Lyotard's Postmodernism

I find I am more interested by what Lyotard doesn't say than by what he does. For example, why is there not a single mention of Barthes in the book?

Lyotard argues that concurrently developing streams of thought, particularly over the last few hundred years but traceable back to Platonism, have led (or are leading) to a crisis in contemporary knowledge--specifically, in the legitimation of Western knowledge. He isolates two models for comprehending the actuality of experience, which I suppose can be summarized as the scientific and the speculative. The scientific method assumes that phenomena can be observed empirically and accurate deductions can be made in order to formulate "laws," which would be legitimate by virtue of the scientific method. The trouble is that these deductions require the presupposition of universal laws in relation to which we may arrange the information we have acquired, laws which must be determined by (demonstrably fallacious) scientific reasoning. On the other hand, the speculative model (which includes such phenomena as German idealism), which attempts to create a self-modulating metalanguage to increase the theoretical and functional accuracy of its utterances, suffers from essentially the same problem--the lack of a good referent. Lyotard speculates that the function of narrative as the overarching reality of human existence (which is to say, the inevitability of the passage of time) can serve as a reference in itself, but I don't quite understand what he wants us to do. It seems fair at this point to say that the only reality to which we have access is the reality of language, or rather, communication (which can be defined as the awareness of the passage of time followed by the conscious expression thereof), to which we can consign the entirety of the arts and sciences, and all the words that people have said. I guess the project of postmodernism is to cautiously but immediately utilize the new potentials of a computerized world to map out the structure of language in a way that can inform the general population as a whole--while avoiding the pitfalls of, for instance, Stalinism and Nazism.