Postmodernism

Jean-François Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard's (1924–1998) The Postmodern Condition (1984) has provided an influential discussion of relations between the modern and the postmodern. For Lyotard, there are two entries into questions about the postmodern condition. One is representable and programmatic and considers the cultural and institutional creation and understanding of knowledge. The other is idiomatic and unrepresentable; it attempts to do justice to the singularity of the event.

For Lyotard, postmodernism concerned with the representable can be approached both as a question of legitimacy and of knowledge. Postmodernism begins with the loss of a sense of authority and a pervasive incredulity toward the grand narratives of modernity. The modern narratives of political emancipation (such as the freedom of the human subject), the claims of science and philosophy to explain and order the world, the inevitability of the progress of wealth and welfare, and the power of the rule of law to produce justice have all lost their force.

One can view this incredulity or loss of faith as both anti-authoritarianism and skeptical. The centuries for formation of the modern sovereign state in the name of the rights of man, security, and the rule of law were also the centuries of the mass destruction of security and law through colonialism and economic exploitation. The century of the universal declarations of human rights was also the one of mass destruction of humanity. Faced with what has been done in the name of the universal and universalizing reason, postmodernists have treated reason as part of the problem, and not as the solution. Critics of postmodernist thought, such as Jürgen Habermas, have viewed such claims [Page 1159]simply as a loss of courage and faith in the intellectual and political project of the Enlightenment.

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