The Postmodern Condition was written as a report on the influence of technology on the notion of knowledge in exact sciences, commissioned by the Québec government. For this reason, The Postmodern Condition has often been interpreted as an excuse for unbounded relativism, which for many has become a hallmark of postmodern thought. In the book, Lyotard professes a preference for this plurality of small narratives that compete with each other, replacing the totalitarianism of grand narratives. Modern science thus destroys its own metanarrative. The result is a plurality of language-games (a term coined by Wittgenstein ), without any overarching structure. Techniques such as artificial intelligence and machine translation show a shift to linguistic and symbolic production as central elements of the postindustrial economy and the related postmodern culture, which had risen at the end of the 1950s after the reconstruction of western Europe. These have become untenable, according to Lyotard, by technological progress in the areas of communication, mass media and computer science. Īmong the metanarratives are reductionism and teleological notions of human history such as those of the Enlightenment and Marxism. The book introduced the term 'postmodernism', which was previously only used by art critics, in philosophy with the following quotation: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives". The book was originally written as a report to the Conseil des universités du Québec. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) is a short but influential philosophy book by Jean-François Lyotard in which he analyzes the epistemology of postmodern culture as the end of 'grand narratives' or metanarratives, which he considers a quintessential feature of modernity. Therefore, a metanarrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other 'little stories' within totalizing a schema. In this text, Lyotard refers to what he describes as the postmodern condition, which he characterized as increasing skepticism toward the totalizing nature of "metanarratives" or "grand narratives."Īccording to John Stephens it "is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience." The prefix meta means "beyond" and is here used to mean "about," and a narrative is a story. The concept was criticized by Jean-François Lyotard in his work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). The term grand narratives can be applied to a wide range of thoughts which includes Marxism, religious doctrines, belief in progress, universal reason, and others. A grand narrative or metanarrative is one that claims to explain various events in history, gives meaning by connecting disperse events and phenomena by appealing to some kind of universal knowledge or schema. In this context, the narrative is a story that functions to legitimize power, authority, and social customs. Metanarrative or grand narrative or mater narrative is a term developed by Jean-François Lyotard to mean a theory that tries to give a totalizing, comprehensive account to various historical events, experiences, and social, cultural phenomena based upon the appeal to universal truth or universal values.
0 kommentar(er)
