Some thoughts on The Postmodern Condition

Postmodernism was the bogeyman of the late ‘90s and early 2000s among evangelicals and other conservatives. In much the same way that one’s response to Critical Race Theory (which has some connections with postmodernity) serves as a shibboleth for acceptability in trendy circles, postmodernism functioned as a way to be part of the cool kids (on either side).

There are now those that think that postmodernism is really just another form of modernity (perhaps further advanced along its trajectory), and thus never really existed as a distinct movement, but there was something that adherents and opponents felt was different from the general stream of modernity, which still deserves some attention. With that in mind, I picked up, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, to try to get a better understanding from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

Lyotard offers a definition in his introduction: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”

In other words, Lyotard was arguing that modernity attempted to impose homogeneity on the world through metanarratives—high level explanations that were an attempt to make sense of everything. Postmodernity claims to recognize metanarratives as impositions from authorities that likely have little claim to correspondence to the truth.

At its best, postmodernity shakes the claims of modernistic empiricism, which leads to the apparent supremacy of “Science.” Postmodernity did not succeed in uprooting the religion of Scientism, as evidenced by the year of shaming that we “follow the Science” or “believe in the Science” or “listen to the Science.” In general, when someone puts a definite article in front of “Science” they are no longer talking about actual science, but about how they intend to try to browbeat you into doing what they want to. We are still very much living in an era where people believe that “Science” has or can produce a unified theory of everything. This despite Thomas Kuhn’s work in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which shows a truer picture of the way the scientific community develops metanarratives that evolve over time.

By Lyotard offers some helpful analysis beyond his definition of postmodernism. Though The Postmodern Condition was written in 1979, he predicted the information age with a surprising degree of prescience.

For example, he wrote,

“Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.”

There are obvious connections to information warfare, the psyops that are ongoing with bots on social media, election interference, etc. The fact that there are operatives from other nations whose primary goal is to stir up dissent and doubt among citizens of the United States is an illustration of Lyotard’s prediction.

Also, significantly for the concept of education and the role of the state, Lyotard anticipated the shifting role of the state with regard to education:

“The mercantilization of knowledge is bound to affect the privilege the nation-states have enjoyed, and still enjoy, with respect to the production and distribution of learning. The notion that learning falls within the purview of the State, as the brain or mind of society, will become more and more outdated with the increasing strength of the opposing principle, according to which society exists and progresses only if the messages circulating within it are rich and easy to decode. The ideology of communicational “transparence,” which goes hand in hand with the commercialization of knowledge, will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and “noise.” It is from this point of view that the problem of the relationship between economic and State powers threatens to arise with a new urgency.”

It isn’t entirely a bad thing when the State is no longer perceived as “the brain or mind of society,” since the State has been significantly wrong about a number of life changing issues in the not-so-distant past. However, within Lyotard’s prediction is the anticipation of QAnon and similar conspiracy theories, which see a “Deep State” that is controlling the narrative. This has effectively made Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other outlets the de facto gatekeepers of truth, as congressional hearings and obnoxious overlays on social media posts frequently remind us.

It is interesting to read The Postmodern Condition at this point, to see how many of Lyotard’s anticipated realities have come true. As a description of reality, he is on the right track. He does little to help find a way to navigate through toward some better condition, but there is some value in the diagnosis.