Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Jean-François Lyotard's elegy on modernity, The Postmodern Condition, appeared in English in 1984. The book effectively declared the end of that idea of nature (as a rationally intelligible structure whose truths might provide the grounds for all those grand and utopian narratives of historical emancipation and the discovery of a perfect order of natural justice) that had come to be associated with Enlightenment thought. For Lyotard, “postmodernity is not a new age, but the rewriting of some of the features claimed by modernity, and first of all modernity's claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of liberating humanity as a whole through science and technology.” The goal of theory for Lyotard must be that of exposing the inability of realist science to legitimate itself within the terms of positivist reductionism; it would be achieved by revealing how that legitimation is always finally dependent upon a narrative imagination, a mythos, which is also now defunct in its grand form of a narrative of the Laws of Nature. In a post-industrial world, which has seen the erosion of customary knowledge as an overarching mythic framework, the grand narrative has lost its credibility and there are only contestatory and agonistic little narratives left to play with; we have even, he says, lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative, the grand teleological picture of Nature that might sanction ... log in or subscribe to read full text