The purpose of this article is to lay out my own framework of thought on contemporary society and to comment on what I see as the current malaise that exists within it. A certain ‘civil illiteracy’ has taken over many liberal democracies in the western world. They are marked by a lack of agreement, a de-legitimation of the politics and a decline in the belief of the ‘truth’. I first came across the work of Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979) through my research on a Russian political advisor named Vladisav Surkov. Surkov has noted in various articles that he had read The Postmodern Condition in his youth during the collapse of the soviet union in the 1990s and has detailed how it has shaped his own views and actions later during his time inside the Kremlin. He is a political maverick, a member of the avant-garde theatre world, the constructor of Russian sovereign democracy and the intellectual father of the non-linear warfare that is currently being fought in Ukraine. Surkov has applied post-modern art techniques to the realm of politics. He has turned Russian politics into a theatrical play. It is a politics that plays with perception and manipulates it toward beneficial ends for the Russian state. It has led people to become demoralised at the fact that their life has no real underlying meaning and that they are somehow being played.
Demoralisation and the gamification of politics is far more widespread than Surkovian politics. It has seeped into the political fabric of the west. A sharp hardening of attitudes, the formation of irreconcilable groupings, the overriding sense that certain ideologies lay claim to political ‘truth’ and political legitimacy are just some of the symptoms of the crisis of liberal democracy. Many commentators have acknowledged this. In America news outlets constantly mention it. At home in England the topic of Brexit appears to evidence the fact that a once seemingly respectable and civil society has descended into tribal groupings with mutual animosity. However, the majority of people who talk about these issues view the ‘fix’ to this situation think it requires a return to the liberal sensibility of being able to see and understand the side of the ‘other’. However, this liberally minded ‘fix’ stems from the discourse and beliefs that emanate from modernity. What I wish to suggest is that the discourse of modernity has long been dead and that the world of the post-modern has arrived. With this transition we have witnessed the demise not only of the modern, but also of the meta-narrative and of the political and moral legitimations that once underpinned our political and societal arrangements. To prescribe ‘fix’s’ from a by-gone era, therefore, is mistaken.
This essay will take the form of two parts. Part one will articulate the notion of the post-modern in direct relation to the thought of Francois Lyotard and part two will discuss what the post-modern means for how we think about the legitimation of politics and, indeed, the legitimation of all forms of societal discourse.
The central question that this essay seeks to grapple with is centred around how one can legitimate politics and political action. At a deeper level, however, it is questioning whether any discourse, be that of politics, morality, justice, freedom, equality, sexism, racism can ever be legitimated at all. To many readers this may be a very frightening proposition. But perhaps this is because the mode of thinking that still exists in 21st society has its antecedents in modernity. Indeed, most adults in British society grew up in the modern world rather than that of the post-modern. It would be entirely natural for many philosophical and political inclinations of the majority of the adult generations to remain wedded, in an almost nostalgic sense, to this previous era. Modernity is characterised by Lyotard as being predicated upon ‘consensus-based’ politics. Enlightenment thought and the Western rationalist tradition gave rise to the concept of the meta-narrative. The meta-narrative is a totalising form of discourse, the overarching language game that all members of a given society are forced into playing. In modernity there existed ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ courses of action. Reason and rationality could determine whether a judgment or action was ‘correct’ or whether it was ‘in-correct’. This binary distinction between a right and wrong course of action or judgement enabled discourses like justice, freedom, equality to have a sense of grounding and righteousness. Indeed, their definitions were backed by that highest faculty of man: reason. They could be used to move people toward specific and correct forms of political action. To act otherwise to this correct path would be tantamount to acting irrationally, and, to act irrationally would be to act incorrectly.
Politics could be legitimated around a meta-narrative: a universalising set of rules and principles determined by rational discussion that the majority of societal members adhered to. According to this criteria a consensus-based politics could be securely established. Those who challenged a societies totalising discourse were consciously and unconsciously silenced. For one to work against this political meta-language was not only subversive, in so far as it undermined the legitimation of the political realm, but it was also wrong because it didn’t play by the ‘correct’ and ‘true’ rules that had been established by reason. Silencing the ‘other’ (or other non-meta narratives) was a reasonable and rational course of action.
Yet, the postmodern condition of the 21st century has discarded this mode of thinking. Post-modernity has marked the irreversible decline not only of the meta-narrative and but also of consensus-based politics. Instead, what proliferates now is not one meta-language, which all societal members speak and understand, but a plurality of heterogeneous language games. Many thinkers like Habermas have attempted to ‘fix’ the crisis of modernity by continuing in the tradition of western rationalist thought which has involved a desperate attempt at maintaining, or reintroducing, a type of consensus based politics. Using the concept of argumentation, Habermas has argued that all language games have certain shared norms or meta-prescriptives. Meta-prescriptives are those overarching norms that exist within every single language game no matter how different they appear to be. Communication, according to Habermas, enables the transformation of opinions into statements with claims to “universality,” the latter being essential for the legitimation of certain statements and their claim to possession of ‘real objective knowledge’. In this way, Habermas is able to legitimise certain meta-norms which everyone in society agrees upon and aligns themselves with. This is a view that many people hold. It is similar to the view of Atticus Finch: to eliminate prejudice and prevent disagreement one must step into the ‘skin’ of others, to empathise with their view, to sit down and talk to them, to see if there exists any commonality or an overlap in ideas. By letting our own opinions known to others, we seek to necessarily justify them and for Habermas, the presence of meta-norms (norms common to whatever language games played by society’s members) enables our opinions and statements to be universalised. Thus, there is a belief that some of our views are subject to common rules and procedures that allow for them to be universalised (this being possible because all people hold them to be true). If certain norms stand the test of universalisation they can be used to legitimise political (and non-political) actions and judgments.
However, no such meta-norms actually exist. They are fictional entities, ones that ‘modern’ thinkers have convincingly conjured up. Habermas is assuming that all language games have meta-norms integrated within them and that these meta-norms have the ability to universalise our own opinions and statements into real objective knowledge. Yet the universalisation of normative statements are heterogeneous to one and other: they don’t share norms. Each statement exists within its own language game and each language game has its own norms and set of rules. Norms exist, but meta-norms do not. Just as the meta-narrative has been deconstructed so too have meta-norms. The idea of totalisation and universalisation have been negated.
The attempt by Habermas to unify the various language games in society and to search for a degree of commonality is, therefore, flawed. Postmodernity is an archipelago of language games. Each language game represents a separate island, not one great land mass. In Lyotardian terms, people do not play only one overarching meta-language game but a multiplicity of little language games. There is no universalising criteria that can be applied to all language games because they each have their own unique criteria and rule set.
The key point trying to be made is that consensus-based politics, the very politics being sought after now, is predicated entirely on a proto-type of Habermas’ intellectual framework. It is a framework that requires the existence of certain fundamental norms which are incapable of being disagreed with. It is an intellectually easy way out. The meta-norm is viewed and treated by Habermas as an entity exempt from critique and disagreement. Why? Because if it was able to be critiqued, then it would involve the undermining and de-legitimation of consensus-based politics.
At a less abstract level, all thinkers of modernity believed that social interaction was based upon the fact that the principle behind our actions would be understood and considered as valid by other societal members. This being the case if the movement of our actions and formation of our thoughts followed a procedure seen to check certain boxes. These boxes need to be both known to, and considered ‘legitimate’ by the majority societal members in order to exist. However, this mode of politics as outdated. It does not account for the plurality of language games that now currently exists in the post-modern society. The post-modern marks the escape from the meta-narrative and the idea of totalising discourses. It marks liberation from linguistic oppression. If consensus based politics no longer exists it follows that there exists no consensus on the rules underpinning political claims. It is a logical step to assert that one can no longer actually make any objective political claims at all. I do not mean this in the rhetorical sense. One can still easily assert statements such as ‘Brexit is bad for the UK economy,’ ‘The Conservative Party have mishandled the COVID crisis’, ‘Trumpian Republicanism is bad for the US constitution’. However, these claims cannot demand the agreement of others as they are un-universalisable. They no longer emanate from the discourse of a societal meta-language that have shared meta-norms that are adhered to by the majority of a society’s members. Instead they emanate from the near infinite plurality of heterogeneous language games that now exist in political discourse.
For Lyotard, the existence of an infinite amount of language games is the key characteristic of the postmodern. It is clear that these heterogeneous language games exist. Yet, it is unclear as to how they relate to one another. This has been a topic that Lyotard has analysed in his book called the Differend (1983).As the diagram below depicts, each language game exists in isolation from one another. Each one has a set of rules unique to it. In this sense, heterogeneity, not homogeneity, is the main aspect of the various language games. They have no common rules and, despite the fact that one cannot rule out that through coincidence some rules could be similar, they will never be the same. A good metaphor would be that of the snowflake, they all look uniform but have an infinite amount of variation that is imperceptible to the naked eye. Every language game (in British discourse) is spoken in english and to the unthinking mind this would mean that they are all part of the same game. But they aren’t. They are all fundamentally different — the rules governing them being unique.
The fact that there is no overlap does not mean that they are solely isolated. Passages between them, like boats between islands, certainly exist but there is no underlying standard upon which they all rest. What is most interesting about this situation is that we have arrived at a politics of dissensus and divergence. The idea of common ground in the postmodern is a fiction. One cannot mediate between two language games because the rules and very linguistic framework that they operate within are incommunicable to each other. One can talk to another and think they understand what they mean, but in reality they will never know what they truly mean. The implication of this for the political realm is fascinating. Just like the language games I have been discussing, politics now does not have, and indeed has never had except through illusion, any set of meta-rules underpinning or legitimating it.
Politics in this regard has a similar basis to aesthetics. In both the realms of the political and the artistic, people make universalising claims regarding a certain object or topic without any set of rules determining whether the claims are valid or not. Politics is no longer a realm in which one can make judgements upon a set of fixed and universalised criteria. Politics is now concerned with how one feels when contemplating a topic. It has moved from the issue of rational judgement to one of ‘taste’. Indeed, the topic or object of the aesthetic or political feeling has no ‘reality’. It is only perceptions of reality that now matter.
In this world there is no underlying objective reality or truth. This explains the predicament that many find themselves in. Why is it that others cannot understand our point of view? Why is it that the truth no longer seems to really matter? Why are our perceptions of events, discourses, and political actions so different to others in society? An ardent Brexiter is playing a different language game to the uncompromising remainer. The Trump voter is playing a different game to the Democrat voter. Furthermore, none of these language games are more ‘correct’ than the next. The moral-righteousness that exists on both sides of the political divide is mistaken. This is especially so in regard to the left and the concept of no-platforming. There is no longer any right and wrong or correct and incorrect, only what people like and don’t like. The flourishing of language games has allowed a liberation from totalising meta-languages.
The postmodern condition has inaugurated a very poorly understood new style of politics. The ‘modern’ paradigm of knowledge has ended. Indeed, now no solid political paradigm exists. Where this leaves us is still yet to be properly discerned but it makes one question whether the postmodern is a desirable place to operate.
If it is undesirable, the question is this: how does one leave the post-modern without recourse to the discourses of modernity?
