Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes

Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.

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

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

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

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.

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

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.

He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments – negative affections. In this nihilist fin de siècle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed, he is laughing, he is here. It’s your sadness, idiot, he’d say.

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’ clothing in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter of TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works.

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

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

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