On the Critical ‘Post'

Lyotard has been predominantly considered in England and America as the philosopher of ‘postmodernity’, or even of ‘postmodernism’. The editors of a recent book entitled Postmodernism and Society state characteristically in this regard that ‘[f]or Lyotard… postmodernity is seen as a post-metaphysical, post-industrial, pluralist, pragmatic and restless set of partially differentiated social orders’. ¹ Implicit in this account of Lyotard’s work—and most evidently The Postmodern Condition—is the assumption that Lyotard is attempting to define a socio-historical category, what comes after modernity, the ‘post’ of postmodernity. ² Much of The Postmodern Condition could be seen to lend itself to this reading: not only because of its stated analysis of ‘knowledge’ in the ‘post-industrial’ age, but also because of the explicit axis of its account of ‘delegitimation’, together with its stress on ‘little’ narratives after the demise of the ‘grand’ narratives of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment (seen respectively to order knowledge according to the practical finality of humanity or to organize it within the speculative and dialectical development of Geist and the proletariat). This story of ‘the postmodern condition’ is now well known and accompanies, whether sympathetically or unsympathetically, much contemporary socio-cultural analysis and literary theory in their attention to questions of subjectivity and difference.