Lyotard, Literature and the Trauma of the differend

D. Sawyer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137383341
• eBook ISBN: 9781137383358
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This original study examines Jean-François Lyotard's philosophical concept of the differend and details its unexplored implications for literature. it provides a new framework with which to understand the discourse itself, from its Homeric beginnings to postmodern works by authors such as Michael Ondaatje and Jonathan Safran Foer.

1

The differend and Beyond

Having now briefly examined the context of Lyotard’s work prior to the publication of The Differend, this chapter seeks to more thoroughly explore the book’s philosophical findings, particularly his concepts of the phrase, concatenation, the wrong, and most obviously the differend. I shall also investigate and dispute Lyotard’s conception of ‘victimhood’ that underpins the work, finding that his understanding of Silence becomes a needless obstacle for literature to surmount in order to bear witness. I shall then examine Lyotard’s work following The Differend, briefly examining the philosopher’s interest in the inhuman, the sublime, and the capacities of literature to resist closures of thought. However, I will also note the limitations Lyotard ascribes to the literary, most particularly his refusal to permit the differend ‘within’ the narrative form. Finally, I will explain that in Lyotard’s last published work – Soundproof Room – he seems to acknowledge that literature (or at least ‘style’) is able to formally attest to Silence but that he also ascribes such functionality more to the call of ‘stridency’ than he does to the differend, an omission that this book seeks redress.

The phrase

Before even the beginning, Lyotard believes that a phrase ‘happens’, that it presents a ‘There is’. All transferences of information (including those which are extralinguistic) are what Lyotard describes as ‘phrases’ – ‘A wink, a shrugging of the shoulder, a tapping of the foot, a fleeting blush, or an attack of tachycardia can be phrases ... To doubt that one phrases is still to phrase, one’s silence makes a phrase’ (D, §65 and xi). A phrase makes known four instances each time it occurs: the ‘addressor’ who presents the phrase, the ‘addressee’ to whom the phrase is presented, the ‘referent’ referring to that which the phrase is about, and the ‘sense’ which relates the possible meanings of the phrase. There is no originary phrase just as there is no final phrase, for to establish such definitive status would be to further perpetuate its linkage. A phrase is forever bound in concatenation, forever a now: ‘To link with one another is necessary, how to link is contingent’ (D, §40). As a result of this unavoidable necessity to phrase ‘the social is always presupposed because it is presented or copresented within the slightest phrase’ (D, §193), thereby making the question of what to link onto the phrase fundamentally political for Lyotard: ‘[Politics] is not a genre, it is the multiplicity of genres, the diversity of ends, and par excellence the question of linkage ... Politics consists in the fact that language is not a language, but phrases, or that Being is not Being, but There is’s’ (D, §190).

The meaning of the phrase (the ‘universe(s)’ it calls forth) only becomes determined through the rules for concatenation, through phrase regimens. These regimens are syntactic governances (cognitive, descriptive, prescriptive, etc.) which align the phrase event with its specific – and necessarily exclusive – requirements. The presentation of a phrase event can never be wholly exhausted by a specific phrase regime as all are inescapably heterogeneous and incommensurable with each other, the constellations they chart serving to simultaneously unveil expanses unseen. The heterogeneity among phrase regimens is nevertheless brought under accord through their subservience to a genre and is shaped and driven by that particular genre’s defining end or purpose. However, this concordance merely permits the site of a new conflict – this time between the apparent incommensurability of multiple genres of discourse and the ‘triumphant’ validity incurred to the chosen phrase regimens and their linkage. As Lyotard notes: ‘Genres of discourse determine stakes, they submit phrases from different regimes to a single finality [that do] nothing more than shift the differend from the level of regimens to that of ends ... [arising between them] because only one of them can happen (be “actualised”) at a time’ (D, §40).

Citing Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Lyotard illustrates the multiplicity of genres using the analogue of an archipelago, each an island to itself though bound together through the explorative motion of judgment: ‘The faculty of judgment would be, at least in part, like an admiral or like a provisioner of ships who would launch expeditions from one island to the next, intended to present to one island what was found ... in the other ... Whether war or commerce, this interventionist force has no object’ (D, Kant 3). Yet the instrumentation of this reflective judgment (to paraphrase Kant’s definition – the attempt by reason to find unknown universals for given particulars) seems to face numerable problems. That it cannot present a totality is essential – ‘the principle of an absolute victory of one genre over another has no sense’ (D, §189) – but since it must be ‘channelled’ by the limits of the genres they inscribe (their specific ‘ends’ or ‘stakes’), which in turn ‘impose [their] mode of linking onto us’ (D, §183), does this not invoke a necessarily conditioned and ‘impure’ faculty of judgment and so bring the very basis of our reasoning into disrepute?¹

It does. As Derrida explains in his essay ‘The Law of Genre’, the separateness between genres implies a limit, which in turn implies a law of demarcation – namely that a genre has unity, one that is not to be intermixed with other genres.² This ideal of purity, this limit, is the law of genre, or the ‘being-law of genre’. Derrida proposes that this law of genre has, embedded within it, its own law, that each genre must have at least one defining trait identifiable to that specific genre ‘authorising us to adjudicate whether a given text belongs to this or perhaps that genre’.³ Yet such a trait is also a ‘marker’, operatively constitutive in its function, both belonging and not belonging to the genre it specifies, ‘re-markable’ due to its absence from the category it defines. It leaves its trace in every object within the genre, existing not only as an outer edge but also an internal imprint, avoiding clear distinction between ‘within and beyond’ as a result of the ‘inside’ carrying the trace of the other. Consequently, Derrida declares there to be a ‘law of impurity’ within the law of genre itself, at once present and absent, which engenders the very possibility of law, genre, and taxonomy: ‘Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text, there is always a genre and genres ... because of the trait of participation itself ... In marking itself generically, a text unmarks itself.’⁴

Yet what if the unavoidable conflict between genres was not simply the result of their struggle for dominance set against incommensurability but also understood as an act of resistance against ‘external’ subjugation? In light of Derrida’s destabilisation of heterogeneity between genres, such an approach would seem to solve the difficulties Lyotard has in sustaining the idea of clear lines of demarcation between genres while simultaneously permitting a site of conflict between them necessary for the evocation of the differend. Indeed, if the concatenation of language could be considered as an act of resistance against its own closing, a directed negotiation committed to sustaining investigation and the multiplicity of voices, then the conflict evoked between genres of discourse (and indeed all phrases) is a necessary one, a spark of combustion that defies thought’s ‘coming to rest’ while at the same time also instigating change. For while language unavoidably consists of the ceaseless concatenation of phrases and so is understood by those it chooses to relate as well as by those it must necessarily repress, phrases themselves resist the attempts of language to impose a stranglehold of meaning upon them: ‘Every phrase is in principle what is a stake in a differend between genres of discourse. This differend proceeds from the question, which accompanies any phrase, of how to link onto it’ (D, §188).

Instead, Lyotard believes that the phrase always seeks to return to its natural state, to turn away from fixed meaning and remain an is perpetually in motion, continually ‘happening’ amid the rules of discourse that seek to govern it. As a result, the phrase (or more accurately ‘phrases’ since the singular unavoidably calls forth the plural) must always provide further linkage because such concatenation is always inherently presupposed – there is no language, no thought, without this ‘one ... indubitable’ (D, xi). This tension between phrases and their utilisation ultimately provide the ground for the evocation of the differend: ‘Every phrase is the locus of a differend, in that the nature of every phrase is to be determined by the next phrase linked to it.’⁵ Indeed, while the differend is to be understood as symptomatic of the phrase’s resistance to methods that seek to corral them (their ceaseless tide urging that there should always be something more to say and be heard), ultimately it exists as the recognition that such impositions have fashioned regimes and genres of discourse that fail to adequately address the totality of Silence when something ‘“asks” to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being to be put into phrases right away’ (D, §23).The differend is then itself to be considered a phrase, but a phrase that struggles with the ability to link – the noted hesitancy of a full-stop amid the concatenation of ellipses. It is also important to recognise that the differend is itself indifferent to the clamour of history and critical demarcation, and that its recognition of Silence occurs regardless of era or event. It is to be understood not as absence of presence but rather the presence of absence as being itself absent, ‘a nonspatial reference to that place, site, event of interaction where something is excluded, obscured, silenced in the attempt to subsume it under some other rubric’.⁶ As Tomiche notes: ‘That a phrase is inarticulate ... means that it does not present a universe. It is thus a non-signifying, non-referenced, non-addressing, and non-addressed phrase ... point[ing] to a meaning that is only one type: a feeling.’⁷ Indeed, this feeling is of critical importance as it sustains the obligation to answer its call and institute new methods of address:

[The differend is a] state signalled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling: ‘One cannot find the words,’ etc. A lot of searching must be done to find new rules for forming and linking phrases that are able to express the differend disclosed by the feeling, unless one wants this differend to be smothered right away in a litigation and for the alarm sounded by the feeling to have been useless ... 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. (D, §22 and §21)

Here it is important to re-emphasise the distinction between a wrong and a differend. While the differend presupposes a wrong (since it is the recognition of its occurrence and the intuition that something must be done to address such injustice), a wrong does not need the active participant of recognition to qualify its happening: ‘A wrong results from the fact that the rules of the genre of discourse by which one judges are not those of the judged genre or genre of discourse’ (D, xi). Indeed, the wrong par excellence would be the one that is passed by unnoticed, unchampioned into oblivion through an absence of witnesses willing (or able) to provide testimony.⁸ In any case, although it may ultimately be addressed through responding to its differend, this unavoidably invokes further wrongs into existence. This is to be expected and could not be otherwise, for the attempt to situate the wrong into a phrase regime and specific discourse presupposes the nature of the wrong and the manner in which it should express itself had it not been denied such representational ability. Since according to Lyotard there is no guiding meta-narrative that governs ethical judgement (which would in any case, unavoidably ignore the wrongs that fell beyond its province) each encounter with a wrong and its differend is an impure and conditional one, able only to reflect individual needs because each instance calls for unique modes of address in which to do so. However, that it ultimately cannot guarantee any definitive rendering of justice is inconsequential, and arguably even unnecessary, for it nonetheless forces genres of discourse – and those who invoke them – to constantly investigate and challenge their established modes of thinking in order to present the unpresentable and attest to the wrong of Silence. The differend then does not present itself as being the definitive answer but rather as a recognition of the importance of sustaining the question. As I will later argue, such ceaseless ethical prompting answers many of the nihilistic and relativist charges brought against Lyotard.

To return to the analogy of the archipelago, the passage of reflective, indeterminate judgment not only permits the unifying conception of totality, but also the communicability between each genre: ‘The expeditions to neighbouring islands undertaken by the faculty of judgment do not just bring back empirical data, but [also] rules of formation and ... linkage’ (D, Kant Notice 3). Lyotard acknowledges that ‘genres of discourse are all subject to a single, universal principle ... of “winning” or “gaining” [dominance]’ (D, §181), as is their superiority being dependent upon submerging the ‘ends’ of other genres within its own borders. Yet I would argue along with Derrida that genres are all observably interwoven with one another, the eruption of their form and colour granted a degree of distinction only from a distance (a distance that nevertheless is unable to exist ‘beyond’ genre). Indeed, while such routes of exchange unavoidably establish further sites of conflict (as well as an impure faculty of judgement), such acts also suggest that even amid apparent incommensurability genres can relate to one another through the active recognition of their differences.⁹ I believe that the differend exemplifies such recognition, functioning as a bridge that both divides and connects two or more (supposedly) incommensurable points, highlighting the very space it feels compelled to traverse and echoing the Silence it is able to hear. It is a paradox, an impulse for disruption that searches for an eventual harmony, undeterred by the impossibility of its charge.

Rather than a silence that is able to ‘bear witness against the authority of the addressee ... against that of the witnesses themselves (we, the survivors, we have no authority to speak of it), or ... against the capacity of language to signify’ (D, §27), it is a silenced Silence that the differend rallies against, one that – often because of the traumatic impact upon its victims – is unable to permit the uninterrupted concatenation of phrases that would otherwise present the object of its attention as intelligible.¹⁰ This is the reason that, although Silence is ‘heard’ by the differend (through a feeling that something is not adequately being expressed), it is still only ever able to relay this wrong by most likel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The differend and Beyond
• 2  Housed Exile
• 3  Homer and Ondaatje
• 4  The Traumatic Sublime
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index