Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes

“A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.”

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

What is required of a working hypothesis is a fine capacity for discrimination.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

“Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.”

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

“A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before.”

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

“Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made.”

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

“What guides Marxism, then, is a different model of society, and a different conception of the function of the knowledge that can be produced by society and acquired from it.”

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

“One can decide that the principal role of knowledge is as an indispensable element in the functioning of society, and act in accordance with that decision, only if one has already decided that society is a giant machine.”

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

“Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.”

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

Even now it is no longer composed of the traditional political class, but of a composite layer of corporate leaders, high-level administrators, and the heads of the major professional, labor, political, and religious organisations.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

“And today more than ever, knowing about that society involves first of all choosing what approach the inquiry will take, and that necessarily means choosing how society can answer.”

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

“Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.”

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

If we wish to discuss knowledge in the most highly developed contemporary society, we must answer the preliminary question of what methodological representation to apply to that society.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

“What is new in all of this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions are losing their attraction.”

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

“Liberalism does not preclude an organisation of the flow of money in which some channels are used in decision making while others are only good for the payment of debts.”

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

“On the other hand, in a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an issue, it is clear that language assumes a new importance.”

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

“It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.”

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

“The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences ...”

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

One knows that frontal and/or profile photography is torn to pieces ... Inversely, what remains of the photograph must be seen as a fragment coming to fill a gap in the drawing.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard