Jean-François Lyotard had previously been quite much in the political scene as a Marxist in the 1950s and 1960s before venturing into his postmodernism revelations. Toward the end, he turned away from Marxism. He became one of the standard prominent figures of postmodernism, and considered it a radical break from the systemic and dogmatic thinking that Marxism represented to him. He had betrayed a changing philosophical direction before the publication of The Difference. That book eventually became one of the principal contributions of this philosopher.
His first book, La Fenomenologia, was published in 1954. It was an introduction to Husserl’s phenomenology. Although he identified as a Marxist at the time, he wasn’t the type to blindly follow the party line. He openly criticized and rejected dogmatic takes on Marx, like Trotskyism and Stalinism. By 1966, he officially cut ties with Marxism, disappointed with how the movement failed to deliver its promise of building a fair socialist society.
One of his main issues with Marxism was that it aimed to create a homogeneous culture. Lyotard pushed back against that, saying the only way such uniformity could ever exist was through violence and violations of human rights. For him, postmodern society is marked by individualism and the freedom to be different, a direct contrast to the forced sameness and violence tied to Marxist ideologies.
The word “postmodern” hit the spotlight with his famous book The Postmodern Condition, first published in 1979 and translated into English in 1984. Since then, it has become the go-to reference point for every discussion of postmodernism in philosophy.
Interestingly, the book was not just a random project but a report commissioned by the University of Quebec Council of Experts. They wanted him to look at societies that had made significant advances in science and technology toward the end of the 20th century. Beyond pointing out how information technology shaped science at the time, Lyotard argued that massive shifts were happening in knowledge, science, and education. All of that, he said, was leading humanity into what he called the postmodern condition.
In the last forty years, cutting-edge science and tech have become deeply tied to language, linguistics, cybernetics, computers, translation tools, data storage, and information systems. These technological changes reshaped knowledge in significant ways. With the miniaturization and commercialization of machines, how knowledge is produced, shared, and even valued has transformed. Lyotard believed that knowledge could not stay the same despite these changes.
Lyotard’s thought circles the role of knowledge in the information technology age, especially how science justifies itself through grand narratives. Ideas like freedom, progress, and the liberation of the working class, much like narratives tied to faith, nationhood, or religion, all face the same downfall. In a scientific age, grand narratives no longer hold up, even those that try to justify science itself. It is at the core of his argument: building a universal, all-encompassing framework of reason is impossible, no matter how much the modernists wanted it.
Knowledge cannot stay the same when everything around it is changing. It only works in new channels when bits of information get turned into specialized knowledge. At this point, society can expect that not everything in the field of knowledge will be “solved”; a lot of it will just get dropped. New research directions will shape whether computer languages can even keep up with ongoing studies. Now, anyone working with knowledge has to translate whatever they want to build or understand into the right “language” first.
As machine translation grows and computer dominance expands, a certain logic appears. A set of rules decides which statements are recognized as valid knowledge. The old idea that specialized knowledge should serve the state, as if society itself were some brain, is getting outdated. That is because an opposing principle is gaining strength. From this perspective, the tension between state power and the economy is becoming more urgent.
It’s not hard to see that specialized knowledge circulates in the same way money does, just as much as political agendas or educational values. The real difference now isn’t between knowledge and ignorance but between how knowledge is used: like spending cash for daily survival or investing money to boost the long-term performance of a project. In other words, knowledge can be exchanged in little “day-to-day” units or pooled together as a bigger resource aimed at optimization.
If that is the case, then total transparency in communication would basically align with liberalism. Liberalism does not get in the way of money flowing smoothly through single-channel systems where decisions are made. By contrast, the other channel is mainly used to pay off debts. You can think of knowledge moving similarly: one track is reserved for decision-makers, while everyone else keeps paying into the endless “debt” of social obligations.
Scientific knowledge has always been partial because it competes with something else. For Lyotard, this is the narrative condition of postmodernism. In fact, narratives were the ones to define knowledge in traditional societies and tell how the rules apply. The immense difference between science and narrative is the “language game” each plays. Science works, with its denotative game, directly stating meanings and ignoring all the other games involved. On the contrary, narratives justify themselves. They do not need evidence, argumentation, or tests to prove them true, so most scientists dismiss them as invalid claims.
Both scientific knowledge and narrative matter are made up of statements created by people playing within their own frameworks and rules. Each kind of knowledge has its own set of rules. What is valid or reasonable in one system might not fit in the other. You cannot judge non-scientific knowledge or narratives purely by scientific standards, and the same goes the other way around, because they run on totally different criteria and language games. This difference in language is cultural; it is not about one being better than the other.
Science does not confine itself to just one worldview. Science exists upon denotative language, which is subject to some internal checks and verification of facts, while narrative knowledge, in turn, restricts itself to metaphorical language. They are two separate systems, with attendant purposes that ultimately contribute to a more textured understanding of the world.
Lyotard adopts a position that is radically opposed to Hegelianism, which treats art history as an essentially progressive record of artistic developments according to the ground rules of modernity. For him, art is not so much a historical object but rather the maker of history. He refuses to entertain the notion that every artwork bears some stable meaning, emphasizing the act of creation instead. He is taking a stand against any assertion that art should communicate a specific message.
He appreciates the same raw, energetic force for art that does not require meaning or identity, just as philosophy does. Although critics and art lovers tend to consider art a meaningful representation, Lyotard argues that, in fact, art acts as a force within itself, an embodiment that directly shows itself. Such an understanding of beauty in art is unorthodox.
Art liberates what is becoming trapped under the domination of techno-scientific discourse for Lyotard; in its more general understanding, postmodernism is a system of openness in which art can give voice to multiple, unpredictable articulations. The human subjects think according to their own laws of these diversions without attempting to master the diversity of life.
Aestheticity, from this vantage point, concerns art rather than settling in language systems; it is loaded with a potentiality. Art can also precipitate different possibilities on earth in its own slippery and arbitrary ways. It must never succumb to outside events but persist as an autonomous entity.
It leads to bigger questions: what exactly are the conditions of postmodernism for Lyotard? Moreover, how do they play out in the messy process of challenging both narrative norms and imagery? Postmodernism does not cancel modernity; it lives alongside it. Everything people take for granted, even stuff accepted just yesterday, should be questioned.
In this context, a postmodern artist or writer takes on the role of a philosopher: instead of sticking to pre-set rules or universal categories, their texts explore and create their own rules from within the work itself. Rules and categories are not fixed beforehand; they are something the artwork has to discover. So the artist or writer works without ready-made rules, shaping them from elements of the past while pushing them into the future.
It is pretty clear that one of the main things shaping postmodernism, at least in Lyotard’s view, is the loss of faith in big, all-encompassing grand narratives and the rise of smaller, fragmented stories. For him, postmodernism is not about one reality but about showing multiple realities and opening up different possibilities. The old cultural heritage that split everything into black and white categories just created rigidity, trapping people in universalist and essentialist thinking. At the core, Lyotard rejects the idea of some universal, objective truth; he argues that what we call “truth” is always shaped by discourse.
References
- Bennington, G. (1988). Lyotard: Writing the Event. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
- Connor, S. (1989). Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1979)
- Lyotard, J. F. (1988). The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (G. Van Den Abbeele, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Lyotard, J. F. (1991). The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (G. Bennington & R. Bowlby, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
- Malpas, S. (2003). Jean-François Lyotard. London: Routledge.
I understand where it came from, but post-modernism has always struck me as such a dead-end philosophy.
I agree with that. Postmodernism has no concrete definition; apart from being philosophy with no boundaries, it is also philosophy with no limitations. Thank you kindly.