Grand Narratives

Conceptual Overview

A defining feature of the Enlightenment was its unflinching belief in progress coupled with a confidence that knowledge, in the form of generalizable scientific laws aimed at uncovering a universal truth, was the instrument that will deliver it. Modernity was built on the Enlightenment project to replace tradition, superstition, and irrational belief with grand narratives of incontestable rational authority. Confidence in the Enlightenment project has declined or even collapsed in what many scholars view as postmodernity. Lyotard and others have argued that grand narratives fragment and disappear, being replaced by small stories, through which people seek to make sense of their experiences and communicate them to others. Faith in progress is shaken, faith in reason dwindles, and faith in universal truths all but disappears as truth is revealed to be contingent on language, discourse, and power relations.

More particularly, it is argued that supposedly objective and eternal truths entail deeply enshrined power relations, including those rooted in colonial, race, gender, and sexual domination and subordination. Lyotard stages a powerful critique of the Enlightenment narratives of progress, science, reason, and absolute truth, arguing that they privilege certain discourses while silencing others and certain types of authority at the expense of others. Scientific reason, in particular, can be said to embody the values of patriarchy, aspiring, as it does, to explain, control, and dominate nature and providing the means whereby small sections of humanity can dominate, exploit, or oppress others (for instance, through military technology or the economics of aid).

Postmodernist theorists argue that a profusion of voices is now being heard where in the past there were sounds of choirs singing in unison. Where once everybody deferred to the power of the grand narrative (driven by universal reason, a universal aesthetic, and moral standards, universal regimes of truth), people are currently seeking to discover their own voice, based on their own experiences and forging their own individual identities. Even science is being challenged, when the voice of the expert scientist, for instance the physician, is questioned and contested by the voice of the patient, who is nonexpert and nonobjective, but has the authority of personal experience of an illness. Speaking with authority is no longer the exclusive privilege of the educated; it is the privilege of everybody who has an experience to narrate.

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