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While Fredric Jameson employs a Marxist approach to postmodernism, arguing that it is a reflection on the cultural level of transformations within capitalism, Jean-Francois Lyotard views the notion of capital as “totalizing,�� and emphasizes instead the differentiation and discontinuity of postmodernism. Thus, he deploys a variety of approaches to the reading of postmodernism, and the interdisciplinary eclecticism of the approaches he deploys could be understood as reflecting his statement that postmodernism is “a skepticism toward metanarratives.�� The approaches, or “mini-narratives�� he deploys in his analysis of postmodernism include narratology, economic analysis and “paralogical�� sciences such as chaos theory and fractals.

Lyotard’s book is much shorter than Jameson’s: one reason for this is that while Jameson includes detailed analysis of a video, a novel, a museum installation, a building and paintings in his discussion, Lyotard does not employ concrete examples in his comments on the transformation of knowledge in the postmodern moment.

Although Jameson and Lyotard represent incongruent approaches to the analysis of postmodern culture, the introduction to Lyotard’s book is by Jameson, and it is written in such a way that Jameson’s disagreements with Lyotard, whatever they might be, are not obvious.

Acquired Dec 13, 1999
City Lights Book Shop, London, Ontario