Postmodernism in Jean-François Lyotard: A Critical Study.

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The importance of this study stems from its examination of the status of knowledge in more advanced societies. Lyotard chose to use the term "postmodernism" to designate this situation. It defines the state of our culture in the wake of the transformations that changed the rules of the game at the end of the nineteenth century. Lyotard will present these transformations in the context of the crisis of narrative. Every science has come to produce a discourse of legitimacy based on the rules of its own game. Therefore, the society of the future is embedded within a pragmatism of linguistic particulars. Science is unable to transcend the realm of the rules of its linguistic game, which is the relegation of science and other forms of knowledge to technological, "instrumental," or "performative" normativity. The litmus test now is the competition for information goods. Knowledge, as an information commodity indispensable to the forces of production, has already become, and will continue to be, a fundamental stake in the global competition for power. Science is not an end in itself, but rather a computation of knowledge, or what is called the "information economy" or the "knowledge economy." We can predict that anything that cannot be translated into a computer language can be discarded. Here, Lyotard means a return to pragmatics, to the analysis of language situations and games, and to analyzing language itself as an unstable exchange between its speakers. Instrumental pragmatism thus becomes the fundamental principle of contemporary science itself.        

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