The Postmodern Condition
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| Author | 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.) |
| Released | 1979 |
| Released in English | 1984 |
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge is a short but influential philosophy book by Jean-François Lyotard in which he analyses the epistemology of postmodern culture as the end of 'grand narratives' or metanarratives, which he considers a quintessential feature of modernity. The book was originally written as a report to the Canadian Counseil des Universities. 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".[1][2]
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, which reached a peak in the 1970s[3] 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), without any overarching structure. Modern science thus destroys its own metanarrative.
In the book, 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 often been interpreted as an excuse for unbounded relativism, which for many has become a hallmark of postmodern thought.[2]
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. It is the 'odd one out' in Lyotards bibliography, because it does not touch on his two major themes: arts and politics. 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'.[2] Despite this, and much to Lyotard's regret, it came to be seen as his most important piece of writing.
