The answer to this question appears, unfortunately, to be: “it’s not at all clear.” The failure of grand narratives marked the birth of identity politics and obsessional eudaemonism as well as frantic personal branding.īut in light of countless and painfully convergent news stories about brutal factional struggles, increasing social chaos, the breakdown of international order, and a sense of ever spreading violence and mayhem which no one could seemingly control any longer, it may be time to raise Lyotard’s second question, which he raised in The Postmodern Condition: “Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?” It was now all about everyone’s personal story in some manner. One did not need grand narratives anymore to tell the big story. True emancipation was a product of postmodernity, because what Francis Fukuyama would a decade later proclaim as the “end of history” – i.e., the new global flourishing of a worldwide liberal, consumerist democracy – would unleash personal freedoms and full-bodied opportunities for self-realization that humankind had hitherto never thought possible. Metanarratives are “totalizing” accounts of human experience that camouflage certain perverse, or predatory, interests behind ideal constructs and lofty sentiments that divert our gaze from the real social and economic circumstances demanding our attention.Īs Lyotard himself admitted, the grand narratives of the modern era purported to be emancipatory tales designed to motivate the oppressed to revolutionary action.īut in the wake of Auschwitz and the gulags and the devastation wrought by two world wars that were themselves wars fueled by clashing grand narratives, the collapse of these narratives was a good thing, Lyotard hinted.
In the last few decades it has acquired overtones of a playful cultural experimentalism that has somehow outgrown the need for authoritative accounts of the meaning and purpose of human history.įurthermore, Lyotard’s expression “metanarrative” – or the more common equivalent “grand narrative,” often invoked by Marxists – has too often been associated with the concept of ideology. That definition has been recited interminably by those grasping for a familiar sound-byte to encapsulate the significance of postmodernity. The “postmodern condition,” as Jean-François Lyotard designated it in 1979, is an “incredulity toward metanarratives.”