Jean-François Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) is the French philosopher who carried Wittgenstein's language games into the debate about postmodernity. His short book The Postmodern Condition (1979), written as a report on knowledge for the Conseil des universités of the Quebec government, made the phrase famous far beyond philosophy departments.

What he took from Wittgenstein

Lyotard borrowed the idea that language is not one thing but a multitude of activities, each with its own rules: describing, ordering, asking, telling a story, making a promise.

Das Wort „Sprachspiel“ soll hier hervorheben, daß das Sprechen der Sprache ein Teil ist einer Tätigkeit, oder einer Lebensform.

The word "language game" is meant to bring out here that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.

Philosophical Investigations §23

A scientist's report and a grandmother's fairy tale follow different rules, and neither is the master key to the other. Lyotard used this to describe a change in how societies justify knowledge. Modern culture, he argued, leaned on grand stories, "metanarratives", about progress, emancipation or the march of reason. The postmodern attitude is "incredulity toward metanarratives": we no longer believe there is one story that makes sense of all the others, only a plurality of local games.

What he did with it

Lyotard gave the language games a twist of his own. In The Postmodern Condition he wrote that to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing: every utterance is a move in a contest. In The Differend (1983) he went further and replaced "language games" with "phrases", organised into regimes (describing, prescribing, questioning) and linked together by genres of discourse. A "differend" arises when two parties have no shared rule by which their dispute could be judged. Settling it in the idiom of one side silences the other. Think of a community whose claim to its land rests on oral tradition, judged in a court that only accepts written titles. For Lyotard, philosophy's task is to bear witness to such silenced claims.

Where he departs from Wittgenstein

The differences are real. Wittgenstein's language games overlap and criss-cross like the fibres of a thread, and they rest on a shared human form of life. Lyotard stresses heterogeneity and untranslatability between genres. He also dropped the word "game" partly because it suggests human players standing outside the game and using language as a tool; for him, speakers are themselves positioned by phrases. And where Wittgenstein described practices without political aims, Lyotard turned the idea into a critique of injustice. Wittgenstein scholars have often found his use of the concept loose. Others see it as one of the most fertile afterlives of the Investigations outside analytic philosophy.