“The Differend” as Spiritual Practice

I’m starting this meditation by returning to a paragraph I wrote in my previous meditation on Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition:

“The challenge Lyotard raises is how to see ourselves in this postmodern condition as still having a desire for justice and still having the practical means of enacting it even if we don’t have prior justifications for what justice is. In other words, to be just toward each other does not mean to have a prior knowledge of what justice is. This requires us to seek a practical notion of a self that can see itself having agency in these networks even if our egos cannot be conceived as the stable center of any given nexus. In such a practical consideration of the self, we’ll need recourse to the notion of a soul as a capacity to control our responses. This soul would need to be fundamentally relational and not atomized. It would need both a powerful capacity for effort and action while also remaining radically open to how those actions reverberate through networks of language games.”

These questions of the soul and its relationships with justice, communication networks, agonistic language games, and incommensurability are fascinating to me. This paragraph seems to be sending me off in the direction of delving into these relationships more fully. I find that these relationships are pulling in a number of threads of my thinking recently, including Nietzsche’s confrontations with nihilism and Christianity, Simone Weil’s Christian spiritual practices of attention and “implicit love of God,” and Lyotard’s diagnosis of our postmodern condition as the incredulity toward metanarratives.

Let me start with Lyotard’s notion of “the differend.” In the preface to that book, he writes, “The time has come to philosophize.” By that he means that the time has come “To bear witness to the differend” (xiii). He uses this phrase again in paragraph 22 of the first chapter: “What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them.” He continues in paragraph 23:

23. In the differend, something “asks” to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases in the right way. This is when the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom), that they are summoned by language, not to augment to their profit the quantity of information communicable through existing idioms, but to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute new idioms which do not yet exist. (The Differend, 13)

As a young graduate student of the 1990’s reading Lyotard for the first time, my attention was on “language games.” Like a lot of us at the time, we were embracing poststructuralism’s emphasis on language as a material force in the way we construct ourselves and our politics. It seemed to me at the time that Lyotard was more in line with the Foucault of The Archealogy of Knowledge and the Derrida of Writing and Difference than he was in line with the machines and flows and rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari. At the time, I was just starting to understand how language could be seen as a mechanism of power and how its ability to express truth is part of that power.

When I read this passage today, I find myself gravitating to the emotional content of the differend. Suffering, pain, silence and struggle are all on display here in a way that makes this passage far more emotionally powerful and less of an expression of languages games as an analytical framework. When this emotional content links up with the differend as something that we need “to bear witness to” the notion of a soul starts to feel relevant to how we bear witness.

How we bear witness to the differend is Lyotard’s postmodern ethical practice. It feels a lot more spiritual today than it did in 1993 or 1994 when I likely first read it. Perhaps this is why I find myself more drawn today to Lyotard than to Foucault or Derrida, though they are both important to me as formative figures in my intellectual journey. For both of them, poststructuralism remained something of a technical skill of reading and analyzing their objects. Deconstruction (as difference and deferral) and “technologies of the self” lack the emotional power of Lyotard’s use of “the differend” as something to which we must bear witness.

For this reason, I find Lyotard far more compelling a philosophical figure today. He is much more open to concepts of the soul, love and justice that move away from an “art of living.” The latter feels to me like a kind of atomizing of the self as a work of art. Lyotard’s notion of the self as a “post through which various kinds of messages pass” (PMC 15) provides a far richer way to understand postmodern subjectivity. To see the subject as a temporal and spatial post through which all manner of different messages are flowing is far more relevant today than a warmed-over Kantian Existentialism that sees the subject as the result of its creative acts. In Foucault in particular, we find a recurrence of the phrase “the work of the self on the self.” Within this phrasing is a bias toward one’s own self as the fundamental raw material on which one works. The outcome of the work — the product — is a self. It is not too hard to see how an “art of living” and askesis as the work of the self to create a self leads to an atomizing bias.

To see the differend as something to which we need to bear witness is to find a relational notion of the soul and thus a greater appreciation for justice, love, suffering and other states of being that are radically and profoundly open to otherness. To bear witness to the differend is to hold oneself radically open to this otherness. This requires “reflection”:

The differend does not bear upon the content of the reflection. It concerns (and tampers with) its ultimate presuppositions. Reflection requires that you watch out for occurrences, that you don’t already know what is happening. (xv, emphasis added)

One could easily link Lyotard’s use of reflection in The Differend with Simone Weil’s notion of attention or with Buddhism’s equivalent concepts that express radical openness to human and non-human others: “Reflection requires that … you don’t already know what is happening.” The differend makes it possible to reclaim religious practices as techniques for truly opening oneself to hearing and witnessing otherness without circumscribing how the other should be responded to. Crucially, the differend must become a spiritual practice. We must not just use it as a nice analytical concept to read texts and discuss works of art. We must “bear witness to it,” which means recognizing it when we are faced with pain and suffering (ours and others). To borrow some phrasing from Weil, “The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth” (Waiting for God, Routledge Edition, 70). The ability to intentionally empty our souls in order to hear the answer is to seek to hear the differend — a hearing that is not a hearing and a recognition that “does not already know what is happening.”

This is a difficult spiritual technique to learn. It can only happen with a lot of practice. What is more, the differend is something that we must not only recognize when it shows up but must solicit and bring into the open: “To give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim” (Paragraph 21, page 13). This is far from an art of living, though art is crucial to Lyotard. Art is one of the ways in which phrases can be combined to listen and give expression to the differend.

In this sense, incommensurability (another of Lyotard’s key terms) must be seen as a fundamental condition of language games. It refers to the attempt to measure different things by the same yardstick. Incommensurability is the normal case, not a defect in the system. Or, if you like, it is a defect in the system that is immanent to the system. We must be able to recognize that different ways of speaking and acting cannot and should not be measured by the same yardstick. Violence occurs when this happens. We can find examples of this all over the place. Jodie Comer’s one-woman show, Prima Facie, can be powerfully understood as a prolonged demonstration of the violence that occurs when incommensurability is ignored and suppressed in order to render legal justice. As a work of theater, it seeks to highlight how the language game of legal justice does violence to the experience of rape and stifles the ability for that experience to find a true hearing in a court of law. Legal justice seeks clear answers by imposing ways of speaking, hearing, and questioning that are designed to reduce all experience and expression — all other language games — to itself. What really happened? What are the facts? Who is at fault? Did the victim bring this on herself? These are the dominant modes of phrasing that try to establish a stable truth about the situation, almost always to the detriment and disadvantage of the plaintiff/victim.

The differend is the ethical disposition we need to have toward incommensurability. It is the ability to bear witness to moments when incommensurability is leading to unjust violence, suffering and pain. This ability is not new. It is central to Nietzsche’s confrontation with and warnings against nihilism. It is central to his notion of the child in Zarathustra as the creative openess to the new. It is there in Buddhism’s radical openness to the suffering of oneself and others. It is there in the mystical work of Weil as she reworks Christian spiritual practices away from a primarily personal and vertical relationship to God and toward a horizontal relationship with others. “Creative attention” is the disposition one must have to others in need of our help. The soul that reaches out does not first reach up but greets the person in need with an emptying of oneself in order to truly understand the need:

That is why expressions such as to love our neighbor in God, or for God, are misleading and equivocal. A man has all he can do, even if he concentrates all the attention of which he is capable, to look at this small inert thing of flesh, lying stripped of clothing by the road-side. It is not the time to turn his thoughts toward God. Just as there are times when we must think of God and forget all creatures without exception, there are times when, as we look at creatures, we do not have to think explicitly of God. At such times, the presence of God in us has as its condition a secret so deep that it is even a secret from us. There are times when thinking of God separates us from him. (Waiting for God, Routledge Edition, 100-101)

The attention called for here is neither exclusively effort nor exclusively passivity. It is a profound effort of opening oneself to the suffering of the other “lying on the road-side.” It is an attention that seeks to help without imposing judgment.