Welcome to this topic on Jean-François Lyotard! Jean-François Lyotard became one of the world’s foremost philosophers, noted for his analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. A key figure in contemporary French philosophy, his interdisciplinary discourse covers a wide variety of topics including knowledge and communication; the human body; modernist and postmodern art, literature, and music; film; time and memory; space, the city, and landscape; the sublime; and the relation between aesthetics and politics.
“Knowledge is produced to be sold.” ~ Jean François Lyotard
Who is Jean-François Lyotard?
Jean-François Lyotard was born in Versailles, France in 1924. He studied philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne, Paris, becoming friends with Gilles Deleuze. After graduating, he taught philosophy in schools for several years in France and Algeria. Lyotard became involved in radical left-wing politics in the 1950s, and was a well-known defender of the 1954–62 Algerian revolution, but his philosophical development ultimately led him to become disillusioned with the meta-narratives of Marxism. In the 1970s he began working as a university professor, teaching philosophy first at the Sorbonne and then in many other countries around the world, including the US, Canada, Brazil, and France. Jean-François Lyotard retired as Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris VIII, and died of leukemia in 1998.
Key philosophical works
- 1971 Discourse, Figure
- 1974 Libidinal Economy
- 1979 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
- 1983 The Differend
The philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard
The idea that knowledge is produced to be sold appears in Jean-François Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. The book was originally written for the Council of Universities in Quebec, Canada, and the use of the term “postmodern” in its title is significant. Although Lyotard did not invent the term, which had been used by various art critics since the 1870s, his book was responsible for broadening its range and increasing its popularity. His use of the word in the title of this book is often said to mark the beginning of postmodern thought.
The term “postmodernism” has since been used in so many different ways that it is now hard to know exactly what it means, but Lyotard’s definition is very clear. Postmodernism, he writes, is a matter of “incredulity towards meta-narratives.” Meta-narratives are overarching, single stories that attempt to sum up the whole of human history, or that attempt to put all of our knowledge into a single framework. Marxism (the view that history can be seen as a series of struggles between social classes) is an example of a meta-narrative. Another is the idea that humanity’s story is one of progress toward deeper knowledge and social justice, brought about by greater scientific understanding.
Therefore, postmodern is defined as can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.
Externalized knowledge
Our incredulity toward these meta-narratives implies a new scepticism. Lyotard suggests that this is due to a shift in the way we have related to knowledge since World War II, and to the huge change in the technologies we use to deal with it. Computers have fundamentally transformed our attitudes, as knowledge has become information that can be stored in databases, moved to and fro, and bought and sold. This is what Lyotard calls the “mercantilization” of knowledge.
This has several implications. The first, Lyotard points out, is that:
- knowledge is becoming externalized. It is no longer something that helps toward the development of minds; something that might be able to transform us.
- knowledge is also becoming disconnected from questions of truth.
- knowledge is being judged not in terms of how true it is, but in terms of how well it serves certain ends.
When we cease to ask questions about knowledge such as “is it true?” and start asking questions such as “how can this be sold?”, knowledge becomes a commodity. Lyotard is concerned that once this happens, private corporations may begin to seek to control the flow of knowledge, and decide who can access what types of knowledge, and when.
References
- Dorling Kindersley. (2011). The Philosophy Book. New York: DK Publishing.
- Stumpf, Samuel Enoch. (2008). From Socrates to Sartre and Beyond. New York: McGraw Hill Publishing.
- Palmer, Donald.(2006). Looking at philosophy:The unbearable heaviness of philosophy made lighter 4th Edition. New York: McGraw Hill Companies.
- Gaarder, Jostein. (2004). Sophie’s World. Great Britain: Phoenix House.
- Postmodernism: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed on September 19, 2017 at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/
- Jean-François Lyotard (1924—1998). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed on September 30, 2017 at http://www.iep.utm.edu/lyotard/
- Jean-François Lyotard: European Graduate School. Accessed on September 30, 2017 at http://egs.edu/faculty/jean-fran%C3%A7ois-lyotard
- Jean-François Lyotard: The Basics of Philosophy. Accessed on September 17, 2017 at www.philosophybasics.com