Jean-François Lyotard — The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

91 published claims from this book.

• A performativity-driven system defines needs by their value to performance, not by suffering
• All formal systems face internal limitations that cannot be escaped
• Basic science creates unpredictable needs by remodeling the technical milieu.
• Class struggle has been neutralized in both liberal and communist societies
• Class struggle offers a viewpoint immune to systemic self-regulation’s allure
• Consensus does violence; invention arises from dissension.
• Conversation shifts freely among language games while institutions filter them
• Cultural imperialism is driven by science’s demand for legitimation, not by material conquest
• Customary knowledge is legitimated by communal consensus the Greeks called opinion
• Data banks become the Encyclopedia of tomorrow, exceeding any single user’s capacity
• Eclecticism of contemporary culture signals a general slackening of taste
• Elite listening to victims reduces their narratives to anecdotes and reinforces elite authority.
• Fractals occupy fractional dimensions between whole numbers
• German idealism legitimated knowledge by unifying truth and justice in a single subject
• German idealism located the subject of knowledge in a speculative System, not the State
• Godel’s theorem proves arithmetic systems cannot be complete.
• Hegel’s encyclopedia produced the metanarrative whose narrator is neither people nor scientists
• Higher education now produces skills instead of ideals or emancipation.
• Humboldt’s university ideal was not science for its own sake but national moral formation
• In science, reality itself is called to testify as a witness
• Interdisciplinarity arises in the age of delegitimation that lacks any metanarrative
• Joyce’s writing makes the unpresentable perceptible in the signifier itself
• Knowledge in general exceeds science and even learning
• Knowledge is competence spanning truth, efficiency, justice, and beauty
• Knowledge under computerization would circulate like money, split into payment and investment categories
• Language games form the minimum relation required for any society to exist.
• Legitimation becomes an object of study only when questioned
• Legitimation by ‘the people’ requires destroying traditional minority knowledges
• Lyotard holds that bureaucracy and technocracy displace classical social classes
• Lyotard leaves the mode-of-production question unresolved
• Lyotard rejects Habermas’s consensus ideal as totalizing and terrorist
• Lyotard’s anti-totality stance stems from a French post-Marxist reaction
• Lyotard’s ethic of schizophrenic desire is survival within capitalism, not revolution
• Marxist categories still explain contemporary multinational and media capitalism
• Master-narratives persist unconsciously rather than disappearing outright
• Mastering matter is now less pressing than building information networks
• Mercantilization replaces truth-testing with saleability and efficiency as the criteria for knowledge
• Modern aesthetics nostalgically presents the sublime; postmodern aesthetics presents it directly
• Modern science grounds truth rules in expert consensus, not transcendental authority
• Narrative and scientific knowledge are incommensurable language games with no common criterion
• Narrative cultures need no memory because recitation itself is contemporaneous
• Narrative knowledge transmits the pragmatic rules that constitute the social bond
• Narrator authority in traditional cultures derives from having been narrated by others
• Nation-states will fight over information as they once fought over territory.
• No metadiscourse can unify or totalize language games
• Paralogy as a move differs from innovation as system improvement
• Performative utterances create reality rather than admit truth-valuation
• Philosophy’s legitimation role requires reworking its bond to the university
• Photography and cinema continued rather than challenged the realist program of painting
• Postmodern science legitimates itself through difference, not maximized performance
• Postmodern society is a pragmatics of heterogeneous language games, not a Newtonian system.
• Postmodernism precedes and enables modernism rather than following it.
• Power legitimates itself through a closed cycle of efficiency and verification.
• Profit motivated technology’s growth before science did
• Proust alludes to the unpresentable through time while Joyce does so through writing itself
• Realism is defined by avoiding the question of reality and serves ruling power
• Realism’s function is to preserve consciousness from doubt, not to copy reality
• Reason shifts from universal metalanguage to a plurality of axiomatic systems
• Research funding subordinates truth to the goal of performativity
• Rules governing scientific discourse are prescriptive, not denotative, claims
• Science and ethics both stem from the same Western choice about truth and justice
• Science must produce a legitimating philosophical discourse about its own rules
• Science’s paralogy is the antimodel to the totalizing performativity system
• Scientific knowledge operates as a pragmatic game governed by contract
• Scientific legitimation rests on consensus among experts about language rules
• Scientific truth rests on a dialectical proof rule and a metaphysical non-deception rule
• Simple causal accounts of the decline of grand narratives are inadequate
• Simultaneous conflicting control variables make behavior abruptly unpredictable
• Social language games are heteromorphous with no common metaprescriptions
• Speech is fundamentally agonistic play, not mere communication
• System theory’s true goal is performativity, optimizing input-output ratios
• Systems theory cannot legitimately describe either science or society
• Teamwork boosts performance for a fixed task but not for conceiving new models
• Technical notation systems proliferated explosively in the mid-twentieth century.
• Technical performativity now shapes what counts as scientific truth.
• Terror is the performativity system’s enforcement by threatening exclusion from the language game
• Terror operates outside language games and destroys the social bond
• The choice between functional and critical knowledge is not easily settled.
• The cumulative character of scientific knowledge is never questioned in the dominant paradigm
• The goal of dialogue is dissent or paralogy, not consensus
• The liberty narrative drives primary education politics rather than higher education
• The modern aesthetic question shifted from beauty to the definition of art
• The people’s consensus and scientific consensus are the same legitimation model
• The temporary contract is supplanting permanent institutions across social life
• The two legitimating grand narratives are national and European myths
• Totalizing philosophical reconciliation has historically demanded terror as its price
• Totalizing truth-seeking theory gets co-opted by the system’s optimization
• University autonomy is hollow because faculty lack control over budgets.
• Utterance types function as rule-governed language games
• Verification and falsification both presuppose that truth must draw consensus
• Wealth determines which scientific claims can be verified as true