Education Quote by Jean-Francois Lyotard

Lyotard’s jab lands because it’s disguised as a calm conditional: you can treat knowledge as society’s indispensable “element” only after you’ve swallowed a bigger, quieter metaphor - society as a machine. The line exposes how technocratic common sense sneaks in. “Knowledge” sounds neutral, civic-minded, even humble; “functioning” sounds like public transit and hospitals. But the sentence argues that this whole vocabulary is already a political choice, not a description. Once you picture society as machinery, knowledge becomes a component part: measurable, interchangeable, valued for keeping the system running. The human messiness that doesn’t fit the diagram - conflict, desire, dissent, incommensurable experiences - reads as noise.

This is vintage Lyotard in the postwar French context that watched expertise balloon into governance: planning commissions, managerial elites, cybernetics, then the late-20th-century pivot toward information as capital. In The Postmodern Condition, he famously tracks the “performativity” principle: knowledge gets legitimated by output, efficiency, optimization. This quote is the philosophical trapdoor under that story. He’s saying the “knowledge society” isn’t just a society with more facts; it’s a society that has decided what counts as reality and value.

The subtext is a warning about moral outsourcing. If society is a machine, then ethics becomes maintenance, politics becomes engineering, and disagreement becomes a technical problem to be debugged. Lyotard’s irony is that this “indispensable” knowledge is only indispensable to a worldview that has already reduced the social to something that can be made to work.