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Lyotard is articulating an exemplary ludic logic here. By foregrounding the issues of language (games) and representation, Lyotard rewrites oppression ("terrorism," “totalitarianism"), not as the material conditions of exploitation—the denial of people's needs and the appropriation of their labor—but as a matter of “consciousness” and language: the “feeling of pain which accompanies silence," in other words, the suppression of the heterogeneity of possible meanings. As a result the necessary political act, for Lyotard, is the subversion of representations, the disruption of those metanarratives (and more broadly the symbolic order) that suppress the differend. Against the “pain” of “silence” (the suppression of the differend), Lyotard asserts the “pleasure” of “invention” (of phrases, idioms, tropes). He is, in short, substituting a discursive “invention” for transformative politics.

In other words, for Lyotard there is a differend between prescription and description, between justice and truth, that denies any possibility of founding justice and thus politics on “truth." Lyotard's logic is based on reducing politics—like the social—to a speech act: to a series of incommensurable relations between sender and receiver and between the communicative interaction and its abstract, localized “context” (Lyotard 1988, 139-40). These differences-within the communicative situation, for Lyotard, undermine the legitimacy of any prescription for social change, as well as any description of the “true," because they open up the possibility of inventing other linkages, other meanings, other “truths."

Lyotard, in a manner reminiscent of Kant, regards any arrival at the concept of justice from the truthful or a decided good to be totalitarian. In short, any attempt to articulate a knowable good involves a differend and the suppression of other notions of “good." Because the social, according to Lyotard, “is given along with the universe of a phrase... [and] depends upon the phrase by which one links onto the preceding one, and since this linking is a matter for differends between genres of discourse, the nature of the social always remains to be judged. In this way, the social is the referent... of a judgment to be always done over again” (Lyotard 1988, 140). Any judgment, in other words, one makes about the nature or truth of the social, of the “good” or about justice, is always a matter of local, specific, contingent, and incommensurable linkages that must be “always done over again," since any one linkage will suppress some differend and must be displaced by yet another linkage. Lyotard's position, then--in the words of a ludic critic—is that “a just politics can only consist in responding to the imperative 'be just' without claiming to know in advance what it is to be just. Politics is thus not a matter of devising strategies of arriving at goals so much as experimenting in search of an indeterminate law, the idea of justice” (Readings 1991, 110). The crux of the ludic logic is this rewriting of the social in terms of indeterminate discourse, language games, phrases, speech acts. Specifically this means that the material social contradictions—especially class contradictions—are subsumed to a discursive “tension," as Lyotard calls it: “the tension, or rather the discord, of the social is... given with its phrase universe” (1988, 140). Politics, itself, is reduced to discursive alterations and subversions: what Lyotard calls the “invention of new idioms” for the differend. The post-al politics of invention is the local, contingent act of generating new phrases, idioms, linkages and rules for judgment (judgments that have “to be always done over again") for each particular situation without any pre-existing criteria.

Such a politics of invention no longer seeks to transform reality and rejects the possibility of social revolution, since there is no basis, no secure knowledge of the real or notion of justice on which to act—only the continual repetition of contingent acts of judging which invent their own idiom, their own criteria as they go along. For historical materialists, however, justice is not indeterminate; nor is politics foundationless. In contrast, for historical materialism the good is real but always obscured by the dominant ideology. In other words, the “knowable good” is not simply a rhetorical effect of language games marked by the play of difference (differend), as Lyotard claims. Rather the “knowable good” is a historical condition: it is the effect of the economic and sociocultural possibilities opened up by human production but which are, at the same time, restricted by the social contradictions of the existing relations of production and obscured by the operation of ideology in global capitalism. To be more specific, capitalism has developed the means of production and forms of technology to fulfill the basic needs of all people—for food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education—but it does not do so because of the imperatives of profit and the priority of private property. To take one quite obvious but largely overlooked example: thousands of tons of dairy products produced in this country are put in storage in order to artificially maintain a certain level of profit on dairy items, rather than distributing the food to the millions of hungry and starving children in the U.S. and globally.

The conflict between the priority of needs (feeding hungry children) and profits (for the dairy industry) is not simply the incommensurable effects of conflicting speech acts and language games—although certainly speech acts are involved in this conflict, especially in the ideological naturalization of hunger and deprivation as what “is," as inevitable. Instead this conflict is the historical effect, as Marx says, of “the material productive forces of society” (the technological capability to produce extremely large quantities of milk products and other foodstuffs) which have “come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated” (1970, 21). This conflict means that the production, commodification and distribution of milk in capitalism has not been primarily to feed as many people as possible but to maximize the surplus value or profit of those who own the means of production and distribution of milk products. It is quite true, however, as Marx argues, that it is within the “ideological forms—the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic"—that women and men “become conscious of this conflict and fight it out” (1970, 21). However, Lyotard's erasure of the issue of ideology and his focus instead on the singularity of phrases, speech acts and differends greatly mystifies the social struggles over “truth” and “justice” by confining them to the arena of language games—that is, to the superstructure—and cutting off their dialectical connection to the relations of production (base). “Justice” in Lyotard's logic seems to be an indeterminate competition of multiple, incommensurable, equal notions of “good” precisely because what is suppressed by his discursive localism is material necessity: the priority of needs.

In historical materialism, “truth” is not a universal given nor a metaphysical certainty, but neither is it simply a local effect of language games. Rather “truth” is a historically struggled over and constructed knowledge-effect. To assert the historical constructedness of truth, however, in no way denies the existence of objective reality (Engels 1939, 96-103), nor dissolves it into rhetoric or textual relativity, instead it refers to the way objective reality is made intelligible at any given historical moment. What is validated as 'making sense,' what is represented as 'what is,' what is legitimated as 'true,' are all effects of class struggles over meaning and the historical conflicts over knowledge. The relativity of knowledge is no way to be equated with relativism (Lenin 1970, 34-136). Rather, these are questions of ideology, for ideology constructs the representations in terms of which we “makes sense of” and live our relation to objective reality—to the material relations of production shaping our lives—and in terms of which we understand and relate to ourselves and each other.

The “truth” of hunger, for example, is not simply “given with its phrase universe," as Lyotard claims. Instead it is the historical effect of the class struggle over the production and distribution of food. One (but only one) of the main arenas of this conflict in patriarchal-capitalism is the ideological fight over the “meaning” or “causes” of hunger—that is, over how it is represented and made intelligible. This means that the “truth” of hunger is indeed articulated in terms of “phrases," “genres," “speech acts," but it is not given by them. These “phrase universes” need to be understood not simply in terms of the communicative situation or “context," but dialectically in connection to the relations of production. In short, we need to know not only what are the conflicting meanings of hunger; how they are constructed, but more important why these specific (mis)representations (phrases, phrase universes, metaphors... ) are produced at this historical moment. It is this last issue—why—that the local, isolating singularity of ludic thinking brackets and makes impossible to know. For the question of why is the question of the dialectical relation of the singular entity, event, meaning to the larger social totality—to the relations of production. Thus the most common ideological misrepresentation, “the most common—and most misplaced—assumption," as one socialist critic, Mark O'Brien, points out, “used to explain starvation is that there is not enough food to go around." This misrepresentation conceals the actual material conditions of production which are quite different: according to O'Brien, “For 30 years, food production has on average increased 16 percent faster each year than population size. Enough grain is grown to make every man, woman and child fat on 3,600 calories a day” (1993). In other words, the ideological misrepresentation of hunger as the result of scarcity “naturalizes” and renders “inevitable” the consequences of production for profit in capitalism: it conceals the reality that scarcity of food is now a result of overproduction for profit. In naturalizing production for profit, ideology operates to remove from critical scrutiny—that is, to render invisible and unknowable--the systematic social, political and economic practices of capitalist relations of production creating this scarcity: such as the transformation of food into a commodity to be purchased, the substitution of cash crops for agricultural production for use (subsistence), and government subsidies for disposing of food. As Paul d'Amato, reminds us “famines do not occur; they are organized." Not only are farmers “paid by governments to take land out of productive use--in order to keep prices competitive," but “during the Reagan years—when millions starved to death in sub-Saharan Africa—the U.S. Government built special grain storage tankers, fitted with special trap doors, to dump their contents into the sea” (d'Amato 1993, 11). Moreover, the commodification of food and demise of subsistence food production means that access to food in patriarchal-capitalism is dependent on one's ability to buy it. The 1974 famine in Bangladesh, for example, as Amartya Sen (1981) has argued, resulted not from scarcity but from the inability of the poor to purchase food. It resulted from the organization of the production and distribution of food for profit—which ideology conceals.

The fundamental material contradiction--the objective reality—of patriarchal-capitalism is deprivation (not only hunger but also poverty, homelessness, lack of health care, illiteracy) amidst overproduction and abundance. But the localism of ludic analytics—the fetishization of the contingent singularity and discursivity of events—mystifies the objective “truth." Justice is not indeterminate, rather it is very clearly determined by the historical conditions of possibility of human production: it is now possible to feed the world's population, to meet every person's basic needs—not doing so is unjust. The question of knowing the "truth” is neither a question of describing some “true” metaphysical or ontological “essence” nor a matter of negotiating incommensurable language games, as Lyotard suggests. Rather it is the question of a dialectical understanding of the dynamic relation between superstructure and base: between ideology—(mis)representations, signifying practices, discourses, frames of intelligibility, subjectivities—and the workings of the forces of production and the historical relations of production. Crucial to such a dialectical knowledge is ideology critique—a practice for developing class consciousness—which, as Henri Lefebevre has discussed, “consists in studying the margin which separates what men are from what they think they are, what they live from what they think. It re-examines the notion of mystification more deeply... for ideologies and mystifications are based upon real life, yet at the same time they disguise or transpose that real life” (1991, 146).

Perhaps one of the most serious problems with ludic knowledges is the way they play a central role in generating many of the ideological (re)mystifications necessary to late capitalism—not the least of which is the erasure of class struggle and the occlusion of the relations of production. These post-al (re)mystifications are all the more effective precisely because they are developed by de-mystifying (deconstructing) the dominant common sense and some of the (out-moded) ideological forms necessary to earlier stages of capitalism.