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 a warning as to where our performance driven society is headed and calls on us to “wage a war on totality.” His report interrogates the present state of knowledge and challenges the totalizing power of modern metanarratives, grand écrits, wherein all problems and possibilities fit together so well that no space is left for questioning, for interpretation, or for the uniqueness of singularity. While committed to challenging this totalizing power of the metanarrative, the sudden popularity of the word postmodern (and its implied categorical separation from the modern) caused Lyotard to rethink whether he had chosen the right word for the process he wished to advocate.

The prefix post signifies a time that comes after, subsequent to, or coming later than, suggesting a separated past, present, futuretoo strong a distinction for Lyotard. He later preferred the prefix re, which carries different signification: To rewrite modernity is to bring forth issues, working through the problems (and possibilities) inherent, but hidden, in the continual present, the now, pregnant with issues yet-to-be. Lyotard's (re)writing of the problematiques of modern metanarratives addresses the totalizing and terrorizing effects of modern representation. His rewriting of modernity has profound and wide ranging implications for the field of curriculum studies, particularly his attention to modern reality, rewritten as event, and the limitations of modern representation rewritten as language games and differend.

Although Lyotard was a committed Marxist and phenomenologist early on, he later found the master narratives of Marx and Hegel troubling: All was solved by history's inevitable march toward progress, toward a better life. He found Marxism in its view of social problems to present a flat reality. For Lyotard, reality is event-fulfull of eventsand singular events cannot be fit into a grand scheme. Something of the personal, filled with desires, passions, hopes, is always left over, a surplus, something for which rational interpretation can not account. This event-ful reality brings with it a personal ethics that requires one to think through each and every situation, to accept the responsibility of such thinking through, and to develop a politics that is not formulaic.

There is a need, Lyotard claims, to free up the rigidity of the grand écrits by searching for ways that personal passions and political structures interplay with one another. Structures are needed, but they need to be flexible. The implication for curricularists is that one should neither willingly impose the structure of curriculum on students, nor dismiss the value of structure. Rather, teachers should attend to the situation, aid students to find their own interpretations within a curriculum, their own connections to, differences from, and reflections on curricular structures.

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