Define Lyotard’s conception of the postmodern condition. Discuss how it pertains to our understanding of science. Construct and provide support for a counter-argument to Lyotard’s understanding of science in society in regards to metanarratives.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Lyotard draws a parallel between the state of knowledge in the postmodern condition and the “language games” described by Wittgenstein. Following Lyotard, all forms of knowledge have rules that prescribe both their use and their meaning. Thus, metanarratives are not established systems of “truth” but “language games” bounded by particular rules accessible only to the initiated. Postmodernism represents an era in which systems of knowledge that had once achieved metanarrative status—like science, religion, political ideologies, and so on—are delegitimated and retranslated into forms of narrative discourse with their own logic and rules of play. Because all knowledge has been reduced to particularized narratives, and the comprehension of and participation in any given narrative requires an understanding of the rules of its “game,” it is now impossible for a local narrative to claim a privileged access to truth. Because the narrative making of any given perspective is organized around a distinctive set of rules, it is likely that the rules of particular language games will be inconsistent with one another such that players in a game cannot engage in effective dialogue and develop a working consensus. For Lyotard, this inability to form universal or “totalizing” truth is the sine qua non of the postmodern condition. Knowledge is forced to take refuge in localized forms with only limited possibilities for consensual understanding and collective politics. Lyotard criticizes Habermas’s emphasis on the role of language and communication in the development of a universal discourse. Lyotard contends that such a project necessarily entails the development of shared rules for a singular “language game” and, in effect, the reinscription of a new metanarrative. In sum, Lyotard finds a return to metanarratives not only largely unfeasible but also undesirable in the postmodern condition, attainable as it is only through force and the suppression of alternative voices.