Jean-Francois Lyotard

10 Key excerpts on "Jean-Francois Lyotard"

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  Profiles in Contemporary Social Theory

  • Anthony Elliott, Bryan S Turner, Anthony Elliott, Bryan S Turner(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  11 Jean-Franc° ois Lyotard VICTOR J. SEIDLER BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND THEORETICAL CONTEXT T hough Jean-Franc Ëois Lyotard (1924±98) is known within the terms of social theory for his writing The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , which helped de®ne the terms for the discussion around post-modernity, this was a text which he was to feel very ambivalent about. In different ways he felt estranged from the manner in which the contrast between modernity and postmodernity was being drawn. He was much less concerned with making a temporal distinction and in different ways distanced himself in his later writings which had much to do with aesthetics, from the discussion that he helped open up around the postmodern. He was still concerned to question the grand narra-tives of history, freedom, and progress which had shaped classical forms of social theory. In different ways he was critical of Marxism as well as liberalism as grand narratives which were at least partly trapped within the terms of an Enlightenment vision of modernity. But Lyotard's questioning of grand nar-ratives and the forms of social theory which would ¯ow from them should not be understood as an abandonment of politics. Rather he sought a different kind of politics which could engage with the ways the world had changed since the 1960s. He makes this clear in his own re¯ections on his early political writings on Algeria and his intense involvement over many years from the 1950s with the journal Socialism or Barbarism . Writing in June 1989, less than a decade before his death in a piece `The Name of Algeria', he pays homage to the education he received from the group and the support they gave to his writings. He also remem-bers how he lived in Constantine in Algeria between 1950 and 1952 when he arrived from the Sorbonne to teach in its high school.

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  Bildung and Paideia

  Philosophical Models of Education

  • Marie-Élise Zovko, John M. Dillon, Marie-Élise Zovko, John M. Dillon(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  et al., 2003; Dhillon & Standish, 2000). In this essay, I will explore the importance for educational practice and discourse of one such key figure within this Continentalist tradition, the French thinker Jean Francois Lyotard (Lyotard, 1986,1993a). Lyotard's work has come to be associated with a certain version of so-called 'postmodernist' philosophy, with what Stuart Hall referred to in a none too complimentary way as a'through the sound barrier postmodernism' (Morley & Chen, 1996). This interpretation of Lyotard sees his work as a high point of New Right ideology, advocating relativism and in relation to education, an affirmation of technicism and instrumentalist approaches (Carr, 2005).

  But this reading of Lyotard’s work, I will argue, is very misleading. Certainly, there are strong tensions in his work, taking account of his early 1960's work in Nanterre University and his relation to the May '68 events in France (Lyotard, 1993a). Through exploring the detail of some of his powerful texts from Nanterre, we will see Lyotard's radical critique of educational institutions and power emerge (Lyotard, 1993b, 1993c, 1993d, 1993e). But rather than being a New Right perspective, it is more accurate to describe his philosophy of education at this time as deriving from, to the contrary, what might be described as an 'ultra-leftist' reading. As Lyotard's work develops from this pivotal period, his emphases undoubtedly change. This can be seen as a general characteristic of Leftist thought in this period, which seeks to come to terms with both the great successes and the ultimate failure ofthe'68 moment (Blake & Masschelein, 2003; Irwin, 2012). Similar trajectories of re-evaluation can be traced in the work of other radical philosophers in France, for example in the work of the original students at the ENS of Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere (Lefebvre, 2002; Ranciere, 1991).

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  An Introduction to Critical Theory

  • Jennifer Rich(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Humanities E-Books

    (Publisher)

  Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction Jean-François Lyotard While Jean-François Lyotard is most famous for his 1979 work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , Lyotard had a long and varied career as a theo -rist of politics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, hermeneutics and linguistics before he was assigned by the Quebec Government to write The Postmodern Condition . Early in his career, Lyotard was a devotee of Marxism, and was deeply engaged in writing about and protesting France’s ongoing colonization of Algeria. He thought Algeria a perfect candidate for socialism upon its liberation; his ultimate dissatisfaction with Marxism as an explanatory model for social life derived in part from the ultimate failure of socialism to take hold in Algerian political life after independence. Prior to the Postmodern Condition , Lyotard developed a ‘libidinal philosophy’ in Libidinal Economy which was partly a rejection of Lacanian psychoanalysis and a rework -ing of Freud’s understanding of the function of desire and drives in the formation of civil society. While Freud understood society as built upon desire’s repression (see Civilisation and its Discontents ), Lyotard, with such thinkers as Deleuze and Guattari, saw drives or libidinal energy as central in the construction of society. In Lyotard’s view, libidinal drives are a good metaphor for understanding both the flux of society and its institutions. Where libidinal drives coalesce or congeal is where Lyotard locates ‘dispostifs’ –libidinal set ups which may or may not become institu -tionalized structures, such as political parties or other kinds of social groupings where the energy of the libidinal can be controlled. While libidinal energy can coalesce to create a structure, it can also function to disrupt it if it is not controlled; these releases of energy are of revolutionary potential and prevent structures from congealing into unmovable and hegemonic social centers of control.

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  Social Life

  Contemporary Social Theory

  • Matthias Benzer, Kate Reed, Author(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  6 Jean-François Lyotard: Living in Postmodernity

  Part 1: Society and the Games of Language

  The dimension of Jean-François Lyotard’s œuvre that has had the deepest impact on sociology is doubtless his examination of postmodernity. In The Postmodern Condition from 1979, Lyotard notes that the term ‘postmodern’ is used in sociology to capture present-day ‘culture’. His famous book employs the term specifically to characterise ‘the condition of knowledge’, namely ‘in the most highly developed societies’ (PC xxiii; see also Malpas 2003: 15, 17; Williams 1998: 26). According to the ‘working hypothesis’ of The Postmodern Condition, ‘the status of knowledge’ is changing at a time when ‘cultures’ are arriving in the so-called ‘postmodern’, and ‘societies’ in the so-called ‘postindustrial’, era (PC 3; see also Malpas 2003: 18). Lyotard indicates in this context several reasons why A Report on Knowledge – the subtitle of that book – might have relevance for those seeking insight into contemporary social conditions (PC 3–6; Malpas 2003: 16–20). Importantly for the following discussion, Lyotard proposes that ‘[s]cientific knowledge is a kind of discourse’ (PC 3), whilst a particular conception of language is indispensable to his conception of society.

  Language Games

  Outlining the ‘Method’ of his study, Lyotard refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s investigations of ‘language’. These concentrate ‘on the effects of different modes of discourse’ (PC 9–10; see Wittgenstein 1953: esp. § 23; see also Malpas 2003: 20–2; Williams 1998: 27). Lyotard mentions the ‘denotative’ type of ‘utterance’ or ‘statement’ – his example being ‘“The university is sick …”’ – as one illustration of what he has in mind. An utterance of this type has a ‘sender’ emitting it, an ‘addressee … receiv[ing] it’, and a ‘referent’. It also has a series of effects. For instance, it puts ‘the sender in the position of “knower”’ and the recipient in that ‘of having to give or refuse … assent’ (PC 9). It is possible similarly to identify other ‘kinds of utterances’, including the ‘declaration’, the ‘question’, the ‘promise’, and many more, each with its own ‘effects’ (PC 9–10, see also 16, 20–1).

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  Organization Theory and Postmodern Thought

  • Stephen Linstead(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  doing ‘justice’ to the organization, people and situation studied, left after one opens the floodgates to perspectivism? Though the theme of justice and the issue of representation ( différend) is crucial to Lyotard’s thought, he is better known as the initiator of the so-called postmodernism debate. Lyotard was a writer who abhorred the ‘sound bite’. He didn’t want to be remembered for a series of clever phrases or attention-catching aphorisms. He distanced himself from the classic tradition of French intellectuals, such as Bergson or Sartre, who were very public thinkers who saw it as their task to get large numbers of people to think about crucial ideas, themes and issues. Lyotard insisted that the classic intellectual’s task was to fill empty, vacant, slow-moving time. People used to have plenty of time, time that they could use to reflect. According to Lyotard, that sort of time no longer exists. Contemporary society puts the person under constant pressure to perform, to be economically active and productive. The intellectual who fills empty time (i.e. time free from work or any economic pressure) has no role in the globalized 24-hour economy. One cannot be a point of reference for free thought in a society wherein no free space exists. If one can no longer be an intellectual in the tradition of Bergson and Sartre, what can one do? Organization Theory and Postmodern Thought 68 Lyotard wanted to be someone who asked critical questions about the preconditions of meaning. He was out to be a ‘critical thinker’ who ferreted out the assumptions inherent in various points of view, and laid bare the limits and contradictions of ideas. But in addition to his philosophical oeuvre , Lyotard wrote some sociology. His sociological texts try to characterize contemporary society – they are (in effect) a narrative about present-day society. In these texts Lyotard ‘authored’ the term postmodern / postmodernism .

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  Poststructuralism and Critical Theory's Second Generation

  • Alan D. Schrift(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  differends, that is, to enduring differences that are unjustly hidden or eliminated.

  I. BEYOND THE MODERN AND THE POSTMODERN

  There is then something of the modern and of the postmodern in Lyotard.7 His work reflects notions of difficulty and complexity that combine a modern desire for unity and a postmodern sense of fragmentation. This combination extends into his understanding of the roles and forms of argument and position-taking in philosophy. Style and form must reflect the paradoxes and contradictions necessary for the expression of multiple positions that cannot be reduced to one another. Ethical and political concerns cannot lead to final categorical truths, but rather must lead to testimonies to the need for further varied thoughts eschewing exclusive positions, while trying to do justice to many positions and to the richness of the matter at hand.

  Lyotard’s work therefore consists of a series of essays – some of them book-length – as opposed to a series of philosophical positions or arguments. The essays are experimental attempts to think round a problem or challenge, while at the same time drawing our attention toward a wide set of delightful but also shocking and puzzling aspects of a topic. They are artworks with a style, originality, and complexity that resist simple reductions to primary ideas and methods. They are also crafted political interventions, philosophical because designed to prompt and guide thought, yet resistant to a definition of philosophy as, essentially, a clearly argued form of problem-solving and bridge-building. This resistance is not perverse or willfully obstructive; rather, it stems from the intuitions that, first, the problems at hand cannot be truly resolved through simple methods and concepts and, second, that the matter encountered by artists and thinkers of all kinds deserves a rich and expressive medium, rather than any reductively clear categorization or definition. Broadly, this is because events exceed any conceptual apparatus designed to present them and because matter demands a rich expressive medium capable of conveying that excess and of overcoming our tendency to become satisfied over time that an established medium is in fact satisfactory for giving a full presentation of events and matter.

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  French Post-War Social Theory

  International Knowledge Transfer

  • Derek Robbins, Author(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  In his introduction, Lyotard insisted that he had written his report as ‘a philosopher’. Canada was in the vanguard both of introducing a system of distance leaning in higher education and relatedly – particularly through the intellectual work of Marshall McLuhan – in reflecting on the social and political implications of new developments in mass communication. Lyotard concluded his introduction by dedicating his text to the Institut Polytechnique de Philosophie of the Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes) ‘at this very postmodern moment that finds the University nearing what may be its end, while the Institute may just be beginning’ (Lyotard, 1986: xxv). When the 1978 conversations of Au juste were published in 1979, Lyotard added a footnote to the earlier use of the word ‘postmodern’ to the effect that ‘postmodern is not to be taken in the sense of implying periodisation’ (1979: 33–4, fn. 1). He was immediately aware, in other words, that the non-referential, dialogic emphasis of his pagan texts would be subverted by an interpretation of The Postmodern Condition which would seek to represent the transition from modern to postmodern as precisely the kind of historical grand narrative of which the text disapproved. The emphasis of the text was on different modes of legitimation (even though these modes were characterised historically as ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘since the end of the nineteenth century’) and it began with a clear return to the opposition explored in Discours, figure – restated less absolutely and more sociologically. ‘Science has always’, Lyotard argued, ‘been in conflict with narratives’ (1986: xxiii). That is to say, scientific or cognitive discourse has always been in conflict with figurative or literary fictions. Inasmuch as science seeks to present itself as ‘true’, Lyotard continues, ‘it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game’ (1986: xxiii) and it produces a discourse called philosophy to carry out this function

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  Max Weber and Postmodern Theory

  Rationalization versus Re-enchantment

  • N. Gane(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  This narrative, as found in the work of Fichte and Hegel, suggests that ‘knowledge first finds legitimacy within itself, and it is knowledge that is entitled to say what the State and what Society are’ (ibid., 34). Lyotard claims, however, that in the postmodern world legitimation of knowledge proceeds on a different basis, for ‘The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation’ (Lyotard, 1984b, 37). 3 This controversial statement, the implications of which will be discussed below, points to a fundamental change in the way that scientific knowledge is legitimated, and, more deeply, to a transformation of the nature of science itself. Indeed, Lyotard proposes that postmodern science is quite different from its modern counterpart, for it is not governed by a general metalanguage but is the outcome of an open conflict between heteromorphous lan- guage games or ‘little narratives’. Postmodern science is ‘founded’ upon a principle of dissensus rather than consensus, but at the same time presupposes some degree of local agreement between its players (scientists) over the rules of the game (science). And this local agree- ment, for Lyotard, forms the basis of postmodern legitimation, or legit- imation by what he terms ‘paralogy’: a form of legitimation which respects the heterogeneity of different language games but which also challenges existing games through the search for new rules, and which thereby seeks ‘not the known, but the unknown’ (ibid., 60). This change in the basis of legitimation is accompanied by two radical shifts in the nature of science: first, a ‘multiplication in methods of argumentation’, and second, ‘a rising complexity level in the process of establishing proof’ (Lyotard, 1984b, 41). Postmodern science no longer consists of a single metalanguage but a plurality of

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  Marx Through Post-Structuralism

  Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze

  • Simon Choat(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  This idea is a persistent theme, albeit one that takes varying forms: an attack on theory, an incredulity towards metanar-ratives, a critique of philosophies of history. Throughout these changes of position, there remains a common respect for what Lyotard calls the event : a sensitivity to that which happens but eludes re-presentation, that which ‘defies knowledge’ (Lyotard, 2006: 46). It is a concern that runs through his engage-ment with Marx, which despite its furious variations and subtle transforma-tions has its own consistency: the critique Lyotard develops after renouncing revolutionary Marxism colours his attitude towards Marx for the rest of his life. This chapter analyses Lyotard’s changing relation to Marx. 1 It argues that while Lyotard highlights important issues in Marx’s work, he is too ready to Marx Through Lyotard 39 dismiss Marx and hence misses much that is valuable in that work. Lyotard attacks Marx’s idealism as I have defined it. But on the one hand, Lyotard does not recognize as fully as Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze that alternatives exist in Marx; and on the other hand, Lyotard’s own alternatives highlight the dangers of trying to posit a materialist philosophy. The breadth and variation of Lyotard’s engagement with Marx will enable us here to examine a variety of significant issues; that this engagement is ultimately rather disappointing allows these issues to be sketched in outline form so that we can later see how Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze have better dealt with them. The chapter will undertake a broadly chronological examination of Lyotard’s relation to Marx, starting with his early Marxist writings, then dealing with libidinal economics and the break with Marxism, through his attack on grand narratives to the philosophy of the differend and the postmodern fables of his final years.

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  Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed

  • Mary Klages(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze . New York: Routledge, 2002. Chris Horrocks and Zoran Jevtic, Introducing Baudrillard . New York: Totem Books, 1996. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism . New York: Routledge, 1989. Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism . New York: Routledge, 1990. Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics . New York: Routledge, 1991. Adam Roberts, Fredric Jameson . New York: Routledge, 2000. Barry Smart, Postmodernity: Key Ideas . New York: Routledge, 1993. 177 POSTMODERNISM CODA: WHAT NOW? I hope by now you have a better idea of what ‘Literary Theory’ is than you did when you started reading this book. These ideas, and the conceptual frameworks they o ff er for understanding how lan-guage, subjectivity, gender, sexuality, race, and other constructions of ‘I’dentity operate to create the world we live in every day, have been more or less required forms of knowledge in the disciplines of literary studies since 1980, when I graduated from college. Not, of course, without debate and struggle; along with the development and expansion of ‘Literary Theory’ have come critics who lament the loss of the humanist perspective and the clarity of the New Critical approach to the literary text. While some would prefer that we forget all that we’ve learned or created in the past decades, others declare that we’ve done all we can with ‘Literary Theory’ and are eager to proclaim it dead, or at least dying. The death of Jacques Derrida in 2005 – 39 years after his essay ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’ – has brought the question into the foreground: Now that we know what ‘Literary Theory’ is, where is it going and what is its future? I have no crystal ball; I can’t predict what the newest cool kind of theory is going to be. I will predict, however, that ‘Literary Theory’ is neither dead nor disappearing from the landscape of literary studies.

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