The Fallacy of Post-Modernism. To me, it’s based on familiar ideas expressed in an exotic vocabulary.
If you look at Lyotard’s original “The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on the Status of Knowledge”, what he says is that in the Modern or Modernistic world you had several “Meta-Narratives” that organized everything, and in the Post-Modern world you no longer have any “Meta-Narratives” at all.
Well…what exactly is this “Meta-Narrative” spoken of?
In truth, what Lyotard was expressing is almost identical to historical ideas from Hegel and others that said that every historical era and every culture within that historical era had its own unique fixations and values….and that with the change of history, over time, one set of values declines and another rises in its place. None of this is particularly new at all, and it manifests not just in history and Hegel but also in Marx with the processions of different modes of production.
In Lyotard’s “Post-Modern Condition”, the question to be asked is why exactly the end of Modernism, as an era, would be replaced by nothing unique at all? One could argue very easily that the “Post-Modern” confusion he saw is a temporary condition based on the ending of one historical era and the beginning of a new one, a sort of lull in the historical stream between two eras, rather than anything permanent.
If, however, we really don’t have any overarching ideas or values that would rule our historical era, but everything really is now up for permanent grabs with mixing and matching, that would be significant, very significant…..but the post-modernists don’t provide any proof for this, and give evidence of not even understanding the concepts that they advocate for.