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= The Postmodern Condition  = Jean-François Lyotard utilized the term postmodern in order to name the changes in societal and cultural “ground conditions” of the late 1970s. What surfaced from his work was a critique of this new message of performativity and what possible effects the new medium of knowledge created and is still creating today. In Lyotard’s work, The Postmodern Condition, he defines the term postmodern as society’s shift from the ideal: grand metanarratives of the time (human emancipation, enlightenment) as tools for legitimating knowledge, to the rational: an optimization of performativity to fulfill societal needs. The consequence of an education system built on performativity criterion is that it continuously perpetuates its agenda through its students, keeping them “inactive” players of the “game.” Lyotard expresses some means of resistance to the totality of performativity, but if we accept that the postmodern condition has been woven into the fabric of educational systems for over 30 years then clearly the means of resistance seems to be failing.

Contents 1. Section [1.] 2. Section [2.] 3. Section [3.]

Performativity
Lyotard asserts that universities are a subsystem of the social system: which is inherently overcome with a performativity design. If this is the case, then universities “will have to create skills, no longer ideals…guiding the nation [not] towards its emancipation, but to supply the system with players capable of acceptably fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by institutions” (48) In a 21st century Canadian context, the government has spent a significant amount of funding advertising for students to join the trades, as the push towards a university education has shown a rapid decrease in those going for the trades. A system “needs” players to fulfill certain roles in order for it to succeed: fixed in a certain time and place. For example, performativity seeps into the university walls when educating teachers to perpetuate the same need for rational knowledge on classroom management, lesson planning, evaluations, etc. Lyotard asked the question back in 1979, that if higher learning becomes functional, then what of the students? The changes he preconceived are now realities of the 21st century. Contesting performativity exists, only it’s modes lack the wider audience and time that postmodernism has been afforded.

The Postmodern Condition in the 21st Century
Much has changed since the 1979 context which Lyotard describes, one being the advancement of technology; however, Lyotard explains that “an organized stock of established knowledge is the essential thing that is transmitted. The application of new technologies to this stock may have a considerable impact on the medium of communication” (50). What is important is that this knowledge still must be inputted to the memory banks where the awaiting outputs, i.e. students, are awaiting the transmission of the same knowledge they would have received in a lecture based form. These “data banks are the Encyclopedia of tomorrow,” however, platforms like Wikipedia dispel the technocratic input/output fear Lyotard described and predicted. Wherein students, or anyone, can input knowledge and others will hold them accountable. A shift for Lyotard’s postmodern question of those no longer asking if it is true, but asking if it is efficient. In “Paying Attention to Attention” the authors suggest that “modernist education has embraced these new capabilities afforded through text-based literacy: postmodern education begins to detect certain limitations…the easy internalization of alphabetic literacy as having effected a repression of our consciousness of the reductiveness of text—shift from 3D to 2D perceptual frames” (Castell & Jenson 2004). Castell & Jensen create an “in-between” present between modern education (utilizing 3D frames) and the postmodern condition (optimizing a 2D frame) which Lyotard describes. Castell & Jensen create a solution to combating postmodernism in the 21st century with the look at an attentional economy and putting text back in a 3D context so that it can be experienced. Lyotard presents a resistance strategy of paralogy that fits well into these new modes of resistance.

Lyotard argues against consensus, as that is a mode of technocracy. Paralogy inspires conversation, creates meaning of knowledge rather than perpetuating an agreed upon body of knowledge. The same loss of consciousness that Lanham discussed in Castell & Jensen occurs in Lyotard’s work when Luhman argues that “the reduction of complexity is required to maintain the system’s capability” (Lyotard 61). Keeping players inactive was a condition of the postmodern condition and is still a plague on modern education today. Lyotard does, however, explain the temptations of performativity as it dispels fables; demands a ‘cold will’ and ‘clear mind’; provides rules and gives answers; and many more. The point I wish to highlight is that it provides a false sense of security in knowledge. The ‘unknown’ seems to be solved within the realm of performativity. Much like the dystopian novels of the 20th century: Brave New World, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, these roles in society can be attractive, provide a sense of knowledge and rules in one’s life that is comfortable; however, there is always a player in the game that requires activation. That message embedded within those same novels is the solution to the postmodern condition as well, and something that can be achieved through new meaning making. The New London Group created a combination of techniques to activate members of the game and thousands of researchers are following suit to re-design a game built on postmodernity.

Lyotard concludes this chapter with a note on the future (i.e. our present) and how the computerization of society affects the problematic case of performativity in postmodernity. It could, as we have explored, be utilized as a dream instrument for ‘controlling and regulating the market system, extended to include knowledge itself and governed exclusively by the performativity principle’ (67). Or, it can be used to ‘aid groups discussing metaprescriptives by supplying them with the information they usually lack for making knowledgeable decisions’ (67). Clearly, computerization has taken hold of society as Lyotard predicted in 1979, and although it has and can be utilized for technocratic means and barred by the postmodern condition; it also has the ability to design, and re-design student’s social futures, to activate them as players in the game. Although Lyotard presented solutions to the postmodern condition through micro-narratives and paralogy, educational theorists in the 21st century have specified modern solutions to the postmodern condition, as explored in Castell & Jensen. Lotherington & Jensen also note how “in the everyday lives of many, the production and consumption of multimodal, digital artefacts [produces] very different kinds of knowing—the difficulty, as McLuhan (1967/2001) foresaw, is figuring out what the nature of those differences are” (240). The age of computerization may have changed the medium; but the message of technocracy can and still does pervade our present day societal context. The call to contesting technocratic paradigms is to create new ways of legitimating knowledge utilizing these daily productions of students lives. Whether we have fully exited the postmodern condition is debatable, but the presence and predominance of performativity in both higher, secondary, and primary levels of education in the 21st century in incontestable. In order to find a balance between performativity and paralogy, “education urgently requires re-vision [that] involves both critically seeing the past and present and imagining a different future” (241). A future which allows for student curation, creation, and re-designing in order to produce a future that best suits the student’s needs and not society’s.