Philip Holden, Department of English Language & Literature, National University of Singapore
As with Baudrillard, I will here concentrate upon only a small aspect of his work which relates to the concerns of CCLA01. For Lyotard, a "crisis of narratives" has occurred in developed societies because of transformations which began in the late nineteenth century. Because of these changes, we live not in a modern world, with a belief in the grand narrative of human progress, but in the radical uncertainty of the postmodern condition
I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse . . . making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Reason, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth...
Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements--narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these . . . . There are many different language games--a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches--local determinism.
In Singapore, what narratives do you think might be coming to an end? What still persist, in apparent contradiction of Lyotard's ideas?
Bibliography
Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmodern Condition.Tr. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984
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