Jean-Francois Lyotard:
 
The Postmodern Condition and the Postmodern Sublime
 
 (Excerpted E-Text of The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge)
 

General Argument, Background and Questions

The Postmodern Condition-- Important Quotes

The Postmodern Sublime

Relevant Links

 Lyotard's General Arguments

• Places emphasis on narrative in the fields of science, too.
• Postmodern condition = post-industrial, computerized society
• Postmodernism as "incredulity toward mata-narratives" (Introduction xxiv).  Against Grand Narratives of legitimation; for small and local narratives.
• He sees the working of society as a network of language games (based on socio-linguistics, esp. the performance theory).  Against consense; for paralogy.
• The postmodern sublime vs. the terror of totalization.

 

Jameson from Forword, The Postmodern Condition

• in the wake of a certain French "post-Marxism" (x)
• Jameson's response to the loss of the great master-narratives: he believes we should "[take] a further step that Lyotard seems unwilling to do in the present text, namely to posit, not the disappearance of the great master-narratives, but their passage underground as it were, their continuing but now unconscious effectivity as a way of "thinking about" and acting in our current situation.  --"political unconscious"
• Jameson's defense of Marxism:
• "The persistance of issues of power and control, particularly in the increasing monopolization of information of information by private business, would seem to make an affirmative answer unavoidable, and to reconfirm the priviledged status of Marxism as a mode of analysis of capitalism proper.  (xiii)
• "The question of social class, and in particular of the "proletariat" and its existence, is hopelessly confused when such arguments conflate the problem of a theoretical category of analysis (social class) with the empirical question about the mood or influence of workers in this or that society today (they are no longer revolutionary, bourgeoisified, etc.).
• Jameson's criticism of Lyotard:
• Missing culture -- "Here Lyotard's sketch is tantalizing and finally frustrating; for the formal limitation of his essay to the problem of "knowledge" has tended to exclude an area -- culture -- that has been of the greatest importance to him in his other writings, as he has been one of the most keenly committed of contemporary thinkers anywhere to the wole range and variety of avante-garde and experimental art today.   . . . Lyotard is in reality quite unwilling to posit a postmodernist stage radically different from the period of high modernism and involving a fundamental historical and cultural break with this last." (xv - xvi)
• Avant-gardist -- ". . .his commitment to cultural and formal innovation still valorizes culture and its powers in much the same spirit in which the Western avant-gardes has done so since the fin de siecle."

• What are at stake in this argument over consense and dissensus, grand narrative vs. small narrative?  Is coginitive mapping a kind of grand narrative?  In any kind of politics, is it really possible to stay with dissensus?  If not, how do we reach consensus without excluding/suppressing others' opinion?
• If, as Jameson said, working class is a theorectical concept, "grand narratives" and "small narratives" are, too.  How do we apply these theorectical concepts to the social-historical?  Can we find any examples for them?
• Is there any contradiction between Lyotard ideas of postmodernism and postmodernity?

"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." (5)

2. Language Games & Performance (Note: "I am not claiming that the entirety of social relations is of this nature -- that will remain an open question." 15)

• ...their rules do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit or not between players (which is not to say that the players invent the rules).
• if there are no rules, there is no game. . .
• every utterance should be thought of as a move in a game.  (10)

4. Legitimation by Paralogy  and Performance
 

1. *Lyotard Auto-Differend Page (a technical experiment and theoretical allegory; makes extensive use of client-pull animation to create a universe of automatic page sequences organized around the philosophy of Lyotard; REQUIRES Netscape 1.1 or later to activate client-pull sequences; Netscape 1.2b3 or later recommended for best results with color backgrounds) (Alan Liu)-- fun to read!
2. *Jean Francois Lyotard's The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Robert S. Leventhal, U. Virginia - Responses to the Holocaust: A Hypermedia Sourcebook for the Humanities)
3. Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard (bibliography) (UC Irvine Critical Theory Resource/Eddie Yeghiayan, U. Calif. Irvine)
4. Comprehensive Lyotard Bibliography
5. Lyotard: Bibliography-in-Progress (Spoon Collective Lyotard List)
6. Lyotard List & Readers' Guide Project
7. Spoon Collective Lyotard List (Shawn P. Wilbur)

Literary Theory: A Literary Theory Project in the Dept. of English, Rice U. (currently centered on Lyotard's Just Gaming and performance theory)