Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge is a short, dense philosophical essay first published in France in 1979 and translated into English in the early 1980s. It began as a commissioned report to the Conseil des Universités of the government of Quebec on the state of knowledge in the most highly developed societies, and it carries that occasional, diagnostic character throughout: Lyotard calls himself a philosopher rather than an expert, and the book reads less like a system than like a set of probes into a situation still forming. Its fourteen short chapters move from the computerized transformation of research and teaching, through an analysis of how science justifies itself, to a proposal about what legitimation might mean once the old justifications have collapsed.
The book’s central claim is that the grand narratives that once secured the authority of knowledge—the emancipation of humanity, the speculative unity of all knowledge in a philosophical system—have lost their credibility. What remains is a plurality of language games, each with its own rules, none able to adjudicate for the others. Lyotard’s question is whether a just society, a legitimate social bond, can be conceived on a model analogous to postmodern science itself: not consensus but dissension, not the expert’s homology but the inventor’s paralogy.
From Computerized Knowledge to the Crisis of Legitimation
The Book as Crossroads
The volume arrives framed as a report rather than a treatise: Lyotard’s study of knowledge in computerized societies, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi and introduced by Fredric Jameson, first appeared in France in 1979 under the title La Condition postmoderne. Its fourteen chapters move from the field of knowledge in computerized societies through the problem of legitimation, the method of language games, the two accounts of the social bond, the pragmatics of narrative and scientific knowledge, the narrative function in legitimation, delegitimation, research and education legitimated through performativity, postmodern science as a search for instabilities, and finally legitimation by paralogy—with an appendix asking what postmodernism is.
Jameson’s foreword treats the book as a crossroads where several debates intersect. Lyotard’s account of new paradigms in scientific research, opened by Kuhn and Feyerabend, doubles as a veiled polemic against Habermas’s idea of a legitimation crisis and his vision of a transparent, noise-free communicational society. The title itself opens onto aesthetics and economics, since postmodernism names a break with a dominant culture and with a prior moment of socioeconomic organization—media society, Debord’s society of the spectacle, consumer society, Lefebvre’s bureaucratic society of controlled consumption, Bell’s postindustrial society. Jameson notes that Lyotard’s combative, prophetic voice stays relatively quiet here, and that the book performs significant methodological work through narrative analysis.
Science, Legitimation, and the Crisis of Representation
Doing science, Jameson observes, carries its own need for legitimation—why students do not run laboratory work in alchemy, why Velikovsky counts as an eccentric—and this can be studied as a subset of the political problem of legitimating a whole social order. Legitimation becomes visible as a problem only when it is called into question; for science, the crisis shows in Kuhn’s and Feyerabend’s theories. The break links to the crisis of representation: a realistic epistemology that treats knowledge as the reproduction within subjectivity of an objectivity outside it, a mirror theory whose evaluative categories are adequacy, accuracy, and Truth. Lyotard rescues the coherence of scientific research by recasting its postreferential epistemology in linguistic terms, drawing on Austin’s theory of the performative: scientific work justifies itself not by modeling an outside reality but by generating more work, new statements, new ideas—by making it new.
Two great legitimizing myths, or narrative archetypes, stand behind the argument: the liberation of humanity and the speculative unity of all knowledge as philosophical system. The first is political and militant, rooted in the French eighteenth century and the Revolution, the tradition Lyotard belongs to; the second is Germanic and Hegelian, contemplative, organized around totality, the tradition to which Habermas remains affiliated. Lyotard writes in the wake of French post-Marxism, a reaction against Marxist and Communist traditions whose prime philosophical target is the Hegel/Lukács concept of totality, assimilated to Stalinism or the Leninist party. His own break with Marxism—he belonged to Socialisme ou barbarie in the 1950s and early 1960s—antedates the French McCarthyist moment.
Mandel, Culture, and the Postmodernist Question
Jameson proposes Ernest Mandel’s theorization of a third stage of capitalism as a Marxian alternative to non-Marxist theories of consumer or postindustrial society, of which Daniel Bell’s is the most influential. Mandel shows that the features Bell uses to document the end of capitalism—the new primacy of science and technological invention, the technocracy it generates, the shift from older industrial to newer informational technologies—can be accounted for in classical Marxist terms as indices of a new global expansion of capitalism into hitherto precapitalist enclaves of Third World agriculture and First World culture, colonizing Nature and the Unconscious. This is consistent with the Frankfurt School’s culture industry, though what remains problematical, even for Debord, is articulating cultural and informational commodities with the labor theory of value—reconciling quantitative labor-time with mental work and nonmeasurable commodities like information bits.
The changing status of knowledge leads back to the mode of production as a system, and to whether a postmodernist culture exists. Lyotard’s sketch is tantalizing and frustrating: limiting himself to knowledge excludes culture, and his commitment to avant-garde art yields an aesthetic closer to high modernism than to current postmodernisms. Though he endorses postmodernism, he will not posit a stage radically different from high modernism; he sees it as a cyclical moment returning before ever new modernisms. Habermas, by contrast, reads postmodernism as a repudiation of the modernist tradition, a return of philistine rejection expressing a new social conservatism. Architecture confirms the split: Le Corbusier and Wright were revolutionaries whose formal innovations were expected to transform social life, replacing political revolution; postmodernist architecture, analogous to neoclassicism, mixes historicist allusion—mannerist, baroque, rococo, neoclassicist variants—and shows the falling away of the older modernism’s protopolitical vocation along with an eclipse of affect in favor of surface and aesthetic play.
An Ethic of Dissension
French poststructuralism invited us toward the superficial; here aesthetics gives way to ethics, an attitude toward the new social formation. Lyotard’s affiliations run to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, whose schizophrenic ethic was less revolutionary than a way of surviving under capitalism. His ethic emerges in his repudiation of Habermas’s consensus community: the self dissolves into networks, contradictory codes, interfering messages. Hence his vision of science as a search for instabilities, a practice of paralogism undermining normal science; hence the rhetoric of struggle, the agonic, and his picture of nonhegemonic Greek philosophy—Stoics, Cynics, Sophists—as guerrilla war of marginals against Aristotle’s Order. There is consonance between Lyotard’s scientific free play and postmodernist architecture’s injunction to learn from Las Vegas. The book’s deepest level, Jameson suggests, is a narrative generating an imaginary resolution of real contradictions.
Narrative Knowledge and Its Own Rules
Lyotard turns to how narrative knowledge actually works—not as a primitive precursor to science but as a coherent pragmatic system with its own logic. Narratives recount a hero’s successes or failures, and in doing so they either legitimize social institutions (myths) or offer models of integration into them (legends and tales). Through this, a society defines its criteria of competence and evaluates what can be performed by those criteria. Unlike developed knowledge, narrative form admits many language games at once: denotative statements about sky and fauna, deontic prescriptions about kinship and neighbors, implied challenges, evaluatives. Competence areas are woven into a single web.
The Cashinahua storyteller illustrates the transmission rules. He opens with a fixed formula—”Here is the story of —, as I’ve always heard it told”—and closes with another naming the teller. His only claim to competence is having heard the story; the listener gains potential access to the same authority by listening. The tale is claimed as faithful transmission told “forever,” and since the hero was once a narratee and narrator, the current teller could be—and necessarily is—a hero, bearing a name given according to the canonic narrative that legitimates Cashinahua patronyms. The right to speak rests on having been addressed and having been recounted oneself. Such knowledge determines what one must say to be heard, listen to to speak, and what role to play to be narrated. It transmits a threefold competence—knowing how to do, to speak, to listen—constituting the social bond.
Time here follows narrative rhythm, synthesizing meter and accent. Cashinahua tales are sung as interminable monotonous chants in a language obscured by lexical and syntactic anomalies, during initiation ceremonies the young men addressed do not understand. Meter overrides accent, making time an immemorial beating that consigns periods to oblivion—jarring against knowledge’s rule “never forget.” Proverbs and maxims are splinters of potential narratives. A collectivity keyed to narrative need not remember its past; the social bond lies in the act of reciting. The reference seems past but is contemporaneous with recitation. Such a culture needs no special procedures to authorize narratives: the narratives themselves have authority, and people actualize them by recounting, listening, and being recounted. Hence the incommensurability between popular narrative pragmatics, with its immediate legitimation, and the West’s question of legitimacy.
The Pragmatics of Scientific Knowledge
Copernicus’s statement that planetary paths are circular carries prescriptions: the sender must prove and refute, the addressee must be a potential equal, the referent must be adequately “expressed”—yet adequation is problematical, since what proves the proof? Two rules solve this: a referent is what is susceptible to proof in debate, and the same referent cannot yield contradictory proofs—”God” is not deceptive. These underlie verification and falsification, bringing a horizon of consensus; not every consensus is truth, but truth presumes consensus. Research needs teaching: equals must be created. Didactics presupposes the student doesn’t know, can learn to equal the master, and that some statements are settled enough to transmit as indisputable. As the student improves, the expert may confide what he is still learning, introducing him to research.
Science differs from narrative on several counts. It retains only denotation; other statements are turning points ending in denotative statements. It is set apart from the social bond, becoming a profession and institution, creating mutual exteriority between itself and society. Competence concerns only the sender; no competence is required of the referent, which is external to the partners. Scientific statements gain no validity from being reported, remain falsifiable, and new statements must refute predecessors. Science implies diachronic temporality—memory and project—with accent and polemics over meter, in principle cumulative. Neither knowledge form is more necessary than the other; their criteria differ, so neither can judge the other. Narrative tolerates science as a variant of narrative culture; science deems narratives savage, primitive, underdeveloped, fit for women and children—an unequal relationship intrinsic to each game’s rules, the history of cultural imperialism, governed by the demand for legitimation.
Plato and the Narrative of Legitimation
Legitimation now becomes legitimated as a problem—a heuristic driving force. The language game of science faced the problem of legitimating itself from its beginning, in Plato. The game of dialogue encapsulates the pragmatics of science, enveloping research and teaching, sharing the rules already enumerated: argumentation aimed only at consensus, the unicity of the referent as guarantee of agreement, parity between partners, and indirect recognition that it is a game, since those refusing the rules out of weakness are excluded. Because the game is scientific, the question of its own legitimacy must be raised in the dialogues. A key example, linking this question to sociopolitical authority from the start, is in books 6 and 7 of The Republic, where the answer comes partly as a narrative—the allegory of the cave—recounting how and why men yearn for narratives and fail to recognize knowledge. Knowledge is thus founded on the narrative of its own martyrdom. The Platonic discourse inaugurating science is not scientific precisely insofar as it attempts to legitimate science; scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is true knowledge without resorting to narrative knowledge, which from its point of view is no knowledge at all—otherwise it would presuppose its own validity and beg the question. Descartes demonstrates science’s legitimacy through what Valéry called the story of a mind, a Bildungsroman; Aristotle separated the rules of scientific statements from the search for legitimacy in a discourse on Being.
With modern science two new features appear: it abandons the metaphysical search for a first proof or transcendental authority, recognizing that the rules of the game of science are immanent in that game, established within an already-scientific debate, with no proof the rules are good other than the consensus of experts.
Science as a Perpetual Search for Legitimacy
Science, on Lyotard’s account, does not expand through the positivism of efficiency. To work on a proof is to search for and invent counterexamples—the unintelligible; to support an argument is to seek a paradox and legitimate it with new rules in the games of reasoning. Efficiency is not sought for its own sake; it arrives tardily, as an extra, when grant givers take an interest. What recurs with every new theory, hypothesis, statement, or observation is the question of legitimacy—asked not by the philosophy of science but by science of itself. What has gone out of date is not the question of what is true and just, but the positivistic view that relegates science to unlegitimated half-knowledge, as the German idealists did. The question “What is your argument worth?” belongs to the pragmatics of scientific knowledge, assuring the transformation of the addressee of an argument into the sender of a new one, renewing scientific discourse and replacing each generation of scientists. Hence the metaquestion: what is your “what is it worth” worth?
Validation Immanent to Scientific Discourse
The striking feature of postmodern scientific knowledge is that the discourse on the rules validating it is explicitly immanent to it. What looked at the end of the nineteenth century like a loss of legitimacy and a fall into “pragmatism” or logical positivism was only an episode; knowledge recovered by including within scientific discourse the discourse on validating statements held to be laws. This inclusion is not simple: it gives rise to seriously taken “paradoxes” and “limitations” that amount to changes in the nature of knowledge. Gödel’s theorem, from metamathematical research, is the paradigm of this change; dynamics is equally exemplary and forces a reconsideration of the notion of system.
The Ideal of Perfect Performance
The idea of performance implies a highly stable system based on a calculable relation between heat and work, hot and cold source, input and output—drawn from thermodynamics—associated with the notion that a system’s evolution can be predicted if all its variables are known. Laplace’s fiction of the “demon” expresses this ideal: knowing all variables at moment t, it predicts the state at t’>t. This rests on physical systems, including the universe of systems, following regular patterns, tracing regular paths, and yielding “normal” continuous functions—and, by extension, futurology.
The Limits of Control: Borges and Brillouin
Quantum mechanics and atomic physics limit this principle in two ways. First, a complete definition of a system’s initial state would require energy at least equivalent to that consumed by the system defined; Borges offers a layman’s version—an emperor orders a perfectly accurate map of the empire, and the project ruins the country as the entire population devotes its energy to cartography. Brillouin’s argument concludes that the idea of perfect control over a system, supposed to improve performance, is inconsistent with the law of contradiction: it lowers the performance it claims to raise. This explains the weakness of state and socioeconomic bureaucracies, which stifle the systems they control and asphyxiate themselves through negative feedback—without invoking any legitimation outside the system, such as the freedom of human agents. Even accepting society as a system, complete control is impossible, since no exact definition of its initial state could be effected. But this only questions practicability; classical determinism survives within the unreachable-but-conceivable limit of total knowledge.
Perrin’s Spherule and Incompatible Statements
Quantum theory and microphysics demand a more radical revision: the quest for precision is limited not by cost but by the nature of matter. Uncertainty does not shrink as accuracy rises—it rises too. Jean Perrin’s example measures the real density of air in a sphere: variations are noticeable reducing the volume from 100 m³ to 1 cm³; little variation from 1 cm³ to 1/1000 mm³, though irregular variations of a billionth occur; as the volume decreases, the variations grow—at 1/10 cubic micron, of a thousandth; at 1/100 cubic micron, of a fifth. Further decreasing reaches the molecular scale: in the void between two molecules, density is nil; about one time in a thousand the spherule’s center falls within a molecule, giving an average density comparable to the gas’s real density. At intra-atomic dimensions, chances are high it lies in the void, but one time in a million its center falls within a corpuscle or nucleus, giving a density millions of times greater than water. Perrin concludes that if the spherule contracts further, average and real density will probably soon become nil and remain nil, except in rare positions reaching spectacularly higher values.
Knowledge about air density thus resolves into a multiplicity of absolutely incompatible statements, made compatible only if relativized to a scale chosen by the speaker. On certain levels, density cannot be stated as a simple assertion but only as a modalized one: “it is plausible that the density will equal zero but not out of the question that it will be of the order of 10^x.” The scientist’s statement and “what nature says” organize as a game without perfect information; modalization reflects that nature’s effective singular statement is unpredictable—only probabilities can be calculated. At microphysics, “better” information cannot be obtained; the problem is not learning what the opponent is but identifying the game it plays. Einstein balked at “God plays with dice,” yet dice is precisely a game for which sufficient statistical regularities can be established—so much for the old image of the supreme Determinant. If God played bridge, the “primary chance” encountered could not be imputed to the die’s indifference but to cunning—a choice.
Legitimation by Performativity and the Exercise of Terror
The system’s legitimation is performativity, not the satisfaction of need. Rights do not flow from hardship but from the fact that alleviating hardship improves system performance; the needs of the most underprivileged should not serve as a system regulator, since the means of satisfying them is already known and actual satisfaction would only increase expenditures. The sole counterindication is that not satisfying them can destabilize the whole.
The Ethnologist’s Predicament and the Politics of Science
The endnotes open with a remark that cuts to the heart of the book’s method. Métraux told Clastres that to study a primitive society it must already be “a little decayed,” because the native informant has to see his own society through the ethnologist’s eyes and question the legitimacy of its institutions. Clastres, reflecting on his failure with the Aché, concluded that the tribe accepted unrequested presents while refusing dialogue because they were strong enough not to need it: “we would start talking when they were sick.” The anecdote quietly frames the whole problem of legitimation—who speaks, from where, and on what authority. From there the notes fan out into a bibliography of resistance: Survivre on scientistic ideology, periodicals and groups fighting the subordination of science to the system, Goldschmidt on Plato’s dialogues, Genette’s terminology, Valéry on Leonardo, Aubenque on Aristotle, and Duhem, Koyré, and Kuhn on physical theory and scientific revolutions. De Certeau, Julia, and Revel appear on the politics of language and French patois; Kalinowski on prescriptions versus norms; and a note traces the politics of the French philosophy class at the end of secondary studies, alongside the GREPH proposal to teach “some” philosophy earlier and Quebec’s CEGEP curricula.
Humboldt, Schleiermacher, and the Idea of the University
The apparatus turns to the university’s own genealogy. Janne is cited on the university and contemporary society’s needs; Julio de Mesquita Filho’s 1937 São Paulo address and a 1968 Brazilian reform report arrive via Helena Chamlian and Martha Ramos de Carvalho; Miguel Abensour and the Collège de philosophie supply French documents by Schelling, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, and Hegel. Humboldt (1810) and Schleiermacher (1808) are quoted directly, the latter holding that the teaching of philosophy is the basis of all university activity. Touraine on the contradictions of transplantation in the United States, Nisbet, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Ricoeur and Gadamer, Rey-Debove’s definition of the “autonym,” and a Kantian principle in transcendental ethics—Kant being prudent in politics—round out the intellectual scaffolding. A note on Öffentlichkeit and the 1960s scientist groups (Survivre, Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action, the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science) marks the moment when the public sphere becomes a site of scientific contestation.
Delegitimation, Nihilism, and the Undemocratic Character of Science
Granel’s translation, Hassan on postmodernism, Mueller’s “process of delegitimation,” Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology, and a postponed study of rules carry the argument forward. Nietzsche’s manuscripts on nihilism, with Ryjik’s commentary, and Nietzsche on educational institutions sit beside Buber and Lévinas; Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations anchors the turn to language games. De Solla Price’s finding that highly productive and low-productivity researchers split apart leads to the blunt conclusion that science is “undemocratic.” Desanti, the reclassification of philosophy and its ties to the university, Janik and Toulmin, Habermas, and Musil follow, then Aristotle, Descartes, and Mill; Bachelard and Serres; Hilbert, Bourbaki, Blanché, Martin; Gödel, Ladrière, Tarski, Desclés and Guentcheva-Desclés, and Bourbaki’s Éléments. Kuhn, Ramsey, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and Herodotus via Hartog appear, then Gehlen, Leroi-Gourhan, Vernant, Baltrusaitis, Mumford, and Gille. Mulkay and Edge on amateur radios and relativity, Mulkay’s branching model, Brooks on research costs, and E. E. David on RANN lead into Lazarsfeld’s 1937 condition for founding the Princeton mass-communication center and its tensions with the radio industries.
Funding, Technocracy, and the Reform of 1968
US federal R&D funding data, Nisbet, and the (Auto)critique chapters give way to Luhmann and Mueller on technocratic legitimation, Fauconnier on controlling truth, the British University Grants Committee (1970) and Brooks, Lasswell’s communication formula, Parsons on “instrumental activism,” and Mueller on the professional versus technical intelligentsia. Enrollment statistics, French budget figures, Mueller again, Dofny and Rioux, Kerr, Alliot, and Vincennes follow—including the author’s personal experience at Vincennes—and the November 12, 1968 reform law on continuing education.
The Minister, the Media, and the End of the Apparatus
The final notes reach outward. A 17 March 1979 interview in Télé-septjours records the French minister of Education, who had officially recommended the Holocaust series to public school students, declaring that the education sector’s attempt to create an autonomous audiovisual tool had failed and that “the first task of education is to teach children how to choose their programs.” British state contribution to university capital and operating expenses rose from 30% to 80% between 1920 and 1960; the University Grants Committee distributes the annual subsidy after studying needs and plans; in the United States the trustees are all-powerful. In France this means distributing earmarked funds among departments, with instructors holding power over salaries only for temporary personnel. McLuhan’s Essays and Antoine’s “Comment s’informer?” appear; intelligent terminals are taught to schoolchildren in Japan and used by isolated Canadian departments; American research centers pursued this policy since before the Second World War. Nora and Minc are quoted: the major challenge is no longer mastering matter but constructing a network of links allowing information and organization to move forward together. Rapoport’
Language Games and the Social Bond
The conceptual engine of the book is the later Wittgenstein’s notion of language games, which Lyotard uses to dismantle the dream of a unified discourse. Denotative statements (true or false), prescriptive statements (just or unjust), and technical statements (efficient or inefficient) obey separate rules; nothing in propositional logic carries you from “The door is closed” to “Open the door.” Once reason is divided this way, science loses its special calling to supervise practice. It becomes one game among others, unable to legitimate the rest and—crucially—unable to legitimate itself without borrowing from the very narrative knowledge it dismisses as savage.
This is why Lyotard spends so much time on narrative. In the Cashinahua storyteller’s formula—”Here is the story of —, as I’ve always heard it told”—he finds a form of knowledge that needs no external authorization: the narrator’s competence rests on having listened, the listener gains the right to speak by hearing, and the tale legitimates itself in the act of being recited. Scientific knowledge, by contrast, excludes the addressee from competence, demands proof, and accumulates. The two are incommensurable, and the history of science’s relation to narrative is a history of domination. Yet science cannot escape narrative: Plato’s Republic answers the question of the legitimacy of knowledge with the allegory of the cave, a story of knowledge’s martyrdom. The legitimation of science is thus founded on a narrative it cannot acknowledge.
The social bond follows the same logic. Lyotard rejects both the Parsonian image of society as a self-regulating organic whole and the Marxist image of society as a field of class struggle, on the grounds that each is a totalizing fiction. What replaces them is a picture of society as a fabric of communication circuits, with each self located at nodal points through which messages pass. The self “does not amount to much,” but no self is an island. The dissolution of the grand Narratives does not produce Brownian atoms; it produces a more complex and mobile weave of relations, and the question of politics becomes the question of who has access to the information that passes through it.
Performativity, Terror, and the University
The book’s most corrosive analysis concerns what happens when legitimation is replaced by a criterion of efficiency. In the discourse of financial backers, Lyotard writes, the only credible goal is power: scientists and instruments are purchased not to find truth but to augment power. The technical criterion—the best input/output equation—seeps into the truth criterion, and Luhmann’s hypothesis that the normativity of law gives way to the performativity of procedures becomes the book’s diagnosis of postindustrial governance. Legitimation by power is self-legitimating: power is good performativity, and performativity is justified by power.
This has a name in Lyotard’s vocabulary: terror. Terror is not the threat of violence but the efficiency gained by threatening to eliminate a player from the language game—silencing him not by refutation but by making his participation impossible. The decision makers’ arrogance (“Adapt your aspirations to our ends—or else”) is the exercise of terror, and the university is where it is most visible. Higher education realigns around two kinds of service: training the players needed for world competition in telematics and related fields, and supplying the professional and technical intelligentsia with the skills the system requires. The student as a youth of the liberal elite concerned with emancipation gives way to the student as a client served knowledge “à la carte.” The old humanist university, modeled on the emancipation of humanity, offers little performance and is quietly defunded.
Science as a Model of Dissension
Against this, Lyotard sets the actual practice of postmodern science, which he reads as an antimodel of the stable system. Science does not advance through the positivism of efficiency; it advances through the search for counterexamples, the invention of paradoxes, and the legitimation of new rules. Gödel’s theorem and the paradoxes of microphysics—Perrin’s demonstration that the density of air resolves into incompatible statements depending on the scale chosen—show that knowledge at its most rigorous is discontinuous, local, and agonistic. The question “What is your argument worth?” is itself subject to the metaquestion “What is your ‘what is it worth’ worth?” and that regress is not a defect but the engine of scientific life.
From this Lyotard draws his positive proposal: legitimation by paralogy. The principle of postmodern knowledge is not the expert’s homology but the inventor’s paralogy—the production of new moves, new rules, new games. Postmodern knowledge refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our tolerance of the incommensurable. It is not merely a tool of the authorities; it can also be a refusal to cooperate with them. The book closes on the question it opened: whether a legitimation of the social bond can be conceived in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific activity, and what that paradox would be. Lyotard does not answer it so much as leave it standing, as the task that postmodernity sets for philosophy.
The Book’s Afterlife
The Postmodern Condition became one of the most cited and most contested books of the 1980s, and much of its reputation rests on the argument it provoked. Fredric Jameson’s foreword frames it as a crossroads where Kuhn and Feyerabend meet Habermas, and reads Lyotard’s rejection of consensus as a veiled polemic against Habermas’s vision of a transparent, noise-free communicational society. Jameson also notes the book’s limitation to “knowledge,” which excludes the broader question of culture, and its author’s commitment to an avant-garde aesthetic closer to high modernism than to the postmodernisms then emerging. The debate between Lyotard and Habermas—paralogy against consensus, dissension against communicative reason—became a defining fault line in late-twentieth-century thought.
The book’s influence has been equally strong in the sociology of science and in debates about the university. Its portrait of knowledge as an informational commodity, produced to be sold and consumed to be valorized, anticipated decades of argument about the commercialization of research. Its insistence that the question of legitimation is internal to science, not imposed from outside, gave a philosophical vocabulary to the post-Kuhnian study of scientific practice. And its diagnosis of the university’s realignment around performativity remains one of the sharpest short accounts of what happens to higher education when the criterion of efficiency replaces the criterion of emancipation. Whether one accepts Lyotard’s answer or not, the question he posed—how a just society is possible once the grand narratives have lost their credibility—has not gone away.
