“What is Postmodernism?” The Postmodern Condition (1979)
Jean-François Lyotard

Before we get into the details of Lyotard’s book, we need to establish what is meant by postmodernism. Although there is no universally agreed upon definition, we will outline postmodernism in a manner which accords with the thinking of Lyotard. We can understand postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” This phase is borrowed from the Marxist critic Frederick Jameson who takes postmodernism to be the cultural expression of changes in the global economy.

 

Critics generally date the starts of the postmodern era to the 1950s or 1960s. In terms of economics, we can call this the start of “late capitalism,” “consumer society,” “post-industrial society” or “multinational capitalism.” Whichever term we use, the point is that after world war two, capitalism entered a new stage with at least two important features. One is that corporations became global, operating across national boundaries. The other is that corporations no longer traded in just physical commodities. Instead, information also became tradable.

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Knowledge

This change in the global economy led to changes in culture which can be seen in literature, film, television, architecture, fashion and music. For most of the book, Lyotard focuses on how knowledge has changed under postmodernism and again his first insight is made in Marxist terms. His observation is that under multinational capitalism, knowledge is produced in order to be sold. Rather than being an end in itself, it becomes a commodity. To use Marxist terminology, rather than having a use-value, it has an exchange-value.

 

This phenomenon is reflected most clearly in today’s data economy where information in the form of user profiles, intellectual property, economic data and computer programs generate ever increasing profits for big tech companies.

 

Accompanying the new status of knowledge, Lyotard diagnoses a crisis of knowledge under multinational capitalism. This crisis revolves around the question of how we know things to be true. He observes, for example, that there is considerable doubt surrounding the objectivity of scientific knowledge, noting that the production of ideas always relies on external rules which are subject to change and is always connected to the exercise of power.

 

But Lyotard’s primary concern is the sort of knowledge produced by narrative. What he means is that telling stories, or arranging facts or ideas in relation to one another is one of the ways in which we produce ideas about the world. For example, Lyotard writes: “even before he is born, if only by virtue of the name he is given, the human child is already positioned as the referent in the story recounted by those around him, in relation to which he will inevitably chart his course.” What he means is that in order to know who we are, we are told a series of stories about ourselves, our place of birth, our family history, our childhood experiences, etc. In this way, narrative is the means by which we understand ourselves.

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Metanarrative

Narrative is the vehicle by which much knowledge is produced. History, for example, is narrated – we tell stories of how one event affects another or how empires rise and fall; psychologists tell a series of stories about childhood experiences and how they relate to the inner lives of adults; nations tell stories about their histories, their people and their characteristics; corporate identity consists of a series of narratives. Even science relies on narrative – the Big Bang, for example, is a creation story; evolution tells a story which accounts for the diversity of life on earth. In short, it is very difficult to know things without making use of narrative.

 

But narrative is not just a random assortment of facts. Not just any old collection of events can make an acceptable narrative. Lyotard draws on the thinking of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and describes narratives as “language games.” By this he means that narratives are organized by a set of rules which dictate what can and cannot be said. Although these rules are flexible, they are crucial to the structure of society which can only know things through them.

 

These rules of narrative can be described as metanarrative. Postmodernism, for Lyotard, happens when people stop believing in the metanarratives of modernity. 

 

The most quoted line from The Postmodern Condition is: “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” He goes on to write that “the narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed into clouds of narrative language.” Here, Lyotard is referring to the big ideas which structure narrative at a high level. When he says “its great goal,” he is talking about narrative which describes a progression towards a specific destination. This sort of narrative is invoked by Martin Luther King when he says “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” King’s claim is structured around the idea that in the long run, things improve. This is the sort of positivism which characterizes modernity but which no longer holds in postmodernity.

 

Another name for metanarratives is grand narratives. You can think of these as any narrative that seeks to provide one overarching, universal account of the world. An example of a grand narrative is Marxism. As we have seen, Marxism seeks to understand the history of capitalism as class struggle. It seeks to understand society through the economic conditions. It insists that history inevitably bends towards revolution and the emancipation of the workers.

 

Christianity is another metanarrative which tells believers how to live their lives if they want to receive salvation from God. It claims that in the end, Christ will return to redeem his believers.

 

The end of the quotation above describes grand narratives being dispersed into clouds of smaller narratives. Lyotard’s argument is that under the conditions of postmodernism, small narratives have taken over. We no longer have one or two big stories that we tell ourselves about progress or history, instead narratives have shrunk and become local. We are likely to subscribe to any number of different narratives which might not even agree with one another.  A part of postmodernism is being comfortable with this contradiction.

 

With multiple small narratives, there are no overriding and eternal truths. Instead, truth becomes relative as each narrative attests to its own reality. We can think of these small narratives as relating to the multiple identities which an individual might inhabit. Someone can be a student at school, a child at home, a shelf-stacker at work, a Jew at synagogue and a graffiti artist at night. None of these identities is the single key to understanding this individual and each one becomes relevant at a different time.

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Unity

In the final chapter of The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard notes that many contemporary thinkers have reacted against the fragmentation of narratives under postmodernism. In an attempt to return to the certainties of modernist thought, there is a call for “order, a desire for unity, for identity, for security, or popularity.” In particular, he discusses ideas and attitudes in the realm of art where he notes that “nothing is more urgent than to liquidate the heritage of the avant-gardes.” Lyotard, however, argues that avant-garde art (which we can think of as experimental or unconventional art) is the only acceptable kind in postmodern times.

 

While Lyotard advocates for avant-garde art, he is critical of realism in art. Roughly speaking, a realist artwork is one which presents an acceptably realistic image of the world. Most movies, for example, are realist. But there are a few reasons to be suspicious of realism, since, like any other form of art, it is nothing more than a set of conventions that we take to be real. Films are synthetic products: they are the projection of light onto a flat screen; they are comprised of thousands of cuts; they are the product of hours of editing; they contain exegetic sounds etc. Yet, despite all of this, they create the impression that art can accurately represent reality. 

 

In Lyotard’s view, producing realistic, unified and stable artworks is neither desirable nor possible. Instead, Lyotard believes that artists should be questioning the conventions of realism and resisting the calls for unity. Part of the reason for this is political. Lyotard is deeply suspicious of unity on the political level since it is the ideological underpinning of totalitarianism. He notes how unity, simplicity and communicability were put into the service of both Stalinism and Nazism.

 

On the other hand, Lyotard has no time for an “anything goes” approach to art or culture. Randomly grouping disparate items together can be called eclecticism and Lyotard sees this as simply conforming to the postmodern trends dedicated by multinational capitalism. In another of the most widely quoted passages from the text, he writes: 

 

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works.

 

To engage in this sort of globalized culture is simple to follow the dictates of global capital. Lyotard is concerned that when there are no aesthetic criteria by which to evaluate works of art, then art is judged successful simply if it is profitable.

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The sublime

As we have seen, according to Lyotard, realism is no longer an option for postmodern art since there is a deep skepticism about the possibility of representing reality though the conventions of realism. Lyotard claims that the very idea of being modern requires a break from what has come before and is based, therefore, on a “shattering of belief.” The axioms of the previous age are swept away. But since, in the postmodern age, they have not been replaced with new metanarratives, there is no new sense of reality. Rather, one is now left with a “lack of reality.”

 

So Lyotard advocates a type of art which will do justice to the idea that postmodern knowledge is relative, contingent and fragmented. Rather than presenting a concrete reality, he wants art to demonstrate its inadequacy when it comes to showing us what the world is like. In short, he wants art to represent the unrepresentable. Or more accurately, “to present the fact that the unrepresentable exists.”

 

He connects this mode of artistic expression to Kant’s idea of the sublime. Lyotard describes the sublime as taking place when “the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept.” To put this more simply, he wants art to demonstrate that there is a gap between what can be conceived (the concept) and what can be represented (the object). He gives the example of the infinite. We can think of this as a concept, but there is no way to adequately express it in an artwork. Instead, all we can do is to demonstrate our inability to present the concept.

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The two modes of presenting the unpresentable

Lyotard ends his book by contrasting modernism with postmodernism. Both movements are characterized by the presentation of the unpresentable, but Lyotard claims that they do this in different ways. 

 

Modernism presents the unpresentable, but it does it in a nostalgic manner. The form of modernist literature has a familiar neatness to it so that it is recognizable and comfortable for the reader. In this way, it offers solace and pleasure to the reader. 

 

In contrast, the postmodern is “that which denies itself the solace of good forms.” In other words, it is at the formal level of a work of art that we experience the unpresentable. What this means is that postmodern art tends not to use familiar or recognizable styles, but instead relentlessly experiments with technique, presentation, modes, appearances, patterns etc. Rather than using old and familiar styles or inventing a single new style, postmodernism reinvents its style every time.

 

Postmodern art, therefore, is not to be judged by preexisting rules or “familiar categories.” Instead, it is as though postmodern art is searching for or making new rules or categories through the work itself. In this sense, the rules would be discovered after the work has been created. But since the next work of art will be different, it will instate new rules and categories and so on.

 

Postmodernism, then, signals the relentless search for ways to present reality. It is always on the move, reinventing itself with each new work of art. Lyotard closes by linking this account of aesthetics back to politics. “The nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” he writes “have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one.” The point that Lyotard leaves us with is that postmodern art is not just an exercise in aesthetics or a theoretical exploration of representation. For Lyotard, postmodernism is a political project which responds to the deadly failures of modernism. The “whole and the one” is the grand narrative that claims to account for everything, it is the idea that reality can be adequately represented by language, it is the fascistic drive towards national unity and social homogeneity, it is the myth of origins, it is the eradication of differences. In Lyotard’s conception, postmodernism challenges all of these and teaches us to always be suspicious of any claim to adequately represent reality.