitted but also the status of knowledge itself. It is not just that we can store more information on computers, and send messages across the world quickly by post, telephone and now email. It is also that these changes in storage and communication are transforming how we use and value knowledge: ‘the miniaturization and commercialization of machines is already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made available and exploited’ (1984: 4). In other words, in what Lyotard calls the ‘postmodern condition’, knowledge itself has changed.

Lyotard demonstrates that knowledge has become a commodity that is bought and sold on the market, and is also the basis of power in society: ‘Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major — perhaps the major — stake in the worldwide competition for power’ (1984: 5). The most powerful nations are the ones who have the greatest knowledge resources: those with the best technology, the most advanced communications and weapons systems, the most highly developed medicines and the means to collect the most detailed information about their competitors. The global competition for power is now fought out as a battle for knowledge just as it used to be for resources like coal, gas and oil. Lyotard foresees a time when nations may literally go to war over knowledge, just as they have fought over land and raw materials such as oil in the past (1984: 5).

On the other hand, Lyotard argues that states are beginning to lose their positions of power in the world as the most important bodies in this new knowledge-based economy. Multi-national corporations such as computer firms, oil companies and the pharmaceutical industry are replacing them as the key players as knowledge itself becomes a commodity. These multi-nationals fund vast amounts of research and use the patent laws to claim ownership of the knowledge generated by it, which can then be put to use to make money. Lyotard's argument here seems particularly prophetic of the changes that many commentators have identified as taking place during the 1980s and 1990s: international corporations' influence has penetrated to the very heart of the decision making processes of national governments, and international treaties (often drawn up by boards staffed with representatives from those corporations) now threaten to dictate the legal systems and cultural policies of countries throughout the world (for accessible and influential accounts of this process see, for example, Naomi Klein's No Logo (2000) or George Monbiot's Captive State (2000)).

To give just one example of this process, in 2001 the South African government was taken to court by a group of pharmaceutical companies because they claimed that it wasn't respecting the patents they had taken out on anti-AIDS medicines. The cost of producing the actual medicines was minimal so they could be manufactured cheaply in South Africa, but what the companies were protecting was the investments they had made in researching and developing these medicines. In this case then, it was knowledge itself that was the commodity for the multinationals. The South African government, which claimed it was trying to save the lives of its citizens without bankrupting the country, were accused of stealing knowledge and cheating these companies out of their profits. A compromise was eventually reached, which meant that the medicines could be bought in Africa for slightly less money, but the fact that a state could be taken to court by private companies for breach of patent shows how politically charged the ownership of knowledge has become.

Another thing this example demonstrates is that science and knowledge are not separate from politics and ethics, but are political through and through. The changes in the status of knowledge that are now taking place therefore mark a transformation in the nature of society and human experience. It is precisely this political transformation that is at stake in Lyotard's report on knowledge in The Postmodern Condition. The method he chooses to analyse the changes in knowledge and political organisation that form the condition of postmodernity draws on the idea of ‘language games’.

LANGUAGE GAMES, LEGITIMATION AND IDENTITY

Lyotard argues that there are two key aspects to the development of knowledge that was described in the last section. The first is that advances in science have wider implications in society. This should be clear from the example of AIDS in South Africa. The research of the drugs companies is immediately tied to questions of money, power and human suffering; it is not just a question of scientific discovery for its own sake. In general terms, this indicates that an advance in research might well have implications for other areas of social policy, as well as for people's everyday life. The second aspect of the development of knowledge follows from this: there are different types of knowledge at work in society, they have different criteria for being categorised as useful or true, and they must be examined in different ways.

In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard differentiates between two major types of discourse: scientific knowledge and narrative knowledge. He argues that ‘scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to […] narrative’ (1984: 7). For Lyotard, narratives are the stories that communities tell themselves to explain their present existence, their history and ambitions for the future. Although the term ‘narrative’ is commonly associated with literary fiction, all forms of discourse employ narratives to present their ideas. Examples of this might include History that constructs narratives of the past, Psychology that tells stories about the self, or Sociology that depicts different social formations and their effects on individuals. In the same way, scientific statements are presented through types of narrative that describe the physical world. In order to explain and justify their discoveries, even mathematical sciences are forced to turn their equations into narratives that explain the implications of their findings. In this way, narrative stands at the basis of human experience and society: it tells us who we are, and allows us to express what we believe and aspire to.

Of course, the different types of narrative used in different discourses follow different rules. The different discourses that make up a society's knowledge — be they physics, chemistry, literature, laws, customs, or even gossip — all have different sets of rules for what count as legitimate statements. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard refers to these different discourses as ‘language games’, a term he draws from the highly influential Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Drawing this notion of language games from Wittgenstein's philosophy, Lyotard makes three observations about them. First, that the rules of a language game are ‘the object of a contract, explicit or not, between the players’ (1984: 10). This means that the rules of a particular language game like poetry or biology are not natural but determined by a community. Second, that ‘every utterance should be thought of as a “move” in a game’ (1984: 10). And third, that ‘if there are no rules there is no game, that even an infinitesimal modification of one rule alters the nature of the game’ (1984: 10). In other words, that all language ‘moves’ obey rules, but the games of which they are a part are open to change and influence by other games or even as the result of the moves themselves.

WITTGENSTEIN AND LANGUAGE GAMES

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was born in Vienna, and moved to Cambridge in 1911 where he began to develop groundbreaking analyses of logic and language. His most influential books are Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), in which he argues that many seemingly intractable philosophical problems arise from misleading pictures of the workings of language, and the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953). In the later book, Wittgenstein asserts that meaning is pragmatic (based on the use of words in specific situations, and coming from the Greek word ‘pragma’ meaning ‘deed’) rather than natural or fixed. He argues that, ‘the meaning of a word is its use in language’ (1967: 20), which implies that words gain their meaning from what they do rather than being fixed labels for things. Language is therefore an active part of our day-today existence, and we use words in order to have effects on the people and things around us. In order to explain this idea, Wittgenstein developed the theory of ‘language games’.

Like normal games, there are a variety of language games that may not always have rules in common. For example, in chess there are rules that allow us to move the pieces in certain ways, set out our objectives for victory and make certain moves illegal. In the same way, in science certain types of statement can be made about the world and certain aims and rules are involved in scientific enquiry and experimentation. The success or failure of a given statement is thus determined by how well it works within the rules of the language game in which it occurs. In each of the different language games, the rules are a pragmatic agreement between the players (for example, between the members of the scientific community about what counts as proper research), and the aim is usually to further the aims of the community that the game sets up.

Lyotard argues that the outcome of these three observations is that the ‘social bond is composed of language “moves”’ (1984: 11). The very structure of society is made up of the statements made in it and the rules it develops to decide whether particular moves are legitimate or illegitimate. Just as different types of games have distinct sets of rules, different societies have diverse forms of politics, law and legitimation. As subjects, we exist within this series of language games, whose different sets of rules make up who we are. According to Lyotard,

A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island … [E]ven before he is born, if only by virtue of the name he is given, the human child is already positioned as the referent of a story recounted by those around him, in relation to which he will inevitably chart his course.

(1984: 15)

The organisation of knowledge in society thereby determines the identity — the self-image, the ideas and aspirations — of the people that make it up. A question immediately arises, however: how do we understand this ‘organisation of knowled...