 Lyotard offers that the postmodern, as he sees it, ought to look for what is irreducible to commodification, that which is unpresentable within the “realism” of today (Postmodern Condition, 73–9). That which is taken to be real and most natural is the formation of knowledge in terms understandable by capitalist economics and its modes of efficiency. Lyotard, then, argues for forms of avant-gardism that seek what is unpresentable in the present. Books by James Joyce (1882–1941), no doubt, can be treated like a commodity like any other, but open up onto a plurality of meanings. One could read Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) in the service of having dinner party patter, but such postmodern works ultimately evade any simple meaning to pass along in such idle chatter. Here is how Lyotard famously defines the postmodern more positively than being merely a disbelief in metanarratives: