"And today more than ever, knowing about that society involves first of all choosing what approach the inquiry will take, and that necessarily means choosing how society can answer"
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Knowledge, for Lyotard, is never an innocent act of looking. It is a design decision. When he writes that understanding society “involves first of all choosing what approach the inquiry will take,” he’s quietly refusing the fantasy of a neutral observer hovering above the mess. Method comes first because method is already politics: pick a lens and you pick what counts as evidence, which voices register as signal, and which experiences get filed as noise.
The sting is in the second clause: choosing an approach “necessarily means choosing how society can answer.” Society doesn’t speak in one voice; it gets ventriloquized through institutions, categories, and “legitimate” languages. A survey makes society answer as statistics. A court makes it answer as testimony. Economics makes it answer as incentives. Psychoanalysis makes it answer as desire. Each procedure builds a stage, hands out scripts, and then congratulates itself on the performance it elicited. The subtext is accusatory: if you don’t interrogate your framework, you’re not discovering truth, you’re manufacturing a kind of consent.
Context matters: Lyotard’s postwar French milieu, then his famous diagnosis of the “postmodern condition,” where grand stories that once justified knowledge (progress, emancipation, Reason) lose their monopoly. In that landscape, inquiry becomes less about marching toward one comprehensive explanation and more about tracking the struggle between competing “language games.” His intent isn’t relativist shrugging so much as methodological accountability: tell us what game you’re playing, what it rewards, and what it excludes.
The sting is in the second clause: choosing an approach “necessarily means choosing how society can answer.” Society doesn’t speak in one voice; it gets ventriloquized through institutions, categories, and “legitimate” languages. A survey makes society answer as statistics. A court makes it answer as testimony. Economics makes it answer as incentives. Psychoanalysis makes it answer as desire. Each procedure builds a stage, hands out scripts, and then congratulates itself on the performance it elicited. The subtext is accusatory: if you don’t interrogate your framework, you’re not discovering truth, you’re manufacturing a kind of consent.
Context matters: Lyotard’s postwar French milieu, then his famous diagnosis of the “postmodern condition,” where grand stories that once justified knowledge (progress, emancipation, Reason) lose their monopoly. In that landscape, inquiry becomes less about marching toward one comprehensive explanation and more about tracking the struggle between competing “language games.” His intent isn’t relativist shrugging so much as methodological accountability: tell us what game you’re playing, what it rewards, and what it excludes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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