Metanarratives

Many Christians find Lyotard’s claim that postmodernity is incredulity toward metanarratives directly contrary to Christian faith, but James KA Smith offers an interpretation of Lyotard’s that is not hostile to Christianity. For Lyotard, he argues, the issue is not so much the scope of the narrative as the claims they make and the ways that they make those claims. The issue, he argues, is legitimation rather than size. Metanarratives in Loytard’s usage are “a distinctly modern phenomenon” and are “stories that not only tell a grand story (since even premodern and tribal societies do this) but also claim to be able to legitimate or prove the story’s claim by an appeal to universal reason.”

Further, Lyotard is concerned about forms of scientific investigation that are legitimated by reference to some grand narrative that justifies the science’s practices, and justifies governments in spending large amounts of money in promotion of the science. In Lyotard’s own words: “I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth.” Thus, for instance, the science of economics locates itself, and proves its legitimacy as a science, within a story-line that tells modern history as a history of rising living standards.

Lyotard’s criticisms of this modern tendency are at least twofold. On the one hand, science claims to have expelled fables and stories from the world, and replaced them with reason and scientific method. Yet, in the end, science justifies itself with fables and myths – the story of evolutionary theory for instance. As Lyotard says, there is an “inevitable” move that amounts to a “return of the narrative in the non-narrative.” States spend “large amounts of money to enable science to pas itself off as epic.” On the other hand, Lyotard criticizes the modern assumption that an appeal to science or to universal reason is an appeal to a standard of judgment that is beyond all particular language games (hence the meta of metanarrative and meta-discourse). The plurality of language games is simply a fact of late modern or postmodern life; science is one language game among others, and reason is always (in MacIntyre’s terminology) tradition-bound. Putting these two points together, “the language game of science desires its statements to be true but does not have the resources to legitimate their truth on its own.”

Smith writes, “modern legitimation has recourse to a universal criterion: reason – a (supposedly) universal stamp of legitimation. This move generates what Lyotard famously describes a metanarratives: appeals to criteria of legitimation that are understood as standing outside any particular language game and thus guarantee universal truth. And it is precisely here that we locate postmodernity’s incredulity toward metanarratives: they are just another language game, albeit masquerading as the game above all games.” And, “The appeal to reason as the criterion for what constitutes knowledge is but one more language game among many, shaped by founding beliefs or commitments that determine what constitutes knowledge within the game; reason is grounded in myth. ‘Metanarratives,’ then, is the term Lyotard ascribes to these false appeals to universal, rational, scientific criteria – as though they were divorced from any particular myth or narrative. For the postmodernist, every scientist is a believer.” Hence, like presuppositional apologetics, postmodernity’s incredulity toward metanarrative is “a suspicion and critique of the very idea of an autonomous reason, a universal rationality without ultimate commitments.”