Lyotard on Wittgenstein:

The Differend, Language Games, and Education

Nicholas C. Burbules

University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign

Published in Lyotard: Just Education, Paul Standish and Pradeep Dhillon, eds. (Routledge, 2000)

This essay is concerned with a major theme of work in education influenced by poststructuralism, namely, a hostility toward the ideals of consensus and understanding. Perhaps the foremost critic in education of these aims of communication is Elizabeth Ellsworth (1989, 1997), who argues that these norms express a rational desire to bridge gulfs of culture and experience which, under most educational circumstances, cannot be bridged. The very attempt to do so, Ellsworth argues, disrespects these differences and puts those different from dominant cultures and values at an asymmetrical risk in these situations. She is far from alone in expressing such views; many writers on multiculturalism and feminism have similarly emphasized the insurmountable barriers of difference.

One of the primary sources drawn upon in buttressing these points is Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the differend, and this idea is explained, by Lyotard, partly in reference to Wittgenstein’s idea of the language game. Here I want to explore this lineage, from Wittgenstein through Lyotard to the hostility toward the ideals of agreement and understanding, not primarily to judge whether Lyotard is using Wittgenstein properly here (I think he is not) but to plumb the roots of this hostility, to ask where it comes from, and to assess whether it can sustain any meaningful sense of communication and education.

Lyotard (1989: xi, 9) defines the differend as "a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments." This case is contrasted with what Lyotard calls a "litigation," in which the claims of the opposing parties can engage one another because they are defined within a common rule of judgment. A.T. Nuyen’s gloss on this quote reflects the import it is typically taken to hold:

At the very start, one needs to question the model of litigation as a general analogue to the process of communication. "Conflict," after all, can mean many things, ranging from different opinions on a matter of taste, to different judgments about another person’s character, to different political views, to disagreements over religion, to competing interests that cannot be mutually satisfied, to opposing rights claims, and so on. Only some of these seem the sorts of matters that could be thought of on the model of a court case, in which there is a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the other’s claim, or in which there is the outcome of a clear winner and loser. Such an analogy introduces from the very start an assumption of what Michael Peters (1995: 391), following Lyotard, calls an "agonistics of language," as if every conversation was a contest, as if every disagreement was a struggle, as if every encounter across sharp cultural difference was characterized by the threat of one party’s rules of discourse overwhelming the other’s. Indeed, Lyotard often uses analogies like playing a card to "trump" another’s as the prototypical move in a verbal contest; yet clearly only some kinds of moves in communication are like this.

There are certainly cases where a wronged party cannot articulate or justify their position within the framework of another vocabulary and value system. The injunction to others to make their case in someone else’s terms or to remain silent is the sort of false choice that allows only for the alternatives of conformity or defeat. Lyotard is right to make this point, and it is one of the subtle ways in which systems of justice, without any overt forms of corruption or bias, nevertheless rule out of court any fundamental challenges to their authority. Lyotard is also correct that encounters across different cultural communities do sometimes give rise to differends, incommensurabilities in which one party cannot make themselves understood in the terms familiar to the other (for that matter, the same thing can happen to parties even within the same cultural community). But what is unsatisfying about these two claims is that they are linked together in Lyotard’s argument: as if communicative encounters across cultural difference were typically adversarial, in which misunderstandings or disagreement necessarily give rise to the threat that one party’s cultural integrity and credibility are immediately at risk.

Lyotard, in elaborating his view of the differend, repeatedly invokes Wittgenstein’s idea of the language game. Here I think Lyotard not only misreads what Wittgenstein meant by that notion, but also fails to see that in fact Wittgenstein’s view poses a direct challenge to the agonistic model of language Lyotard is taking for granted. Lyotard’s "Nietzscheanized Wittgenstein" (Bohman 1987: 68) is a stranger to anyone who has studied him closely.

In his most-often quoted passage on language games, Lyotard writes,

Steven Best and Douglas Kellner (1991: 175) call this mode of analysis "Lyotard’s one-sided celebration of differences, fragmentation, and dissensus."

Now, Wittgenstein’s idea of a language game in the Philosophical Investigations plays a very particular purpose in his philosophy. He is trying to make clear, in distinction to his own previous views in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that language does not only serve the purpose of describing the world, that is, asserting propositions that can be tested for truth and falsity; language is used to play many other "games" — joking, praying, promising, and so forth — or what later philosophers called "speech acts," which serve a variety of purposes. These different language games have different purposes and they are characterized by different rules; but they co-exist within the same "language," even when people might sometimes be confused about which game is being played ("Was that a joke or a threat?"). Misunderstandings between different language games are possible, but these misunderstandings are possible precisely because people are speaking the same basic language. Language games, for Wittgenstein, are not different cultural or national languages (French versus Chinese); nor are they alternative "paradigms" or world views; and only in particular instances could they be characterized as "phrase regimes" — for example, within forms of life in which language games or speech acts are invested with significant political or institutional weight. But not all language games are like this. The slippage from "language games" to "phrase regimes" conflates, ironically, a vast variety of different language games under a single characterization — a very un-Wittgensteinian thing to do, I would say.

It is also un-Wittgensteinian to invoke the idea of language games to establish the idea of "islands of language," given the way that Lyotard wants to use that image. Here Lyotard’s argument is more subtle, but still in the end not very convincing. He says,

There are many ideas at work here, not all of them parts of the same argument. It is certainly true that "moves" within different language games are by definition characteristic of those games (just as moves in games like tennis or chess are). But it is not true, first of all, that they are never translatable into other games: there are certain moves and strategies within chess (for example, moving pieces to control the center of the board) that are quite translatable into checkers. A move in bridge can be translated into a move in tennis; for example, a method of communicating with your partner (if playing doubles) that you do not want your opponents to understand. To take the linguistic case, phrases in different language games are in fact often translatable into others: as when teachers appropriate the language of contracts and use it as a way of negotiating grades with students; or when a philosopher uses a joke (say, Groucho Marx’s quip that "I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member") to make a serious point about political philosophy. Of course, sometimes such an attempt at translation will seem malapropic, even absurd: it might show that one does not understand the nature of the language games he or she is playing (using a vulgar joke at a eulogy; or trying to negotiate a peace treaty by giving the recipe for how to make a soufflé). But there is no reason to generalize from these sorts of cases to all encounters between language games.

Moreover, even if one takes Lyotard at his word, it seems that he is caught in a contradiction, for he is saying that "there is no unity," no common measure, across these islands — but then one wonders what vantage point Lyotard is occupying that allows him to recognize this fact and to comment upon it. Here is what he says:

There are three deep problems with this response. The first is that it is a vast overstatement, even on Lyotard’s own account, to say that "we know of nothing in common" between different language games. Even if one accepts the untranslatability thesis, which I have just challenged, saying that particular phrases might not be translatable across different language games is not the same thing as saying that they have nothing in common. I do not think that point even requires further argument. Second, for Wittgenstein, as I noted earlier, language games exist within "the same" language; they are speech acts that might even use the same words, albeit with different meanings and significance. Now, one might try to extend Wittgenstein’s argument to refer to entirely different linguistic traditions, in order to show that they speak right past one another and have nothing in common; but Lyotard does not give us that argument. Finally, it is a significant point to note that agents play multiple language games, and are sometimes even playing multiple games at the same moment; there is no one-to-one mapping between different games, different agents, or different groups of people. Lyotard’s "island" imagery assumes that when you are "within" one language game you are cut off from all the others; that when two people speak from within respective language games they speak across a gulf of difference. Given his concerns with disenfranchised groups whose "language games" are not being respected by others, this imagery is understandable. But it conflates the supposed "island" of a language game with the "islands" of social position or cultural otherness — which are not the same thing. And Wittgenstein’s idea is especially unsuited to this argument because of his assertion that we can and do play multiple language games, not only the one representing "our" island (as if there were only one).

Finally, there is Lyotard’s celebration of "dispersion" (it "is good in itself, and ought to be respected"). By this I take Lyotard to mean that the multiplicity and incommensurability of language games is not only a fact, but a desirable condition; that they should be kept separate and autonomous, and even multiply. Given his assumption, that in cases of a differend the only resolution of conflict must come at the expense of the cultural integrity and credibility of at least one of the parties, one can see why he believes that the less these islands have to do with one another the better. But this position does not sustain a positive conception of social and political philosophy (nor of education). It is not practicable on a wide scale, nor does it present a general conception of communicative relations that can undergird even a state of peaceful and tolerant coexistence, let alone one of possible cooperation and reconciliation. Not all differends may be reducible to litigations; but then litigation is not the only basis for reconciling conflicts.

Lyotard’s politicization of discourse, of course, is part and parcel of a broader theoretical emphasis within poststructural theory: "Political struggle for Lyotard is a matter of discursive intervention within language, contesting rules, forms, principles, and positions"(Best and Kellner 1991: 163). There may be no writer who emphasizes so strongly that language is variously the terrain, the weapon, and the stakes in this struggle:

I am not the first to find Lyotard’s enlistment of Wittgenstein as an ally in this process a strange and even inappropriate misinterpretation: Richard Rorty (1992: 64), and the co-authors Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish (1998: 33) make similar points. But neither of these analyses develops the view I am stressing here, that in fact Wittgenstein’s view offers an alternative and a critique of Lyotard’s "islands of language" and the fundamentally agonistic view of language this assumes. Michael Peters, on the other hand, defends Lyotard’s interpretation of Wittgenstein. He calls it a "playful and innovative" reading (1995: 391; see also 1989: 100-101); although in a more recent correspondence with me he suggested that a better term would be "creative misappropriation." I suspect that he would stress the first term in that phrase; I would stress the second.

Lyotard’s version of a language game is, first, internally structured by a system of rules that are constitutive of, and unique to, that game (as the rules of chess or of baseball are); second, a language game is dependent for its legitimacy on these rules (that is, it cannot be justified to those who do not share those rules); third, any language game inherently contains a paradox, because no system of rules can entirely support itself (there must always be elements within a language game that cannot be justified on its own terms; as, for example, when science needs to appeal ultimately to narratives or allegories — the Book of Nature — to explain and justify itself); therefore, fourth, these legitimating narratives can never provide an overarching set of rules, a "common measure" by which competing languages games can be judged or compared (that is, they are incommensurable); finally, fifth, this condition makes language games untranslatable with each other, where the limit case is the differend, where competing language games cannot engage one another at all (Lyotard 1984: 10).

However, on each of these points Lyotard misunderstands what Wittgenstein means by a language game. A language game is not a world view, an argument, a paradigm, or a culture: it is a specific set of discursive practices tied to specific purposes. Hence, first of all, while language games certainly comprise rules, these rules do not circumscribe the practice; the practice comes first (hence, Wittgenstein says, we can learn to play a game without ever being able to identify or articulate all of the rules). Second, language games do not depend for their legitimacy on these rules; they depend for their legitimacy, Wittgenstein says, on the forms of life that sustain them — and a language game makes no sense outside of that form of life. Third, it is not a paradox to say that no such system of rules can support itself; we should never expect a language game to "justify" itself. It is more accurate to characterize Wittgenstein’s view as "one does not have to play any particular language game; but if one does, there is a right and a wrong way to play it." Argument is entirely external to this process or, more precisely, argument is one type of language game, not a characteristic of language games ("phrase regimes") generally. Fourth, a point so crucial that I will return to it at length in a moment, Wittgenstein rejects the entire notion that there can be, or needs to be, a "common measure" operating across language games that allows them all to be understood as language games: this is his idea of a family resemblance across language games, which relates them all as games without identifying an essential core characteristic or characteristics that they all must share. Finally, fifth, as Lyotard himself notes, translation is itself a language game (not a meta-language game), and so it is very strange for him to suggest that translation between language games is a general issue or problem. Perhaps in the case of a litigation or a differend, where there is an actual conflict of interests or desires that needs to be reconciled, it makes sense to ask whether a common ground on which to negotiate or adjudicate that conflict exists; but this is not a general problem between language games. We do not typically worry about achieving a "translation" between, say, a joke and a prayer, or between an apology and a mathematical proof, or between a scientific journal article and a poem.

One must ask, therefore, why Lyotard has chosen to emphasize the agonistics of language and, within it, the cases of untranslatability between "islands of language." He is certainly not the first to use Wittgenstein in this manner: Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, makes a similar kind of argument — indeed, it is Kuhn above all who established the idea of "incommensurability" between "paradigms" as a virtual truism for many today (although he later backed off that interpretation of his work). But Lyotard goes beyond these views to consider incommensurability, not only as a failure of translation, but as a positive good; and to consider consensus as a threat (Blake et al. 1998: 11). "Consensus," he says, "does violence to the heterogeneity of language games" (Lyotard 1984: xxv). If one believes this, then highlighting the incommensurability of the differend, and protecting it from compromise through litigation, or through being homogenized through translation, becomes the only way to avoid doing violence to radical difference. One cannot (consistently) claim to understand or appreciate all of those differends; nor can one presume to speak for them. But one can argue for their preservation (the "dispersion" of language) as a good in itself.

But why would one believe that consensus necessarily does violence to heterogeneity? Why would one call it "deadly," as Lyotard does? One thing that this claim could be taken to mean is that consensus reduces heterogeneity: that where there were two or more contending views, there is now only the one shared view. But the idea that consensus in this sense eliminates heterogeneity assumes that reconciliation inevitably happens on one party’s terms (in which case the other party "loses"), as opposed to circumstances in which a consensus or rapprochement gives rise to a new position, in which case there is an increase in the options available, not a diminishment of them. But, like many "Nietzscheanized" theorists, Lyotard seems to assume that for one point of view to win the other must always lose — there is no third way:

Another thing that Lyotard’s "violence" might be taken to mean is that people who yield to consensus do so within an asymmetrical relation in which they do not appreciate what they are giving up by doing so. They suffer violence by losing their uniqueness and integrity, without realizing it; and once gone, it cannot be recaptured. To use a Foucauldian term, they have become "normalized." I think that there are cases in which this is a disturbing prospect and cases in which it is not. To judge whether this is a violence or wrong to them, one needs to consider a range of specific features of the situation: the conditions under which this agreement is obtained and the extent to which it is voluntary or coerced (this is rarely likely to be a clear-cut and unproblematic judgment); the nature of the differences that are lost or compromised (are all differends worth preserving?); whether there were alternatives to this change (it is important to recognize that in particular circumstances the actual choice is not simply between preserving the differend or eliminating it); and so on.

Another thing that Lyotard’s "violence" might be taken to mean is that consensus among some parties inevitably excludes or silences others, those not party to the agreement. I think that this concern is more salient than some of the others, because it asks us to interrogate the circumstances under which consensus is "voluntarily" obtained, not only to weigh its effects on those party to it, but on others whose views are not even taken into consideration. Indeed, it is sometimes only by excluding or silencing some voices and points of view that an agreement can be secured among the voices and points of view remaining. Here again, however, in order to make this judgment we need to consider a number of particulars about the case, the parties to it, their motivations, and so on.

Lyotard gives one other argument about the "violence" that is done through consensus. This argument derives from his view of performativity, the "technical language of efficiency and inefficiency" that increasingly comes to dominate public language in contemporary society. As Robin Usher and Richard Edwards define it,

This logic of performativity tends to "colonize" other ways of speaking and acting about social concerns; in particular, it tends to crowd out prescriptive discourses about justice and respect for difference. As a result, one might argue, the impulse to regard all language games as commensurable serves the performative orientation, in which all differences are simply problems to be solved or overcome in the pursuit of one large market of ideas, products, and ends. While Lyotard does not make this connection directly, I think that another way in which consensus could be said to do "violence" to the differend is by facilitating the approximation of all points of view and value orientations to this one dominant regime. Here, too, I think that the picture is more complex than one of simple domination; but to a significant extent Lyotard would be right that discordant or oppositional views only gain a hearing within this framework when they express themselves within a technical discourse that may be incompatible with the presentation of fundamental criticisms or radical alternatives.

What is the alternative, if any, to this "violence"? J. M. Fritzman suggests that the choice is a "politics of the lesser evil" which "would attempt to phrase wrongs so that they may be recognized as such….A politics of the lesser evil will not forget that there are differends which cannot be transformed into litigations, and so will seek to make decisions that will minimize the wrongs that necessarily occur" (Fritzman 1990: 477-478). Elsewhere, however, Lyotard seems to go beyond this politics of the lesser evil. A.T. Nuyen expresses this positive view as an "ethical injunction to bear witness to differends" (1998: 175). Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish suggest, similarly, that we ought to "explore the manifold language games, many of which modernism has marginalized, and find out how and where they are useful, how and where they can help us with what we want to understand" (1998: 142). Lyotard goes even further, however, not only to recognize and to preserve differends but to try to create new ones: "the task is one of multiplying and refining language games…an enterprise of experimentation on language games" (1979: 49).

But, then, more recently, Lyotard confronts us with a new dilemma: one does violence by rejecting differends or by forcing them into conformity, but one also does violence by trying to learn new ones:

So, perhaps we return to the politics of the lesser evil after all.

In the end, I believe, Lyotard’s positive position is very confusing. On the one hand invoking the concept of "deadly" violence, a strange usage in the context of consensus and of playing a game, certainly seems to suggest that the exercise of violence should be avoided or at least minimized. We do this not only by endeavoring to recognize and preserve differends but to try to create new ones: his process for doing so he terms paralogy, defined by Fritzman as "imaginative moves which directly contest the procedural rules that claim to regulate and adjudicate conflict" (1990: 380). James Bohman elaborates paralogy as:

And yet Lyotard says in the preceding quote that "violence is inevitable." What is he trying to claim here? Can violence and peace co-exist.? In order to understand where this argument has gone wrong, we need to approach the problem from an entirely different perspective, I believe.

Language contains both centripetal and centrifugal impulses. At any moment a word, an idiom, a slogan, a metaphor is undergoing a process in tension between the novelty of its initial expression and its capacity for yielding up new interpretations, on the one hand, and the tendency to become static, reified through repetition, and clichéd, on the other hand. If language becomes too static, it becomes meaningless through habituation, as in the slogans of the novel 1984; if there is too much invention and local differentiation, then it loses its capacity to support communication directed toward the possibility of shared understanding and, sometimes, agreement. Lyotard writes at times as if the only alternatives for language were either (a) metanarratives, which overwhelm difference and creativity, or (b) a multiplicity of incommensurable language games. From this vantage point, the only choice, then, is between the violence of "consensus," which destroys the differend, and violence to one’s self in encountering and trying to reconcile one’s self to the "bizarre." Yet in other places Lyotard writes as if the choices were between playing different language games, learning other games, and creating new games, "in peace." And so he seems torn between agonism in the sense of a contest, a game, and agonism in the sense of a war: "conflict," the term he uses repeatedly, is not sufficiently fine-grained to help us distinguish the two.

Like some other poststructural writers, Lyotard has a tendency to fetishize difference — one might even say he constructs a metanarrative of difference — as if this were the overarching principle of language. Yet sameness and difference, consensus and conflict, understanding and misunderstanding, are all twin principles of language; neither makes sense without the other (Burbules 1997). General pronouncements about incommensurability or the untranslatability of the differend do not help us recognize or understand the nature of differences we encounter between language games and when rules or concepts may be applicable between them, and when not. Sometimes translations fail; but this is not the same thing as untranslatability.

A general hostility to consensus or metanarratives does not help us understand when provisional grounds of agreement might yield relatively stable principles or generalizations that are useful in organizing our lives. And if we need to be reminded, rightly, of how these provisional grounds of agreement only include some actors and not others, that should make us question the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion entailed by those agreements, and perhaps choose others. But any other choice would entail its own inclusions and exclusions, only different ones — and that is the level at which an honest choice needs to be made. A perpetual openness to difference, whatever that would look like, might avoid creating any exclusions, but it would also never create any inclusions either; and no social existence could exist under such a principle.

Finally, there is the level at which this issue affects the person. As Wittgenstein himself pointed out, we cannot doubt everything. We cannot destabilize everything, especially not all at the same time. We must keep some points fixed still in order to question others. And if we want to question those fixed points, it can only be by (at least provisionally) affirming others. This general way of looking at language and understanding, it seems to me, yields a fundamentally different analysis of these problems than that offered by Lyotard. And the starting point to unraveling the antinomies with which Lyotard has left us is one of the core Wittgensteinian ideas, intimately linked with his idea of language games, and yet as far as I can see discussed nowhere by Lyotard, for all the times that he invokes the language game notion.

In defining language games Wittgenstein asked, first, What is a game? And he found out that he could not give a strict set of criteria or a definition that demarcated games; as he put it, one can only say "This and similar things are called ‘games’" (Wittgenstein 1962/1997: § 69). Games share a set of criss-crossing, overlapping features, none held by all instances, and some instances, perhaps, having a set of features that share little or nothing in common with other particular instances. So what comprises all of these instances as instances of the category "game"? Family resemblances, Wittgenstein said, just as family members have a set of similar characteristics, but perhaps no single set of common characteristics. What I want to argue in the last part of this essay is how the family resemblance notion erases the dichotomy between metanarratives and a multiplicity of incommensurable language games as the only alternatives. It directly challenges the key point in Lyotard’s argument about "islands of language," quoted at the beginning of this essay: "When I say: There is no common measure, it means that we know of nothing in common with these different language games." Family resemblance explains how, even when there is no single "common measure," it does not mean that there is necessarily "nothing in common." By erasing this either/or dichotomy, the family resemblance idea opens up a whole new approach to the issues of understanding and misunderstanding, of consensus and conflict, among language games.

Dorothy Lee writes, "I want to criticize understanding, because I myself do not want to be understood" (1976: 86). Now, I suppose that the only consistent response to such a statement is, "huh?" But venturing to understand what Lee means here (I hope she doesn’t mind), she seems to be rejecting the condescending, and sometimes domineering, attitude of others who say, patronizingly, "I understand you completely." No one can be understood completely, and the claim that one does fully understand another seems to lock the complexity and ambiguity of a living person into a set of assumptions, theoretical categories, and stereotypes. Lee’s complaint is typical of the contemporary hostility to understanding discussed at the opening of this essay; and in many educational settings and others, multicultural studies are taken as a series of object lessons in how the Other must remain utterly inscrutable. To suggest otherwise is to be aligned with "humanists" who believe that "we are all basically alike" or naïve communication theorists who believe that all linguistic barriers can be, with persistence and good will, eventually broken down. It seems that the only possible choices are that differences must be either utterly transparent or they are utterly opaque.

We must reject that dichotomy. Both options, in my view, have done serious damage; though if they were the only two choices, I would probably agree that the one less likely to harm would be deferring to the uniqueness and integrity of others. But they are not the only two choices. Understanding and misunderstanding are not opposing alternatives; they are aspects of the same process by which meaning is shared between persons.

To understand is never to understand "completely." Because of the unique qualities of each person’s knowledge and experience, what is understood from others (however similar they might be to us) is always understood differently. Whether one has understood sufficiently for communication to proceed further, for coordinating practical efforts, for achieving a level of empathy and intersubjective connection, is a matter to be discovered. At the same time, however, there will always be something in what was meant that was not understood, and something in what was understood that brings in elements from the listener’s knowledge and experience, not the speaker’s. Sometimes in being understood differently, a mistake is made, a mistake that interferes with further communication, coordinating practical efforts, or intersubjective connection; and then one must try to understand again. Other times, however, this difference in understanding is productive; as when others see more in what we say than we realize we meant. Sometimes it might even seem that a mistake has been made, but on further discussion it turns out that what was understood is a truer representation of what the speaker meant than what they actually thought they said. In all of this, understanding and misunderstanding are ever-present conditions; because one is always understanding differently, the judgment about whether it constitutes understanding or misunderstanding comes after; it is not immediately apparent and, to an extent, both features are always commingled (perhaps Lyotard’s reading/misreading of Wittgenstein can be seen as a nice case study of this intermingling). In most cases what we need to decide is whether we have understood enough. When one judges that it is not sufficient one says, "You have misunderstood." But this is a judgment following the effort.

Following from this analysis, we can see how most claims of incommensurability are exaggerated and even self-fulfilling. It is almost inconceivable to imagine a case in which anything was understood perfectly, or a case in which something was understood not at all (although we frequently speak this way). Just as misunderstanding is a condition of understanding, to the extent that we do understand, so also is understanding a condition of misunderstanding. If no engagement of understandings occurs at all, then it is impossible even to say "you have misunderstood me" — for one thing, the speaker must understand the listener sufficiently to recognize that what was understood was different from what was meant; but this also means that what the listener says is related enough to what was said for the contrasts to be apparent. So incommensurability, in the sense of two spheres of meaning that do not engage one another at all, could occur only when the two parties were speaking entirely different languages; and even then I would argue that some level of understanding (through gestures, expressions, and so on) can often still be achieved, if inadvertently.

Lyotard’s claims about the incommensurability of language games, then, must be seen as an overstatement. They are not "islands of language" and could not be so (for one thing, as Wittgenstein would point out, we recognize them all as language games). Sometimes, as I have argued, points of similarity or connection can be established between them, and sometimes, perhaps more often, they cannot. But this is not a conclusion to assert a priori or in general. There are differends — "the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be put into phrases cannot yet be" (Lyotard 1988: 13) — but the existence of them does not render different language games utterly incommensurable. When Lyotard says that languages are translatable, but language games cannot be, he neglects the family resemblance characteristic that, for Wittgenstein, is partly constitutive of what language games are; where there are family resemblances, translation is always a possibility, even if only an imperfect and incomplete translation (as all translations necessarily are, to some extent).

Incommensurability is actually a problem of a very different sort. While it literally means matters that cannot be compared or judged by a common standard, in ordinary usage it is taken to mean many different things: (a) heterogeneous; (b) no overlap (islands); (c) mutually incomprehensible; (d) incompatible; (e) untranslatable; (f) not combinable; or (g) not reducible, one to the other. Elements of each of these meanings can be found in the various ways in which Lyotard speaks of language games. But to ascertain whether two language games actually can be compared or judged by a common standard (as with translation generally), one can only try to do so and see whether it works out. Sometimes it will work in certain respects, or for certain purposes, and not for others. Sometimes it will work only at the expense of a severe effort or sacrifice being made by one or more of the parties to the relation, and sometimes this price will be judged too steep. And with this last point, I think, we begin to understand what is really at work in this problem area.

One cannot infer incommensurability from the mere fact of disagreement, even serious disagreement. It cannot be inferred from the mere fact of misunderstanding, even egregious and persistent misunderstanding. It cannot be inferred from an inability, in practice, of achieving a workable translation. Incommensurability is an assertion at the level of meaning, the metaphysics of language, if you will; it is sweeping, conclusive, and often self-perpetuating, because once one assumes incommensurability, serious efforts at communication might as well cease (why persist in the face of inevitable futility?). But at the level of communication, what we are experiencing are disagreement, misunderstanding, and the inability of achieving a workable translation (not incommensurability). These are difficult enough problems, and they represent real failures at making a meaningful connection. But overlaying them with the conclusion "…and therefore these views are incommensurable" is to prejudge the possibilities of future efforts, or efforts made by others, or efforts made under other circumstances — for sometimes the failure is attributable to these sorts of factors, not to the intrinsic character of the views being discussed.

Wittgenstein, once again, made clear that language games are intimately related to a context, or form of life, that sustains them and gives them relevance. Language games are not phenomena that can be understood or appreciated apart from that: for example, no one can understand chess, no matter how long one tries to explain the rules to them, if they do not understand the idea of a game, specifically a board game — some cultures may find the entire idea of staring at and moving pieces of wood on a board very mysterious, even bizarre. What is causing the confusion here is not the language game, or the incommensurability of its rules; it is the foreignness of a form of life. And here, finally, I think that we arrive at the deeper problem that we need to think through.

Just as Lyotard says, rightly, that translation is a language game, so also I would say that consensus is a kind of language game — or, more precisely, an element within many different possible language games (and, significantly, there are other language games in which reaching consensus is not the point). Consensus can mean answering a question, solving a problem, arriving at a compromise, resolving a disagreement, negotiating a deal, and so on. Each of these is a different sort of language game, relating to a different sort of conflict or problem, and while there are similarities between, for example, scientists debating the significance of an experimental result in a laboratory, and a purchaser and seller trying to settle on the acceptable price for an automobile, it is a dangerous oversimplification to say that just the same sorts of processes are at work in all of these instances. There may be a family resemblance that allows us to cluster them all as instances of "consensus," but there are significant differences as well. Specifically, these activities inhabit different forms of life, and it is often at that level that significant differences reside — for instance, with what might be considered "cheating" or inappropriate behavior within each game. Saying that consensus does violence to language games obscures the very different things that consensus can mean; at the same time, saying that the failure of consensus is a sign of incommensurability between language games attributes the breakdown to the wrong factors. Incommensurabilities, or deep conflicts, are more often attributable to the differences among the forms of life that sustain language games and give them relevance than to the essential features (rules, phrases, etc.) of the language games themselves.

Here, finally, we are less concerned with the "metaphysics of language," and more concerned with the social orders in which, and between which, communication happens. I think that the sorts of deep conflicts that trouble Lyotard are rarely because of clashes between language games themselves. They are over other sorts of disputes: What is the language game we are playing? Whose game are we playing? Who decides which language game we are playing? What constitutes cheating or inappropriate behavior in this language game? If we are playing multiple language games (I would argue that we rarely are each only playing one), which one is most salient at this moment? Does X count as a language game? Who gets to participate in this language game (or these language games)? Who decides when the language game is "finished" and who has "won" or "lost" — or even if this is a language game about winning and losing? Here, with these sorts of questions, is where the conflicts typically reside. And these are not conflicts between language games per se, not in the sense that Lyotard means it; they are conflicts over those games (whose game, what sort of game, and so on). These disputes take on the significance they do because they arise within and between the forms of life that sustain and give relevance to these different games (imagine a scientist who approached a dispute over evidence in the laboratory the way he would approach wrangling over the price of a car — both can be considered playing the game of reaching consensus, but his actions might very well be judged disruptive and inappropriate, if not incompatible with the spirit of "ascertaining scientific truth"; he would be excused of playing the wrong game for these circumstances).

Wittgenstein: "It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life" (1962/1997: § 241, emphasis in the original).

If my argument has succeeded, I have translated the problem of incommensurability, as Lyotard characterizes it) from a problem of conflict between languages, or between phrases, or between rules, or between language games, to a problem of conflict between forms of life. Lyotard is entirely correct that differends exist; that they often exist against the background of power differences that delegitimate and suppress the views of nondominant groups (who are unable to make their case in the language game of litigation); and that as a result a certain openness to heterogeneity in language games is part of a just social order. But he is wrong that the existence of differends proves something about the general incommensurability of language games; that misunderstanding will be inevitable, and total, when people try to translate between different language games; and that as a result any pursuit of consensus "does violence" to the language games of others. Conflicts between languages, phrases, rules, or language games are always the potential conditions of an experiment in translatability; a translation that, to be sure, may fail. But the failures of understanding, translation, and agreement are human failures, not generally problems of language (or of language games). It is our values, our forms of life, and our refusal or inability to respect or consider the forms of life of others that give rise to the breakdowns in understanding that Lyotard decries. And it is in encounters with strange, disturbing, or challenging language games that we stand to learn by reflecting upon ourselves. We can, as Lyotard says, try to learn to play the other’s game; but unlike him, I would not say that this means "doing violence" to what we think. It may mean coming to recognize and rethink the form of life that we take for granted, which makes this other language game seem so "bizarre" to us.

In closing, I hope that this essay provides an answer to those, like Lyotard, who are prepared to jettison the values of understanding or consensus, to see in them only the vampire-like threat of sapping Others of their otherness, normalizing them to dominant language games. Some authors, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer or Jürgen Habermas, are much more optimistic about the possibilities of understanding or agreement. But both the pessimists and the optimists here miss the point, I would suggest. The issue is not with the nature of language, but with the practice of communication. The available language both facilitates and constrains the possibilities of communication (it is not a remarkable observation to say this); but whether communication can generate shared understandings or agreements is not determined by the available language itself, so much as by the ways in which persons enact the communicative relation. This is a social problem, and a moral problem, more than a linguistic or epistemological one.

Certain forms of life invest language games with an import that can be deadly serious — for example, whether one utters a confession when interrogated. Such contexts (forms of life) make issues of difference in language or in language games not mere matters of understanding or making one’s self understood, but interactions that have asymmetrical consequences for the different participants. And when a hegemonic mode of speaking and thinking, like performativity, threatens to "colonize" other types of speaking and thinking about social concerns, then the push to treat all language games as commensurable (comparable by a single set of standards) can be seen as an aspect of this colonization. Similar points could be made about the language of science, or litigation, or bureaucracy, all ascendent in educational discourse today. But the fetishization of difference as a corrective has its own excesses as well; and here too this orientation only makes sense within a particular form of life — one that could be as constraining in its implications for learning and social development as any other. Addressing these various forms of life and the language games that they do and do not make possible poses a new set of questions, not with the desirability of understanding and agreement in general (as if one could make a judgment of such things in general), but with the conditions that make understanding and agreement possible, and for whom, and for what purposes.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: I appreciate the suggestions and support of Paul Standish, Pradeep Dhillon, and Michael Peters.

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