Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean-Francois Lyotard

Lyotard is quietly warning that when a society becomes obsessed with “communication,” language stops being a neutral conduit and becomes contested infrastructure. The line’s careful scaffolding - “as a reality and as an issue” - matters: communication isn’t just what we do more of; it’s what we argue about, regulate, monetize, and weaponize. That doubleness is the subtext. Once communication is both omnipresent and politicized, language gains “new importance” not because people suddenly love words, but because power increasingly moves through them.

The phrasing also smuggles in a Lyotard trademark: suspicion toward any story that pretends to stand above discourse. In his postmodern frame, the big legitimating narratives (progress, emancipation, even “truth” as a stable destination) are fraying. What replaces them is a battlefield of “language games,” where meaning is produced by rules, institutions, and audiences. When communication becomes “more prominent day by day,” it’s a symptom of modern life shifting from production to information, from factories to networks, from material coercion to persuasion, metrics, and managed visibility.

Contextually, this sits neatly in the late-20th-century moment Lyotard helped define: mass media’s saturation, technocracy’s rise, and early digitalization. The intent isn’t to romanticize language; it’s to underline stakes. If social reality is increasingly mediated, then whoever sets the terms of speech - what counts as knowledge, whose testimony is legible, which phrases become “common sense” - governs the horizon of the possible. Language “assumes a new importance” because it’s where legitimacy now gets built or broken.