MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

In 1979, the Ministry of Higher Education of Québec commissioned French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) to write a report on the influence of technology on science. The result, La Condition postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir is a short analysis of how stories and knowledge have been traditionally passed on. The term 'postmodern' rarely features in this influential book. Lyotard did not want to introduce a new paradigm within philosophy, yet uses the concept to refer to the state of culture after the changes that science, literature and art went through since the middle of the 20th century.

Lyotard departs from Ludwig Wittgenstein's language theory to argue that political, social or scientific knowledge and stories come into being when people enter a fluid and complex web of linguistic moves and countermoves. Divergent and heterogeneous language games all obey their own rules. There is no umbrella meta-language. Lyotard bases his radical rejection of the great stories and ideologies on this heterogeneity: they suppress diversity and strive for conformist, consensus-oriented monocultures. According to Lyotard, anything that can increase heterogeneity – a multitude of small stories, the introduction of new rules or even the creation of completely new language games – can contribute to the end of monocultural modernity, based on universal, exclusive and authoritarian systems.

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward meta-narratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it.”