Abstract
Often associated with themes in political philosophy and aesthetics, the work of Jean-François Lyotard is most known for his infamous definition of the postmodern in his best-known book, La condition postmoderne (1979), as incredulity towards metanarratives. The claim of this article is that this famous claim of Lyotard is actually embedded in a philosophy of technology, one that is, moreover, still relevant for understanding present technoscience. The first part of the article therefore sketches Lyotard’s philosophy of technology, mainly by correcting three common misconceptions: that La condition postmoderne would only be about metanarratives, whereas in fact, it is mainly about what replaces them, namely performativity; that performativity would be shorthand for capitalism, whereas in reality, capitalism is the latest instance of a longer history of performativity; and that Lyotard’s reflections on science and technology would be restricted to this book alone, whereas in reality, a well-articulated philosophy of technology, centered around the concept of technoscience, is found in his later work. The second part of the article then aims to highlight the contemporary relevance of this philosophy of technoscience through a brief examination of two contemporary technosciences: synthetic biology and data science.
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Notes
I am not the first to make this particular point. For instance, in a text dealing with Lyotard, Ian Hamilton Grant has similarly argued that in Lyotard “[p]ostmodernity has nothing to do with the demise of narrativity” (Grant, 2014, 278).
My reading of Lyotard thus also differs from transhumanist or accelerationist readings of Lyotard that seek in Lyotard an ally to think and live beyond the human body as it currently exists. For some texts going in that direction, see Mackay & Avanessian (2014).
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Acknowledgements
A previous version of this paper was presented at The Society for Philosophy and Technology Conference (SPT) — June 28-30 2021 in Lille (online). I thank the audience for their questions and comments. I also would like to thank Kiff Bamford for helping me to correct a number of mistakes in the manuscript.
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This work was supported by the Research Foundations Flandres (FWO).
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Simons, M. Jean-François Lyotard and Postmodern Technoscience. Philos. Technol. 35, 31 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-022-00517-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-022-00517-3