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Jean-François Lyotard 185

in 1984. The influence of this book on the debate has been enormous. In many
respects it was this book that introduced the term ‘postmodernism’ into academic
circulation.
For Lyotard the postmodern condition is marked by a crisis in the status of know-
ledge in Western societies. This is expressed as an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’
and what he calls ‘the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation’
(xxiv). What Lyotard is referring to is the supposed contemporary collapse or wide-
spread rejection of all overarching and totalizing frameworks that seek to tell universal
stories (‘metanarratives’): Marxism, liberalism, Christianity, for example. According to
Lyotard, metanarratives operate through inclusion and exclusion, as homogenizing
forces, marshalling heterogeneity into ordered realms, silencing and excluding other
discourses, other voices in the name of universal principles and general goals. Post-
modernism is said to signal the collapse of all metanarratives with their privileged truth
to tell, and to witness instead the increasing sound of a plurality of voices from the
margins, with their insistence on difference, on cultural diversity, and the claims of
heterogeneity over homogeneity. 40
Lyotard’s particular focus is on the status and function of scientific discourse and
knowledge. Science is important for Lyotard because of the role assigned to it by the
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Enlightenment. Its task, through the accumulation of scientific knowledge, is to play
a central role in the gradual emancipation of humankind. In this way, science assumes
the status of a metanarrative, organizing and validating other narratives on the royal
road to human liberation. However, Lyotard claims that since the Second World War,
the legitimating force of science’s status as a metanarrative has waned considerably.
It is no longer seen to be slowly making progress on behalf of humankind towards
absolute knowledge and absolute freedom. It has lost its way – its ‘goal is no longer
truth, but performativity’ (46). Similarly, higher education is ‘called upon to create
skills, and no longer ideals’ (48). Knowledge is no longer seen as an end in itself, but
as a means to an end. Like science, education will be judged by its performativity; and
as such it will be increasingly shaped by the demands of power. No longer will it
respond to the question, ‘Is it true?’ It will hear only, ‘What use is it?’ ‘How much is
it worth?’ and ‘Is it saleable?’ (51). Postmodern pedagogy would teach how to use
knowledge as a form of cultural and economic capital without recourse to concern or
anxiety about whether what is taught is true or false.
Before leaving Lyotard, it is worth noting his own less than favourable response to
the changed status of culture. The popular culture (‘contemporary general culture’) of
the postmodern condition is for Lyotard an ‘anything goes’ culture, a culture of ‘slack-
ening’, where taste is irrelevant, and money the only sign of value (79). The only relief
is Lyotard’s view that postmodernist culture is not the end of the much superior cul-
ture of modernism, but the sign of the advent of a new modernism. Postmodernism is
that which breaks with one modernism to form a new modernism: ‘A work can
become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not
modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’ (ibid.).
Steven Connor (1989) suggests that The Postmodern Condition may be read ‘as a
disguised allegory of the condition of academic knowledge and institutions in the