The Postmodern Condition
| The Postmodern Condition | |
|---|---|
Front cover of the 1984 University of Minnesota Press edition |
|
| Author(s) | Jean-François Lyotard |
| Original title | La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir |
| Translator | Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Subject(s) | Postmodern culture, technology, epistemology |
| Publisher | Les Éditions de Minuit (French ed.), University of Minnesota Press (English ed.) |
| Publication date | 1979 |
| Published in English |
1984 |
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) is a philosophy book by Jean-François Lyotard that analyzes the epistemology of postmodern culture as the end of 'grand narratives' or metanarratives, which Lyotard considers a quintessential feature of modernity. Short but influential, the book was originally written as a report to the Conseil des universités du Québec.[1][2] The book introduced the term 'postmodernism', which was previously only used by art critics, in philosophy with the following quotation: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives".[3][4]
Among the metanarratives are reductionism and teleological notions of human history such as those of the Enlightenment and Marxism. These have become untenable, according to Lyotard, by technological progress in the areas of communication, mass media and computer science. Techniques such as artificial intelligence and machine translation show a shift to linguistic and symbolic production as central elements of the postindustrial economy and the related postmodern culture, which had risen at the end of the 1950s after the reconstruction of western Europe. The result is a plurality of language-games (a term coined by Wittgenstein[5]), without any overarching structure. Modern science thus destroys its own metanarrative.
Lyotard professes a preference for this plurality of small narratives that compete with each other, replacing the totalitarianism of grand narratives. For this reason, The Postmodern Condition has been criticized as an excuse for unbounded relativism. However, Lyotard suggests that there is an objective truth, but because of the limited amount of knowledge that humans can understand, humans will never know this objective truth. In other words, there is no certainty of ideas, only better or worse ways to interpret things.
The Postmodern Condition was written as a report on the influence of technology on the notion of knowledge in exact sciences, commissioned by the Québec government. Lyotard later admitted that he had a 'less than limited' knowledge of the science he was to write 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'.[4] Despite this, and much to Lyotard's regret, it came to be seen as his most important piece of writing.
[edit] References
- ^ Bruneault, Frédérick (Autumn 2004). "Savoir scientifique et légitimation", Revue PHARES vol. 5.
- ^ Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1979). "Les problèmes du savoir dans les sociétés industrielles les plus développées". Quebec: Conseil des Universités. Original report available online at: http://www.cse.gouv.qc.ca/FR/Publications_CUniv/
- ^ Lyotard, Jean-François (1979). La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Minuit.
- ^ a b Anderson, Perry (1998). The Origins of Postmodernity. London/New York: Verso, pp. 24–27.
- ^ Lyotard, Jean-François (1979). La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir. Les Editions de Minuit. p. 67.
