Against Autonomy

Lyotard, Judgement and Action

Neal Curtis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138634268
• eBook ISBN: 9781351809603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This title was first published in 2001: Against Autonomy reassesses Jean-Francois Lyotard's contribution to philosophy and theory, and explores how his work challenges the privileged position of the principle of autonomy in contemporary liberal democratic thinking, as seen in such diverse thinkers as Rawls, Rorty and Fukuyama. Curtis argues that the political models autonomy legitimates are inadequatefor thinking justice. Such models invariably promote self-legislation as the ground of freedom turning the subject away from its prior constitutionby, and responsibility for, the Other. He explores Lyotard's reading of Kant as well as his responses to Levinas and Heidegger in order to rethink the political. Developing a regulative Idea based on new understandings of heteronomy and an-archyCurtis shows how Lyotard's argument that there are no criteria for justice does not mean judgement and action fall prey to decisionism and relativism, but that this lack of criteria commits us to a renewed sensitivity to events. Examining Lyotard's work in relation to Arendt's writings on the vita activa, this book explores themes of community, communication and action, suggesting how Lyotard's work calls for an alternative conception of political space. This book will be of particular interest to those studying communitarianism, liberalism, anarchism, post-structuralism and postmodernism, particularly within the context of political philosophy, ethics, and political and social theory. Neal Curtis is Lecturer in Communication Studies, Anglia Polytechnic University at Cambridge, UK

Chapter 1

Models, Descriptions, Ideas

Instead of making the ciphered common currency, we must try to do justice to its insignificance.

Jean-François Lyotard

To approach autonomy after Kant is to think the moral law: to think the moral law after Lyotard is to radically question autonomy. For Lyotard the law is the practical condition whereby we are first and foremost addressed. Having been bom without wanting to be, and having been given our place by language (or places, for such embeddings are numerous), the subject is continually immersed in, and affected by, events to which he or she cannot but respond. The law, then, is this condition of being held. It is the necessity of a response, as well as a responsibility for the manner of that response. The law, however, does not signify what is to be done, it remains indeterminate in this regard. Lyotar’s sober, almost monastic, meditations on the law have been perceived by one commentator as penance for the heresy and excesses of Lbidinal Economy,¹ which Lyotard himself regarded as his ‘evil book’ (1988b: p. 13). This remark appears in Lyotard’s most concise and autobiographical discussion of the law in the first lecture of his Peregrenations, where he explains that ‘[t]he desire to explore [thoughts, forms, phrases] is the duty we are committed to by the law’ (p. 12). But he reminds us that Very many ways are available to fulfill this duty. Moreover such a diversity would be more respectful of the constitutive withdrawal of the law than the exclusive privilege arrogated by theory’ (p. 12). There is, then, a summons to respond and explore, but we do not know what this law commands for ‘the law is only prescription as such’ (p. 10), that is, the prescript of being held in a prescriptive position.

The law calls for a doing without determining what is to be done. It is the necessity of linking onto phrases without ever mastering them. This space of hesitation before the law, ‘which forbids and prevents us from identifying with it and profiting from it’ (p. 10), means two things for Lyotard. Firstly, this ban on identifying with the law displaces theory, for no discourse, account or model is adequate to the law. Secondly, as a consequence of this indeterminacy, experimentation is required in the fulfillment of our duty to it. However, every thinker, Lyotard writes, ‘carries […] as a particular temptation the weakness or the possibility of ignoring that he or she is committed to a “I don’t know what’” (p. 12). This is not to say that thinkers act as if there is no law to which they are beholden, rather, they seek to overcome the ban and our abandonment to this “I don’t know what”. They argue that the law is dedudble. In this way the law is made our own, we are commensurate with it. No longer the anxiety of a radical questioning, it is now something determinate against which we might measure our judgements and actions as correct.

Resistant to such model building, Lyotard’s own writings need to be read as examples of experimentation in response to the law’s ban. As a consequence it is difficult to define his thinking as it does not concern itself with an object, it does not have a field and it refuses disciplines. It constantly moves in search of ways to answer the appeal. If anything, it might be characterized as a philosophy of the remainder, with the law itself being emblematic of that which remains or resists. The remainder, or ‘thing’ which resists, has been thought in terms of the pagan ruse, the postmodern petit récit, the immemorial debt, “the jew”, the event and the differend. The anamnesis of an immemorial and indeterminate law, which in prescribing itself prescribes the unpresentable, does not only appear in his writings specific to the question of the law and justice, it can be traced in all of Lyotard’s work. It has been given the name of figure, the invisible, intensity, dreamwork, the body, matter. This does not mean these terms are exchangeable, rather it suggests that when thought organizes itself into discursive, conceptual or representative structures there are many ways of phrasing the ‘thing’ which resists. In witnessing the remainder, the thinker is witnessing the law, it is as if the undoing of the subject of knowledge by this unpresentable remainder can be likened to the prescript which holds the subject as an addressee.

In Lyotard’s biography of Malraux, published only a couple of years before his death, the opening provides a wonderful analogy for this law and the pretension or illusion that one might be done with it. Lyotard notes how Malraux recorded the death of his mother in his Anti-Memoirs and Days of Wrath. Of being at her death bed Malraux remembers his mother’s hand and the fine, deep lines of her palm which intersected indefinitely and merged with the lines of the earth; the clay in which Malraux’s still-born brother had already been lain. To his mother he would owe ‘his trepidation, his eagerness to break up relationships, his hunger for adventure. In vain would he protest his debt and deny the creditor; his lifelong denial itself marked how much he was a tributary of that palm’ (Lyotard, 1999: p. 12).

Initially he followed his father who had already taken flight from the matrixial web. Malraux was to give birth to himself, ‘obeying the true law of men, which was to forge their own statue’ (p. 6). Malraux received from his father ‘a patronymic associated with outward-bound men’ (p. 15). He enters the world and a flood of artistic and literary phrases. To confront his destiny he becomes a dealer in wonders, a trafficker in legends, a compiler and editor of other people’s stories, a forger of signatures practicing to sign his own. ‘For a long time he thought that he was signing his life […] But, in the end, he was seeking the countersignature of the unknown donatrix’ (p. 69). Malraux’s signature would always be the sign of a debt which delivered him to the action of life and to the ruin of death. All the way through the opening pages Lyotard presents Malraux as first and foremost addressed by birth, death, names, words and works, held by an indeterminate law and filled with a ‘nihilistic dread’ borne of its indeterminacy; a condition which persists throughout the uncertain but necessary life he acts.

Indeed Malraux’s life, as given by Lyotard, is a good example of the ‘dizziness’ Lyotard himself felt when he realised how groundless the criteria were for responding to the law. That the spectre of nihilism haunts all of Lyotard’s work is undoubted, but this nihilism is borne of the law and is not the result of its demise. One responds to nihilism by testifying to the law through searching for the rule on the occasion of each phrase, each event, not by the restoration and administration of a certain systematic politics. Such formulaic thought will only drift and break up under the law’s constitutive withdrawal. To this extent, and for the purposes of my work here, I wish to focus on Lyotard’s search for a way to bear witness to an indeterminate law and the infinity of possible responses or phrases it commits us to, while at the same time maintaining a guide for judgement as ‘a safekeeper of the pragmatics of obligation’ (Lyotard, 1985: p. 76), that is, an ethics.

The importance of this safekeeping came to the fore in Lyotard’s departure from libidinal philosophy, where ‘the polymorphic paganism of exploring and expoliting the whole range of intensive forms could easily be swept away into lawful permissiveness, including violence and terror’ (1988b: p. 15). To resist this danger Lyotard turned to Kant for a way of regulating the possible responses to the law without reducing it to a determinate structure, thereby maintaining the duty to a “I don’t know what”. This chapter will therefore explore Lyotard’s use of Kant’s Critique of Judgement for regulating and linking phrases, that is judging and acting in the absence of criteria. To do this it will first of all be necessary to briefly introduce Lyotard’s philosophy of phrases, before considering in detail the differend between the law and its description, the regulative Idea and the use of reflective judgement for making ‘passages’ amid this heterogeneity.

Phrases

To begin to ask what phrases are I have chosen to highlight seven topics, all of which draw out significant aspects of Lyotard’s work of this period. The following, then, are brief excursions into the phrase analysis in order to formulate a schematic definition of the term, to ask why phrases should be privileged in philosophical analysis, how they relate to events (a term in need of definition itself), how the analysis responds to the charge of relativism, the relationship between phrases and reality, the use of practical wisdom or phronesis with regard to phrasing, and finally phrases thought in terms of the radical incommensurability of the differend.

1. It is incorrect to assume that Lyotard’s phrase analysis in The Differend is a purely linguistic concern. This analysis of phrases does, of course, involve a highly developed critique of linguistic configurations, but it must also be remembered, as mentioned in the introduction, that a phrase is a silence, a gesture, an action, a desire, a look, a mark on a canvas, and innumerable other such examples that do not fall into the common understanding of spoken or written language. The French word phrase can be translated as sentence and some commentators prefer this rendition. Geoffrey Bennington argues that by using the word “sentence”, one is more accurately portraying the unity intended by Lyotard and connoted by the French phrase, whereas the English “phrase” designates a fragment of a larger unity. This is undoubtedly correct, for Lyotard’s phrase analysis does assume an integrity for each phrase and a sensitivity to the phrase’s particularity that follows from this. Bennington also argues that using sentence instead of phrase brings to the fore Lyotard’s interest in the Anglo-American tradition of linguistic analysis, of which the first chapter of The Differend is an excellent example. Having said this, I choose to retain the use of phrase adopted by Georges Van Den Abbeele in his translation of The Differend as I believe it invokes some of the ‘non-linguistic’ examples of phrases better than the word sentence, which tends to promote The Differend as more of a philosophy of language than it actually is. Indeed, on this point Lyotard is adamant that his thought is not a general theory of language as this would lend itself to an ontology, and Lyotard, by promoting a multiplicity of phrase forms, is attempting to avoid any speculation on the fundamental nature of things.

2. Why are phrases privileged and not, for example, the reasoning of a practical agent? When Lyotard asks himself what is absolutely certain he can only conclude that there are phrases. And again, as above, nothing substantial can be concluded from this, only the inevitability of more phrases taking place. The subject uncovered by the phrase “I think” has no enduring substance but is rather the referent of that particular phrase, and with other phrases identity and status alter. This is because each phrase institutes a phrase universe and arranges the four instances differendy according to which phrase regime or family the phrase belongs. What is commonly called the subject shifts between the different instances of addresser, addressee, referent and sense, and with this the nature and authority of the subject also changes. What is more, subjectivity will be affected by the genre of discourse in which the phrases are linked together. Each genre – poetics, politics, economics, statistics, ecology, etc. – has rules for reaching particular ends – creativity, consensus, wealth, prediction, conservation – and the subject will be different in each – expressive, autonomous, exchangeable, numerical, heteronomous. These phrase regimes and genres of discourse are what were referred to as language games in the Wittgensteinian idiom of Lyotard’s work in the seventies. The terminology changed because language game did not make the distinction between regime and genre, and it also assumed a subject outside of the game, playing it.²

While a critique of subjectivity is nothing new, what is different in Lyotard’s work is the resistance to the recovery of the addresser instance, where the mutable subject nevertheless recovers security in selfdetermination, self-legislation or self-creation; that is autonomy. The critiques of subjectivity that have separated the subject from an essential nature, nevertheless privilege the reinvention of subjectivity over and over again, and the corresponding priority given to the addresser instance in this reinvention. Instead of disrupting the affinity between subject, addresser and authority, critiques of subjectivity have only served to strengthen the intimacy of the assumed bond. Lyotard’s phrase analysis, however, undoes the possibility of finding both a founding phrase that would give legitimacy to all the others, and a first phrase from where the subject might create itself. He is critical of the Cartesian project that seeks authority in a first phrase such as “I think”, which is presumed to provide the critical first step of certainty in thought, and from where the subject assumes the position of addresser and begins to say what is and is not the case. For Lyotard, the irrelevancy of the fundamental phrase comes from the fact that one is always embedded in language, the phrase I think presupposes I and think, while also presupposing the numerical sequence that might allow it to be first. There is no phrase, or linkage of phrases, that can lift the subject out of this condition. I am never first, I am always at least second.

3. Phrases futher disrupt the assumed authority of the subject of knowledge when their quality as events is considered. For Jacob Rogozinski what defines an event ‘is the arrival of an otherness, of a radical uniqueness that the multiple tries to attain without ever reaching’ (1991: p. 109). An event is ‘the occurrence “before” the signification of the occurrence’ (Lyotard, 1988a: p. 79). It is the suspense of a singularity which exceeds reference. It is prior to and heterogeneous to discourse, it is ‘an empty place to be occupied by a referent’ (p. 79). It is ‘the case that something happens’ (Readings, 1991: p. xxxi). An event is the advent of the It happens rather than the signification of What happens. Events, like phrases, happen all the time and are often referred to as phrase-events, whereby the word phrase is the unitary form of differing events – an action, a word, a tone, a silence – with event signifying the singular occurrence or happening of each phrase. The temporality of the It happens, its precedence and irreducibility to the What happens, means that the happening of a phrase-event is unpresentable, or is registered only negatively.

Because it is absolute, the presenting present cannot be grasped: it is not yet or no longer present. It is always too soon or too late to grasp presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific and paradoxical constitution of the event. That something happens, the occurrence, means that the mind is disappropriated. The expression ‘it happens that […]’ is the formula of non-mastery of self over self. The event makes the self incapable of taking possession and control of what it is. It testifies that the self is essentially passable to a recurrent alterity (Lyotard, 1991b: p. 59).

This ‘recurrent alterity’ is the movement of time which can never be held, it is the unrecoverable happening of the event, the singular difference of each event, and the deferring of any end to their advent.³

Thinking suffers, its systems, models, and criteria are threatened with the advent of each phrase-event. The inability for consciousness to grasp, or be adequate to, not only the happening of events but also their singularity is a recurring motif in an ethics where the ‘ungraspable point’ of presentation has the quality of a prior and unrecoverable alterity, situating the subject as responsive and responsible. Events in their particular happening disturb and question discourses, histories, modes of representation and classificatory practices. They do not abide by the narratives and categories that stabilize our world. As Lyotard explains phrase-events ‘come to us concealed under the appearance of everyday occurrences. To become sensitive to their quality as actual events, to become competent in listening to their sound underneath silence or noise, to become open to the “It happens that” rather than the “what happens”, requires at the very least a high degree of refinement in the perception of small differences’ (1988b: p. 18).

The competency Lyotard refers to is not just a competency of perception for it is also a competence of judging how to respond to a phrase, for one cannot not phrase. It is necessary to link, but how one links is contingent. This is another way in which Lyotard talks of the constitutive withdrawal of the law. ‘One phrase calls forth another, whichever it may be’ (Lyotard, 1988a: p. 66). When Lyotard doubts he concludes that there are phrases, together with the inevitability...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Models, Descriptions, Ideas
• 2 Autonomy 1: Legitimation
• 3 Autonomy 2: Recognition
• 4 Heteronomy: Priority and Responsibility
• 5 An-archy: Principles and Foundations
• 6 Action; or, Linking and Sharing
• Bibliography
• Index