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Contemporary Cultural Theory

of a continuous disturbance or subversion of pre-existing cult-
ural norms. For Lyotard this led to an essentially celebratory
account of postmodernism as a technocratic liberal-individualist
utopia. Baudrillard’s reading of the postmodern contained
similarly utopian elements, but was less unambiguously ‘cel-
ebratory’, even if on occasion it was described as such (Grossberg,
1996, p. 133). There is much in common, nonetheless, between
their two accounts. Both Lyotard and Baudrillard commenced
from a logic of periodisation, in which the ‘postmodern’ (for
Lyotard) or the ‘hyperreal’ (for Baudrillard) had succeeded to
and proceeded from a past understood as modern, industrial and
capitalist. Both also sought to explain postmodern culture as
the historical effect of changes in the system of economic prod-
uction. For Lyotard, ‘the status of knowledge is altered as societies
enter... the postindustrial age’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. 3). For Baud-
rillard, the shift from industrial production to the hyperreal
‘simulations’ of the media economy is an effect of ‘capital itself’
(Baudrillard, 1993, p. 8).
Once the postmodern stage had been achieved, however, the
cultural ‘superstructures’ became dominant over what had once
been the economic ‘base’. For Lyotard, ‘flexible networks of
language games’ predominate over postindustrial postmodernity
(Lyotard, 1984, p. 17), both in its ‘normal’ functioning and in
the utopian possibilities immanent within it. Hence the aspiration
to language games ‘of perfect information at any given moment’
(p. 67). For Baudrillard, the real economy has now been super-
seded by an ‘order no longer of the real, but of the hyperreal’
(Baudrillard, 1993, p. 3). Hence his conclusion that ‘the real
message... lay in reproduction itself. Production itself has no
meaning: its social finality is lost’ (p. 56).

Lyotard on the decline of the grand narrative
In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard had characterised modernism
and modernity by the co-presence of science and a series of
universalising and legitimating metanarratives, deriving ultim-
ately from the Enlightenment. These metanarrative paradigms
had run aground, he argued, in the period since the Second World

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