. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 33, No. 5, October 2002 0026 1068 LINGUISTIC ARCHIPELAGO AND (ITS?) HISTORY MARIANNA PAPASTEPHANOU ABSTRACT: In this article I examine Jean-François Lyotard s conception of history, its philosophical presuppositions, and its implications. As his conception s most crucial implicit assumptions I consider Lyotard s account of language and his notion of agonistics and dissent. Concerning its implications, I consider the nominalist and relativist conclusions Lyotard s theory may engender if thought through to its end, as well as the possibilities it opens up for ethics and justice for alterity, or otherness, via a new notion of human history. My aim is to show how Lyotard advances philosophical thought about history and to examine whether he succeeds in delivering the goods he promises. I conclude with suggestions for an alternative approach. The main thesis of the article is that Lyotard s metacritique of past accounts of human history is pertinent and apposite but, because of some negative implications of certain implicit assumptions on which he relies to articulate this critique, it appears inadequate in some respects. I argue that it is possible to promote a critique of older notions of human history along Lyotardian lines and to preserve the merits of Lyotard s critique for a sensitive and nonlogocentric approach to otherness via another route, one that is not committed to Lyotard s agonistics and incommensurability of language games. Keywords: Lyotard, Kant, history, representation, antagonism, justice, language. A great deal of confidence in the accuracy and truth of Occidental methods of historical research derives from negligence concerning the relation of language and time. With regard to language, the traditional philosophy of history overlooked the fact that even when we think of what is happening now, the duplicity of the economy of representation is already at work. The event is represented in thought and put into words, but an ontological gap separates the sphere of facticity (what is actually happening) and the sphere of representation in thought and language. Representation (reflection of worldly contents in consciousness and transformation of those contents into contents of thought or language) is economical because it adapts entities and states of affairs to the epistemological makeup of the human subject. The excessive worldly material that cannot be canalized in consciousness is suppressed or ignored. Representation is duplicitous because in being economical in its operation it gives us a sense of adequacy and completeness in our relation to facticity that most of the time is functional but is illusory and self-deceptive.
LINGUISTIC ARCHIPELAGO AND (ITS?) HISTORY 567 Twentieth-century philosophy has painstakingly exposed what is simultaneously the terror and the blessing of the linguistic phrase, its worlddisclosing and world-concealing forces operating together to shape the Is of consciousness while truncating the Is of its objects. This duplicity generates at best the necessary illusion that we know more or less what is happening and at worst the arrogant gleefulness that the now of our consciousness is the now of the Real, with no excess of presentability and no surplus of unpresentability. But with regard to history, the doubleness of signification-as-representation is multiplied by time. Because of historical language s unavoidable debt to time deictics (words having an ostensive temporal function, such as then, at that time, before, and so on), history is the representation of representation. When the now of narrative representation becomes the then of historical accounts, the abovementioned ontological gap widens twice as much and the approximation to the meaning of old events appears even less attainable. The modern science of history in its optimism forgets precisely that sentences referring to the past are not presenting the present, they are that present, then presenting and now presented (Lyotard 1991, 59). If modernist historians were aware of, and sensitive to, this further temporal deferral of meaning, they would consider themselves appendices to their story and not the absolutely privileged and secure site grounding the possibility of the story (Readings 1992, 58). Instead, they justify their endeavor by the assumption of such a present-ability of the past that, in this artificial unity of undifferentiated temporality, the act of narration itself is forgotten (that is, they forget that narrating is not identical with being present when the events were actually happening). Ironically, the apparent unity of time in modernist historiography relies on a tacit rupture of time, split into a past that is the referent of historical writings and a present that is the time of writing. The historian s gaze reduces the past to an object of a present standing out of time. By ignoring the beat of time, however, the historian ignores the impossibility of objectivity entailed by the inescapability of her own temporality and discursivity. In the postmodernist frame of thought I have just sketched, historical objectivity becomes problematized to the extent that objectivity presupposes sufficient success in representing past events in our consciousness, success that is never fully attainable. But objectivity that is, the objectivity of an observer is not the only impossibility that historiography confronts according to some postmodernist trends. Giving a value-neutral account of the past is another. I shall explain this by drawing on a metaphor that Jean-François Lyotard employs (Lyotard 1991, 30). A metaphor placing history in a psychoanalytic context attests to the unpresentability of the past and the lack of value neutrality of its accounts. History appears as the phylogenetic moment of reflection on collective memory, mirroring the ontogenetic moment of reflection on childhood. Just as in psychoanalysis the subject restores the significance of
568 MARIANNA PAPASTEPHANOU her past, humanity finds in history what it experiences as a redemptive presentation of its origin and truth. Consciousness endeavors to present itself historically. Thus, history is an attempt to give unity, identity, and harmony to the subject by looking at its past as unitary mapping of its existence in time. It is synonymous with repression because the moment it highlights what it considers outstanding, it at the same time represses and excludes what fails to meet its standards. Its claim to value neutrality is its own snare. In its demand that the historian be objective, impartial, distanced from the object of her study, and that the object be withdrawn from any libidinal investment on the part of the historian, history puts the past down in the double meaning of the word, redigere in Latin (Lyotard 1991, 29). Bereft of the subject s desire to remember it, the historical event, as put down in language, is simultaneously preserved and discredited. Interpreting Lyotard s Account of History My rather anonymous preceding remarks are intended to facilitate comprehension of the context in which the drama of the intersection of history, ontology, and justice takes place, before I narrow my account down to Lyotard s particular position and critically discuss his chief assumptions. My overall strategy involves the brief introductory exposition of the spirit of the times (Zeitgeist) in its impersonal and tacit significance; a critical interpretation of Lyotard s ideas about that drama; and some suggestions for an alternative approach that preserves the merits of Lyotard s theory while placing them in a different and less problematic, I hope ontological frame. The rough outline of some postmodernist basic assumptions of history and its (im)possibilities that I have begun with reveals the springboard from which Lyotard, among others, sets out to discuss history. For all the reasons I touched on in the outline, Lyotard regards history s pretensions to referential accuracy as an illusion, even if it were feasible to organize historical recording along the lines of psychoanalytic free association. His insights on history will be explored here in a twofold descriptive attempt to answer with him the question of historiography and the question of speculative philosophy of history, and in a critical attempt to trace the currents operating against his responses and to suggest possibilities for alternative answers. Such answers (unavoidably short and suggestive) will share some paradigmatic assumptions with Lyotard s theory and will employ them as starting points, but they will break with those other assumptions that seem to me to have undesirable epistemological, anthropological, and political implications. Lost time is not represented like in a picture, it is not even presented. It is what presents the elements of a picture, an impossible picture (Lyotard 1991, 31). We cannot master time through conceptual analysis.
LINGUISTIC ARCHIPELAGO AND (ITS?) HISTORY 569 Such endeavor is undermined by what Lyotard sees as immemorial (which in Lyotard has the double meaning of that aspect of history which cannot be forgotten but also cannot be fully remembered) and by its peculiar relation to time. It is neither remembered nor forgotten. When it is felt, it acts as a figure. Figure is the unspeakable other at work within and against discourse, disrupting the rule of representation. 1 What appears as figure is the event. The event is the occurrence after which nothing will ever be the same again. It happens in excess of the referential frame within which it might be understood, disrupting or displacing that frame.... The event is the radically singular happening which cannot be represented within a general history without the loss of its singularity, its reduction to a moment (Readings 1992, 57). It appears so under the guise of anachronism in history. Anachronism in history corresponds to the Freudian Nachträglichkeit (belatedness): it refers to two incommensurable temporalities blocked together. 2 Therefore, in my interpretation of Lyotard s ideas, we can draw the conclusion that true history, like psychoanalysis, can only be interminable. Textual support for this interpretation can be found in the following Lyotardian assertion. A postmodern historiography will be the kind of history that does not forget that forgetting is not a breakdown of memory but the immemorial always present but never here-now, always torn apart in the time of consciousness, of chronology, between a too early and a too late the too early of a first blow dealt to the apparatus that it does not feel, and the too late of a second blow where something intolerable is felt (Lyotard 1995, 20). Historical periodization is the enemy of anachronism and an obsession of scientistic modernity. Being a way of placing events in a diachrony (Lyotard 1991, 25), periodization serves the vision of linearity in human progress and overlooks its own limits. When modernist history aims to articulate a diachronic succession of moments known from a position of transcendent subjectivity abstracted from that sequence (Readings 1992, 56), it normalizes the event and condemns it to anonymity. Then a speculative philosophy of history comes to legitimate such domestication of historical moments. It aspires to elevate the archive to the status of a chart of human telos. History (understood in a more macrocosmic sense) does not repeat itself, because it recounts the route to emancipation. Along the way, all events forfeit their uniqueness and particularity and are harnessed and adapted to the ultimate end that is, progress as anticipated and orchestrated by a divine hand, a providential intervention. The narration of episodes of history loses its metonymic character and acquires a metaphoric one. 1 The figural force of the event disrupts the possibility of thinking history as a succession of moments (Readings 1992, 55). 2 Lyotard (1995, 15) defines Nachträglichkeit as a double blow that is constitutively asymmetrical, and a temporality that has nothing to do with what the phenomenology of consciousness (even that of Saint Augustine) can thematize.
570 MARIANNA PAPASTEPHANOU If we search for the devices philosophy of history has used, we may also add to Lyotard s analysis that speculative philosophy of history has recruited not only periodization but also other means of normalizing events. What resists, at first sight, the classification imposed by the ultimate narrative of progress and its contribution to eschatology is far from evident is bridled by the several cunnings invented by philosophy, from Ferguson s heterogeneity of ends down to Kant s cunning of nature and Hegel s cunning of reason. In the depiction of history as a progression toward what speculative philosophers see as the ultimate end, namely, harmony and reconciliation within an undifferentiated unity, proper names are lost. The singularity of the event is vitiated by the terror of the economy of the speculative genre and the homogenizing universalism it imposes. Anonymity is the end of time. What is implicit in Lyotard s understanding of history and his attack on speculative philosophy of history is a theory of language premised on the conceptual tools of incommensurability of language games and agonistics. A particular genre (or faculty) is irreducible and untranslatable to any other without loss and violence exerted on its heterogeneity. A phrase regimen is like an islet; its insular character secures its freedom from the tyranny of metalanguage (despite the illusory metaphysical assertions to the contrary). If historical accounts are such phrases, they are in dispute with those genres that encroach on them to assimilate them. Positivism aims, for instance, precisely at installing the cognitive genre in history, granting it hegemony. Phrases inside a genre of discourse are linked by rules, but these rules have no authority at all when applied between one genre and another (Lyotard 1988, 30). 3 Instead of searching in a genre for rules that transcend it and are higher than the rules of other genres and hence applicable to them one must acknowledge their incommensurability. In Lyotard s own words, [The] object with which to validate the dispersion or fission of the faculties can only be a symbol I would suggest that of an archipelago. Each family of phrases would be like an island, and the faculty of judgement would be (at least in part) like a ship-fitter or an admiral, sending out expeditions with the job of presenting one island with what they had found ( invented, in the etymological sense) on the others. (Lyotard 1991a, 166; emphasis added) When judgment takes place by virtue of criteria set by a dominant language game, it draws the opponents, the phrases in dispute, the weaker, or even both, into a metalepsis, in which the differend is absorbed. Then 3 It is along these lines that the following Lyotardian comment on the Faurisson case makes better sense. 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 (Lyotard 1988, 19).
LINGUISTIC ARCHIPELAGO AND (ITS?) HISTORY 571 consensus is prioritized over agonistics. Unlike consensus, agonistics perpetuates the conflict by protecting the heterogeneity of the language game of each of the opponents and suspending the criteriology imposed by the dominant discourse. We might say that it grants and preserves the isostheneia of the interlocutors by deliberately ignoring the possibility for appealing to the referent as the ultimate arbiter of truth to settle their debate and enforce consensus. (Isostheneia [ison + sthenos = equal power and ability of two agents to express their views] is a term I borrow from the ancient Greek dramaturgical context to signify the dramatic import of the preservation of the equal argumentative force of the position of the main dramatic characters.) What is presupposed is an ineluctable textuality, one that proclaims time and history a text. The referent is not the reality ; it is the stakes of a question, of several questions, which take place in an argument. The referent is invoked there through the play of monstration, of naming and of signification, as proof administered to underscore a thesis (antimemorialist, in this case) (Lyotard 1995, 9). Overall, against modernist historiography, Lyotard argues that history, like literature, becomes the site of the recognition that there is something that cannot be said. This is the incommensurability to which the aesthetic may testify, though it has no language in which to speak that would not reduce incommensurability to the comparability of a single voice (Readings 1992, 62). The scientistic dogmatism of modernist historiography elevating dominant interpretations to absolute truths is based on a referentialist credulity bordering on stupidity (Lyotard 1995, 9) and forgets the immemorial at work in the historical quest for objectivity. Against the dogmatism of speculative philosophy of history pretending to have discovered and articulated the purpose of humanity, Lyotard points out that not only is the cognitive phrase incapable of doing so; even the aesthetic one is inadequate, save some exceptional modes of it. For that matter, he appeals to Kant, attempting a reading of his idea of universal history that is both exciting and provocative but also highly debatable. (I view his reading as debatable because with it Lyotard highlights the Kantian dependence on aesthetics in the discourse about progress while leaving the rest of the Kantian argumentation unaccounted for, the part that is more onto-theological and thus vulnerable. He emphasizes Kant s concession that not just any aesthetic phrase can provide the proof (beweisen) that humanity is in constant progress in improvement but only the phrase of the extreme sublime [Lyotard 1991a, 176].) 4 Analyzing Some Implications From Lyotard s twofold critique of modernist history that is, as a critical 4 I think that Lyotard overemphasizes this point. Kant also employs other justifications that are not so much aesthetic-sublime as onto-theological.
572 MARIANNA PAPASTEPHANOU field of science and as a branch of speculative philosophy, which applies to the traditional as well as the dialectical historical perspective there emerge two intersecting questions. (a) Is it still plausible to elaborate on the idea of a progressing human history without forming the worst complicities? If yes, then how? (b) Can there be a historiography emancipated from the speculative genre that would do justice to the past s resistance to representation while preserving memory? I shall proceed with a reconstruction of what I think Lyotard s response might be and then move to my critique of it. The answer to the question of speculative philosophy of history is not easy, and Lyotard clearly does not direct the reader toward a clear-cut position of yes or no. As I interpret him, there are two possibilities, two possible readings. One is that there is a history of progress but we know nothing about it and only feel it through the sublime. It is ineffable and beyond ontology, it belongs to silence as much as insanity does. Historical-political enthusiasm is thus on the edge of dementia, it is a pathological outburst (Lyotard 1988, 166). History would take the role of considering the event. One could call an event the impact, on the system, of floods of energy such that the system does not manage to bind and channel this energy; the event would be the traumatic encounter of energy with the regulating institution (Lyotard 1993, 64). Such an outburst points to a whole world of nonarticulable possibilities for a human potential to break the spell of signification and the Law of the Father accompanying it. In this way, Begebenheit (occurrence) is a sign of history because it reveals the ineffability of the other of speech, testifies to its a-venir character (that is, its inherent futurity), its ineluctable deferral in time immemorial. Being merely a sign of history, it does not violate the uneconomical nature of ineffability, because it does not transform it into theory. The other possibility is that there is no history of progress at all, not even a smoldering one, and for this lack we cannot say much, for it is not articulable. It is ineffable and is revealed to us only through feelings aroused from Begebenheiten once again, but this time these occurrences are of a sort different from, let us say, the French Revolution, which exemplified a sign of history for Kant in an optimistic way. Occurrences like Auschwitz turn enthusiasm into sorrow (Lyotard 1988, 179). Evidently, here the term sign of history is redolent of the pessimism and ineffable pain associated with the corresponding historical events and not of the jouissance 5 related to the positive and optimistic moment of catching a glimpse of unspeakable freedom. Thus, the emotional association of the term sign of history becomes a determining factor of how we understand speculative philosophy of history and the reason for oscillating between gleefulness 5 Jouissance is a Lacanian term often translated as enjoyment or pleasure. Such translations, however, are not satisfactory, because they do not convey the connotations of the French. In psychoanalysis, jouissance denotes a realm of enjoyment or perfection of being that eludes signification, a surplus and unconscious pleasure that is not symbolized.
LINGUISTIC ARCHIPELAGO AND (ITS?) HISTORY 573 and despondency. If one thing is clear in Lyotard, however, it is that the certainty concerning the truth of the history of progress consolidated into a form of science is deceptive. As for the philosophy of history, about which there can be no question in a critical thought, it is an illusion born from the appearance that signs are exempla or schemata (Lyotard 1988, 171). 6 An answer to the question of historiography is not easy either, and one cannot be cautious enough in giving an account of it that will be as nuanced and fair to Lyotard s position as possible. Although Lyotard s treatment of referentiality and discursivity is such that at first sight it would justify any move to deny all claims of history to reconstructing the past and also to collapse the differences between history and other genres oriented to the past, the opposite may also hold. Textual evidence for this is found (not accidentally, in my opinion) in Lyotard s Heidegger and the Jews, where the political necessity for preserving the fuzzy borders separating history from other types of writing is more strongly felt. He writes that it is certainly not fair to say that reality is nothing but the referentiality included in the discourse (which, stupidly and dangerously, would disallow one to distinguish between history and the novel or the myth, or the memorial, and to differentiate the genre of discourse whose stakes are to speak the truth about an object from the one that is submitted to entirely different ends, be they political, religious, literary) (Lyotard 1995, 10; emphasis added). Then again, Lyotard s whole theory attests to the ineluctability of discursivity and treats the issue of historical truth in such a deflationist manner that it occludes all epistemic and political significance it might have. (And my comment here anticipates some of the objections that will follow in a later section. This becomes obvious in an exemplary way in Lyotard s discussion of his debt to Aristotle s notion of phronesis, in which the commitment to a very weak sense of truth is manifest and very little is left to a stronger (albeit not necessarily foundationalist) sense of objectivity (Lyotard 1996). Although that is indeed the general feeling one has from the rest of Lyotard s work, passages in his texts like the one above ( passage understood in both meanings, bit of text and path ) reintroduce the potentiality of right and wrong historical accounts. Either stance could be explained via and be attributed to polemics, but this is a matter of interpretation and cannot be taken up here. (I believe that the distinction between right and wrong interpretation in history cannot be sustained within Lyotard s theory, not even as a critical gesture of the historian, 6 I agree with Lyotard about the rejection of this type of speculative philosophy of history of progress. But unlike him, I do not reject all theories of emancipation (Papastephanou 2000). For I think that we can preserve a history of progress without the teleological grounding that is imbued with onto-theology, even the negative-apocalyptic one. Hence my approach says that we see progress in history with vigilance and as a matter of contingently accumulated events (à la Levi-Strauss).
574 MARIANNA PAPASTEPHANOU because of the prohibitive function of the rest of his assumptions, linguistic and anthropological. But that is also another matter that cannot be undertaken here not, at least, in this rather descriptive part of the article.) Historiography, insofar as its modernism consists also of its coupling of periodization with the speculative grand narrative, is just as assailable as philosophy of history. Obviously, bidding farewell to its modernism, historiography will cease to be ancillary or theoretically subordinated to speculative philosophy of history, but that does not exhaust all that can be said (or cannot be said as a matter of fact) about it. If historiography only needed to free itself from teleology, would it suffice for us to return to the ancient justification of historical research? Universalism and pure teleology are not classical in the sense of Antiquity, but modern in the sense of Christianity. Philosophies of history are forged around a redemptive future. (Even capitalism, which has no philosophy of history, disguises its realism under the Idea of an emancipation from poverty) (Lyotard 1988, 155). Furthermore, The moderns subordinate the legitimation of the collective subject called Europe or the West to the deployment of historical time. With Herodotus and Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus, the Ancients did, of course, invent history in opposition to myth and epic, the other narrative genres. And, on the other hand, with Aristotle, they elaborated the concept of telos, of the end as perfection, and teleological thinking. But eschatology, properly called, which governs the modern imaginary of historicity, is what the Christianity rethought by Paul and Augustine introduced into the core of Western thought. (Lyotard 1997, 96) Hence, ancient historiography represents a promising direction not so much for promoting a throwback to its tradition as for contesting from within Lyotard s blanket critique of history as science. But to the extent that ancient historiography was a quest for truth and accuracy and had faith in representation as much as its modernist counterpart, it was already contaminated with the terror of the economy of the phrase and ontology. Therefore, thanks to Lyotard s indictment of the politics of language and truth claims as by definition violent to unassimilated alterity, a recuperation of ancient interpretations of history deriving from the references given above is impeded from the start. For it is incompatible with the rest of his theory. To Lyotard, a historian committed to the supposed primacy of the cognitive genre and impervious to the lessons of the signs of unpresentability, stubborn in her search for what really happened, is more pious than pagan and, in consequence, unjust. 7 We may adapt as applicable to the historian what is said about the philosopher: Whereas the pious philosopher aims to speak the truth, the pagan uses ruses and trickery in order not to redefine the truth but to displace the rule 7 For more on these terms and their interconnection see Lyotard 1977.
LINGUISTIC ARCHIPELAGO AND (ITS?) HISTORY 575 of truth (Readings 1992, 73). The historian who sets a record straight is not just by dint of whom she speaks for, what she stands for, but is just only by dint of the means she employs. Such means are pagan and justify their employment when they respect the islets of language games. As regards cases of litigation or even differend, any direct confrontation of the powerful with those wronged by their power within the language game of the former will doom the latter to defeat. (In Lyotard the case of Faurisson and the Holocaust is often presented as a typical example of historical differend.) Hence, ancient historiography would not be just, because so long as it would operate within the language game of truth it would have to play the game of the powerful. The weak do not become strong, but use ruses so that weakness may overcome strength, as mortals may trick the gods (Readings 1992, 73). Paganism is to judge without criteria and, as such, it is just gaming. Ruse is not just a technique or a device for the purpose of overcoming one s opponents; it is much more than that. Ruse is an activity bound up with the will to power, because the will to power, if the word is to have a meaning, is carried out without criteria (Lyotard 1996, 16). What is the notion of history that we could extrapolate from Lyotard s ideas? One ought to be pagan means one must maximize as much as possible the multiplication of small narratives (Lyotard 1996, 59). 8 We also arrive at the same implication and conclusion via another route. A theory of historiography might emerge from a psychoanalytic consideration of remembering. Psychoanalytically viewed, traditional historiography is inscription and repression, recording and discrediting, as I mentioned earlier. Remembering might mean to orient oneself concerning one s past at will, forgetting selectively by judging the past, by desiring to silence some of it. But what psychoanalytic free association teaches us is that the mind must be patient, not passive, giving passage to all events, not omitting or censuring anything (Lyotard 1991, 31). Now, such historiography must be vigilant to preserve its paganism by jettisoning any claim that its free associations correspond or will eventually correspond by virtue of their multiplicity and anarchical seriality to a master narrative of truth and referentiality. Given that the adjective pious implies the representation of something that of course is absent, a lost origin, something that must be restored to a society in which it is lacking (Lyotard 1996, 19), the risk postmodernist narratology confronts is to become pious like modernist historiography and speculative philosophy of history. 8 As to the prescriptive character of this statement, Lyotard explains that there are prescriptions in paganism, but not derived from or founded on an ontology. They are left hanging.
576 MARIANNA PAPASTEPHANOU Critiquing the Theory I wish to begin this section by alluding to the significance of the most salient of those Lyotardian assumptions and theses I have stated or interpreted in the more descriptive parts of the article, as I aim to justify my assessment of his theory by virtue of their implications. What I see as most enabling and fruitful in Lyotard s insights on history is his notion of vigilance with regard to piousness on the condition that it does not deny to history its criteriological-identitary dimension but reminds history of its inherent forgetfulness. To fight against forgetting means to fight to remember that one forgets as soon as one believes, draws conclusions, and holds for certain. It means to fight against forgetting the precariousness of what has been established, of the reestablished past; it is a fight for the sickness whose recovery is simulated (Lyotard 1995, 10). The new idea of history we deduce from Lyotard s criticisms would claim that it is fairer to those wronged. It is fairer, to a great extent, because ousting the entrenched modern myth of one truth, one interpretation, one accurate exposition of facts allows for more stories to be related. Agonistics and discord allow for more mobility and displacement and suspend judgment. But if to be pagan means to judge without criteria, and if the emphasis on this overpowers other interpretations of Lyotard s conception of history, such as the one hinted at above, is justice an attribute of pagan agon, or perhaps only one of its possibilities? We can extrapolate from our preceding discussion that for Lyotard justice is a pragmatic equal treatment of all discourses emanating from the liquidation of rationalist criteriology and its hierarchical and violent character. A just condition of life presupposes the allowance of differends to appear and flourish without trying to solve them by means of litigation, that is, by imposing on them rules that do not belong in their own language games. 9 Is the absence of criteriology just? Conversely, is injustice not a result of the lack of respect for criteria by those who can afford to dispense with them? In his Instructions Paiennes, Lyotard uses an ancient myth (Lyotard 1977, 49) to illustrate the fate of those who confront the powerful within the latter s language game. Arachne claims that she spins better than Athena does. She challenges the goddess, and they compete. Arachne proves herself to be better indeed, and Athena, furious at her defeat, turns Arachne into a spider. According to Lyotard, the weak engages in the game of the strong and confronts her directly as if they were equals, only to discover the inexorable invincibility of the dominant language game. We can expand this reading of the myth in a way that is faithful to Lyotard, though not articulated by him. Athena masters the cognitive phrase regimen, and in a very interesting reversal of roles she acts likes a 9 On the concept of differend and its connection to justice see Lyotard 1988, and for more detailed accounts of what Lyotard sees as justice see his 1996.
LINGUISTIC ARCHIPELAGO AND (ITS?) HISTORY 577 spider and sets a trap for Arachne so that she simply cannot win. If she loses to Athena, Athena proves to be stronger. But if Arachne beats the goddess, she will be destroyed. The web is the contract, the assumption that there will be fair play, and the bait luring Arachne into the web will be the supposed commensurability of their different origins and absence of power, that is, respect for the rules of the game. From a pagan point of view, Arachne s only hope for overpowering the goddess would be not to confront her directly at all but to employ ruse and trickery instead. There can be another reading of the myth, however. As I interpret it, Arachne s fate does not result from criteriology and the existence of criteriology. The rule, despite being the rule that the powerful may have formulated, could be made to favor the weak. It was according to set criteria of speed and quality that Arachne displayed her superiority. But it was precisely the collapse of criteriology, the lack of respect for it on the part of the powerful, that caused the violence of the goddess. It was not Athena s and Arachne s language games that were incommensurable but the pragmatics of their differing power. The exploitation of this incommensurability of power can be explained by Athena s elastic sense of justice as well as by her self-understanding and existential choice that set her in competitive closure with respect to her other. Hence it is not so much a collapse of criteriology that is required in order to have justice but rather its restitution and empowerment so that it will be binding on both parts. That presupposes in turn a shift in self-understanding that establishes some kind of subjective openness and other-oriented force. Moreover, confrontation as such is theoretically more crucial here than the fact that the dispute was carried out as litigation and metalepsis (that is, reality turned into graspable and transmittable knowledge) instead of agonistics and differend. Why should it have taken place between them, anyway? If it was unnecessary, regardless of the form it took, it indirectly proves that even in the mode of agonistics the cultivation of confrontation as a locus of innovation and promotion of alterity is not as innocent and divested of individualist closure and self-assertion as it is made to appear. If confrontation has been necessary, as some conflicts always are when their occurrence is caused by a claim to justice or merely by coexistence, it proves to be detrimental to the weak once again. For confrontation sides with the strong in the unqualified and raw modes of its ontology, that is, those modes that do not accept criteria shared in common by the opponents, or only pay lip service to them, and those that reject criteriology and opt for trickery since trickery cannot always succeed. In any case, despite the effort to divest it of individualist connotations, is not any agon a struggle to ascertain identities? Is it not in a dangerous and unavoidable proximity to ant-agon-ism? Should we not also be vigilant as to the space we allocate it in ontology and the ideological baggage this al-location carries? Is Lyotard s agonistics not suspiciously reminiscent of Kant s idea based on his assumption of intrinsic human unsocial
578 MARIANNA PAPASTEPHANOU sociability (Kant 1992, 45)? David Lindstedt (1999, 133) gives the following account of Kant s coupling of antagonism and rationality: Because antagonism is necessary for the development of human reason, nature must have as its end a society in which there might remain antagonism but not war, a community in which each person would have the freedom to pursue one s own ends and compete with one another as long as such competition did not directly interfere with the freedom of another. This would be a nation with a perfect constitution that would allow people to be free through coercion, allowing antagonism to develop talents without invalidating the freedom of another. Can such convergence between this Kantian idea and Lyotard s connection of agonistics with the nouveau and the inconnu be confined to its face value distanced from the onto-anthropological Kantian problematic? 10 It is true that injustice often results from silencing a dialogue by bringing it to an end. When consensus is understood as conclusive and exhaustive, and many debates about historical issues are considered settled, agonistics represents a refreshing virus dismantling hierarchies, reopening cases, giving new potentialities to those wronged by perpetuating their active intervention through shifting textual priorities and introducing new language games. The meaning Lyotard gives to justice and the importance I detect in it can be drawn from his view that absolute injustice would occur if the pragmatics of obligation, that is, the possibility of continuing to play the game of the just, were excluded. That is what is unjust. Not the opposite of the just, but that which prohibits that the question of the just and the unjust be, and remain, raised (Lyotard 1996, 66 67). To the extent that this remark refers to injustice as dogmatism, as we saw above when discussing the game of the just, it is apposite and useful. But if the game of the just here means only what is stated, namely, that agonistics should be perpetuated, one may counterargue by unmasking its modernism. Perpetuation of agonistics has a negative modernist sense, like the one attributed by Lyotard to nonagonistic forms of claiming justice. It is modern because of its forgetfulness of time. It forgets time s urgency, the urgency of the constellation of the I, the other, and their praxis of the here and now. Many examples from history show that action must be taken and that time works at the expense of the weak. One of the side effects of perpetuating a never-ending negotiation (even if it is not exactly a negotiation but merely an attempt to trick the strong) is that it almost legitimates and consolidates de facto the faits accomplis of an injustice. For instance, mobility resulting in demographic alteration that serves the objectives of those who are strong enough to implement it turns, after some years, into unshaken faits accomplis against which the other party involved, the one affected by the demographic alteration, cannot even argue without risking 10 For a discussion of that problematic see my 2002.
LINGUISTIC ARCHIPELAGO AND (ITS?) HISTORY 579 to appear intransigent and inhumane. (Such is the case with the Greek Cypriot dislocation from the north after the Turkish invasion, and it is generalizable to the Palestinian flight from Israel or the Armenian diaspora from Anatolian Turkey.) The problem itself, the one that generated either dialogue or agonistics in the first place, becomes history. Then the powerful undertake the role of the judge of the differend and address the parties involved with the imperative Forget history! at will, a will dictated by power. But a Lyotardian might ask, Who is right and who is wrong in a situation like this? And what kind of historico-political discourse might ever establish this so adequately as to have action taken? And how could one safeguard that such economical action is not violent to the conflicting parties? The nominalism that underlies all these questions (blocking all recourse to the referent as an objective touchstone of truth) is not only indifferent but also violent itself or so it might be felt by those concerned. By assuming that the economy of language is by definition violent and that we can escape from it only if we relativize all criteriology and relinquish all claims to reason and argumentation having a legitimizing force, Lyotard propounds a never-ending language game of novel and unknown trickery. To that I object by directing some attention to the fact that several conflicts do demand that we take a position on the grounds of validity (which view is morally right and permissible). The injustice of perpetuating the suffering of those wronged by relativizing their arguments and depriving them of their appeal to some kind of rational legitimizing force is often far greater than the kind of injustice Lyotard sees in consensual rational argumentation. In my view, the urgent pragmatics of many conflicts is what constitutes another sense of the beat of time, a beat that has been ignored equally by modernist and postmodernist discourse. It represents the only reason for recuperating theoretically (without restoring its hegemony) the economy of representation (that is, giving a more or less accurate picture of what really happens) implicit in the conception of reason as a legitimizing force. Thus I claim that Lyotard s idea of justice has to be supplemented with a revisited conception of the ontology of language, one that is not by definition incriminated for violence and economical terror in other words, one whose complicity is contingent and contextual, not ahistorical and omnipresent. Injustice does not simply derive from an always violent representation of facts; it also derives from seeing the representation of facts as always violent and refusing to allow for criteria stemming from a fair representational account of facts in order to deal justice. History, Justice, Ontology, and Postmodernism Let us examine how this claim ties in with the issue of history by comparing some tendencies within postmodernism. Foucault is inclined to use
580 MARIANNA PAPASTEPHANOU archival research to retrieve the forgotten history of the mad person and give voice to the silent. Derrida criticizes Foucault s move for reinforcing the rule of voice over silence by adapting the rule of madness to the rule of the logocentric mode of discourse (Readings 1992, 60). Thus, the rule of history as voice repressing the silent remains intact. Now, Lyotard s approach supersedes both Foucault s view and Derrida s by demonstrating that oppression does not simply take place in historical representation but begins in the modernist ( modernist in the qualitative and not the strictly temporal sense) thought of history as representation (Readings 1992, 61). What I see as escalating through the tendencies mentioned above is a progressive dematerialization of violence and projection of it into an ontological-linguistic sphere. Violence, it is important to add, appears in the guise of ontology and language, as an omnipresent and endemic aspect of a speech and a representation articulated around an Is of things and people. But, as I argue, violence as inscription on bodies is always as contingent and ephemeral as bodies are and as everything else is and there is nothing metaphysical about violence save what we ascribe to it. Hence there is no logical ground for defending the proclamation of violence as a metaphysical parameter of representation. Unfortunately, whereas most postmodernists, Lyotard among them, have taken great pains to expose the bad metaphysics of Occidental philosophy, the tacit metaphysical character of their wholesale incrimination of representation and its negative implications (for example, the political inoperativeness described above) seems to have escaped their attention. Bill Readings states that Lyotard s position, by pushing toward a historical writing that attests to history as a site of dispute, of differends, leads us out of the impasse of the Foucault versus Derrida debate. In my opinion, Lyotard s position pushes the debate through to its end instead of overcoming it and in this way becomes a manifestation of the impasse created by the blanket incrimination of language and ontology. If representation (language, ontology) is violent, a glimpse of the ineffable within the historical event is the only justice that can be done it. But is this glimpse possible without representation? Readings comments that the task of historical writing is not to give voice to the silence of the oppressed, which would be only to betray that silence.... Once we claim to represent the Holocaust as part of history, then it becomes just one atrocity among others in the long history of man s inhumanity to man, as West German revisionist historians have argued. In order to respect the impossibility of atonement, of coming to terms with horror by representing it, we have to write a history that will testify to the unrepresentable horror without representing it (Readings 1992, 61). But in my opinion the ensidic (the ensemblistic-identitary dimension, to use a term by Castoriadis) of the Holocaust referent and the Holocaust narrative meet precisely in the assertion of the unique and unrepresentable horror. This is what only signification can allow to appear and ironically is what
LINGUISTIC ARCHIPELAGO AND (ITS?) HISTORY 581 Lyotard himself can do solely through the economy of the phrase, that is, preserve the memory of the unprecedented horror of that event in his books, which themselves are not at all silent about this unpresentability. They are, however, indeed silent on many other historical events (not on the significance of the Holocaust, one might retort, but is this comparison not already violent and unjust?). Events like the genocide of American Indians seem simply not to have drawn the attention of Lyotard or other prominent Western figures of contemporary thought, modern and postmodern. (I am not implying that they would condone or tolerate the American Indian genocide, or that its existence somehow justifies events like the Holocaust, an atrocious argument, but I am using that genocide as an example of the im-passe created by the emphasis on ineffability.) Nonrepresented can also mean as I see it unknown or forgotten, never wronged in the consciousness of the strong, the third party, the judge, or the wrongdoers themselves. Those who have been wronged in that way have no means to demand justice other than to articulate the wrong. The only ruse and trickery they can perform in our postmodern times is mimesis, to imitate the strong, to pretend that they are like them. Or to imitate their language game, learn their language, study their lifestyles and preferences so as to persuade them (since convincing implies an appeal to a rationality and criteriology that is in practice marginal and in theory only a smoke screen). (Is it accidental that some of the most successful politicians of the so-called third world have studied in Europe or the United States, or have been bilingual since birth, or have managed to be hardly distinguishable in mannerism and appearance from their Western colleagues?) The wronged can trick those who are strong by articulating the wrong and making the strong speak about it themselves, in what we might call their own genuine way of putting things nicely, without malapropisms. And they must do that gently, in order not to offend the masters, and subtly, in order not to raise the suspicion of propaganda, lest there be neither effectiveness nor charm in their move. Thus, the best idea of trickery, an idea that is imposed by our times, may operate not out of the dominant language game but only within it and not through confrontation but through piecemeal politics of persuasion. In the gloomy perspective of contemporary world politics, the most persuasive narrative of the injustice suffered is given not by the one who avoids the game of the strong and shifts her role but by the one who learns to play the game better. Against Lyotard, I would argue that the cause of justice can be taken up not by the pagan but by the perfect mime. Suggestions If such an empirical pragmatics is too cynical, we have to strive for a new understanding of our language and ontology, a more enabling one. Lyotard s insightful theory can contribute to this, but only if it is itself