Lyotard and the Postmodern Condition's Incredulity toward Metanarratives

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) had been politically active in the Marxist splinter group Socialisme ou Barbarie during the 1950s and 1960s, an engagement — including his early support for Algerian independence — that shaped his later, more skeptical stance toward totalizing political theories claiming to grasp the whole of history and society under a single explanatory scheme. In 1979, Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir), commissioned by the Conseil des universités of the government of Quebec to assess the state of knowledge in advanced industrial, or "postindustrial," societies. Although Lyotard later described the book, somewhat dismissively, as his "worst book" and admitted only a limited acquaintance with much of the scientific literature he cited, it became, quite unexpectedly, one of the most widely read texts identifying and naming "postmodernism" as a distinct intellectual and cultural condition.