The demise of grand narratives? Postmodernism, power-knowledge, and applied epistemology

This chapter introduces postmodern epistemology by focusing on Lyotard’s now- canonical “report on knowledge”, The Postmodern Condition. In section 1 , I examine the social and historical bases of Lyotard’s claims concerning “knowledge in highly advanced societies.” In section 2 , I turn to his claims about the alleged proliferation of “language games” in these societies. In section 3 , I look specifically at Lyotard’s “applied” claims concerning the “scientific language game,” undermining its claims to epistemic difference, over “traditional” or “narrative” forms of knowledge. Section 4 then looks at the resulting epistemic relativism Lyotard defends in The Postmodern Condition : an “agonistics” (16) which assigns positive value to the “paralogical” disruption of existing forms of consensual knowledge, over traditional epistemic norms like truth, verisimilitude, simplicity, falsifiability, etc. In section 5 , I look at one instance of what a postmodern, paralogical “applied epistemology” looks like: the famous case of Pierre Rivière as analyzed by Michel Foucault in the early 1970s.