Playing upon knowledge through language games: Lyotard’s ‘The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’

Abstract

Lyotard's seminal work The Postmodern Condition has been considered one of the most influential works of postmodernism. It has inspired thinkers and scholars in its criticism and report of the knowledge and its suggestiveness of paralogies. Many scholars even today draw on his definition of postmodernism as the incredulity of metanarratives. The text has been selected to be closely read and understood from the Foucauldian viewpoint of the creation of regimes of truth which we have argued that the text is involved in the same practice of creating its hegemonic place by making certain assumptions and assertions over nature, status, and forms of knowledge. We have also contended that Lyotard's interests are involved in writing this text, particularly in the propagation of the concept of paralogies and rejection of grand narratives. The text has also been viewed from Van Dijk's perspective that certain scholars who are given value by the elite to be part of the scholarly elite control academic discourses which are specifically disseminated and propagated to influence humanity. This is how the postmodern condition has been generated, produced, disseminated, legitimized and propagated worldwide.