The+Postmodern+Condition


 * =Title= || The Postmodern Condition ||
 * =Author= || Jean-Francois Lyotard ||
 * =Date= || 1979 ||
 * =Summary By= || Namalie ||
 * =Summary= || * ==== According to Lyotard, we have come to the end of the “grand narrative”, which was a characteristic of modernity. ====
 * ==== Delegitimation” and “nihilism” were inherent in the grand narratives of the 19th century. Lyotard states that since this grand narrative used its own language to legitimate it, it therefore does not really know what it think it knows. ====
 * ==== Lyotard suggests thinking of the grand narrative, or the positive sciences, as a speculative game with a set of rules one must accept in order to play the game. Crucial to this process is the need to have the presupposition that a process exists and that it is itself an expression of that process – and “that this presupposition defines the set of rules on must accept in order to play the speculative game” (466). ====
 * ==== Erosion within the speculative game – “by loosening the weave of the encyclopedic net in which each science was to find its place, it eventually sets them free” (467). This will strip away the dividing lines between disciplines. ====
 * ==== “There is nothing to prove that if a statement describing a real situation is true, it follows that a prescriptive statement based upon it will be just” (467). ====
 * ==== By attacking the legitimacy of the discourse of science, by revealing it as a language game with its own rules, there is therefore no good reason why it is should control the “game of praxis” (467). Since “science plays its own game; it is incapable of legitimating the other languages” (467). ====
 * ==== There is no one grand narrative – no metalanguage: “The social subject itself seems to dissolve in this dissemination of language games. The social bond is linguistic, but is not woven with a single thread. It is a fabric formed by the intersection of at least two language games, obeying different rules” (467). So we seem to be getting several small narratives instead. ====
 * ==== Lyotard ends by lauding Wittgenstein from steering away from the Vienna Circle’s positivist way of thinking and moving more towards the knowledge that “legitimation can only spring from their own linguistic practice and communicational interaction” – which is what postmodernism is all about. ====

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