The Postmodern Condition

Infobox Book
name = The Postmodern Condition
title_orig = "La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir"
author = Jean-François Lyotard
translator = Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi


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country = France
language = French
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subject = Postmodern culture, technology, epistemology
publisher = Les Éditions de Minuit (French ed.), University of Minnesota Press (English ed.)
release_date = 1979
english_release_date = 1984
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"The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge" (1979) 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 "Conseil des universités du Québec" [Frédérick Bruneault (Autumn 2004). " [http://www.ulaval.ca/phares/vol5-automne04/texte03.html Savoir scientifique et légitimation] ", "Revue PHARES" vol. 5.] . 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". [Jean-François Lyotard (1979). "La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir". Paris: Minuit.] Perry Anderson (1998). "The Origins of Postmodernity". London/New York: Verso, pp. 24–27.]

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 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 [cite book |last= Lyotard |first= Jean-François |title=La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir | publisher=Les Editions de Minuit | year=1979 | pages=67] ), 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.

"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. 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'. Despite this, and much to Lyotard's regret, it came to be seen as his most important piece of writing.

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