Dialectic of Totality: A Critique of Postmodernism

By tracing the function of totality in French post-structuralist thought, particularly that of

Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, this study will demonstrate how in the

postmodern era a new stability has been found within the absolute repudiation of consensus.

It will be argued that the undialectical dualistic tendencies in this thought constitutes a new

totality, counterposing progress and stasis, heterogeneity and homogeniety, homology and

paralogy, as if they were not mutually constitutive. Frustrating though it may be that the

search for a non-totalizing consensus has proven to be so elusive and at times so dangerous,

the absolute opposition to all forms of totality does not provide a solution to this problem,

offering, as it does, a new form of stability. It is, however, precisely this negation of totality

which can be seen as the primary project of postmodernism. Implcit throughout this study is

a defence of Marxist dialectics over the absolute heterogeneity of postmodernism.

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Introduction

The contradiction is the non-identical under the aspect of identity; the primacy of the

principle of contradiction in dialectics measures what is heterogenous in unitary

thinking. By colliding against its own borders, it reaches beyond itself.1

Enough books, essays, and articles have been written on the relationship between modernism

and postmodernism that, to a casual observer, it must appear that if so many definitions have

not yet been realized, and so many difficulties not yet overcome, then it may be time to throw

in the towel of mutual incomprehensibility and lay down at the altar of relativism. There are

those who see the birth of the postmodern period as a fracture with the past, and those who

see it as an augmentation of tendencies latent in modernism; those who see postmodernism as

constituting a radical critical attitude, and those who see it as yet another reactionary neo-

conservative tract; some see the seeds of totalitarianism as arising in the monolithic shadow

of modernist functionalism, and some see it dispersed in the atomized soil of postmodern

plurality.2 The list goes on. Furthermore, at a deeper level of analysis the theories

themselves have become a subject for the development of further ‘meta-theories’. Far from

providing a ‘way out’ from the conflict, this procedure frequently only serves to more deeply

entrench the irreconcilability of two apparently opposing views, retreating, as it does, within

a cradling metaphysics. Take, for example, Alex Callinicos’ Against Postmodernism: A

Marxist Critique which attempts to locate a wide range of – mostly French – thinkers, from

Jacques Derrida to Jean Baudrillard, within a socio-economic context, thereby accounting for

1Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics. trans. Dennis Redmond. 2001.

http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/ndtrans.html accessed 21st April 2011, 16-18. 2 Though each of these arguments have been pursued to greater or lesser degrees by many writers, each

dichotomy can be seen as headed by Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas respectively. See Jean-

François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 1979); and Jürgen Habermas. The theory of communicative action: Reason and the rationalization of

Society. trans. Thomas McCarthy. (Cambridge: Polity, 1984).

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some of the developments peculiar to their thought. Callinicos concludes that the air of

distrust, typical of postmodern thought – which emerged in the wake of the events of May

1968 – towards any claim that vowed to bring about ‘emancipation’ or ‘revolution’ was an

“inevitable consequence of the objective logic of the events – which was to modernize, and

not overthrow French capitalism – and a form of adaptation to consumer society perfected as

a result of that crisis.”3 To the untrained eye Callinicos lays bare his conclusions for all to

see, but to the postmodernist, there is a further implicit conclusion: that it is in fact possible to

plausibly assimilate figural reality and discourse to singular claims.

The postmodern rebuttal to this implicit assumption would be to ask if heterogeneous reality

can really be subsumed beneath a totalizing theory. And if this can be done of postmodern

thinkers, can this not also be done of Callinicos?4 For if discourse, whether philosophical,

psychological, sociological, or aesthetic, can be located historically, then can this assessment

not also be subjected to the same treatment? Can we not, in other words, also locate

Callinicos’ conclusions in much the same way, and therefore question the ‘objective’ validity

of his work? And of this further diagnosis, can we not also subject this to the same

treatment? And so on in an infinite regress. Lack of consensus may equally be seen as a

tragic indictment of universality and the futility of self-willed human emancipation – which,

to many, amounts to nothing more than a self-defeating attempt to haul oneself up by one’s

own bootstraps – or as providing the subject for a heroic intellectual synthesis of an Hegelian

magnitude. Either way, the two arguments remain obdurately opposed.

3 Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), 166. 4 Important to note that Callinicos was aware of these criticisms and has justified himself at length in both

Against Postmodernism and elsewhere. His position is being used for the purposes of contextualizing an

ostensibly totalizing argument.

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But there are, as I see it, two key reasons why it would be folly to simply admit defeat

because of these seemingly intractable difficulties. First, the theorization of any socio-

cultural formation must inevitably be characterized by conflict if thought is to resist

hypostatization. The unfolding of a discourse is as much a document of the emergent present

as it is a commentary on the retracting past, not least when the subjects of the debate are

those who are simultaneously its objects. It is therefore to be expected that as conditions

change in the present, so does this impact upon the way the past is understood. Second, it is

difficult to imagine what a debate or a discussion would sound like without conflict. My

guess is that it wouldn’t sound much like a debate at all. Argumentation is predicated upon

the existence of antagonism, but the recognition that a debate is beyond reconciliation

because of the heterogeneity of “language-games” – the goal of which, Jean-Francois Lyotard

claims, is not after-all consensus, but “paralogy”5 – undermines the very foundations of

rational discussion, serving only to level out this antagonism. For if conflict is to be retained,

so must the potential for reconciliation; as Frederic Jameson points out, “a requirement for

dissension to exist is an accepted norm against which such protest can be measured.” Indeed,

the a priori acceptance of truth as being entirely relative would itself serve the very function

that much postmodern discourse so avowedly denigrates: the retrieval of absolute identity

under the unity of absolute differance.6 These two points serve as both the justification for

offering up this paper to the seemingly insatiable appetite of modern-postmodern academic

discourse, and as the point from which this critique of postmodernism is to be launched.

5 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1979), 65. 6 Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. (London:

Verso, 1987), 43.

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Frustrating though it may be that the search for a non-totalizing consensus has proven to be

so elusive and at times so dangerous, always threatening to revert into a repressive

ideological weapon, the means of escape from this situation comes not through an absolute

opposition to totality, for such negation remains tied to the very thing that it opposes. And

yet it is precisely this negation of totality which can be seen as the primary project of

postmodernism. Since its inception, Enlightenment rationality has sought a means of self-

affirmation in the absence of a God – or what may now be secularly referred to as a

transcendental signified. Such a project, David Harvey argues, has culminated in the ‘crisis

point’ of postmodernity, “because reason, a means, was left, in the absence of God’s truth,

without any spiritual or moral goal.”7 But whereas for many this crisis point is seen as a

liberation from the jaws of a totalizing reason, a realisation that the consensus that we have

hitherto been longing for comes only in the cold embrace of a totalitarian society, I believe

that this postmodern attitude constitutes a new unity, a new consensus, but one made of

fragments. To throw in the towel of mutual incomprehensibility and to accept a situation of

absolute difference is to kneel down before a new altar, a new transcendental signified. The

incarceration of human thought within a dualistic conception of totality will never achieve the

liberation that postmodernism envisages, but will only serve to re-establish the very totality

that postmodernism seeks to exclude. This process is all the more dangerous because of the

self-deception that it involves. At all times the interdependence of particular and universal

must be maintained, to strip dialectics of its power, only “[t]his would release the non-

identical, relieving it even of its intellectualized compulsion, opening up for the first time the

multiplicity of the divergent...”8 That there is a dialectic of totality will, I believe, become

apparent through an examination of three philosophical figures of structuralist and post-

structuralist thought: Adorno, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard.

7 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1990), 40. 8 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics. trans. Dennis Redmond. 2001.

http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/ndtrans.html accessed 21st April 2011, 16-18.

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The Marxist Critique of Postmodernism – The Postmodern Critique of Marxism

Although I recognize the precarious intellectual position that critics such as Callinicos

maintain with regard to this debate, I am inclined to agree with his view that there is a certain

degree of resignation involved in postmodern philosophy. I also agree with his tacit

assumption that it is possible to make such an assessment of a heterogeneous social formation

– my reasons for this will become clear over the course of this paper. In order to proceed

with this study, it is necessary first to locate views such as Callinicos’ within a wider

discourse and to give a brief summary of the theoretical impasse which its opposition to

postmodernism has created.9

At root, Callinicos’ thesis can be seen as a development of the critique of religion outlined in

the introduction of Karl Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Unlike the typical

atheistic stance, Marx treats religion “not simply... as a set of false beliefs, but as the distorted

expression of real needs denied by class society.” Marx argues that the “realization of

humanity in heaven is merely a creation of the mind”, but whilst this creation may be false,

its cause is real: “despite its untruth, it is truthful as expression of misery and protest against

this misery”.10 The location of humanity in heaven is therefore to be seen as a protest against

the lack of humanity on earth. However, whilst permitting the experience of an illusory

happiness alleviates the existence in misery, it simultaneously prevents the establishment of

“true happiness.” Thus for Marx, “the critique of religion is the critique in embryo of the

vale of tears of which religion is the halo...”11 Similarly, Callinicos sees postmodernism as

9 Because of space requirements this summary will necessarily be very reductive, but is nevertheless important

in outlining some of the key arguments. 10 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. trans. John O'Malley. (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1970), 131. 11 Ibid.

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false consciousness, which he seeks to historically locate and critique as a consolatory

illusion.12

Many of the arguments that the post-structuralist has in their arsenal to deconstruct

Callinicos’ distinctly structuralist view centre upon his adherence to what they consider to be

a totalizing metaphysics. Roland Barthes, during his post-structuralist phase, would no doubt

argue that Callinicos’ analysis of postmodernism represents an attempt to locate a

transcendental signified – and thus the origin of all texts – through socio-historical analysis:

in Marxist theory, Barthes writes, “the text is treated as if it were the repository of an

objective signification”. According to Barthes this cannot be true since the text is to be

realised as ‘production’ (produced upon being read) not a ‘product’, that is, the text signifies

something other than itself (this deconstructive idea will be looked at in more detail later in

an analysis of Derrida and différance). To this end, the texts that Callinicos places under the

microscope, could be said to signify his own intentions, perhaps his own belief in the

historical dialectic. Callinicos’ finding, therefore, a consolation for the failed revolutions of

the 1960s within postmodernism signifies not so much an objective truth, but a sign of his

dogmatic loyalty to a metaphysical abstraction.

A typical, though not always entirely convincing, way of dealing with this critique is to set

forth a moral argument against the deconstructive dissolution of meaning, and the stultifying

uncertainty that it instils in its adherents. A number of critics – Terry Eagleton and John M.

Ellis to name just two – have at times appealed to this approach, and often to great effect.13

12 Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), 6. 13 See Terry Eagleton, After Theory. (London: Penguin Books, 2004) and John M.Ellis, Against

Deconstruction.(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

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But when intellectual rigour and consistency are key, it is not enough, as Peter Dews argues,

to simply point accusingly at what one considers to be a philosophy bereft of morals: “[i]t is

not sufficient to point to the ultimate passivity, or even the politically disastrous implications,

of a mode of thought which prides itself precisely on a reckless integrity and consistency, and

which is therefore willing to brave all consequences.”14 To many the postmodern liquidation

of a cohesive subject (see Jacques Lacan’s rereading of Freudian psychoanalysis in Écrits, or

Lyotard’s abandonment of the Marxian concept of alienation) serves only to normalize a

condition peculiar to advanced capitalist social organisation, but to the postmodern thinker

the very attempt to impose a unity upon the social body represents a “totalitarian politics”.

Both philosophies, in other words, live in fear of pervasive domination, but both see the seeds

of this domination in the other. The argument thus seems to reach an insurmountable

obstacle.

This fundamental impasse between Marxist (as a representative of modernist or “categorical”

logic) and postmodern thought arises because attempts to legitimate the conclusions of each

emerge not from some position of pure objectivity, but only within the theory itself, as a form

of self-legitimation. To assert that Callinicos is correct, is all too frequently to argue the case

for the validity of his methodology, and thus to prove that he is correct involves reversion to

the same methodological apparatus that is under question (hence the inevitable petitio

principii difficulties faced by a Marxist defending another Marxist against a non-Marxist – a

position that I can sympathize with right now). It is, in fact, precisely this argument over

self-legitimation that forms one of the central tenets of postmodern thought, the central

explication of which comes from Lyotard’s diagnosis of postmodernity The Postmodern

14 Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. (London:

Verso, 1987), xvi.

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Condition: A Report on Knowledge. According to Lyotard, attempts to legitimate so-called

“grand-narratives” require for agreement a pre-existing concordance between interlocutors.

In order to justify Callinicos’ claims, in other words, a degree of agreement must already be

presupposed in the reader. Lyotard sees these metanarratives as inextricably tied to all forms

of reductionism and teleological notions of human history, such as Marxism and the

Enlightenment concept of progress, and claims that they all fail to reflect the true

heterogeneity of their parts – tending instead toward forms of social domination and

totalitarianism. Lyotard therefore comes to define postmodernism as the “incredulity toward

metanarratives.”15 A more detailed examination of Lyotard’s position will be returned to

later, but for the purposes of this preliminary summary it is necessary to turn to Jürgen

Habermas, and to discuss his concept of performative contradiction.

In Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas discusses at length what he perceives to be a

pervasive contradiction that runs through Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic

of Enlightenment. If their thesis that reason is identified with a compulsion to dominate is

correct, Habermas asks, then how is it that Adorno and Horkheimer can continue to practice a

critical theory of society, because in order to make their case they must leave at least one

aspect of reason intact?16 Habermas uses this observation to carry out a critique of the

monologic conception of consciousness which, he believes, to be at the root of Cartesian

philosophy, and offers as an alternative a “dialogic conception of subjectivity and

rationality”.17 Now, interesting though this may be as an alternative understanding of reason

it is not the alternative that is of interest here but the application that the idea of performative

15 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: the First Complete Edition in English. trans. Bruce Fink. (New York: Norton &

Company Inc., 2006). xxiv-xxv. 16 Quoted in Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), 80. 17 Ibid. 97

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contradiction may have to postmodern thought. That Lyotard should unfold a metanarrative

of his own, as the story of the dissolution of metanarratives, is not itself logically

contradictory: Lyotard’s declaration of the postmodern “incredulity toward metanarratives”

apparently refers to only a few historical defunct narratives of legitimation.18 But such a

position, according to Habermas advocates a form of epistemological relativism that is

incompatible with the final claims of Lyotard’s argument: all things are relative, except, that

is, the statement that all things are relative.

Frustratingly, the problem with Habermas’ argument is that it again takes a modernist view of

postmodernism, attempting to delineate postmodernism using the very totalizing rationality

that is under question. Postmodernism, according to Lyotard, cannot be understood through

the categorical logic of modernism, since in postmodernism traditional logic is used only in a

contingent fashion. A similar phenomenon is evident in the debate surrounding

deconstruction: “Scholars who have discussed deconstruction in a critical way have generally

elicited the response from its advocates that what they have discussed was not, in fact,

deconstruction because any statement or logical analysis of what deconstruction is runs

against its nature: it cannot be described and stated as other positions can.”19 Again, then, we

come up against a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.

It is my belief, however, that the meaning of postmodernism lies precisely within this

inexplicability, this resistance to modernist reason and traditional forms of logical analysis.

If postmodernism is impenetrable, then let this impenetrability be interpreted. That one

18 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: the First Complete Edition in English. trans. Bruce Fink. (New York: Norton &

Company Inc., 2006), 23. 19 John M.Ellis, Against Deconstruction.(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3.

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cannot confront Derrida’s deconstruction in terms of a normal analysis and that one cannot

meet Lyotard’s conception of postmodernism on the familiar battleground of theoretical

discourse, are both, I believe, signs of a retreat within a new position of ontological stability,

but one founded within the perpetually unstable. Whilst the value of a critique of a totalizing

categorical rationality is not something that should be undervalued, it should simultaneously

be subjecting its own processes to this same critique. This means examining its own ancestry

and asking just how complicit it is with the thing that it opposes. In the absence of a God,

reason, a means, has been left without an ultimate goal. This has led to a lasting and

penetrating critique on any philosophy that contains even the slightest hint of essentialism.

But this very same philosophy has, I believe, failed to treat itself with the same rigour with

which it bears down on its enemies. Through the lens of one of the foremost dialecticians of

the twentieth-century, Adorno, one can garner a better understanding of Derrida and

Lyotard’s – the most influential philosophers for the postmodern era – complicity with

totality.

Derrida and Différance

The principle concerns of post-structuralist philosophy are analogous to many of the

seemingly intractable difficulties faced by Cartesian identity philosophy, in particular, the

relation between subjective perception and objective reality.20 Historically, self-

consciousness was seen as the emergence of a unified subject (René Descartes), a self

becoming one with its own existence. There are, however, countless problems with this

view; the most prominent for post-structuralism is summarized by Johann Gottlieb Fichte:

20 Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. (London:

Verso, 1987), 21.

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You are conscious of yourself, you say; thus you necessarily distinguish your thinking

I from the I which is thought in its thinking. But in order for you to do this, that

which thinks in this thinking must be the object of a higher thinking, in order to be an

object of consciousness; and you immediately obtain a new subject, which is once

more conscious of that which was formerly self-consciousness.21

The process, as Fichte explains, goes on in an infinite regress, “needing for each

consciousness a new consciousness which is simultaneously and immediately consciousness

of itself, whose object the former is”. Derrida confronts many of these same issues through

what he calls deconstruction.

One of the ways in which the process of deconstruction is demonstrated, found most

prominently in Of Grammatology, is through a critique of the preferential treatment that

Derrida believes philosophy to have traditionally given to presence over absence, and of the

consequent “ethnocentrism which, everywhere and always,” has “controlled the concept of

writing.”22 Derrida calls this epistemological bias logocentrism. By highlighting this

prejudice, Derrida’s primary concern is to undermine the common belief that when speaking

our words are in direct contact with meaning – indeed, Derrida states, there is “nothing before

the text... no pretext which is not already a text” because to envisage a world that could exist

prior to language, the concept of language must always be presupposed.23

21 Quoted in Ibid. 29 22 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University

Press, 1998), 4. 23 Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. (London:

Verso, 1987), 112

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Much of Derrida’s conception of language is based on the linguistic theory of Ferdinand

Saussure. In his Course on General Linguistics Saussure attempted to delineate the different

aspects of language. Though there was much in Saussure’s work that Derrida found highly

questionable – the ontological priority of speech over text for one – Saussure nevertheless set

down one key principle that was to be of great and lasting influence upon Derrida: the

relationship between signifier and signified is not one of immediacy, but one implied by

convention.24 Though it may be agreed that a certain phonological sound may represent an

object, Saussure observed, the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary: to see

words as having a logical relationship with the object to which they allude is the result of

convention, not fact. But whilst we may acknowledge this intellectually, we are not

confronted by this capricious relationship when speaking or writing: “words (whether written

or spoken) can seem to have a natural and direct relation to the structure of the world.”25

Signifiers, that is to say, appear to the speaker as self-present, as containing their own

meaning.

Against this common misconception, Derrida argued two interrelated points. First, the

definition of a word depends upon a multitude of other words for its expression, and as such

should not be seen to be self-evident. When trying to define a word, it is necessary to use

other words to do this, and these words that we use to define the first word need defining also

– and so on ad infinitum. As in Fichte’s identity paradox, Derrida argues that what we find in

language is a constant deferral of meaning: the meaning of a word relies on the system of

differentiation, and this meaning presupposes a stable definition of other words which simply

is not there. Consequently Derrida goes on to make the second point that language differs

24 Ferdinand Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade

Baskin, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966), 65. 25 John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 35.

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from itself by the absence of presence, or what he refers to as “trace”.26 By this, Derrida

means that because a word relies upon another for its meaning, then it cannot be identical

with itself, but must be marked by absence. Meaning is therefore derived relationally,

between one signifier and another, and is thus infused with absence; meaning is in a state of

perpetual flux, never to be tied down to a stable, self-present source. This is what Derrida

means by that most famous of neologisms, différance.

In relation to Fichte’s identity paradox, deconstruction would suggest that between identity

and non-identity there exists a dialectical tension. One of the principle failings of

metaphysics, Derrida argues, is the constitution as a founding term one of a pair of opposites

that are, in fact, intrinsically bisected by one another. Derrida thus wishes to abandon the

distinction between these two kinds of concepts, which he sees as mutually constitutive;

indeed, this is precisely why Derrida insists “that idealism cannot be defeated by

counterposing a materialism, but – ultimately – only by going beyond the duality.”27

According to Derrida it is only a philosophical tradition which privileges presence over

absence that can make the mistake of believing them to be separable. To go “beyond” a

dualism, for Derrida, is to transcend a simple two-way relationship – it is to see that meaning

is established relationally, and that whenever one tries to fix a stable self-identical meaning it

must always contain a “trace” of non-identity, of the thing that it is not.

Now, there is, as Dews points out, a problem with this theory. The constant movement and

elusiveness of meaning, derived from Saussurean linguistics, forces Derrida into a position in

26 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University

Press, 1998), translators preface, xvii. 27 Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. (London:

Verso, 1987), 24.

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which différance must be hypostatized as a form of epistemological origin. Meaning, in other

words, is relational, and thus always unstable:

... in Derrida’s work, différance cannot be defined by its oppositional relation to

identity, since it is considered to be the ‘nonoriginary origin’ of presence and identity,

and as such cannot be dependent upon them for its determination. But, if différance

does not stand in opposition to presence and identity, then neither can it differ from

them. However, if it were to be maintained that différance differs from identity, then

by this very token it can not differ absolutely, since all determinate differences are

internal to différance.28

It would be wrong, however, to suggest that Derrida was not aware of this issue. Indeed,

Derrida believed that it was the structure of language that trapped us within metaphysics, and

so found hope only within contradiction and heterogeneity – that Derrida replaced a

metaphysics of presence with a metaphysics of absence reflects only the importance that he

attributes to subversion. This is, in essence, the project of deconstruction: the attempt to

subvert the priority of one side of a duality, and thus to move beyond the duality. The fact

remains however, that in order for Derrida to conceive of a notion of presence as always

constituting absence, he must make recourse to the same totalizing conceptuality that he

critiques. Presence, in other words, stands in a dialectical relation to absence, and thus the

absolute opposition to one results in the redemption of the other. This metamorphosis is only

able to take place because the distinction between identity and non-identity, universal and

particular, material and ideal, has been liquidated, as, paradoxically, it is precisely within this

lack of distinction that the seeds of identity are smuggled: all things are united under the

universal principle of différance. Just as Adorno stated that “the absolute liberation of the

particular from any universality makes it a universal through the polemical and fundamental

28 Ibid.26.

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relation to universality” so too does Derrida’s logic run up against its own totalizing opponent

in positioning itself as absolutely opposed to its cause. By destroying the distinction between

identity and non-identity, différance becomes a powerful “principle of unity”.29

Whilst the point that opposing forces are mutually constitutive is, I believe, correct, by

establishing at the root of this relationship a metaphysics of absence Derrida’s argument only

serves to re-establish the infinite regress of Fichte’s identity paradox, but reformulated within

a paradox of absence and presence. The throat of Derrida’s philosophy, that is to say,

remains locked in the iron grip of totality – albeit a perpetually self-deconstructive one. One

possible reason that has been suggested for this came in 1971 from Lyotard. Derrida’s belief

that there is nothing beyond the text, and the impossibility of a reality which is not

presupposed by language, represents for Lyotard a fundamental bias toward discourse.

Instead of asserting that the world is unknowable without language, “why should not the

impossibility of a linguistic grasping of the originary rather reveal the inherent limitations of

language itself, its ultimate powerlessness when confronted with the non-linguistic?” 30 The

explication of this reductive hegemony of the discursive provides the ultimate impetus of

Lyotard’s work in Discourse, Figure.

Lyotard, the Figural, and the Postmodern

In the introduction to Discourse, Figure Lyotard neatly summarized his position with regards

to the linguistic mediation of reality: “[o]ne does not at all break with metaphysics by putting

29 Ibid.43. 30 Ibid.112.

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language everywhere.”31 Language, it is fair to say, is about reality, and thus, Lyotard

concludes, by giving it priority over the physical world one remains within the barbarous

clutches of metaphysics. “This book... protests”, he writes, “that the given is not a text, that

there is within it a density, or rather a constitutive difference, which is not to be read, but to

be seen: and that this difference, and the immobile mobility which reveals it, is what is

continuously forgotten in the process of signification.”32 It is, then, the aim of Discourse,

Figure to establish the priority of the perceptual over the conceptual.

What Lyotard means by the hegemony of the discursive can best be understood through a

comparison of his reading of the relation between the conscious and the unconscious in

Freudian psychoanalysis with his more structuralist oriented contemporary Jacques Lacan.

Lacan’s understanding of the unconscious represented a radical departure from that of

Freud’s less critical adherents. Rather than understanding the unconscious as the site at

which repressed desire is made manifest, the point at which the primal urges of the id can

find expression amidst the tyranny of the reality principle, Lacan saw the unconscious as the

“exteriority of the symbolic in relation to man”; he saw, that is to say, the unconscious not as

constituting a fundamentally different language to that of the conscious, as did Freud, but as

the manifestation of the subject’s response to a symbolic world marked by instability.33 Thus

for Lacan, the cathartic process of psychoanalysis was not a matter of revealing to the

neurotic subject the true cause of their problem, but of a different way of looking at the same

situation.

31 Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure. trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon. (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 2010), 14. 32 Ibid.9. 33 Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. (London:

Verso, 1987), 108.

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Lacan’s appeal to the multiple readings of psychoanalysis bears a striking similarity to the

instability of the signifier seen in Derrida, and there is, furthermore, a conspicuous priority

given to language in both their philosophies. Both assume the priority of language over

reality and both insist upon the non-fixity of this meaning. Indeed, this is precisely where

Lyotard takes exception. For Lyotard, just as the discursive has traditionally been given

preferential treatment over the figural, so does Lacan’s treatment of the unconscious as site of

the unstable symbolic give preference to the reading of reality rather than reality itself.

Instability, according to both Lacan and Derrida, is built into the conceptual system of

language – and for Lacan this flux finds expression in the unconscious – whilst the external

world is typified by the passive and the constant; Lyotard, on the other hand, sees stasis in

“the fixed intervals of the linguistic system,” and the unconscious as linked with the “fluidity

and mobility of the perceived world.”34 Discourse, according to Lyotard, is a reduction of, or

an attempt to tame, heterogeneous reality.

The critique of totalizing reason which dominated much of Lyotard’s work throughout the

1960s and 1970s reached its apotheosis in 1984 in what is perhaps his most influential and

popular work, The Postmodern Condition. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard argues

that a fundamental attitudinal shift has taken place in the late twentieth-century. Speculative

philosophy, which had formerly provided legitimating narratives for science through the

“dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or

working subject, or the creation of wealth”, had been progressively exceeded by a scientific

language-game interested only in the pursuit of pure denotation.35 In the postmodern era,

rapid growth in technology, amongst other things, has placed increasing emphasis upon the

34 Ibid. 123. 35 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1979), xxiii.

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means of human action as opposed to the ends. As a result of this change, faith in self-

legitimating narrative knowledge has gradually been eroded: “I define postmodern as

incredulity toward metanarratives”, Lyotard states. For Lyotard this move represents

something of a liberation, since the fallow soil which nurtured the growth of totalizing

theories – which hitherto had dominated philosophy – is finally seen for what it is, and

science is free to develop independent of a restrictive epistemic grounding. Truth in the

postmodern era can no longer be established through a dogmatic appeal to narrative

knowledge, and nor can it be realized in consensus, but truth is born of dissension – or what

Lyotard terms “paralogy” – in the “heterogeneity of language games”.36 Consequently,

though science may be freed from philosophy, its own language-game cannot be used to

legitimate others: each game must be free to be defined by its own terms.

The diversity of these “language games” (a term derived from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s

Philosophical Investigations) reflect the fluidity of the perceived world that Lyotard first

explicated in Discourse, Figure, and to attempt to impose a unity upon this constitutive

difference is to attempt to re-establish the dominance of discourse. This, according to

Lyotard, was the principle failing of modernism, and whose only relevance to today’s

postmodern society is as an instructive lesson in regressive thought: “I suggest that the

alternative it [modernism] attempts to resolve, but only reproduces, is no longer relevant for

the societies with which we are concerned and that the solution itself is still caught within a

type of oppositional thinking that is out of step with the most vital modes of postmodern

knowledge.”37 For Lyotard this “alternative” could be construed as any form of narrative

knowledge – particularly teleological conceptions of history such as socialism – that offers a

36 Ibid.xxv. 37 Ibid.14.

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unifying solution to theoretical or social antagonisms. Postmodern knowledge “refines our

sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable.”38

Postmodernism is, in Lyotard’s eyes, the (anti)ideological counterpart to reality’s domination

of discourse.

Critiquing the Critique of Totality

That Lyotard’s valorisation of the unconscious as representative of external reality, his

elevation of the figural as above the reductive status of discourse and his subsequent

downgrading of consciousness to a tool of conceptual domination and instrumentality, should

lead him to a performative contradiction is inevitable. Indeed, as we have seen Lyotard

explicitly acknowledged this in his statement that metaphysics cannot be escaped by “putting

language everywhere”. Lyotard communicates through language, thus he cannot help but fall

into the same metaphysical trap that both he and Derrida saw as an intrinsic part of the

linguistically mediated. The more subtle question that Lyotard’s work poses, however, is not

simply whether there is a performative contradiction – for this is without doubt – but whether

this contradiction can be justified. Whether, that is to say, the categorical modernist logic

evident in Lyotard’s work is used only in a contingent fashion. There are two main points

that I wish to make with regard to this issue.

First, and most obviously, by roughly tracing the development of Lyotard’s thought, in

opposition to the philosophical priority given to discourse by Derrida, who in turn can be

traced back to Saussurean linguistics and Cartesian identity philosophy, it is clear that his

work was in fact built upon the logical foundations laid in the past. That Lyotard’s work has

38 Ibid.xxv.

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historical origins, and is not unprecedented in human history, is a given. In the same way that

language must always be about reality, a philosophy which has origins must in some way be

said to be about those origins, a part of the unfolding of the history of those ideas. If, as we

find in the relationship between Lyotard and Derrida, the development of a logic consists in

the negation of a previous logic, the resulting rationale nevertheless remains tied to the thing

that it seeks to exclude, even when the succeeding logic claims to be qualitatively different.

Categorical logic is therefore contained within the imperatives of postmodern knowledge as

that which is repressed, that which has been silenced.

This dialectical view brings me to the second, somewhat more substantial point. The

imperatives of Lyotard’s work in Discourse, Figure bear numerous similarities with the work

of the Frankfurt School, in particular with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of

Enlightenment; that is, the critique of a dominative reason from within the confines of such a

rationality represents in Lyotard’s work the same performative contradiction that Habermas

sees in Dialectic in Enlightenment. Yet there is, as Dews points out, a subtle but important

distinction between the two projects, and one which unravels Adorno and Horkheimer’s

contradiction whilst leaving Lyotard’s unexplained. For Adorno and Horkheimer, reason is a

twofold phenomenon: on the one hand it is the general interests of man and the “idea of a

free, human, social life”, and on the other it is the “court of judgement of calculation”,

“instrument of domination, and means for the most rational exploitation of nature”.39 In

Adorno’s view, the internal difficulties faced by the Enlightenment subject are a result of a

tearing of the self from its natural basis. As we have seen, Lyotard associates this disorder

and fragmentation with the irreducible heterogeneity of the external world, whilst the ego is

39 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Translators

preface, xvii.

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equated with “repression” of these drives.40 For Adorno, however, the rupture between self

and nature is both emancipatory and oppressive. The drive to dominate nature necessitates a

repression of the impulsive drives, which are themselves constitutive of the natural basis of

human behaviour. This is what Adorno terms the “internalization of sacrifice”. In the

dialectic of Enlightenment, this conflict is sublimated within an ever-intensifying adherence

to the very instrumental rationality which enabled the domination of nature to take place in

the first place, and ultimately, domination of nature leads to self-domination.

In Adorno’s case, the overcoming of this performative contradiction is to be found in his

dialectical view of reason. Though in his philosophy the spontaneity that reason was

intended to preserve may have been all but crushed by a rationality intent on the domination

of all forms of nature, the very existence of such a rationality preserves within itself its

repressed ‘other’. In other words, by adopting a dialectical view “Adorno’s argument allows

him to give an account of the ambivalent status of both consciousness and the unconscious”

and he is thus able to account for the simultaneously oppressive and emancipatory function of

reason. Lyotard, on the other hand, cannot provide an explanation as to how a destructive

conceptual reason can ultimately come full circle to finally grasp the priority of the figural,

for if it is to do so, surely modernist logic must contain within itself the seeds of this

liberation, the possibility of overcoming its own contradictions, and therefore not be

straightforwardly dominative – this is most certainly not in keeping with the anti-dialectical

dualism that he established in Discourse, Figure. The contradiction can be summarized as

follows: if reason can come full circle to grasp its own inadequacies this would presumably

40 Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. (London:

Verso, 1987), 141.

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demonstrate the competence of such a reason, but this competence would contradict the very

premises of this conclusion, and thus invalidate its findings.

The same problem is evident in Lyotard’s conception of the postmodern: if the status of

disunity is absolute, does not this absoluteness constitute a unity? The notion of paralogy

does not exist without consensus, and to move into a postmodern condition of pure conflict

simultaneously means the redemption of unity – just as Jameson points out that “absolute

change equals stasis”41 so also does absolute chaos equal absolute order. Furthermore, if

Lyotard is correct in asserting that the ego is associated only with the repression of disorder

through the control of the instinctive drives – which themselves are representative of the

figural world – then it is reason that comprises the problem. Indeed, as Lyotard states “there

is no ego whose function it would be to lift to reverse repression”.42 But, as Adorno

observed, the idea of a regression back into pre-consciousness would not constitute a

liberation because there would be no self-conscious subject to be liberated. The concept of

the liberation of the drives is inextricably bound up with their repression.

The priority, therefore, of a variegated external reality over the restrictive concepts of

language must account for the fact that such a grasping of reality as incomprehensibly

heterogeneous was not possible without discourse. This is not to suggest that there can be no

reality without language – thus asserting the ontological priority of the discursive – but nor

should it mean that discourse commits only a violence upon reality: as Adorno believed, “it is

necessary to maintain both that there is something given in experience, and that there is

41 Frederic Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern. 1983-1998. (London: Verso,

1998), 60. 42 Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure. trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon. (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 2010), 357.

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nothing given immediately. Experience must be seen as an interplay of the immediate and the

mediated, of presence and absence, of the identical and the non-identical...”43 The anti-

totalizing thought that Lyotard expresses through the priority that he gives to the figural, and

the postmodern belief in paralogy, ultimately comes full circle to retrieve the thing that he

seeks to exclude.

Interim Conclusion

Despite seeking to undermine many of Derrida’s assumptions, latent and otherwise, the

antagonisms that plagued Derrida’s thought are also to be found in Lyotard. Whilst Derrida

may have set out to critique all attempts to fix meaning, his emphasis on subversion

ultimately led him to establish a metaphysics of différance, and thus, paradoxically, a

retrieval of identity within non-identity. Lyotard, on the other hand, attempts to disrupt

totalizing thinking altogether: first, by outlining the hitherto hegemonic relationship of

conceptual/narrative thinking over figural reality, which itself does not account for the fact

that this realisation was predicated upon the paradox of thought grasping its own inadequacy;

and second, through the assertion of an irreducibly plural postmodernism, which in itself only

serves to canonize a principle not dissimilar from differance but expressed for Lyotard as

paralogy. What these two thinkers both have in common, then, is the paradoxical location of

a stable meaning within the desire to show that such a thing as stability either cannot exist or

cannot be comprehended.

The desire to preserve conflict, as “paralogy”, is predicated upon some notion of consensus, a

shared discourse or a mutual comprehension. To remove this common-ground and valorise

43 Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. (London:

Verso, 1987), 41-42.

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only the heterogeneity of language-games is not, I believe, to escape the pitfalls of totalizing

thought, because paralogy depends upon the very totalizing consensus that it wishes to

destroy. Can we not say that the consensus of postmodernism is that such a consensus does

not exist? Equally, if we find a group who maintain that such a totalizing consensus does

exist, take any form of totalitarian politics for instance, can we not say that they are a

necessary opposite in order for the postmodern belief in diversity to sustain itself, that they

are the source of critique without which paralogy would lose all definition? The veiling of

this mutually constitutive relationship only serves to speed the dialectical reversal from one

to the other – an observation that Eagleton has made with some power:

Modernity for Lyotard would seem nothing but a tale of terroristic reason and Nazism

little more than the lethal terminus of totalizing thought. This reckless travesty

ignores the fact that the death camps were among other things the upshot of a

barbarous irrationalism which, like some aspects of postmodernism itself, junked

history, refused argumentation, aestheticized politics and staked all on the charisma of

those who told the stories.44

If the postmodernist can accept that the only consensus is in a lack of consensus, that if we

can agree it is only to disagree, then it must surely be recognized that the idea of consensus is

not in and of itself totalitarian, for if it is so, then are they not guilty of this same crime?

Postmodernism is left with the Hobson’s choice of either accepting itself as a totalizing logic

or accepting categorical logic as not being inherently negative; either way it ends up in a

position in which it must refute its own claims in order to prove itself.

44 Terry Eagleton, ‘Awakening from Modernity.’ Times Literary Supplement, 20th February 1987.

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