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LegitimacyandthePostmodernCondition:thePoliticalThoughtofJean
FranoisLyotard
LegitimacyandthePostmodernCondition:thePoliticalThoughtofJeanFranois
Lyotard
byDavidB.Ingram
Source:
PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:3+4/1987,pages:286305,onwww.ceeol.com.
LEGITIMACY AND THE POSTMODERN CONDI-
TION: THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF JEAN-
FRANCOIS LYOTARD
1
David Ingram
The coupling of 'legitimacy' and 'postmodern' in the title of this essay may
strike some as melodramatic. These terms descend from radically different
lineages, the political and the aesthetic. Worse yet, they collide in what
appears to be a rather tasteless oxymoron. What one normally associates with
a postmodern aesthetic is a kind of eclecticism, or stylistic pastiche, whose
most enduring monuments, pop art and the new architecture, protest the
modernist suppression of regional and traditional modes beneath the cold
surfaces of functional design. To complicate matters further, postmodernism
maintains an uneasy alliance with a philosophical movement of a similar vein,
poststructuralism. From a political standpoint, these movements inveigh
against the totalitarian impulse toward social homogeneity and its attendant
marginalization of dissident subcultures. Moreover, both are inclined to
blame this state of affairs on the rational demand for unity, purity, uni-
versality, and ultimacy.
2
Now it is precisely this demand which ostensibly informs our modern
understanding of legitimacy; for in thinking of the latter, we invariably fix
upon the idea of valid authority vested in universal consent. It would seem
that the incongruity between this notion with its attendant emphasis on the
pure, rational sovereignty of the individual subject and the conviction held by
most poststructuralists that subjectivity is all illusion superimposed over a
system of language wherein binary oppositions are continually dissolved and
referential loci displaced would render the post-modern movement,
considered as a political force, highly problematic.
3
Why be political if there is
no ideal to be fought over, no subject to be emancipated? Lyotard's
courageous insistence on developing a postmodern idea of legitimation and
justice provides an intriguing response to this question, for if his work can be
characterized as poststructuralist, it is only in the sense that it moves beyond
the linguistic a priori intrinsic to structuralism generally.
4
Lyotard's reflection
on the unspoken and transcendent within language issues in a tension between
modern and pagan motifs whose resolution will occupy the remainder of this
paper. I argue that Lyotard's first attempt to sketch a postmodern conception
of justice and legitimacy in La Condition Postmoderne (1979) and Au Juste
(1979) fails since its dependence on pre-modern narratives is burdened with
self-referential aporia. Le Differend (1983) rectifies these difficulties by
embracing the heterogeneity of modern discourse as a fact of linguistic
existence, thereby abandoning if not the idea, then at least the reality, of
justice as a global ethical condition. This favors a politics of least harm, in
Praxis International 7:3/4 Winter 1987/8 0260-8448 $2.00
Praxis International 287
which the wrongs caused by some discursive regimes prevailing over others is
simultaneously acknowledged and attenuated through the disclosure of
suppressed idioms. It follows from this analysis that the differences separating
Lyotard from consensus theorists such as Habermas are less extreme than
they are often thought to be.
I
The key assumption in La Condition Postmoderne is that there is an
isomorphism between science on the one hand and ethics and politics on the
other. The grand narratives (grands recits) which legitimate science are the
same that legitimate the state even if "the statements consigned to these two
authorities differ in nature."s This linking of knowledge and power is
especially evident in today's information society. The right to decide in the
political sense is more and more a function of possessing the right type of
credentials, the right type of expertise. Communication here ceases to be a
medium of impartial dialogue and increasingly assumes the status of an
exchange system in which the ledger sheets of informational capital are
balanced out. The "general transformation" in the way in which scientific
research is conducted and transmitted in the cybernetic age goes hand in hand
with the "mercantilization" of knowledge as such. Knowledge has for some
time been accorded the value of a productive force; with the advent of
post-industrial capitalism, it has emerged as a commodity whose possession
determines the economic fate of nations. One of the questions raised by this
new economy of knowledge and language is whether the technical capacity to
enhance the functional adaptability of the state, e.g., by augmenting produc-
tivity through increased informational input, is capable of justifying demands
for legitimacy. Can efficient adaptation be a substitute for justice, or does the
incommensurability of "ought" and "is" refer the concept of legitimacy to a
purely normative category, such as free universal consent? If the latter no
longer seems adequate to express the dynamic bricolage we call modern
society, then what is?
Lyotard proceeds to answer these questions by examining what it is about
scientific knowledge and its legitimation that bears upon the issue of the state.
Since Plato, philosophers have been accustomed to viewing knowledge as an
important ingredient in the legitimation of power, but only recently have they
sought to relate the legitimation of knowledge to politics. Unlike earlier
metaphysical narratives, the narratives of the Enlightenment presupposed
that science directly institutionalized rational discourse and that politics
mirrored science. Two distinct but overlapping narratives reflected this
change, one liberal, the other conservative (27-31).
The liberal legitimation of science asserted that technically useful knowl-
edge was the key to individual and social emancipation. The educational
policy appropriate to this narrative, which found its supreme expression in the
French Third Republic, emphasized primary over secondary schooling. In
contrast, the conservative legitimation of science promoted self-understanding
above emancipation. The educational policy which it embodied reflected less
the utilitarian bent of the French and English schools than the moralizing
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spirit distilled in Humboldt's proposal for the founding of the university of
Berlin. Philosophy is here called upon to provide the speculative means for
integrating the knowledge of the various disciplines and recovering the moral
purpose animating the nation (31-37).
In Lyotard's opinion, these narratives now stand discredited, and for good
reason. The speculative philosophy of the German school could only
legitimate the positive sciences by denigrating their knowledge as partial,
abstract, and wholly incapable of grasping the higher truth of living spirit.
The subsequent decline of German Idealism brought home the utter cont-
ingency of the separate spheres of knowledge and ushered in a positivistic
phase that also discredited its French and English counterpart. Since it was
now taken for granted that prescriptions for achieving political emancipation
and statements of scientific fact were logically irreducible, truth and justice
lost whatever value their former association had once accorded them (37-41).
If we no longer look to science and political life as legitimating one another,
it is just as true that the time is long past for thinking of science as truthfully
representing reality in itself and politics as justly mirroring the ideal
conditions of emancipation. The two rival models of legitimation mentioned
by Lyotard that dominate the contemporary scene attest to this nihilistic
self-awareness in radically different ways, and both do so even while
maintaining the formal unity of science and politics. On the one hand, there
are those systems theorists such as Parsons and Luhmann who claim that
knowledge can only be justified performatively.
6
Efficiency here replaces truth
as the criterion of validity. This substitution, it seems, is dictated not only by
the methodological connection between verifiability, predictability, and
technological control, but also by the functionalistic imperatives of the modern
state. As a cybernetic system, the state requires fresh inputs of information in
order to adapt itself to a capricious environment. Its legitimation is guaranteed
by maintaining efficient administration and economic growth. Although
consensus is still taken to be an important index of social stability, it is
deprived of antecedent validity. The freedom to make informed administra-
tive decisions, Luhmann tells us, requires manipulating democratic input
from above, if not scaling it back altogether. Because it would be impractical
and dangerous to implement an interdisciplinary liberal arts curriculum,
higher education should properly confine itself to the business of proffering
technical and vocational instruction.
7
On the other hand, there are those such
as Habermas and Apel who claim that cognitive and prescriptive judgments
can only be justified on the basis of their universal acceptance by persons in
rational dialogue. Unconstrained consensus provides a touchstone for truth
and justice which favors democracy. Accordingly, the critical theory of
legitimation views society as a communication network in which social
conflict, not functional equilibrium, is the norm. Nevertheless by advocating
the view that society ought to reflect unity, it too stands in close proximity to
the legitimating narratives of the Enlightenment, for which knowledge is seen
as dispelling ideology and ensuring collective emancipation.
8
Lyotard sometimes speaks as if this latter theory of legitimation were
distinctly modern in its articulation of an ideal of rational autonomy. If we
Praxis International 289
turn to Au Juste we find him contrasting the kind of free, mutual recognition
intrinsic to modern justice with the heteronomy of its pagan counterpart. For
the Greeks, the legitimacy of the state is proportional to its imitation of an
ideal harmony (or mean) inscribed in the cosmos-a proper distribution
known by theorectical reason or observation to be conducive to social and
individual well-being. With the advent of modern science, forms of naturalis-
tic, teleological reasoning are replaced by more abstract formal conceptions of
calculating and consistency reasoning. What ought to be no longer stands in
any logical relation to what is. By the same token, no combination of existing
passions, desires, or conventional habits is sufficient to ground moral practice.
It is principally out of a modern and fundamentally Kantian distaste for moral
heteronomy that Lyotard denies the possibility of any scientific, or func-
tionalistic, legitimation. Morality presupposes a spontaneous initiation of
action that emanates solely from individual practical reason. This supposition
is the cornerstone of modern, social contract theories of legitimation as well.
Since it is incumbent upon any government aspiring to the title of legitimacy
to satisfy the common interests of its citizenry and to do so by their free
consent, it follows as a matter of course that the best government will be
democratic. Legitimate states, we believe, ought to advance rational, uni-
versalizable interests. And this conviction remains even if these interests
extend no further than endorsing the most basic rules of the democratic game
(41-50).
It is just this assumption of a shared discourse, or agreement over the rules
of a universally binding game, that Lyotard challenges. The rise of multi-
national corporations, the decline of nation states as global administrative
agencies, the logistics of information gathering and transmission, the need for
self-regulating systems to avoid informational overloading and bureaucratic
entropy, and the unpredictable nature of social displacements in response to
new data seem to undermine the functionalistic conception of the state and its
performative legitimation. The state is no longer in control of the technical
apparatus necessary to guarantee efficient administration and economic
growth. And it is not just because the databanks are in the hands of hostile
corporations. On the contrary, the absorption of information itself proves
disfunctional when it outstrips the capacity of the system to make decisions.
9
This indecidability penetrates to the heart of modern science itself. Anti-
nomies revolving around the formal and pragmatic limits to the derivation of
consistent and complete systems of axioms (Godel), the establishment of
independent criteria of verification or falsification, and the imprecision built
into the prediction and measurement of subatomic particles (Heisenberg),
testify to the inherent instability of modern science (53-60). The need to
ground knowledge and moral obligation in logically incommensurable lan-
guage games would already render a functionalistic legitimation of the state
suspect were it not for the fact that science itself is just as impure as it is
ungrounded. Indeed, the composite descriptive/prescriptive nature of sci-
entific principles seems to fracture any claim to rational unity, thus bearing
witness to the impurity of social life itself. 10 The schizophrenic fragmentation
of persons and institutions into so many atomic roles and language games
290 Praxis International
continually undermines the formation of a unitary political culture based upon
principles of consistency and personal sovereignty. Summoning the spirit of
the late Wittgenstein along with the spectre of deconstruction, Lyotard
writes, "the social subject itself seems to dissolve in this dissemination of
language games. The social bond is linguistic, but is not woven with a single
thread. It is a fabric formed by the intersection of at least two (and in reality an
indeterminate number of) language games obeying different rules" (40).
Now the aforementioned futilty of attempting any scientific, or argumenta-
tive, grounding of theory would seem to have the paradoxical effect of
rendering Lyotard's own views on this matter 'illegitimate' were it not for the
fact that he develops an alternative theory of legitimation. Despite their
impurity, all forms of scientific legitimation strive to maintain the logical
separation of descriptive, prescriptive, and expressive language games. Such
is not the case with the "small narratives" underwriting everyday practice,
which Lyotard likens to "a monster formed by the interweaving of hetero-
morphous classes of utterances" (65). The idea that knowledge and practice
must be argumentatively justified is foreign to them. The knowledge guiding
our conduct appears to be more a matter of pragmatic "know-how" than
propositional "know-that." According to Lyotard, what is important about
this so-called "narrative knowledge" is that is is passed down through ritual
imitation and oral recitation. Because the authority of these narratives, and to
a lesser extent, their scientific counterparts, ultimately lacks a privileged past,
they are legitimated, "by the simple fact that they do what they dO."11
Likewise, if Lyotard does not intend his own theory to be a grand narrative
laying claim to scientific legitimacy, this is because it acknowledges the link
between grand and small narratives. Ultimately, all theories, including
scientific ones, must have recourse to story telling in order to legitimate their
practical worth in the grand scheme of things--indeed, the interlocking of
politics and epistemology examined above testifies to this very fact. Hence,
such global rationalizations of institutionalized practices which answer the
question "Why should there be science at all?" are at least indirectly
interwoven with the myths and everyday practices defining our membership
in something like a national, cultural identity. The legitimacy of Lyotard's
theory thus resides in its retelling at a higher register one of the many
mundane stories we moderns share-a story of alienation and loss of self but
also of an expanded horizon of future possibility.
'[wo questions remain to be answered: Can Lyotard's theory yield a concept
of justice and, getting back to the question of legitimacy, can this conception
be related to the conventional practices governing modern life? To begin with,
Lyotard doubts that modern conceptions of legitimacy and justice have had
the beneficial effects claimed by their defenders. More to the point, he denies
that these ideals can be grounded in language as Habermas and Apel contend.
According to him, the local nature of radically heteromorphous language
games essentially frustrates any attempt to uncover overarching rules of
communication. Consequently, the democratic demand that social practices
conform to a universally binding consensus as a condition of their legitimation
cannot but have totalitarian implications: does not mean large
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291
number, but great fear" (A.J.: 188). In the final analysis, Lyotard insists that
any alternative to the "terrorism" of technological domination and totalitarian
consensus must take into account the "agonal" nature of actual speech. The
cybernetic model overlooks this fact when it attempts to reduce communi-
cation to the tranquil exchange of information within a closed system. Unlike
the electronic transmission of information, the pragmatic conditions under-
lying speech include a performative component by which sender and
addressee position themselves vis-a-vis one another and a situation they
themselves have constituted. Here, speaking, doing, and making codefine one
another in accordance with rules whose meaning is continually contested. In
science too as in daily life, conflicts between proponents of competing
paradigms go well beyond inducing the sorts of innovations generated within
the rules of normal practice. Consequently, neither science nor politics is a
closed system, and what appears to be a controlled distribution of information
or a dialogue oriented toward consensus is in fact a struggle between
competing players (PMC: 20).
If the postmodern condition fosters an incessant search for the new, the
unknown, the anomalous, the subversive, the eclectic; in short, dissent from
dominant conventions and decentration of subjectivity, then only a "legitim-
ation by paralogy" can satisfy "both the desire for justice and the desire for the
unknown" (65-67). But what could this amalgamation of the political and the
aesthetic amount to? We must turn to Au Juste to find the answer. There,
Lyotard suggested that our political desire for justice, which he interpreted in
a Kantian vein, and the aesthetic desire for intensity and novelty, which he
characterized as pagan, were not .as opposed as one might think. To begin
with, our modern (or more precisely, postmodern) condition is also a pagan
one insofar as it is marked by lack of agreement over criteria and values. 12 In
these cicumstances what lends value to an action or work is its sublime
violation of conventional taste, that is, its transcendence of the limits of
representation and its shattering of established hierarchies of thought,
disciplinary boundaries, and canonical norms into new configurations of
discourse. It is as if an artistic will to power of the sort extolled by Nietzsche
conferred a kind of charismatic legitimacy on its creations, transforming them
into criteria for others (the judges) to the extent that the sheer intensity of
feeling alone, heightened further by the agonal confluence of conflicting
forces, acted as a magnet, attracting and repelling at the same time. Yet
paganism is essentially heteronomous. If a will to power can be said to exist at
all, it nonetheless remains embedded in a play of authorless narrations and
interpretations over which the speaker has no absolute control.
Now it is unclear how such a pagan notion might be conjoined to an idea of
justice, since the latter affirms precisely what the former denies, namely acting
freely, responsibly, and consistently within limits. Yet even this characteriz-
ation is not quite accurate, for as Lyotard notes, the pagan urge to violate
convention still occurs within the framework of conventional limits. The
sophists were correct in holding that moral convictions are a matter of
opinion, of the truthful (vraisemblable) rather than the true, but Aristotle was
right in holding that the formation of such opinion occurs against the political
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backdrop of speech, action, and judgment. To judge prudently of opinion is
to calculate its consequences vis-a-vis conventional rules whose meaning is
sufficiently undetermined to permit application to singular, concrete situ-
ations. A body of conventional limits from which our opinions derive their
conviction, a common tradition if you will, gets reinterpreted so as to apply to
the unique circumstances of the actor/judge. One calculates the costs and
benefits for long-term happiness, to be sure, but this is less a matter of
knowledge (episteme) than of art (techne), here understood as an imaginative
figuration of ends and not merely as a technical application of means:
" ... the veritable nature of the judge is just to pronounce judgements, hence
prescriptions, without criteria" (52-53).
So much for pagan justice. But our modern, Kantian conception of justice
requires that we take as our limit notion not this or that existing convention,
but a transcendent Idea, a formal obligation to universalize our customary
maxims. The question now becomes "How does one introduce opinion into
the Kantian register?" (146). The problem is eased somewhat if we recall that
for Kant, morality and political judgment partake of what Lyotard calls the
pagan. The categorical imperative, like opinion, is a kind of irreducible fact,
albeit of practical reason, the judgmental application of which involves
investing an empty, formal Idea with singular content. The meaning of this
Idea is best captured, Lyotard believes, by the pragmatics of Judaism as
interpreted by Emmanuel Levinas.
One says simply 'there is law' . . . but that does not mean that this law is
defined ... there is a meta-Iaw which says 'Be just!' But we just don't know
what it means to be just. It is not 'conform to this', nor is it 'love one another,'
etc.; all that is just a joke. 'Be just!': case by case one will have to decide,
pronounce upon, judge, and then think about whether this was what was meant
by being just, each time. 13
The pagan element is also evident in Kant's political writings, where reflection
on the moral destiny of humanity is relegated to the non-cognitive sphere of
aesthetics, Since aesthetic judgments are guided by supersensible Ideas of
unity and harmony, one judges the purposiveness of natural beauty and
historical progress without established criteria for resolving disputes.
However, this does not explain how any judgment, be it ever so indeter-
minate, can simultaneously claim universal validity and still remain pagan,
i.e., prescribe local, conventional instructions (107-09). Perhaps as Lyotard
suggests, one "maximises opinions," somewhat like the Sicilian rhetorician
Corax, who defended his client against the charge of beating a weaker man by
arguing that his client would never bring suspicion upon himself by doing
what everyone expects the stronger to do, beat the weaker. By appealing to
conventional wisdom as an instantiation of something indeterminate and
transcendent, one generates an infinite space for variation within it that
produces reversal (150-53).
Ultimately, the problem of justice touches on both the particular judgment
that is exercised within the limits prescribed by a local language game and the
universal judgment exercised from without by the philosopher. The former
Praxis International 293
justice is less problematic, since it operates in accordance with established
criteria, the rules of the game, even while it works "at the limits of what the
rules tolerate in order to invent new moves (coups), perhaps new rules and
thus new games" (188). Yet insofar as it serves to counteract the totalitarian
impulse toward stability and homogeneity by fostering self-referential par-
adoxes, sublime paralogies, and other experiments which dissolve convent-
ional hierarchies and disciplinary boundaries, this conception of the
"multiplicity of justices" stands in curious state of tension vis-a-vis its
counterpart. This latter conception, the "justice of multiplicities," intervenes
from without to regulate the plurality of language games to the extent that
these can be described as "impure", i.e., to the extent that they mix
heterogeneous language games, such as the scientific game of truth and the
ethical game of obligation. It prescribes not that this or that rule should be
obeyed, but that heteronomy be avoided commensurate with the violence
required to generate new moves (182-83).
Now the tension between this Idea of justice and the multiplicity of justice
is two-fold. The Idea of justice, Lyotard recognizes, is itself a prescription
which supervenes in particular language games in order to prevent the
intervention of prescriptions generally. Paradoxically, it has the value of a
universal, meta-linguistic prescriptive. Second, the Idea of justice supervenes
as a judgment without determinate criteria and therefore cannot even be
formulated. Despite Lyotard's own judgment that prescription should be left
out of science, he himself acknowledges that the status of science, not unlike
pagan discourse, is and even should be impure and undecided. That the
logical status of a scientific law or a rule of language hovers somewhere
between the prescriptive and the descriptive, is something to be at once
praised and condemned, depending on whether one judges this to be
paralogical or terroristic.
What may we conclude from Lyotard's dilemma? To begin with, Au Juste
has by no means resolved the tension between the aesthetic and the political. 14
The Idea of justice developed there is caught between two incompatible goals,
both having totalitarian implications; for a doctrine of ethical purity could
legitimate a fascist politics of racial hegemony just as easily as a doctrine of
pagan impurity. Lyotard's attempt to downplay the insularity implicit in the
game metaphor by adverting to a conception of language as a system of
exchange, or circulation, replete with a "general agonistics" is appropriately
introduced in order to offset the former of these implications, but it goes too
far in the other direction by subsuming moral, political, aesthetic, and
scientific discourses under the polymorphous languages of capital and ITiythic
narrative. The pagan will to power evident in the agonistic language game of
aesthetic creativity can no more be superimposed over the ethical relationship,
and its self-abnegating respect for the transcendent other, than can the
political relationship of reciprocity and rights. The impression that Lyotard
himself is treading upon similar ground is only reinforced by his admission
that in playing the "great prescriber" who imposes from without a global ideal
of justice on local configurations of justice specific to particular language
games, he too risks being classified as an elitist or worse. IS
294 Praxis International
Since the late seventies, Lyotard has sought mightily to dispel this
impression, and has done so by hewing ever more closely to the Kantian path.
This is most evident in his defense of distinctions and his tendency to adopt a
more sober attitude toward self-referential paradoxes, especially insofar as
they fuel the kind of totalizing dialectic which he finds so repugnant. For
example, he now concedes that his subsumption of science and knowledge tout
court under the rubric "narrative" ignored crucial distinctions necessary for
disentangling the knotty question concerning the nature of legitimation and
its relationship to totalitarianism, terrorism, tribalism, and capitalism. In
particular, he emphatically asserts that the kind of narrative knowledge
described in La Condition Postmoderne, which he now says pertains solely to
the myths of archaic cultures rather than to mundane discursive practices
characteristic of modern societies, has lost whatever legitimating capacity it
formerly possessed. With the advent of modern science, legitimation draws
inspiration from ideas of future emancipation rather than mythic origins. 16
But if the various grand narratives within which this distinctly modern idea
has taken shape-Christianity, science and technology, cultural Bildung,
Communism, capitalism, and so on-have themselves been invalidated by the
march of history, the everyday "prose of the people" is yet too inconsistent
and parochial to provide a substitute.
If the Idea of justice has escaped this fate it is because the paradoxes which
burdened it in Au Juste are absent in his latest work, and for two reasons.
First, Lyotard no longer regards the idea as capable of providing prescriptions
for regulating language games. Indeed, he maintains that neither linguistic
rules nor normative principles of justice are prescriptive. If principles of
justice intervene at all, it is in order to legitimate prescriptions already in
operation by subsuming them under ideas of community or universal
lawfulness (DF: 146-48, 206-08). And this leads to the second reason why
paradoxes are absent in Lyotard's recent work. What has emerged since the
late seventies is a rather more complicated picture of the way in which
language mirrors unity and difference. Rejected is the pragmatist metaphysics
of the language game, which attributes the interaction of opposed systems of
rules to player-subjects. The new theory rather posits the intersection of genres
of discourse at points of conflict constituted by distinct regimes of phrases
(89). In this civil war there can be no question of establishing a final justice, or
peaceful resolution through common criteria. But is there then no injustice?
11
The kind of injustice, if one can call it that, which inhabits politics and
language in general is what Lyotard calls a differend. A differend occurs,
"whenever a plaintiff is deprived of the means of arguing and by this fact
becomes a victim" such as when the settling of a conflict between two parties
"is made in the idiom of one of them in which the wrong (tort) suffered by the
other signifies nothing (24--25) A differend occurs, for example, when the
silence of holocaust survivors is interpreted as iack of evidence for the
existence of death camps. One is silenced as a victim or as a survivor whose
testimony lacks credibility. A differend also occurs, as Marx saw, when the
Praxis International 295
proletariat is forced to define its own laboring capacity in the commodity
language of capitalism. By obscuring the fact that labor power is the
nonverifiable basis of workers' self-realization, the wage contract deprives
them of the only moral idiom for contesting the justice of capitalism as such
(17-18). In these examples, items referred to by identical names differ
depending on whether these names occur in phrases uttered by plaintiffs
(survivors of death camps and workers) or defendents (revisionist historians
and political economists). As Lyotard points out, what the camp survivor
refers to by 'holocaust' is not some fact to be established in a scientific court of
law but rather signifies something transcendent and non-representable for
which Auschwitz, with its foreclosure of any universal historical meaning,
must serve as an ominous reminder (90-91, 130ff.).
Differends thus arise from the problematic relationship between language
and reality. According to Lyotard, what we call reality is neither a function of
simple ostension nor an idealistic construct of meaning, but an amalgamation
of the two. Because ostensive phrases containing deictic expressions such as
'here', 'there', 'this', 'that', 'now', 'then', 'I', 'you', etc. are alone insufficient
to establish fixity of reference, one must have recourse to proper and relational
names, what Lyotard following Kripke calls rigid designators (57, 65-68). In
order to avoid any confusion with idealism or essentialism, Lyotard
emphasizes that names, meaningless in themselves, are relationally
determined within nominal systems and networks of descriptions.
I7
The
upshot of this analysis is threefold. First, although names are not realities,
they nonetheless mediate reference and sense in such a way as to comprise
meaningful worlds. Second, the scope of reference determined by a name
varies relative to an open horizon of associated meaning. Finally, because
names are joints (chevilles) linking different types of phrases, conflicts between
genres of discourse using the same names but inserted in different systems of
meaning and having differing referential valences are always possible.I
8
But are such conflicts unavoidable? It would appear so. If there is an apriori
principle for Lyotard it is that every phrase must be followed by another.
I9
The succession of possible phrases (enchainement) depends on the universe
presented by an initial phrase, which consists of four instances: meaning,
reference, and positions of addresser and addressee. The form of the phrase,
i.e., its sense as a description, exclamation, question, etc., situates these
instances in relation to one another so that any number of possible types of
phrases may follow. Thus, in response to the question 'Did you shut the
door?' one may follow with a question about the addressee ('Are you talking to
me?'), an affirmation aimed at clarifying meaning ('Yes, if this panel can be
called a door'), a description aimed at clarifying reference ('Which door?'), or
a command directed to the authority of the addresser ('You do it-it's your
job!) (108-10, 117-18).
Differends arise from the fact that ambiguity is an essential feature of
ordinary language. The addressee is free to classify a phrase under a regime
different from that intended by the addresser, thereby subsuming the phrase
in question under a different genre of discourse (120-24). Because each genre
of discourse is teleologically determined by a distinct idea that serves to
296 Praxis International
impose unity over the disparate regimes of phrases that occur within
it-truth, for example, subsumes cognitive discourse under the rule of
reaching uncoerced consensus-the subsumption of one and the same phrase
under two different genres of discourse will have the effect of silencing
whichever one is prior. Thus, the survior of the holocaust is reduced to silence
in the face of interrogation because the cognitive discourse to which his or her
phrase is assimilitated presupposes that the interrogator has the authority to
interrogate, the survivor has the authority to respond, and the interrogator
and survivor are talking about a public fact on which uncoerced agreement
can be reached. 20
If the differend is integral to language then language must in its very
structure presuppose judgment, social conflict and political deliberation.
The tension, the veritable discord of the social, is thus given immediately with its
phrasal universe, and the political question with the mode of its linking, that is to
say, its finalization over a stake ... It is equally easy to comprehend that the
nature of the social, its identification by a defining phrase for example, is easily
deferred. For as it is given with the universe of a phrase, and as the finality (the
meaning of the meaning if you will) of this universe depends on the phrase by
which it is linked to the preceding one-this linking being the substance of the
differend betweed genres of discourse-the nature of the social is yet to be judged
(200).
The sense in which "the nature of the social is yet to be judged" is exemplified
in political deliberation. The seven steps in any deliberative process involve
the linking of heterogeneous regimes of phrases held together by a fragile idea
answering the supreme normative question regarding final ends: What should
we be? The ethical formulation of a final end is followed by a hypothetical
imperative answering the question: What should we do in order to be that?
This, in turn, requires drawing up an inventory of available means and
resources for bringing about the desired end-an activity that engages an
entirely different genre of discourse-the cognitive. The fourth step in the
process draws upon this information to formulate some idea of the limits and
possibilities of human endeavor-an "irreal" narrative corresponding to what
Kant understood by an idea of the imagination (an intuition without concept)
or to what Freud meant by free association. Once this has been accomplished,
the process moves on to the proposal of alternate policies in which two or more
deliberants seek to persuade others of the rightness of their opposing views.
The judgment which resolves this debate must in turn be legitimated. Who
has the right to judge and by what authority (217-17)?
According to Lyotard, each step in this process commits a differend by
invoking a specific genre of discourse that is superceded and suppressed by
the one that follows. In fact, at various stages in this process the cognitive, the
ethical, the political, and the aesthetic suppress, and in turn are suppressed
by, one another. Kant's paradoxical formulation of the principle that ought
implies can is repeated here. Although the moral law is supposed to be the
unconditioned fact of reason from which we infer the possibility of our own
freedom (here understood as a capacity to spontaneously initiate a causal
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chain), it nonetheless appears conditioned by capacities and principles of a
purely heteronomous nature. Thus, the ethical prescription of an absolute,
obligatory end loses its supremacy once it is in turn derived from and qualified
by a factual description of psychological and physical capacities (174-79).
Another differend is committed by assimilating the ethical to the political in
the narrow sense of the term; that is, in demanding that the entire process of
political deliberation, and therewith, the ethical command determining it, be
legitimated. Following Levinas, Lyotard staunchly defends the asymmetry
between the addresser and the addressee of an ethical prescription. The
former, be it conceived as God, reason, conscience, or nature confronts "me",
the addressee, as an unknowable other who is respected not because it is an
equal with whom I can identify but rather because it is utterly transcendent
and greater than I. Indeed, so radical is the transcendence that one obeys the
obligation before comprehending its meaning (163-70). Hence, one cannot
regard oneself as legislator of the moral law. Such a concept of self-
determination not only collapses the distinction between addresser and
addressee, but it also assimilates ethics to politics, itself wrongly conceived in
a manner analogous to cognitive discourse. As for the former error, legitim-
ation remains caught in a vicious circle: I am obligated to obey the very
authority which I myself have authorized. As for the latter, I am required to
conceive of myself as an unconditioned legislator whose laws nonetheless
remain conditioned by the cognitive constraints of logical consistency and
universal truth (205-17).
The fragility of political deliberation is further compounded by the fact that
there are many possible futures and therefore many possible ideas claiming
our universal allegiance. The supreme ethical idea of the modern age,
freedom, is essentially indeterminate, thereby giving rise to a host of symbols,
such as the kingdom of heaven or the community of workers. The indeter-
minacy of these figures of the imagination poses a problem for political
judgment (step six) which, being deprived of a determinate rule by which to
judge, engages in historical reflections having no foundation other than
aesthetic intuition. Political ideals claiming unconditioned normative validity
thus find themselves compromised on two fronts; not only are they circum-
scribed by intuitions of a purely aesthetic nature, but the latter, reflecting the
impartial standpoint of the disinterested spectator-judge, cannot, strictly
speaking, be represented at all.
21
Lyotard thus concurs with Kant that
revolution "rests on a transcendental illusion in the political domain; it
confuses what is presentable as an object for a cognitive phrase with what is
presentable as an object for a speculative and/or ethical phrase". 22
Ultimately, we are presented with a negative dialectic (Adorno) where each
finalizing judgment is seen as yielding to injustice without ever arriving at a
speculative mediation in which closure, identity, and totality are achieved.
Thus it remains a vindication of Kant against Hegel. Philosophy cannot
reflexively articulate the whole without succumbing to self-referential par-
adox: either it is itself a member of the series which it seeks to comprehend, in
which case it is but a partial truth relative to others, or it is outside the series,
in which case it is still a partial truth for having failed to comprehend itself. 23
298 Praxis International
If the differend signals more than a species of injustice, designating a fact
about language in general-Lyotard himself never explicitly distinguishes
these two possibilities-must it then preclude any idea of community that
might otherwise aid in critical judgment? Yes and no. Clearly the concept of
subjectivity, of the collective "we", must be re-elaborated-a task which,
Lyotard claims, involves "abandoning from the outset the communicative
linguistic structure (I/you/it) that the moderns, consciously or not, have
accredited with being an ontological and political model" (PE: 51). But in that
case, how can the Ideas of community and justice still be retained? At this
juncture of Lyotard's argument one detects a divergence from the earlier
account of judgment presented in AuJuste that explains just this possibility.
There judgment meant either the application of conventional rules requiring
specification (Aristotle) or the reflexive discovery of rules in light of Ideas
(Kant). In neither case was it explained how pagan heterogeneity might be
compatible with modern universality or community. In the work presently
under consideration, the community underlying judgment is rephrased in
terms of the conflict of faculties elaborated by Kant in his later writings. 24
In the Introduction to the Third Critique Kant talks about finding passages
(Ubergiinge) of a symbolic or analogical sort linking what are otherwise
heterogeneous faculties. Lyotard too seems to accept this as a possibility for
critical judgment, though he characteristically interprets it in a manner that
brings out the underlying tension. In The Conflict ofFaculties, Kant no longer
conceived critical philosophy as a neutral tribunal that delivers final verdicts
without incurring new wrongs.
2S
We find instead the notion of a guardian who
watches over a battle without intervening. The battle in question is the
conflict of faculties, a conflict which arises because opposed cognitive and
practical faculties lay claim to the same territory, human nature. One cannot
regulate this differend; at most, one can expose it by defending the equally
valid claim of the weaker party, the advocate of freedom, against the
apparently stronger claim of the dogmatist. The basis for this judgment seems
to be that the conflict of faculties, and thus, the distraction of the subject, may
yet be conducive to the health of the soul.
Now health is an aesthetic category insofar as it implies the internal
integrity of heterogeneous parts interacting in accordance with the principle of
maximum harmony, or equilibrium. The critical judgment of the philospher
is therefore an aesthetic judgment. For Kant, aesthetic judgments, like all
reflective judgments, are undetermined by concepts (prior criteria); hence
their validity cannot be objectively deduced. Yet the fact that persons dispute
matters of taste seems to bear witness to an ideal demand for agreement which
suggests to him that the communicable harmony of understanding and
imagination necessarily activated by cognition (sensus communis) spontan-
eously occurs in aesthetic judgment as well. But wheras judgments of beauty
reflect the imagination's success in discovering symbols which represent ideas
of reason and attest to the unity of faculties, including the unity of the
cognitive and the practical in the supersensible Idea of nature, judgments of
the sublime articulate just the opposite-the incommensurability of imagi-
nation and understanding, the presentation of the unpresentable. Sublime for
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Kant are those experiences of formlessness, boundlessness, and lack of
finality, such as political revolutions, which paradoxically arouse enthusiasm
in us because they somehow manage in spite of themselves to signal precisely
the finality and community they empirically deny (240-43). Sublime, too, is
the heterogeneity and lack of finality evident in the differend since it signifies a
community of discourse in which integrity, harmony, and justice ideally
prevail.
The Idea of community in Lyotard's philosophy testifies to an idealism that
must remain desideratum, a justice of judgment rather than of action and
representation. Any attempt to instill it with content by identifying it with
some concrete political arrangement such as social democracy, would invari-
ably result in a transcendental dialectic-in this instance the confusion of the
general will with the will of all that occurs in Rousseau's political philosophy.
For this reason, Lyotard judiciously concludes that "politics cannot have for
its stake the good, but would have to have the least bad" (203). By contrast,
justice demands only that one judge without prescribing, that one listen for
the silences that betoken differends so as to finally let the suppressed voice
find its proper idiom (30).
III
It is appropriate to conclude this essay with a brief remark about the
modern/postmodern debate between Lyotard and Habermas. The acrimony
that has marked the debate-each side accusing the other of terrorism and
neoconservatism respectively-has not aided in furthering understanding of
their differend, and it is to be regretted all the more given their shared
indebtedness to critical philosophy. 26Lyotard's deep respect for Adorno,
Benjamin and even Habermas, as well as his dedication to the critical task of
working through the Kantian problematic of justice, sets him apart from
mainstream poststructuralism and its abdication of political judgment.
Indeed, his expansion of linguistic philosophy in the direction of the political
parallels Habermas' in its concern for the fragmentation of domains of
discourse and value spheres which, since Kant, has come to signify the
modern condition-a condition of permanent crisis afflicting both legiti-
mation and justice. What's at stake here is the autonomy and integrity of a
subject lost in the heteronomy of consumption and dispersed over conflicting
domains of discourse in which the strategic game of success and profitability
has come to dominate.
In Habermas' judgment this crisis is not intrinsic to the modern project of
enlightenment, but stems from the penetration of economic and political
systems of strategic action into areas of public life-family, education, public
opinion, etc.-integrated by consensus oriented communication. As a salutary
response to the adaptive imperatives of modern capitalism, the crisis betokens
resistance emanating from a need, cultivated in consensus oriented communi-
cation, for mutual freedom and recognition. This is a dangerous need,
Habermas realizes, since it can lead persons to find in mass democracy an
illusory fulfillment of authentic, identity-building consensus. Hence, he like
300 Praxis International
Lyotard is more inclined to eschew the current politics of consensus in favor
of forming local pockets of resistance decentered around heterogeneous
gender, ethnic, and issue-based interest groups. If it can be said that idealism
still holds the key to this resistance, it is in the sense of a radical avant garde
aesthetic in which, as for Lyotard, the ideal of a just society resides as much in
the form of a negative disassociation of reified appearances as in the positive
projection of community.27
Of course, it can be argued that the above description only serves to obscure
the immense gulf separating the two thinkers. After all, Lyotard denies that
subjectivity is defensible-either as an ideal or as a reality. Nor is he convinced
that Habermas' turn to art is entirely free of a speculative yearning to unify the
rationality his own theory of communicative action has sundered.
28
(For his
part, Habermas criticizes the sublime formlessness of some modern art as
incapable of reintegrating experience at the level of consciousness.) Finally,
there is the matter of the differend.
Without lending the mistaken impression that these are not basic areas of
disagreement, I would not go so far as to exaggerate their importance. Lyotard
too defends the integrity and autonomy of local communities, though under a
title which makes no reference to subjects. And as I've argued elsewhere,
Habermas' turn to art as a vehicle of truth is not the recrudescence of
Hegelianism it first seems to be.
29
For Habermas, art exhibits a mimetic unity
not unlike the analogical tracing of passageways attributed by Kant to the
operation of reflective judgment. As such, it bears some likeness to that
sublime art and pagan admixture of language games mentioned by Lyotard, a
melange, Habermas notes, which is located on this side of the everyday
language/specialized discourse boundary. 30 Last but not least, one could even
go so far as to ascribe a self-acknowledged differend in Habermas' recognition
of the irrecusable contingency of all philosophical foundations and in his
Benjamin admission that the idea of justice informing political legitimation
and communicative ethics cannot speak for or compensate those whose
sufferings have made the idea a possibility in the first place.
31
The differend between Habermas and Lyotard is at once methodological,
pitting structuralism against hermeneutics, and philosophical, opposing two
different readings of Kant. On Habermas' reading of Kant, one respects the
other out of consideration for a basic commonality, or mutual identification
with the other. This formulation of Kant's ethics is directly tied to the
political idea of universal legislation, self-determination, and legitimation as
consensus-a "conflation" of distinct discourses, Lyotard believes, which
ultimately privileges the cognitive. He himself prefers to focus on a different
aspect of Kant's ethics, the moment of respect for the transcendent other who
obligates and limits the self absolutely, without possibility of representation. 32
These antithetical readings, I believe, have their basis in a methodological
differend, which is well illustrated by an exchange that occurred in AuJuste.
Lyotard was asked to comment on the justice of two competing sets of
prescriptions, Helmut Schmidt's and the one defended by the terrorist group
known as the Red Army Faction. He responded that he could not do so, since
he was not judging, but only describing. He remarked, however, that he
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301
thought it unjust for Americans to program bombing raids on Hanoi from
computer installations in Heidelberg. This judgment was expressly offered as
an opinion and nothing more (129-32). The standpoint here adopted is that of
a dispassionate, alienated observer, or better yet, a judge whose opinion is
simply that-a belief rendered subjective for lack of determinate criteria. In
either case, it represents the standpoint of one who is not himself directly
involved in a conversation; transcendent ethic and transcendent methodology
thus conspire to enmesh Lyotard in the very subjectivism he so earnestly seeks
to avoid. Because Lyotard labors under a structuralistic philosophy that
brackets subjectivity, he sees language as primarily a surface (or moebius
strip, to borrow a metaphor from Economie Libidinal) without an interior or
reverse side. It thus appears as a system of exchange, or better, a civil war in
which judgments pass only as opinions or mere effects. Still, the differends
which arise from the effects of heterogeneous discourses in their interaction
with one another must be judged as well as described. But from what
standpoint? From the standpoint of an Idea of justice which, however one
chooses to interpret it, is not validated by structuralism, but derives from the
internal reflection of a Levinas or a Kant.
33
Habermas, by contrast, has no difficulty accounting for the normative
standpoint of his critique, since his hermeneutic perspective does not
bracket subjectivity, but rather seeks to comprehend social life from within,
the way it is experienced by everyday, speakers. In so doing, it tries to situate
even the agonistics of the strategic language game of manipulation and deceit
against the backdrop of our tacit faith in the reciprocity of communication;
for this game only plays on condition of their being a prior disposition
toward communication, i.e., toward reaching agreement, or mutual
understanding, over a common meaning in an unconstrained manner, with
mutual trust and restraint. But as Habermas himself pointed out in his
debate with Gadamer, this conception of language can neither be understood
in an ontological fashion, nor upheld as a goal of concrete political praxis
without becoming ideological. The need to expose systemic distortions of
consensual understanding generated within mass democracy and cultural
imperialism requires an external critique of ideology, which, as Habermas
notes, suspends the communicative routine in a structuralist epoche. The
differend between Habermas and Lyotard is thus a differend internal to both
their philosophies. One cannot critique ideology in the absence of an idea,
yet one does a disservice to the idea, to the language game which we are
when, as Gadamer notes, we refuse to play the game. It's as if one were to
contradict oneself by adverting to the ideal presuppositions of
communication-trust, openness, and orientation toward reaching
consensus-in order to distrust, hold oneself in abeyance, and place oneself in
opposition to the consensus gentium. Still, an injustice would be perpetrated if
we were to insist otherwise, for if Lyotard has taught us anything, it is that
silence, too, can be a form of integrity.
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NOTES
1. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 1986 Pacific Division Meeting of the American
Philosophical Association. The author is especially grateful to his wife, Julia, and to Professor Joseph
Prahbu for their careful reading of earlier versions of the manuscript.
2. To suggest that there is a common political or philosophical stance uniting persons who call
themselves postmodernists or poststructuralists, or that the union of postmodernism and poststruc-
turalism is unproblematic would be to gloss over subtle differences. For a discussion of these
differences see Fredric Jameson, "The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodern
Debate" in New German Critique, 33 (Fall, 1984); Hal Foster, "(Post) Modern Polemics" New
German Critique, 33 (Fall, 1984); and Jonathan Arac, ed., Postmodernism and Politics (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press), 1986.
3. A Heideggerian/Derridean philosophy of the political addressing itself to totalitarianism and
subjectivism had its base in the short-lived Center For Philosophical Research on the Political
(1980-84). The research of the center was compiled in two volumes edited by the co-directors,
Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Le retrait du politique (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1983)
and Rejouer le politique (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1981). The latter volume contains an essay by
Lyotard entitled, "Introduction a une etude du politique selon Kant." See Nancy Fraser's analysis of
the decline of the center in "The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing
the Political?" in New German Critique, 33 (Fall, 1984); and my essay, "The Retreat of the Political in
the Postmodern Age: Jean-Luc Nancy on Totalitarianism and Community," in Research in
Phenomenology (forthcoming).
4. This tension was already announced in the opening page of Discours, figure (Klincksieck, 1971):
". . . the given is not a text . . . there is within it a density, or rather constitutive difference, which is
not to be read, but to be seen; and ... this difference, and the immobile mobility which reveals it, is
what is continually forgotten in the process of signification" (9). The difference between the sensible
and intelligible (Merleau-Ponty), between the "letter" as the bearer of conventional meaning and the
"figure", is misleading; yet despite repudiating his earlier "nostalgia for some extra-linguistic entity"
Lyotard continues to draw a distinction between the spoken and the unspoken-a tendency which led
him to go beyond the negative politics of deconstructive criticism in the direction of affirming the play
and intensification of forces. The consumate expression of this Nietzschean tendency, Economie
libidinal (1974), seemed to not only affirm the primacy of the unconscious over the conscious, but also
dissolve reifying linguistic distinctions in the fluidity of an omnipresent libido, thus conclusively
breaking with the poststructuralist privileging of language. For a good discussion of Lyotard's early
thought see L'Arc 64 (1976) and Peter Dews' review of Discours, figure in Diacritics (Fall, 1984). For
Lyotard's own retrospective see the interview with Georges van den Abbeele in the same issue and Au
Juste, coauthor J.-L. Thebaud (Christian Bourgeois, 1979), pp. 170-71 (hereafter abbreviated AJ).
5. Page references are taken from J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(hereafter abbreviated PMC), trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 8.
6. See Niklas Luhmann and Jiirgen Habermas, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie. Was
Leistet die Systemforschung? (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971).
7. Luhmann, p. 44. At the same time, the need to expand freedom of selection pulls the university in the
direction of implementing experimental, interdisciplinary curricula which may produce disfunctional
side effects. It is this tension, diagnosed by Habermas, which appears to underly Lyotard's conviction
that the principle of performativity leads to its own surpassing.
8. Lyotard remarks that the functionalistic model has its basis in the French enlightenment while the
critical, or Marxist, model evolved from German Idealism. This does not alter the fact that orthodox
Marxist schools (as opposed to their revisionist counterparts in the West such as the Frankfurt School
or socialisme ou barbarie of which Lyotard himself was an active member from 1954 to 1969) have
been attracted to a functionalistic view of society. Foucault explicitly identifies the two.
9. PMC, pp. 5-9, 61-4. There are other paradoxes pertaining to the functionalistic reduction of
meaning, truth, and legitimacy to efficiency which, owing to his suspicion of hermeneutics, Lyotard
does not acknowledge. For a discussion of these, see Habermas (1971), pp. 187-95.
10. PMC, pp. 64-5. See Richard Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity" in Praxis
International 4: 1 (April, 1984), p. 33ff. Rorty strongly criticizes Lyotard's deduction-from the mere
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303
fact of paralogy-of the absence of consensus as a goal of science and society. He also questions
Lyotard's apparent belief that the transition from a positivist to a more Kuhnian (or better,
Feyerabendian) philosophy of science indicates a real change in scientific practice itself.
11. PMC, pp. 18-23. Using Andre Mariel d'Ans ethnological description of the handing down of roles in
Cashinahua myth as a model, Lyotard lists five characteristics which serve to distinguish the narrative
structure of customary knowledge from the discursive structure of scientific truth. First, small
narratives exemplify criteria of practical competence in the form of offering positve or negative role
models and "apprenticeships." Second, they comprise a greater variety of language games than their
scientific counterparts. Third, their transmission itself constitutes a social bond by replaying (orally
and pragmatically) a story one has heard in which one has identified with the speaker who, in turn,
has identified with the hero of the story. Fourth, it follows that rhythmic and stylistic features of
speech and action take precedence over the conveyance of meaning. Finally, the timeless quality of
these narratives (e.g., old proverbs, nursery rhymes, and repetitive rituals generally) means that they
have no identifiable origin which might legitimate them.
12. AJ, p. 33-36, 71. However much Lyotard insists on the modern/postmodern distinction, he
elsewhere says that the postmodern condition is not the culmination of the modern, but its constant,
nascent state. (PMC, p. 79). The modern condition presupposes a criterion of taste in the form of the
"people" as the ultimate addressee and judge of value. The postmodern condition does not. In any
case, the distinction refers to styles rather than periods. See PMC, p. 33.
13. Ibid., p. 102. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1969).
14. For a discussion of this dilemma see Geoff Bennington, "August: Double Justice" in Diacritics
(supra), pp. 64-71. Samuel Weber's, Afterword to the English translation of Au Juste, entitled Just
Gaming (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); and Jean-Luc Nancy, "Dies-Irae," in La
Faculte de Juger (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1985). Nancy points out that Lyotard's principal
mistake resides in trying to substitute plurality for totality in Kant's conception of an Idea, thereby
giving a prescriptive value to what is in fact a non-prescriptive, ontological condition for determinacy,
or presentability in general.
15. See Seyla Benhabib, "Epistemologies of Postmodernism: A Rejoinder to Jean-Francois Lyotard,"
New German Critique 33 (Fall, 1984). Approaching her topic from a Habermasian perspective,
Benhabib criticizes Lyotard's failure to ground his theory as well as his adherence to "neo-liberal
interest group pluralism," for failing to advance "radical, democratic measures redressing economic,
social, and cultural inequalities and forms of subordination" (p. 124).
16. J.-F. Lyotard, Le Postmoderne explique aux Enfants (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1986), pp. 40-1, 90-4,
105-15 (hereafter abbreviated PE). The distinction between retrospective and prospective strategies
of legitimation plays a crucial role in Lyotard's classification of the USSR under Stalin as terroristic
rather than totalitarian. Revolutionary (or terroristic) regimes aim at realizing a future state of
emancipation. However, the emancipatory drive to eliminate particular interests (and whatever else
appears constraining and divisive) produces discord and instability. Consequently, such regimes end
up withdrawing into the bureaucratic entropy afforded by more traditional forms of ideological
coercion such as nationalism. Totalitarian regimes, by contrast, react against the threat of anarchy
posed by emancipatory movements like Marxism. Consequently, they turn to the more stable,
organic, and racially exclusive identities embedded in mythic traditions. This explains why, strictly
speaking, only fascist regimes are totalitarian; the emancipation sought by Marxists is universal in
scope and encompasses, at least in principle, the values of individual autonomy and social equality.
This is not to say that fascist regimes are mere repetitions of traditional patterns of stratification and
authority; rather, their distinctly modern, ideological cast is reflected in their attempt to establish a
universal world order based on racial hegemony. Capitalism, Lyotard now maintains, is neither
totalitarian nor terroristic, but is hegemonic in an entirely different sense in that it tends to replace the
moral language constitutive of identity formation with the universal language of technological
domination, productive efficiency, exchange, success, and "saving time." See Le Differend (Paris:
Les Editions de Minuit, 1983), p. 172 (hereafter abbreviated DF), and my essays, "The Retreat of
the Political in the Postmodern Age: Jean-Luc Nancy on Totalitarianism and Community," (loc. cit.)
and "The Finality of Judgment: Kant and the Politics of Postmodernism" (unpublished).
17. DF, pp. 68, 71-2, 81-2, 86-7. 'Red', for example, is strongly determined vis-a-vis the system of color
names by relations of sameness and difference and weakly determined with respect to the existing
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universe of possible descriptions, such as 'roses are red', 'Red is a color' and so on.
18. DF, p. 90. Names are also focal points around which other political conflicts, which Lyotard calls
"litigations," arise. Litigations also involve conflicts over naming, but are distinguished from
differends in that the suppression of a genre of discourse is not a stake.
19. DF, pp. 76-7, 93-4, 101-08. This, Lyotard suggests, is the proper Cartesian beginning, since the "I
think" is itself dispersed over distinct instances which serve to situate it. That there must be phrasing
(the "is it happening that . . ?" which functions as the figural horizon of genres of discourse) is
compatible with the idea that silence itself is a phrase which pre-figures the transcendent limits of
phrasing. See Lyotard's discussion of the continuity between Discors, figure and Le Differend in
Diacritics, p. 17.
20. DF, pp. 30--1, 127-9, 187-8. It must be added that the context cannot always be relied on to eliminate
ambiguity in ordinary language since there is no meaningful reality independent of the universe
presented by a succession of phrases.
21. DF, pp. 243-6, and I. Kant, "An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly
Progressing" in On History, ed. L.W. Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 143-4.
22. DF, p. 233, 246-48. Marxism, Lyotard notes, makes two illusory moves: first, .by identifying the
sufferings of the proletariat with the Idea of a revolutionary subject, and second, by identifying the
proletariat qua idea with a real political organization.
23. Ibid., pp. 248--58; PE, pp. 90-4, 107-15. Russell's solution to the paradox of self-referentiality as
evidenced in such expressions as "I am now lying" or "This sentence is false," was to deny them the
status of being logically well-formed, or truth decidable. It later led to the distinction between
language and meta-Ianguage-a distinction often invoked by Lyotard to underline the differend
which obtains whenever philosophy talks about ordinary language.
24. For a helpful discussion of this side of Lyotard's thought, see David Carroll, "Rephrasing the Political
with Kant and Lyotard: From Aesthetic to Political Judgments" in Diacritics, pp. 74-87.
25. Lyotard is sensitive to the enormous difficulty that attends Kant's conception of judgment, which is
alternately characterized as a process of validating a general rule by subsuming a particular under it,
in which case it is a function inhabiting the distinct faculties of understanding, practical reason, and
theoretical reason (providing, respectively, schemas, types, and symbols), as a separate faculty in its
own right, but lacking a specific object or field, and as a kind of aesthetic philosophical reflection
which discovers analogical Leitfaden knitting the disparate faculties together. As the critical tribune of
the First Critique, judgment unproblematically rejects the opposing arguments of the mathematical
antinomies for applying the rules of the understanding, rightly applicable only to spatio-temporal
phenomena, to things in themselves. The image of a neutral tribunal is more problematic in the case
of the dynamic antinomy of freedom and determinism, for here both sides lay just claim to the same
territory without sharing any common rules. For a more detailed discussion on this problem, see DF,
pp. 189 ff., and J.-F. Lyotard, "Judicieux dans le Differend" in la Faculte de Juger (supra), pp.
195-216.
26. See J. Habermas, "Modernity Versus Post-Modernity" in New German Critique, 22 (1981), pp. 3-14,
for his discussion of French neoconservatism.
27. See J. Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 Vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1981). "Modernity Versus Postmodernity," and "Questions and Counter-Questions," in Praxis
International, 4:3, (1984), pp. 229-50.
28. "My question is to determine what sort of unity Habermas has in mind. Is the aim of the project of
modernity the constitution of socio-cultural unity within which all the elements of daily life and
thought would take their places as an organic whole? Or does the passage that has to be charted
between heterogeneous language games-these of cognition, of ethics, of politics belong to a different
order from that? ... the first hypothesis, of Hegelian inspiration, does not challenge the notion of a
dialectically totalizing experience; the second is closer to the spirit of Kant's Critique ofJudgment, but
must be submitted, like the Critique, to that severe examination which postmodernity imposes on the
Enlightenment, on the idea of a unitary end of history and of a subject." (PMC, p. 73).
29. See my discussion of this problem in the last chapter of Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
30. Lacoue-Labarthe points out ("Ou en etions nous," in La Faculte de Juger, p. 167) that Hannah
Arendt also commits the same "fallacies" committed by Habermas in her lectures on Kant's political
philosophy. In particular, Lacoue-Labarthe objects to her use of Kant's aesthetics in developing a
Praxis International 305
model of political judgment and to her abiding faith in the possibility of a unified experience founded
on a common public space. This way of depicting Arendt's use of Kant, I believe, neglects the extent
to which she herself questions the reliability of the politicallifeworld, and from precisely the same
postmodern point of view as that of Lyotard. In any case, Lacoue-Labarthe appears to agree with
Arendt (and, if one considers his most recent pronouncements on artistic truth, Habermas) on one
decisive point, namely, the urgency of raising the question of the lifeworld and with it, the
relationship between art and politics that Heidegger had noted in his essay, "The Origin of the Work
of Art." Indeed, his conviction that art "mimetically" discloses the communal ground of experience in
a manner evoking a deeper, ontological truth appears to be distinguished solely by its reference to the
sublime rather than beautiful. See H. Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, edited by
Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason
(loc.cit.); and my essay on Kant and the problem of judgment (supra, n. 16).
31. J. Habermas, "Replik," in Habermas: Critical Debates, edited by J.B. Thompson and David Held
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 243-4.
32. As Stephen Watson remarks, "What Habermas owes to Kant is precisely what Lyotard denies him
and he does so in Kant's name" ("Jiirgen Habermas and Jean-Francois Lyotard: Postmodernism and
the Crisis of Rationality" in Philosophy and Social Criticism, Fall, 1984, p. 13).
33. Even Lyotard acknowledges the inescapable circularity of the postmoden position, which must
presuppose the idea of justice it seeks to vindicate (DF, p. 196).