Francois LyotardThinkers

Consensus is a dangerous commitment which ultimately promotes a bland centrism, appoints the compromise candidate that no one really wants, satisfies nobody, and leaves things much as they are.

The Differend is a book that argues that disputes between incommensurable positions cannot be resolved without injustice to one side or the other.

A Grand narrative is a metanarrative whose those totalizing account of the world offers to explain everything, reducing all history to a single trajectory: the progressive emergence of rational values, for instance; or, alternatively, ‘development’ towards the global market.

A Grand narrative is a comprehensive, totalizing story, which accounts for everything and reduces all little stories to its terms.

Modernism is a movement that lamented the impossibility of truth and devoted itself to defining in stories and artworks a nostalgia for lost presence. The other, the postmodern, rejoiced in the freedom this impossibility conferred.

Neutrality is not neutral at all, but sides with the way things are to avoid the dissension that might lead to change for the better. Consensus, then, may come into conflict with justice.

Paralogy is a form of reasoning that either breaks the rules or invents new ones in a striving toward heterogeneity, the multiplication of differences, and the pursuit of the as-yet unknown.

The Postmodern is characterized by a rejoicing in the freedom conferred by the impossibility of truth which modernism lamented.

The Postmodern is both too early and too late: too early for the public, since it must be new; too late for the author, who cannot know in advance whether it will prove to be intelligible, pleasurable, or absurd.

Postmodernism is a celebration of the capability of the signifier itself to create new forms and, indeed, new rules.

Realism is a reaffirmation of the problematic illusion that we are able to seize hold of reality, truth, the way things ‘really’ are; that photography, film, and television, offer themselves as windows onto the world, delivering ‘the facts’.

Realism is a protection from doubt, a circular reaffirmation that things are, human beings are, and, above all, we are just as we have always supposed.