Quotes from Jean-Francois Lyotard

If we wish to discuss knowledge in the most highly developed contemporary society, we must answer the preliminary question of what methodological representation to apply to that society.

Saddam Hussein is a product of Western departments of state and big companies, just as Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were born of the 'peace' imposed on their countries by the victors of the Great War. Saddam is such a product in an even more Flagrant and cynical way. Because the Iraqi dictatorship proceeds, as do the others, from the transfer of aporias in the capitalist system to vanquished, less developed, or simply less resistant countries.

Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange

The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers.

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

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.

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, it is clear that language assumes a new importance.

If we wish to discuss knowledge in the most highly developed contemporary society, we must answer the preliminary question of what methodological representation to apply to that society.

What is required of a working hypothesis is a fine capacity for discrimination.

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.

A self does 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.

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 organisations.

What is new in all of this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions are losing their attraction.

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.

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.

It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.