The Postmodern Condition Quotes

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

“... In the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

“Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

“A new problem appears: devices that optimize the performance of the human body for the purpose of producing proof require additional expenditures. No money, no proof - and that means no verification of statements and no truth. The games of scientific language become the games of the rich, in which whoever is the wealthiest has the best chance of being right. An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

“Knowledge [savoir] in general cannot be reduced to science, nor even to learning [connaissance]. Learning is the set of statements which, to the exclusion of all other statements, denote or describe objects and may be declared true or false. Science is a subset of learning. It is also composed of denotative statements, but imposes two supplementary conditions on their acceptability: the objects to which they refer must be available for repeated access, in other words, they must be accessible in explicit conditions of observation; and it must be possible to decide whether or not a given statement pertains to the language judged relevant by the experts.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

“Postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta", catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge