Jean-François Lyotard's The Differend . . . << overview to chapter one >>
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C O N T E N T S : (1) Overview of The Differend (2) Tips for Reading The Differend (3) Structure of the Book (4) Preface: Reading Dossier (5) Chapter One: “The Differend” |
(1) Overview of The Differend:
Le Différend was published in 1983 (translated into English in 1988); it is his most notable and most challenging work. In it, he is seeking to understand “differends,” that is, irreconcilable conflicts, when and where they arise, in law, in grammar, in logic, in the history of philosophy, and in everyday life and speech. Accordingly, his writing is fragmentary and nonlinear; it embraces numerous styles and stylistic devices; it intersperses textual analyses of texts, mainly philosophical, but also legal and literary, amongst chapters broken into numbered and occasionally titled sections.
Lyotard is seeking the inexpressible; he will not resolve the conflicts, but will lay bare, express (albeit not answer) something about the inexpressible.
For Lyotard, the problem of witnessing is introduced by the provocative declaration: “You are informed that human beings endowed with language were placed in a situation such that none of them is now able to tell about it” (The Differend, §1).
This situation, wherein one finds testimony impossible, is a differend. A differend is an impasse to successful communication; it is an insurmountable gulf between heterogeneous phrase regimes that forbids the translation of one’s meaning into anything the other side could comprehend.
Lyotard’s most poignant example is the holocaust survivor whose testimony is illegitimated by a logical bind born from Robert Faurisson’s revisionist claim that his scientific research proves that there were no gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camps. The rules of this bind limit a truthful response to the objective demonstration of personal experience and therefore prohibit the living witness from testifying to her own death by gas. The vicious logic perpetrates a second wrong against the already-victim. Instead of dismissing historical revisionism as hate speech, criminal, or inhuman, Lyotard takes up the bind and endeavors to unravel it from within itself. To dismiss it without challenging it within its own framework would only bolster its power and falsely affirm its logic. Ultimately, the revisionist’s logic is shown to be constructed poorly but still significant in that it points beyond itself to the true challenge: that “Auschwitz” is an event of such proportion that it does exceed our capacity to encapsulate it. This example demonstrates the central challenge of his book, that is, the necessity of the address of the addressing all differends even as the possibility of bridging these impasses is likely to fail.
Lyotard defines the inexpressible as precisely that which must be expressed in the face of logic deeming it absurd and even in the face of its own impossibility.
Lyotard is seeking the inexpressible; he will not resolve the conflicts, but will lay bare, express (albeit not answer) something about the inexpressible.
For Lyotard, the problem of witnessing is introduced by the provocative declaration: “You are informed that human beings endowed with language were placed in a situation such that none of them is now able to tell about it” (The Differend, §1).
This situation, wherein one finds testimony impossible, is a differend. A differend is an impasse to successful communication; it is an insurmountable gulf between heterogeneous phrase regimes that forbids the translation of one’s meaning into anything the other side could comprehend.
Lyotard’s most poignant example is the holocaust survivor whose testimony is illegitimated by a logical bind born from Robert Faurisson’s revisionist claim that his scientific research proves that there were no gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camps. The rules of this bind limit a truthful response to the objective demonstration of personal experience and therefore prohibit the living witness from testifying to her own death by gas. The vicious logic perpetrates a second wrong against the already-victim. Instead of dismissing historical revisionism as hate speech, criminal, or inhuman, Lyotard takes up the bind and endeavors to unravel it from within itself. To dismiss it without challenging it within its own framework would only bolster its power and falsely affirm its logic. Ultimately, the revisionist’s logic is shown to be constructed poorly but still significant in that it points beyond itself to the true challenge: that “Auschwitz” is an event of such proportion that it does exceed our capacity to encapsulate it. This example demonstrates the central challenge of his book, that is, the necessity of the address of the addressing all differends even as the possibility of bridging these impasses is likely to fail.
Lyotard defines the inexpressible as precisely that which must be expressed in the face of logic deeming it absurd and even in the face of its own impossibility.
(2) Tips, Ideas, Questions ... to keep in mind when Reading
The Differend:
Write down every “definition” for seemingly important terms as you come across them.
Think about the following: Expression, description, definition, and formula.
Pay attention to how the books/selections are written.
- Compare the textual “definitions,” their in-text explanations, with dictionary-style definitions; note when there are similarities and differences. Note, too, how these in-text definitions can be very different, even opposing, for the same term, idea, or in the same work (e.g., in the dossier, he defines “differend” as “a case of conflict that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments” (xi), but then, in the first chapter, defines it as “the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. This state includes silence …” (§22)--are these compatible, developmental, contrary, etc.?). Why is this? Are some wrong, some right? Can right and wrong coexist with conflicting definitions? What does this say about truth? About knowledge?
Think about the following: Expression, description, definition, and formula.
- Where do we get knowledge from and how to we express it? Are descriptions different from definitions, and definitions from formula? Are these explanations, or are they naming some thing? Is a name an explanation? What is the difference between what something is, and that it is, or how it is, or why it is? Do we create knowledge, or simply gather it? Is knowing something necessary for its expression? Can something be known but not capable of expression? Can it be, if it cannot be expressed?
- What is the dichotomy of knowing and feeling, of reason and passions, of reason and faith, of reason and belief? Is feeling a reliable source of knowledge? Is it a source at all? Must all passions be suffered? Can there be a suffering from knowledge? Is silence always a harm to expression?
Pay attention to how the books/selections are written.
- What is the author’s voice like?
- What does the narrative look like? (i.e., is there linear argument, circular argument, debate, streams of consciousness, is the thought scattered, logically following, is it like a mystery novel, a detective novel, is it deductive, is it poetic, etc.?)
- What literary devices are employed?
- What is effective and what is not? Why do you think what you do here?
(3) Structure of the Book:
- Preface: Reading Dossier
- Seven Chapters: composed of non-linear narrative in numbered sections (in Result, also named), with frequent parenthetical cross-references to explanatory sections
- 1 The Differend
- 2 The Referent, The Name
- 3 Presentation
- 4 Result
- 5 Obligation
- 6 Genre, Norm
- 7 The Sign of History
- Within these seven chapters:
- Thirteen Notices: analytic excurses interspersed throughout text, offset by bold title and small text--The numbered sections for general, educated populate, but, “(Pour les Notices, un lecteur un peu plus professionnel)” (13)—this alteration suggests the naturalness of being able to switch between them, like the natural to phenomenological attitudes…:
- Protagoras
- Gorgias
- Plato
- Antisthenes
- Kant Notice 1
- Gertrude Stein
- Aristotle
- Hegel
- Levinas
- Kant Notice 2
- Kant Notice 3
- Declaration of 1789
- Cashinahua
- Kant Notice 4
- Thirteen Notices: analytic excurses interspersed throughout text, offset by bold title and small text--The numbered sections for general, educated populate, but, “(Pour les Notices, un lecteur un peu plus professionnel)” (13)—this alteration suggests the naturalness of being able to switch between them, like the natural to phenomenological attitudes…:
- English Translation includes glossary and indexes
- Note through the numbered sections Lyotard has parenthetical ‘sign posts’ that refer backwards or forwards in the text to where the immediate topic is dealt with, addressed, broached, etc.
(4) Preface: Reading Dossier [Fiche de lecture]:
A “preface” (from the Latin prae-, “before,” and –factum/-fari, “spoken or made,” and borrowed into English through the Old French in the 14th c. where is meant “that opening part of sung devotions) is typically an author’s ‘meta’ considerations: how or why did this book come to be; what are its methods or aims? It is interesting to think about whether Lyotard’s preface is one in this spirit.
A “dossier” is a bundle or collection of documents about something or someone (a natural history museum may have a dossier on ferns or a stegosaurus find; a security agency may have a dossier on a political activist). The French, fiche de lecture, names what we might call an “executive summary” or our anglicized adoption of the French term “précise,” which is longer than an abstract, but shorter than a full summary, something that focuses upon delineating and explicating the main concepts within a work.
While thinking about the nature and role of this preface, consider the parts that form the whole of this dossier: Title; Object; Thesis; Question; Problem; Stakes; Context; Pretext; Mode; Genre; Style; Reader; Author; Address.
Note the number of definitions provided, whether you gather a sense of what the whole will be about, and what additional meaning-rich insights you can pick up about the book, its author, the topic, etc.
See here for a growing list of definitions.
I intend the following to serve just two purposes: highlight a few really important ideas, and supplement, like an encyclopedia, some explanations or contexts behind certain allusions, phrases, or things named.
A “dossier” is a bundle or collection of documents about something or someone (a natural history museum may have a dossier on ferns or a stegosaurus find; a security agency may have a dossier on a political activist). The French, fiche de lecture, names what we might call an “executive summary” or our anglicized adoption of the French term “précise,” which is longer than an abstract, but shorter than a full summary, something that focuses upon delineating and explicating the main concepts within a work.
- See here, if so desired, for more than you really want to know about the parts of a book.
While thinking about the nature and role of this preface, consider the parts that form the whole of this dossier: Title; Object; Thesis; Question; Problem; Stakes; Context; Pretext; Mode; Genre; Style; Reader; Author; Address.
Note the number of definitions provided, whether you gather a sense of what the whole will be about, and what additional meaning-rich insights you can pick up about the book, its author, the topic, etc.
See here for a growing list of definitions.
I intend the following to serve just two purposes: highlight a few really important ideas, and supplement, like an encyclopedia, some explanations or contexts behind certain allusions, phrases, or things named.
Title:
Note the suggested thesis of the book: “… that a universal rule of judgment between heterogeneous genres is lacking in general” (xi). This corresponds to the definition of “differend,” and could also serve as a definition for the “incommensurable,” something that cannot be judged according to the standards of something else (e.g., I cannot legitimately judge Sally by the standards I use to judge a tasty apricot; religion cannot be judged by the standards used to judge mathematical equations, etc.).
“As distinguished from a litigation, a differend [différend] would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments” (xi).
The reading dossier begins with a definition of the work’s title, “differend.” The definition starts concisely only to unravel and undermine its intention to be a definition by the interspersion of six disjointed parenthetical comments. The first two parentheticals “(at least)” broaden his claims, while the other four seem to clarify his points. The clarification, however, actually only succeeds in further multiplication of their meanings through specific cases (xi). It is unclear if these additions are to offer value judgments or preferences on the part of the author, to clarify his meaning or purposely to obscure it. His sardonic wit, throughout, further makes us question how we are to interpret his “definitions.” This insight hearkens “hermeneutics:”
Hermeneutics: Lyotard’s incessant allusions and tone suggest his invitation to hermeneutical engagement within this dossier. Hermeneutics, whether concerned with the Talmud, the Bible, Plato, or the human person as text, teaches methods of discernment of (often esoteric) messages through the careful consideration of etymology, tone, use of symbol, and consideration of form.
Within Lyotard, rhetorical questions become indirect commands to read through, in, around, and behind his words because it is this very activity that will be the object of investigation. The indirection is accentuated by a disdainful tease that the reading dossier “will allow the reader, if the fancy grabs him or her, to ‘talk about the book’ without having read it” (xiv). His jest succeeds if it makes us aware that there is something in us that desires to be able to “talk about” things without the labor of “working through” them.
This hermeneutical style and tone suggests that this Reading Dossier is far from a typical preface that offers straightforward definitions and clear summations. In a way, its seeming clarity that reveals ambiguity forces the reader’s presumptions to be put into question and asks the reader to ‘work through’ the ideas. This inversion of a reader’s passive receipt of an author’s ideas to the reader’s active pursuit with the author to try to understand something very much is what postmodernism aims to do in the uncovering and addressing of grand narratives. His evasion of a transcribable, linear narrative in favor of one that weaves divergent, sometimes contradictory voices from the canon with echoes from parasitic narratives that we already hold, pointedly reveals the inherent paradoxes and problems yet necessity of all narratives. For Lyotard, the only possible way to re-write modernity is to explore the “senseless” as the only new possibility for “sense.” This re-writing may be a means by which he can give voice to the silenced victim.
Note the suggested thesis of the book: “… that a universal rule of judgment between heterogeneous genres is lacking in general” (xi). This corresponds to the definition of “differend,” and could also serve as a definition for the “incommensurable,” something that cannot be judged according to the standards of something else (e.g., I cannot legitimately judge Sally by the standards I use to judge a tasty apricot; religion cannot be judged by the standards used to judge mathematical equations, etc.).
“As distinguished from a litigation, a differend [différend] would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments” (xi).
The reading dossier begins with a definition of the work’s title, “differend.” The definition starts concisely only to unravel and undermine its intention to be a definition by the interspersion of six disjointed parenthetical comments. The first two parentheticals “(at least)” broaden his claims, while the other four seem to clarify his points. The clarification, however, actually only succeeds in further multiplication of their meanings through specific cases (xi). It is unclear if these additions are to offer value judgments or preferences on the part of the author, to clarify his meaning or purposely to obscure it. His sardonic wit, throughout, further makes us question how we are to interpret his “definitions.” This insight hearkens “hermeneutics:”
Hermeneutics: Lyotard’s incessant allusions and tone suggest his invitation to hermeneutical engagement within this dossier. Hermeneutics, whether concerned with the Talmud, the Bible, Plato, or the human person as text, teaches methods of discernment of (often esoteric) messages through the careful consideration of etymology, tone, use of symbol, and consideration of form.
Within Lyotard, rhetorical questions become indirect commands to read through, in, around, and behind his words because it is this very activity that will be the object of investigation. The indirection is accentuated by a disdainful tease that the reading dossier “will allow the reader, if the fancy grabs him or her, to ‘talk about the book’ without having read it” (xiv). His jest succeeds if it makes us aware that there is something in us that desires to be able to “talk about” things without the labor of “working through” them.
- (“Working through” can be read as a translation of Durcharbeitung, a psychoanalytic term that is a methodological command for an analyst to pay equal attention to all phrases the patients uttered, discriminating against none, no matter how seemingly inconsequential they may sound. Lyotard uses this term and idea in explaining the “re-” of “re-writing modernity,” which is a name he suggests to replace “postmodernism.” He says this “re-” is not a return to an origin but is better compared to the Freudian Durcharbeitung, a “working through,” “a work of thinking the meanings or events that are hidden not only in prejudices but also in projects, programs, prospects and the like, that are concealed even in the propositions or purposes of a psychoanalysis” (Lyotard, “Re-Writing Modernity,” 4).)
This hermeneutical style and tone suggests that this Reading Dossier is far from a typical preface that offers straightforward definitions and clear summations. In a way, its seeming clarity that reveals ambiguity forces the reader’s presumptions to be put into question and asks the reader to ‘work through’ the ideas. This inversion of a reader’s passive receipt of an author’s ideas to the reader’s active pursuit with the author to try to understand something very much is what postmodernism aims to do in the uncovering and addressing of grand narratives. His evasion of a transcribable, linear narrative in favor of one that weaves divergent, sometimes contradictory voices from the canon with echoes from parasitic narratives that we already hold, pointedly reveals the inherent paradoxes and problems yet necessity of all narratives. For Lyotard, the only possible way to re-write modernity is to explore the “senseless” as the only new possibility for “sense.” This re-writing may be a means by which he can give voice to the silenced victim.
Object & Thesis:
“The only one [object] that is indubitable, the phrase, because it is immediately presupposed. (To doubt that one phrases is still to phrase, one’s silence makes a phrase)” (xi).
Consider “Phrase” to be a technical term (working from ancient to contemporary linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language philosophy, and his contemporary post-structuralists like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, etc.), perhaps most succinctly generalized as an “expression of meaning.” As the above quote’s parenthetical suggests, a “phrase” is not just a linguistic oral utterance aimed at communication. There are innumerable phrases and such are neither merely formal sentences nor clauses of words; they go beyond language, narrowly understood, to include other speech acts, silence, gestures. Some of his examples include: “It’s daybreak; Give me the lighter; Was she there? … ax2+bx+c=0; Ouch! … This is not a phrase; Here are some phrases” (§109) and, the “raised tail of a cat” (§123).
A phrase operates by rules and each institutes a “phrase universe:” the addressor, addressee, sense (meaning), and referent (object the meaning is about). Due to this universe, every phrase calls forth other phrases, hence, the phrase universe is akin to Wittgenstein’s “context” established by “family resemblances” between “language games,” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “semiotic systems,” the structuring networks forged incessantly by phrases; all of these indicate the theoretical containment around their respective signs or phrases.
Within phrase universes, there are elements of meaning un-phrased or unexpressed; these are what Lyotard calls “differends,” Wittgenstein points to as “that of which we must not speak,” and parallel Deleuze and Guattari’s potentially inexpressible “form of content” they broach when discussing the difficulty of interiorized validation: “A regime of signs constitutes a semiotic system. But it appears difficult to analyze semiotic systems in themselves: there is always a form of content that is simultaneously inseparable from and independent of the form of expression …” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 111).
“The only one [object] that is indubitable, the phrase, because it is immediately presupposed. (To doubt that one phrases is still to phrase, one’s silence makes a phrase)” (xi).
Consider “Phrase” to be a technical term (working from ancient to contemporary linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language philosophy, and his contemporary post-structuralists like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, etc.), perhaps most succinctly generalized as an “expression of meaning.” As the above quote’s parenthetical suggests, a “phrase” is not just a linguistic oral utterance aimed at communication. There are innumerable phrases and such are neither merely formal sentences nor clauses of words; they go beyond language, narrowly understood, to include other speech acts, silence, gestures. Some of his examples include: “It’s daybreak; Give me the lighter; Was she there? … ax2+bx+c=0; Ouch! … This is not a phrase; Here are some phrases” (§109) and, the “raised tail of a cat” (§123).
A phrase operates by rules and each institutes a “phrase universe:” the addressor, addressee, sense (meaning), and referent (object the meaning is about). Due to this universe, every phrase calls forth other phrases, hence, the phrase universe is akin to Wittgenstein’s “context” established by “family resemblances” between “language games,” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “semiotic systems,” the structuring networks forged incessantly by phrases; all of these indicate the theoretical containment around their respective signs or phrases.
Within phrase universes, there are elements of meaning un-phrased or unexpressed; these are what Lyotard calls “differends,” Wittgenstein points to as “that of which we must not speak,” and parallel Deleuze and Guattari’s potentially inexpressible “form of content” they broach when discussing the difficulty of interiorized validation: “A regime of signs constitutes a semiotic system. But it appears difficult to analyze semiotic systems in themselves: there is always a form of content that is simultaneously inseparable from and independent of the form of expression …” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 111).
Question:
“A phrase ‘happens’” (xii). “Happens” = “Ereignis”
Ereignis: German term used most infamously by Martin Heidegger, the student of Husserl, who founded Phenomenology; it is widely translated as: event, occurrence, presencing, enowning, appropriation, “propriating” (to endeavor an allusion to “proprietary” or echo the French propre (own) in order to incorporate the sense of ownness born from the eigen into the idea of an event). In Heidegger’s phenomenology and later existentialism, Ereignis is a nebulous, yet central, idea: not a straightforward noun, something one could ostensively indicate, but both an activity and site, a something and nothing at once that relates intimately to Being and to language.* The two most notable examples of such “events” or “happenings” are: death (presence and deferral by which we define our Being) and the call of conscience (unspoken call, from us, calls us back to reflect upon ourselves)—both examples are non-specific indications that solicit our response; they are a coming to presence and that which presences, a revelation and withdrawal of Being.
- * “… the human is indeed in its essence linguistic. The word ‘linguistic’ as it is here used means: having taken place (ereignet) out of the speaking of language. What has thus taken place (das so Ereignete), the essential being of man, has been brought into its own (Eigenes) by language so that it remains given over or appropriated (übereignet) to the essential nature of language” (Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, quoted in John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 166).
Problem:
“Given 1) the impossibility of avoiding conflicts (the impossibility of indifference) and 2) the absence of a universal genre of discourse to regulate them … to find, if not what can legitimate judgment (the ‘good’ linkage), then at least how to save the honor of thinking” (xii).
The wrong will always follow the differend and differends, conflicts, are impossible to avoid. Given this, if we cannot find the “good” linkage (to erase the differend), then can we find how to save the honor of thinking?
Consider the following ideas: the productivity of failure; spiritual exercise; a therapy of incessant critique.
Stakes:
Notice the variety: “To convince,” “To refute,” “To defend and illustrate,” and the final one: “To bear witness to the differend” (xiii).
Note: the author is also a reader here engaged by these stakes.
Context:
“Linguistic turn:” Names a moment in the history of philosophy that is typically used to designate when “Modern Philosophy” became “Contemporary Philosophy.” After the peak of Modernity’s system-building (e.g., Kant and Hegel), there was a reawakened interest in looking at the details, the formative structures, the effects and affects of language and meaning. As this “linguistic turn” inaugurates contemporary philosophy, which also inaugurates a massive split between “Analytic” and “Continental” schools of thought, “linguistic turn” equally names both schools: the analytics took the turn into linguistics and logic, the continentals took it into the meaning of lived-experience. Dominating philosophy for almost a full century (the 20th), Lyotard is issuing a call to arms: “The time has come to philosophize” (xiii).
Notice the variety: “To convince,” “To refute,” “To defend and illustrate,” and the final one: “To bear witness to the differend” (xiii).
Note: the author is also a reader here engaged by these stakes.
Context:
“Linguistic turn:” Names a moment in the history of philosophy that is typically used to designate when “Modern Philosophy” became “Contemporary Philosophy.” After the peak of Modernity’s system-building (e.g., Kant and Hegel), there was a reawakened interest in looking at the details, the formative structures, the effects and affects of language and meaning. As this “linguistic turn” inaugurates contemporary philosophy, which also inaugurates a massive split between “Analytic” and “Continental” schools of thought, “linguistic turn” equally names both schools: the analytics took the turn into linguistics and logic, the continentals took it into the meaning of lived-experience. Dominating philosophy for almost a full century (the 20th), Lyotard is issuing a call to arms: “The time has come to philosophize” (xiii).
Pretext:
This identifies the two most dominate thinkers/works influencing and motivating his book:
This identifies the two most dominate thinkers/works influencing and motivating his book:
- Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (aka. 3rd Critique) (and “4th,” an unofficial label designating his historical-political texts)
- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804, German philosopher); his invaluable contribution to Western Philosophy is his Critical Project:
- His First question, in his Critique of Pure Reason (written in 1781 and revised in 1787, aka 1st Critique), is whether metaphysics is possible, which is to ask, are a priori synthetic judgments valid?
- His Second work is his Critique of Practical Reason (1788, aka 2nd Critique) and represents his application of his examination of reason to the practical realm: ethics. His ethical system is a deontological (duty-based) meta-ethics (seeking universals, not particulars) that argues that morality is formed from a rational foundation called the “Categorical Imperative,” which is a rational, universal, duty-based demand deducible by the mind alone; morality is obedience to this imperative while immorality violates it and is, thus, irrational. It is duty-based in that moral content is not chosen by potential consequences (i.e., we are not nice to our siblings in order to get a cookie and avoid being sent to our room; instead, we are nice because it is universally, rationally, morally right, thus, it is our moral duty). There are three formulations of the Categorical Imperative:
- 1) Act on the maxim that you will to be a universal law (i.e., act in such a way as if the maxim that guides your action will become a universal law of nature).
- 2) Act so that you treat all humanity always as an end, never merely as a means.
- 3) Act as if you were a law-making member of a universal kingdom of ends (i.e., a hypothetical perfect, moral society, and our goal to create).
- 1) Act on the maxim that you will to be a universal law (i.e., act in such a way as if the maxim that guides your action will become a universal law of nature).
- His Third Critique is his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), about aesthetics (study of art and beauty) and teleology (study of ends, final causes, goals). His aesthetics divide the Beautiful from the Sublime; the former is judged by four conditions: Disinterest, Universality, Purposiveness without purpose, and Necessity. The Sublime is that experience wherein our ability to intuit is overwhelmed by magnitude or force; we then conquer over the sublime when we can think it. The second half of his work is concerned with teleology.
- His First question, in his Critique of Pure Reason (written in 1781 and revised in 1787, aka 1st Critique), is whether metaphysics is possible, which is to ask, are a priori synthetic judgments valid?
- The hinge of these three works is the faculty of judgment. In Understanding, explored in the 1st Critique, judgments are determinate (has concept to subsume particulars under); in Reason, explored in the 2nd and 3rd Critiques, judgments are reflective (has no full concept).
- So, how does Judgment judge without a concept? Does Reflective Judgment give itself an a priori principle? YES—it gives itself an a priori principle via Reason of the Purposiveness of Nature, which can be represented via Aesthetic or Teleological Judgments (which are explored in the 3rd Critique):
- Aesthetic Judgments: Accordance of Form (related by imagination) to the Cognitive Faculties; Form is considered a ground of pleasure from the representation.
- Teleological Judgments: Accordance of Form with the possibility of the thing-itself; the Thing is represented by form to be fulfilling an End or Purpose of nature.
- The a priori regulative concept of the Purposiveness of Nature connects nature (1st Critique) with freedom (2nd Critique). The 3rd Critique, then, is the hinge for his whole philosophical system of everything.
- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804, German philosopher); his invaluable contribution to Western Philosophy is his Critical Project:
- Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (plus posthumous works)
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (b. 1889, Vienna; d. 1951, Cambridge, England) is a monumental figure for both analytic and Continental philosophy, and interpreted dramatically differently (almost always) by the two sides. His PI is a revolutionary book; breaking from the intense logical form of his early work (Tractatus), it works almost aphoristically through numbered sections to build a damning critique of all previous philosophy of language. Notably, it identifies meaning as operative under even the most basic or primitive language systems, which destroys the ideas of both universal ideal languages and wholly constructed private languages, while also destroying any idea of one-to-one correspondences between words and meanings (i.e., “red” = the color/the visible light with an approximate wavelength of 650 nm/etc.), thereby invalidating pure objective origins for language and further liberating language from the conceptual binds such correspondence consequentially imposed upon it by the competing schools of behaviorism and psychologism that gave opposite origins and means for the expression of knowledge.
- See here for more on the philosophy of language that serves as background to Lyotard’s work.
Style:
Lyotard (as “A,” the Author) writes that his “ideal is to attain a zero degree style [le degré zéro du style] and for the reader to have the thought in hand, as it were” (xiv).*
What is a “zero degree” style? This is a vague concept, although most of its definitions would suggest that Lyotard struggles to or out rightly fails in attaining his ideal.
Does “zero degree” mean:
He notes, “There sometimes ensues a tone of wisdom, a sententious one, which should be disregarded” (xiv) which hearkens Socrates’ remark in the Apology that he will speak in his trial the way that he speaks all the time (i.e., not in the language of the courts—granted, it was precisely the way he spoke all the time that landed in on trial in the first place).
Lyotard (as “A,” the Author) writes that his “ideal is to attain a zero degree style [le degré zéro du style] and for the reader to have the thought in hand, as it were” (xiv).*
- * Note the striking similarity to Kierkegaard’s pedagogic use of “A” as “Author” in Either/Or, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Further, while “A.” is convention for designating “Author,” it is also worth smirking a little that Lyotard is not using his own name or speaking in the position of authority (the first person), he who will go on to speak much about the witness who is forbidden to speak as witness, and how (thanks to Heidegger) we can conceive of this as robbing a person of their being, for humans are the rational animals, the animals with logos, the word, the capacity to speak.
What is a “zero degree” style? This is a vague concept, although most of its definitions would suggest that Lyotard struggles to or out rightly fails in attaining his ideal.
Does “zero degree” mean:
- A “deconstructing” style, taking apart arguments, i.e., careful textual analysis, hermeneutics, Plato’s dialogues, defined in Aristotle’s De Interpretatione and elaborated in his Poetics and Rhetoric, and codified into theory through medieval Biblical analysis? If this is Lyotard’s goal, he achieves it. His critical reading of texts is superior.
- However, “deconstructed” can also designate the Heideggerian “destroyed” text, wherein he tries to erase the signification of words by printing “Being” or replacing it with only an ellipsis. This model is only accurate for Lyotard if the destroyed is not the signification of words but their grammar’s inherent tendency to fictionalize through linear narrative.
- Or, “deconstructed” can mean already-taken-apart, that is, a minimalist work. If so, Lyotard’s profound clutter of allusions and references undermines his intention. The density of his excurses appears to be the opposite of the minimalist style, say, of Beckett.
- (Only a highly sympathetic reading of minimalism, i.e., sparse prose or visual emptiness let us grasp an excess of meaningful density, would permit this designation for Lyotard’s work.
- What is minimal in his book is connection; in content, this lack is between topics, in form, it is between sections and excurses. Neither a tone of authorial opinion nor form of logical argument guides the interconnection between his many topics. As is the case of a minimalist book or painting, this absence can be conceived as pregnant: simultaneous with a discernment of its barrenness is the appearance of one’s own prejudices and interpretations pasted onto his richly blank text).
He notes, “There sometimes ensues a tone of wisdom, a sententious one, which should be disregarded” (xiv) which hearkens Socrates’ remark in the Apology that he will speak in his trial the way that he speaks all the time (i.e., not in the language of the courts—granted, it was precisely the way he spoke all the time that landed in on trial in the first place).
Reader & Author:
The Reader: a philosophical one: i.e., one not “done with language” or out to “gain time.” The Notices require a more professional one.
The Author (“A”): fearful of being tedious.
Address:
A sardonic antipathy to the future! “So, in the next century there will be no more books. It takes too long to read, when success comes from gaining time” (xv).
“Despite every effort to make his thought communicable, the A. knows that he has failed, that this is too voluminous, too long, and too difficult” (xv).
We do not reflect these days (hearkens Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, preface, ‘we knowers have remained unknown to ourselves for too long’). “Reflection is not thrust aside today because it is dangerous or upsetting, but simply because it is a waste of time” (xv). “Reflection requires that you watch out for occurrences, that you don’t already know what’s happening. It leaves open the question: Is it happening? [Arrive-t-il?] It tries to keep up with the now [maintenir le maintenant] …”
Reflection’s contrast is the economic genre (what happens can only happen if its happening has already cancelled itself out--i.e., a book must sell out before it is put out).
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“[The author's] ideal is to attain a zero degree style [le degré zéro du style] and for the reader to have the thought in hand, as it were” (Lyotard, The Differend, xiv).
“Despite every effort to make his thought communicable, the A. knows that he has failed, that this is too voluminous, too long, and too difficult” (Ibid., xv). (image: Piet Mondrian, "Composition No 10," 1939-42) |
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(5) Chapter One: “The Differend:”
The first chapter of The Differend is entitled “The Differend” and seeks an elaboration of the differend’s conceptual function, which is as a failure of communication.
Robert Faurisson’s denial of the testimony about the death chamber from Holocaust survivors:
“You are informed that human beings endowed with language were placed in a situation such that none of them is now able to tell about it” (§1). This situation that renders one mute is the differend: “I would like to call a differend [différend] the case where the plaintiff [le plaignant] is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim [une victime]” (§12—this definition will become one amongst many).
Considering the differend in the legal notation of the double bind leads him to explore how such violates the principle of non-contradiction, that is, one of the three most basic laws of logical thought that says that contradictory statements cannot both be true and false at once. So, if A is true and its opposite is B, B cannot be true.
Then, he gives us two artistic Examples:
This expansive way of defining and explaining the differend reveals that Lyotard’s address to the historical revisionist is not going to be merely a juridical presentation of empirical counter evidence, but seek to tackle the underlying perplexity inherent in that state of prohibited language.
Robert Faurisson’s denial of the testimony about the death chamber from Holocaust survivors:
- Faurisson is described in Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s work, which Lyotard references, as “[p]ursuing his crusade—whose theme may be summarized as follows: the gas chambers did not exist because they can not have existed; they can not have existed because they should not have existed; or better still: they did not exist because they did not exist—Robert Faurisson has just published a new book.” A book that is “… neither more nor less mendacious and dishonest than the preceding ones” (Pierre Vidal-Naquet, On Faurisson and Chomsky, collected in Assassins of Memory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992; reprinted electronically at http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/VidalNaquet81b/).
“You are informed that human beings endowed with language were placed in a situation such that none of them is now able to tell about it” (§1). This situation that renders one mute is the differend: “I would like to call a differend [différend] the case where the plaintiff [le plaignant] is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim [une victime]” (§12—this definition will become one amongst many).
Considering the differend in the legal notation of the double bind leads him to explore how such violates the principle of non-contradiction, that is, one of the three most basic laws of logical thought that says that contradictory statements cannot both be true and false at once. So, if A is true and its opposite is B, B cannot be true.
- The legal framework is productive, but only one mode of interpretation; the following “Notices” elaborate the double bind of the wrong’s ancient history, and expose the:
- --paradoxical nature of the double bind that logic can force,
- --the ontological conclusions from the possibility of a witness giving testimony or not,
- --and the philosophical and political consequences of how and by which logic one speaks.
Then, he gives us two artistic Examples:
- (1) The example of an editor who points out that a masterpiece cannot be such if it has been rejected by all publishers, for then it would remain unknown (§3). The potential masterpiece, then, is silenced like the potential witness.
- (2) The example of the testimonial bind of a resident of the fictitious Ibansk, the land of Ivans, in the Kafkaesque novel, The Yawning Heights, by the Russian philosopher Alexander Zinoviev. This bind silences the witness because its premise, “either the Ibanskian witness is not a communist, or else he is,” is impossible to prove either way (§4). As Zinoviev’s character notes within this novel, “our life is made up of attempts to solve insoluble problems …” (Alexander Zinoviev, The Yawning Heights, trans. Gordon Clough (New York: Random House, 1979), 326). Lyotard notes that his communist nature renders a particularly deep differend because this object is not observable through concrete symptoms, like the presence of a virus in a body, or, directly, like a nebula in the sky. There is no established and consistent scientific method to deduce the communistic character of one’s nature (§5).
This expansive way of defining and explaining the differend reveals that Lyotard’s address to the historical revisionist is not going to be merely a juridical presentation of empirical counter evidence, but seek to tackle the underlying perplexity inherent in that state of prohibited language.
Protagoras Notice:
Sec. 1.
Protagoras: (ca. 480-411 bce) Protagoras of Abdera: a Pre-Socratic, known as one of the original or “Older Sophists.” Sophist: an expert in and teacher of rhetoric—given a dubious reputation by Plato, et al, for those with a somewhat unscrupulous interest in logical arguments and winning them more than for seeking truth.
Euathlus: Student of Protagoras. Protagoras, reputedly, was so confident in his teaching and skills of rhetoric that he only demanded fees from his students when they won contests in their debates (i.e., in legal cases).
The Paradox: Euathlus (E) had not paid Protagoras (P), and P demanded his fees. E argued that he had not yet won a debate, hence owes nothing. P argues that E owes him the money because, either: if P successfully wins the case that he is owed money, then he must be paid, or: if E successfully argues that he owes no money, then E wins the debate, thus owes him money.
Lyotard claims: “… the fable has a didactic [educational] value. It contains several paradoxes” (p.6).
“In its brachylogical conciseness, Protagoras’ reply transforms the alternative into a dilemma” (6)
Sec. 2.
The paradox rests on the fact that: A phrase must take itself as its referent: “I did not win, I say it, and in saying it I win” (6). Lyotard argues that P “confuses the modus (the declarative prefix: E says that) with the dictum, the negative universal that denotes a reality (E. did not win once)” (6). He notes that Bertrand Russell (analytic philosopher of logic/language) avoids this trick by the following addition: a proposition that refers to a totality of propositions cannot be included in that totality. So, here, that means that the proposition that is the verdict of the debate cannot be included in the debate that judges the totality of other arguments E has made. The reasoning is that its inclusion in the whole denies it the right to be the universal principle or rule by which they are judging.
So, a good logician rejects P’s form of argumentation. But, just because the logician despises this bad form of logic used, the sophist loves it—the sophist does not deny or ignore the principle of non-contradiction, including the verdict in the judgment, but “unveils” it, uses it to his benefit. Because, why not? The rule of judgment did not include the rule that the verdict could not be included in the debated cases. (The sophist laughs; the Ibansk cries; the puzzle maker laughs; the holocaust victim cries.) The point: Russell’s way of avoiding these cases is one set of rules that carefully defines the “logical genre of discourse” in terms of its specific goal (to decide the truth of a phrase). Protagoras’ rhetoric, however, plays by a different set of rules (perhaps one that makes the weaker argument the better in order to win, to persuade the other). This is a differend: they are both ‘speaking different languages’ or ‘playing by different rules.’
Sec. 3.
“The totality upon which the argument bears is serial …” (7). This explains the inclusion of the rule within the whole explained above.
Aorist (enikèsa): “the tense for the indeterminate” (7); an unqualified past tense of a verb (especially used in Ancient Greek) that has no reference to duration or an action’s completion.
Note how important time becomes here. The temporal dimension of meaning/language will be difficult and persistent throughout the book. The most important aspect right away is “now” (what has fascinated and perplexed philosophy throughout its history).
Sec. 4.
Seriality (in the second section) and the temporal deictic (in the third section) leads to this section’s idea on the ‘last’ (also see end of the fifth section). If something “last” is the synthesis of everything that comes before (e.g., a “conclusion” to a problem is the synthesis of its happening and unfolding events), is it or is it not part of the set (i.e., is a conclusion to a problem part of the components in a problem)? If so, refer back to Bertrand Russell’s “solution” to the paradox about payment. If not, how do we understand what a “conclusion” is/means divorced from its “problem?” If it is divorced from the problem, then the problem, considered as a set, has no end, no solution, no “last;” if there is no last to the problem, then we can only view the problem as ‘proposed’ and not ‘given.’
Kant’s KRV: This is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, or 1st Critique; see notes above for the Preface’s “Pretext” section.
Sec. 5.
Antistrephon: a figure of speech in classic Greek rhetorical strategy that declaims the opposition, that is, of ‘using an opponent’s words against him/her,’ but specifically in an ‘after the fact’ way, that is, I do not slyly anticipate an event when I do this (that would be prolepsis), but use information that has already happened to craft my antistrephon that answers to something yet to come or argue for something hoped for, e.g., a debater uses the evidence of her opponent in order to counter the opponent’s argument (i.e., the debater is not arguing by anticipating what the opponent will say, but using what s/he did say).
Lyotard follows this identification (“Protagoras’ argument is an antistrephon”) by saying “It is reversible” (8)—a common illustration of antistrephon is as a “boomerang,” what someone throws out turns around to come back and hit the thrower.
No last judgment: every phrase calls forth more phrases; there can be no last phrase. This will be an important idea throughout the text.
Sec. 1.
Protagoras: (ca. 480-411 bce) Protagoras of Abdera: a Pre-Socratic, known as one of the original or “Older Sophists.” Sophist: an expert in and teacher of rhetoric—given a dubious reputation by Plato, et al, for those with a somewhat unscrupulous interest in logical arguments and winning them more than for seeking truth.
- Protagoras is most notable for three positions: (1) that “man is the measure of all things,” (2) that he could make the “worse argument the better,” [later, Socrates is accused of such, re: Apology,] and (3) one cannot know if the gods exist or not.
- Although only a few fragments of this thought exist, as well as reports from others, his primary interest seems to be in questions of virtue (can it be taught?) and knowledge (what can we know and what can we doubt?).
- Following from his first notable position, Plato ascribes to Protagoras the belief of radical relativism—truth is determined subjectively, rather than it being something universal and/or objective (e.g., “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”).
Euathlus: Student of Protagoras. Protagoras, reputedly, was so confident in his teaching and skills of rhetoric that he only demanded fees from his students when they won contests in their debates (i.e., in legal cases).
The Paradox: Euathlus (E) had not paid Protagoras (P), and P demanded his fees. E argued that he had not yet won a debate, hence owes nothing. P argues that E owes him the money because, either: if P successfully wins the case that he is owed money, then he must be paid, or: if E successfully argues that he owes no money, then E wins the debate, thus owes him money.
Lyotard claims: “… the fable has a didactic [educational] value. It contains several paradoxes” (p.6).
“In its brachylogical conciseness, Protagoras’ reply transforms the alternative into a dilemma” (6)
- Brachylogical: the study of combining forms (Greek: Brakhus: short).
Sec. 2.
The paradox rests on the fact that: A phrase must take itself as its referent: “I did not win, I say it, and in saying it I win” (6). Lyotard argues that P “confuses the modus (the declarative prefix: E says that) with the dictum, the negative universal that denotes a reality (E. did not win once)” (6). He notes that Bertrand Russell (analytic philosopher of logic/language) avoids this trick by the following addition: a proposition that refers to a totality of propositions cannot be included in that totality. So, here, that means that the proposition that is the verdict of the debate cannot be included in the debate that judges the totality of other arguments E has made. The reasoning is that its inclusion in the whole denies it the right to be the universal principle or rule by which they are judging.
- E.g.: imagine a group of beauty contestants; we consider the legitimate judgment of who will be the winner of the contest to compare each contestant to the same external idea of beauty; we would consider it unjust to judge the winner by comparing each to contestant #5.
So, a good logician rejects P’s form of argumentation. But, just because the logician despises this bad form of logic used, the sophist loves it—the sophist does not deny or ignore the principle of non-contradiction, including the verdict in the judgment, but “unveils” it, uses it to his benefit. Because, why not? The rule of judgment did not include the rule that the verdict could not be included in the debated cases. (The sophist laughs; the Ibansk cries; the puzzle maker laughs; the holocaust victim cries.) The point: Russell’s way of avoiding these cases is one set of rules that carefully defines the “logical genre of discourse” in terms of its specific goal (to decide the truth of a phrase). Protagoras’ rhetoric, however, plays by a different set of rules (perhaps one that makes the weaker argument the better in order to win, to persuade the other). This is a differend: they are both ‘speaking different languages’ or ‘playing by different rules.’
Sec. 3.
“The totality upon which the argument bears is serial …” (7). This explains the inclusion of the rule within the whole explained above.
Aorist (enikèsa): “the tense for the indeterminate” (7); an unqualified past tense of a verb (especially used in Ancient Greek) that has no reference to duration or an action’s completion.
Note how important time becomes here. The temporal dimension of meaning/language will be difficult and persistent throughout the book. The most important aspect right away is “now” (what has fascinated and perplexed philosophy throughout its history).
- “Now:” a “temporal deictic:” Also see §§57-58; a “deictic:” something that designates reality, but lacks signification; it is a pure (lacking content) designation, i.e., “now” has meaning, you understand it, but, it has no concrete object (“now” is gone as soon as I say it; this “now” means the same as that “now,” but both are different, opposites, in fact, so how can they both truly be ‘now’?).
Sec. 4.
Seriality (in the second section) and the temporal deictic (in the third section) leads to this section’s idea on the ‘last’ (also see end of the fifth section). If something “last” is the synthesis of everything that comes before (e.g., a “conclusion” to a problem is the synthesis of its happening and unfolding events), is it or is it not part of the set (i.e., is a conclusion to a problem part of the components in a problem)? If so, refer back to Bertrand Russell’s “solution” to the paradox about payment. If not, how do we understand what a “conclusion” is/means divorced from its “problem?” If it is divorced from the problem, then the problem, considered as a set, has no end, no solution, no “last;” if there is no last to the problem, then we can only view the problem as ‘proposed’ and not ‘given.’
Kant’s KRV: This is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, or 1st Critique; see notes above for the Preface’s “Pretext” section.
Sec. 5.
Antistrephon: a figure of speech in classic Greek rhetorical strategy that declaims the opposition, that is, of ‘using an opponent’s words against him/her,’ but specifically in an ‘after the fact’ way, that is, I do not slyly anticipate an event when I do this (that would be prolepsis), but use information that has already happened to craft my antistrephon that answers to something yet to come or argue for something hoped for, e.g., a debater uses the evidence of her opponent in order to counter the opponent’s argument (i.e., the debater is not arguing by anticipating what the opponent will say, but using what s/he did say).
Lyotard follows this identification (“Protagoras’ argument is an antistrephon”) by saying “It is reversible” (8)—a common illustration of antistrephon is as a “boomerang,” what someone throws out turns around to come back and hit the thrower.
No last judgment: every phrase calls forth more phrases; there can be no last phrase. This will be an important idea throughout the text.
§§9-27 (pp.8-14):
The Notice’s investigation into paradox primes us for the text’s quick declaration that: “It is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong” (§9).
“Reality is the plaintiff’s responsibility”--cf., Aristotle’s Rhetoric 1402b24-5.
Another Paradox Develops:
§14: “‘The survivors rarely speak’ (no. 1). But isn’t there an entire literature of testimonies … ? --That is not it, though. Not to speak is part of the ability to speak, since ability is a possibility and a possibility implies something and its opposite.”
The Notice’s investigation into paradox primes us for the text’s quick declaration that: “It is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong” (§9).
- The Plaintiff: wronged and can show evidence of such;
- The Victim: has no means to prove the wrong;
- Why? Many reasons will come. But … think about the nature of a witness:
- “Witness,” from the Old English, wit, “knowledge;” thus, a witness is one with knowledge of something. Note how this sets up an intentional structure, “A knowledge OF something,” hence dictates a subject-object relationship; the meaning of each are as much required to validate the relation as the relation establishes the meaning of each (i.e., I must ‘know’ the “I” when I testify to “X;” I know X as that which is not-I; however, to be the “I” that is “witness,” I must know the “I” as consequent of the X; and, if “I” am a witness, but cannot validly testify to X, that invalidates my being an “I,” etc. ad infinitum--cf. the unusual ontological nature of the victim (§§15-16).
- Why? Many reasons will come. But … think about the nature of a witness:
“Reality is the plaintiff’s responsibility”--cf., Aristotle’s Rhetoric 1402b24-5.
- §11: example: drug dealer. Kafka warned us about this. It is impossible to establish one’s innocence, in and of itself. It is a nothingness” (§11).
Another Paradox Develops:
§14: “‘The survivors rarely speak’ (no. 1). But isn’t there an entire literature of testimonies … ? --That is not it, though. Not to speak is part of the ability to speak, since ability is a possibility and a possibility implies something and its opposite.”
- “POSSIBILITY:” leads to crucial difference between not being able to speak and not choosing to speak (“It would be absurd to suppose that human beings ‘endowed with language’ cannot speak in the strict sense, as is the case for stones” (§15)); however, the differences between possibility and necessity (again invoking the important negative/positive distinction)—“To be able to not speak” [negation] does not equal “not to be able to speak” [deprivation] (§14)—is a logical difference, and, think of the Sophist who laughs.
- (Lyotard links this vertigo of endless phrasing to the fear of death—recall the explanation of Ereignis, the event or occurrence, that Heidegger named as the call of conscience and death, etc.: in fear of death, we have great fear for the unknown to which we are directed every moment we live, yet unable to experience it and reflect back upon it so as to know one phrase, one truth, about it. For a phrase to be the last one, there must be another that declares it to be the end; for knowledge about X there must be a vantage point beyond X to be able to reflect upon it).
§18: Phrase Universe: the addressee and addressor should be thought of as instances presented by a phrase. This means that the addressee, to be, must be given as the addressee, and likewise for the addressor; they are what they do, something names them, thus, they must be what they are by their activity (done through a phrase) of addressing or being addressed. That is, the phrase does not exist as an independent between them, but is what comes from one and is received by the other.
Do we own phrases, or, do phrases happen (Ereignis) and present universes in which these four attributes are established? (This hearkens Heidegger and his engagement in the long debate, predominately in German Romanticism and its wake about whether we are masters of language or merely instruments for language to work through. Further, recall the Reading Dossier’s section “Title:” “but the very principle that one ought to treat a work as an object of ownership may constitute a wrong” and, in “Question:” “A phrase ‘happens.’” --So, we already have a hint of where he falls on this question of whether we own language or language owns us.) If one presumes this human ownership of language, then one must presume that humans own knowledge (possess it), and that they can communicate it (§20). This is a faulty view of language in most interpretations, as the existence of differends reveals.
This is no conclusion; it only gets us started by giving us a mission, an ‘obligation:’ to undo a differend, we must link to other families of phrases:
- The phrase situates them in a “phrase universe.” This phrase universe, then, includes:
- Addressee, Addressor, Referent (that which the phrase is about), and Sense (the meaning).
Do we own phrases, or, do phrases happen (Ereignis) and present universes in which these four attributes are established? (This hearkens Heidegger and his engagement in the long debate, predominately in German Romanticism and its wake about whether we are masters of language or merely instruments for language to work through. Further, recall the Reading Dossier’s section “Title:” “but the very principle that one ought to treat a work as an object of ownership may constitute a wrong” and, in “Question:” “A phrase ‘happens.’” --So, we already have a hint of where he falls on this question of whether we own language or language owns us.) If one presumes this human ownership of language, then one must presume that humans own knowledge (possess it), and that they can communicate it (§20). This is a faulty view of language in most interpretations, as the existence of differends reveals.
This is no conclusion; it only gets us started by giving us a mission, an ‘obligation:’ to undo a differend, we must link to other families of phrases:
- “To give the differend its due is to institute new addresses, new addressors, new significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim. This requires new rules for the formation and linking of phrases. No one doubts that language is capable of admitting these new phrase families or new genres of discourse. Every wrong ought to be able to be put into phrases. A new competence (or ‘prudence’) must be found” (§21).
- Note: this is one firm piece of text that suggests we CAN un-do differends by finding a new idiom, new rules, etc. Others suggest that they can never be undone, but we must try. The book may well have a tone that moves from optimism towards pessimism.
Which leads him to another definition of the Differend:
“What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them” (§22).
§25:
phrase universes in relation to silence:
Silence tells us nothing about which instance is negated; when the survivor is silent, we could deduce different interpretations (§26):
THUS, “The silence of the survivors does not necessarily testify in favor of the non-existence of gas chambers, as Faurisson believes or pretends to believe” (§27).
So!!! He has undone the legitimacy of the other’s position… but, this is just the negative denying what is, so, he needs to now establish the positive existence of it:
- “The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be” (§22). To which, he adds, “This state includes silence.” Silence “speaks;” it is a “negative phrase,” but it still calls to other phrases to link up with it. Often, the silent phrase indicates what we talk about as “feeling” rather than “knowing.”
“What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them” (§22).
- In Plato’s Apology, Socrates reveals that he does what he does, philosophy, his gad-fly-ness, because it is his divine mission … he is called by the gods to seek wisdom, that is, to seek that what he does not know … Here … note that Lyotard is positing philosophy’s mission as bearing witness to that which cannot be testified to (without bringing forth a wrong, bringing on silence):
- “In the differend, something ‘asks’ to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away” (§23). –this is like a call to arms!
- We are summoned to language and by language “to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute new idioms which do not yet exist” (§23).
§25:
phrase universes in relation to silence:
- Referent: what it is about, the case, ta pragmata
- Sense: what is signified about the case, der Sinn
- Addressee: that to which or addressed to which this is signified about the case
- Addressor: that ‘through’ which or in the name of which this is signified about the case
- Note: A phrase may include numerous of each of the four; it may also not note any of the four.
Silence tells us nothing about which instance is negated; when the survivor is silent, we could deduce different interpretations (§26):
- “…1) that the situation in question (the case) is not the addressee’s business (he or she lacks the competence, or he or she is not worthy of being spoken to about it, etc.);
- or 2) that it never took place (this is what Faurisson understands);
- or 3) that there is nothing to say about it (the situation is senseless, inexpressible);
- or 4) that it is not the survivor’s business to be talking about it (they are not worthy, etc.).
- Or, several of these negations together.”
THUS, “The silence of the survivors does not necessarily testify in favor of the non-existence of gas chambers, as Faurisson believes or pretends to believe” (§27).
- Note: here Lyotard has revealed at least four, and likely more, truths/definitions of the survivor’s silence—he has, in effect, done what Zeno does in multiplying the number of possible truths in order to undermine the position of one who thinks that they are holding the one, universal definition.
So!!! He has undone the legitimacy of the other’s position… but, this is just the negative denying what is, so, he needs to now establish the positive existence of it:
- “If one wishes to establish the existence of gas chambers, the four silence negations must be withdrawn: There were no gas chambers, were there? Yes, there were. –But, even if there were, that cannot be formulated, can it? Yes, it can. –But even if it can be formulated, there is no one, at least, who has the authority to formulate it, and no one with the authority to hear it (it is not communicable), is there? Yes, there is” (§27).
- This is the plan he must accomplish… he is only saying what it is, he must now try and produce the argument for each of those “yes’s”.
Gorgias Notice:
Gorgias, another Pre-Socratic (ca. 485-380 bce) and compatriot to Protagoras in the “Early Sophists.”
A master rhetorician, he either birthed or formalized paradoxologia, the use of paradox, and did so with a great poetic flourish. His writings are thought to demonstrate the rhetorical abilities and advantages of paradox, therefore they often support really absurd positions—thus, he leaves us more of an instruction manual for rhetoric than he does a body of doctrine (like Protagoras, he promoted a relativism, esp. re: value claims). He revealed the power of words to extend far beyond their definitions—essentially, he was speaking of the persuasion of language and means of propaganda.
Lyotard cites Gorgias’ On Not Being, which may be thought to actually promote an ontological theory rather than only a rhetoric, but it only exists via two paraphrases, one by Sextus Empiricus and another anonymous author (Lyotard uses both for his sources). Its main argument can be summarized in three points:
- 1) Nothing exists,
- 2) Even if something exist, nothing can be known about it, and
- 3) Even if something is known about it, its knowledge cannot be communicated.
Thus, we can believe that this theory (1) establishes Gorgias as a nihilist (from nihil, “nothing;” that he believe that nothing exists nor can be known) or (2) that it is like his rhetoric, and is a performative argument demonstrating a theory of knowledge (regardless of reality, to know and to communicate are dubious), or (3) that it is like his rhetoric because he is showing the most far fetched argument (i.e., the one our eyes deny) to be the strongest.
Regardless of its motive, this three-step is the sort of argument that Lyotard is exploring in The Differend and it is exploring being and non-being … precisely the question involved in asking about the existence of gas chambers, the nature of existence of the witness, and the existence of one who could say “yes” to the negations posed by the victim’s silence.
Gorgias operates in a way that is similar to Protagoras, by making one answer seem false by presenting contraries as equally potential answers, but, the latter sought to affirm a case, whereas the latter operates to deny a case. Gorgias is in the position of the defense and merely needs to negate what is posited. That is: The witness is in a position like one who must counter Gorgias’ three-step.
Gorgias’ argument: “Nothing is; and even if it is, it is unknowable; and even if it is and is knowable, it cannot be revealed to others” (p.14).
Gorgias’ (G) argument’s framework (taxis) relies upon concessions (“logical retreat”) from the other (X) (p.15):
- X says: there is something
- G says: there is nothing
- X says: there is something and something is apprehendable
- G says: if there were, it would not be apprehendable
- X says: there is something and something is apprehendable and this is communicable
- G says: [if there were, if it were apprehendable, still] it is not communicable (p.14-15).
Parallel to the KETTLE analogy (recorded in Freud):
- Plaintiff X claims: he lent an undamaged kettle to Gorgias and G returned it with a hole in it.
- The dialectical argument is as follows: dialectical: a back and forth, cyclic method of argumentation
- X: G borrowed K [kettle]
- G: Not borrow K
- X: borrowed K undamaged
- G: borrowed K with a hole in it
- X: borrowed K undamaged and returned K with hole
- G: returned K undamaged
Freud/Lyotard show this follows the same three-step and works by retreat:
- There is no reality (borrowed)
- Even if there is a reality (borrowed, not), it is not predicatable
- And if it is, its attribute (hole, no hole) cannot be shown
Lyotard notes for us to note that Gorgias is arguing for the defense: he must only negate X.
This method and argument is then applied to Parmenides’ thesis of Being:
- Conclusion: “It is possible… neither to be nor not to be” (p.15).
Reasoning:
- If not-being = not-being (i.e. Parmenides) as much as the existent,
- Then non-existent = non-existence as much as the existent = existent,
- So that actual things are, no more than they are not.
- But, then, if not-being is, its opposite, Being, is not.
- If not-being is, then being is not.
- If being is not not-being, it is because Being is not not-being and is only affirmed through a double negation.
- According to Lyotard, Gorgias anticipates Hegel’s argument in Science of Logic [Being is Becoming] and Hegel’s version is what Gorgias calls “neither being nor not-being.” But, Gorgias refuses a Self, like an Aristotelian god, outside of it all (absolute spirit, maybe?) (p.15).
Relation of Gorgias to Differend:
According to Lyotard, Gorgias’ argument does not refute Parmenides’ opening line (not-being is not being as being is being, given by a goddess), but ruin it by making that phrase into a family of phrases. [AND] He takes the ontology + poeisis of a goddess, a genre that is not competent to hear refutation, and treats her as dialectic.
Lyotard then re-refers to the scholar Barbara Cassin, who, he argues, takes the genre out of its rules and offers an original interpretation of a disputed phrase therein: “If nothing is therefore, then demonstrations sat everything without exception” (980a9; p.16) and lets us [read, with cynicism] have a new interpretation overall:
- “It is from this simultaneously nihilistic and logological standpoint that we receive and study the question of reality. Reality is not bestowed by some goddess at the tip of her index finger, it has to be ‘demonstrated,’ that is, argued and presented as a case, and, once established, it is a state of the referent for cognitive phrases. This state does not preclude that, simply put, ‘nothing is’” (p.16).
Like for Wittgenstein, color serves Gorgias as the paradigm for reality—neither seek any theory of color, but the relation of color to thought… how can we have a logic of color? Impossible! Essentially, Faurisson, et al, do something similar to reality: it refuses it to be that which may not be logically delineated by appealing to a very narrow argumentative set of rules OR (equally damning) lets it be that, only to undermine it by offering a very broad set of relativistic rules. Like “Catch 22:” Damned if you do and damned if you don’t!
§28-to the Plato Notice:
Between the Gorgias Notice and the Plato Notice, §§28-34 explores consensus and the impossibility of agreement: if we want to replace the silence in one or more of the four instances of the phrase universe with an affirmation and permit the witness to speak, how do we do it? Well, we need to get the two sides to agree upon a rule, that is, we must establish the reality of the referent (gas chambers).
The two sides must agree on what “gas chamber” means or refers to and then find the idiom that would point to it and link sense with that referent, because this is what the (scientific) cognitive genre demands in testimony. In §29, he explores if this really is what the genre calls for. In §30 he explores how validation differs between the cognitive and other genres. In §31 he pursues humanity and inhumanity, further demonstrating how dramatically the different genres address and evaluate the same things (as Aristotle begins his Categories, with defining equivocal: the same word with different meanings). The investigation into humanism is particularly pertinent because the book strains back and forth with humanistic impulses: we are called to act for the other by differends versus we must set aside prejudices and objectively take up and work through the revisionist logic; he hotly pursues and gives us hope of instituting a new idiom but also extinguishes our support for vengeance as somehow lawful; also, he pushes us to ask unpopular questions about inhumanity, banality of evil, the inevitability of failure, etc.
Then, continuing the issue of different regimens playing by different rules, §32 asks of verification--how do we know? And invokes “use,” which we remember from Wittgenstein—this has good and bad sides, the bad is when it invokes instrumentalism. To presume all is so structured presumes also an easy way out if we abide by the rules (we’ll see this again in §37). §33 introduces “bad faith” – if the revisionist is in bad faith, the historian cannot convince him gas chambers exist. §34 asks how do we know if the other is in bad faith? We cannot. We must just “play the game.” Then we move into the Plato Notice.
Here is some context for these sections:
Seeking validation reveals the cognitive genre of discourse, which leads us into science:
§29:
Is there really even any successful functioning of the ostensive phrase in the cognitive genre? Even in science? (He references Feyerabend’s Against Method ...
But, the cognitive genre is different than the scientific one, as Bruno Latour points out when he notes that the cognitive is more rhetorical than scientific ...
Between the Gorgias Notice and the Plato Notice, §§28-34 explores consensus and the impossibility of agreement: if we want to replace the silence in one or more of the four instances of the phrase universe with an affirmation and permit the witness to speak, how do we do it? Well, we need to get the two sides to agree upon a rule, that is, we must establish the reality of the referent (gas chambers).
The two sides must agree on what “gas chamber” means or refers to and then find the idiom that would point to it and link sense with that referent, because this is what the (scientific) cognitive genre demands in testimony. In §29, he explores if this really is what the genre calls for. In §30 he explores how validation differs between the cognitive and other genres. In §31 he pursues humanity and inhumanity, further demonstrating how dramatically the different genres address and evaluate the same things (as Aristotle begins his Categories, with defining equivocal: the same word with different meanings). The investigation into humanism is particularly pertinent because the book strains back and forth with humanistic impulses: we are called to act for the other by differends versus we must set aside prejudices and objectively take up and work through the revisionist logic; he hotly pursues and gives us hope of instituting a new idiom but also extinguishes our support for vengeance as somehow lawful; also, he pushes us to ask unpopular questions about inhumanity, banality of evil, the inevitability of failure, etc.
Then, continuing the issue of different regimens playing by different rules, §32 asks of verification--how do we know? And invokes “use,” which we remember from Wittgenstein—this has good and bad sides, the bad is when it invokes instrumentalism. To presume all is so structured presumes also an easy way out if we abide by the rules (we’ll see this again in §37). §33 introduces “bad faith” – if the revisionist is in bad faith, the historian cannot convince him gas chambers exist. §34 asks how do we know if the other is in bad faith? We cannot. We must just “play the game.” Then we move into the Plato Notice.
Here is some context for these sections:
Seeking validation reveals the cognitive genre of discourse, which leads us into science:
§29:
Is there really even any successful functioning of the ostensive phrase in the cognitive genre? Even in science? (He references Feyerabend’s Against Method ...
- see here for his own summary of this work: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/feyerabe.htm).
But, the cognitive genre is different than the scientific one, as Bruno Latour points out when he notes that the cognitive is more rhetorical than scientific ...
- (Lyotard cites an untranslated source, but here is a biographical sketch of him and his work with links to selections of his thought: http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/latour/index.html).
§30-31:
Differentiations between: “well-formed expression” and “meaningful phrase” (§30) reveal problems or impossibilities in translating between genres of discourse. However, he identifies the “restrictions” as actually opening up more possibilities for specification.
“Vidal-Naquet quotes Lucien Febvre quoting Cyrano de Bergerac: ‘We must not believe everything about a man, because a man can say everything. We must believe only what is human about him’ (1981: 93)” (§31).
Humanity and Inhumanity:
“The historian asks: ‘What is human? What impossible? The question we must answer is: Do these words still have a meaning?’ Shouldn’t we believe the inhumanity reported by testimonies of Auschwitz? --Inhuman means incompatible with an Idea of humanity. This sense [#1] is pertinent for the ethical, the juridical, the political, and the historical families of phrases, where this Idea is necessarily at stake. In cognitive phrases [sense #2], human predicated an event which relates to the human species, and for which cases can be shown. The victims, the executioners, and the witnesses at Auschwitz enter into the class of human beings; the messages we receive from them are meaningful and offer material for verification, even if they are incompatible with any Idea of humanity” (§31).
A more contemporary debate of humanism was between Heidegger and Sartre, specifically, and phenomenology versus existentialism more generally:
Consider his “Introduction: About the Human,” to his work The Inhuman: Reflections on Time:
Born out of this discussion, yet, standing as another variation to it: If inhuman is an opposite to human, the inhuman must be understandable. But, do we understand inhumanity? Is not inhumanity that which makes us affirm what is human and how we cannot fathom any human doing otherwise?
Recall Hannah Arendt’s remark that things like the Nuremberg Trials revealed the banality of evil … This phrase is a gesture towards the genuine differend the holocaust points to … how can that soft spoken German man, that good father, that loving husband assist in the torture and clinical eradication of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of human beings, of men, women, and children? How is the perpetrated of such acts not a demon incarnate?
Differentiations between: “well-formed expression” and “meaningful phrase” (§30) reveal problems or impossibilities in translating between genres of discourse. However, he identifies the “restrictions” as actually opening up more possibilities for specification.
“Vidal-Naquet quotes Lucien Febvre quoting Cyrano de Bergerac: ‘We must not believe everything about a man, because a man can say everything. We must believe only what is human about him’ (1981: 93)” (§31).
- First, note how Lyotard says this: Vidal-Naquet, the historian who introduces the problem of Faurisson, quotes Lucien Febvre, another French historian who fully embraced modernism and contextualized all his history against the style of his day, who quotes Cyrano de Bergerac, the drama writer known for the large nose and agility in sword duels who was often the subject of other fictionalized or biographically based dramas …
- Second, now direct attention to the content: what is the distinction he is drawing our attention towards?
Humanity and Inhumanity:
“The historian asks: ‘What is human? What impossible? The question we must answer is: Do these words still have a meaning?’ Shouldn’t we believe the inhumanity reported by testimonies of Auschwitz? --Inhuman means incompatible with an Idea of humanity. This sense [#1] is pertinent for the ethical, the juridical, the political, and the historical families of phrases, where this Idea is necessarily at stake. In cognitive phrases [sense #2], human predicated an event which relates to the human species, and for which cases can be shown. The victims, the executioners, and the witnesses at Auschwitz enter into the class of human beings; the messages we receive from them are meaningful and offer material for verification, even if they are incompatible with any Idea of humanity” (§31).
- Humanism: often, this designates the intellectual, literary, and scientific thought from the 14th c. to 16th c. that modeled itself after the intellectual and cultural productions of antiquity. Classical training (i.e., the “humanities”), they proposed, could make a perfect human (their counterpoint, that to which they were reacting was Scholasticism, a predominately Christian rationalism, see here for information on that movement). The medieval Church used the classics as a foundation for their thought and as textbooks in their education (as pedagogical works), they considered its attachment to worldliness to be an inducement to sin (i.e., one of Saint Augustine’s many definitions of sin as longing for things that can be taken away from one rather than eternal things). In contrast, the humanists use the classics as a model demonstrating the worldliness to which the educated person should aspire and, in relation, the value placed upon the worldly connection of humanity. They emphasize the value of the human and seek to study what is human about the human. Humanism persists today with these general aims, yet often veers from the foundation in the classics (religious humanism and secular humanism counters the Church’s authoritarianism via the same basic means but to opposing ends, political humanism often rejects a specific value of the human, while embracing its general value, etc.).
A more contemporary debate of humanism was between Heidegger and Sartre, specifically, and phenomenology versus existentialism more generally:
- One would presume that ontology is humanism since one study’s being and the other existence. However, Sartre’s supposed equation of these studies angered Heidegger who insisted that his phenomenological ontology was seeking the essential traits of Being itself as opposed to the specific traits of beings in the world. While his study of Being was embodied and engaged in the world, it was not individual beings but the essence that makes all those beings be Being. (Think in terms of the linguistically and theoretically implied differences between Being and beings). Sartre’s existentialism was humanism; Heidegger’s philosophy was not.
- Heidegger, like Lyotard, was seeking a universal that could be applicable across many different particulars. But, Lyotard’s employment of Heidegger, however, is what the latter would consider blasphemy; most basically, it comes down to the same charge that Heidegger held against Sartre: you make Being into beings. For Lyotard, the only way that it works is if we acknowledge the inseparability of Being and beings.
- But, while Lyotard is promoting a humanistic position and shows its impulses by such things as saying that phrases call to us, differends obligate our involvement in trying to resolve them, no matter how absurd, etc., but, he would hesitate at the term “humanism.” He is not really doing a humanism. He is doing something more primary, something that rests under the consideration of humanity and makes it possible.
Consider his “Introduction: About the Human,” to his work The Inhuman: Reflections on Time:
- “Humanism administers lessons to ‘us’ (?). In a million wars, often mutually incompatible. Well founded (Apel) and non founded (Rorty), counterfactual (Habermas, Rawls) and pragmatic (Searle), psychological (Davidson) and ethico-political (the French neo-humanists). But always as if at least man were a certain value, which has no need to be interrogated. Which even has the authority to suspend, forbid interrogation, suspicion, the thinking which gnaws away at everything.
- What value is, what sure is, what man is, these questions are taken to be dangerous and shut away again pretty fast. It is said that they open the way to ‘anything goes’, ‘anything is possible’, ‘all is worthless’. Look, they add, what happens to the ones who go beyond this limit: Nietzsche was taken hostage by fascist mythology, Heidegger a Nazi, and so on. … ”
Born out of this discussion, yet, standing as another variation to it: If inhuman is an opposite to human, the inhuman must be understandable. But, do we understand inhumanity? Is not inhumanity that which makes us affirm what is human and how we cannot fathom any human doing otherwise?
Recall Hannah Arendt’s remark that things like the Nuremberg Trials revealed the banality of evil … This phrase is a gesture towards the genuine differend the holocaust points to … how can that soft spoken German man, that good father, that loving husband assist in the torture and clinical eradication of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of human beings, of men, women, and children? How is the perpetrated of such acts not a demon incarnate?
- Example: the Coen brothers’ film “No Country for Old Men” (2007): a man [Anton Chigurh] we would label a diabolical murderer, a psychopath, a dispassionate murdered, etc., is in pursuit of a man [Llewellyn Moss] who accidentally discovered two million dollars in the remains of a drug deal gone terribly wrong. There is a sheriff [Ed Tom Bell] who is pursuing the murder, but is persistently overwhelmed with pure dispassion with which each murder (of anyone and everyone who gets in the way) takes place. The sheriff cannot fathom this much blood over money; he must make the killer into something more than human. He begins to see this contextualized as a change in his times and country and, noting they are more than what he can comprehend, he characterizes them as “changed,” i.e., the title, “no country for old men.” He cannot admit that the murder is simply human and the times simply contain this degree of dispassion. The acts are too evil for a banal cause and context.
§32
Verification: Even if, the question begins, the verification is done according to its prescribed rules, how does one ever know that the other “gets it?” This question is getting at whether or not one can ever know the other. This interrelation of the self and other has been a pinnacle question throughout the history of philosophy. “—The addressor presupposes it” (§32).
This is truly commonplace. When a teacher or field commander gives X and asks if the addressees understand, they say or show that they do, the teacher and commander moves on. This is required for basic communication to take place. It is only when we think philosophically, that is, we reflect or stop to question things, that we begin to wonder about whether the other really gets it, can ever, could ever, despite what s/he says or shows. Skepticism is a secondary condition; in everyday life, we presume (like Husserl’s natural attitude), it is only when we stop to think it over (like Husserl’s phenomenological attitude) that we can broach the question as to whether communication has happened.
“Here you are in the act of doing ‘human sciences,’ of probing the meanings (vouloir-dire), the desires, the beliefs that you presuppose to be the property of these entities, human beings” (§32).
To stop simply believing in the humans and placing them as objects of study in the reflection whether they actually understand or not is to be doing the human sciences. This does follow directly from the preceding section; so, keep in mind his elliptical critique of humanism. A second presumption that we have in the natural attitude is that the other uses languages—this is a theory of instrumentalism that we saw Lyotard equally-elliptically critique when he asked in §18 concerning whether we own phrases, or, do phrases happen (Ereignis) and present universes? This is a crucial question because the Revisionist presumes that the witness owns the knowledge of the event to which they are witness and can, thus, present it to another. Why else would anyone threaten a witness if they did not presume that the witness was in possession of such knowledge and could testify to it and can choose to not do so.
This instrumental model of language, Lyotard reveals, follows a technological model: “…thought has ends, language offers means to thought” (§32).
Do we think this is the way reality works? That all things are so structured so that ends exist outside of language and language permits a route between them?
Instrumentalism also rejects everything beyond the simple explanation of ends and means.
“For questions of language, the pertinence of the ideas of Homo, of Homo faber, of will, and of good will, which belong to other realms, appears not to raise any questions” (§32)!
Homo faber: “Man the Maker” (as in a smith) in contrast to Homo sapiens, “man the wise,” and employed by Hannah Arendt and Max Scheler to designate the view that humanity controls its environment through tools but also referenced by Henri Bergsom in The Creative Evolution (1907) to define intelligence.
It ignores the fact that in between the ends and in and around the means are humans, are creatures of habit and impulse, are contexts, are ideas of will and intelligence, manipulation and truth, and more.
A “pure” ends and means language would probably look like the language of the builders in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
Verification: Even if, the question begins, the verification is done according to its prescribed rules, how does one ever know that the other “gets it?” This question is getting at whether or not one can ever know the other. This interrelation of the self and other has been a pinnacle question throughout the history of philosophy. “—The addressor presupposes it” (§32).
This is truly commonplace. When a teacher or field commander gives X and asks if the addressees understand, they say or show that they do, the teacher and commander moves on. This is required for basic communication to take place. It is only when we think philosophically, that is, we reflect or stop to question things, that we begin to wonder about whether the other really gets it, can ever, could ever, despite what s/he says or shows. Skepticism is a secondary condition; in everyday life, we presume (like Husserl’s natural attitude), it is only when we stop to think it over (like Husserl’s phenomenological attitude) that we can broach the question as to whether communication has happened.
“Here you are in the act of doing ‘human sciences,’ of probing the meanings (vouloir-dire), the desires, the beliefs that you presuppose to be the property of these entities, human beings” (§32).
To stop simply believing in the humans and placing them as objects of study in the reflection whether they actually understand or not is to be doing the human sciences. This does follow directly from the preceding section; so, keep in mind his elliptical critique of humanism. A second presumption that we have in the natural attitude is that the other uses languages—this is a theory of instrumentalism that we saw Lyotard equally-elliptically critique when he asked in §18 concerning whether we own phrases, or, do phrases happen (Ereignis) and present universes? This is a crucial question because the Revisionist presumes that the witness owns the knowledge of the event to which they are witness and can, thus, present it to another. Why else would anyone threaten a witness if they did not presume that the witness was in possession of such knowledge and could testify to it and can choose to not do so.
- (Also, note, for later, the French vouloir-dire, the conjunction of the infinitive verbs “to want” and “to say,” translated as “meanings.” This is not a mistranslation at all; it simply captures an aspect of meaning that our word “meaning” does not so clearly convey.)
This instrumental model of language, Lyotard reveals, follows a technological model: “…thought has ends, language offers means to thought” (§32).
Do we think this is the way reality works? That all things are so structured so that ends exist outside of language and language permits a route between them?
- (Cf., Heidegger’s critique of technology (i.e., cybernetics) in essays collected in Basic Writings.)
Instrumentalism also rejects everything beyond the simple explanation of ends and means.
“For questions of language, the pertinence of the ideas of Homo, of Homo faber, of will, and of good will, which belong to other realms, appears not to raise any questions” (§32)!
Homo faber: “Man the Maker” (as in a smith) in contrast to Homo sapiens, “man the wise,” and employed by Hannah Arendt and Max Scheler to designate the view that humanity controls its environment through tools but also referenced by Henri Bergsom in The Creative Evolution (1907) to define intelligence.
It ignores the fact that in between the ends and in and around the means are humans, are creatures of habit and impulse, are contexts, are ideas of will and intelligence, manipulation and truth, and more.
A “pure” ends and means language would probably look like the language of the builders in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
§33
Bad Faith (mauvaise foi)
The term, however, is also used in law to designate the intentional dishonesty of not fulfilling a contract. A breach of contract is cause for a charge of bad faith.
The Dreyfus Affair: (affaire Dreyfus) a French political scandal around the 1890’s-1900’s.
Lyotard broaches this case to let it raise the point: “Thus bad will, or bad faith, or a blind belief … can prevent truth from manifesting itself and justice being done” (§33).
To which he strongly asserts: “—No. What you are calling bad will, etc., is the name that you give to the fact that the opponent does not have a stake in establishing reality, that he does not accept the rules for forming and validating cognitives, that his goal is not to convince” (§33).
In other words, the cover-up shows that the other, the addressee or addressor, has no stake in agreeing to the rules of the language game. A true case of the cognitive genre requires that the parties agree that the reality of a referent can be established (as he explained in §29). False evidence undermines this genre; it is not a failing of human character that we must accede to, but one example wherein the genre does not operate. The failure can be mediated, as it was with his re-trial; a true character trait would be harder to mediate:
“The historian need not strive to convince Faurisson if Faurisson is ‘playing’ another genre of discourse, one in which conviction, or, the obtainment of a consensus over a defined reality, is not at stake. Should the historian persist along this path, he will end up in the position of victim” (§33).
Bad Faith (mauvaise foi)
- “It remains that, if Faurisson is ‘in bad faith,’ Vidal-Naquet cannot convince him that the phrase There were gas-chambers is true” (§33).
- If one is thrown into the world, into existence, without a pre-given essence, one’s existence, then, has no bare, brute meaning. There is no reason or purpose for existence. Humanity, to have meaning, must make meaning. How do we normally get meaning? Well, we think it is pre-invested in us through a concept of a divinely created soul, as being part of a divine plan, we get meaning from our social roles (as mother, student, child, wife, etc.), from our parents and other figures of authority, etc. But, if we acknowledge our thrownness, our being thrown into existence without an essential meaning, then we must consider all these sources of meaning as variously inauthentic. It is only by embracing our meaninglessness that we can make meaning: this is to accept our radical freedom and take responsibility for our value; this is the only stance that is authentic human living. It is a very hard stance to take. It is taking a stand in absurdity, this is the state of Angst, or anxiety. Anxiety, provoked by refection outside of the norms of everyday being in the world, is uncomfortable to violent, it is the mode of life that we “do not have time for anymore” as Lyotard says in his Reading Dossier. So, most often, even if we can or do acknowledge thrownness, we fall into false meaning and fulfill false roles and live under false values; this is mauvais foi.
The term, however, is also used in law to designate the intentional dishonesty of not fulfilling a contract. A breach of contract is cause for a charge of bad faith.
The Dreyfus Affair: (affaire Dreyfus) a French political scandal around the 1890’s-1900’s.
- Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was convicted for treason in 1894 and sentenced to life in prison (solitary confinement) for allegedly conveying French military secrets to Germany.
- In 1896, evidence revealed the real culprit to be Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. This evidence, though, was suppressed and the latter was acquitted. False documents, created by a French counter-intelligence agent Hubert-Joseph Henry, were produced to further incriminate Dreyfus and were uncritically accepted.
- The writer Émile Zola, in 1898, started a massive public protest about the acceptance of these documents and the framing of Dreyfus was exposed (Zola’s letter can be read here:
Lyotard broaches this case to let it raise the point: “Thus bad will, or bad faith, or a blind belief … can prevent truth from manifesting itself and justice being done” (§33).
To which he strongly asserts: “—No. What you are calling bad will, etc., is the name that you give to the fact that the opponent does not have a stake in establishing reality, that he does not accept the rules for forming and validating cognitives, that his goal is not to convince” (§33).
In other words, the cover-up shows that the other, the addressee or addressor, has no stake in agreeing to the rules of the language game. A true case of the cognitive genre requires that the parties agree that the reality of a referent can be established (as he explained in §29). False evidence undermines this genre; it is not a failing of human character that we must accede to, but one example wherein the genre does not operate. The failure can be mediated, as it was with his re-trial; a true character trait would be harder to mediate:
“The historian need not strive to convince Faurisson if Faurisson is ‘playing’ another genre of discourse, one in which conviction, or, the obtainment of a consensus over a defined reality, is not at stake. Should the historian persist along this path, he will end up in the position of victim” (§33).
§34
But… the interlocutor cannot accede yet: “But how can you know that the opponent is in bad faith as long as you haven’t tried to convince him or her and as long as he or she has not shown through his or her conduct a scorn for scientific, cognitive rules” (§34)? In other words, bad faith is common, so, do we turn away from the combatant before we know whether or not s/he would be willing to strive for a good faith communication with us? Lyotard responds by suggesting that it is not a matter of knowing if the other is genuine or manipulative but a matter of playing the game of the genre of discourse and seeing whether or not the addressee responds in accordance with the same rules.
The other can lie or obfuscate, but the witness is required to present reality, so must simply keep presenting evidence and the defense must simply keep attacking it until something comes about and is revealed by the process. This something would either be a solution / arbitration or a differend. That is, this process should solve the dispute or reveal if the other is working under a heterogeneous genre of language. It seems impossible, they (Lyotard and his devil’s advocate) propose, to avoid a differend by anticipating it because to anticipate it is to prejudge something, which is prohibited by the rules of the genre. The game must be played out to determine its ends.
But… the interlocutor cannot accede yet: “But how can you know that the opponent is in bad faith as long as you haven’t tried to convince him or her and as long as he or she has not shown through his or her conduct a scorn for scientific, cognitive rules” (§34)? In other words, bad faith is common, so, do we turn away from the combatant before we know whether or not s/he would be willing to strive for a good faith communication with us? Lyotard responds by suggesting that it is not a matter of knowing if the other is genuine or manipulative but a matter of playing the game of the genre of discourse and seeing whether or not the addressee responds in accordance with the same rules.
The other can lie or obfuscate, but the witness is required to present reality, so must simply keep presenting evidence and the defense must simply keep attacking it until something comes about and is revealed by the process. This something would either be a solution / arbitration or a differend. That is, this process should solve the dispute or reveal if the other is working under a heterogeneous genre of language. It seems impossible, they (Lyotard and his devil’s advocate) propose, to avoid a differend by anticipating it because to anticipate it is to prejudge something, which is prohibited by the rules of the genre. The game must be played out to determine its ends.
Plato Notice:
In five parts:
1. Strong and Weak
Strong and Weak: logical reversal of arguments; Phrasing of Being; Poetics: arousing quasi-phrases silent feelings in addressee, if they were real phrases, the equivocation of pathos and their charm would be dissipated (p.21).
Socrates strives to prevents the weaker argument to win over the stronger with charm and persuasion; relation to funeral oration (p.20).
Prosopopoeia: A figure of speech in which an imaginary, dead, or absent person speaks.
Paralogical Operations: métabolè, mimèsis, peithô; how do these operations relate to impiety?
2. Impiety
These operations presuppose an ability to be affected in the addressee (a patheia); in the addressor, there is presupposed a dissimulation. For impiety, the gods are taken as addressees. Socrates multiplies the charges to three impieties, then it resembles the paradox of Gorgias: impiety renders the gods weaker, nonexistent or spoken about: “Language is the sign that one does not know the being of the existent. When one knows it, one is the existent, and that’s silence (Letter VII, 342 a-d).” (p.22). “The canonical phrase of Platonic poetics would be in sum: I deceive you the least possible” (p.22).
3. Dialogue
Speech versus the book.
4. Selection
Who participates in the living dialogue (24); effacement of the writer (25).
5. Metalepsis
Differend between agonistics and dialogue; third party
"Metalepsis" is a figure of speech in which one thing is referenced by something merely remotely associated with it; a sophistical allusion. For example: “I’ve got to go catch the worm tomorrow!” This would mean that I will awaken early tomorrow in order to achieve success. It is an instance of metalepsis because it makes an association between waking up early and success by allusion to the cliché ‘the early bird catches the worm.’ *
In five parts:
1. Strong and Weak
Strong and Weak: logical reversal of arguments; Phrasing of Being; Poetics: arousing quasi-phrases silent feelings in addressee, if they were real phrases, the equivocation of pathos and their charm would be dissipated (p.21).
Socrates strives to prevents the weaker argument to win over the stronger with charm and persuasion; relation to funeral oration (p.20).
Prosopopoeia: A figure of speech in which an imaginary, dead, or absent person speaks.
Paralogical Operations: métabolè, mimèsis, peithô; how do these operations relate to impiety?
2. Impiety
These operations presuppose an ability to be affected in the addressee (a patheia); in the addressor, there is presupposed a dissimulation. For impiety, the gods are taken as addressees. Socrates multiplies the charges to three impieties, then it resembles the paradox of Gorgias: impiety renders the gods weaker, nonexistent or spoken about: “Language is the sign that one does not know the being of the existent. When one knows it, one is the existent, and that’s silence (Letter VII, 342 a-d).” (p.22). “The canonical phrase of Platonic poetics would be in sum: I deceive you the least possible” (p.22).
3. Dialogue
Speech versus the book.
4. Selection
Who participates in the living dialogue (24); effacement of the writer (25).
5. Metalepsis
Differend between agonistics and dialogue; third party
"Metalepsis" is a figure of speech in which one thing is referenced by something merely remotely associated with it; a sophistical allusion. For example: “I’ve got to go catch the worm tomorrow!” This would mean that I will awaken early tomorrow in order to achieve success. It is an instance of metalepsis because it makes an association between waking up early and success by allusion to the cliché ‘the early bird catches the worm.’ *
- * “37. Of tropes which modify signification, there remains to be noticed the μετάληψις (metalepsis), or transsumptio, which makes a way, as it were, for passing from one thing to another. It is very rarely used, and is extremely liable to objection, but is not uncommon among the Greeks, who call Chiron the Centaur and νήσοι ὀξεῖαι (nesoi oxeiai), ‘sharp-pointed islands,’ θοαί (thoai), ‘swift.’ Who would bear with us, if we should call Verres Sus ‘Hog’ or Laelius Doctus ‘Learned?’ 38. For the nature of metalepsis is that it is an intermediate step, as it were, to that which is metaphorically expressed, signifying nothing in itself, but affording a passage to something. It is a trope that we give the impression of being acquainted with rather than one that we actually ever need. The most common example of it is [cano ‘to sing’ is equivalent to canto ‘to reiterate,’ and canto equivalent to dico ‘to say;’ therefore, cano is equivalent to dico (explicated from Watson's footnote --LH)]. 39. I shall dwell no longer upon it, for I see but little use in it except, as I said, where one thing is to lead to another” (Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, trans. Rev. John Selby Watson (CITY: Iowa State University, 1856, 2006), Bk. 8, Ch. 6, §37-9. Available at: http://honeyl.public.iastate.edu/quintilian/8/chapter6.html#37).
§§35-46:
bring the first chapter to a close; they mainly move through questions of validation: what are the motives of the historian?; how does the cognitive genre necessitate validation via an positivistic interlocutor?; can we avoid differends?; and explores vengeance.
History: Judging the witness:
But … now, post-war, V-N claims the 2nd motive is over because the Jews have been displaced from victimhood by their prohibited testimony, tragedy has become secularized … the historian, then, is left with no one to bear witness to because the referent (the victims) have been prohibited from being that:
Note, this logic comes from Plato; a contrast found in Aristotle’s Categories. But, Lyotard argues with the aid of Kant:
He elaborates again with an example of a citizen of Martinique:
bring the first chapter to a close; they mainly move through questions of validation: what are the motives of the historian?; how does the cognitive genre necessitate validation via an positivistic interlocutor?; can we avoid differends?; and explores vengeance.
History: Judging the witness:
- Vidal-Naquet (the historian versus the revisionist) questions his authority because he wavers between two motives:
- to preserve memory from oblivion
- This subjects the witness only to the rules of scientific cognitives (establish the facts of our past).
- to carry out revenge
- This “is different” – its archetype comes from François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848, French writer -‘founded’ Romanticism- and diplomat): “In the silence of abjection, when the only sounds to be heard are the chains of the slave and the voice of the informer; when everything trembles before the tyrant and it is as dangerous to incur his favor as to deserve his disfavor, this is when the historian appears, charged with avenging this people.” *
- * In Vidal-Naquet, “A Paper Eichmann,” trans. M. Jolas, Democracy I, 2 (1981): 94.
- * In Vidal-Naquet, “A Paper Eichmann,” trans. M. Jolas, Democracy I, 2 (1981): 94.
- This “is different” – its archetype comes from François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848, French writer -‘founded’ Romanticism- and diplomat): “In the silence of abjection, when the only sounds to be heard are the chains of the slave and the voice of the informer; when everything trembles before the tyrant and it is as dangerous to incur his favor as to deserve his disfavor, this is when the historian appears, charged with avenging this people.” *
- to preserve memory from oblivion
But … now, post-war, V-N claims the 2nd motive is over because the Jews have been displaced from victimhood by their prohibited testimony, tragedy has become secularized … the historian, then, is left with no one to bear witness to because the referent (the victims) have been prohibited from being that:
- “There are no more victims (No. 35)” (§36). “Now, to say that the Jews are no loner victims is one thing, but to say that there are no more victims at all is another. A universal cannot be concluded from a particular” (§36).
Note, this logic comes from Plato; a contrast found in Aristotle’s Categories. But, Lyotard argues with the aid of Kant:
- The phrase There are no more victims and the phrase There are no more differends are tautologies (redundancies), and neither is a cognitive phrase that could be verified or refuted in accordance with the rules established for establishing and validating cognitives.
- “Labor-Power” is the object of a concept, but, according to Kant, its concept is an Idea, which does not give rise to an intuition and therefore cannot issue a controversy or bring about a verdict before a tribunal of knowledge.
He elaborates again with an example of a citizen of Martinique:
- A Martinican is a French citizen but s/he cannot bring a complaint against X that impinges upon her/his rights as a French citizen under the constitutional privileges of French law, although the wrong may be prosecutable under international law, but then the person would not be bringing a complaint as a French citizen. {in essence, the colony’s people are “owned” by the colonizer, but not as full citizens of that mother nation}
- “These are examples of situations presented in phrase universes of Ideas (in the Kantian sense): the Idea of nation, the Idea of the creation of value. These situations are not the referents of knowledge phrases. There exist no procedures instituted to establish or refute their reality in the cognitive sense. That is why they give rise to differends” (§36).
- I think we can add to these examples the Ibansk who is asked to prove his communist-ness.
- If we attempt to formulate these situations in accordance with the rules for cognitive phrases, we will end in a paradox, bind, or absurdity.
§37
“Let us admit your hypothesis, that the wrong comes from the damages not being expressed in the language common to the tribunal and the other party, and that this gives birth to a differend. But how can you judge that there is a differend when, according to this hypothesis, the referent of the victim’s phrase is not the object of a cognition properly termed. How can you (No. 1) even affirm that such a situation exists? Because there are witnesses to it? But why do you grant credence to their testimony when they cannot, by hypothesis, establish the reality of what they affirm? Either the differend has an established reality for its object and it is not a differend but a litigation, or, if the object has no established reality, the differend has no object, and there is simply no differend” (§37).
This, says Lyotard, is the line of Positivism.
But, positivism, according to Lyotard, confuses reality and referent.
§38
Some grieve more for an animal wronged than a human because an animal cannot, in accordance with human rules, bear witness to their wrong. To defend a wrong on their behalf places one before a dilemma. “… the animal is a paradigm of the victim” (§38).
§39
If phrases from different regimes encounter each other and yield differends, isn’t it the case that they have enough in common so as to encounter each other?
Do they not have common properties? Do they not have to encounter one another in the same universe?
Lyotard replies, no, for this universe to be one is to presuppose it exists prior to the phrases instead of it being produced by the phrases.
The phrases make the universe seem as if it has always been there, but it has not.
(This is similar to Kant’s conception of space and time as a priori forms of sensibility which come prior to and make possible all sense perception and his Categories as the a priori concepts which come prior to and make possible understanding by giving understanding the forms for the synthesis of sensible data. This is also similar to Derrida’s ideas of the différance, trace, and arché-writing, as three things which come prior to and permits X to present itself or be inscribed.)
The positivistic interlocutor attempts to use the transcendental possibility as a rebuff to Lyotard, saying that he is not claiming the universe to be the reality, but to be the condition for the possibility of reality, to which Lyotard responds no, the condition for the encounter is the phrase, not the universe instituted by it.
The condition of the encounter is transcendental, not empirical.
The universe would be like the effect of the encounter, which is the same as saying the universe is the condition of the encounter.
Transcendental and empirical are terms which do no more than indicate two different phrase families: the critical (criticizing) philosophical phrase and the cognitive phrase” (§39).
“… phrases from heterogeneous regimens or genres ‘encounter’ each other in proper names, in worlds determined by networks of names (Nos. 80, 81, 60).”
Note, that “proper names” will become an important consideration in the text to come.
“Let us admit your hypothesis, that the wrong comes from the damages not being expressed in the language common to the tribunal and the other party, and that this gives birth to a differend. But how can you judge that there is a differend when, according to this hypothesis, the referent of the victim’s phrase is not the object of a cognition properly termed. How can you (No. 1) even affirm that such a situation exists? Because there are witnesses to it? But why do you grant credence to their testimony when they cannot, by hypothesis, establish the reality of what they affirm? Either the differend has an established reality for its object and it is not a differend but a litigation, or, if the object has no established reality, the differend has no object, and there is simply no differend” (§37).
This, says Lyotard, is the line of Positivism.
- Positivism: a school of epistemology that proposes that the only authentic knowledge must have as a base actual sense experience. The idea has been around since antiquity, but was coined as a distinct school and taken up predominately by sociologists; coined by Auguste Comte and expanded by Émile Durkheim, (the 20th c. Max Weber, Georg Simmel, etc. sharply rejected its strictness).
- In psychology, behaviorism is basically positivistic (psychology can be determined by watching behavior—its counter was mentalism; both were countered by Wittgenstein’s P.I.).
- Logical Positivism was a 20th c. development that rejected all metaphysics and tried to reduce everything to statements and statements to pure logic; this theory grounds Analytic Philosophy (i.e., Anglo-American school, the counter to Continental Philosophy * ).
- * Kant permits us an eloquent rebuff to the Positivist: “Experience is the first product of our understanding (yielded via sensible impressions), yet, despite experience’s breadth, it is not the limit of our understanding. Experience tells us what is, but not that it must necessarily be so. It gives us no true universality. Reason is thus stimulated by experience, but not wholly satisfied” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction A 1-2).
But, positivism, according to Lyotard, confuses reality and referent.
- “… in many phrase families, the referent is not at all presented as real …” (§37). For example, he quotes the opening line of Goethe’s poem “Uber allen Gipfeln ist Ruhe,” 2x2=4, Get out, At that time, he took the path towards…, that’s very beautiful. “This does not prevent the phrases from taking place,” but then, parenthetically, adds, “(But is to take place the same thing as to be real?) (§37).
§38
Some grieve more for an animal wronged than a human because an animal cannot, in accordance with human rules, bear witness to their wrong. To defend a wrong on their behalf places one before a dilemma. “… the animal is a paradigm of the victim” (§38).
§39
If phrases from different regimes encounter each other and yield differends, isn’t it the case that they have enough in common so as to encounter each other?
Do they not have common properties? Do they not have to encounter one another in the same universe?
Lyotard replies, no, for this universe to be one is to presuppose it exists prior to the phrases instead of it being produced by the phrases.
The phrases make the universe seem as if it has always been there, but it has not.
(This is similar to Kant’s conception of space and time as a priori forms of sensibility which come prior to and make possible all sense perception and his Categories as the a priori concepts which come prior to and make possible understanding by giving understanding the forms for the synthesis of sensible data. This is also similar to Derrida’s ideas of the différance, trace, and arché-writing, as three things which come prior to and permits X to present itself or be inscribed.)
The positivistic interlocutor attempts to use the transcendental possibility as a rebuff to Lyotard, saying that he is not claiming the universe to be the reality, but to be the condition for the possibility of reality, to which Lyotard responds no, the condition for the encounter is the phrase, not the universe instituted by it.
The condition of the encounter is transcendental, not empirical.
The universe would be like the effect of the encounter, which is the same as saying the universe is the condition of the encounter.
Transcendental and empirical are terms which do no more than indicate two different phrase families: the critical (criticizing) philosophical phrase and the cognitive phrase” (§39).
“… phrases from heterogeneous regimens or genres ‘encounter’ each other in proper names, in worlds determined by networks of names (Nos. 80, 81, 60).”
Note, that “proper names” will become an important consideration in the text to come.
§40
If the encounters birth differends, can we not avoid them?
No, says Lyotard, contact is unavoidable and necessary:
Some ways are pertinent, some not. The interlocutor proposes that if we eliminate the inconsistent linkages, we will avoid the differend. Yes, sure, says Lyotard, but how do you know which are which? You must work through them, let the happen, make them, try them … all … including the inconsistent ones.
But, there are rules, cries the interlocutor. If we obey the rules can we not avoid differends?
Just because several linkages are possible, must there be a differend between them?
Yes, only one phrase potential can be actualized at a time.
§41
“It is necessary to link, but the mode of linkage is never necessary. It is suitable or unsuitable” (§41).
For example, if the police are pounding upon your door and demanding that you open it, it is unsuitable for you to comment, what a lovely door! “These unsuitabilities are so many damages inflicted upon the first phrase by the second” (§41).
§42
Lyotard quotes from §35: “The victim’s vengeance alone gives the authority to bear witness” (§42, from §35) and notes, “authority” is equivocal (cf. §43). Legally, the victim lacks the authority to do so; if s/he does gain vengeance, it is in spite of the law (and likely, outside of the law).
“The law reserves the authority to establish the crime, to pronounce the verdict, and to determine the punishment before the tribunal which has heard the two parties expressing themselves in the same language, that of the law” (§42).
When the victim cries for justice, s/he cries for vengeance for the wrong committed against her/him. But … this cry should not be put into the language of law, that is, in the forensic and juridical discourses, for law cannot hear it. Her/his cry is properly not in that language, for if it were, the original wrong would be undone.
If the encounters birth differends, can we not avoid them?
No, says Lyotard, contact is unavoidable and necessary:
- 1) “… it is necessary to link onto a phrase that happens … there is no possibility of not linking onto it” (§40).
- 2) “… to link is necessary; how to link is contingent. There are many ways …” (§40).
Some ways are pertinent, some not. The interlocutor proposes that if we eliminate the inconsistent linkages, we will avoid the differend. Yes, sure, says Lyotard, but how do you know which are which? You must work through them, let the happen, make them, try them … all … including the inconsistent ones.
But, there are rules, cries the interlocutor. If we obey the rules can we not avoid differends?
- Lyotard responds: “—Genres of discourse determine stakes, they submit phrases from different regimens to a single finality: the question, the example, the argument, the narration, the exclamation are in forensic rhetoric the heterogeneous means of persuading. It does not follow that differends between phrases should be eliminated. Taking any one of these phrases, another genre of discourse can inscribe it into another finality. Genres of discourse do nothing more than shift the differend from the level of regimens to that of ends” (§40).
Just because several linkages are possible, must there be a differend between them?
Yes, only one phrase potential can be actualized at a time.
§41
“It is necessary to link, but the mode of linkage is never necessary. It is suitable or unsuitable” (§41).
For example, if the police are pounding upon your door and demanding that you open it, it is unsuitable for you to comment, what a lovely door! “These unsuitabilities are so many damages inflicted upon the first phrase by the second” (§41).
- The wrong is not just that the second interferes with the validation of the first; for “Validation is a genre of discourse, not a phrase regimen. No phrase is able to be validated from inside of its own regimen: a descriptive is validated cognitively only by recourse to an ostensive (And here is the case). A prescriptive is validated juridically or politically by a normative (It is a norm that …), ethically by a feeling (tied to the You ought to), etc.” (§41).
§42
Lyotard quotes from §35: “The victim’s vengeance alone gives the authority to bear witness” (§42, from §35) and notes, “authority” is equivocal (cf. §43). Legally, the victim lacks the authority to do so; if s/he does gain vengeance, it is in spite of the law (and likely, outside of the law).
“The law reserves the authority to establish the crime, to pronounce the verdict, and to determine the punishment before the tribunal which has heard the two parties expressing themselves in the same language, that of the law” (§42).
When the victim cries for justice, s/he cries for vengeance for the wrong committed against her/him. But … this cry should not be put into the language of law, that is, in the forensic and juridical discourses, for law cannot hear it. Her/his cry is properly not in that language, for if it were, the original wrong would be undone.
§43
“All the same, vengeance authorizes itself on account of the plea’s having no outcome” (§43).
This is, properly, psychology or social psychology, Lyotard notes. But, nonetheless, its greater problem is that is accepts “a teleological principle [that] regulates the passage from one genre of discourse (the cognitive) to another (the phrase of the Idea). But what proof do we have that there is a principle of compensation between genres of discourse?” (§43).
He also, poignantly, asks: “Can it be said that since I don’t succeed in demonstrating this, then it is necessary that I be able to tell it?” (§43).
Also, it is important to note that this is a confusion: the victim is victimized a second time, but the referent is not the same, the damages of the event are not the wrong, the property to be demonstrated is not the event to be told—even as they hold the same name (“equivocal,” cf. §42).
The quotation from Wittgenstein illustrates how we can always translate phrases one to another, but that does not guarantee that we will follow the rule or order of one genre when we pass into the next.
Lyotard’s example is superb: “… the officer cries Avanti! and leaps up out of the trench; moved, the soldiers cry Bravo! but don’t budge” (§43).
§44
“Vengeance has no legitimate authority, it shakes the authority of the tribunals, it calls upon idioms, upon phrase families, upon genres of discourse (any which one) that do not, in any case, have a say in the matter” (§44).
§45
“One defers to the ‘tribunal of history,’ Hegel invokes the ‘tribunal of the world.’ These can only be symbols, like the last judgment” (§45).
Citation (metalanguage) makes all phrases pass under a single regimen of cognitives. Lyotard’s examples:
The tribunal is then asked: if each case has effectively been asked or declared? --Validation.
“Effectively” means “… does the cited phrase (order, question, description) well present the traits we say it does (was it indeed an order, etc.? ? Did it indeed take place (was it indeed the case?)?” (§45).
These questions asked by “effectively” are pertinent when a cognitive phrase is to be validated. They are not pertinent in other cases, for example, validating a command “stop singing” should be done by determining if the ordered has indeed stopped or validating the exclamation “what a beautiful aria!” should be done by the attempt to partake in the other’s emotion (No 149).
§46
“Citation submits the phrase to an autonymic transformation”
So, citation makes open the door! Into: The “Open the door!”
Does it lose its character as a current phrase when translated this way?
When a performative is not performed, “meeting adjourned” does not adjourn the meeting, when the commander’s “charge” is applauded instead of acted upon, a character does seem to be lost …
The transformation renders a command into something we expect not to be followed.
“All the same, vengeance authorizes itself on account of the plea’s having no outcome” (§43).
This is, properly, psychology or social psychology, Lyotard notes. But, nonetheless, its greater problem is that is accepts “a teleological principle [that] regulates the passage from one genre of discourse (the cognitive) to another (the phrase of the Idea). But what proof do we have that there is a principle of compensation between genres of discourse?” (§43).
- This passage may well be taken like an illusion or as a refrain that summons Kant’s Third Critique, named as one of the two sources of “Pretext” in the Reading Dossier (the other being Wittgenstein). Is not the Third Critique’s starting question about how can, in reason, judgment judge without a concept [in contrast, in understanding, judgment has the table of categories through which it gets a priori principles]? In reason, can judgment give itself an a priori principle? (Which, yes, it does, via reason, of the purposiveness of nature, which can be represented according to aesthetic (the accordance of form, related by the imagination, to the cognitive faculties) or teleological (the accordance of form wit the possibility of the thing-itself) judgments.
He also, poignantly, asks: “Can it be said that since I don’t succeed in demonstrating this, then it is necessary that I be able to tell it?” (§43).
Also, it is important to note that this is a confusion: the victim is victimized a second time, but the referent is not the same, the damages of the event are not the wrong, the property to be demonstrated is not the event to be told—even as they hold the same name (“equivocal,” cf. §42).
The quotation from Wittgenstein illustrates how we can always translate phrases one to another, but that does not guarantee that we will follow the rule or order of one genre when we pass into the next.
Lyotard’s example is superb: “… the officer cries Avanti! and leaps up out of the trench; moved, the soldiers cry Bravo! but don’t budge” (§43).
§44
“Vengeance has no legitimate authority, it shakes the authority of the tribunals, it calls upon idioms, upon phrase families, upon genres of discourse (any which one) that do not, in any case, have a say in the matter” (§44).
- --Its demands: revision of competencies; institution of new tribunals
- --Disavows any tribune of phrases claiming supremacy
- --It is mistaken that vengeance calls upon “rights of man” against the law—“Man is surely not the name that suites this instance of appeal, nor right the name of the authority which this instance avails itself of (No. 42). Rights of the other is not much better. Authority of the infinite perhaps, or of the heterogeneous, were it not so ineloquent” (§44).
§45
“One defers to the ‘tribunal of history,’ Hegel invokes the ‘tribunal of the world.’ These can only be symbols, like the last judgment” (§45).
Citation (metalanguage) makes all phrases pass under a single regimen of cognitives. Lyotard’s examples:
- The order Open the door becomes (for the tribunal’s cognizance) the descriptive It was ordered that the door be opened.
- The question Is this lipstick? Becomes the description It was asked if this is lipstick.
- The descriptive The wall is white becomes the descriptive It was declared that this wall is white.
The tribunal is then asked: if each case has effectively been asked or declared? --Validation.
“Effectively” means “… does the cited phrase (order, question, description) well present the traits we say it does (was it indeed an order, etc.? ? Did it indeed take place (was it indeed the case?)?” (§45).
These questions asked by “effectively” are pertinent when a cognitive phrase is to be validated. They are not pertinent in other cases, for example, validating a command “stop singing” should be done by determining if the ordered has indeed stopped or validating the exclamation “what a beautiful aria!” should be done by the attempt to partake in the other’s emotion (No 149).
§46
“Citation submits the phrase to an autonymic transformation”
- Autonym: an autological (aka homological) word whose definition is self-describing, i.e., its definition is self-referential (it has the property it denotes); often, adjectives (e.g., polysyllabic: it has and means more than one syllable), but can also be nouns, verbs, or phrases (e.g., three words long: is describes what it is, three words long).
So, citation makes open the door! Into: The “Open the door!”
Does it lose its character as a current phrase when translated this way?
When a performative is not performed, “meeting adjourned” does not adjourn the meeting, when the commander’s “charge” is applauded instead of acted upon, a character does seem to be lost …
The transformation renders a command into something we expect not to be followed.