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Introduction

The object of this study is the condition of knowledge in the most
highly developed societies. I have decided to use the wordpost-modernto describe that condition. The word is in current use on the
American continent among sociologists and critics; it designates
the state of our culture foEowing the transformations which, since the
end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for
science, literature, and the arts. The present study will place these
transformations in the context of the crisis of narrative

Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the
yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to
the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful
regularities and seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of
its own game. It then produces a discourse of legitimation with
respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy. I will use the
termmodernto designate any science that legitimates itself with
reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal
to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the her-meneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working
subject, or the creation of wealt

. For example, the rule of consensus
between the sender and addressee of a statement with truth-value is
deemed acceptable if it is cast in terms of a possible unanimity be-tween rational minds: this is the Enlightenment narrative, in which
xxiiixxiv G INTRODUCTION
the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end
—universal peace. As can be seen from this example, if a metanarrative
implying a philosophy of history is used to legitimate knowledge,
questions are raised concerning the validity of the institutions govern-ing the social bond: these must be legitimated as well. Thus justice is
consigned to the grand narrative in the same way as truth.

Simplifying to the extreme, I definepostmodernas incredulity
toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product
of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it.
To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation
corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy
and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The
narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great
dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in
clouds of narrative language elements—narrative, but also denotative,
prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are
pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the inter-section of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish
stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do
establish are not necessarily communicabl

Thus the society of the future falls less within the province of
aNewtonian anthropology (such as stucturalism or systems theory)
than a pragmatics of language particles. There are many different
language games—a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to
institutions in patches—local determinis

The decision makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of
sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which
implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole is
determinable. They allocate our lives for the growth of power. In
matters of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the legitimation
of that power is based on its optimizing the system’s performance
—efficiency. The application of this criterion to all of our games neces-sarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be opera-tional (that is, commensurable) or disappear.

The logic of maximum performance is no doubt inconsistent in
many ways, particularly with respect to contradiction in the socio-economic field: it demands both less work (to lower production
costs) and more (to lessen the social burden of the idle population).
But our incredulity is now such that we no longer expect salvation to
rise from these inconsistencies, as did Marx.

Still, the postmodern condition is as much a stranger to disenchant-ment as it is to the blind positivity of delegitimation. Where, afterINTRODUCTION D xxv
the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? The operativity criterion
is technological; it has no relevance for judging what is true or just.
Is legitimacy to be found in consensus obtained through discussion,
as Ju’rgen Habermas thinks? Such consensus does violence to the
heterogeneity of language games. And invention is always born of
dissension. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the author-ities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability
to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert’s
homology, but the inventor’s paralogy.

Here is the question: is a legitimation of the social bond, a just
society, feasible in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific
activity? What would such a paradox be?

It remains to be said that the author of the report is a philosopher,
not an expert. The latter knows what he knows and what he does not
know: the former does no

Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as
societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures
enter what is known as the postmodern age.1
This transition has been
under way since at least the end of the 1950s, which for Europe
marks the completion of reconstructio

Rather than painting a picture that would inevitably remain in-complete, I will take as my point of departure a single feature, one
that immediately defines our object of study. Scientific knowledge is
a kind of discourse. And it is fair to say that for the last forty years
the “leading” sciences and technologies have had to do with language:
phonology and theories of linguistics,4
problems of communication
and cybernetics,5
modern theories of algebra and informatics,6
computers and their languages,7
problems of translation and the
search for areas of compatibility among computer languages,8
prob-lems of information storage and data banks,9
telematics and the
34 D THE POSTMODERN CONDITION
perfection of intelligent terminals,10
paradoxology.11
The facts
speak for themselves (and this list is not exhaustive).

These technological transformations can be expected to have
aconsiderable impact on knowledge. Its two principal functions
—research and the transmission of acquired learning—are already feel-ing the effect, or will in the futur

, it is common knowledge that
the miniaturization and commercialization of machines is already
changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made avail-able, and exploited.12
It is reasonable to suppose that the prolifera-tion of information-processing machines is having, and will continue
to have, as much of an effect on the circulation of learning as did ad-vancements in human circulation (transportation systems) and later,
in the circulation of sounds and visual images (the media).13

The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this
context of general transformation. It can fit into the new channels,
and become operational, only if learning is translated into quantities
of information.14
We can predict that anything in the constituted
body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be aban-doned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the
possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer
language. The “producers” and users of knowledge must now, and
will have to, possess the means of translating into these languages
whatever they want to invent or learn. Research on translating
machines is already well advanced.15
Along with the hegemony of
computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of pre-scriptions determining which statements are accepted as “knowledge”
statements.

We may thus expect a thorough exteriorization of knowledge with
respect to the “knower,” at whatever point he or she may occupy in
the knowledge process. The old principle that the acquisition of
knowledge is indissociable from the training(Bildung)of minds, or
even of individuals, is becoming obsolete and will become ever more
so. The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the
knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly
tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of com-modity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce
and consume—that is, the form of value. Knowledge is and will be
produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to
be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.THEPOSTMODERNCONDITION D
5Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its “use-value.”16

It is widely accepted that knowledge has become the principle
force of production over the last few decades;17
this has already had
a noticeable effect on the composition of the work force of the most
highlydevelopedcountries18
ndconstitutesthemajorbottleneck
for the developing countries. In the postindustrial and postmodern
age, science will maintain and no doubt strengthen its preeminence in
the arsenal of productive capacities of the nation-states. Indeed, this
situation is one of the reasons leading to the conclusion that the gap
between developed and developing countries will grow ever wider in
the future.19
But this aspect of the problem should not be allowed to over-shadow the other, which is complementary to it. Knowledge in the
form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive
power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhapsthe
major—stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceiv-able that the nation-states will one day fight for control of informa-tion, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and
afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials
and cheap labor. A new field is opened for industrial and commercial
strategiesontheonehand,and political and military strategies on
the other.20

However, the perspective I have outlined above is not as simple as
I have made it appear. For the mercantilization of knowledge is
bound to affect the privilege the nation-states have enjoyed, and still
enjoy, with respect to the production and distribution of learning.
The notion that learning falls within the purview of the State, as the
brain or mind of society, will become more and more outdated with
the increasing strength of the opposing principle, according to which
society exists and progresses only if the messages circulating within
it are rich in information and easy to decode. The ideology of com-municational “transparency,” which goes hand in hand with the
commercialization of knowledge, will begin to perceive the State as
a factor of opacity and “noise.” It is from this point of view that
the problem of the relationship between economic and State powers
threatens to arise with a new urgency.

Already in the last few decades, economic powers have reached
the point of imperiling the stability of the State through new forms
of the circulation of capital that go by the generic name ofmulti-national corporations.These new forms of circulation imply that
investment decisions have, at least in part, passed beyond the control
of the nation-states.21
The question threatens to become even more6 O THE POSTMODERN CONDITION
thorny with the development of computer technology and telematic

Suppose, for example, that a firm such as IBM is authorized to occupy
a belt in the earth’s orbital field and launch communications satel-lites or satellites housing data banks. Who will have access to them?
Who will determine which channels or data are forbidden? The
State? Or will the State simply be one user among others? New legal
issues will be raised, and with them the question: “who will know?“

Transformation in the nature of knowledge, then, could well have
repercussions on the existing public powers, forcing them to recon-sider their relations (both de jure and de facto) with the large corpor-ations and, more generally, with civil society. The reopening of the
world market, a return to vigorous economic competition, the break-down of the hegemony of American capitalism, the decline of the
socialist alternative, a probable opening of the Chinese market
—these and many other factors are already, at the end of the 1970s,
preparing States for a serious reappraisal of the role they have been
accustomed to playing since the 1930s: that of guiding, or even
directing investments.In this light, the new technologies can only
increase the urgency of such a reexamination, since they make the
information used in decision making (and therefore the means of
control) even more mobile and subject to piracy.

It is not hard to visualize learning circulating along the same lines
as money, instead of for its “educational” value or political (adminis-trative, diplomatic, military) importance; the pertinent distinction
would no longer be between knowledge and ignorance, but rather, as
is the case with money, between “payment knowledge” and “invest-ment knowledge”—in other words, between units of knowledge ex-changed in a daily maintenance framework (the reconstitution of the
work force, “survival”) versus funds of knowledge dedicated to
optimizing the performance of a project.

The Field: Knowledge in Computerized Societies

If this were the case, communicational transparency would be
similar to liberalism. Liberalism does not preclude an organization
of the flow of money in which some channels are used in decision
making while others are only good for the payment of debts. One
could similarly imagine flows of knowledge traveling along identical
channels of identical nature, some of which would be reserved for
the “decision makers,” while the others would be used to repay each
person’s perpetual debt with respect to the social bond.

ndalreadyguidingcertaindecisionsbythe
governmental agencies and private firms most directly concerned,
such as those managing the telecommunications industry. To some
extent, then, it is already a part of observable realit

This is as much as to say that the hypothesis is banal. But only to
the extent that it fails to challenge the general paradigm of progress
in science and technology, to which economic growth and the expan-sion of sociopolitical power seem to be natural complements. That
scientific and technical knowledge is cumulative is never questioned.
At most, what is debated is the form that accumulation takes—some
picture it as regular, continuous, and unanimous, others as periodic,
discontinuous, and conflictual.24

But these truisms are fallacious. In the first place, scientific know-ledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always
existed in addition to, and in competition and conflict with, another
kind of knowledge, which I will call narrative in the interests of
simplicity (its characteristics will be described later). I do not mean
to say that narrative knowledge can prevail over science, but its
modelisrelatedtoideasofinternalequilibriumandconviviality25
next to which contemporary scientific knowledge cuts a poor figure,
especially if it is to undergo an exteriorization with respect to the
”knower” and an alienation from its user even greater than has
previously been the case. The resulting demoralization of researchers
and teachers is far from negligible; it is well known that during the
1960s, in all of the most highly developed societies, it reached such8 Q THE POSTMODERN CONDITION
explosive dimensions among those preparing to practice these profes-sions—the students —that there was noticeable decrease in productiv-ity at laboratories and universities unable to protect themselves from
its contamination.26
Expecting this, with hope or fear, to lead to
arevolution (as was then often the case) is out of the question: it will
not change the order of things in postindustrial society overnight.
But this doubt on the part of scientists must be taken into account as
a major factor in evaluating the present and future status of scientific
knowledge.

It is all the more necessary to take it into consideration since—and
this is the second point—the scientists’ demoralization has an impact
on the central problem of legitimation. I use the word in a broader
sense than do contemporary German theorists in their discussions of
the question of authority.Take any civil law as an example: it
states that a given category of citizens must perform a specific kind
of action. Legitimation is the process by which a legislator is author-ized to promulgate such a law as a norm. Now take the example of
ascientific statement: it is subject to the rule that a statement must
fulfill a given set of conditions in order to be accepted as scientific.
In this case, legitimation is the process by which a “legislator” deal-ing with scientific discourse is authorized to prescribe the stated
conditions (in general, conditions of internal consistency and experi-mental verification) determining whether a statement is to be included
in that discourse for consideration by the scientific community.

The parallel may appear forced. But as we will see, it is not. The
question of the legitimacy of science has been indissociably linked to
that of the legitimation of the legislator since the time of Plato.
From this point of view, the right to decide what is true is not inde-pendent of the right to decide what is just, even if the statements
consigned to these two authorities differ in nature. The point is that
there is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called
science and the kind called ethics and politics: they both stem from
the same perspective, the same “choice” if you will—the choice
called the Occident.

When we examine the current status of scientific knowledge—at
atime when science seems more completely subordinated to the pre-vailing powers than ever before and, along with the new technologies,
is in danger of becoming a major stake in their conflicts—the ques-tion of double legitimation, far from receding into the background,
necessarily comes to the fore. For it appears in its most complete
form, that of reversion, revealing that knowledge and power areTHE POSTMODERN CONDITION D
9simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge
is, and who knows what needs to be decided? In the computer age,
the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of
government.

The Method: Language Games

The reader will already have noticed that in analyzing this problem
within the framework set forth I have favored a certain procedure:
emphasizing facts of language and in particular their pragmatic as-pect.28
To help clarify what follows it would be useful to summarize,
however briefly, what is meant here by the termp
ragmati

Adenotativeutterance29
uchas”The university is sick,” made in
the context of a conversation or an interview, positions its sender
(the person who utters the statement), its addressee (the person who
receives it), and its referent (what the statement deals with) in
aspecific way: the utterance places (and exposes) the sender in the
position of “knower”(he knows what the situation is with the univer-sity), the addressee is put in the position of having to give or refuse
his assent, and the referent itself is handled in a way unique to
denotatives, as something that demands to be correctly identified
and expressed by the statement that refers to it.

If we consider a declaration such as “The university is open,“
pronounced by a dean or rector at convocation, it is clear that the
previous specifications no longer apply. Of course, the meaning of
the utterance has to be understood, but that is a general condition
of communication and does not aid us in distinguishing the differ-ent kinds of utterances or their specific effects. The distinctive
feature of this second, “performative,“30
utterance is that its effect
upon the referent coincides with its enunciation. The university is
open because it has been declared open in the above-mentioned
circumstances. That this is so is not subject to discussion or verifica-tion on the part of the addressee, who is immediately placed within
the new context created by the utterance. As for the sender, he must
be invested with the authority to make such a statement. Actually,
we could say it the other way around: the sender is dean or rector—
that is, he is invested with the authority to make this kind of state-ment—only insofar as he can directly affect both the referent, (the
university) and the addressee (the university staff) in the manner
Ihave indicate

A different case involves utterances of the type, “Give money to10 D THE POSTMODERN CONDITION
the university”; these are prescriptions. They can be modulated as
orders, commands, instructions, recommendations, requests, prayers,
pleas, etc. Here, the sender is clearly placed in a position of authority,
using the term broadly (including the authority of a sinner over a god
who claims to be merciful): that is, he expects the addressee to per-form the action referred to. The pragmatics of prescription entail
concomitant changes in the posts of addressee and referent.31

Of a different order again is the efficiency of a question, a promise,
a literary description, a narration, etc. I am summarizing. Wittgen-stein, taking up the study of language again from scratch, focuses his
attention on the effects of different modes of discourse; he calls the
various types of utterances he identifies along the way (a few of
which I have listed)anguage
games.32Whathemeansbythisterm
that each of the various categories of utterance can be defined in
terms of rules specifying their properties and the uses to which they
can be put—in exactly the same way as the game of chess is defined
by a set of rules determining the properties of each of the pieces, in
other words, the proper way to move the

It is useful to make the following three observations about lan-guage games. The first is that their rules do not carry within them-selves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit
or not, between players (which is not to say that the players invent
the rules). The second is that if there are no rules, there is no game,33
that even an infinitesimal modification of one rule alters the nature
of the game, that a “move” or utterance that does not satisfy the
rules does not belong to the game they define. The third remark is
suggested by what has just been said: every utterance should be
thought of as a “move” in a game.

This last observation brings us to the first principle underlying our
method as a whole: to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and
s
peechacts34fallwithinthedomainofageneralagonistics.35 Thidoes not necessarily mean that one plays in order to win. A move can
be made for the sheer pleasure of its invention: what else is involved
in that labor of language harassment undertaken by popular speech
and by literature? Great joy is had in the endless invention of turns
of phrase, of words and meanings, the process behind the evolution
of language on the level ofparole.But undoubtedly even this plea-sure depends on a feeling of success won at the expense of an adver-sary—at least one adversary, and a formidable one: the accepted
language, or connotation.36

This idea of an agonistics of language should not make us lose
sight of the second principle, which stands as a complement to itTHE POSTMODERN CONDITION O 11
and governs our analysis: that the observable social bond is com-posed of language “moves.” An elucidation of this proposition will
take us to the heart of the matter at hand.

The Nature of the Social Bond: The Modern Alternative

If we wish to discuss knowledge in the most highly developed con-temporary society, we must answer the preliminary question of what
methodological representation to apply to that society. Simplifying
to the extreme, it is fair to say that in principle there have been, at
least over the last half-century, two basic representational models for
society: either society forms a functional whole, or it is divided in
two. An illustration of the first model is suggested by Talcott Parsons
(at least the postwar Parsons) and his school, and of the second, by
the Marxist current (all of its component schools, whatever differ-ences they may have, accept both the principle of class struggle and
dialectics as a duality operating within society).37

This methodological split, which defines two major kinds of dis-course on society, has been handed down from the nineteenth
century. The idea that society forms an organic whole, in the absence
of which it ceases to be a society (and sociology ceases to have an
object of study), dominated the minds of the founders of the French
school. Added detail was supplied by functionalism; it took yet
another turn in the 1950s with Parsons’s conception of society as
aself-regulating system. The theoretical and even material model is
no longer the living organism; it is provided by cybernetics, which,
during and after the Second World War, expanded the model’s
applications.

In Parsons’s work, the principle behind the system is still, if
Imay say so, optimistic: it corresponds to the stabilization of the
growth economies and societies of abundance under the aegis of
amoderate welfare state.38
In the work of contemporary German
theorists,systemtheorieis technocratic, even cynical, not to men-tion despairing: the harmony between the needs and hopes of
individuals or groups and the functions guaranteed by the system is
now only a secondary component of its functioning. The true goal
of the system, the reason it programs itself like a computer, is the
optimization of the global relationship between input and output
—in other words, performativity. Even when its rules are in the process
of changing and innovations are occurring, even when its dysfunc-tions (such as strikes, crises, unemployment, or political revolutions)
inspire hope and lead to belief in an alternative, even then what is12 D THE POSTMODERN CONDITION
actually taking place is only an internal readjustment, and its result
can be no more than an increase in the system’s “viability.” The only
alternative to this kind of performance improvement is entropy, or
decline.39

Here again, while avoiding the simplifications inherent in a sociol-ogy of social theory, it is difficult to deny at least a parallel between
this “hard” technocratic version of society and the ascetic effort that
was demanded (the fact that it was done in name of “advanced
liberalism” is beside the point) of the most highly developed industrial
societies in order to make them competitive—and thus optimize their
”rationality”—within the framework of the resumption of economic
world war in the 1960s.

Even taking into account the massive displacement intervening be-tween the thought of a man like Comte and the thought of Luhmann,
we can discern a common conception of the social: society is a uni-fied totality, a “unicity.” Parsons formulates this clearly: “The most
essential condition of successful dynamic analysis is a continual and
systematic reference of every problem to the state of the system as
awhole. … A process or set of conditions either ‘contributes’ to the
maintenance (or development) of the system or it is ‘dysfunctional’
in that it detracts from the integration, effectiveness, etc., of the
system.”40
The “technocrats41
alsosubscribetothisidea.Whence
its credibility: it has the means to become a reality, and that is all
the proof it needs. This is what Horkheimer called the “paranoia” of
reason.42

But this realism of systemic self-regulation, and this perfectly
sealed circle of facts and interpretations, can be judged paranoid only
if one has, or claims to have, at one’s disposal a viewpoint that is in
principle immune from their allure. This is the function of the prin-ciple of class struggle in theories of society based on the work of
Marx.

”Traditional” theory is always in danger of being incorporated
into the programming of the social whole as a simple tool for the
optimization of its performance; this is because its desire for a uni-tary and totalizing truth lends itself to the unitary and totalizing
practice of the system’s managers. “Critical” theory,43
based on
aprinciple of dualism and wary of syntheses and reconciliations,
should be in a position to avoid this fate. What guides Marxism, then,
is a different model of society, and a different conception of the
function of the knowledge that can be produced by society and
acquired from it. This model was born of the struggles accompanying
the process of capitalism’s encroachment upon traditional civilTHE POSTMODERN CONDITION D 13
societies. There is insufficient space here to chart the vicissitudes of
these struggles, which fill more than a century of social, political, and
ideological history. We will have to content ourselves with a glance at
the balance sheet, which is possible for us to tally today now that
their fate is known: in countries with liberal or advanced liberal
management, the struggles and their instruments have been trans-formed into regulators of the system; in communist countries, the
totalizing model and its totalitarian effect have made a comeback in
the name of Marxism itself, and the struggles in question have simply
been deprived of the right to exist.44
Everywhere, the Critique of
political economy (the subtitle of Marx’sCapital)and its correlate,
the critique of alienated society, are used in one way or another as
aids in programming the system.45

Of course, certain minorities, such as the Frankfurt School or the
group Socialisme ou barbarie,46 preserved and refined the critical
model in opposition to this process. But the social foundation of the
principle of division, or class struggle, was blurred to the point of
losing all of its radicality; we cannot conceal the fact that the critical
model in the end lost its theoretical standing and was reduced to the
status of a “utopia” or “hope,“47
a token protest raised in the name
of man or reason or creativity, or again of some social category
—suchastheThirdWorldorthestudents48—on which is conferred in
extremis the henceforth improbable function of critical subject.

The sole purpose of this schematic (or skeletal) reminder has been
to specify the problematic in which I intend to frame the question of
knowledge in advanced industrial societies. For it is impossible to
know what the state of knowledge is—in other words, the problems
its development and distribution are facing today—without knowing
something of the society within which it is situated. And today more
than ever, knowing about that society involves first of all choosing
what approach the inquiry will take, and that necessarily means
choosing how society can answer. One can decide that the principal
role of knowledge is as an indispensable element in the functioning
of society, and act in accordance with that decision, only if one has
already decided that society is a giant machine.49

Conversely, one can count on its critical function, and orient its
development and distribution in that direction, only after it has been
decided that society does not form an integrated whole, but remains
haunted by a principle of opposition.50
The alternative seems clear:
it is a choice between the homogeneity and the intrinsic duality of
the social, between functional and critical knowledge. But the deci-sion seems difficult, or arbitrary.

It is tempting to avoid the decision altogether by distinguishing
two kinds of knowledge. One, the positivist kind, would be directly
applicable to technologies bearing on men and materials, and would
lend itself to operating as an indispensable productive force within
the system. The other—the critical, reflexive, or hermeneutic kind
—by reflecting directly or indirectly on values or aims, would resist any
such “recuperation.”51

The Nature of the Social Bond:
The Postmodern Perspecti

I find this partition solution unacceptable. I suggest that the alterna-tive it attempts to resolve, but only reproduces, is no longer relevant
for the societies with which we are concerned and that the solution
itself is still caught within a type of oppositional thinking that is out
of step with the most vital modes of postmodern knowledge. As
Ihave already said, economic “redeployment” in the current phase of
capitalism, aided by a shift in techniques and technology, goes hand
in hand with a change in the function of the State: the image of soci-ety this syndrome suggests necessitates a serious revision of the alter-nate approaches considered. For brevity’s sake, suffice it to say that
functions of regulation, and therefore of reproduction, are being and
will be further withdrawn from administrators and entrusted to
machines. Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will
have access to the information these machines must have in storage
to guarantee that the right decisions are made. Access to data is, and
will continue to be, the prerogative of experts of all stripes. The rul-ing class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers. Even
now it is no longer composed of the traditional political class, but
of a composite layer of corporate leaders, high-level administrators,
and the heads of the major professional, labor, political, and religious
organizations.52

What is new in all of this is that the old poles of attraction repre-sented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and histori-cal traditions are losing their attraction. And it does not look as
though they will be replaced, at least not on their former scale. The
Trilateral Commission is not a popular pole of attraction. “Identify-ing” with the great names, the heroes of contemporary history, is
becoming more and more difficult.53
Dedicating oneself to “catching
up with Germany,” the life goal the French president [Giscard
d’Estaing at the time this book was published in France] seems to
be offering his countrymen, is not exactly exicting. But then again,THE POSTMODERN CONDITION D 15
it is not exactly a life goal. It depends on each individual’s industri-ousness. Each individual is referred to himself. And each of us knows
that ourselfdoes not amount to much.54

This breaking up of the grand Narratives (discussed below, sections
9 and 10) leads to what some authors analyze in terms of the dissolu-tion of the social bond and the disintegration of social aggregates
into a mass of individual atoms thrown into the absurdity of Brownian
motion.55
Nothing of the kind is happening: this point of view, it
seems to me, is haunted by the paradisaic representation of a lost
”organic” society.

Aselfdoes not amount to much, but no self is an island; each
exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile
than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a per-son is always located at “nodal points” of specific communication
circuits, however tiny these may be.56
Or better: one is always
located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass. No
one, not even the least privileged among us, is ever entirely powerless
over the messages that traverse and position him at the post of sender,
addressee, or referent. One’s mobility in relation to these language
game effects (language games, of course, are what this is all about)
is tolerable, at least within certain limits (and the limits are vague);
it is even solicited by regulatory mechanisms, and in particular by
the self-adjustments the system undertakes in order to improve its
performance. It may even be said that the system can and must
encourage such movement to the extent that it combats its own
entropy; the novelty of an unexpected “move,” with its correlative
displacement of a partner or group of partners, can supply the
system with that increased performativity it forever demands and
consumes.57

It should now be clear from which perspective I chose language
games as my general methodological approach. I am not claiming
t
hat the entirety of social relations is of this nature—that will remainan open question. But there is no need to resort to some fiction of
social origins to establish that language games are the minimum rela-tion required for society to exist: even before he is born, if only by
virtue of the name he is given, the human child is already positioned
as the referent in the story recounted by those around him, in rela-tion to which he will inevitably chart his course.58
Or more simply
still, the question of the social bond, insofar as it is a question, is
itself a language game, the game of inquiry. It immediately positions
the person who asks, as well as the addressee and the referent asked
about: it is already the social bond.

On the other hand, in a society whose communication component
is becoming more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an
issue,59
it is clear that language assumes a new importance. It would
be superficial to reduce its significance to the traditional alternative
between manipulatory speech and the unilateral transmission of mes-sages on the one hand, and free expression and dialogue on the othe

A word on this last point. If the problem is described simply in
terms of communication theory, two things are overlooked: first,
messages have quite different forms and effects depending on whether
they are, for example, denotatives, prescriptives, evaluatives, per-formatives, etc. It is clear that what is important is not simply the
fact that they communicate information. Reducing them to this
function is to adopt an outlook which unduly privileges the system’s
own interests and point of view. A cybernetic machine does indeed
run on information, but the goals programmed into it, for example,
originate in prescriptive and evaluative statements it has no way to
correct in the course of its functioning—for example, maximizing
its own performance. How can one guarantee that performance
maximization is the best goal for the social system in every case? In
any case the “atoms” forming its matter are competent to handle
statements such as these—and this question in particula

Second, the trivial cybernetic version of information theory misses
something of decisive importance, to which I have already called at-tention: the agonistic aspect of society. The atoms are placed at the
crossroads of pragmatic relationships, but they are also displaced by
the messages that traverse them, in perpetual motion. Each language
partner, when a “move” pertaining to him is made, undergoes
a”displacement,” an alteration of some kind that not only affects him
in his capactiy as addressee and referent, but also as sender. These
”moves” necessarily provoke “countermoves” —and everyone knows
that a countermove that is merely reactional is not a “good” move.
Reactional countermoves are no more than programmed effects in
the opponent’s strategy; they play into his hands and thus have no
effect on the balance of power. That is why it is important to increase
displacement in the games, and even to disorient it, in such a way as
to make an unexpected “move” (a new statement).

What is needed if we are to understand social relations in this
manner, on whatever scale we choose, is not only a theory of com-munication, but a theory of games which accepts agonistics as
afounding principle. In this context, it is easy to see that the essential
element of newness is not simply “innovation.” Support for this ap-proach can be found in the work of a number of contemporaryTHE POSTMODERN CONDITION D 17
sociologists,60
in addition to linguists and philosophers of languag

This “atomization” of the social into flexible networks of lan-guage games may seem far removed from the modern reality, which
is depicted, on the contrary, as afflicted with bureaucratic paraly-sis.61
The objection will be made, at least, that the weight of certain
institutions imposes limits on the games, and thus restricts the in-ventiveness of the players in making their moves. But I think this can
be taken into account without causing any particular difficult

In the ordinary use of discourse—for example, in a discussion
between two friends—the interlocutors use any available ammuni-tion, changing games from one utterance to the next: questions,
requests, assertions, and narratives are launched pell-mell into battle.
The war is not without rules,62
but the rules allow and encourage the
greatest possible flexibility of utteranc

From this point of view, an institution differs from a conversation
in that it always requires supplementary constraints for statements to
be declared admissible within its bounds. The constraints function to
filter discursive potentials, interrupting possible connections in the
communication networks: there are things that should not be said.
They also privilege certain classes of statements (sometimes only
one) whose predominance characterizes the discourse of the parti-cular institution: there are things that should be said, and there are
ways of saying them. Thus: orders in the army, prayer in church,
denotation in the schools, narration in families, questions in philo-sophy, performativity in businesses. Bureaucratization is the outer
limit of this tendency.

However, this hypothesis about the institution is still too “un-wieldy”: its point of departure is an overly “reifying” view of what
is institutionalized. We know today that the limits the institution im-poses on potential language “moves” are never established once and
for all (even if they have been formally defined).63
Rather, the limits
are themselves the stakes and provisional results of language strate-gies, within the institution and without. Examples: Does the univer-sity have a place for language experiments (poetics)? Can you tell
stories in a cabinet meeting? Advocate a cause in the barracks? The
answers are clear: yes, if the university opens creative workshops;
yes, if the cabinet works with prospective scenarios; yes, if the limits
of the old institution are displaced.64
Reciprocally, it can be said that
the boundaries only stabilize when they cease to be stakes in the
game.
This, I think, is the appropriate approach to contemporary institu-tions of knowledge.

The Pragmatics of Narrative Knowled

In Section 1, I leveled two objections against the unquestioning ac-ceptance of an instrumental conception of knowledge in the most
highly developed societies. Knowledge is not the same as science, es-pecially in its contemporary form; and science, far from successfully
obscuring the problem of its legitimacy, cannot avoid raising it with
all of its implications, which are no less sociopolitical than episte-mological. Let us begin with an analysis of the nature of “narrative”
knowledge; by providing a point of comparison, our examination will
clarify at least some of the characteristics of the form assumed by
scientific knowledge in contemporary society. In addition, it will aid
us in understanding how the question of legitimacy is raised or fails
to be raised toda

Knowledge [savoir] in general cannot be reduced to science, nor
even to learning[connaissance] .Learning is the set of statements
which, to the exclusion of all other statements, denote or describe
objects and may be declared true or false.65
Science is a subset of
learning. It is also composed of denotative statements, but imposes
two supplementary conditions on their acceptability: the objects to
which they refer must be available for repeated access, in other
words, they must be accessible in explicit conditions of observation;
and it must be possible to decide whether or not a given statement
pertains to the language judged relevant by the experts.66

B
ut what is meant by the term knowledge is not only a set ofdenotative statements, far from it. It also includes notions of “know-how,” “knowing how to live,” “how to listen” [savoir-faire, savoir-vivre, savoir-ecouter] , etc. Knowledge, then, is a question of compe-tence that goes beyond the simple determination and application of
the criterion of truth, extending to the determination and applica-tion of criteria of efficiency (technical qualification), of justice and/
or happiness (ethical wisdom), of the beauty of a sound or color
(auditory and visual sensibility), etc. Understood in this way, know-ledge is what makes someone capable of forming “good” denotative
utterances, but also “good” prescriptive and “good” evaluative
utterances. … It is not a competence relative to a particular class
of statements (for example, cognitive ones) to the exclusion of all
others. On the contrary, it makes “good” performances in relation to
a variety of objects of discourse possible: objects to be known, de-cided on, evaluated, transformed… . From this derives one of the
principal features of knowledge: it coincides with an extensive arrayTHE POSTMODERN CONDITION Q 19
of competence-building measures and is the only form embodied in
a subject constituted by the various areas of competence composing
it.

Another characteristic meriting special attention is the relation
between this kind of knowledge and custom. What is a “good” pre-scriptive or evaluative utterance, a “good” performance in denotative
or technical matters? They are all judged to be “good” because they
conform to the relevant criteria (of justice, beauty, truth, and effi-ciency respectively) accepted in the social circle of the “knower’s”
interlocutors. The early philosophers called this mode of legitimating
statements opinion.67
The consensus that permits such knowledge to
be circumscribed and makes it possible to distinguish one who knows
from one who doesn’t (the foreigner, the child) is what constitutes
the culture of a people.68

This brief reminder of what knowledge can be in the way of train-ing and culture draws on ethnological description for its justifica-tion.69
But anthropological studies and literature that take rapidly
developing societies as their object can attest to the survival of this
type of knowledge within them, at least in some of their sectors.70
The very idea of development presupposes a horizon of nondevelop-ment where, it is assumed, the various areas of competence remain
enveloped in the unity of a tradition and are not differentiated ac-cording to separate qualifications subject to specific innovations, de-bates, and inquiries. This opposition does not necessarily imply
adifference in nature between “primitive” and “civilized” man,71
but is compatible with the premise of a formal identity between “the
savage mind” and scientific thought;72
it is even compatible with the
(apparently contrary) premise of the superiority of customary know-ledge over the contemporary dispersion of competence.73

It is fair to say that there is one point on which all of the investiga-tions agree, regardless of which scenario they propose to dramatize
and understand the distance separating the customary state of know-ledge from its state in the scientific age: the preeminence of the
narrative form in the formulation of traditional knowledge. Some
study this form for its own sake;74
others see it as the diachronic
costume of the structural operators that, according to them, properly
constitute the knowledge in question;75
still others bring to it an
”economic” interpretation in the Freudian sense of the term.76
All
that is important here is the fact that its form is narrative. Narration
is the quintessential form of customary knowledge, in more ways
than on

First, the popular stories themselves recount what could be called20 D THE POSTMODERN CONDITION
positive or negative apprenticeships(Bildungen):in other words, the
successes or failures greeting the hero’s undertakings. These successes
or failures either bestow legitimacy upon social institutions (the
function of myths), or represent positive or negative models (the
successful or unsuccessful hero) of integration into established insti-tutions (legends and tales). Thus the narratives allow the society in
which they are told, on the one hand, to define its criteria of compe-tence and, on the other, to evaluate according to those criteria what
is performed or can be performed within it.

Second, the narrative form, unlike the developed forms of the dis-course of knowledge, lends itself to a great variety of language games.
Denotative statements concerning, for example, the state of the sky
and the flora and fauna easily slip in; so do deontic statements pre-scribing what should be done with respect to these same referents, or
with respect to kinship, the difference between the sexes, children,
neighbors, foreigners, etc. Interrogative statements are implied, for
example, in episodes involving challenges (respond to a question,
choose one from a number of things); evaluative statements also
enter in, etc. The areas of competence whose criteria the narrative
supplies or applies are thus tightly woven together in the web it
forms, ordered by the unified viewpoint characteristic of this kind of
knowledge.

We shall examine in somewhat more detail a third property,
which relates to the transmission of narratives. Their narration
usually obeys rules that define the pragmatics of their transmission.
Ido not mean to say that a given society institutionally assigns the
role of narrator to certain categories on the basis of age, sex, or
family or professional group. What I am getting at is a pragmatics of
popular narratives that is, so to speak, intrinsic to them. For example,
aCashinahua77
torytelleralwaysbeginshisnarrationwithafixed
formula: “Here is the story of—, as I’ve always heard it told. I will
tell it to you in my turn. Listen.” And he brings it to a close with
another, also invariable, formula: “Here ends the story of—. The
man who has told it to you is— (Cashinahua name), or to the
Whites— (Spanish or Portuguese name).“78

A quick analysis of this double pragmatic instruction reveals the
following: the narrator’s only claim to competence for telling the
story is the fact that he has heard it himself. The current narratee
gains potential access to the same authority simply by listening. It is
claimed that the narrative is a faithful transmission (even if the narra-tive performance is highly inventive) and that it has been told “for-ever”: therefore the hero, a Cashinahuan, was himself once a narratee,THE POSTMODERN CONDITION D 21
and perhaps a narrator, of the very same story. This similarity of con-dition allows for the possibility that the current narrator could be
the hero of a narrative,just as the Ancestor was. In fact,he is necessarily
such ahero because he bears a name,declined atthe end of his narration,
and that name was given to him in conformity with the canonic narrative
legitimating the assignment of patronyms among the Cashinahu

The pragmatic rule illustrated by this example cannot, of course,
be universalized.79
But it gives insight into what is a generally recog-nized property of traditional knowledge. The narrative
“posts”(sender, addressee, hero) are so organized that the right to occupy
the post of sender receives the following double grounding: it is
based upon the fact of having occupied the post of addressee, and of
having been recounted oneself, by virtue of the name one bears, by
aprevious narrative—in other words, having been positioned as the
diegetic reference of other narrative events.80
The knowledge trans-mitted by these narrations is in no way limited to the functions of
enunciation; it determines in a single stroke what one must say in
order to be heard, what one must listen to in order to speak, and
what role one must play (on the scene of diegetic reality) to be the
object of a narrativ

Thusthespeechacts81
relevanttothisformofknowledgeareper-formed not only by the speaker, but also by the listener, as well as
by the third party referred to. The knowledge arising from such an
apparatus may seem “condensed” in comparison with what I call
”developed” knowledge. Our example clearly illustrates that a narra-tive tradition is also the tradition of the criteria defining a threefold
competence —“know-how,” “knowing how to speak,” and “knowing
how to hear” [savoir-faire, savoir-dire, savoir-entendre] —through
which the community’s relationship to itself and its environment is
played out. What is transmitted through these narratives is the set of
pragmatic rules that constitutes the social bon

A fourth aspect of narrative knowledge meriting careful examina-tion is its effect on time. Narrative form follows a rhythm; it is the
synthesis of a meter beating time in regular periods and of accent
modifying the length or amplitude of certain of those periods.82
This
vibratory, musical property of narrative is clearly revealed in the
ritual performance of certain Cashinahua tales: they are handed
down in initiation ceremonies, in absolutely fixed form, in a language
whose meaning is obscured by lexical and syntactic anomalies, and
they are sung as interminable, monotonous chants.83
It is a strange
brand of knowledge, you may say, that does not even make itself
understood to the young men to whom it is addressed!

And yet this kind of knowledge is quite common; nursery rhymes
are of this type, and repetitive forms of contemporary music have
tried to recapture or at least approximate it. It exhibits a surprising
feature: as meter takes precedence over accent in the production of
sound (spoken or not), time ceases to be a support for memory to
become an immemorial beating that, in the absence of a noticeable
separation between periods, prevents their being numbered and con-signs them to oblivion.84
Consider the form of popular sayings, pro-verbs, and maxims: they are like little splinters of potential narratives,
or molds of old ones, which have continued to circulate on certain
levels of the contemporary social edifice. In their prosody can be
recognized the mark of that strange temporalization that jars the
golden rule of our knowledge: “never forget.”

Now there must be a congruence between this lethal function of
narrative knowledge and the functions, cited earlier, of criteria for-mation, the unification of areas of competence, and social regulation.
By way of a simplifying fiction, we can hypothesize that, against all
expectations, a collectivity that takes narrative as its key form of
competence has no need to remember its past. It finds the raw ma-terial for its social bond not only in the meaning of the narratives it
recounts, but also in the act of reciting them. The narratives’ refer-ence may seem to belong to the past, but in reality it is always con-temporaneous with the act of recitation. It is the present act that on
each of its occurrences marshals in the ephemeral temporality in-habiting the space between the “I have heard” and the “you will
hear.”

The important thing about the pragmatic protocol of this kind of
narration is that it betokens a theoretical identity between each of
the narrative’s occurrences. This may not in fact be the case, and
often is not, and we should not blind ourselves to the element of
humor or anxiety noticeable in the respect this etiquette inspires.
The fact remains that what is emphasized is the metrical beat of the
narrative occurrences, not each performance’s differences in accent.
It is in this sense that this mode of temporality can be said to be si-multaneously evanescent and immemorial.85

Finally, a culture that gives precedence to the narrative form
doubtless has no more of a need for special procedures to authorize
its narratives than it has to remember its past. It is hard to imagine
such a culture first isolating the post of narrator from the others in
order to give it a privileged status in narrative pragmatics, then in-quiring into what right the narrator (who is thus disconnected from
the narratee and diegesis) might have to recount what he recounts,THE POSTMODERN CONDITION P 23
and finally undertaking the analysis or anamnesis of its own legiti-macy. It is even harder to imagine it handing over the authority for
its narratives to some incomprehensible subject of narration. The
narratives themselves have this authority. In a sense, the people are
only that which actualizes the narratives: once again, they do this
not only by recounting them, but also by listening to them and re-counting themselves through them; in other words, by putting them
into “play” in their institutions—thus by assigning themselves the
posts of narratee and diegesis as well as the post of narrato

There is, then, an incommensurability between popular narrative
pragmatics, which provides immediate legitimation, and the language
game known to the West as the question of legitimacy —or rather,
legitimacy as a referent in the game of inquiry. Narratives, as we have
seen, determine criteria of competence and/or illustrate how they are
to be applied. They thus define what has the right to be said and
done in the culture in question, and since they are themselves a part
of that culture, they are legitimated by the simple fact that they do
what they do.

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