Aging & Wisdom Quote by Jean-Francois Lyotard

Lyotard opens like a lab report and lands like a provocation. “Our working hypothesis” signals provisionality, a refusal to sound like the old-style philosopher laying down eternal laws. That framing is already the message: in the postindustrial, postmodern condition, even theory has to admit it’s a tool under pressure, not a cathedral.

The key move is “the status of knowledge is altered.” Lyotard isn’t claiming we know different things; he’s saying knowledge itself changes jobs. In industrial modernity, knowledge liked to pose as emancipation: science, education, progress, the big story where rationality redeems history. Postindustrial society, organized around information, services, and technocracy, treats knowledge less as truth and more as performance: what can be stored, transmitted, monetized, optimized. Think databases, credentials, metrics, patents. “Status” is the tell: knowledge becomes a social rank and an economic resource, not just a correspondence to reality.

Then comes the doubled “what is known as,” a sly distancing from the labels themselves. Lyotard is winking at the periodizing jargon while using it, implying that these names are part of the same knowledge-game they claim to describe. “Societies” and “cultures” split the arena: material restructuring (economies, institutions) on one side, symbolic upheaval (art, language, legitimation) on the other. The subtext is anxious: when the old grand narratives lose authority, what makes knowledge legitimate? Not tradition, not universal reason, but local rules, competing “language games,” and the cold logic of utility.