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Routledges Encyclopedia Politics Key Concepts refers to
Postmodernism as As a descriptor of society,
postmodernism refers to a much more contingent, unsettled
and disorderly social order rather than certainties around
which modernity was seemingly organized.
Lyotard: Incredulity towards metanarratives!: The rejection
of the scientific canon, of the idea there can be a single
coherent rationality or that reality has a unitary nature that
can be definitively observed or understood
Jean-Francois Lyotard
Born in Versailles, France. Lived 1924-1998
One of the worlds foremost philosophers and a notably selfproclaimed postmodernist
Taught at Lycee (Algeria), Saint-Denis (Paris), University of
California Irvine; also taught as visiting professor at John
Hopkins, Berkeley, Yale, Stony Brook, San Diego, San Paulo
(Brazil), Montreal (Canada)
Covered a variety of topics such as postmodern conditions,
modernist and post modernist art, knowledge and
communication, language metanarratives, and legitimization
Language G am es
Utterances defined by rules that contextualize and
characterize their meaning.
Language Games do not need outside legitimation they
are valid so long as the participants participate in them.
Every utterance is move in a game. If rules change, so
does the game.
Denotative: Snow is white (correctly identity things)
Performative: I do, I promise (carries out an action)
Prescriptive: Give me money (requests, recommends,
commands)
M odern Science
Modern Science is a language game which legitimates itself
with reference to metanarratives:
to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating
useful regularities and seeks the truth, it is obliged to
legitimate the rules of its own game [it] legitimates itself
with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an
explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the
dialectics of Spirit [Hegel] the emancipation of the
rational (Enlightenment) or working subject (Marxism), or
the creation of wealth (Capitalism).
Anti-Foundationalism ?
To say that postmodernity refuses foundations, and becomes
merely relativist, is to say that permanent and stable
foundations exist in the first place and that ones chooses to
ignore a foundation, a pregiven point of departure.
if foundations are things that are constructed and constituted
brought into existence not expressive of a realitythen to
question the act of constituting foundations is not to relativize
their existence as much as it is a matter of questioning the
political interests and forces that underscore that act.
LiberalRefl
exivization (or guilt)
The retreat of the Big Other: we no longer live our
lives in compliance with Nature or Tradition; there is no
symbolic order or code of accepted fictions to guide us
in our social behavior
All our impulses, from sexual orientation to ethnic
belonging, are more and more often experienced as
matters of choice. Thing which once seemed selfevident how to feed and educate a child, how to
proceed in sexual seduction, how and what to eat, how
to relax and amuse oneself have now being colonized
by reflexivity and are experienced as something to be
learned and decided on.
Repression of Class-Consciousness
Repression of Class Politics, or even any form of genuine
politics (social liberation at large) leads to ethnic and
religious fundamentalisms, i.e. racism
the excessive investment of the multiculturalist liberals in
protecting immigrants ethnic rights clearly draws its
energy from the "repressed" class dimension.