Success Quote by Jean-Francois Lyotard

Lyotard doesn’t romanticize knowledge as enlightenment; he coldly invoices it. The line is built like a double-entry ledger: knowledge is produced to be sold, then consumed only to be “valorised” (given value) inside the next round of production. The grim punch is in that final clause: the goal isn’t truth, emancipation, or even understanding. It’s exchange.

That blunt economizing is the intent. Writing in the late-20th-century pivot to postindustrial capitalism, Lyotard is diagnosing a world where universities, research labs, media, and tech firms increasingly treat information as a commodity. “Will be” matters: this isn’t just description, it’s forecast, almost a warning that the logic is structural, not a temporary corruption that better morals will fix.

The subtext is a critique of legitimacy. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard argues that grand narratives (Progress, Reason, national destiny) no longer convincingly justify why knowledge matters. Into that vacuum steps performativity: knowledge gets funded, circulated, and rewarded insofar as it optimizes systems - profit, efficiency, competitiveness. Even “consumption” isn’t leisure here; it’s instrumental. You learn so you can produce more learnable, sellable outputs. Credentials, patents, datasets, metrics: knowledge as a pipeline.

What makes the sentence work is its mechanical, almost inhuman rhythm. Repetition (“is and will be”) mimics inevitability; passive constructions erase agents, implying that individuals don’t choose this so much as get processed by it. Lyotard’s cynicism isn’t decorative. It’s a snapshot of a culture sliding from education as public good to information as tradable asset, where meaning is less discovered than priced.