Universality without consensus: Jean-François Lyotard on politics in postmodernity

Science, knowledge and consensus

In the years after the publication of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, critical readers such as Axel Honneth, Richard Rorty, Seyla Benhabib, Dana Villa and Allen Dunn questioned what they interpreted as a purely negative vision of politics, based on the disavowal of universality, existing institutions, consensus and communication without providing a ground for this disavowal or a new orientation for politics. ¹ The idea that Lyotard’s conception of postmodernity dismisses any claim to universality has had a long-standing predominance among both critical and sympathetic readers of his work. ² Two of the most recent comprehensive studies of Lyotard’s political thought claim that his understanding of postmodernity leads either to ‘resistance to universality’ and ‘nihilism’ or otherwise to an understanding of universality in terms of respect for difference and plurality – which brings Lyotard’s conception of ‘postmodernity’ much closer to a theory of communication or justification than it seems at first sight. ³ Thus, the notion of postmodernity seems to be trapped between two undesirable options: either there is no ground for universal claims, and the notion entails an abandonment of any universalist politics, or it presupposes a universalist politics that it does not specify, and then the notion is hardly original and theoretically weak. In order to avoid this alternative, as I show in this section and the next, it is necessary to understand Lyotard’s distinction between universality and consensus, which is an essential element of The Postmodern Condition. Postmodernity entails an abandonment of a model of universality based on a certain kind of production of scientific knowledge, which underlies political theories based on consensus, but not of universality altogether.

The notion of postmodernity stems in Lyotard from a diagnosis of the transformation of the role of scientific knowledge in contemporary societies, which explains both the emergence of the model of consensus as a ground for political judgment and why it has become untenable. Indeed, the famous ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ characteristic of Lyotard’s definition of postmodernity ‘is undoubtedly a product of the progress in the sciences’ ⁴ – which is why the subtitle of The Postmodern Condition is ‘A Report on Knowledge’. Given the centrality of the problem of scientific knowledge for the development of the notion of postmodernity, it is surprising that it has received so little systematic attention by readers of Lyotard, beyond some swift dismissals of his conception of science. ⁵ If we follow this problem carefully, we can see that the end of metanarratives is symptomatic of a larger transformation in the role of scientific knowledge, which has important implications for the constitution of the social bond. Specifically, the end of metanarratives follows from the impossibility of scientific knowledge to produce the social competences by which individuals orient their speech and action.

Relying on anthropological studies, Lyotard claims that the production of knowledge that is essential for the formation of common customs proceeds from narrations. ⁶ Narrations produce customary knowledge [savoir] (which is different from scientific knowledge or ‘cognition’ [connaissance]) by defining three competences that are essential for belonging to a certain community: (1) knowing what to do, (2) knowing how to tell and (3) knowing how to listen. These three competences correspond to the three positions assigned by the transmission of narratives: (1) the ‘hero’ of the narration, (2) the sender who tells the story and (3) the addressee who listens to it. This is the elementary form of social belonging, that is, ‘the set of pragmatic rules that constitutes the social bond’. ⁷ By being situated as the addressee of a narration, the individual learns how to listen and, in its turn, how to tell the story. At the same time, by learning what her ancestors did, she knows what to do. ⁸ This way, narratives ‘define what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question’. ⁹ Narrative knowledge has no need of further legitimation or validation, for the authority of the narration stems from the very act of its transmission: ‘a culture that gives precedence to the narrative form doubtless has no more of a need for special procedures to authorize its narratives…The narratives themselves have this authority’. ¹⁰ Therefore, in societies where the social bond depends on narrative knowledge, the demand for legitimacy is never the cause of social conflict or change.

The question, then, is how legitimacy becomes a problem. This question leads us to the central discursive incommensurability that gives rise to postmodernity, namely, the incommensurability between narrative and scientific knowledge. As scientific knowledge expands and acquires a more prominent role, it enters in conflict with narrative knowledge, for ‘the scientist questions the validity of narrative statements and concludes that they are never subject to argumentation or proof’. ¹¹ Unlike narrative statements, scientific statements are subject to the rules of validation. This means that a statement is only ‘scientific’ insofar as its addressee is capable of formulating her agreement or disagreement with it in accordance with the standards of verification and falsification. Science thus creates a horizon of consensus, insofar as the legitimacy of its claims depends on others formulating their agreement with them in accordance with scientific standards. Scientific statements are either true or false, and thus they ‘allow a horizon of consensus to be brought to the debate between partners (the sender and the addressee)’. Truth and consensus are interrelated, for even if ‘not every consensus is a sign of truth…it is presumed that the truth of a statement necessarily draws a consensus’. ¹² Narrative statements, by contrast, are neither true nor false, and therefore ‘agreement’ and ‘disagreement’ do not apply to them. This is why narrations and science are incommensurable: it is ‘impossible to judge the existence or validity of narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge and vice versa: the relevant criteria are different’. ¹³

Yet as scientific consensus becomes the new model for the constitution of the social bond, it must produce a new narration, for two reasons. First, science needs narrations in order to legitimate its own statements, given that one cannot determine the validity of a scientific statement in the same way that a scientific statement determines an object: ‘scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no knowledge at all’. ¹⁴ The narratives that validate scientific knowledge are provided by philosophy – according to Lyotard, most philosophical works on the problem of knowledge rely on narrations, such as the Allegory of the Cave or modernity’s philosophies of history. ¹⁵ The second reason why consensus must turn to narratives is that only the latter can legitimize political authority. With the liberation of the bourgeoisie from traditional authorities, ‘narrative knowledge makes a resurgence in the West as a way of solving the problem of legitimating the new authorities’. ¹⁶ At this point, the growing scientific attitude combines with the inquiry into political legitimacy: ‘the name of the hero is the people, the sign of legitimacy is the people’s consensus, and their mode of creating norms is deliberation’. ¹⁷ Thus, philosophical narratives provide the legitimacy of both scientific statements and social norms.

The philosophical narrative differs in one crucial point from traditional narratives: it admits no others. This is an implication of its intertwinement with scientific knowledge. Traditional narrative knowledge has no pretension of universality. Modern narratives do. The reason is that they model the hero (‘the people’) upon a scientific community, whose horizon is consensus. Those who refute the narrative are not simply different, but wrong – just like disagreeing with a true statement is not simply difference, but error. This means that ‘“the people” should be at the same time actively involved in destroying the traditional knowledge of peoples, perceived from that point forward as minorities or potential separatist movements destined to spread obscurantism’. ¹⁸ Insofar as the subject of the modern narrative is modelled upon a scientific community, those who lack knowledge are deprived of the possibility of participating in universal consensus. As a consequence, from this point of view, ‘all peoples have a right to science. If the social subject is not already the subject of scientific knowledge, it is because that has been forbidden by priests and tyrants’. ¹⁹ As long as universality is identified with consensus, dissensus must be explained as stemming from prejudice, backwardness or some other kind of fault.

Consensus in crisis

Why do metanarratives cease to be credible? One reason is the plurality of language games characteristic of contemporary societies, but the core of Lyotard’s explanation is immanent to the narrative attempt to legitimize science. Briefly stated, narrative cannot avoid delegitimizing scientific knowledge as it seeks to legitimize it. Philosophy emerges as a discourse that legitimizes scientific knowledge, but in so doing it reduplicates the latter and degrades it to an inferior form of knowledge which cannot legitimize itself. In other words, scientific statements are truly ‘knowledge’ if they can find legitimation in philosophy, which ‘is as much as to say that, in its immediacy, denotative discourse bearing on a certain referent…does not really know what it thinks it knows. Positive science is not a form of knowledge’. ²⁰ Thus, the delegitimation of science is not a contingent historical event, but rather ‘a process of delegitimation fueled by the demand for legitimation itself’. ²¹ By redoubling itself into philosophical knowledge, scientific knowledge admits its own uncertainty. ²²

There is a second element driving this delegitimation, which concerns the relationship between science and social norms. Simply put, the criteria of validation of denotative statements characteristic of science are unable to legitimize prescriptive statements. In Lyotard’s example, ‘between “The door is closed” and “Open the door” there is no relation of consequence as defined in propositional logic’. ²³ No narrative of knowledge can bridge the gap between the two kinds of statements, which leads to the delegitimation of philosophical narratives, based on the legitimation of scientific knowledge, as a means to legitimize social norms. Even if philosophy were capable of legitimizing scientific consensus (based on denotative statements), it would remain unable to legitimate moral and political consensus (based on prescriptive statements). The crisis of legitimacy characteristic of postmodernity is therefore not merely the outcome of increasing social heterogeneity, but also of the inherent limitation of the modern project of legitimizing social norms on the model of scientific consensus.

We can now understand both the emergence of the idea of consensus and its crisis. The question that follows is what to do with this crisis. On this point, Lyotard is critical of Habermas’s project of continuing the project of consensus by means of the practice of argumentation. The main problem with this project is that it assumes that it is possible to find norms shared by all language games, or what Lyotard calls ‘metaprescriptives’. For Habermas, linguistic intersubjectivity, or communication, transforms opinions, sensations, and needs into statements with a ‘claim to universality’, which is essential both to the objectivity of knowledge and the legitimacy of norms. ²⁴ By virtue of making our opinions, sensations and needs understood to others, we necessarily seek to justify them, in such a way that our point of view may be in agreement with others. This presupposes that intersubjective dialogue provides meta-norms by which to universalize any kind of statement, either descriptive or prescriptive. ²⁵ Lyotard does not believe that such norms exist. By means of a reference to Kant, he claims that the universalization of cognitive statements and the universalization of normative statements are heterogeneous to one another, which means that the rules by which to attain each kind of universalization are not the same. ²⁶

Let us note that the problem with Habermas’s idea of consensus is not merely that it supposedly excludes the possibility of disagreement. In a response to Lyotard and other critical readers of Habermas, Patchen Markell argues that given that for Harbermas the norms of communication are fallible, they are inherently open to disagreement. ²⁷ However, the fundamental problem for Lyotard is that Habermas turns the norms of a specific language game (argumentation) into meta-norms capable of regulating all disagreements. Even if these norms are fallible, and consequently subject to disagreement, argumentation remains the model in which valid disagreement is to be framed.

Although Lyotard’s critique of Habermas was developed in the late seventies in response to a particular stage of Habermas’s work, I believe that his analysis of the theoretical presuppositions underlying the notion of consensus has broad implications that are still relevant for political theory today. Consensus-based political theories, such as the ones proposed by John Rawls and Rainer Forst, also claim that agreement regarding a set of fundamental social norms is the orienting principle of political action and judgment. There are of course wide divergencies regarding how this agreement is to be reached, but not regarding the idea that it is both possible and desirable. ²⁸ For Rawls, agreement regarding fundamental principles of justice is possible by bracketing our all-encompassing moral convictions and contingent social position, so as to judge actions and institutions from a viewpoint of complete equality. This is the procedure which he calls ‘the veil of ignorance’, which provides a point of view ‘removed from and not distorted by the particular features and circumstances of the all-encompassing background framework, from which a fair agreement between persons regarded as free and equal can be reached’. ²⁹ According to Forst, agreement on social norms can be reached by means of justification, that is, by giving universalizable reasons for our actions that do not grant priority to the needs or interests of some people over others (what Forst calls ‘reciprocity’) or exclude the objections of those affected by the norms (‘generality’). ³⁰ Despite their differences, Forst, Rawls and Habermas share the view that social interactions are based on the expectation that the principle of our actions will be understood by others, and thus considered valid.

Following Lyotard’s analysis, we can identify two problematic presuppositions underlying consensus-based theories of political action and judgment: first, that social interactions are oriented by the expectation of agreement and mutual understanding; second, that this mutual understanding is based on a single set of rules or procedures. While these assumptions have been criticized from multiple angles in recent years, Lyotard’s analysis is unique in providing a historical account of the emergence of the idea of consensus as well as of the historical and social process by which it becomes politically untenable. ³¹ This account, as we have seen, is based on the development of scientific knowledge. The metanarratives characteristic of modernity stem from the attempt to ground social norms through the model of scientific consensus, while the ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ characteristic of postmodern societies stems from the failure of this attempt. Following this analysis, Lyotard claims that consensus is an ‘outmoded’ idea, because it does not reflect the plurality of language games characteristic of contemporary societies. ³² The task, then, is to find a model for political claims that does not rely on dated scientific standards, whose goal is to validate denotative statements (i.e. statements about objects) by following a series of rules. It is this move away from scientific cognition that explains Lyotard’s turn to Kant’s Third Critique.

Justice, legitimacy and the turn to Kant

If one cannot assume a consensus regarding the rules by which to ground political claims, the problem is whether it is possible to make political claims at all – that is, claims that demand the agreement of others. This is a problem that has attracted the attention of several political theorists in recent years, most saliently Hannah Arendt. But while Arendt’s response to the problem has been the object of extensive scholarship, Lyotard’s approach has received little attention. One possible explanation for this is the widespread misconception that Lyotard disavows universality and agreement altogether. ³³ However, as Wolfgang Welsch rightly points out, Lyotard’s disavowal of consensus goes hand in hand with a reconsideration of the problem of universality, which he develops in his later writings. ³⁴ In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard claims that ‘we must…arrive at an idea and practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus’. ³⁵ This point is explained at greater length in Just Gaming, published just a few months earlier, where Lyotard claims that justice has to be understood as an Idea in the Kantian sense, that is, as a concept that regulates our actions and judgments without determining any specific content. Justice demands that we judge, but it does not tell us how to judge. It is for this reason that judgments based on the idea of justice, which is the case of political judgments, correspond to what Kant calls ‘reflective judgments’, that is, judgments that relate to a singular object without subordinating it to a pre-given concept.

Lyotard’s turn to Kant’s Third Critique as a model for political judgment has evident similarities to Arendt’s reading of Kant in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Both thinkers share a critique of the attempt to ground political judgments upon cognitive procedures and turn to the Third Critique in search for a kind of judgment that does not depend on a series of pre-established rules. Yet there is a crucial difference that explains Lyotard’s focus on the judgment of the sublime, by contrast to Arendt’s focus on the judgment of the beautiful. While Arendt is still concerned with finding a principle of commonality among multiple perspectives, or what she calls (borrowing Kant’s term) a sensus communis, Lyotard believes that political judgments are grounded upon the disaccord between different perspectives. This is what he describes as a ‘politics of Ideas’, in which ‘justice is not placed under a rule of convergence but rather a rule of divergence’. ³⁶ The notion that an Idea, which is inherently universal, can involve divergence, explains Lyotard’s turn to the sublime, in which respect for the Idea of reason is aroused by the discordance between reason and the imagination. Indeed, Lyotard’s political writings after The Postmodern Condition, in which the influence of Kant’s critical philosophy, and especially the Third Critique, takes a prominent role, can be read as an attempt to understand this paradoxical articulation of universality and divergence. ³⁷

It is worth emphasizing at this point to what extent neglect of Lyotard’s turn to the aesthetic judgment in Kant has contributed to the widespread association of ‘postmodernity’ with a sort of ‘anti-universalism’. Honneth rightly points out that Lyotard’s affirmation of a plurality of discourses irreducible to a meta-language implies a universal obligation to respect such plurality. ³⁸ However, because he assumes that Lyotard leaves aside the problem of universality altogether, Honneth claims that this implicit universal obligation necessarily has the form of Habermas’s discourse ethics. A recent study by Matthew Congdon challenges this view, arguing that for Lyotard the universalization of political claims stems from the discordance between established universal norms and particular cases of injustice. ³⁹ Congdon stresses the similarity between Lyotard’s conception of universal judgments and Kant’s notion of ‘reflexive judgment’, whose universal aspiration lacks a pre-given rule. ⁴⁰ But because he leaves aside Lyotard’s own reading of Kant, which centres on the judgment of the sublime, Congdon does not explain why the discordance produced by a particular case of injustice becomes the ground of a universal judgment. Why is the exclusion of a particular discourse experienced as ‘injustice’ at all, that is, as the ground for a universally valid claim that such exclusion be overcome? We will go back to Lyotard’s conception of universal judgments in the next section. For now, I simply wish to stress that neglect of Lyotard’s writings on Kant has obscured his views on this issue.

The importance of Kant for Lyotard’s political thought is summarized in the opening pages of Enthusiasm, his collection of essays on Kant, where he claims that

there is an affinity between the critical (the ‘tribunal’ of critique, the ‘judge’ who examines the validity of the claims of various phrase families…) and the politico-historical: each has to make judgments without having a rule for making judgments, as opposed to the politico-juridical. ⁴¹

According to Lyotard, Kant’s fundamental analysis of how critical judgments proceed in the absence of rules takes place in the analysis of the ‘reflective judgment’ in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The reason is that ‘the critical is determined in general as reflexive’, in the sense that

it does not arise from a faculty, but from a quasi- or ‘as if’ faculty (the faculty of judgment, sentiment) inasmuch as its rule for determining which universes are pertinent to it entails some indeterminacy (the free play of the faculties among themselves). ⁴³

It is precisely because the power of judgment in its reflective use must judge without a priori principles that it shows the work of the critical judgment in general, which proceeds by inspecting the legitimacy of judgments. The procedure for legitimating cognitive judgments is the central concern of the Critique of Pure Reason, while the procedure for legitimating moral judgments is the central concern of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. The Critique of the Power of Judgment, Lyotard claims, has ‘the mission of unifying the field of philosophy’ by ‘making manifest…the reflexive manner of thinking that is at work in the critical text as a whole’. ⁴⁷ The reflective judgment is not just another kind of judgment, but the judgment that makes manifest the manner in which critical thinking proceeds in general. Lyotard is careful to stress Kant’s distinction between ‘manner’ and ‘method’: while the latter ‘follows definite principles’, the former ‘possesses no standard other that than the feeling of unity in the presentation’. ⁴⁸ A method provides thinking with definite principles by means of which to unify its presentations and produce a judgment upon objects, while a manner provides nothing but a feeling that presentations constitute a unity, without a rule for producing this unity through judgment. This is precisely what makes thinking critical: it lacks any fixed resting point that would put a halt to its quest for a judgment’s legitimation. ⁴⁹

One of the main problems of the aesthetic judgment concerns its communicability: in the absence of fixed principle of legitimation, on what grounds can a judgment demand the agreement of others? According to Kant, the communicability of judgment stems from the accord between our faculties. Both theoretical and moral judgments are valid, and can therefore demand universal agreement, insofar as our faculties achieve a harmonious relationship with one another by means of a set of principles. In the theoretical judgment, the principles are given by the understanding, which legislates over the imagination, while in the practical judgment they are given by reason, which legislates over the understanding. In the reflective judgment, such principles are missing. However, if the judgment still demands to be communicated and claims universal validity, it means that it stems from the same disposition of thinking present in the other two kinds of judgment. ⁵⁰ Consequently, the demand of communication reveals that there is a ‘unity of the faculties’, which precedes ‘the unison required of other individuals by the individual who judges’. ⁵¹ In making an aesthetic judgment, thinking feels the same disposition as when it makes a cognitive or practical judgment. Unlike these judgments, however, it lacks a definite principle that determines the accord between the faculties. Therefore, no ‘disputation’ is possible regarding the legitimacy of an aesthetic judgment, because there are no objective grounds upon which to decide whether it is valid or not. However, it is possible to ‘argue’ about taste, which implies the hope to reach universal agreement without objective proofs. ⁵²

In the sublime, by contrast to the beautiful, the agreement between the faculties is achieved by virtue of their disagreement. The two faculties involved in the judgment of the sublime, imagination and reason, are radically heterogeneous, in the sense that there is no common language between the two. The imagination is the faculty of presentation, while reason is the faculty of ideas (such as the absolutely powerful and the absolutely great), which are inherently unpresentable. In the presence of certain objects (a mountain, the ocean, St. Peter’s Basilica), however, the imagination is stretched to the limit of what it can present, to the point that it fails. While this failure produces a feeling of displeasure, the very striving to present the unpresentable arouses the idea of a vocation of the mind to transcend its own limitations, which produces a feeling of pleasure. Thus, in the sublime, disharmony between the faculties is paradoxically intertwined with a sort of harmony:

The feeling of the sublime is thus a feeling of displeasure from the inadequacy of the imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude for the estimation by means of reason, and a pleasure that is thereby aroused at the same time from the correspondence of this very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest sensible faculty in comparison with ideas of reason, insofar as striving for them is nevertheless a law for us. ⁵³

The sublime and the differend

Lyotard’s main political text, The Differend, represents an attempt to respond to a question left open by The Postmodern Condition, namely: how do heterogeneous language games relate to one another? Given that there are no neutral, common rules that regulate the relationship, but only a clash between heterogeneous rules, one language game will be disavowed by the other. This is indeed what Lyotard calls a ‘differend’, which takes place when ‘something which must be able to be put into words cannot yet be’. ⁵⁶ The reason why something cannot be put into words is that it lacks an ‘idiom’, that is, a discourse that is able to communicate it. One of Lyotard’s examples is a Martinican who is considered a French citizen under French law. By being considered a French citizen, the Martinican suffers a wrong, for he does not consider himself a French citizen. ⁵⁷ Yet any complaint that he can bring to the French authorities will be taken as a litigation under French law. The wrong thus lacks an idiom to express itself, for it is always translated into a discourse that is foreign to it. The question that follows is: if the wrong lacks an idiom through which to express itself, can it be communicated at all? How do we even know that it is there? It is on this point that the political import of the sublime feeling becomes evident.

The wrong suffered by one of the parties in a differend produces both a silence and a ‘call upon phrases which are in principle possible’. ⁵⁸ The differend is a state in which something cannot be put into phrases, yet this ‘something’ is felt as a call to invent new phrases by means of which it can be expressed. Lyotard describes this feeling through an analogy that resembles the sublime:

Suppose that an earthquake destroys not only lives, buildings, and objects but also the instruments used to measure earthquakes directly and indirectly. The impossibility of quantitatively measuring it does not prohibit, but rather inspires in the minds of the survivors the idea of a very great seismic force. The scholar claims to know nothing about it, but the common person has a complex feeling, the one aroused by the negative presentation of the indeterminate. ⁵⁹

The new idiom that communicates different discourses is not a meta-language, that is, a set of rules shared by them, but a passage that allows the discourses to communicate while preserving their heterogeneity. Lyotard describes this procedure through the symbol of an archipelago:

each genre of discourse would be like an island; 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. ⁶¹

Lyotard’s focus on the sublime shows that the ground of communicability is not a universally shared standard or rule, as consensus-based conceptions of communication propose, but rather the experience of discursive heterogeneity. It certainly seems paradoxical that the invention of new means of communication stems from an incommunicable feeling, or from the feeling that there is no communication. Yet this is precisely why communication depends on invention rather than on the discovery of any procedure. For Lyotard, the encounter with an other with whom we cannot communicate and the feeling that there is a wrong summons us to ‘institute idioms which do not yet exist’. ⁶³ This institution has nothing to do with the discovery of a common ground mediating two standpoints, such as the procedures of argumentation, justification and reason-giving stressed by consensus-based political theorists. If this were the case, the experience of dissensus would be a means to discover an underlying consensus, which would serve as a common ground from which to assess the validity of the conflicting judgments. If, by contrast, dissensus is irreducible to a higher consensus, then it is up to each party to produce new means of communication from nowhere – or, following Kant’s term in his analysis of the sublime, from the ‘abyss’ that a party encounters when it reaches the limit of what it can present. ⁶⁴ It is on the basis of feeling this abyss that heterogenous discourses may invent passages that allow them to communicate with one another, as opposed to attempting to subordinate the other to a given procedure.

Postmodern universality

Now that we have seen the interrelation between communication and disagreement, let us take a step further in order to address the original question of this essay, namely, the possibility of universal judgments independently of consensus. On this point, Lyotard is critical of a universalist politics that presupposes the existence of a universal subject, such as ‘humanity’, which could be represented by one discourse. This is the core of his critique of the Declaration of the Rights of Man which, in his view, turned the French Nation into a representative of humanity, thus authorizing it to impose its norms upon others. Benhabib criticizes Lyotard’s position, arguing that without universal human rights there is no basis from which to denounce exclusionary discourses such as nationalism and xenophobia. ⁶⁵ However, she says nothing about some of the discourses with which the idea of universal rights has been associated, such as imperialism and revolutionary terror. This is, in my view, a common problem with critiques of Lyotard’s purported ‘anti-universalism’, which decry the loss of universality while leaving aside the regrettable political outcomes to which the universal principles of the Enlightenment often contributed. In order to avoid this complicity, it is necessary to leave behind the idea that there are rules that are universally valid independently of how different discourses respond to them. This does not mean, however, that universal ideas such as ‘humanity’ should be abandoned. It means rather that the content of this idea cannot be adjudicated by a series of rules whose validity is beyond disagreement. But how can we make judgments on the basis of a universal idea, without a rule that determines its content? Lyotard responds to this question through a reading of Kant’s famous remarks on the French Revolution in The Conflict of the Faculties. ⁶⁶

The focus of Lyotard’s reading of Kant’s remarks is the notion of ‘sign of history’, which underlies the possibility of making universal judgments upon action. Kant introduces this notion as part of his attempt to respond to the question of whether the human race is progressing morally. This question, Kant claims, cannot be answered by means of observation, because we cannot foresee free actions, which are the actions that stem from a moral disposition. In order to know whether human beings will act morally in the future (and thus that they are morally progressing), we need to know their moral disposition, which is impossible. However, Kant claims

there must be some experience in the human race which, as an event, points to the disposition and capacity of the human race to be the cause of its own advance toward the better, and (since this should be the act of a being endowed with freedom), toward the human race as being the author of this advance. ⁶⁷

Lyotard interprets Kant’s brief remarks on the French Revolution through an analysis of the sublime. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant claims that ‘aesthetically, enthusiasm is sublime, because it is a stretching of the powers through Ideas, which gives the mind a momentum that acts far more powerfully and persistently than the impetus given by sensory representations’. ⁷⁰ Observing a certain event, the imagination of the spectators is stretched to the point of arousing a feeling of that which lies beyond representation, namely, Ideas of reason. But unlike what Kant calls ‘transcendental illusion’, which mistakenly takes Ideas to be representable, enthusiasm only feels that which lies beyond representation, and remains at the threshold between the representable and the non-representable. The sign, therefore, does not produce a unity between representation and ideas, but rather remains in a zone of indeterminacy between the two, as Lyotard claims: ‘the “passage” does not take place; it is a “passage” in the course of coming to pass, and its course, its motion, is a kind of agitation in place, within the impasse of incommensurability, over the abyss’. ⁷¹ One cannot know that a certain historical event is caused by a good moral disposition, because there is an abyss between ideas and historical events. However, the agitation produced by certain events makes the spectators feel the abyss. Given that this feeling is only possible if the imagination is aroused to go beyond its limit by Ideas of reason, the feeling is in itself a sign of the presence of Ideas, even if we cannot present them.

The sublime, according to this interpretation, constitutes a model for a specifically political kind of universality which, unlike consensus-based universality, does not presuppose a shared set of rules. According to Lyotard, there is an affinity between politics and aesthetics, for just like the importance of Kant’s philosophy of the beautiful and the sublime ‘resides in the de-realizing of the object of aesthetic feelings, and at the same time, in the absence of a faculty of aesthetic cognition’, the same goes ‘for the historico-political object, which has no reality in and of itself, and for a faculty of political cognition, which must remain nonexistent’. ⁷² Both in politics and in aesthetics, we make universal claims regarding a certain object, without a rule that determines whether the claims are valid. Strictly speaking, we do not make judgments about the object, but rather about how we feel when contemplating an object – which is why the object of the aesthetic (or political) feeling ‘has no reality’. This shifts the source of the universality of a claim from a procedure to a feeling. The sublime feeling, Lyotard claims, ‘is not universal the way a well-formed and validated cognitive phrase can be; a judgment of cognition has its determining rules set ‘before it’, while the sublime phrase judges in the absence of rules’. ⁷³ Therefore, while the cognitive judgment applies a rule that is given to it beforehand, the judgment of the sublime has a ‘rule in waiting, a rule with the “promise” of universality’. ⁷⁴ The judgment of the sublime is universal only in the sense that those who judge expect that their judgment will be shared by everyone, without possessing a rule that grounds this expectation. Yet let us note that Lyotard is not claiming that there should be no rules, but rather that the expectation of a rule, or the ‘rule in waiting’, stems from the feeling aroused by an object that exceeds representation by means of rules. The rule is not there, but we feel the need for it, and we expect that this feeling will be shared by everyone.

As we saw in the previous section, the sublime feeling is aroused by the differend, which is why universal judgments stem from a conflict among heterogeneous discourses. Lyotard explains the link between the differend and universality through an analysis of Marxism and, more specifically, in response to the question: ‘Marxism has not come to an end, but how does it continue?’ The challenge consists in interpreting the demand of the proletarians as the expression of a differend, rather than as the representation of a universal subject – as if the proletarians were the representatives of humanity. As Lyotard explains:

The wrong is expressed through the silence of feeling, through suffering. The wrong results from the fact that all phrase universes and all their linkages are or can be subordinated to the sole finality of capital…and judged accordingly. Because this finality seizes upon or can seize upon all phrases, it makes a claim to universality. The wrong done to phrases by capital would then be a universal one. Even if the wrong is not universal…, the silent feeling that signals a differend remains to be listened to. Responsibility to thought requires it. This is the way in which Marxism has not come to an end, as the feeling of the differend. ⁷⁵

It remains to determine what is the ‘responsibility to thought’ that requires that one listens to the silent feeling of the differend. As we have seen in the previous section, Lyotard understands critical thought as a thought that is prior to any specific regulation, which corresponds to the ‘mode of thinking’ characteristic of the sublime. In postmodernity, where no discourse is in principle more legitimate than the others, we are responsible for listening to the wrongs produced by this heterogeneity. Lyotard explains this notion of responsibility in the essay ‘Tomb of the Intellectual’, where he reflects on the role of intellectuals in post-modern societies:

The decline, perhaps the ruin, of the universal idea can free thought and life from totalizing obsessions. The multiplicity of responsibilities, and their independence (their incompatibility), oblige and will oblige those who take on those responsibilities, small of great, to be flexible tolerant, and svelte. These qualities will cease to be the contrary to rigor, honesty, and force; they will be their signs. Intelligences do not fall silent, they do not withdraw into their beloved work, they try to live up to this new responsibility, which renders the ‘intellectuals’ troublesome, impossible. ⁷⁶

Certainly, this conception of universality does not tell us how to make universal claims. Linda Zerilli criticizes Lyotard on these grounds, finding in Arendt’s notion of ‘representative thinking’ a more robust theory of political judgment. ⁷⁹ Following Arendt, Zerilli claims that political judgments become universal by taking into account the needs and opinions of others, generating agreement not by virtue of an a priori valid rule, but rather by virtue of representing a plurality of perspectives. ⁸⁰ This criticism, in my view, misses the central point of Lyotard’s conception of universality. The point is not to tell us how to achieve universal judgments, as if one could anticipate and prescribe how to invent new idioms, but rather to explain why we feel the call to make universal judgments to begin with. The answer, as we have seen, is that this call stems from the feeling that something remains incommunicable, which is in turn an effect of the discordance between heterogeneous discourses – a discordance that does not play a central role in Zerilli’s, nor in Arendt’s analysis of judgment. One important implication of Lyotard’s perspective is that, by contrast to consensus-based political theory, but also to other approaches to political judgment inspired by Arendt, disagreement is not a failure of argumentation or justification, nor of ‘representative thinking’, but a constitutive element of universal judgments. If this is the case, then the goal of political judgment is not to overcome disagreement, but rather to invent new means of communication within disagreement. Or to put it differently, disagreement is not a problem to be solved, but rather the very ground of communication and universality. The challenge of political judgment in postmodernity consists therefore in inventing new idioms that allow heterogeneous discourses to communicate, while acknowledging that the disagreements produced by this heterogeneity are irreducible to any uncontestable principle of commonality.

It is important to stress the distinction between universalist judgments and universal normative foundations that is at the core of Lyotard’s thought, for the conflation of the two underlies misunderstandings of ‘postmodernity’. If Lyotard’s critique of meta-narratives and totalizing discourses amounted to an affirmation of the right of excluded discourses to have a voice, the question of the universal foundation of this right would be unavoidable. In other words, if this were the case, Honneth would be right that ‘without moral universalism…, one cannot at all understand what having to defend the particularity of the suppressed language game against the dominant agreement is supposed to mean’. ⁸¹ But as it should be clear by now, the point is not to choose between universalism and particularism, but rather to rethink universalism on the basis of the disagreement between particular discourses. Universality, following Lyotard, is not a normative principle that conflicting discourses share, but an effect of the attempt to communicate in the absence of any pre-existing principle. We experience the demand for universality as a complex feeling that calls for the invention of new means of communication, while acknowledging that these new means of communication will necessarily generate new limitations to communication. It is this open-ended, inherently incomplete universalism that orients political judgments in postmodern societies.

Conclusion

The goal of this essay has been to set right a long-standing misreading of Lyotard, which equates his rejection of consensus with a rejection of universality, thus leading to scepticism and even nihilism. I have shown that, for Lyotard, universality is intertwined with heterogeneity and disagreement. Certainly, there are other political theorists, such as Laclau, Rancière and Honneth, who have conceived of universality as involving disagreement. My hope is that this essay contributes to reassess the importance of Lyotard within this perspective, challenging offhand dismissals of his position as essentially anti-universalist, and presenting a new approach to the relationship between universality and dissensus. Given the complexity of Lyotard’s thought, I have focused on providing an accurate analysis of his critique of consensus as well as of his attempt to reconsider universality independently from it. It should be clear that Lyotard is not a representative of relativism and particularism, as his notion of ‘postmodernity’ is too often mistakenly interpreted. Rather, his understanding of postmodernity, in which Kant’s critical philosophy plays a central role, contains a robust theory of communication and universality in contemporary societies, which deserves careful attention by political theorists today.