ABSTRACT

French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (b. 1924) is the author of one of the key texts on postmodernism. His work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, commissioned by the Quebec government, challenges many of the assumptions of modernism. Here Lyotard is concerned with the legitimation of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, and observes famously the crisis of legitimation within the postmodern condition. For Lyotard the principle of the ‘Grand Narrative’ (liberalism, Christianity, Communism, etc.) has been called into question, and the world should now be understood in terms of small or local narratives. Knowledge is now legitimated no longer according to any notion of human emancipation or speculative spirit, but solely through performative discourses of economics and technology.