Lyotardian Thought

In the late 1970s, Jean-François Lyotard (19241998) was commissioned by the government of Quebec, Canada, to analyze changes in Western knowledge since World War II. In his report, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, published in 1979, Lyotard describes the erasure of culture and aesthetics with the incoming technological age, (mis)shaping advanced, industrialized societies, computerizing them and their concept of knowledge. Reality becomes bytes of information, and performativity becomes the legitimation of that reality. In schools, test scores (high or low) not only attest to one's knowledge acquisition but also legitimate (or not) one's values and methods of operation. We are the scores we produce, and our curricula are designed not to help students question, explore, and think, but to produce efficiently.

Lyotard's report is ...