Outline Lyotards theory of the postmodern

"Modernity" is that period roughly associated with twentieth century Western ideas about art (although traces of it in emergent forms can be found in the nineteenth century as well), in which science established facts, political theory established the social state, secularism overcame religious opinion, and the notion of shame was denied or explained away with various social conventions. It was an era dominated by the thought of Freud and Marx. Its tendency was toward the legitimacy of the social welfare state.
Steven Connor (1989) says that the "concept of postmodernism cannot be said to have crystallized until about the mid-1970's . . ." Modernity had received some strong criticism, and it was becoming more and more viable to assert that the postmodern had come to stay. Postmodernism is characterized by the emergence of the postindustrial information economy, replacing the previous classes of aristocracy, middle class, and working class with the new paradigm: information elite,...