Abstract

MORENO, Gendrik. Critical Essay on the Notion of the Social tie in the work The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard. Revista de Ciencias Sociales [online]. 2007, vol.13, n.2, pp.321-345. ISSN 1315-9518.

The article presents a brief reflection on the notion of the social tie in the work The Postmodern Condition of Jean-François Lyotard. The work is written like a report and deals with the condition of knowing in more advanced western societies. This reflection deals with the analysis of two chapters from the work: “The nature of the social tie: the modern alternative” (Chap. IV) and “The nature of the social tie: the postmodern perspective” (Chap. V). This paper attempts to extract the notion of the social tie that Lyotard presents, investigating its specifications. As a tentative conclusion, it states that the social tie, according to the modern alternative, was confined to two of the great “stories” of sociological discourse in the XX century, functionalism and Marxism assuming the tie to be a problem of balance, order and consensus for the first and division and conflict for the second, respectively; on the other hand, according to the postmodern condition, the social tie is apparently diluted in all this theoretical framework with the exception that it is through “language games,” in an agonistic sense, that meaning or sense can be reconstructed and bestowed.

Keywords : Nature of the social tie; the modern alternative; nature of the social tie; the postmodern perspective; social tie; language; Jean-François Lyotard.