Education Quote by Jean-Francois Lyotard

Lyotard is quietly booby-trapping the conversation before it starts: you can’t talk about “knowledge” in advanced societies as if it were a timeless substance, because the very lens you use to describe the society will pre-decide what counts as knowledge. The line has the dry, procedural feel of a committee memo, and that’s the point. He’s mimicking the technocratic tone of the systems he’s interrogating, then turning it against them.

The specific intent is methodological suspicion. “Most highly developed” sounds like a neutral sociological label, but it smuggles in a progress narrative that modern institutions love: more development equals more rationality, more objectivity, more legitimate expertise. Lyotard’s move is to force a prior audit: which representation are you using - Marxist class analysis, functionalism, information theory, cybernetics, liberal pluralism? Each one doesn’t just interpret society; it produces a different map of what “knowledge” is for. Is it emancipation, social cohesion, prediction, control, market advantage?

The subtext is that contemporary society is no longer organized around truth as an ideal but around performativity: knowledge valued for its operational payoff. That’s the late-20th-century shift Lyotard names in The Postmodern Condition, written against the backdrop of postwar technocracy, expanding universities, computerization, and the legitimation crisis of big political stories (progress, revolution, national destiny). He’s warning that when knowledge gets processed through the wrong “representation,” critique becomes a service function - and philosophy becomes just another instrument panel in the control room.