Lyotard's greatest contribution, The Postmodern Condition tells of the new economy after society wisely moved away from the meaning the modernism offered in decades past. This treatise is an attempt to codify the social and cultural abandonment of modernist value systems, and for that intent it certainly succeeding, offering the term 'Postmodernism' for the new school of thought, a borrowed term Lyotard discovered in Art Theory discussions.
He explains a concept called a "grand narrative," such as the mythological attachment to technological advancement which was born in WWII. He says that in such value systems, humans participate in language games to trick themselves into believing that their lives are of some importance in the grand scheme of things. This grand importance is also referred to as a 'meta-narrative,' a story imposed over the culture by which people can attach themselves to commonly held virtues and ideas. But for Lyotard, this effort was doomed from the beginning, because life's "meaning" is subjective at best, and at worst it's wish fulfillment.
Lyotard then explains the different ways our societal assumptions around art, science and literature had shifted in his time, all with the basic tendency to reject commonly agreed-upon sources for meaning, such as religion, social contribution and the myth of progress.
In an interesting twist, he then turns to analyze science, and the way science had to adjust to the new value systems, explaining that science seems to be establishing a new ethos in technology, and that the legitimacy of science is becoming attached to information machines—leading Lyotard to conclude that in the future (his future, that is), knowledge will only be considered useful or valuable if that knowledge has been transmitted through a computer, since people are hardwired from modernism to trust computer technology.
