The Postmodern Condition

A short report on the state of knowledge in the most developed societies, written at the request of the Quebec government's council of universities and subtitled A Report on Knowledge. Lyotard defines the postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. Modern science and politics had justified themselves through grand narratives: the speculative story of knowledge unified in a system, inherited from Hegel, and the emancipatory story of humanity freed through knowledge. These, he argues, have lost their credibility. In their place stand many local language games, a notion taken from Wittgenstein, each with its own rules. Meanwhile computerisation turns knowledge into information that can be bought and sold, and institutions increasingly judge knowledge by performativity, the efficiency of input and output. Against this, Lyotard points to science's own search for instabilities and to paralogy, legitimation through dissent rather than consensus. The English edition adds his essay Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism? Habermas and others replied in defence of modernity's unfinished project.

It gave the word postmodern its philosophical meaning, and its account of knowledge as data judged by efficiency fits universities and the information economy today.