3.6 - Ingram, David B. - Legitimacy and the Postmodern Condition. the Political Thought of Jean...

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Legitimacy and the Postmodern Condition: the Political Thought of JeanFranois Lyotard

Legitimacy and the Postmodern Condition: the Political Thought of Jean FranoisLyotard

by David B. Ingram

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 3+4 / 1987, pages: 286-305, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=9e4d6499-94a7-47c0-b6d3-48244233281fhttp://www.ceeol.com/


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LEGITIMACY AND THE POSTMODERN CONDITION: THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF JEANFRANCOIS LYOTARD1

David IngramThe coupling of 'legitimacy' and 'postmodern' in the title of this essay maystrike some as melodramatic. These terms descend from radically differentlineages, the political and the aesthetic. Worse yet, they collide in whatappears to be a rather tasteless oxymoron. What one normally associates with

a postmodern aesthetic is a kind of eclecticism, or stylistic pastiche, whosemost enduring monuments, pop art and the new architecture, protest themodernist suppression of regional and traditional modes beneath the coldsurfaces of functional design. To complicate matters further, postmodernismmaintains an uneasy alliance with a philosophical movement of a similar vein,poststructuralism. From a political standpoint, these movements inveighagainst the totalitarian impulse toward social homogeneity and its attendantmarginalization of dissident subcultures. Moreover, both are inclined toblame this state of affairs on the rational demand for unity, purity, universality, and ultimacy. 2Now it is precisely this demand which ostensibly informs our modernunderstanding of legitimacy; for in thinking of the latter, we invariably fixupon the idea of valid authority vested in universal consent. It would seemthat the incongruity between this notion with its attendant emphasis on thepure, rational sovereignty of the individual subject and the conviction held bymost poststructuralists that subjectivity is all illusion superimposed over asystem of language wherein binary oppositions are continually dissolved andreferential loci displaced would render the post-modern movement,considered as a political force, highly problematic.3 Why be political if there isno ideal to be fought over, no subject to be emancipated? Lyotard'scourageous insistence on developing a postmodern idea of legitimation andjustice provides an intriguing response to this question, for if his work can becharacterized as poststructuralist, it is only in the sense that it moves beyondthe linguistic a priori intrinsic to structuralism generally.4 Lyotard's reflectionon the unspoken and transcendent within language issues in a tension betweenmodern and pagan motifs whose resolution will occupy the remainder of thispaper. I argue that Lyotard's first attempt to sketch a postmodern conceptionof justice and legitimacy in La Condition Postmoderne (1979) and Au Juste(1979) fails since its dependence on pre-modern narratives is burdened withself-referential aporia. Le Differend (1983) rectifies these difficulties byembracing the heterogeneity of modern discourse as a fact of linguisticexistence, thereby abandoning if not the idea, then at least the reality, ofjustice as a global ethical condition. This favors a politics of least harm, inPraxis International 7:3/4Winter 1987/8 0260-8448 $2.00


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Praxis International 287which the wrongs caused by some discursive regimes prevailing over others issimultaneously acknowledged and attenuated through the disclosure ofsuppressed idioms. It follows from this analysis that the differences separatingLyotard from consensus theorists such as Habermas are less extreme thanthey are often thought to be. I

The key assumption in La Condition Postmoderne is that there is anisomorphism between science on the one hand and ethics and politics on theother. The grand narratives (grands recits) which legitimate science are thesame that legitimate the state even if "the statements consigned to these twoauthorities differ in nature."s This linking of knowledge and power isespecially evident in today's information society. The right to decide in thepolitical sense is more and more a function of possessing the right type ofcredentials, the right type of expertise. Communication here ceases to be amedium of impartial dialogue and increasingly assumes the status of anexchange system in which the ledger sheets of informational capital arebalanced out. The "general transformation" in the way in which scientificresearch is conducted and transmitted in the cybernetic age goes hand in handwith the "mercantilization" of knowledge as such. Knowledge has for sometime been accorded the value of a productive force; with the advent ofpost-industrial capitalism, it has emerged as a commodity whose possessiondetermines the economic fate of nations. One of the questions raised by thisnew economy of knowledge and language is whether the technical capacity toenhance the functional adaptability of the state, e.g., by augmenting productivity through increased informational input, is capable of justifying demandsfor legitimacy. Can efficient adaptation be a substitute for justice, or does theincommensurability of "ought" and "is" refer the concept of legitimacy to apurely normative category, such as free universal consent? If the latter nolonger seems adequate to express the dynamic bricolage we call modernsociety, then what is?Lyotard proceeds to answer these questions by examining what it is aboutscientific knowledge and its legitimation that bears upon the issue of the state.Since Plato, philosophers have been accustomed to viewing knowledge as animportant ingredient in the legitimation of power, but only recently have theysought to relate the legitimation of knowledge to politics. Unlike earliermetaphysical narratives, the narratives of the Enlightenment presupposedthat science directly institutionalized rational discourse and that politicsmirrored science. Two distinct but overlapping narratives reflected thischange, one liberal, the other conservative (27-31).

The liberal legitimation of science asserted that technically useful knowledge was the key to individual and social emancipation. The educationalpolicy appropriate to this narrative, which found its supreme expression in theFrench Third Republic, emphasized primary over secondary schooling. Incontrast, the conservative legitimation of science promoted self-understandingabove emancipation. The educational policy which it embodied reflected lessthe utilitarian bent of the French and English schools than the moralizing

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288 Praxis Internationalspirit distilled in Humboldt's proposal for the founding of the university ofBerlin. Philosophy is here called upon to provide the speculative means forintegrating the knowledge of the various disciplines and recovering the moralpurpose animating the nation (31-37).

In Lyotard's opinion, these narratives now stand discredited, and for goodreason. The speculative philosophy of the German school could onlylegitimate 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 contingency of the separate spheres of knowledge and ushered in a positivisticphase that also discredited its French and English counterpart. Since it wasnow taken for granted that prescriptions for achieving political emancipationand statements of scientific fact were logically irreducible, truth and justicelost 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 truthfullyrepresenting reality in itself and politics as justly mirroring the idealconditions of emancipation. The two rival models of legitimation mentionedby Lyotard that dominate the contemporary scene attest to this nihilisticself-awareness in radically different ways, and both do so even whilemaintaining the formal unity of science and politics. On the one hand, thereare those systems theorists such as Parsons and Luhmann who claim thatknowledge can only be justified performatively.6 Efficiency here replaces truthas the criterion of validity. This substitution, it seems, is dictated not only bythe methodological connection between verifiability, predictability, andtechnological control, but also by the functionalistic imperatives of the modernstate. As a cybernetic system, the state requires fresh inputs of information inorder to adapt itselfto a capricious environment. Its legitimation is guaranteedby maintaining efficient administration and economic growth. Althoughconsensus is still taken to be an important index of social stability, it isdeprived of antecedent validity. The freedom to make informed administrative decisions, Luhmann tells us, requires manipulating democratic inputfrom 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 profferingtechnical and vocational instruction.7 On the other hand, there are those suchas Habermas and Apel who claim that cognitive and prescriptive judgmentscan only be justified on the basis of their universal acceptance by persons inrational dialogue. Unconstrained consensus provides a touchstone for truthand justice which favors democracy. Accordingly, the critical theory oflegitimation views society as a communication network in which socialconflict, not functional equilibrium, is the norm. Nevertheless by advocatingthe view that society ought to reflect unity, it too stands in close proximity tothe legitimating narratives of the Enlightenment, for which knowledge is seenas dispelling ideology and ensuring collective emancipation. 8Lyotard sometimes speaks as if this latter theory of legitimation weredistinctly modern in its articulation of an ideal of rational autonomy. If we


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Praxis International 289turn to Au Juste we find him contrasting the kind of free, mutual recognitionintrinsic to modern justice with the heteronomy of its pagan counterpart. Forthe Greeks, the legitimacy of the state is proportional to its imitation of anideal harmony (or mean) inscribed in the cosmos-a proper distributionknown by theorectical reason or observation to be conducive to social andindividual well-being. With the advent of modern science, forms of naturalistic, teleological reasoning are replaced by more abstract formal conceptions ofcalculating and consistency reasoning. What ought to be no longer stands inany logical relation to what is. By the same token, no combination of existingpassions, desires, or conventional habits is sufficient to ground moral practice.It is principally out of a modern and fundamentally Kantian distaste for moralheteronomy that Lyotard denies the possibility of any scientific, or functionalistic, legitimation. Morality presupposes a spontaneous initiation ofaction that emanates solely from individual practical reason. This suppositionis the cornerstone of modern, social contract theories of legitimation as well.Since it is incumbent upon any government aspiring to the title of legitimacyto satisfy the common interests of its citizenry and to do so by their freeconsent, it follows as a matter of course that the best government will bedemocratic. Legitimate states, we believe, ought to advance rational, universalizable interests. And this conviction remains even if these interestsextend 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 rulesof a universally binding game, that Lyotard challenges. The rise of multinational corporations, the decline of nation states as global administrativeagencies, the logistics of information gathering and transmission, the need forself-regulating systems to avoid informational overloading and bureaucraticentropy, and the unpredictable nature of social displacements in response tonew data seem to undermine the functionalistic conception of the state and itsperformative legitimation. The state is no longer in control of the technicalapparatus necessary to guarantee efficient administration and economicgrowth. And it is not just because the databanks are in the hands of hostilecorporations. On the contrary, the absorption of information itself provesdisfunctional when it outstrips the capacity of the system to make decisions. 9This indecidability penetrates to the heart of modern science itself. Antinomies revolving around the formal and pragmatic limits to the derivation ofconsistent and complete systems of axioms (Godel), the establishment ofindependent criteria of verification or falsification, and the imprecision builtinto the prediction and measurement of subatomic particles (Heisenberg),testify to the inherent instability of modern science (53-60). The need toground knowledge and moral obligation in logically incommensurable language games would already render a functionalistic legitimation of the statesuspect were it not for the fact that science itself is just as impure as it isungrounded. Indeed, the composite descriptive/prescriptive nature of scientific principles seems to fracture any claim to rational unity, thus bearingwitness to the impurity of social life itself. 10 The schizophrenic fragmentationof persons and institutions into so many atomic roles and language games


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290 Praxis Internationalcontinually undermines the formation of a unitary political culture based uponprinciples of consistency and personal sovereignty. Summoning the spirit ofthe late Wittgenstein along with the spectre of deconstruction, Lyotardwrites, "the social subject itself seems to dissolve in this dissemination oflanguage games. The social bond is linguistic, but is not woven with a singlethread. It is a fabric formed by the intersection of at least two (and in reality anindeterminate number of) language games obeying different rules" (40).Now the aforementioned futilty of attempting any scientific, or argumentative, grounding of theory would seem to have the paradoxical effect ofrendering Lyotard's own views on this matter 'illegitimate' were it not for thefact that he develops an alternative theory of legitimation. Despite theirimpurity, all forms of scientific legitimation strive to maintain the logicalseparation of descriptive, prescriptive, and expressive language games. Suchis not the case with the "small narratives" underwriting everyday practice,which Lyotard likens to "a monster formed by the interweaving of heteromorphous classes of utterances" (65). The idea that knowledge and practicemust be argumentatively justified is foreign to them. The knowledge guidingour conduct appears to be more a matter of pragmatic "know-how" thanpropositional "know-that." According to Lyotard, what is important aboutthis so-called "narrative knowledge" is that is is passed down through ritualimitation and oral recitation. Because the authority of these narratives, and toa lesser extent, their scientific counterparts, ultimately lacks a privileged past,they are legitimated, "by the simple fact that they do what they dO."11Likewise, if Lyotard does not intend his own theory to be a grand narrativelaying claim to scientific legitimacy, this is because it acknowledges the linkbetween grand and small narratives. Ultimately, all theories, includingscientific ones, must have recourse to story telling in order to legitimate theirpractical worth in the grand scheme of things--indeed, the interlocking ofpolitics and epistemology examined above testifies to this very fact. Hence,such global rationalizations of institutionalized practices which answer thequestion "Why should there be science at all?" are at least indirectlyinterwoven with the myths and everyday practices defining our membershipin something like a national, cultural identity. The legitimacy of Lyotard'stheory thus resides in its retelling at a higher register one of the manymundane stories we moderns share-a story of alienation and loss of self butalso of an expanded horizon of future possibility.'[wo questions remain to be answered: Can Lyotard's theory yield a conceptof justice and, getting back to the question of legitimacy, can this conceptionbe related to the conventional practices governing modern life? To begin with,Lyotard doubts that modern conceptions of legitimacy and justice have hadthe beneficial effects claimed by their defenders. More to the point, he deniesthat these ideals can be grounded in language as Habermas and Apel contend.According to him, the local nature of radically heteromorphous languagegames essentially frustrates any attempt to uncover overarching rules ofcommunication. Consequently, the democratic demand that social practicesconform to a universally binding consensus as a condition of their legitimationcannot but have totalitarian implications: ' ~ M a j o r i t y does not mean large


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Praxis International 291number, but great fear" (A.J.: 188). In the final analysis, Lyotard insists thatany alternative to the "terrorism" of technological domination and totalitarianconsensus must take into account the "agonal" nature of actual speech. Thecybernetic model overlooks this fact when it attempts to reduce communication to the tranquil exchange of information within a closed system. Unlikethe electronic transmission of information, the pragmatic conditions underlying speech include a performative component by which sender andaddressee position themselves vis-a-vis one another and a situation theythemselves have constituted. Here, speaking, doing, and making codefine oneanother in accordance with rules whose meaning is continually contested. Inscience too as in daily life, conflicts between proponents of competingparadigms go well beyond inducing the sorts of innovations generated withinthe rules of normal practice. Consequently, neither science nor politics is aclosed system, and what appears to be a controlled distribution of informationor a dialogue oriented toward consensus is in fact a struggle betweencompeting players (PMC: 20).

If the postmodern condition fosters an incessant search for the new, theunknown, the anomalous, the subversive, the eclectic; in short, dissent fromdominant conventions and decentration of subjectivity, then only a "legitimation by paralogy" can satisfy "both the desire for justice and the desire for theunknown" (65-67). But what could this amalgamation of the political and theaesthetic amount to? We must turn to Au Juste to find the answer. There,Lyotard suggested that our political desire for justice, which he interpreted ina Kantian vein, and the aesthetic desire for intensity and novelty, which hecharacterized as pagan, were not .as opposed as one might think. To beginwith, our modern (or more precisely, postmodern) condition is also a paganone insofar as it is marked by lack of agreement over criteria and values. 12 Inthese cicumstances what lends value to an action or work is its sublimeviolation of conventional taste, that is, its transcendence of the limits ofrepresentation and its shattering of established hierarchies of thought,disciplinary boundaries, and canonical norms into new configurations ofdiscourse. It is as if an artistic will to power of the sort extolled by Nietzscheconferred a kind of charismatic legitimacy on its creations, transforming theminto criteria for others (the judges) to the extent that the sheer intensity offeeling alone, heightened further by the agonal confluence of conflictingforces, acted as a magnet, attracting and repelling at the same time. Yetpaganism is essentially heteronomous. If a will to power can be said to exist atall, i t nonetheless remains embedded in a play of authorless narrations andinterpretations over which the speaker has no absolute control.Now it is unclear how such a pagan notion might be conjoined to an idea ofjustice, since the latter affirms precisely what the former denies, namely actingfreely, responsibly, and consistently within limits. Yet even this characterization is not quite accurate, for as Lyotard notes, the pagan urge to violateconvention still occurs within the framework of conventional limits. Thesophists were correct in holding that moral convictions are a matter ofopinion, of the truthful (vraisemblable) rather than the true, but Aristotle wasright in holding that the formation of such opinion occurs against the political


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292 Praxis Internationalbackdrop of speech, action, and judgment. To judge prudently of opinion isto calculate its consequences vis-a-vis conventional rules whose meaning issufficiently undetermined to permit application to singular, concrete situations. A body of conventional limits from which our opinions derive theirconviction, a common tradition if you will, gets reinterpreted so as to apply tothe unique circumstances of the actor/judge. One calculates the costs andbenefits for long-term happiness, to be sure, but this is less a matter ofknowledge (episteme) than of art (techne), here understood as an imaginativefiguration of ends and not merely as a technical application of means:"... the veritable nature of the judge is just to pronounce judgements, henceprescriptions, without criteria" (52-53).So much for pagan justice. But our modern, Kantian conception of justicerequires that we take as our limit notion not this or that existing convention,but a transcendent Idea, a formal obligation to universalize our customarymaxims. The question now becomes "How does one introduce opinion intothe Kantian register?" (146). The problem is eased somewhat if we recall thatfor Kant, morality and political judgment partake of what Lyotard calls thepagan. The categorical imperative, like opinion, is a kind of irreducible fact,albeit of practical reason, the judgmental application of which involvesinvesting an empty, formal Idea with singular content. The meaning of thisIdea is best captured, Lyotard believes, by the pragmatics of Judaism asinterpreted by Emmanuel Levinas.

One says simply 'there is law' . . . but that does not mean that this law isdefined ... there is a meta-Iaw which says 'Be just!' But we just don't knowwhat 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 meantby being just, each time. 13The pagan element is also evident in Kant's political writings, where reflectionon the moral destiny of humanity is relegated to the non-cognitive sphere ofaesthetics, Since aesthetic judgments are guided by supersensible Ideas ofunity and harmony, one judges the purposiveness of natural beauty andhistorical progress without established criteria for resolving disputes.However, this does not explain how any judgment, be it ever so indeterminate, can simultaneously claim universal validity and still remain pagan,i.e., prescribe local, conventional instructions (107-09). Perhaps as Lyotardsuggests, one "maximises opinions," somewhat like the Sicilian rhetoricianCorax, who defended his client against the charge of beating a weaker man byarguing that his client would never bring suspicion upon himself by doingwhat everyone expects the stronger to do, beat the weaker. By appealing toconventional wisdom as an instantiation of something indeterminate andtranscendent, one generates an infinite space for variation within it thatproduces reversal (150-53).Ultimately, the problem of justice touches on both the particular judgmentthat is exercised within the limits prescribed by a local language game and theuniversal judgment exercised from without by the philosopher. The former


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Praxis International 293justice is less problematic, since it operates in accordance with establishedcriteria, the rules of the game, even while it works "at the limits of what therules tolerate in order to invent new moves (coups), perhaps new rules andthus new games" (188). Yet insofar as it serves to counteract the totalitarianimpulse toward stability and homogeneity by fostering self-referential paradoxes, sublime paralogies, and other experiments which dissolve conventional hierarchies and disciplinary boundaries, this conception of the"multiplicity of justices" stands in curious state of tension vis-a-vis itscounterpart. This latter conception, the "justice of multiplicities," intervenesfrom without to regulate the plurality of language games to the extent thatthese can be described as "impure", i.e., to the extent that they mixheterogeneous language games, such as the scientific game of truth and theethical game of obligation. It prescribes not that this or that rule should beobeyed, but that heteronomy be avoided commensurate with the violencerequired to generate new moves (182-83).Now the tension between this Idea of justice and the multiplicity of justiceis two-fold. The Idea of justice, Lyotard recognizes, is itself a prescriptionwhich supervenes in particular language games in order to prevent theintervention of prescriptions generally. Paradoxically, it has the value of auniversal, meta-linguistic prescriptive. Second, the Idea of justice supervenesas a judgment without determinate criteria and therefore cannot even beformulated. Despite Lyotard's own judgment that prescription should be leftout of science, he himself acknowledges that the status of science, not unlikepagan discourse, is and even should be impure and undecided. That thelogical status of a scientific law or a rule of language hovers somewherebetween the prescriptive and the descriptive, is something to be at oncepraised and condemned, depending on whether one judges this to beparalogical or terroristic.

What may we conclude from Lyotard's dilemma? To begin with, Au Justehas by no means resolved the tension between the aesthetic and the political. 14The Idea of justice developed there is caught between two incompatible goals,both having totalitarian implications; for a doctrine of ethical purity couldlegitimate a fascist politics of racial hegemony just as easily as a doctrine ofpagan impurity. Lyotard's attempt to downplay the insularity implicit in thegame metaphor by adverting to a conception of language as a system ofexchange, or circulation, replete with a "general agonistics" is appropriatelyintroduced in order to offset the former of these implications, but it goes toofar in the other direction by subsuming moral, political, aesthetic, andscientific discourses under the polymorphous languages of capital and ITiythicnarrative. The pagan will to power evident in the agonistic language game ofaesthetic creativity can no more be superimposed over the ethical relationship,and its self-abnegating respect for the transcendent other, than can thepolitical relationship of reciprocity and rights. The impression that Lyotardhimself is treading upon similar ground is only reinforced by his admissionthat in playing the "great prescriber" who imposes from without a global idealof justice on local configurations of justice specific to particular languagegames, he too risks being classified as an elitist or worse. IS


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294 Praxis InternationalSince the late seventies, Lyotard has sought mightily to dispel thisimpression, 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 amore sober attitude toward self-referential paradoxes, especially insofar as

they fuel the kind of totalizing dialectic which he finds so repugnant. Forexample, he now concedes that his subsumption of science and knowledge toutcourt under the rubric "narrative" ignored crucial distinctions necessary fordisentangling the knotty question concerning the nature of legitimation andits relationship to totalitarianism, terrorism, tribalism, and capitalism. Inparticular, he emphatically asserts that the kind of narrative knowledgedescribed in La Condition Postmoderne, which he now says pertains solely tothe myths of archaic cultures rather than to mundane discursive practicescharacteristic of modern societies, has lost whatever legitimating capacity itformerly possessed. With the advent of modern science, legitimation drawsinspiration from ideas of future emancipation rather than mythic origins. 16But if the various grand narratives within which this distinctly modern ideahas taken shape-Christianity, science and technology, cultural Bildung,Communism, capitalism, and so on-have themselves been invalidated by themarch of history, the everyday "prose of the people" is yet too inconsistentand parochial to provide a substitute.If the Idea of justice has escaped this fate it is because the paradoxes whichburdened 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 prescriptionsfor regulating language games. Indeed, he maintains that neither linguisticrules nor normative principles of justice are prescriptive. If principles ofjustice intervene at all, i t is in order to legitimate prescriptions already inoperation by subsuming them under ideas of community or universallawfulness (DF: 146-48, 206-08). And this leads to the second reason whyparadoxes are absent in Lyotard's recent work. What has emerged since thelate seventies is a rather more complicated picture of the way in whichlanguage mirrors unity and difference. Rejected is the pragmatist metaphysicsof the language game, which attributes the interaction of opposed systems ofrules to player-subjects. The new theory rather posits the intersection of genresof 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, orpeaceful resolution through common criteria. But is there then no injustice?

11The kind of injustice, if one can call it that, which inhabits politics andlanguage in general is what Lyotard calls a differend. A differend occurs,"whenever a plaintiff is deprived of the means of arguing and by this factbecomes 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 thesilence of holocaust survivors is interpreted as iack of evidence for theexistence of death camps. One is silenced as a victim or as a survivor whosetestimony lacks credibility. A differend also occurs, as Marx saw, when the


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Praxis International 295proletariat is forced to define its own laboring capacity in the commoditylanguage of capitalism. By obscuring the fact that labor power is thenonverifiable basis of workers' self-realization, the wage contract deprivesthem of the only moral idiom for contesting the justice of capitalism as such(17-18). In these examples, items referred to by identical names differdepending on whether these names occur in phrases uttered by plaintiffs(survivors of death camps and workers) or defendents (revisionist historiansand political economists). As Lyotard points out, what the camp survivorrefers to by 'holocaust' is not some fact to be established in a scientific court oflaw but rather signifies something transcendent and non-representable forwhich 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 languageand reality. According to Lyotard, what we call reality is neither a function ofsimple ostension nor an idealistic construct of meaning, but an amalgamationof the two. Because ostensive phrases containing deictic expressions such as'here', ' there', ' this', 'that', 'now', 'then', 'I', 'you', etc. are alone insufficientto establish fixity of reference, one must have recourse to proper and relationalnames, what Lyotard following Kripke calls rigid designators (57, 65-68). Inorder to avoid any confusion with idealism or essentialism, Lyotardemphasizes that names, meaningless in themselves, are relationallydetermined within nominal systems and networks of descriptions. I7 Theupshot of this analysis is threefold. First, although names are not realities,they nonetheless mediate reference and sense in such a way as to comprisemeaningful worlds. Second, the scope of reference determined by a namevaries relative to an open horizon of associated meaning. Finally, becausenames are joints (chevilles) linking different types of phrases, conflicts betweengenres of discourse using the same names but inserted in different systems ofmeaning and having differing referential valences are always possible.I8But are such conflicts unavoidable? It would appear so. If there is an aprioriprinciple for Lyotard it is that every phrase must be followed by another. I9The succession of possible phrases (enchainement) depends on the universepresented 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 theseinstances in relation to one another so that any number of possible types ofphrases may follow. Thus, in response to the question 'Did you shut thedoor?' one may follow with a question about the addressee ('Are you talking tome?'), an affirmation aimed at clarifying meaning ('Yes, if this panel can becalled a door'), a description aimed at clarifying reference ('Which door?'), ora command directed to the authority of the addresser ('You do it-it 's yourjob!) (108-10, 117-18).Differends arise from the fact that ambiguity is an essential feature ofordinary language. The addressee is free to classify a phrase under a regimedifferent from that intended by the addresser, thereby subsuming the phrasein question under a different genre of discourse (120-24). Because each genreof discourse is teleologically determined by a distinct idea that serves to


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296 Praxis Internationalimpose unity over the disparate regimes of phrases that occur withinit-truth, for example, subsumes cognitive discourse under the rule ofreaching uncoerced consensus-the subsumption of one and the same phraseunder two different genres of discourse will have the effect of silencingwhichever one is prior. Thus, the survior of the holocaust is reduced to silencein the face of interrogation because the cognitive discourse to which his or herphrase is assimilitated presupposes that the interrogator has the authority tointerrogate, the survivor has the authority to respond, and the interrogatorand survivor are talking about a public fact on which uncoerced agreementcan be reached. 20

If the differend is integral to language then language must in its verystructure presuppose judgment, social conflict and political deliberation.The tension, the veritable discord of the social, is thus given immediately with itsphrasal universe, and the political question with the mode of its linking, that is tosay, its finalization over a stake ... It is equally easy to comprehend that thenature of the social, its identification by a defining phrase for example, is easilydeferred. For as it is given with the universe of a phrase, and as the finality (themeaning of the meaning if you will) of this universe depends on the phrase bywhich it is linked to the preceding one-this linking being the substance of thedifferend 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 exemplifiedin political deliberation. The seven steps in any deliberative process involvethe linking of heterogeneous regimes of phrases held together by a fragile ideaanswering the supreme normative question regarding final ends: What shouldwe be? The ethical formulation of a final end is followed by a hypotheticalimperative answering the question: What should we do in order to be that?This, in turn, requires drawing up an inventory of available means andresources for bringing about the desired end-an activity that engages anentirely different genre of discourse-the cognitive. The fourth step in theprocess draws upon this information to formulate some idea of the limits andpossibilities of human endeavor-an "irreal" narrative corresponding to whatKant 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 moredeliberants seek to persuade others of the rightness of their opposing views.The judgment which resolves this debate must in turn be legitimated. Whohas the right to judge and by what authority (217-17)?According to Lyotard, each step in this process commits a differend byinvoking a specific genre of discourse that is superceded and suppressed bythe one that follows. In fact, at various stages in this process the cognitive, theethical, the political, and the aesthetic suppress, and in turn are suppressedby, one another. Kant's paradoxical formulation of the principle that oughtimplies can is repeated here. Although the moral law is supposed to be theunconditioned fact of reason from which we infer the possibility of our ownfreedom (here understood as a capacity to spontaneously initiate a causal


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Praxis International 297chain), it nonetheless appears conditioned by capacities and principles of apurely heteronomous nature. Thus, the ethical prescription of an absolute,obligatory end loses its supremacy once it is in turn derived from and qualifiedby a factual description of psychological and physical capacities (174-79).

Another differend is committed by assimilating the ethical to the political inthe narrow sense of the term; that is, in demanding that the entire process ofpolitical deliberation, and therewith, the ethical command determining it, belegitimated. Following Levinas, Lyotard staunchly defends the asymmetrybetween the addresser and the addressee of an ethical prescription. Theformer, be it conceived as God, reason, conscience, or nature confronts "me",the addressee, as an unknowable other who is respected not because it is anequal with whom I can identify but rather because it is utterly transcendentand greater than I. Indeed, so radical is the transcendence that one obeys theobligation before comprehending its meaning (163-70). Hence, one cannotregard oneself as legislator of the moral law. Such a concept of selfdetermination not only collapses the distinction between addresser andaddressee, but it also assimilates ethics to politics, itself wrongly conceived ina manner analogous to cognitive discourse. As for the former error, legitimation remains caught in a vicious circle: I am obligated to obey the veryauthority which I myself have authorized. As for the latter, I am required toconceive of myself as an unconditioned legislator whose laws nonethelessremain conditioned by the cognitive constraints of logical consistency anduniversal truth (205-17).

The fragility of political deliberation is further compounded by the fact thatthere are many possible futures and therefore many possible ideas claimingour 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 indeterminacy of these figures of the imagination poses a problem for politicaljudgment (step six) which, being deprived of a determinate rule by which tojudge, engages in historical reflections having no foundation other thanaesthetic intuition. Political ideals claiming unconditioned normative validitythus find themselves compromised on two fronts; not only are they circumscribed by intuitions of a purely aesthetic nature, but the latter, reflecting theimpartial standpoint of the disinterested spectator-judge, cannot, strictlyspeaking, be represented at all. 21 Lyotard thus concurs with Kant thatrevolution "rests on a transcendental illusion in the political domain; itconfuses what is presentable as an object for a cognitive phrase with what ispresentable as an object for a speculative and/or ethical phrase".22Ultimately, we are presented with a negative dialectic (Adorno) where eachfinalizing judgment is seen as yielding to injustice without ever arriving at aspeculative mediation in which closure, identity, and totality are achieved.Thus it remains a vindication of Kant against Hegel. Philosophy cannotreflexively articulate the whole without succumbing to self-referential paradox: either it is itself a member of the series which it seeks to comprehend, inwhich 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


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298 Praxis InternationalIf the differend signals more than a species of injustice, designating a factabout language in general-Lyotard himself never explicitly distinguishesthese two possibili ties-must it then preclude any idea of community thatmight 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 communicativelinguistic structure (I/you/it) that the moderns, consciously or not, haveaccredited with being an ontological and political model" (PE: 51). But in thatcase, how can the Ideas of community and justice still be retained? At thisjuncture of Lyotard's argument one detects a divergence from the earlieraccount of judgment presented in AuJuste that explains just this possibility.There judgment meant either the application of conventional rules requiringspecification (Aristotle) or the reflexive discovery of rules in light of Ideas(Kant). In neither case was it explained how pagan heterogeneity might becompatible with modern universality or community. In the work presentlyunder consideration, the community underlying judgment is rephrased interms of the conflict of faculties elaborated by Kant in his later writings. 24In the Introduction to the Third Critique Kant talks about finding passages(Ubergiinge) of a symbolic or analogical sort linking what are otherwiseheterogeneous faculties. Lyotard too seems to accept this as a possibility forcritical judgment, though he characteristically interprets it in a manner thatbrings out the underlying tension. In The Conflict ofFaculties, Kant no longerconceived critical philosophy as a neutral tribunal that delivers final verdictswithout incurring new wrongs.

2SWe find instead the notion of a guardian whowatches over a battle without intervening. The battle in question is theconflict of faculties, a conflict which arises because opposed cognitive andpractical faculties lay claim to the same territory, human nature. One cannotregulate this differend; at most, one can expose it by defending the equallyvalid claim of the weaker party, the advocate of freedom, against theapparently stronger claim of the dogmatist. The basis for this judgment seemsto be that the conflict of faculties, and thus, the distraction of the subject, mayyet 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 ofmaximum harmony, or equilibrium. The critical judgment of the philospheris therefore an aesthetic judgment. For Kant, aesthetic judgments, like allreflective judgments, are undetermined by concepts (prior criteria); hencetheir validity cannot be objectively deduced. Yet the fact that persons disputematters of taste seems to bear witness to an ideal demand for agreement whichsuggests to him that the communicable harmony of understanding andimagination necessarily activated by cognition (sensus communis) spontaneously occurs in aesthetic judgment as well. But wheras judgments of beautyreflect the imagination's success in discovering symbols which represent ideasof reason and attest to the unity of faculties, including the unity of thecognitive and the practical in the supersensible Idea of nature, judgments ofthe sublime articulate just the opposite-the incommensurability of imagination and understanding, the presentation of the unpresentable. Sublime for


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Praxis International 299Kant are those experiences of formlessness, boundlessness, and lack offinality, such as political revolutions, which paradoxically arouse enthusiasmin us because they somehow manage in spite of themselves to signal preciselythe finality and community they empirically deny (240-43). Sublime, too, isthe heterogeneity and lack of finality evident in the differend since it signifies acommunity of discourse in which integrity, harmony, and justice ideallyprevail.The Idea of community in Lyotard's philosophy testifies to an idealism thatmust remain desideratum, a justice of judgment rather than of action andrepresentation. Any attempt to instill i t with content by identifying it withsome concrete political arrangement such as social democracy, would invariably result in a transcendental dialectic-in this instance the confusion of thegeneral will with the will of all that occurs in Rousseau's political philosophy.For this reason, Lyotard judiciously concludes that "politics cannot have forits 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 forthe silences that betoken differends so as to finally let the suppressed voicefind its proper idiom (30).

IIIIt is appropriate to conclude this essay with a brief remark about themodern/postmodern debate between Lyotard and Habermas. The acrimonythat has marked the debate-each side accusing the other of terrorism andneoconservatism respectively-has not aided in furthering understanding oftheir differend, and it is to be regretted all the more given their sharedindebtedness to critical philosophy.26Lyotard's deep respect for Adorno,Benjamin and even Habermas, as well as his dedication to the critical task ofworking through the Kantian problematic of justice, sets him apart frommainstream poststructuralism and its abdication of political judgment.Indeed, his expansion of linguistic philosophy in the direction of the politicalparallels Habermas' in its concern for the fragmentation of domains ofdiscourse and value spheres which, since Kant, has come to signify the

modern condition-a condition of permanent crisis afflicting both legitimation and justice. What 's at stake here is the autonomy and integrity of asubject lost in the heteronomy of consumption and dispersed over conflictingdomains of discourse in which the strategic game of success and profitabilityhas come to dominate.In Habermas' judgment this crisis is not intrinsic to the modern project ofenlightenment, but stems from the penetration of economic and politicalsystems of strategic action into areas of public life-family, education, publicopinion, etc.-integrated by consensus oriented communication. As a salutaryresponse to the adaptive imperatives ofmodern capitalism, the crisis betokensresistance emanating from a need, cultivated in consensus oriented communication, for mutual freedom and recognition. This is a dangerous need,Habermas realizes, since it can lead persons to find in mass democracy anillusory fulfillment of authentic, identity-building consensus. Hence, he like


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300 Praxis InternationalLyotard is more inclined to eschew the current politics of consensus in favorof forming local pockets of resistance decentered around heterogeneousgender, ethnic, and issue-based interest groups. If it can be said that idealismstill holds the key to this resistance, it is in the sense of a radical avant gardeaesthetic in which, as for Lyotard, the ideal of a just society resides as much inthe form of a negative disassociation of reified appearances as in the positiveprojection of community.27

Of course, it can be argued that the above description only serves to obscurethe immense gulf separating the two thinkers. After all, Lyotard denies thatsubjectivity is defensible-either as an ideal or as a reality. Nor is he convincedthat Habermas' turn to art is entirely free of a speculative yearning to unify therationality his own theory of communicative action has sundered.28 (For hispart, Habermas criticizes the sublime formlessness of some modern art asincapable 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 ofdisagreement, I would not go so far as to exaggerate their importance. Lyotardtoo defends the integrity and autonomy of local communities, though under atitle 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 ofHegelianism it first seems to be. 29 For Habermas, art exhibits a mimetic unitynot unlike the analogical tracing of passageways attributed by Kant to theoperation of reflective judgment. As such, it bears some likeness to thatsublime art and pagan admixture of language games mentioned by Lyotard, amelange, Habermas notes, which is located on this side of the everydaylanguage/specialized discourse boundary. 30 Last but not least, one could evengo so far as to ascribe a self-acknowledged differend in Habermas' recognitionof the irrecusable contingency of all philosophical foundations and in hisBenjamin admission that the idea of justice informing political legitimationand communicative ethics cannot speak for or compensate those whosesufferings have made the idea a possibility in the first place. 31The differend between Habermas and Lyotard is at once methodological,pitting structuralism against hermeneutics, and philosophical, opposing twodifferent readings of Kant. On Habermas' reading of Kant, one respects theother out of consideration for a basic commonality, or mutual identificationwith the other. This formulation of Kant's ethics is directly tied to thepolitical idea of universal legislation, self-determination, and legitimation asconsensus-a "conflation" of distinct discourses, Lyotard believes, whichultimately privileges the cognitive. He himself prefers to focus on a differentaspect of Kant's ethics, the moment of respect for the transcendent other whoobligates and limits the self absolutely, without possibility of representation.32These antithetical readings, I believe, have their basis in a methodologicaldifferend, which is well illustrated by an exchange that occurred in AuJuste.Lyotard was asked to comment on the justice of two competing sets ofprescriptions, Helmut Schmidt's and the one defended by the terrorist groupknown as the Red Army Faction. He responded that he could not do so, sincehe was not judging, but only describing. He remarked, however, that he


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Praxis International 301thought it unjust for Americans to program bombing raids on Hanoi fromcomputer installations in Heidelberg. This judgment was expressly offered asan opinion and nothing more (129-32). The standpoint here adopted is that ofa dispassionate, alienated observer, or better yet, a judge whose opinion issimply that-a belief rendered subjective for lack of determinate criteria. Ineither case, it represents the standpoint of one who is not himself directlyinvolved in a conversation; transcendent ethic and transcendent methodologythus conspire to enmesh Lyotard in the very subjectivism he so earnestly seeksto avoid. Because Lyotard labors under a structuralistic philosophy thatbrackets subjectivity, he sees language as primarily a surface (or moebiusstrip, to borrow a metaphor from Economie Libidinal) without an interior orreverse side. It thus appears as a system of exchange, or better, a civil war inwhich judgments pass only as opinions or mere effects. Still, the differendswhich arise from the effects of heterogeneous discourses in their interactionwith one another must be judged as well as described. But from whatstandpoint? From the standpoint of an Idea of justice which, however onechooses to interpret it, is not validated by structuralism, but derives from theinternal reflection of a Levinas or a Kant. 33Habermas, by contrast, has no difficulty accounting for the normativestandpoint of his critique, since his hermeneutic perspective does notbracket subjectivity, but rather seeks to comprehend social life from within,the way it is experienced by everyday, speakers. In so doing, it tries to situateeven the agonistics of the strategic language game of manipulation and deceitagainst the backdrop of our tacit faith in the reciprocity of communication;for this game only plays on condition of their being a prior dispositiontoward communication, i.e., toward reaching agreement, or mutualunderstanding, over a common meaning in an unconstrained manner, withmutual trust and restraint. But as Habermas himself pointed out in hisdebate with Gadamer, this conception of language can neither be understoodin an ontological fashion, nor upheld as a goal of concrete political praxiswithout becoming ideological. The need to expose systemic distortions ofconsensual understanding generated within mass democracy and culturalimperialism requires an external critique of ideology, which, as Habermasnotes, suspends the communicative routine in a structuralist epoche. Thedifferend between Habermas and Lyotard is thus a differend internal to boththeir 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 arewhen, as Gadamer notes, we refuse to play the game. It's as if one were tocontradict oneself by adverting to the ideal presuppositions ofcommunication-trust, openness, and orientation toward reachingconsensus-in order to distrust, hold oneself in abeyance, and place oneself inopposition to the consensus gentium. Still, an injustice would be perpetrated ifwe were to insist otherwise, for if Lyotard has taught us anything, it is thatsilence, too, can be a form of integrity.


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302 Praxis InternationalNOTES

1. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 1986 Pacific Division Meeting of the AmericanPhilosophical Association. The author is especially grateful to his wife, Julia, and to Professor JosephPrahbu 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 callthemselves postmodernists or poststructuralists, or that the union of postmodernism and poststructuralism is unproblematic would be to gloss over subtle differences. For a discussion of thesedifferences see Fredric Jameson, "The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the PostmodernDebate" in New German Critique, 33 (Fall, 1984); Hal Foster, "(Post) Modern Polemics" NewGerman 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 andsubjectivism 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 byLyotard entitled, "Introduction a une etude du politique selon Kant." See Nancy Fraser's analysis ofthe decline of the center in "The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructingthe Political?" in New German Critique, 33 (Fall, 1984); and my essay, "The Retreat of the Political inthe Postmodern Age: Jean-Luc Nancy on Totalitarianism and Community," in Research inPhenomenology (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 isnot to be read, but to be seen; and ... this difference, and the immobile mobility which reveals it, iswhat is continually forgotten in the process of signification" (9). The difference between the sensibleand 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 ledhim to go beyond the negative politics of deconstructive criticism in the direction of affirming the playand intensification of forces. The consumate expression of this Nietzschean tendency, Economielibidinal (1974), seemed to not only affirm the primacy of the unconscious over the conscious, but alsodissolve reifying linguistic distinctions in the fluidity of an omnipresent libido, thus conclusivelybreaking with the poststructuralist privileging of language. For a good discussion of Lyotard's earlythought see L'Arc 64 (1976) and Peter Dews' review of Discours, figure in Diacritics (Fall, 1984). ForLyotard's own retrospective see the interview with Georges van den Abbeele in the same issue and AuJuste, 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 ofMinnesota Press, 1984), p. 8.6. See Niklas Luhmann and Jiirgen Habermas, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie. WasLeistet 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 thedirection of implementing experimental, interdisciplinary curricula which may produce disfunctionalside effects. It is this tension, diagnosed by Habermas, which appears to underly Lyotard's convictionthat the principle of performativity leads to its own surpassing.8. Lyotard remarks that the functionalistic model has its basis in the French enlightenment while thecritical, or Marxist, model evolved from German Idealism. This does not alter the fact that orthodoxMarxist schools (as opposed to their revisionist counterparts in the West such as the Frankfurt Schoolor socialisme ou barbarie of which Lyotard himself was an active member from 1954 to 1969) havebeen 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 ofmeaning, truth, and legitimacy to efficiency which, owing to his suspicion of hermeneutics, Lyotarddoes 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 PraxisInternational 4: 1 (April, 1984), p. 33ff. Rorty strongly criticizes Lyotard's deduction-from the mere


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Praxis International 303fact of paralogy-of the absence of consensus as a goal of science and society. He also questionsLyotard'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 inCashinahua myth as a model, Lyotard lists five characteristics which serve to distinguish the narrativestructure of customary knowledge from the discursive structure of scientific truth. First, smallnarratives exemplify criteria of practical competence in the form of offering positve or negative rolemodels and "apprenticeships." Second, they comprise a greater variety of language games than theirscientific counterparts. Third, their transmission itself constitutes a social bond by replaying (orallyand 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 ofspeech and action take precedence over the conveyance of meaning. Finally, the timeless quality ofthese narratives (e.g., old proverbs, nursery rhymes, and repetitive rituals generally) means that theyhave no identifiable origin which might legitimate them.

12. AJ, p. 33-36, 71. However much Lyotard insists on the modern/postmodern distinction, heelsewhere 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 anycase, 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 LaFaculte de Juger (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1985). Nancy points out that Lyotard's principalmistake resides in trying to substitute plurality for totality in Kant's conception of an Idea, therebygiving 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-liberalinterest 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 strategiesof legitimation plays a crucial role in Lyotard's classification of the USSR under Stalin as terroristicrather than totalitarian. Revolutionary (or terroristic) regimes aim at realizing a future state ofemancipation. However, the emancipatory drive to eliminate particular interests (and whatever elseappears constraining and divisive) produces discord and instability. Consequently, such regimes endup 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 anarchyposed by emancipatory movements like Marxism. Consequently, they turn to the more stable,organic, and racially exclusive identities embedded in mythic traditions. This explains why, strictlyspeaking, only fascist regimes are totalitarian; the emancipation sought by Marxists is universal inscope 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 andauthority; rather, their distinctly modern, ideological cast is reflected in their attempt to establish auniversal world order based on racial hegemony. Capitalism, Lyotard now maintains, is neithertotalitarian nor terroristic, but is hegemonic in an entirely different sense in that it tends to replace themoral language constitutive of identity formation with the universal language of technologicaldomination, 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 ofthe 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 colornames by relations of sameness and difference and weakly determined with respect to the existing


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304 Praxis Internationaluniverse 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 fromdifferends 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 "Ithink" 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) iscompatible with the idea that silence itself is a phrase which pre-figures the transcendent limits ofphrasing. See Lyotard's discussion of the continuity between Discors, figure and Le Differend inDiacritics, p. 17.

20. DF, pp. 30--1, 127-9, 187-8. It must be added that the context cannot always be relied on to eliminateambiguity in ordinary language since there is no meaningful reality independent of the universepresented by a succession of phrases.21. DF, pp. 243-6, and I. Kant, "An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race ConstantlyProgressing" 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 thesufferings of the proletariat with the Idea of a revolutionary subject, and second, by identifying theproletariat 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 asevidenced in such expressions as "I am now lying" or "This sentence is false," was to deny them thestatus of being logically well-formed, or truth decidable. It later led to the distinction betweenlanguage and meta-Ianguage-a distinction often invoked by Lyotard to underline the differendwhich obtains whenever philosophy talks about ordinary language.24. For a helpful discussion of this side of Lyotard's thought, see David Carroll, "Rephrasing the Politicalwith 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 isalternately 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, andtheoretical reason (providing, respectively, schemas, types, and symbols), as a separate faculty in itsown right, but lacking a specific object or field, and as a kind of aesthetic philosophical reflectionwhich discovers analogicalLeitfaden knitting the disparate faculties together. As the critical tribune ofthe First Critique, judgment unproblematically rejects the opposing arguments of the mathematicalantinomies for applying the rules of the understanding, rightly applicable only to spatio-temporalphenomena, to things in themselves. The image of a neutral tribunal is more problematic in the caseof the dynamic antinomy of freedom and determinism, for here both sides lay just claim to the sameterritory 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 PraxisInternational, 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 ofmodernity the constitution of socio-cultural unity within which all the elements of daily life andthought would take their places as an organic whole? Or does the passage that has to be chartedbetween heterogeneous language games-these of cognition, of ethics, of politics belong to a differentorder from that? ... the first hypothesis, of Hegelian inspiration, does not challenge the notion of adialectically totalizing experience; the second is closer to the spirit of Kant's Critique ofJudgment, butmust be submitted, like the Critique, to that severe examination which postmodernity imposes on theEnlightenment, 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 (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1987).30. Lacoue-Labarthe points out ("Ou en etions nous," in La Faculte de Juger, p. 167) that HannahArendt also commits the same "fallacies" committed by Habermas in her lectures on Kant's politicalphilosophy. In particular, Lacoue-Labarthe objects to her use of Kant's aesthetics in developing a


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Praxis International 305model of political judgment and to her abiding faith in the possibility of a unified experience foundedon a common public space. This way of depicting Arendt's use of Kant, I believe, neglects the extentto which she herself questions the reliability of the politicallifeworld, and from precisely the samepostmodern point of view as that of Lyotard. In any case, Lacoue-Labarthe appears to agree withArendt (and, if one considers his most recent pronouncements on artistic truth, Habermas) on onedecisive point, namely, the urgency of raising the question of the lifeworld and with it, therelationship between art and politics that Heidegger had noted in his essay, "The Origin of the WorkofArt." Indeed, his conviction that art "mimetically" discloses the communal ground of experience ina manner evoking a deeper, ontological truth appears to be distinguished solely by its reference to thesublime rather than beautiful. See H. Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, edited byRonald 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 himand he does so in Kant's name" ("Jiirgen Habermas and Jean-Francois Lyotard: Postmodernism andthe Crisis of Rationality" in Philosophy and Social Criticism, Fall, 1984, p. 13).33. Even Lyotard acknowledges the inescapable circularity of the postmoden position, which mustpresuppose the idea of justice it seeks to vindicate (DF, p. 196).

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