Dialogue in Agony: The Problem of Communication in Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

Jean-François Lyotard’s philosophy of phrasing and the differend presents a way of thinking about dialogue that communication theorists have largely neglected. In this essay, the author draws on Lyotard’s magnum opus, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, to conceive of dialogue as a concatenation of genres encompassing narrative, poetic, and deliberative forms, rather than a single genre (ontologically or epistemologically). Such a distinction is useful for conducting inquiry on communicative practices in authoritarian regimes, where the advent of the dialogical is evident in dissident acts that phrase damages and wrongs in the face of authorities who attempt to cancel the debt of these “differends.” Rather than pitting partisans of dialogue against partisans of agonistics, or discussing ways in which dialogue draws upon agonistics for rational argumentation or relational development, the author proposes that thinking about and engaging dialogue under authoritarian social, political, and economic constraints is impossible without agony, demanding time, respect, sorrow, outrage, and a feeling for the sublime (pain, pleasure, and their mix). Implications for dialogue theory are considered along with suggestions for research in authoritarian and other fields.