Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory: Between Critical Theory and Post-Marxism (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory

The end of the Cold War and the subsequent critique of Communism as a viable political alternative to liberal democracies has led to an often uncritical acceptance of an emerging global capitalist order. In this book, Mark Devenney seeks an alternative perspective drawn from a synthesis of critical theory and post-Marxist theory while avoiding the reactionary fundamentalism that rejects altogether the possibility of building an enlightened, secular, social order. In addressing the political and theoretical debates between critical and postMarxist theorists, this book discusses the politics of communication and rationality, subjectivity, sovereignty, ethics and deliberative democracy, considering questions such as: ● ●

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Does the theory of communicative action justify deliberative democracy? Is a theory of hegemony compatible with an account which relies upon an ideal of communicative success? Is autonomy a good which should be fostered? Can the ideal of democracy extend beyond the nation state? Does post-Marxism have anything interesting to say about ethics?

Analysing the work of Ernesto Laclau and Jürgen Habermas – as representatives of different choices made in regard to theory, politics and morality – Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory develops a critical response to the contrasting conclusions of these approaches. Mark Devenney is a senior lecturer in politics and philosophy at the University of Brighton, UK. His current research concerns political economy and death, and involves a re-reading of Marx’s labour theory of value and Foucault’s biopolitics.

Routledge Innovations in Political Theory

1 A Radical Green Political Theory

Alan Carter 2 Rational Woman A feminist critique of dualism Raia Prokhovnik 3 Rethinking State Theory Mark J. Smith 4 Gramsci and Contemporary Politics Beyond pessimism of the intellect Anne Showstack Sassoon 5 Post-Ecologist Politics Social theory and the abdication of the ecologist paradigm Ingolfur Blühdorn 6 Ecological Relations Susan Board 7 The Political Theory of Global Citizenship April Carter 8 Democracy & National Pluralism Edited by Ferran Requejo 9 Civil Society and Democratic Theory Alternative Voices Gideon Baker 10 Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory Between critical theory and post-Marxism Mark Devenney

11 Citizenship and Identity Towards a new republic John Schwarzmantel 12 Multiculturalism, Identity and Rights Edited by Bruce Haddock and Peter Sutch

Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory Between critical theory and post-Marxism

Mark Devenney

First published 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2004 Mark Devenney All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Devenney, Mark, 1968– Ethics and politics in contemporary theory: between critical theory and post-Marxism / Mark Devenney. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Political ethics. 2. Political science – Philosophy. 3. Socialist ethics. 4. Philosophy, Marxist. I. Title. JA79.D48 2004 335.4–dc22 ISBN 0-203-48205-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-63150-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–23737–8 (hardback)

2003016011

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements

ix xi

Introduction

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The ends of Marx(ism)? Beyond Marxism? 8 Critical theory and the shadows of enlightenment 22 Conclusion 28

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Language, communication, performativity Habermas’s critique of Adorno 30 The universal pragmatics of communication 32 Enlightenment, ideal speech and politics 40 The uncertain limits of communication 43

30

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Performativity and politics: from Habermas to Laclau Three versions of performativity 49 Conclusion 57

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Politics, idealisation and performativity Introduction 60 Performativity and politics 61 Performativity and idealisation in political theory 65 Conclusion 73

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Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory Kant: the transcendental presuppositions of human knowledge 76

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viii Contents Habermas: reconstructive science and the quasi-transcendental 82 Discourse theory and quasi-transcendentalism 88 Conclusion 95 6

The politics of subjectivity Introduction 97 The subject of enlightenment 99 Communicative competence and subjectivity 104 The undecidable subject of politics 110 Conclusion 115

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Deliberative or radical democracy? the politics of performativity Introduction 117 Democracy and performativity 118 Deliberative democracy 124 Post-Marxism and radical democracy 140

97

117

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Post-structuralism and democratic theory Introduction 147 Post-structuralism and politics 148 Deliberative democracy reconsidered 153 Post-structuralism, deliberation and democracy 159

147

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Ethics and politics in discourse theory Post-Marxism and instrumental rationality 165 Discourse theory, ethics and politics 168 From the City of Man to the City of God: ethics and instrumental rationality 175

163

Notes Bibliography Index

178 185 191

Preface

This book would not have been possible without the help of many people, too many to mention. In particular the main lines of argument have been presented at various conferences and to the Ideology and Discourse Analysis program at the University of Essex. My thanks to the participants, and particularly to Ernesto Laclau and Simon Critchley for their suggestions and continued support. Colleagues at the University of Brighton have fostered a supportive but critical environment in which to debate these and many other ideas. My father and Gail have supported me through years of study and struggle, with human and goodwill. Last, but most importantly, Justine and Jack have put up with many late nights, papers and books everywhere and the stress associated with final writing. Their patience and love allowed me to finish this.

Acknowledgements

The author and publishers would like to thank: Taylor and Francis (www.tandf.co.uk) for allowing us to reproduce ‘Towards Ethics of Incommensurability’ by Mark Devenney, originally published in Strategies, vol. 14, no. 2, 209–25. Edinburgh University Press for granting permission to reprint ‘Post-Structuralism and Radical Democracy’ by Mark Devenney, originally published in Politics and Poststructuralism: An Introduction edited by Alan Finlayson and Jeremy Valentine (2002).

Introduction

This book critically introduces and investigates post-Marxist political and critical theory. At the beginning of the third millennium this is an important theoretical task. The end of Cold War antagonism, and subsequent critique of Communism as a viable political alternative to liberal democracies, has resulted in an often resigned acceptance of an emerging global capitalist order. The most visible alternative is a reactionary fundamentalism that rejects altogether the possibility of building an enlightened, secular, social order and responds viscerally to the hypocrisy and violence which undergird the expansion of capitalist liberal democracy. Critical theorists, inspired primarily by the work of Habermas, and post-Marxist theorists, drawing upon the critique of structuralism and metaphysics developed in France in the 1960s, have responded very differently to this new conjuncture. Surprisingly there has been little critical engagement by critical theorists with the most avowedly political of the post-structuralists theorists, Ernesto Laclau. Likewise those influenced by post-Marxism waste little time in rejecting Habermas as the last representative of a potentially repressive universalism which sanctions the inclusion or suppression of difference. One has only to look to the title of a recent book by Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, to recognise the radically different assumptions regarding politics and difference, which structure this exclusionary silence. Both responses are misleading, and prejudice what should be a pressing engagement with the different self-understandings of contemporary politics and enlightenment. This is all the more odd as it is Laclau’s work which addresses head on the demand of many critical theorists that postMarxists and post-structuralists provide an account of radical democratic politics, which goes beyond the valorisation of an essential negativity devoid of any relevance to contemporary political struggle. This book takes the form of an extended critique and analysis of these two theorists, as representative of different choices made in regard to theory, politics and morality. The differences between these perspectives sets the stage for many of the arguments developed, though the ideas explored do not derive from the clash of these bodies of work, but are critical responses to their contrasting conclusions. The underlying assumption of the book is that post-Marxist thought advances a more profound critique of the ills of modern society than Habermas’s account of

2 Introduction communicative rationality. My intention though is not simply to reject communicative rationality and deliberative democracy, but to shake many of the assumptions in contemporary critical theory from within in order to push it in different directions. At the same time I insist on a considered reading of critical theory, a reading which does not simply seek weakness in order to reject out of hand opposing arguments. In fact the critiques of instrumental rationality, of sovereign representation, and of the distinction between validity and power all found in Habermas’s work are adopted and adapted through my interpretation of post-Marxism. This introduction touches upon the key themes of the book: the main theoretical differences which structure this debate; their respective responses to the critique of moral and ethical universalism in postmodern thought; and the political implications of their work for a conceptualisation of radical democracy. The critique of Western Marxism developed by critical and post-Marxist theorists is addressed in the first chapter. Here I touch on the three key areas of argument: (i) the claim that Marxism is an essentialism; (ii) the inability of Western Marxism to address the complexity of political identification in modern societies; and (iii) the failure of Western Marxism to deliver an adequate account of its social scientific credentials. The chapter ends with a critical reflection on the early work of Adorno, and his appropriation of negativity from Marx and Hegel. His focus on a negativity that cannot be positivised is a key element of the argument that follows. There I explore the implication of Habermas’s failure to grasp the nettle of negativity, and suggest that in Laclau’s work negativity is rendered productive for a conceptualisation of radical democracy and politics. Let me reflect briefly though on three lines of argument in the rest of the book. The organising metaphor of the theoretical debate that follows (Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5) is the relation between symmetrical and asymmetrical conceptions of communication, discourse and language. Critical theorists argue that a symmetrical justification of democracy is possible. Second generation critical theory contends that a normative stance, justifying a critical attitude to the given, is preserved in the presumption of an ideal of symmetrical communication between competent subjects. Although seemingly innocuous this move anchors: (a) the critique of an instrumental attitude towards other human beings and nature; (b) a moral theory free of the quandaries of relativism; and (c) the justification of a democratic polis in which citizens extend to each other, through the medium of law, equal rights and liberties. Post-Marxist theorists counter that any perceived symmetry relies on hidden asymmetries, and the unacknowledged exercise of a force which can never finally be justified. Post-Marxist theorists echo Adorno in making this point and I contend that Habermas’s critique of Adorno is all too fast. While Adorno had bemoaned the totalising logic of modern forms of rationality, he insisted that any claim to totality cannot account for the non-identical within itself. This moment of negativity points to the residual potential for emancipation latent within the promise of enlightenment. These differences are highlighted in an analysis of different responses to social contract theory, and a sustained reflection on the key linguistic term which is at the root of these different theoretical approaches: performativity.

Introduction 3 Debates concerning performativity have their origin in Austin’s How to do Things with Words. His deceptively simple analysis of this concept has framed a smouldering debate between critical and post-structuralist theorists. Habermas takes Austin as his starting point, and asserts that all communication implies an illocutionary peformativity. Communicating subjects make implicit speech act commitments to justify their claims to truth, sincerity and right if challenged. These claims to validity which are, at least analytically, distinct from the content of the speech orient an ideal of communicative rationality. Butler and Laclau contend by contrast that the performative dimensions of the speech act render it unstable. Listeners may inflect speech act claims in a variety of ways. We are not sovereign over our speech and for that reason communication does not admit of an ideal of reason such as the form of universalism defended by Habermas. This debate within linguistic theory is at the root of differing attitudes towards symmetrical and asymmetrical relations. It touches too on a number of secondary themes, each of which represents an elaboration of similar issues, though on different terrain. What is the real around which language circles: does language simply describe or does it participate in the constitution of this real; who or what is the subject of language; if the subject does not control its utterance then what happens to the ideal of the self-conscious and responsible subject? My contention is that communicative rationality can neither presuppose perfect symmetry nor absolute asymmetry. All communication is in some minimal sense imperfect. Yet this imperfection is not a flaw, but is a necessary presupposition. Where symmetrical relations appear to obtain it is likely that a hegemonic consensus has been forged which hides inequalities or indeed justifies them. It should be noted that this is an inversion of Habermas’ account: rather than contending that symmetry has to be presupposed in order to ground the critique of inequality, it is only the existence of asymmetry which gives any pertinence to this ideal. This takes up the essential negativity identified by Adorno and Laclau, to suggest that communication is structured aporetically: it is both necessary and impossible to finally achieve. This aporetic conclusion is a condition of possibility and impossibility of any communication. This does not disable politics or political analysis, but is on the contrary a precondition of proper political attitude to the present. Diana Coole writes critically of Habermas that: Negativity must refuse any institutionalisation as a positive model of power; instead it implies a permanent process of critique . . . But negativity is not merely abstract negation or nihilism . . . its own practice reveals affirmative dimensions, while the contextuality of its immanent critiques suggests that where resistances are possible it will discern and guide, even provoke them. (Coole 2000: 193) I investigate the political implications of just such a conception of negativity through an analysis of the theory of hegemony, developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. If the speech act is characterised in terms of this negativity then

4

Introduction

the stabilisation or idealisation of even what is implicit in language, represents a hegemonic closing of the speech act from the risks to which it is necessarily subject. The occurrence of this at the theoretical level translates into how we understand morality and politics. Politically it suggests the presence of unjustified power in all decisions, even those apparently consensual. It destabilises that which seems most settled, putting into question key concepts of political modernity such as sovereignty, property and legitimacy. For Habermas the claim to intersubjective validity implies the possibility of reconstructing universal conditions of morality. However, this moral claim is understood in terms of the symmetrical obligations of equals. The theorisation of an irreducible dimension of risk in all communicative action points to the need to take seriously an asymmetry irreducible to consensual legitimation. This recalls too Adorno’s attention to the non-identical, to which Habermas gives such short shrift. What though is the status of these theoretical claims? That is, as Habermas might ask, how is their validity established, and would they stand the test of open argumentation in which only the best argument wins out? This is investigated in Chapter 5, which explores a concept oft invoked by Derrida, Habermas and Laclau, but which is rarely discussed: the quasi-transcendental. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued, in contrast to both idealism and empiricism, that any human knowledge has to make certain presumptions which are neither purely logical nor purely empirical. He explains these presumptions with reference to a transcendental subject of apperception, a subject that is presupposed by every empirical subject in their engagement with different aspects of their worlds. Habermas rejects this form of transcendental argument on a number of grounds. He objects to the presupposition of a transcendental subjectivity and argues that attention to the pragmatics of communication privileges an intersubjective conception of rationality. Thus he seeks to reconstruct universal claims to validity which have to be presupposed in all communication, even when violated. Habermas contends however that any theory is fallible, and that reconstructive science should draw upon any number of disciplines and forms of research in order to validate its claims. While reconstruction claims to find exactly those underlying pragmatics of any communication, these claims are themselves subject to empirical and theoretical testing, that is, to the force of the counterfactual. This raises the problem of the relationship between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. Kant’s argument was that theoretical knowledge is limited by its inability to determine the nature of morality and of moral actions. Rather the ideas of reason pointed to in the analysis of pure reason act as positive points of orientation for a moral practical consciousness. For Habermas too moral insights cannot be assimilated to epistemic knowledge. However, given his argument that moral reason is implicit in the structures of communication he insists that the premises of this morality may be reconstructed cognitively, in discerning the underlying generative presuppositions of communicative rationality. For Laclau, however, the discursive has no conditions of possibility. Rather the discursive is itself the condition of possibility for the emergence of other discourses and any form of communication. The discursive though entails a necessary contingency. The conditions of possibility of any discourse are also

Introduction 5 its conditions of impossibility undermining any claim to transcendence. It is important to note though the different objects to which these alternative versions of quasi-transcendentalism refer. While Habermas makes certain cognitive claims about the nature of communicative rationality, Laclau investigates the very possibility of stable meaning. Instead, Laclau argues that contingency is a necessary condition of any discursive formation. Given that any claim to knowledge, on this argument, hides the contingency of its own claims, how is it possible to question the status of the quasi-transcendental claims that Laclau makes. Does his work deprive us of the criteria according to which we may judge these very claims? I suggest that any theoretical discourse must recognise this contingency within itself, but is as a consequence subject to possible revocation in a discourse of knowledge. This begins the outline of a social scientific theory which in recognising its inherent contingency builds it into the theoretical decisions which it makes. This combines elements of both Laclau’s insistence on an ultimate contingency and Habermas’s account of reconstructive science. However, unlike Habermas who posits only the hypothetical nature of any claim to know what the case is, this argument insists that the contingency of any theoretical claim should be reflected in the deployment of social scientific theorisation. The key arguments of this book though concern the political and ethical implications of post-Marxism. The last four chapters address in turn subjectivity and politics, democracy and deliberation, and key concepts in the political studies lexicon such as sovereignty, representation, property and the relationship between ethics and politics. Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality has been translated into a nuanced defence of deliberative democracy, while agonistic theories of the political are linked to a defence of radical democracy especially in the work of Chantal Mouffe. Laclau and Mouffe contend that the extension of capitalist relations of production, and the concomitant subordination of these to a logic of profit, as well as increased bureaucratisation, results in new forms of subordination. Contrary though to Adorno the authors optimistically suggest that the displacement of the egalitarian imaginary into those areas subordinated to capital and administration forms the basis for a New Left politics, a politics of hegemony and articulation. There are however shortcomings in both of these contemporary versions of democratic theory. In most deliberative accounts deliberative democracy is deduced from a working out of the institutional and political conditions necessary to the achievement of a society in which communicative rationality is realised through democratic institutions and practices. While Habermas knows that such an ideal has to be mediated by a variety of mechanisms – the political organisation of legal consociates, a free press, sluices of rationalisation which influence the executive and legal functioning of government – he cannot adequately account for the asymmetrical other, those claims or demands which cannot be contained within such a legitimatory discourse. This inability to address the asymmetries confronting any democratic polis means that Habermas cannot adequately account for the exercise of a force which

6

Introduction

cannot be legitimised. This is maintained in most states’ ability to introduce state of emergency or sovereign exception, and suspend the law. This is most pertinent when one questions the foundations of the democratic state, and the exclusions that it has to perform in order to maintain its authority. Deliberation does not proceed from the presumption of an ideal of truth or consensus, but institutionalises conditions which render any consensus contingent and open to possible revocation or rearticulation. The negativity defended by radical democrats resists assimilation to any institutionalisation. A seamless account of deliberation which links legitimacy, law, deliberation and public policy runs the risk of assimilating that which is other, and, through ignorance of its own blind spots, doing an injustice to that which cannot be conceptualised within its own self-understanding. Neither of these accounts, however, seriously addresses the challenges to the sovereign authority of the nation state presented by the globalisation of finance, trade and politics. This threatens to undermine all of the traditional categories of political analysis: subjectivity and citizenship (explored at length in Chapter 6), and autonomy, representation, property and sovereignty (all explored in Chapter 8). PostMarxism does not simply reject these concepts but appropriates them leech like, sucking on the blood of tradition in order to break with that which limits the building of radical alternatives. What then of moral arguments? A key element of the argument in this book is that any analysis of the conditions of possibility of communication already involves the making of theoretical decisions that preclude certain ethical and political positions. If this is so then it is not so much the case that one makes an illegitimate transition from a constitutive claim to a moral claim; rather moral positions insist from the inside of a theoretical discourse. Moral and ethical positions obtain even at the quasifoundational level of the different theoretical perspectives. This argument extends that of Ernesto Laclau who holds that the theoretical identification of a radical negativity does not entail any particular ethical or political implications. This, I argue, is an inconsistent position, which holds to the strict delineation of the theoretical from the practical and moral without questioning the assumptions grounding this distinction. Laclau’s own work, and especially his more recent work on the ethical, implies that the distinction between facts and norms requires careful revisiting. This necessitates a modification of Habermas’s ideal of rational communication, as the starting premise for the analysis of morality and ethical life. My reading, like that of Habermas, takes seriously the particularity of all acts, the necessity of combining moral, ethical and pragmatic discourses when judging actions, but in addition recognises the fundamental asymmetry which is invoked in the making of any judgement. The asymmetry entails that justice can never finally be done, that is, every decision already entails an irreducible violence. This take on morality and ethics displaces a long tradition in political philosophy, which believes that moral commitments frame political discourse. Instead, I suggest that morality always entails a politics, and that ethical and moral debates are caught in a double bind. On the one hand they invoke the possibility of a non-instrumental world, a world in which all are treated as ends and not as means; on the other hand they cannot but

Introduction 7 make instrumental claims. This ideal may be found in Augustine’s distinction between the City of Man and the City of God, but as Augustine was all too painfully aware that the ideal invoked cannot be thought in human terms, and thus functions as a condition of impossibility of any moral discourse. Critical theory has always been oriented by one central idea: how to ground the critique of instrumental rationality, the reduction of all aspects of life to use value. It is Laclau’s analysis of the logic of the empty signifier, of a constitutive impossibility which undermines any means to end rationality, that is better suited to the critique of the dominance of instrumental relations in the capitalist order. PostMarxism must, I argue, take on these older forms of moral argumentation, appropriating elements from different traditions, in defending an ethics compatible with a politics constituted around an essential negativity.

1

The ends of Marx(ism)?

Beyond Marxism? Introduction Marxism was, in some or other sense, in terminal crisis throughout the twentieth century. Events in the last two decades of the century seemed finally to seal its demise, once more laying to rest the spectre which had haunted capitalism since the failed revolutions of 1848. The inability of ‘communist’ regimes to develop a legitimate alternative to capitalist modernisation was demonstrated as protesters apportioned and sold the bricks of the Berlin wall to the newly available ‘free’ market. In the new millennium those few regimes that hold to the ‘faith’ belie their own rhetoric with gradual economic ‘liberalisation’ while upholding one-party domination of the political system. The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed too the uneven spread of liberal democratic institutions across the world. In Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa south of the Sahara and South East Asia recalcitrant dictatorships spluttered towards liberal democracy, while enshrining free market policies in thrall to imperatives established by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and global corporations. Inspired by these changes writers such as Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history, welcoming the realisation that there is no better alternative to the liberal democratic institutions of the ‘free world’ (Fukuyama 1992). These developments have been interpreted in radically different ways however. The positive spin of Fukuyama, among others, is rejected by Hardt and Negri in their description of a new global Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000) whilst Badiou, critical of the liberal consensus concerning human rights, contends that the affirmation of universal human rights is only the latest version of an egoistic nihilism characteristic of the smug West, which is implicated in a global system of economic and political inequality (Badiou 2001). These radically different views suggest that endings are far more complex than any simple minded historical narrative of liberal democracy permits. Antagonisms repressed or marginalised under socialist regimes take on altered forms, while those plastered over by the ideological veil of Cold War antagonism in the West are no longer so easily hidden. Marx’s claim that capitalism would become the dominant form of social organisation is validated by a global economic system built on

The ends of Marx(ism)? 9 high rates of consumption in ‘developed’ countries, and low consumption allied with cheap production in other countries. Rather than the extension of equality and liberty, the twin poles of liberal democratic enlightenment, the closing years of the twentieth century witnessed the deepening of some of the most perverse inequalities ever in the life of democracy. The threads linking indentured and slave labour to the labels on clothing and the food the privileged eat are all too apparent. Whatever rights liberal democratic regimes have entrenched must be viewed, as Marx once claimed, in light of the institutional exploitation which is their other face. In this new global economy, developed since the 1970s, the margins are at the centre, and the proclamation of freedom in one place is implicated in repression elsewhere. After the demise of Communism various forms of fundamentalism market themselves as the only plausible alternative to capitalist liberal democracy. Any understanding of this ‘empirical’ end to Communism must abjure the rationalisations of apologists such as Fukuyama. The end of the Cold War did not resolve the crisis tendencies which beset capitalist modernisation and liberal democracy. Many of these were acutely diagnosed by Marxist critics of monopoly capitalism. Crises of legitimation and motivation (Habermas 1976), systemic crises effecting accumulation, and crises concerning the remit of sovereign authority all plague the capitalist state. The indices of social progress defended by liberal democracies themselves – poverty, levels of education, protection from arbitrary exercise of force inter alia – indicate the failure of these societies to meet even their own minimal ideals. Average indices of social wealth, which indicate rising living standards in the developed west, shroud the vast inequalities within nation states. Inequalities prevalent in the highly developed capitalist societies are exacerbated in so-called third and fourth world conditions. Moreover, the global deregulation of financial capital has resulted in the extension of new forms of risk invisible to apologists for the new global market. As preposterous as Fukuyama’s thesis is however there is one grain of truth which nags. While resistance to the newly deregulated global financial system has increased, no equivalent to Marxism, either as theory or as ideology, commands the allegiance of all groups opposed to the terms of the deregulated global market. Expressed simply there is no viable alternative to the liberal democracy that Fukuyama encourages us to welcome. Any reform is designed to maintain the system; revolution seems a forlorn hope. Given this the task of any critical theory and politics has two potentially conflictual strands. On the one hand critique should keep in sight the normative idealism which underpins one spirit of Marx, the insistence that things ought to be otherwise. This demands the positive formulation of alternatives to the dominant order: alternatives which draw inspiration from multiple points of resistance and a critique which goes beyond the limitations of the present, in an immanent engagement with its contradictions. On the other hand post-Marxist accounts cannot retain intact the rationalist and deterministic limitations of the western Marxist tradition. These limitations have been denounced time and time again by historians of the Russian revolution and in the plethora of theoretical texts which now parody Marxism whilst affirming a post-modern simplification of the political.

10 The ends of Marx(ism)? There is a new opportunity to reread and to rework Marx after the demise of Marxism as an alternative imaginary to liberal democracy. The extension of capitalist liberal democracy across the globe requires a revaluation of the politics of the left as well as a revaluation of the politics of interpretation on the left. The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed unprecedented resistance to global corporate and capitalist power. This intensification of anti-corporate activity coincides with a fundamental restructuring of capitalism, and the emergence of what Castells terms a network society (Castells 1997). Post-Marxist and critical theories have been tardy in responding to these developments. The globalisation of neo-liberal economic policies, and hegemony of free market solutions to a wide variety of systemic and lifeworld crises, suggests that left political and cultural thought must retain a universal or global sense of political change inspired in part by the legacies of Marx. Multi-cultural identity politics is an ineffective response to crises which are systemically though contingently linked. The left has to negotiate two apparently conflicting imperatives: a global politics which cuts across all previously established borders, and the fragmentation of identity politics, sometimes as a response to these imperatives, sometimes as a consequence of the slow decomposition of previously dominant forms of identification such as the nation state and nuclear family. The universal pretensions of such an ideal seems patently absurd, a remnant of the romanticism which inspired the Jacobin threads of Marxist revolutionary theory.1 The link between universal and particular in political theory must not be lost, despite the fragmentation of the left into a variety of different theoretical and political perspectives. The elements of such a framework, a common imaginary, have to be painfully constructed, but cannot be presupposed. For many post-Marxism has meant the abandonment of the critical impulse which underpinned Marxism altogether. Terry Eagleton, for example, asks of Derrida’s Specters of Marx: How is a deconstructed Marxism different from what Raymond Williams taught? If on the other hand deconstruction is to be more than some familiar marxisant revisionism or boring brand of left liberalism, then it has to press its anti-metaphysical, anti-systemic, anti-rationalist claims to flamboyantly anarchic extremes, thus gaining a certain brio and panache at the risk of a drastic loss of intellectual credibility. (Eagleton 1999: 84) Despite Eagleton’s wilful misreading his anxiety is common. These fears do an injustice to the set of discourses which are the starting point of a post-Marxist account. This book sets out to dispel these reservations, both theoretically and politically. In order to do so however, a revisiting of the various criticisms of Marxism is required. The theoretical limits of Marxism are well rehearsed, and all too quickly invoked to dismiss the suggestion that Marxist thought is a valuable reference point for a critical theory of modern society. In the rest of this chapter I reconstruct

The ends of Marx(ism)? 11 these criticisms not to dismiss but to trace a debt, which any critical politics has to pay. This debt is both political and theoretical. I address three themes: (i) determinism and essentialism, (ii) complexity, (iii) and the question of whether or not a science of society is possible. Many of these criticisms were foreshadowed in the work of Adorno. The last section of this chapter retraces his critique of reification. I contend that his work offers a good starting point for consideration of an alternative political imaginary, an imaginary which is explored through the work of Habermas and Laclau in the chapters which follow. Determinism and essentialism The questions of determinism and essentialism have plagued Marxism and the social sciences throughout the twentieth century. Debates centred on the extent to which the economy could be said to be determinate of all social relations, and if so how this causality might be formulated, giving due weight to the influence of ideological and other factors on identity formation and political action.2 In an oftquoted passage Marx makes a universal claim for the ultimate determination of economic relations on all forms of human life, describing the economic structure of society as: the real foundation on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. (Marx 2000b: 182) In Capital this version of determinism is allied with a distinction between essence and appearance. Marx writes: … what is true of all forms of appearance and their hidden background is also true of the form of appearance ‘value and price of labour-power’. The forms of appearance are reproduced directly and spontaneously, as current and usual modes of thought; the essential relation must first be discovered by science. Classical political economy stumbles approximately onto the true state of affairs without consciously formulating it. It is unable to do this as long as it stays within its bourgeois skin. (Marx 1976: 682) These forms of appearance are reproduced as current modes of thought, but their essential relation is hidden by the bourgeois skin which is the phenomenal form of a real content. Marxists struggled throughout the twentieth century to marry such claims with a materialist account of history and politics. The alternatives ran from the claim that the distinction between essence and the forms of its appearance was a necessary effect of the capitalist relations of production, to more sophisticated versions of abstract determinism or determination in the last

12 The ends of Marx(ism)? instance, most deriving support from a variety of Marx’s own texts. Ernest Mandel attempting to give substance to Marx’s use of the distinction unwittingly points towards the many difficulties it gives rise to: The distinction between essence and appearance which Marx inherited from Hegel and which is part and parcel of the dialectical method of investigation, is nothing but a constant attempt to pierce farther and farther through successive layers of phenomena, towards laws of motion which explain why these phenomena evolve in a certain direction and in certain ways. (emphasis added) … But the distinction between essence and appearance in no way implies that appearance is any less real than essence … The distinction between essence and appearance refers to different levels of determination, that is in the last instance to the process of cognition, not to different degrees of reality. To explain the capitalist mode of production in its totality it is wholly insufficient to understand simply the basic essence of the law of value. It is necessary to integrate appearance and essence through all their integrating intermediate links to explain how and why a given essence appears in given concrete forms and not in others. (Mandel 1976: 20) For Mandel the distinction involves the attempt to find ‘through’ the phenomenal layers certain laws of motion which explain this phenomenal appearance. Yet Mandel insists that the phenomenal appearance of these laws is not thereby rendered any less real than their essence. The distinction is one of cognition, not different degrees of reality. In reality, he contends, essence and appearance are integrated with intermediating links which must be explained. Mandel though is still concerned to question why it is that a given essence takes on a certain concrete form. For a writer determined to defend a science of historical materialism, as Mandel often claimed to do, this ludicrous explanation cannot be acceptable. Why should the cognitive distinction hold any merit if it is not to do with different degrees of ‘reality’? If this cognitive claim seeks to explain the appearance of essence then it must of necessity penetrate through the phenomenal to grasp that which is more real. In this case it can inform the decisions that class actors might make about their political role in the world. Yet Mandel disclaims just this link at precisely the moment when he needs it. In fact there should not be any problem making the claim that certain actions, events or structures take an appearance which is at odds with their reality. The problem is, and this is a problem inherited from a certain reading of Marx, when this distinction is overlain with that between essence and appearance, or between the phenomenal and the real. It may well be the case that what is experienced at first hand is only one aspect of an overdetermined reality. For example we can certainly accept that an experience of the commodity in an exchange relation is an abstraction from the social conditions of the commodity’s production, and that this abstraction has effects on the knowledge claims we may make. It is quite another thing to claim that below the phenomenal appearance we discover an essence, where there is to be located the laws of motion of the

The ends of Marx(ism)? 13 capitalist economy. Indeed one might read the short history of post-Marxism as an attempt to account for these metaphysical propositions in the Marxist tradition. This distinction between essence and appearance entails, as Laclau and Mouffe note, the abstraction of the economy as a universal object, [along with] another equally abstract object (conditions of existence) whose forms may vary historically, but which are unified by the pre-established essential role of assuring the reproduction of the economy. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 99) If other elements, such as political and ideological practices, are necessary to the functioning of any economy then they cannot, except as a methodological abstraction, be deemed secondary to economic practices.3 But, in this case, as noted in the discussion of Mandel earlier, the relation between this abstraction and the phenomenal experience thereof requires adequate explication. It is the later work of Raymond Williams, particularly Marxism and Literature, which best explores these extraordinarily complex debates. Williams rejected the simplistic reflection model which in a variety of sophisticated, and not so sophisticated, versions had come to constitute western Marxism. He is particularly concerned to repudiate abstract determinism, the establishment of ahistorical determining principles which afflict all social structures in differently mediated ways. Williams criticises Marx for reading the economy back in time, rather than heeding his own advice that such abstraction repeats the idealism of the political economy from which he so decisively broke. He thus disavows the determinism and the essentialism implied by the base–superstructure model and begins with another of Marx’s assertions, that social being determines consciousness. For Williams determinism is best seen as the setting of limits and the exertion of pressures. He writes: Determination of this whole kind – a complex and interrelated process of limits and pressures – is in the whole social process itself and nowhere else: not in an abstracted mode of production nor in an abstract psychology. (Williams 1977: 87) On this account Marxism is not a nomological theory which posits abstract laws for all social formations, but a dynamic account of the relations between active consciousness and a petrified second nature which is itself the outcome of long processes of political and economic struggle. He thus rejects a number of different accounts of the relation between economy and polity: the ideas of mediation, reflection and determination in the last instance. In the case of determination in the last instance he rightly notes that it abstracts structural limits on human action, without an account of the limits of such a structuralism or an account of social structures as the outcome of human praxis and struggle. Instead he argues that overdetermination is the most useful concept for understanding the complexities

14 The ends of Marx(ism)? of any social activity, and that it is closest in spirit to Marx’s own writing. Williams thus refuses the categorical language of base and superstructure, noting that the so-called base is characterised by ‘dynamic and internally contradictory processes’ (Williams 1977: 82), which means that it can never be abstracted from social practice and process. As he writes: The social and political order which maintains a capitalist market, like the social and political struggles which created it, is necessarily a material production. From castles and palaces and churches to prisons and workhouses and schools; from weapons of war to a controlled press: any ruling class, in variable ways though always materially, produces a social and political order. These are never superstructural activities. They are the necessary material production within which an apparently self-subsistent mode of production can alone be carried on. The complexity of the process is especially remarkable in advanced capitalist societies, where it is wholly beside the point to isolate ‘production’ and ‘industry’ from the comparably material production of defence, law and order, welfare, entertainment, and public opinion. … The concept of superstructure was not a reduction but an evasion. (Williams 1977: 93) There is nevertheless a problem with this characterisation. On the one hand Williams enriches the idea of production in order to include all of those conditions under which our social lives are reproduced. This allows for the cultural materialist analysis of a variety of practices, which does not simply render them refluxes of a more real base but constituents of overdetermined social practices. On the other hand he insists that the class character of such activities must be kept in view. Thus, in the earlier extract, he writes of a ruling class producing a social and political order. Likewise in his reading of the concept of hegemony later in the book he rejects any implication of ideological misrecognition, noting that a hegemony is built through a variety of complex, sometimes contested, practices, and that for the most part it is accepted by members of any society. Yet he still holds onto the notion of the working class having to build an alternative hegemony to the dominant order. Doubtless a more detailed reading is required of Williams’ cultural materialism but it is difficult to know what is meant by class in this context, for he has already broken decisively with the definition of class in terms of differential relation to the means of production. Indeed his own analysis suggests that the relationship between consciousness and identity is not one way, that structural location in a particular mode of production does not automatically result in a certain consciousness. If he is not to maintain the unpalatable claim that classes exist without being aware of their position as a class, then he must concede the insistence on class as the determining antagonism.4 William’s position is reminiscent of that of Gramsci, whose discussion of historic blocs parts decisively with any form of necessity and determinism, only for him to assert the necessary role of fundamental classes defined in terms of their relationship to the means of production.

The ends of Marx(ism)? 15 Willliams’ residual resistance against the implications of his own analysis may have resulted from a sense of vertigo, of being unanchored and having to give up all claim to be a Marxist. Lawrence Cahoone notes that: Marxism had provided a philosophy of history that served for a sizeable segment of the secularised Western intelligentsia as a promise of worldly salvation, a fulfilment of that great modernist hope in progress, what Christopher Lasch called the “True and Only Heaven.” For many … the hope for a socialist future gave badly needed significance to a life lived after the death of God. The loss of hope struck a sizeable portion of this group much as the loss of religion had already struck traditional society: absent a historical telos or goal, it seemed that the world had become centerless and pointless once again. (Cahoone 2002: 4–5) Whether or not this ad hominem characterisation of Williams is fair the tensions in his work point to a Marx that exceeds what Marxism became through much of the twentieth century. Williams indicates that there is much to retain from a reading of Marx which is flexible and attuned to the moments when Marx himself breaks with the metaphysics which most notions of determinism protect. His work is in important respects a precursor to the post-Marxism developed in the 1980s and 1990s. For authors such as Laclau and Mouffe, a critique of determinism does not entail that all social action is free (in the sense that it is not determined by certain structural limits), nor does it contend that anything goes or any action is possible. Rather it insists on the overdetermined nature of all social relations. Overdetermination does not imply absence of determination, but rather absence of abstract determination or necessary determination as Williams was well aware. This critique of determinism must though be qualified. It is all too easy to move from this post-Marxist critique of determinism to a second, false claim. This suggests a general indeterminacy which avoids all reference to structural limitation on action. In this form the critique of determinism is a mirror image of the claim that the economy determines, finally, all social relations. It becomes an abstract hypothesis, independent of the forms of its own determination. Ironically, these arguments mimic, in a less sophisticated form, Hegel’s distinction between abstract and determinate negation in his Logic. Abstract negation refers to the idealisation of Being, which is essentially indeterminate, and thus nothing at the same time. This abstraction cannot account for the real negation characteristic of antagonistic struggles in social life – it remains wholly indeterminate, and because of this completely determinate.5 Laclau and Mouffe’s theoretical analysis of the exigencies of Marxist thought and practice undermines the assertion that the economy can be postulated as an object in and of itself, and that this abstract object determines in however mediated a fashion all social relations. The important point for Laclau and Mouffe is to wrest Marxist analysis away from a presumptive proscription of the forms political and economic organisation may

16 The ends of Marx(ism)? take, as well as to undermine the idealisation of the economic as a concrete object independent of a variety of other relations. As Daly writes: … the economy can never become an object but will always depend upon wider power relations and those historical attempts to construct it in certain ways. Evidently this does not mean that the economy disappears but that its dimensions and frontiers are always historically constituted. At an abstract level the term economy can be understood as designating the material reproduction of social life. However, the way in which that material reproduction is understood and organised is finally a political matter. (Daly 2002: 114) The economy cannot then be hypostasised as an abstract object independent of social conditions propitious to different forms of accumulation, and the different elements of any identifiable social formation can only be abstracted within a theoretical discourse, which does injustice to the overdetermined nature of all social relations. This does not have to disable the analysis of the limitations which economic practices place on any social organisation. Rather the critique of a metaphysics of production or abstract economism necessitates a determined study of specific relations of determination and limitation in any particular conjuncture. If we then leave aside those times when Marx treats the economy as a special category, with a universal and ahistorical core, we must perforce address the specificity of his analysis of capitalism which marks a radical break with the political economy of writers such as Smith and Ricardo. This entails the claim that within capitalist societies a certain form of economic organisation, linked to the imperative to accumulate through the exploitation of surplus value of the workers’ product, is hegemonic. Indeed, Marx makes claims about what is intrinsic to capitalism as a social formation which establishes its hegemony after the collapse of the feudal state, and concomitant political forms of accumulation associated with the dominance of the landed aristocracy. For Marx the determining principle of capitalist production, the key to why a surplus can be generated, is that labour power is a special commodity: unlike other commodities the cost of its reproduction is not equivalent to the amount of capital it produces. This allows for the production of capital, its appropriation by those who own and control the means of production and investment in technological change which will ultimately result in the demise of the capitalist system. Thus Capital develops an anatomy of the laws of motion of capitalism, with a specific focus on the expropriation of surplus value. This structure is characterised by certain immanent laws which entail that its growth and eventual demise are inevitable. On this reading these laws are not to be extended beyond the analysis of the specific form of capitalism. Marx believed that he had solved a number of political and economic problems with the discussion of the extraction of surplus value in capitalist society. He has explained the logic which will engender crises for capital: as the relation between constant and variable capital changes and as the proletariat are increasingly impoverished, crises eventually result in revolutionary

The ends of Marx(ism)? 17 change.6 He has demonstrated the relation between these economic relations and other relations (such as the law) in modern capitalist societies. These economic relations are crystallised in the form of bourgeois law, and in the representative institutions of capitalist democracy. The worker treated as a unit of abstract labour power in the sphere of economic production is likewise abstracted in the realm of civil society, where his influence over political affairs is limited to participation in elections once every few years.7 This form of determinism, which is not abstract, but refers to so-called real abstractions, has proved incompatible both with the forms of antagonism in modern democratic society, and with the critique of abstract determinism noted earlier. Nonetheless these limitations should not blind the critic to key elements of this argument which are of much value in the critique of current global economic and political organisation. I return to these in later sections. In essence this strategy claims that the economy is determinate for capitalist relations of production, but that this determinism may change in different conditions. All evidence contradicts this assertion. I will not repeat it here, but simply note a few of the more prevalent points: the state has engendered new forms of domination and dependency; a simplification of the class structure has not occurred; the politics of identity has resulted in further fragmentation of political identity rather than a simplistic division of political identity in relation to the means of production; capitalism has consistently managed to overcome the crises which afflict the system; and the forms of production and the organisation of capital have altered dramatically since the 1973 oil crisis.8 On the other hand Marx’s analysis of the relations between commodity fetishism, money and capital delivers one of the strongest indictments of capitalism, an indictment which rings strong today. In particular his analysis of the equivalence established between different forms of labour, and different commodities through a system of universal exchange which seems anonymous, but is in fact differentially organised must be the starting point of any analysis of hegemony today. The hegemony of the new right over the economic and political policies of most nation states has much to do with the apparent neutrality of the equivalential relations established between capital expenditure on labour and on other aspects of production. The concept of equivalence, and its links to what the Frankfurt School following Lukács would later term reification, are no less important today than they were to earlier forms of capitalist organisation. It is no mistake that the concept of equivalence is crucial to Laclau and Mouffes’ conceptualisation of hegemony as the articulation of a common nodal point linking different political demands. I return to this in concluding the chapter. The critique of determinism does not then simply entail the limitation of the pretensions of the economy. Laclau and Mouffe write: it is perfectly possible to argue both that there are vast areas of social life which escape economic determinism, and that, in the limited area in which its effects are operative, the economy must be understood according to a determinist paradigm. Nonetheless there is an obvious problem with this

18 The ends of Marx(ism)? argument: in order to affirm that something is absolutely determined and to establish a clear line separating it from the indeterminate, it is not sufficient to establish the specificity of the determination; its necessary character must also be asserted … the determinate in establishing its specificity as necessary, sets the limits of variation of the indeterminate. The indeterminate is thus reduced to a mere supplement of the determinate. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 48) There are then empirical and theoretical reasons for rejecting both weak and strong versions of economic determinism. Even if we adopt the pragmatic view that the area of determination specific to the economy does not extend to all antagonistic relations in modern societies we then have to determine where the dividing line between these two is, as if the ‘economy’ could remain a pristine and determinate entity not subject to the vicissitudes of the indeterminate. Nor can we argue that economic organisation is the source of exploitation, and thus the dominant antagonism, of capitalist societies. For we would still have to strip the economy of its forms of appearance as if these were ancillary relations articulated to a core economic framework. As a political strategy such arguments may well have merit, but as a form of theoretical reflection they hold little purchase. Post-Marxist thought has not however developed an alternative conceptualisation of economic relations, which goes beyond the more general assertion that the economy is neither a self-regulating nor a determining instance of modern social structures. What is required is an analysis, along the lines proposed by Williams, of the changing regimes of the production and reproduction of social practice and of the complex relations that subsist between these. This may well make use of what Marx termed real abstractions, but these abstractions have to be referred back to the changing constellation of social practices as well as to their own conceptual history. They will never simply reflect the reality which they seek to describe. This book, regretfully, does not carry out just such an analysis, but it is a preoccupation of my work in progress on a political economy of bodies and death. Complexity A key presupposition of Marx’s analysis of capital was the simplification of the forms of antagonism arising from differential access to the means of production. This entailed the pivotal role of the antagonism between the proletarian and bourgeois classes, an antagonism which fosters a revolutionary transition to socialism, and consequent socialisation of the means of production. To be more accurate, it finalises a socialisation of the means of production which capitalism itself has already begun in the separation of labour and property begot by the abstraction of individual labour in the process of capitalisation. The development of capitalism in the twentieth century confounded this analysis. Rather than the simplification of antagonisms the development of welfare state capitalism in the past century saw a proliferation of forms of conflict irreducible to class. Moreover, sociology and psychoanalysis have thematised the complexity of personal

The ends of Marx(ism)? 19 identity and thus the multifarious forms of subjectification – certain of which become topics of political dispute – in modern societies. Even if one remained within the structural matrix of class analysis, theorists such as Eric Olin Wright were forced to acknowledge that instead of simplification social divisions and identifications have become ever more complex (Olin Wright 1985). Determined to protect Marxism against postmodern interlopers theorists such as Wright performed contortion tricks to assert the essential accuracy of the Marxist attempt to link structural position, political identity and capitalist development. Again such attempts would founder on the twin rocks of theoretical incoherence and an empirical overflow of the attempt to categorise. Their anachronistic premises, all too obvious now with the changing nature and organisation of political and economic institutions in the information age, are useful only insofar as the struggle to preserve the integrity of an argument without integrity suggests the articulatory nature of the western Marxist project. This unconscious betrayal suggests that there is a political claim underlying the attempt to establish class as ultimately determinate of all social relations. This is most obviously the case in instances where class-based politics has hegemonised and sidelined other forms of political identification. This was particularly the case in the long and often tedious debates concerning the relationships between race and class, and gender and class. A better starting point would acknowledge that class is not the essential determinant of social structure but a particular form of antagonism which is overdetermined by a number of other antagonisms, certain of which are linked to economic relations, some of which are independent thereof. Debates concerning race and gender have instead sharpened conceptual focus on the complexity and contingency of racial, gender and sexual identity and their implication in a normative politics of psychological well-being in liberal capitalist states. Moreover changes in the global economy and polity have led to different forms of antagonistic political struggle, forms which are infinitely more complex than any class-based analysis can suggest. From an analytical point of view we might view Marxism as a particular attempt by a particular sector of society to establish/ articulate a universal basis for politics. This basis is not though natural and its historical insistence on the working-class politics as the essential prerequisite for a transformation of the global capitalist system is misplaced. This demands a reconstruction of historical materialism as a theoretical framework.9 When Marx developed the notion of historical materialism he did so with a specific and limited actor in mind. This actor which manages, in Marx’s view, to escape its particularity because of its special place in the relations of production, finds the expression of its historical destiny in historical materialism. A materialism divested of this necessary link between topographical space and universal destiny will have to reconsider the premises and provenance of the theoretical claims which it makes. In the context of what Castells terms the network society this link between topographical space and revolutionary destiny is even more difficult to sustain. Castells suggests that modern society has no centre, but is better characterised as a series of networks linked by interconnected nodes. This results in a new topology of exclusion and inclusion in which distance is not measured

20 The ends of Marx(ism)? spatially, but in terms of access to networks. Network society, in Castell’s view, is dominated by finance capital (and new forms of generation of profit) and depends upon new information technologies for its functioning. This changed spatial topography demands a different conceptualisation of political organisation and space than the limited imaginary of the Marxist inspired left has permitted. A science of society? The problem of knowledge, and of a scientific theory of society, is raised by both the structuralist problematic and in Marx’s account in Capital. If Marx’s defence of a revolutionary change is to hold then an adequate concept of society which grasps that which is essential to the real, society must be both plausible and adequately developed in theoretical practice. Marxism claimed to offer an objective analysis of capitalism, an analysis which can account for the crises which beset the capitalist system, and define all modes of production which have existed in human history. As Althusser expresses it in Reading Capital: By combining or inter-relating […] different elements – labour power, direct labourers, masters not direct labourers, objects of production, instruments of production etc. – we shall reach a definition of the different modes of production which have existed in human history. (Althusser 1970: 176) This presumes the possibility of defining elements independent of historical variation in positing a science of all human society. What exactly though is the position of the scientist in this analysis? Marxism offers a number of possible positions. The scientist may simply have his place in the structure of society. In this case he does not so much reflect the truth of the structure, as have that truth reflected through him, as the anonymous agent of the structure. In this case the scientist is a mannequin displaying the evolution of a history of which s/he is but an effect. Thus neutralised he plays no role in describing the structure, other than the role which has been prescribed for him. Althusser rejected this crude argument but the difficulties which any Marxist account of ‘society’ faces are evident in his attempt to explain the relation between the real object (capital) and the object in thought. The real object thus exists prior to thought, and knowledge is a process of approaching the concrete in thought. As such knowledge is a system of production which, analogous to Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production, consists in raw material (ideas), means of production (concepts, methods, assumptions) and knowledge which is the result of this mental labour.10 This implies a rejection of knowledge premised on a subject–object relation, which seeks to extract an essence from the real object. Instead knowledge follows its own immanent laws in the construction of its object which is distinct from the real object. What then are the criteria for evaluating this knowledge and how does the object outside thought relate to the concrete in thought?

The ends of Marx(ism)? 21 Althusser’s own self-criticism argues that his mistake was theoreticism. Structuralism, in defending Marxism as a science, asserts the primacy of theory over practice. His rather weak solution, in his Essays in Self Criticism, is that knowledge should be subject to empirical testing and verification, and should continually be worked on to avoid positivism and speculation (Althusser 1976: 123). He insists however on maintaining a minimum of non-existent generality quoting Marx to justify this position: ‘science in general does not exist, but nor does production in general. Yet Marx talks about production in general, and deliberately consciously in order to be able to analyse concrete modes of production’ (Althusser 1974: 124). Althusser seems caught between equally unpalatable alternatives: either the real is simply reflected by the real in thought (knowledge maps onto the world), or knowledge is a process immanent to itself, in which case its relevance to the analysis, or transformation of capitalist society is unclear. In both cases the political role of the Marxist theorist is neutralised. Once this political role is acknowledged the neutrality of the theorist, whether Marxist or otherwise, is put in to question. The problem we will have to face is what role the theorist could have, if s/he is always already implicated in the politics underlying the claims made. That is can there be a more objective stance than simply to affirm the plurality of language games constituting the world; do certain claims have provenance over others, and if so what justifies this claim? Post-Marxist critics of Marx and Marxism then leave any critical theory of society11 with some answers to the dilemmas posed by Marx, and a number of questions which demand further exploration. First is the relation between knowledge, politics and power. To what extent is knowledge already implicated in a politics, to what extent does thought allow for a distancing effect which authorises objective judgements about society and politics. Is the history of Marxism as it developed in the twentieth century the history of a politics of truth, ‘a problematic of necessary truth effects’ (Balibar 2002: 20) rather than an objective accounting for the constitution of power in modern society, as critics inspired by Foucault have argued?12 Second, following this line of thought, we are left with the question of the status of the real abstractions that Marx develops in his analysis of capital. A key critique of Marxism, developed by Laclau and Williams among others, takes these abstractions to task suggesting that they become rigid categories independent of their historical instantiation. The role of abstraction and of science in any critical theory of society then is left underspecified in the suggestion that these categories are implicated in a politics of truth. Third, the question of determinism requires further explication in at least two respects. There is the general question of overdetermination and of the status of this category, but there is also the immediate question of the analysis of determination in modern societies. The abstract theoretical question, and the political question of the particular determinations of modern forms of power, cannot be explored independently of each other. Last there is the question of enlightenment and politics. Marxism, whatever else its limitations, had always insisted on changing the world. Theory and politics are not independent of each other, as idealist thought would have it, and thought does not simply reflect reality but portends a transformation of that reality. Its ultimate aim is the realisation of equal freedom

22 The ends of Marx(ism)? for all. This can only be achieved in Marx’s view once class distinctions have been overcome, and the state has been abolished. As he wrote in The Civil War in France: ‘the political form of their (the working class) enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation’ (Marx 2000a: 162). Marx defends the enlightenment ideal of equal freedom but ties this to the material transformation of the conditions of production and reproduction. Post-Marxist theorists demonstrate ambivalent attitudes not only to Marx, but also to the enlightenment legacy in his work. This ambivalence echoes Marx’s own difficult relation to the enlightenment, as critic of its failed universal promise, and as partisan of a reformulated version of this universalism. This ambivalent attitude towards the enlightenment receives its earliest, and in some respects most radical formulation, in Adorno and Horkheimers’ mid-century text Dialectic of Enlightenment. Convinced of the limitations of Marxism, Horkheimer and Adorno still held to the promise of enlightenment, but believed that the opportunity for its realisation had been missed. Their difficult relation with Marxism is a useful forerunner of contemporary post-Marxism especially as these links are rarely drawn. Most important is Adorno’s attention to what he terms a moment of non-identity intrinsic to any rationality which claims universality, and his reformulation of the concept of subjectivity associated with the enlightenment ideal of a freedom to be realised. In this respect Adorno contributes to a theory of democracy adequate to the self-understanding of modern complex societies while evincing themes more fully developed in the work of Laclau and Mouffe later in the century. The last section of this chapter explores these themes before turning to Habermas’s radical reformulation of critical theory in Chapter 2.

Critical theory and the shadows of enlightenment Enlightenment, as political theory, proposed the appropriation of personal and social destiny, by either autonomous agents or social groups. Kant expressed well this relation between enlightenment and democratic will formation: Reason depends on this freedom for its very existence. For reason has no dictatorial authority; its verdict is always simply the agreement of free citizens, of whom each one must be free to express, without let or hindrance, his objections or even his veto. (Kant 1929: A738–9/B766–7) But the idea of a free reason has always had its critics. One of the enlightenment’s constitutive metaphors suggests that reflective thought is akin to an inner eye, corresponding to an outer physical eye. This inner (eye, ego, I) seeks to control the proclivities of inner nature, to take charge of the self, while the outer eye roves the world, taking charge of external nature. For writers such as Foucault13 (Foucault 1986: 195–231), this inner eye is reminiscent of Bentham’s Panopticon: like the prisoner modern subjects learn to regulate themselves. The transmission of power becomes all the more diffuse and difficult to trace. Human and

The ends of Marx(ism)? 23 non-human nature are made susceptible to law-like generalisation and become resources for use and aesthetic appreciation. Accordingly, some argue, ‘in modern times the debate of how to master nature engulfs the question of whether or not to do so’ (Conolly 1988: 4). The restless subject of enlightenment experiences limitation as oppression: thus the constant renewal, and transgression of limits so characteristic of the avant garde. On this view what separates reason from power and coercion is difficult to fathom, as there are no neutral or universal means of providing criteria for judgement. The enlightenment commitment to autonomy and freedom presupposes a microphysics of power and the ‘free agent’ is a subject of this microphysics. The Marxist ideal of the realisation of freedom through the collective appropriation of the means of production inherits precisely those enlightenment themes which require the closest attention, committed as it is to the transfiguration of humanity through a transformation of the relationship of humankind to nature. Early members of the Frankfurt School, notably Adorno, believed that any faith in the revolutionary and democratic role of the proletariat had been scuppered by events and experiences of the first half of the twentieth century. Contrary to a widely held belief that the growth of the productive forces would expand space for the expression of human freedom,14 Adorno insisted, even in his earliest writings, that enlightenment rationality was itself complicit in the outbreaks of irrationality and barbarity at the heart of civilised Europe. These events betrayed a danger latent in the enlightenment project, a will to control both internal and external nature, which finally results in a loss of freedom not its extension. Enlightenment promised release from the prosaic necessity of nature and the emancipation of the subject from the diktats of an other worldly being through a process of secularisation and rationalisation. Instead, Adorno and Horkheimer argue, Enlightenment reinstates myth with the achievement of a mass culture in which freedom is but a delusion. This loss of freedom is complemented by a loss of meaning instigated by the secularisation of the world – a process which robs the world of mystery only to replace it with the meaningless rituals of culture as an industry. Human beings, no longer tied by a Gordian cord to either internal or external nature, become anonymous cogs in a seemingly anonymous system. The emancipatory faith foisted upon the proletariat is lost. In History and Class Consciousness, published in 1921, Lukács contended that the proletariat, which experiences its own objectification as a commodity subjectively, was the privileged agent of social change. For him rationalisation mystifies its exploitative underbelly, but the source of this reification may be identified and overcome by a revolutionary subject, the proletariat. In this role the proletariat solves two problems at once. As workers they transcend the subject–object distinction in experiencing objectification subjectively at the point of production. The proletariat uncovers the secret of the commodity form through its own objectification as a commodity on the marketplace (Lukács 1971).15 For Lukács it is the duty of intellectuals to promote this awareness among the working class. This knowledge spurs the proletariat to act as an agent of historical progress, which further resolves the antinomies of bourgeois knowledge. Kant had placed the

24 The ends of Marx(ism)? impossible thing-in-itself at the limits of human knowledge. Lukács claims that proletarian knowledge of exploitation reveals the bourgeois social conditions which limit the possible resolution of these antinomies. Adorno and Horkheimer reject this diagnosis. If, as Lukács had argued, reification extends across all social institutions, then the failure of working-class revolution suggests that no social group is ready to or capable of effect(ing) far-reaching social change. Critical theory seems to lose its connection to agency, reverting to the resignation of philosophy and literature. The enlightenment legacy is betrayed by the very logic which it set in motion, and any space for resistance is immediately incorporated in an all encompassing politico-administrative body politic. The growth of the modern state, the spread of the Culture Industry, and the predominance of capital ensue in a formal-rationalistic orientation to the world, a world controlled by predictability and instrumentalised for use.16 It results, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, in the technical control of external nature, and the administrative control of other human beings. Weber termed this Zweckrationalitãt. Humans become … specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has achieved a level of civilisation never before achieved. (Weber 1976: 182) Adorno and Horkheimers’ disenchantment arises from similar concerns to those of Marx, but in their view technological progress and rationalisation do not foster freedom. Computation and utility are but the most obvious features of enlightened reason. These ensure the subsumption of the particular to the universal. Even words and concepts, like the exchange relation, reduce the diverse to the same. Language becomes a currency with exchange value, a currency which does damage to the particular which it subsumes. Likewise, the methods which dominate the social sciences repeat the mistake of assuming the objective existence of facts which it is the purpose of the theorist to reconstruct. Already in Traditional and Critical Theory Horkheimer had rejected verification through perception as shallow, and suggests that in order to understand positivism and induction as methods it is necessary to locate them within the social processes which make them possible (Horkheimer 1976). With the enlightenment, man finally breaks free from nature, and stands over it attempting to control and direct it.17 Knowledge is geared towards this instrumental end. According to Adorno and Horkheimer the formalism of mathematics, scientific thinking and positivist ideology all reflect this end, the use of conceptual thought to subsume the object without remainder.18 Modern knowledge furthers the abstraction begun with sacrifice, reducing diverse objects to the same. Yet the domination of nature has a darker side: enlightenment liquidates its object, ruling as a dictator, towards things. The chilling use of the word liquidate recalls the holocaust, for human beings too become things. Incapable of trusting in a mimetic relation with nature the enlightened despot humanity rules over nature, a rule mirrored in the disfigured urban landscapes of modernity. The unhappy product of this rule is

The ends of Marx(ism)? 25 a universal taboo, the positing of a realm which is not subject to understanding, a realm which escapes the domination of universality. In the case of individual subjectivity we would have to trace the repression necessary to the constitution of the modern ego. In the case of the social totality the upshot of enlightenment is that humans lose control of their own creation. The enlightenment ideal of a general will exercising reasoned control over the whole itself seems part of the problem. The ideal functions as just another propaedeutic on the path to universal dominance of the system over all things. Enlightenment reverts to mythology in the happy maintenance of the status quo, the appearance of necessity underpinning a world which is in fact a creation with a history and second nature. Modern abstraction also scars the communication between subjects. In abstracting from the particular we empty the world of meaning. Language stands under the domination of a system of calculation and bestows on the conditions of domination their universality. Only the equivocal language of art escapes this reduction, but it is necessarily marginalised. Instead, the language of universal equivalence neutralises the voice of the powerless and those discourses claiming to represent them. Even philosophy cannot escape implication: This illusion in which a wholly enlightened mankind has lost itself cannot be dissolved by a philosophy which, as the organ of domination, has to choose between command and obedience. (Adorno and Horkheimer 1985: 39) Philosophy, language, concepts: all participate in the extirpation and alienation of nature. Enlightenment is mocked by the emptiness of the ideals which it posits: its own figures of thought are doomed to dominate the subject whose name it speaks.19 The paradox of (political) philosophy is that it cannot claim to know without becoming entangled in the repressive logic which it attempts to escape. What then of critical theory? What of philosophy? Philosophy unravels the ‘truth’ of an unjust society, but under conditions in which nothing is immediately knowable. Its function is analogous to the solving of a riddle. It brings elements into changing constellations ‘until they fall into a figure which can be read as an answer…[revealing the] real via the unintentional juxtaposition of analytically separate elements’ (Adorno 1977: 127). The juxtaposition of seemingly antipodean elements, in what Adorno terms a constellation, offers a momentary illumination of reality without appropriating it. The most apposite analogy is probably that of a modernist artwork – say Picasso’s Guernica – which disrupts any simple relation between the viewer and the artwork, while disturbing the viewer’s sensibility, provoking an ineffable discomfiture. A constellation, Adorno suggests, allows ‘cognition of the process stored in the object’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1985: 163) and a revelation of what has constituted it as a second nature. While, as Buck-Morss notes, the evil of the past cannot be revoked, philosophy posits the possibility of a better future (Buck-Morss 1977). Negative dialectics is thus a response to the aporia of enlightened knowledge. It discloses the historical character of that which appears natural, and reminds the

26 The ends of Marx(ism)? apparently autonomous ego of a past constituted by pain and loss as well as enlightenment. This is a negative dialectic because it does not presuppose that history is constituted by any objective necessity. This discussion prefigures the postmodern critique of the rational subject and enlightenment. Adorno historicises the autonomous ego and thus the form of thought itself. However the distinction of subject and object is not simply false: it expresses the historical dichotomy of the human condition in which the subject forgets that it too is an object with a transitory nature (Adorno 1978). Adorno’s critique of enlightenment entails too a critique of the politics of identity. His focus on non-identity is suggestive of an alternative vision of politics which he never himself elaborated. This is foregrounded in one of his earliest texts ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ (Adorno 1977: 120–33).20 I am particularly interested in the question of non-identity as that which escapes the totalising logic of instrumental reason. Adorno relentlessly traces the aporia of a critique which constantly refuses inclusion within the totalising logic of a reified culture. Adorno’s 1931 essay, The Actuality of Philosophy addresses the question of totality in relation to that of ontology.21 Adorno’s critique of ontology though has a bearing on his characterisation of modern capitalist societies. Arguing that the ‘being’ question is the least radical posed by philosophy he contends that philosophy rarely acknowledges that ‘the power of thought is insufficient to grasp the totality of the real, (Adorno 1977: 120).22 The attempt to grasp being, even in its historicity, reproduces an idealism of the autonomy ratio, and its attempt to ‘gain a trans-subjective, binding order of being’ (Adorno 1977: 122). In a characteristically cursory manner Adorno later writes in Negative Dialectics, with reference to Heidegger: Ontology meets a need, a longing that Kant’s verdict on a knowledge of the Absolute should not be the end of the matter. Stirring in ontology is a will to grasp the whole, to escape mere regionalism … to find a rational draft that pre-designs the whole structure of the abundance of Being. (Adorno 1973: 61–2). His early and indeed later reading of Heidegger have been challenged on a number of counts, but that is not my concern here. More relevant is that his rejection of ontological universality be read in the light of the themes of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno presents both political and philosophical objections to the possibility of Being grounding itself internally. This quest, he suggests, mirrors the totalising logic of modern exchange value, which extends way beyond the sphere of the exchange of commodities, to infect even the language we use. Yet he also refuses the dissolution of philosophical questioning. No other discourse addresses the significance of the alien consciousness. An immanent critique of philosophy, drawing attention to its moments of undecidability, without seeking to resolve these through any invocation of totality, or Being, may result in a paradoxical, momentary transcendence which resists the compulsion of identity logic to

The ends of Marx(ism)? 27 rationalise and algorithmatise. The hope of philosophy thus lies elsewhere than science. Science claims to know the world; philosophy seeks only to interpret it: In this remains the great perhaps the everlasting paradox: philosophy persistently and with the claim of truth, must proceed interpretively without ever possessing a sure key to interpretation; nothing more is given to it than fleeting, disappearing traces within the riddle figures of that which exists and their astonishing entwinings. (Adorno 1977: 126) This ‘riddle solving’ is analogous to mimesis in that it does not seek to dominate its object, petrifying the results of study as an eternal object of knowledge. Rather, philosophy brings its elements into changing constellations ‘until they fall into a figure which can be read as an answer, while at the same time the question disappears’ (Adorno 1977: 12). Interpretation is a renegade in its refusal to mindlessly repeat the decayed symbols of philosophy. Along with its renunciation of the question of totality, philosophy renounces appeal to the universal symbol, which like the judge sits dispassionate over the various empirical instances subject to its law. Adorno then refuses any systematisation which either evaporates the subject in objective structure(s), or reduces the object to a subject which gives to it meaning. While the subject cannot sit outside the object society – which may confront us as an alienated second nature – neither is the subject simply an inflection of the object. Only the inexhaustibility of this subject–object dialectic grounds the possibility of a mimetic relation with ‘nature’, and allows an immanent engagement with philosophy. He thus insists on ‘the concentration of philosophic questions on concrete inner-historical complexes from which they are not to be detached’ (Adorno 1977: 129). How does this relate to the possibility of emancipatory critique and politics? Adorno refused to attribute inevitability either to history, as a predetermined telos whose script has been written in advance as if by the hand of God, or to nature, the dull necessity of the present which allows of no exit. Moreover, he sunders any direct link between knowledge and revolutionary praxis. Instead he defends the more modest task of ideology critique, while acknowledging that mere knowledge cannot change the world. Revealing the untruth of the social totality contributes to conditions requisite for change, but does not replace or even ground revolutionary activity. Adorno thus rejects the classic ideal of a link between objective knowledge and the revolutionary activity of any particular agent. The reasons for this are political, theoretical and historical. In Germany division within the working class contributed to the ascendancy of fascism – clearly Lukàcs had to impute to the working class a consciousness which they simply did not possess. The imputation of true consciousness violated one of the central principles of Adorno’s philosophy, namely that the concept could not, and should not without doing extreme damage, overwhelm the reality which it claimed to encompass. In this respect Marxist orthodoxy, ontological arguments and the dominance of the culture industry seemed to be in

28 The ends of Marx(ism)? cahoots. This deference to the real is influenced by the recognition that the whole cannot be reconstituted, that knowledge, ethics and praxis are irretrievably sundered with the separation of modern powers of reason. The image of totality is revoked, and philosophy offers the shock tactics of the discontinuous, of the spaces in between subject and object where history has not yet petrified into the amorphous image of a coca-cola culture. As early as 1931 he could write ‘the subject of the given is not ahistorically identical and transcendental but rather assumes changing historical and comprehensible forms’ (Adorno 1977: 131). ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ then predicts in minutiae the many problems which a revolutionary left, defeated and exhausted as the millennium approaches, retraced time and time again through the twentieth century: how to resolve the contradiction between exploitation experienced subjectively, and an objective revolutionary resolution of this problem which links the wills of the many, without doing damage to the wills of the few.23 Inevitably the attempts were spectacularly, often brutally, unsuccessful. This empirical failure announces the impossibility of a theoretical reason masking itself as practical reason. If the recalcitrant truth of philosophy holds implications for politics it lies in this reinstatement of truth into its historical conditions of existence, beyond the atemporality of ontology and revolutionary transcendence. This synopsis of the aporia of enlightened subjectivity alludes to themes crucial to this book. Adorno indicates that the totality cannot claim full identity with itself, and should be indicted of non-identity at precisely the moment when it proclaims its dominance. This indictment points towards a reconciliation of subject and object which implies an alteration in both. This alteration portends a language beyond the signified, a language which is not merely about the propositional transfer of contents. Adorno’s analysis of the problem of language is prescient. Much of the debate about the politics of transformation in the twentieth century focuses on this question of the instrumental reduction of language to its propositional functions, with little reflection on signifying practices which did not fit this mathesis.

Conclusion This chapter opened with the assertion that although post-Marxism has left one spirit of Marx behind, the revolutions against Stalinism and its legacy between 1989 and 1991 delivers the opportunity to reread Marx, not as Marxists seeking some dogma of faith about the necessity of class revolution, or linking antagonism indefatigably to transformations wrought by the forces of production, but a Marx less certain and less in control of his own spirit. Writers such as Laclau, Derrida, Habermas and Balibar have already effected just such a displacement in the reading of Marx. While their readings are often radically disjunctive in each case it is no longer simply a matter of rejecting or affirming Marx. Instead different spirits of Marx are affirmed, while others are rejected. One key aspect uniting all of these writers is a more complex relation to the metaphysical aspects of the Marxist tradition. This chapter has touched on at least three key issues.

The ends of Marx(ism)? 29 The first might broadly be termed a politics of negativity. Laclau, for example, takes from Marx the insistence on negativity, but like Adorno refuses to link negativity to the agency of the proletariat. For Laclau negativity can never be positivised; rather it is the very precondition for the thinking of politics. The failure of any system to signify adequately its own limits means that a key aspect of politics concerns this impossibility of any agent, whether negatively or positively, incarnating totality. I pursue this line of thought in Chapter 3 of this book. Second, I have pointed to the complexity of modern societies, both in terms of societal organisation and in terms of the politics of identity. This is pursued further in Chapter 6, but a few points are of pertinence here. What all of these authors share is the claim that there is no privileged revolutionary subject, and no single source for antagonistic political relations. Rather the task of building an alternative political imaginary is not given, but depends on political construction. This construction will itself have to cut across a number of different political demands linking often disparate political claims. Habermas points to a variety of sources of potential antagonism, including labour, consumption, taxation, citizenship and identity. Every individual relates to a complex set of economic and political relations. Moreover these relations increasingly extend beyond the remit of a sovereign state authority. Laclau and Mouffe note the variety of specific antagonisms which have fractured liberal capitalist democracies, as well as the new forms of inclusion and exclusion which structure modern political economies. Third, I have insisted that post-Marxism reject economic determinism, but that this should not mean that the relation between political and economic relations is ignored. In much post-Marxist work the critique of economic essentialism has resulted in a renewed conceptualisation of the Political. In the following chapter I focus on Habermas’s reworking of enlightenment rationality through a study of the pragmatics of communication. This may seem far removed from Marx’s initial concerns, but as we shall see it concerns the attempt to defend enlightenment politics. I suggest however that Habermas’s project is crucially flawed, and that a study of the politics of performativity points to a critical theory of modern societies adequate to the twenty-first century.

2

Language, communication, performativity

Reading Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality as a response to the aporias of Adorno’s critical theory accents the political implications of Habermas’s work. In particular Habermas wants to rescue the promise of enlightenment through an analysis of modern processes of rationalisation. He argues that modern societies bear an intuitive rationality which provides orientation for a modern democratic politics, as well as a normative basis for the judgement of the particular path rationalisation has taken. Habermas finds this potential in the pragmatics of everyday communication. Such a study of language, he claims, avoids the almost total inclusion of language in an instrumental relation to nature. In his view enlightenment rationality should not refer back to either logic or the objective representation of the world, but to the rationality implicit in communication between subjects. Against Marx then he turns to intersubjective relations, rather than instrumental rationality, as the basis for a project of enlightenment. He argues that the expansion of productive activity is not of necessity the basis for an alternative politics of enlightenment. I begin with a brief account of Habermas’s criticisms of Adorno, before turning to the pragmatics of speech which is the theoretical basis of his conception of rationality. This discussion points to the centrality of the concept of performativity to Habermas’s account. In the following chapter I tease out the theoretical limitations of this version of performativity, and thus of the project of communicative rationality as a whole. I conclude this chapter with a discussion of the critical implications of Habermas’s project.

Habermas’s critique of Adorno Habermas’s primary concern is how to preserve the category of critique in the light of a seemingly inextricable will to dominate, which an immanent critique of the forms of reason reveals. In essence Habermas claims that Adorno and Horkheimer cut the ground from under their own feet: If they do not want to renounce the effect of a final unmasking and still want to continue with critique, they will have to leave at least one rational criterion intact for their explanation of the corruption of all rational criteria. In the face of this paradox, self referential critique loses its orientation. (Habermas 1987: 127)

Language, communication, performativity 31 Adorno, he suggests, leaves us with little more than the vain hope of an aesthetic sublime, which may allow a perverse monadic experience of aesthetic integrity but does not eventuate in substantive transformation of modern sociality.1 Habermas terms this a performative contradiction in critical theory. Once the conceptual extension of reification becomes totalising a critical distinction of its negative effects is impossible. Thus: Horkheimer and Adorno detach the concept not only from the special historical context of the rise of the capitalist economic system but from the dimension of interhuman relations altogether; and they generalise it temporally (over the whole history of the human species) and substantively (the same logic of domination is imputed to both cognition and in the service of self preservation and the repression of instinctual nature). This double generalisation of the concept of reification leads to a concept of instrumental reason that shifts the primordial history of subjectivity and the self formative process of ego identity into an encompassing historico-philosophical perspective. (Habermas 1987: 389–90) It is this performative contradiction which Habermas claims to overcome in refusing the limitation of rationality to a philosophy of consciousness premised on the subject–object relation. He insists that rationality cannot be reduced to instrumentality, and that reconciliation cannot be thought purely in terms of subjects somehow regaining a mimetic relation to the object. For Habermas characterising modernity as the long march of an instrumental relation to nature, and to ourselves, short-changes the forms of intersubjective rationality which develop with modernity, and alongside the growth of the capitalist mode of production and bureaucratic forms of rationality: … when purposive rationality, overblown into a totality, abolishes the distinction between what claims validity and what is useful for self-preservation, and so tears down the barrier between validity and power, it cancels out those basic conceptual differentiations to which the modern understanding of the world believed it owed the definitive overcoming of myth. As instrumental, reason assimilated itself to power and thereby relinquished its critical force – that is the final disclosure of ideology critique applied to itself. To be sure, this description of the self destruction of the critical capacity is paradoxical because in the moment of description it still has to make use of the critique that has been declared dead … Adorno was quite aware of this performative contradiction inherent in totalised critique. (Habermas 1987: 119) In short Habermas argues that rationality should not be reduced to the subject – object relation; that the dominance of instrumental rationality is a feature of capitalist societies only and not universal and that it is possible to theorise an alternative communicative rationality found in the pragmatics of communication

32 Language, communication, performativity between socialised individuals. Communicative rationality not only provides terms on which the relation between subject and object may be rethought, but intimates towards an all-embracing rationality which precedes the instrumental relation. Adorno argued that language, through the labour of generalisation, reduces the contingent to the same and is used as a tool by the rational subject society in an attempt to control and exploit nature. For Adorno language also harbours the latent possibility of liberation in the form of a refusal to engage with instrumentality. But this aesthetic experience loses all ability to connect with political struggles because the retreat of politics into an aesthetic beyond instrumentality is ordained by the system of domination. If a study of language is one of the keys to ascertaining the distorted relation humans hold to both inner and outer ‘nature’, then a reconsideration of linguistic interaction suggests alternative accounts and strategies for addressing mass reification and commodification. This is Habermas’s strategy. It involves a consideration of debates within linguistics, and a somewhat abstruse reconstruction of the pragmatics of language. In turning to this account I wish to keep in mind Adorno’s wariness about any claim to totalisation. I return to this concern towards the end of the chapter.

The universal pragmatics of communication It is perhaps no surprise that at the root of Habermas’s disagreement with Adorno lies the historical experience of the Holocaust and the Second World War. For Adorno, who fled Germany along with other members of the Frankfurt School, (and whose close friend Benjamin died while fleeing Nazism), the Holocaust spelt the end of the myth of enlightenment. No longer could the west claim the mantle of a superior reason, the institutionalisation of which would inevitably result in a better society. Habermas by contrast, who as a teenager grew up in Nazi Germany and unwittingly participated in the youth brigades of the party, insists that the experience of listening to and discovering the truth of the Holocaust, instilled in him a desire to rediscover a rationality inherent within enlightenment, a rationality which grounds a critique of the horror western civilisation had allowed to occur (Habermas 1983b: 41). He seeks to provide an orientation for emancipatory politics, without reference to either a universal rationality intrinsic to the species, or to a divine being beyond the species. His ingenious strategy is to recast a theory of rationality in terms of language. Henceforth a defence of the project of enlightenment follows from the characterisation of communicative rationality as an implicit intersubjectivity, binding individuals to the social collective, and grounding their self-evolution in the development of social capacities. The alternative to both Marx and Adorno then begins with a reconceptualisation of the nature of rationality premised upon a different conception of the relation between words and things. As Habermas’s most sympathetic American critic, Thomas McCarthy, expresses it: Habermas’s entire project, from the critique of contemporary scientism to the reconstruction of historical materialism, rests on the possibility of providing

Language, communication, performativity 33 an account of communication that is both theoretical and normative, that goes beyond a pure hermeneutics without being reducible to a strictly empirical analytic science. (McCarthy 1978: 242) Any critical account of Habermas’s work should begin with this account of universal pragmatics. Whatever limitations we find in his conceptualisation of communicative rationality will be located in the pragmatics of communication. Delineating an object of study Although Habermas’s initial delineation of universal pragmatics as a domain of study seems unpromising for a modernity finally exhausted, and uncertain of its ability to make critical judgements, his aims are far ranging. Earlier I noted Habermas’s resistance to the idea that language has become a tool, reflecting the fetishism of commodities under capitalist relations of production. In this account language and system are equated, and language is robbed of its pragmatic dimension, the establishment of relationships between subjects who communicate. This relation to the other, he claims, is always potentially open, allowing for the contestation of claims raised in language. In short, Habermas resists reducing language to its propositional content, to a theory of truth, or an epistemology, premised on the correspondence of words to things, or sentences to states of affairs. Investigating an alternative form of rationality, implicit in language, demands a study of the universal pragmatics of communication: The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible understanding. In other contexts one also speaks of ‘general presuppositions of communication’, but I prefer to speak of general presuppositions of communicative action because I take the type of action aimed at reaching understanding to be fundamental. Thus I start from the assumption that other forms of social conflict – for example conflict, competition, strategic action in general – are derivatives of action oriented to reaching understanding. (Habermas 1979: 1) Already the wide provenance of this turn should be obvious. If, for example, all strategic actions are derivatives of communicative action then not only Marx, but also critics of the ideal of enlightenment are mistaken. The question is no longer whether exploitation can be overcome once the full potential of the productive forces has been liberated, or even if the further expansion of the productive forces harnesses man to an uncontrollable second nature. Rather, Habermas argues that the resources of communicative action and rationality provide a bulwark against these strategic imperatives. The core of Habermas’s theoretical project, since the early 1970s, has been a reconstruction of the universal or formal pragmatics of communication and rationality.

34 Language, communication, performativity Habermas’s chosen object of study is the pragmatics of communication. In contrast to post-Saussurean linguistic theory, he contends that it is possible to reconstruct not only the linguistic rule system, but also a rule system governing the production of utterances: This abstraction of language from the use of language in speech (langue versus parole), which is made in both the logical and the structural analyses of language is meaningful. Nonetheless, this methodological step is not sufficient reason for the view that the pragmatic dimension of language from which one abstracts is beyond formal analysis … . I would like to defend the thesis that not only language but speech too – that is, the employment of sentences in utterances – is accessible to formal analysis. (Habermas 1979: 6) The distinction of these two different objects of study, and thus the fundamentally different assumptions about parole and its relation to the linguistic system, ground the differences between Habermas and post-structuralist theorists more fundamentally than any disagreement over the characterisation of modernity. Habermas, unlike Laclau, for example, is not concerned with the limits which a failure of signification would portend for politics. This may initially appear legitimate. After all, Habermas acknowledges that he has delineated an object of study, and the legitimacy of any claims made about this object are surely dependent on the initial delineation. But he goes further. He claims that this reconstructive science of communication traces what actually occurs in all communication. While Habermas concedes that all theory is ultimately fallible, this fallibility is a methodological principle, not one which effects the theoretical framework from the inside. Thus Habermas treats the results of his investigation as fallible at the level of theory, but this fallibility does not hold consequences for the conclusions that have been reached. I detail this limitation in Chapter 5. Habermas then formalises speech acts or parole. The fact that he traces a formal pragmatics is important. Intuitively an empirical pragmatics would seem to have more relevance for a study of communicative rationality which orients everyday life. Habermas claims though that an empirical pragmatics cannot deliver the rationality basis of linguistic communication, because it is limited to the study of particular contexts of interaction. Formal pragmatics is oriented to the universal aspects of different forms of rationality regardless of language or context (Habermas 1983: 328–37). These acts, conveyed by all utterances, establish a relation between interlocutors, the force of which determines the manner in which the speech act is to be understood. These implicit acts are outlined below, but a quote from Theory of Communicative Action demonstrates the importance of this claim: In communicative action the plans of individual participants are co-ordinated by means of the illocutionary binding effects of speech acts. Thus we might

Language, communication, performativity 35 also conjecture that constative, regulative, and expressive speech acts also constitute corresponding types of linguistic interaction. (Habermas 1984: 327) Habermas’s object of study then is communication, not simply the communication of a semantic content between speakers but the conditions which make communication possible. These conditions are, he suggests, a universal competence, which extend beyond the limits of particular linguistic systems. The object of this pragmatic analysis is the speech act. While empirical pragmatics is limited to a study of context bound speech actions, universal pragmatics delineates the rules for the use of sentences in utterances, regardless of context. Habermas’ key argument is that every speech act raises four claims to validity, which have to be vindicated before the speech act is successful. This thesis is initially defended drawing upon the work of Austin in speech act theory, and extending Austin’s distinction of the propositional from the illocutionary. While propositional analysis raises the question of how it is possible that language represents states of affairs in the world, the development of the illocutionary dimensions of speech allows Habermas to defend a broader conceptualisation of rationality. The double structure of speech (propositional and illocutionary) points to two different dimensions of the speech act: We have seen that communication in language can take place only when the participants, in communicating with one another about something, simultaneously enter upon two levels of communication – the level of intersubjectivity on which they take up interpersonal relations and the level of propositional contents … in speaking we can make either the interpersonal relation or the propositional content more centrally thematic; correspondingly we make a more interactive or a more cognitive use of our language. In the interactive use of language, we thematise the relations into which speaker and hearer enter – as a warning promise, request – while we only mention the propositional content of the utterances. In the cognitive use of language, by contrast, we thematise the content of the utterance as a proposition about something that is happening in the world … . (Habermas 1979: 53) Both the establishment of an interpersonal relation and the representation of content are essential to the performance of the speech act. If either of them is violated, (if, for example, there is disagreement about the nature of the content) the speech act may not be successful. If participants enter into communication with the intention of representing the truth, there is the unstated assumption that any disagreement is resolvable. But Habermas is not satisfied to leave the argument here. It is not only the establishment of legitimate interpersonal relations, and the transmission of agreed contents, that contribute to the success of the communication. The speakers have to share a comprehensible grammar, and all parties have to trust that the speaker

36 Language, communication, performativity is truthful, that is, that alter has the correct intentions. There are thus four important validity claims raised in all acts of communication, set out in the table below:

Comprehension Expression Proposition Normativity

Validity claim

Speech act

Relation

Grammar Truthfulness Truth Rightness

Avowal Constative Regulative

Sincerity/intent Subject–object Intersubjectivity

Habermas maintains that each one of these claims is raised in every speech act, and that each can in principle be thematised and vindicated if there is a breakdown or dispute in communication: … the illocutionary force of an acceptable speech act consists in the fact that it can move a hearer to rely on the speech act typical commitments of the speaker … this illocutionary force of speech acts is connected to cognitively testable validity claims, because reciprocal bonds have a rational basis. (Habermas 1979: 62–3) This means that every speaker has an obligation to provide grounds for the assertions they make. Each validity claim demarcates a specific relation: the claim to truth distinguishes subject from object; the claim to rightness distinguishes the subject from symbolically prestructured reality in which s/he interacts; the claim to truthfulness allows the subject to thematise her own internal nature; and comprehensibility distinguishes the subject from his language. These validity claims comprise the unspoken illocutionary force of communication, in which all engaged speakers accept that all others make utterances which are seriously meant: … The model intuitively introduced here is that of a communication in which grammatical sentences are embedded, by way of universal validity claims, in three relations to reality, thereby assuming the corresponding pragmatic functions of representing facts, establishing legitimate interpersonal relations, and expressing one’s own subjectivity. (Habermas 1979: 67) What happens if participants, implicitly relying on the speech act commitments of the speaker, do not accept the validity of one of the claims raised? This depends on which of the claims is thematised. For example the distinction of propositional content from the question of right, or intersubjective validity, demands different modes of resolution. If there is a disagreement over questions of right they should be resolved in a practical discourse where ‘theoretical justifications for problematic norms’ (McCarthy 1978: 313) are raised and criticised. In discussing issues of

Language, communication, performativity 37 morality, he distinguishes discourses of application from discourses of justification. According to Habermas: [Participants] must make a pragmatic presupposition to the effect that all affected can in principle freely participate as equals in a co-operative search for truth in which the force of the better argument alone can influence the outcome. On this fact of universal pragmatics is founded the fundamental principle of discourse ethics: only moral rules that could win the assent of all affected as participants in a practical discourse can claim validity. (Habermas 1983: 49–50) This idealising assumption is for Habermas a matter of fact. Yet the essential question is how it might be relevant to particular moral questions, and forms of life. He suggests that these idealisations do not impose obligations to act rationally, but act as transcendental constraints on what may be deemed moral action. All the principle of universalisation does is outline the conditions under which moral norms may claim to be universal. It does not prescribe, or so Habermas argues, moral norms. In order to be effective these moral norms need to be complemented by a process of socialisation which allows agents to internalise these morals as norms of action (Habermas 1983: 31–5). This limitation though does not answer the question of particularity. How is a moral norm to be made compatible with the variety and particularity of differing situations? Habermas recognises that the rightness of a norm in a particular situation can never be finally determined by a universal justificatory discourse: Analytically the right thing to do in given circumstances cannot be decided by a single act of justification … but calls for a two stage process of argument consisting of justification followed by application of norms … . Hence the idea of impartiality, which is expressed in the moral point of view and gives determinate meaning to the validity claim of moral judgements, demands that we take into account a norm’s rational acceptance among all those possibly affected with reference to all situations appropriate to it. (Habermas 1983: 36) All norms are subject to reinterpretation in unanticipated situations of application. In being applied norms have, moreover, to be appropriate to the situations of application. Here Habermas follows Klaus Gunther in arguing that the meaning of valid norms will change in every situation. All that remains identical is, he argues, the moral point of view (Habermas 1983: 39). Unlike a theoretical discourse in which evidential claims about various propositions may be tested inductively against the facts so to speak, in this idealised form of discourse the universalisation principle ensures that participants are immunised against repression and inequality, to use Habermas’s words (Habermas 1990: 88). The equivalent of this intersubjective discourse in the life of the individual is the psychoanalytic session in which, according to Habermas,

38 Language, communication, performativity the speaking cure allows the individual to translate a repressed motive into thematisable linguistic utterances thus exerting control over repressed motives which have been barred from expression and communication. The discourse theory of truth then retrospectively reconstructs intuitive knowledge of supposedly universal validity claims. Universal pragmatics reveals the intersubjective grounding of emancipatory critique, and avoids relativism in a maieutic justification of its normative foundations. Practical discourse thematises validity claims already implicit in speech and subjects them to rational argument. These features of language are expressed ‘with the aid of dialogue constitutive universals which are not the subsequent verification of previously co-ordinated speech situations but are the very factors allowing us to generate speech (Habermas 1984: 369). Habermas believes that these universal features of all language may be cognitively ascertained, and thus theoretically justified. Approaching the object of study Above I noted Habermas’s refusal of the analytical reduction of language to propositional statements. This is translated into the methodological assumptions underlying his formalisation of speech acts, his development of an account of communicative rationality and his version of knowledge.2 He terms this approach to knowledge rational reconstruction. Reconstruction does not seek out nomological knowledge, but ‘a systematic reconstruction of intuitive knowledge of competent subjects’ (Habermas 1979: 10). It is not derived from observation by a monadic perceiving subject, but from an understanding which is intersubjective. Explication aims to interpret the meaning of utterances experienced in a communicatively established intersubjectivity. The interpreter thus has a different epistemic relation to his object than that of the observer: The difference in level between perceptible and symbolically prestructured reality is reflected in the gap between direct access through observation of reality and communicatively mediated access through understanding an utterance referring to events. (Habermas 1979: 10) Any claim to knowledge has always to meet the requirements of an open interpretive framework in which it has to be justified. Habermas does not seek simply to establish means of resolving uncertain semantic expression at the level of content or meaning. Attention to the understanding of content, while important, is limited by the context of utterances. If interpretation cannot resolve disputed meaning, then the form of explication changes. The interpreter shifts from a consideration of content to the generative structure of the expressions themselves: The interpreter attempts to explicate the meaning of utterances in terms of rules according to which the author must have brought it forth … the interpreter attempts to peer through the surface, as it were, and into the symbolic

Language, communication, performativity 39 formation to discover the rules according to which the latter was produced. … the intuitive rule consciousness that a competent speaker must have of his own language … we can distinguish between know how – the ability of a competent speaker who understands how to produce or perform something – and know that – the knowledge of how it is that he understands … this is the task of reconstructive understanding, that is of meaning explication in the sense of rational reconstruction of generative structures underlying the production of symbolic formations. (Habermas 1979: 12–13) This knowledge is categorical – in the Kantian sense of being necessary whenever communication occurs – and conceptual. It is a pre-theoretical knowledge, which for communicating subjects is intuitive and which a reconstructive account attempts to prove has necessarily to be presupposed. The claims of a reconstructive science are ascertained via a maieutic procedure, through which the case has to be proven. This allows the reconstructive scientist to make strongly essentialist claims: … if reconstructions are true they correspond precisely to the rules that are operatively effective in the object domain – that is to the rules that actually determine the production of surface structures. (Habermas 1979: 16) Thus given the data, (communicative interaction and the speech acts at the basis of communication), the reconstructive scientist explains what has to be presupposed before the data could be generated. Like a Kantian transcendental argument, reconstructive science delineates the necessary presuppositions of all communication between competent subjects. However, the argument supporting this necessity is itself subject to argumentative clarification and only gains force in being the best possible explanation of its object. This points to a strange circularity characteristic of the attempt to reconstruct the assumptions of communication, namely that what is explained, that is, communicative competence, is also what grounds the attempt at explanation. The ‘force of the better argument’ is a presupposition not only of the object of study, but also of the subject capable of drawing conclusions about that object. Habermas finds what he presupposes as his approach to vindicating the claims of theory. Thus for Habermas validity claims, always raised in particular contexts, transcend all restrictions of time and place. Philosophy reconstructs these already given presuppositions after the fact, and in delineating them provides a defence of the minimal claims of reason (Habermas 1990: 12). It occupies the rather strange position of … an empirical theory with strong claims … [which] plays the part of a mediating interpreter relating the different interests of reason to one another and the lifeworld, without grounding them (Habermas 1990: 17–19). The nature of this quasi-transcendental argument is the subject of my third chapter. Let me turn now from methodological considerations to the import this holds for grounding an enlightenment politics.

40 Language, communication, performativity

Enlightenment, ideal speech and politics It should by now be clear why universal pragmatics is of such great importance to Habermas. It allows him to achieve a number of contradictory imperatives, in what appears to be a seamless theoretical edifice. First, he has seemingly provided an answer to Adorno and Horkheimers’ critique of enlightenment, developing a theory of rationality which both grounds a critique of the systemic distortions of reification, and allows for the positing of an emancipatory perspective. Second, he follows Adorno in linking an analysis of language to societal rationalisation, in such a way that the two appear inextricably interconnected. However, his universal pragmatics is deemed valid not only with respect to a scientific reconstruction of language, but also as a basis for an account of societal rationalisation. Habermas’s claim is particularly strong. He believes that late capitalism allows the theorist to recognise these universal structures in all communication. Third, the project of enlightenment is given new cognitive grounds. Recalling Adorno’s less optimistic construal of enlightenment casts some light on Habermas’s claims. He responds to at least three elements of Adorno’s diagnosis of enlightenment: first, the assertion that society so dominates the subject, as a second nature, that the possibility of change is severely limited; second, the claim that the language of enlightenment is repressive; third, the belief that modernity engenders a narcissistic subjectivity. (a) Habermas contends that the three Kantian domains of science, morality and art correspond, more or less, to the three validity claims which he locates in the universal pragmatics of speech. The rationalisation of modern societies institutionalises a scientific discourse which reflects the validity claim of truth (the relation between subject and object); the institutionalisation of a democratic polis, legal system and other vehicles of democratic will formation reflect the validity claim to normativity; the separation out of art as an independent sphere of aesthetic experiment reflects the expressive claims of an individuality freed from social constraint: The project of modernity as it was formulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century consists in the relentless development of the objectivating sciences, of the universalistic foundations of morality and law, and of autonomous art all in accord with their own immanent logic. But at the same time it also results in releasing the cognitive potentials accumulated in the process from their esoteric high forms and attempting to apply them in the sphere of praxis, that is to encourage the rational organisation of social relations. (Habermas 1996: 45) A sociological translation of the theory of communicative rationality then involves an analysis of how these different domains interact with one another. Indeed one of the problems Habermas associates with modernity is that communication between the different spheres of a rationalised society is limited. Each of

Language, communication, performativity 41 these spheres develops its autonomy, and is sundered from the lifeworld in which it is initially located. Specialisation results in the interruption of feedback processes, which ideally should communicate the positive results of this knowledge back into the lifeworld. But cultural impoverishment is by no means a necessity. The fragmented consciousness which results may be overcome by increased consensual co-ordination of these spheres, and improved public communication of their particular knowledges. What’s more, the illocutionary structure of speech points to a universal moral principle underlying all sociality. This universal principle – the discourse ethic – provides a point of orientation for political critique, as well as a point of view from which moral claims may be evaluated. Simone Chambers has usefully summarised the links between the analysis of speech and morality: Habermas draws a connection between speaking a language and adopting a particular moral point of view, namely, a deontological point of view, which sees justice as primary and impartiality as central to justice. (Chambers 1997: 124)3 While, for Habermas, this point of orientation is implicit in all of our interactions, this does not necessarily mean that the social institutions and mores by which we live accord with the discourse ethic. Rather the development of these faculties depends upon the structure of social rationalisation characteristic of modernity. Whether or not this potential is realised in modern democratic institutions depends very much, according to Habermas, on the relation between a rationalised lifeworld and instrumental rationality. Despite the fact that the empirical organisation of modern societies suggests that the institutionalisation of these ideals is contingent, Habermas insists that communicative rationality alludes to two general principles of morality, to which all users of language implicitly subscribe. The first principle (U) states a norm is only valid when all affected by it can accept its consequences and anticipated side effects for everyone’s interests. This universalisation principle itself implies a second principle (D), which stipulates that all participants in a discourse should be treated as free and equal in rational argumentation, if the outcome of the argument is to be valid (Habermas 1990: 65).4 The concerns raised in this section are the subject of Chapter 7 of this book, where I critically discuss Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms which defends a communicative account of deliberative democracy. (b) The project of modernity possesses a second potential, which the separation out of these spheres contributes to somewhat circuitously. While agreeing with Adorno that modern rationalisation is pathological, Habermas insists that the ability to make such a judgement depends on a context which sanctions (however obliquely) an alternative. The theory of communicative action grounds both this critique, and the possibility of thinking another future. In this light Habermas proposes a revised thesis of reification, what he terms colonisation of the lifeworld. He argues that a paradoxical relation exists between the mechanism of linguistic communication oriented to validity claims which the rationalisation of the lifeworld

42 Language, communication, performativity makes possible, and the steering media of money and power which this same process sets free, differentiating out systems of success-oriented instrumental action (Habermas 1984: 342). Modern rationalisation reflects the growing domination and penetration of the communicatively structured lifeworld by quasiautonomous and formalised systems of action oriented to performative success: The rationalisation of the lifeworld is a precondition and starting point for a process of systemic rationalisation, which then becomes more autonomous vis-à-vis the normative constraints embodied in the lifeworld, until in the end systemic imperatives begin to instrumentalise the lifeworld and threaten to destroy it. (Wellmer 1985: 56) Increased juridification of the lifeworld – especially in the welfare state – and the administrative bureaucratisation of everyday life create an ever-expanding domain of dependency (Habermas 1987a: 437). Individuals relate to the economic and political system as employee and consumer, client and citizen respectively, and are increasingly integrated into institutional structures. The result is a loss of freedom and increased disenchantment. Nevertheless the lifeworld sustains a capacity to resist these imperatives. One example of this is the proliferation of new social movements since the 1960s, many of which practiced an anti-disciplinary politics. More importantly he contends that communication is a prerequisite for any co-ordination of actions in the system. As the lifeworld is increasingly invaded by the imperatives of the system the preconditions for systemic reproduction are undermined, resulting in systemic crises inter alia crises of motivation, legitimation, loss of meaning and anomie. At some point, Habermas argues, a barrier of irrationality will be met, forcing the system to compromise. In short capitalism, in order to reproduce itself, must respect the limits of its own ability to instrumentalise its intersubjective preconditions. These limits are traced through an account of the pragmatics of communication. (c) Contrary to Adorno, Habermas argues, last, that modernity does not of necessity engender a narcissistic subjectivity. Rather, the freeing of the subject from traditional constraints which the project of modernity fosters, allows for the development of forms of subjectivity which reach beyond narcissistic concern with the self. This is not to say that narcissism is not a feature of twentieth-century forms of identity formation. Indeed he notes that: For some time now, psychoanalytically trained physicians have observed a symptomatic change in the typical manifestations of illness. Classical hysterics have almost died out; the number of compulsion neuroses is drastically reduced; on the other hand narcissistic disturbances are on the increase. (Habermas 1987: 388) He suggests that one of the reasons for this is that socialisation now occurs almost wholly through the internalisation of communicative norms, which force

Language, communication, performativity 43 adolescents after a certain age to construct their identities for themselves. They can no longer depend upon stable identity structures transmitted unproblematically between generations. This helps explain not only the increase of narcissistically induced disorders, but also the increase in youth protest, and what Habermas terms withdrawal cultures (Habermas 1984: 388). Yet Habermas reads these shifts as symptoms of a larger process of rationalisation, the potential of which is distorted if one privileges limit cases. Rather the theory of communicative rationality allows for a recasting of the structural model of the subject, developed by Freud. He connects Freud’s analysis of the relation between superego, ego and id with Mead’s analysis of intersubjectivity, and Piaget’s developmental psychology. His belief is that the theorist, using the thesis of communicative rationality as the point of orientation, can outline a passage of normal development for all individuals, which accords with structurally defined stages of learning. Jeffrey Alexander neatly summarises Habermas’s recourse to developmental psychology: developmental theory conceives socialisation as learning to be rational and autonomous, not dependent and submissive. (Alexander 1991: 52) Given that this is precisely the intention of an account of communicative rationality, Habermas can incorporate developmental psychology within his theory of communicative action, as a means of explicating the development of personality structures which accord with the intuition that the fragile means of communication is all that grounds our ability to be autonomous. I have only briefly elucidated Habermas’s delineation of universal pragmatics as the basis for developing a full-blown account of reification and instrumentalisation in modern societies. The seemingly sterile account of the pragmatics of language paves the way towards a theory of societal rationalisation with universalistic claims. Science, morality and art all find their place on this map. Let me travel a little back down the path, taking a detour via Adorno, in order to reconsider certain of the untheorised decisions made by Habermas. My aim here is to prepare for a critique of the strong thesis about communicative idealisation, which is carried out in Chapters 3 and 4.

The uncertain limits of communication It will be recalled that Adorno refuses the image of a totality, or of any entity which expressively unifies sundered reality. His reasons were both theoretical and political. The claim to have discovered a trans-historical meaning of being is said to reflect the totalising logic of reified society. A critical theory which holds onto the image of totality is itself subject to the same imperatives as that which it attempts to escape. Now, the question is whether or not Habermas falls prey to this imperative. This perhaps seems an odd question, given Habermas’s

44 Language, communication, performativity attention to the pragmatics of language, but is pertinent, due to Habermas’s lack of attention to the systemic analysis of language. In being attentive to language use Habermas ignores the relation of specific linguistic acts to the system of language as a whole. Put simply, Habermas presupposes both a semantic and pragmatic idealisation which rely upon a stable system of communication and language. This is necessary: if the meaning of communicative acts was inherently not just empirically uncertain, then the attempt to establish rational grounds for communicative consensus would be undermined. Of course Habermas acknowledges that the derivation of the concept of communicative rationality depends upon certain abstractions and idealisations, which rarely characterise everyday communication. It will be my contention that the abstraction in fact misses a crucial moment in any idealisation, that is the necessary failure of such idealisations. This is not as I argue in the next chapter simply an empirical failure. Rather it is central to the theoretical abstraction which delivers the concept of communicative rationality. This has certain ironic implications. While he disclaims any realist epistemology, or simplistic correlation of word to object, he nonetheless essentialises the results of his own reconstruction. This is perhaps unfair, given the acknowledgement that the procedure for verification of such a science is maieutic, and thus always open to review. But Habermas gives so little attention to the possibility that his reconstruction is merely one alternative, that in effect he claims to have reconstructed the fundamentals governing the generation of communication. The theoretical claims of structural linguistics put into question, though, Habermas’s defence of semantic idealisation. One example, which is of import for the following chapter, makes the point. In his recent work Ernesto Laclau poses the question of how it is possible for a linguistic structure to determine its own limits. He concludes: … the limits of signification can only announce themselves as the impossibility of realising what is in those limits – if the limits could be signified in a direct way they would be internal to signification and ergo would not be limits at all. (Laclau 1994a: 168) The import of this conclusion is further outlined in the next chapter, but it points to the difficulty of presupposing an idealisation of meaning. The stability of meaning, according to Laclau, cannot be a presupposition of any theory. Rather meaning is inherently unstable, and only maintained through acts of power. Now assuming this to be valid with respect to Habermas’s formalisation of speech acts a number of questions are raised. First, it corroborates Habermas’s initial prudence regarding the universality of reconstructive science. The drawing of limits around speech act theory is premised upon certain decisions which assist in the delineation of the object. There is however a second more serious implication which bears on the relation between universal pragmatics and politics. While universal pragmatics seeks to orient politics in modern societies it might be

Language, communication, performativity 45 suggested that Habermas does not find his politics in the study of communication, but projects his politics into this study. Surely it is not a science which grounds politics, but a politics which grounds the decisions Habermas makes, and the theoretical assumptions underlying his work. Is there not the force of a desire at work which is untheorised? This might be true in at least two respects: first, it might be suggested that the decision to exclude certain dimensions of language from the foundational premises of the study is both a political decision in itself, and already pre-determines certain theoretical and political outcomes. Second, it could plausibly be argued that once these decisions are made, Habermas still has to read a politics into his theoretical conclusions. Habermas believes that the distance between theoretical claims and normative presuppositions is undermined in his reconstructive science. Thus the theoretical analysis of the structure of communication supposedly points to certain normative implications in and of itself. An obvious place to begin in this critique is with the distinction between normal and parasitic forms of communication. Habermas argues that literature is parasitic on normal communication. This argument is developed with recourse, ironically, to structural linguistics. In essence Habermas suggests that fictional language derives force from the suspension of one, or more, of the claims to validity. Second he argues that strategic forms of action and rationality are derivative of, or parasitic on communicative rationality. Here his argument is that any form of strategic intervention in the world must presuppose, in no matter how minimal a form, the ability to communicate. While this may indeed be true it does not imply, as Habermas goes on to suggest, that because there is a minimal ability to communicate this entails that communicative rationality grounds strategic or other forms of interaction. A third example is Habermas’s privileging of form over content. He insists that meaning and validity are inextricably interwoven and that a claim to validity cannot simply transcend its context. However, in the last instance validity determines meaning. Ultimately it is the implied claim to validity which will determine the truth of a dispute – truth here in the extended version along all three of its axes. In spite of Habermas’s claim that he has avoided Hegel’s critique of Kantian formalism this does not appear to be the case. If, as Hegel contends, truth involves as much subject as substance, the universal and the immediacy of being, then Habermas has not succeeded in relating the two adequately. In brief Habermas reduces the idea of transparency to an ‘as if’, implied in parole. As a result he privileges a fictional transparency over fiction in language, fictional transparency over a messy instrumentality and a fictional transparency over the interaction of concrete others. Benhabib puts the last point well: … the shift to the language of an anonymous species-subject pre-empts the experience of moral and political activity as a consequence of which alone a genuine ‘we’ can emerge. A collectivity is not constituted theoretically but is formed out of the moral and political struggles of fighting actors. (Benhabib 1987: 339)

46 Language, communication, performativity All of these points however rely on one initial presupposition made by Habermas: the privileging of a universal pragmatics of parole over a consideration of how speech acts relate to the structure of language more generally, and the implications of this reintegration for a formal pragmatics of language. In concluding I briefly pursue this issue with respect to two issues: the limits of a transcendence immanent to the pragmatics of language, and the claim to sincerity in relation to this immanence. I have noted Habermas’s attempt to formalise parole as the basis for his reconstruction of a theory of rationality. One of the consequences of this formal/ procedural approach is his failure to seriously account for the breakdown of structure, the moments when structure experiences dislocation. In recent works however Habermas has shifted his perspective. This suggests a transcendence, an appeal to a beyond, which is not simply internal to the lifeworld. As Dews expresses it: Habermas (only recently) acknowledges the continuing human need for contact with a transcendence which is more contentful and meaningful than the purely formal transcendence from within to which we are exposed by the force of validity claims. He goes on to quote Habermas: ‘Another kind of transcendence is disclosed in the undefused force which is disclosed by the critical appropriation of identity forming religious traditions, and yet another in the negativity of modern art. The trivial must be allowed to shatter against the sheerly alien, abyssal, uncanny which resists assimilation to what is already understood. (Dews 1995: 10–11) This recognition of the limits of disenchantment alludes to that which resists rational appropriation. Here communicative rationality runs up against a limit which cannot simply be reintegrated within the frame of consensual co-ordination. Having said so we are forced to question the nature of that limit – for if it is simply a conceptual expression of philosophical humility on Habermas’s part, then, I would argue he has not taken full cognisance of the implications it holds for his own work. This moment of transcendence has implications for all of the validity claims analysed by Habermas. I briefly focus on the question of sincerity, before investigating the question further in the following chapter. Habermas identifies four claims to validity in language. The claim to represent external reality is institutionalised and negotiated in scientific and economic discourses, claims to normative rightness imply the existence of democratic procedures of rational will formation. However the third claim, that of sincerity, or truthfulness demands closer attention. What does it mean to say that a subject is truthful? Habermas reduces this to a question of sincerity: that the subject’s expression corresponds to her actions and intentions. This suggests that the subject has developed a strong ego identity. However, when the subject says ‘I am’ there

Language, communication, performativity 47 is surely more at stake than a simple assertion of sincerity. Dews quotes Lacan to good effect: … the question of his existence bathes the subject, supports him, invades him, tears him apart even, is shown in the tensions, the lapses, the fantasies that the analyst encounters. (Dews 1995: 12) This moment, when the subject claims ‘I am’, is forever delayed in language. Earlier I noted in passing Adorno’s resistance to ego psychology. The reasons behind that resistance now become clearer. The self-confident Cartesian ego which says ‘I am’ at once comes up against the facticity of her language. For Adorno this facticity is two fold: on the one hand the ‘I am’ is simply the mirror image of a fully constituted social object, the universal dominance of exchange. On the other hand that dominance meets its limit in a language which resists objectification. In both instances however the enlightened subject in effect loses control over herself. In the first instance s/he simply affirms the exchange relation. In the second case a moment of resistance is found, a resource within language, which refuses objectification. Although Adorno does not develop the argument along these lines this implies distinguishing the subject of enunciation from the subject of the statement. The subject of the enunciation presupposes the coherence of its own ego, and indeed retrieves the mirror image of itself from society. However, in modernist art forms (whether literary or otherwise) there is an intimation to a subject which is never simply certain of itself. It is correlative with the failure of the structure which cannot return an image of certainty to the subject. On this argument the subject of the enunciation is not equivalent to the subject at the level of the statement. Habermas excludes the subject’s relation to the statement from his discourse theory. If the subject of the enunciation seeks or believes in the coherence of its own ego, a coherence which as Habermas argues unifies the ego and its intentionality, the subject at the level of the statement always fails to objectify itself. For Laclau it is this failure which is at the base of the political. Many criticisms of Habermas centre on this failure to take seriously the expressive moment of subjectivity. This failure is reflected in his arguments that aesthetic language is parasitic on normal language games, and that the aim of the psychoanalytic cure is the ego’s rational control over unconscious impulse. Now if this critique is fair it must have implications for Habermas’s account of the rational subject of communication. The mutual imbrication of statement and enunciation imply that the subject of communication loses himself in a moment of exteriorisation, just as he attempts to represent himself in language. This failure extends across all four dimensions which Habermas finds in language: normativity, representation, subjective truthfulness and comprehension. The chapter which follows outlines what a politics of this failure might entail. Tracing this failure necessitates that a critical theory of communication be articulated to a political project whose

48 Language, communication, performativity starting assumption is that even as an ideal, communicative rationality has to recognise its own impossibility. This argument may be developed purely in terms of a logical critique of the necessary failure of pure symmetry. However, as the second section of this book argues, a critique may also be mounted from the perspective of the political implications of such an ideal. The following chapter takes this up with respect to the category of the performative, which is a central plank of Habermas’s analysis of the speech act.

3

Performativity and politics From Habermas to Laclau

Three versions of performativity What does language do: Austin and performativity? The development of a theory of communicative rationality, as an attempt to orient politics in a post-metaphysical world, responds in part to the failure of the traditional left to offer an adequate account of the potential embedded in the public sphere of liberal democratic societies. As such it draws impetus from the radical democratic idea of society as a self-regulating democratic polis of equal citizens, but ties this to the deepening of democratic tendencies in contemporary liberal democracies.1 Both the projects of modernity and of democratic transformation receive justification and orientation from an account of the presuppositions of communicative rationality. The theory thus seeks to reconstruct an understanding of the normative presuppositions of social actors, and to orient a critique of society, drawing upon these theoretical conclusions. The reconstruction of the intuitive knowledge of social actors makes a claim to theoretical validity, which at the same time provides critical orientation for moral discourses, invoked in judging dysfunctional social actions. A key aspect of this defence of critical theory is the claim that language is never simply propositional, that a propositional theory of language cannot account for the full variety of speech acts. This propositional reduction of language was reflected in the dominance of positivism in the social sciences. Mid-century political theory in America and Europe for the most part rejected the investigation of normative questions, as being beyond the scope of the social scientist. Stanley Cavell writes of the: … climate in which positivism was pervasive and dominant in the AngloAmerican academic world from the mid-1940s to the 1950s and beyond, almost throughout the humanities and the Social Sciences, a hegemonic presence more complete I believe than any of today’s politically developed or intellectually advanced positions: positivism during this period was virtually unopposed on any intellectually organised scale. (Cavell, S. 1995: 51)

50 Performativity and politics Habermas develops the implications of the speech act critique of propositional reduction into an all-embracing theory of social action and rationality. The argument that everyday language use entails more than the making of propositional (or constative) statements left open two paths: either statements which did not conform to the logical structure of equations, or possess a demonstrable referential validity, were deemed nonsense as Ayer suggests in Language, Truth and Logic (Ayer 1971), or a different account of truth, language and speech had to be developed. The varied attempts to account for this nonsense, ensued in ‘a revolution in philosophy’2 to use the words of John Austin. Speech act analysis contends that a variety of different types of claim are made when communicating. Their validity extends beyond the propositional correlation of facts with the world. A key text in the development of this account is Austin’s How to do Things with Words (Austin 1962). In How to do Things with Words, a set of lectures delivered first in 1955, John Austin argues (initially) that explicit performatives are words which effect an action solely in being enunciated, assuming apposite conditions. Describing sentences such as ‘I do’, or ‘I bet you a dollar it will rain tomorrow’, Austin declares: … it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in of course the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing, of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing, or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it. (Austin 1962: 1) Austin thus identifies certain sentences as actions in themselves, rather than simply references to actions. The best example in Political Theory is that of the social contract. The performative character of a social contract binds participants to act according to certain principles under certain conditions. Yet the promises made in a contract are not simply statements of fact or propositions. These statements bind participants to act in particular ways at a later date. The contract is an action, similar to a promise, effecting in performance a new situation, for example, the establishment of a new legal framework. At one point Austin mentions social contracts. He suggests that one of the problems the idea of social contract has to address is that persons engaged in the making of a contract already have to be constituted as subjects capable of contracting, before they can do so. I shall return to this problem in concluding my discussion of performativity, with reference to deconstruction (Austin 1962: 29). How though are the limits of the performative speech act established? Austin is unsure, and for very good reason. The problem is that any linguistic statement may be restated as a performative. For example ‘I saw the bird’ may be restated as ‘I stated that I saw the bird’. This suggests that all statements are in some sense performative, though different in kind from explicit performatives such as ‘I promise’. I will not here explicate all of the difficulties in drawing these fine distinctions. If, however, we are to accept the extension of performativity beyond speech acts which explicitly effect a consequence in their being said, we would have to conclude that all speech acts are in some sense performative, that all speaking is a form of doing.

Performativity and politics 51 Indeed, Austin notes that there is no purely verbal criterion of performativity. Constative statements too may be subject to performative failure, and we always perform some speech act whenever we communicate. It is this worry that prompts Austin to develop a revised categorisation: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts respectively. He writes: There is yet a further sense in which to perform a locutionary act, and therein an illocutionary act, may also be to perform an act of another kind. Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it may be done with the design, intention or purpose of producing them; and we may then say thinking of this, that the speaker has performed an act in the nomenclature of which reference is made either, only obliquely, or even not at all, to the performance of the locutionary or illocutionary act. (Austin 1962: 101) In brief, locutionary acts represent states of affairs; perlocutionary acts produce an effect on the hearer; and illocutionary acts are those acts performed through the force of the speech act. Illocutionary force determines how the speech act is to be understood. This notion of illocutionary acts take up on the definition of the performative but extends it, attributing a performative force to all speech acts. Austin though is not entirely convinced by this neat separation of the dimensions of the speech act. He suggests that all speech acts are characterised by a commissive dimension (Austin 1962: 158–9), a promise that in future the implicit commitments raised in the speech act will bind the speaker to certain actions. Staten writes, noting this confusion of boundaries in Austin’s work: He [Austin] repeatedly finds that a given performative will participate in various categories at the same time, so that even if we know that ‘I shall’ in a given case is a promise, a promise need not fit neatly into a single category of illocutionary force. (Staten 1986: 116) While this confusion of boundaries disturbs the pristine distinction of illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts, it suggests a move beyond this distinction, which both grounds and subverts it. Confronted with this ambiguity two alternatives seem plausible. Either we can revert to a restricted notion of performativity or we can extend the analysis of performativity across the full range of speech acts. This is the strategy pursued by Habermas, and in a different vein by Derrida. Let me first consider attempts to limit this extension of performativity, a strategy defended by Searle and Benveniste. Benveniste limits the concept of performativity to actions performed while speaking. He outlines a number of features of the performative speech act: authority, context, particularity and self-reference. For Benveniste a performative

52 Performativity and politics is such because as an event it creates an event. He thus narrows the provenance of the performative excluding imperatives such as ‘SIT DOWN!’, which in itself is not an act but effects an act (Benveniste 1971: chapter 23). This solution is dubious. Take the command ‘SIT DOWN!’, as an example. The imperative presupposes authority; this authority depends on context; it is particular; and most important there is an element of self-reference. Of course this self-reference is not pure. The speaker performs a speech act which establishes a relation of authority with another, and makes a claim that this authority is justified and relevant in the context. If it is not in the strict sense a performative action, the boundary dividing it as an imperative from performativity is not stable. Moreover in uttering a command the speaker at the same time performs an action which lays claim to the right to make this command. More interesting is Searle’s development of Austin’s analysis. Searle writes: The notion of ‘performative’ is one of the most confused and misused in recent philosophy of language. Originally, Austin opposed performatives to constatives, but that opposition failed for reasons that he made clear. Every utterance is a performance in the sense that every utterance is a speech act, but not every utterance is thereby a performative. Within utterances, i.e. speech acts, there is a sub-class of utterances that are performed by way of using a word that names the very type of act being performed. (Searle 1991: 95) In this case not all speech acts are performatives; they are however performances simply by virtue of being speech acts. This contradicts the idea that all speech acts have a performative character. What exactly is lost with this restriction? Searle rejects the argument that all speech acts are implicit performatives. One reason for this is his reliance on a primordial notion of intentionality. For Searle: Most forms of adult intentionality are essentially linguistic. But the whole edifice rests on biological primitive forms of prelinguistic intentionality. (Searle 1991: 94) As I shall argue next, accepting the extension of the concept of performativity beyond explicit performatives has the consequence of undermining this model of intentionality. Moreover this notion of intentionality violates the spirit of Austin’s discussion. In his first lecture Austin writes: But we are apt to have a feeling that their [words] being serious consists in their being uttered as (merely) the outward and visible sign…of an inward and spiritual act: from which it is but a short step to go on to believe or to assume without realising that for many purposes the outward utterance is a description, true or false, of the occurrence of the inward performance. The classic expression of this idea is to be found in the Hippolytus (l. 612) where Hippolytus

Performativity and politics 53 says: ‘my tongue swore to, but my heart (or mind or other backstage artiste) did not.’ Thus ‘I promise to…’ obliges me – puts on record my spiritual assumption of a spiritual shackle. (Austin 1962: 9–10) Austin goes on to note that the insistence on intentionality here lets the liar off the hook. It implies that words do not have to be taken seriously, only these fictitious inner states to which there is no direct access.3 This is not to say that the question of intentionality is irrelevant – indeed any theory of politics has somehow to link the actions of individual and collective subjects to their intentions. Public access to intentions is delimited though by the form in which we access intention, the speech act commitments that speakers engage in. Of course analytic precision is important, but in this case it obscures what is most interesting about Austin’s ruminations: the possibility that performativity effects all speech acts. In this respect a second option appears more interesting: rethinking the distinction of the performative from all other speech acts in such a manner that the original distinctions are undermined. There are at least two alternatives. As I suggested earlier these are key dimensions of contemporary disputes in critical theory. The first, outlined by Jürgen Habermas, links performativity to validity; the second, developed by deconstruction and postMarxist theory, suggests a generalised theory of performativity which undermines any simplistic model of intentionality or validity. Habermas: performativity and validity The claim that all speech acts have a performative dimension allows Habermas to redraw the nature of communication in terms of actions which implicitly raise a claim to validity. Let me again use the idea of social contract as an example. In an ideal contract this consensus would have to be assumed. Every interlocutor would have to believe that the intention of all other participants is such that the contract will be successfully effected. Second, the language of the contract would have to be free of ambiguity and possessed of a fixed sense. Let me recapitulate key discussions of Chapter 2 with reference to a theory of performativity. Whenever we communicate using speech acts, Habermas argues, we raise a number of validity claims which make communication possible. We not only attempt to exchange and understand utterances; we also perform the act of establishing a communication in which we make claims about the truth, validity and intention of our utterance. For Habermas this means that all communication implicates the speaker in a universal ideal which transcends the particularity of context specific speech acts. The performative has here been extended far beyond its initial categorisation in speech act theory – it assumes a predominance in the study of language which precedes the categorisation of other speech acts, like the constative. Indeed Habermas will suggest that other forms of interaction are parasitic on communication oriented to reaching understanding. Habermas thus rejects any form of intentionalist semantics. Meaning cannot be derived from some idea of the inner state of mind of subjects. Communication is

54 Performativity and politics not primarily about the transfer of contents from one subject to another; rather language is now viewed as a medium for the intersubjective search for truth (Habermas 1984: 273–6). Habermas takes from Austin the idea that all speech acts bear a performative force. He adopts Austin’s terminology too in distinguishing between locutionary, perlocutionary and illocutionary acts. However, Habermas makes a constitutive claim in this respect. His aim is to show that: …the use of language with an orientation to reaching understanding is the original mode of language use, upon which indirect understanding, giving something to understand or letting something be understood, and the instrumental use of language in general are parasitic. In my view, Austin’s distinction between illocutions and perlocutions accomplishes just that. (Habermas 1984: 288) Given this parasitic relation between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts Habermas contends that perlocutionary aims can only be achieved by using the illocutionary means of co-ordination between speakers. However, what dominates in these interactions is the speaker’s orientation to success which may be hidden from the hearer. Thus the speaker manipulates the orientation to understanding implicit in the performative character of her speech acts. For Habermas the performative aspect of all speech acts is conveyed by the claims to validity which underlie communication. This implies a distinction between validity and meaning which nonetheless mutually imply each other. We raise claims to validity in particular contexts of meaning, and particular contexts of meaning influence what is to be accepted as valid. However, as my discussion in the last chapter should have made clear: Agreement which is arrived at through communication, which is measured by the intersubjective recognition of validity claims, makes possible a networking of social interactions and lifeworld contexts. Of course these validity claims have a Janus face: as claims they transcend any local context; at the same time they have to be raised here and now … . The transcendent moment of universal validity bursts every provinciality asunder … hence a moment of unconditionality is built into factual processes of mutual understanding. (Habermas 1987a: 322) Thus validity claims are not contingent; they do not depend on particular lifeworld contexts, but are universals raised in all communication in any language. The performative dimension of all speech acts implies that speakers make a warranty to provide reasons against possible criticisms. The intersubjective binding which this implies does not depend on the validity of what is said, but on the co-ordinating effects of the claim to be valid which accompanies all communication (Habermas 1984: 302). For Habermas the performative does not operate solely under the claim to truth; rather its felicity conditions differ depending upon the claim raised by

Performativity and politics 55 speakers in communication. Even constatives, he argues, imply an attempt to get the hearer to believe what is asserted. He terms the illocutionary/performative traits of all speech acts dialogue constitutive universals, which are a priori linguistic elements, enabling the reproduction of general structures of the speech situation.4 Thompson usefully summarises Habermas’s presuppositions: (i) Every speech act in the standard form contains an illocutionary component, represented by a performative sentence, and a propositional content which is differentiated out. (ii) The differentiation of the standard speech act reflects two levels which are involved in communication: the level of intersubjectivity and the level of objects; a successful speech act results in the establishment of a relation in which at least two subjects come to an understanding about a state of affairs. (iii) The establishment of such a relation can be accounted for only on the assumption that four validity claims are implicitly raised and reciprocally recognised with the utterance of every speech act. (Thompson 1982: 125) In working with these premises Habermas claims to be following Austin’s assertion that ‘the issuing of an utterance is the performing of an action which is felicitous (Austin 1962: 6–7).5 Universal pragmatics subjects this object domain to a formal analysis, thus generating and generalising conditions which claim to be universal. This implicit universality is not though equivalent to a form of life. Rather it acts as an orienting ideal for critique and as a thorn in the side of reality pointing to the limits of the given. Deconstruction and performativity The debate concerning performativity does not end with this idealisation of validity claims. Deconstruction has a different take on the concept of performativity. Derrida traces, through a reading of the exclusions and elisions which scar any metaphysics, an originary performativity which exceeds all convention. Language implies a performative summons which, he argues, ‘refuses to bow to the being of anything that is’ (Derrida 1994: 32). The example of contract once more serves to aid this explication of arche-performativity. How is communication across context possible? This is crucial to any theory of contract – if the contract is to remain a successful means of orienting action beyond its immediate context then the commitments made in the contract have to be re-iterable in other contexts. The very possibility of re-iteration, of repeatability in a recognisable form, is what accords to the signs of language a stability which mere signs would not appear to have. Yet repetition also undermines the a priori determination of meaning. In this case no contract can ever be fully self-referential. If the meaning of the contract were closed and determinate then its repetition across context would be impossible. There has to be a breach in the meaning of any utterance which allows it to maintain

56 Performativity and politics validity in other contexts. But this repetition implies the possibility of new interpretations emerging, of inflected meanings, shifts which result from the changed context. This breach is a requirement of the institutional stability of words – they can only be the same if uttered in different places, if they can saturate different contexts. It is this argument which prompts Judith Butler to suggest that the subject is not sovereign over its speaking, but rather that all utterances are a scene of conflict. She points to the incommensurability between intention and utterance, utterance and action, intention and action (Butler 1997: chapter 1). In ‘Signature, Event, Context’ (Derrida 1982) Derrida engages in a painstaking, though contested, reading of John Austin’s How to do Things with Words. His argument bears some resemblance to that of Habermas. Derrida follows speech act theory in accepting that all speech acts do more than simply make propositions about the world or states of affairs. He maintains too that language cannot be returned to the intention of actors, the secret presence of the first person present behind all utterances. Derrida’s reasoning is different however, and is summarised in the infrastructure of iterability, which he implies is fundamental to the transmission of meaning. Iterability, as my initial discussion above suggested, undermines the possibility of a pure communication ab initio. Gasché identifies three traits specific to this infrastructure. First, the possibility of any unit, linguistic or other, being repeated rests upon it not being fully present to itself: If the unit were totally present, and present to itself, if it were not breached by a certain lack of plenitude, no repetition could ever occur. (Gasché 1986: 213) Presence is possible only as a result of a certain absence. This suggests that there is no originary presence which founds representation.6 If this argument is valid, then it holds implications, as my discussion in the next chapter indicates, for any conceptualisation of representative democracy. Second, what divides a ‘unit’ is also what allows it to be repeated, that is, allows its identity. The very possibility of idealisation and identification is thus ab initio a divided possibility. That which can remain the same, yet be repeated in another context, is divided from the self-presence which its identity seems to guarantee. Repetition, on these terms makes ‘truth’ possible, but at the same time ensures that truth can never be achieved. As Gasché summarises it: The ideality broached by iteration is a breached ideality, a limited ideality, since iterability ‘ruins (even ideally) the very identity it renders possible’. Although iterability as such is the becoming of intelligibility and ideality, the very possibility of repetition as the root of truth also prohibits truth from becoming itself. Iterability, without which the ideality on which truth is based could not be achieved, is at once the death of truth, its finitude. (Gasché 1986: 215)

Performativity and politics 57 This does not entail a simplistic renunciation of the idea of truth. Rather a focus on its conditions of possibility reveals that it can only function as a forever delayed condition of idealisation. Thus third, the interiority of the sign, which supposedly guarantees its meaning, is an interior whose truth can only be maintained through the possibility of its iteration across context. In one sense this may be read in a manner congruent with pragmatics – the meaning of words is a function of their specific instantiations. However, it should be clear from the earlier sections that there is more at stake. It is the very possibility of a shift in meaning, of a non-originary and nonsaturated meaning, which iterability is constitutive of but irreducible to. What universal pragmatics cannot explain is why different contexts not only accord words different meanings, but also allow for a repetition of meanings which retain a trace of that context. Without this possibility the stable meaning of our common lifeworld would be impossible. Iterability points to an originary performativity which undermines any semantic idealisation of language for at least two reasons. First, meaning cannot be referred to an originary intention, or action, à la Searle. Second, meaning is not reducible to use, nor transcendentally guaranteed, via a phenomenological reduction or with reference to an idealised subjectivity. What does this imply for Habermas’s notion of universal pragmatics? If any use of language necessarily presupposes an iteration which displaces the pure interiority of the sign, and thus of the speaking subject, then the communication of an ideality is at once made possible and denied. All language, whether speech or writing, presupposes the non-saturation of context precisely because it can be repeated in the absence of particular context. Context can thus never guarantee meaning. Nonetheless the possibility of this repetition is what allows the establishment of an apparent consensus, or the presentation of an ideality. The ideal of transparent consensus is however undermined a priori. Its realisation would imply the end of communication tout court, thus rendering the tension which the ideal introduces into apparently sedimented reality null and void. Transparent communication, or a transparent ego, fully in control, and in knowledge of its self, would be a mute matter. For Derrida then communication is not the transport of a sense, or an exchange of intentions or meaning. Intentionality is an instance of general system of writing, not its governing structure. This generalised dissemination of meaning undermines the semantic presuppositions of communicative action theory, suggesting that the speech act is a site of struggle and that the invocation of an ideal of communicative consensus is breached by a necessary failure (Derrida 1982: 327–8). This displacement of the general system of communication which is suggested in Derrida’s critique of Austin’s performativity holds important implications for how we are to conceive of politics as my discussion of Ernesto Laclau’s work in chapters to follow suggests.

Conclusion Let me use social contract to summarise the distinctions I have drawn. First, the making of a contract is a performative act in the minimal sense. It is literally

58 Performativity and politics language in action. Second, this is a social contract, a contract which implies reciprocal relations of recognition, and trust, outlined in my discussion of Habermas earlier. All participants must recognise the binding nature of the chains which they impose upon their own liberty. Moreover every actor must presuppose that every other actor accepts these chains. This implies that those entering into the contract cannot be reduced to the unitary perspective of the one – communication can only occur in the context of difference – a monological ego communicating with itself cannot make a contract which is binding. Indeed ignorance of this element of performativity often characterises social contract theory. In John Rawls’ Theory of Justice this is obvious: To begin with it is clear that since differences among the parties are unknown to them, and everyone is equally rational and similarly situated, each is convinced by the same arguments. Therefore we can view the choice from the standpoint of one person selected at random. (Rawls 1971: 139) Here the restrictions imposed by the original position bind actors to unanimity, without choice, the very antithesis of the idea behind making a contract. Difference no longer matters, and the making of the contract seems irrelevant. If we turn to the third dimension of performativity we realise that this is implausible for reasons beyond communication. The performance of a speech act as act, third, is subject to the requirement of iterability. For the contract to be maintained it must be re-iterable in other circumstances – for example, in a court of law, in a parliament, in conversation between citizens and the like. This repetition defines the borders of the contract made – but also means that they are permeable, that the contract never closes in on itself. The borders of meaning shift as new interpretations, new judgements, new generations generate wholly other instances in which the contract maintains validity. The meaning of the American Declaration of Independence, or of the French Revolution is not in this case fixed – it is an event under constant redefinition – an event in which the contract is potentially always open. Bennington has developed a similar point in respect of social contract theory. Speaking of this generalised concept of performativity, as something which has always to be presupposed, he writes: The already thus developed explains the aporias of all social contract doctrines, for example. The primitive ‘contract’ marked by the yes said to the other, the contracting ring of indebtedness which closes thus in its more or less tight stricture, precedes any social contract as its condition of possibility (how do you say yes to the social contract, or sign it, if the contractors are not yet already bound by a code permitting a minimum of mutual comprehension?), and therefore, as we expect by now, as its condition of impossibility (for how will the social contract attain the originarity it is seeking if it must presuppose a priori an earlier contract?). We also know that the idea of the social contract must give to time a twist it is unable to think, insofar as at least one of the parties to the

Performativity and politics 59 contract has its existence only through the contract it is nevertheless supposed to be able to sign, and therefore is supposed to precede. An analysis of the American Declaration of Independence shows, mutatis mutandis, how the thing is done, via an undecidability of constative and performative values…in a pseudo-present that would be the fiction of the origin-point of the State…. One must already be independent in order to be able to declare oneself such, but this independence is produced only in and through the declaration of itself. (Bennington 1993: 232–3) This point recalls that made by Austin and noted earlier. A contract has to presuppose as a condition of its possibility an impurity which suggests that it will not be realised. This characterisation entails that speech acts are undecidable in principle. It suggests the possibility that they may be rearticulated in other contexts. The different developments of Austin’s account of performativity by Habermas and Derrida respectively rely on important decisions which go untheorised in both accounts. Habermas excludes from consideration the abstraction of systemic or structural principles in the study of the linguistic system. Derrida leaves the question of the pragmatics of speech act theory to the side, in order to displace the metaphysical presuppositions of speech act theory. Habermas cannot, as a consequence, consider the critique of systematic closure, and of structurality which undermines the semantic idealisation that is necessary to his account of communication. His initial decision to exclude these questions from the remit of communicative action forecloses ‘communication’ by drawing boundaries which immediately limit the possible terms of debate. On the other hand Derrida’s work holds implications for the pragmatics which Habermas develops, but the development of deconstruction in the context of structural linguistics has resulted in limited study of universal pragmatics. This discussion of contract theory and performativity demonstrates that the seemingly abstruse reconstruction of a debate about the nature of the speech act has profound implications for how we are to think about key concepts in political science such as autonomy, sovereignty and law. These are all discussed in the chapters to follow.

4

Politics, idealisation and performativity

Introduction Critical theorists have often chided those influenced by deconstruction for undermining the political project of modernity. Habermas, in an echo of Adorno’s critique of Heidegger, writes of Derrida: Derrida develops the history of Being – which is encoded in writing – in another variation from Heidegger. He, too, degrades politics and contemporary history to the status of the ontic and the foreground, so as to romp all the more freely and with a greater wealth of associations, in the sphere of the ontological and archewriting. (Habermas 1987a: 181–2) Yet Habermas’s reading is selective and inaccurate. This attitude towards Derrida’s work mirrors a general silence among critical theorists about postMarxism which draws explicitly on deconstruction in developing a radically different conceptualisation of the political to that evinced by Habermas’s recent work. Derrida argues that deconstruction allows a reflection on the institutional structures that make possible, and in some instances govern our practice: ‘[deconstruction] should seek a new investigation of responsibility, an investigation, which questions the codes inherited from ethics and politics. This means that too political for some, it will seem paralysing to those who only recognise politics by the most familiar road signs’ (Bernstein 1991: 217). Derrida does not affirm a politics recognisable by familiar signs. He defends a hyper-politicisation which critically analyses these markers, and brackets the assumptions of political theory such as democracy, subjectivity and autonomy (Derrida 1996). These are bracketed in order to allow a reflection on the exclusions, the forms of sedimentation, the unspoken assumptions which gird the inherited lexicon. In more recent work Derrida contends that the ‘always already’ of deconstruction locates us in the indeterminable space of a messianic promise, of a democracy to come. Initially this seems very close to Habermas’s idea that communicative interaction binds us to an idealisation which transcends the context of our language use. This is not the case. In what follows I trace this relation of deconstruction

Politics, idealisation and performativity 61 to politics through a discussion of the question of performativity and politics in the post-Marxist work of Ernesto Laclau and the relation of the performative to the promise of language, to what Derrida has termed democracy-to-come. This political inflection allows closer reflection on the claim made by Habermas that Derrida refuses engagement with the ontic particularity of modernity and its self-understanding.

Performativity and politics I have argued that an originary performativity divides the given from itself, that every speech act is performative in that no prior set of institutional rules guarantees the success of the performance. If this is so then no set of sedimented political relations can ever be taken as preordained. Moreover their stability is not natural, but naturalised through the repetition of rules which are inherently vulnerable to challenge. The crux of this argument has been developed in the post-Marxist work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Their immanent deconstruction of Marxist theory, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, traces the emergence of a logic of hegemony within Marxist thought, a logic which results in a fundamental break with the essentialist dimensions of Marxism. Like Habermas these authors reject the economism of Marxist theory, pay increased attention to language and its relation to the practices of political life, and reject any notion of preordained agency or necessary development. Against Habermas, Laclau and Mouffe contend that meaning cannot be presupposed even as an ideality. The consequence of this radical critique of the pledge of meaning is a very different notion of politics. For Laclau there is an essential performativity implied in all politics. If the constitution of meaning is a forever delayed and divided possibility, then the retention of a particular meaning depends upon the exclusion of other possibilities. Laclau terms this hegemony, in order to signify the fact that all consensus presupposes a minimal violence. Laclau and Mouffe write of Derrida: Derrida…starts from a radical break in the history of the concept of structure, occurring at the moment in which the centre – the transcendental signified in its multiple forms: eidos, arché, telos, energia, ousia, alètheia, etc. – is abandoned, and with it the possibility of fixing a meaning which underlies the flow of differences. At this point Derrida generalises the concept of discourse in a manner coincident with that of our text: ‘It became necessary to think both the law which somehow governed desire for a centre in the constitution of structure, and the process of signification which orders the displacements and substitutions for this law of central presence – but as a central presence which has never been itself, has always already been exiled from itself into its own substitute…. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a centre or origin, everything became discourse – provided we can agree on this word – that is to say a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present

62 Politics, idealisation and performativity outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 80) If there is no transcendental signified which guarantees meaning, Laclau and Mouffe conclude that accepted truth is the result of a political struggle. For this reason any establishment of accepted meaning is, in this minimal sense, an act of power. The absence of this guarantor suggests the originary performativity which does not conform to pre-existing convention (Derrida 1990) but both makes possible the establishment of convention through a hegemonic politics, and determines every convention as unstable. For Laclau this points to the dislocated nature of any identity: … every identity is dislocated insofar as it depends on an outside which both denies that identity and provides its condition of possibility at the same time. (Laclau 1990: 39) Any analysis of politics has to account for the actuality of certain meanings, as well as the predominance of certain institutions. This arche-performativity suggests the ever-present possibility that things may be otherwise, and the ultimate impossibility of a finally constituted polis. Given that established conventions have to repeat themselves in order to retain authority their idealisation is always apt to fail. The perfect good, to abuse Plato’s metaphor, shines far too brightly to look at. However, the perfect good is not thereby irrelevant to politics. Indeed Laclau and Mouffe argue that the transcendental signified returns as an impossible attempt to fix society in various hegemonic configurations. If this battle were ever to end, politics would no longer occur. Absolute meaning would also be the absence of meaning. This points to why signification has become so important in the consideration of contemporary political theory. Crucially it is signification and discourse which are the key concepts here, not language. Indeed contrary to the claims of readers such as Norman Geras, Laclau and Mouffe’s work is a reflection on the limitations of language as a signifying system. Where Habermas begins with the employment of utterances in sentences, and the corresponding validity claims, Laclau questions the very possibility of signification before presupposing the possible success of signifying practices. This strategy allows for a reflection on dimensions of the communicative act which are occluded by the theoretical choices Habermas makes in his initial delineation of universal pragmatics. Laclau’s basic thesis is that any signifying system is always already internally subverted: if language is a system of differences the systematicity of the system is logically required for the constitution of any single identity. This systematicity depends on establishing the limits of the system … but as the beyond can only

Politics, idealisation and performativity 63 consist of other differences the system cannot determine whether the other differences are internal or external to itself … a constitutive undecidablility penetrates all structural arrangement. (Laclau 1994: 168) If a structure is to set limits to its content the formal mechanism for the establishment of this limit can only be a trace internal to the system itself and not external to it. If this is the case the limits to any system are not necessary or natural but auto-referential. Within a system of signification then one element of the system assumes the position of representing its point of suture or closure, guaranteeing meaning. However this can only be a temporary nodal point, a fixation which is made possible precisely because the system struggles to ensure its stability. The necessity of the system remarking itself also points beyond the system to its failure. That which ensures its systematicity constitutes it as impossible. This is what Laclau terms the empty signifier, the mechanism whereby particular elements assume the function of representing the closure of the system, but whose necessary failure allows for the rearticulation of different points of closure. Occupancy of the place of the empty signifier is impossible, for it is radically outside and yet ineradicably inside the system. This recalls Adorno’s characterisation of modern art as pointing to the limits of any attempt to systematically enclose and signify all the world, but also allows me to draw links with Habermas. Adorno, I argued in Chapter 1, refused to affirm that any subject – collective or individual – can understand the reified totality. The claim to represent the totality of society reproduces the domination of the object by an all-knowing subject, a subject which in fact exists only in relation to the forces constitutive of that society. Instead, immanent critique of theories which posit the autonomy of reason or the subject, reveals that philosophy does injustice to the non-identical. Recalling my brief suggestions about the asymmetrical other earlier we can begin to agree with Adorno that totality condemns itself in those moments when it makes its most grandiose claims, and second that the domination of the commodity form across all social relations represents the hegemony of a particular form of organisation, but not a hegemony which is necessary. Laclau terms the impossibility of final structural determination antagonism, and the struggle to suture the system hegemony. He points to the impossibility of society ever constituting itself as a self-referential totality. The empty signifier is another name for Adorno’s moment of non-identity. Laclau pushes this further however, arguing that this necessary failure has implications for a theory of political subjectivity. A social structure could only prescribe fixed subject positions if it possessed full objectivity, yet this objectivity is constitutively impossible. All structures will have a limited ability to prescribe fully constituted subject positions. Thus both the subject and the object society are constituted by a moment of failure. For Laclau the concept of subject only makes sense in the context of the undecidability of social structures. If it were the case that structures fully interpellated all

64 Politics, idealisation and performativity subject positions, then the idea of freedom and of constituting subjectivity, would have to be rejected. Instead: … if undecidability lies in the structure as such, then any decision developing one of its possibilities will be contingent, that is external to the structure, in the sense that it is not determined by that particular structure, even though it may be made possible by it … the agent of that contingent decision must be considered as an entity separate from the structure, but constituted in relation to it. (Laclau 1990: 30–1) Subjectivity then describes the extent to which a structure does not fully determine the actualisation of particular possibilities. In contrast to the individual subject of classical liberalism, Laclau associates subjectivity with a failure of meaning: I have a failed structural identity. This means that the subject is partially self-determined. However, as this self-determination is not the expression of what the subject already is but the result of its lack of being instead, selfidentification can only proceed through processes of identification. (Laclau 1990: 44) Particular identifications repress other alternatives. For that reason Laclau argues that an objectivity, which dresses up in the clothes of neutrality, is always premised upon power. While such decisions will never have the rational character of a foundation, they will, Laclau suggests, be justifiable according to a set of reasons, and accumulated evidence. But reasons and evidence are never decisive in determining a particular outcome (Laclau 1990: 31). The decision taken represses other possible decisions and is thus always an act of power. The subject exists (and ek-sists) because the structure is indicted of non-identity with itself. The subject functions as the metaphor of an absent structure constructing his/her identity through acts of identification.1 Freedom then can only be posited due to the necessary dislocation of all structures. While various aspects of this very general argument demand clarification it points towards the relation between arche-performativity and politics. The notion of arche-performativity suggests the essential undecidability of meaning, and the undecidability of any structure, whose identity can only be constituted by a radical exclusion. The logic of arche-performativity entails, at the level of the political, that reason will never finally determine what outcome or choice is best. Objectivity, neutrality and essence then are concepts which retain a trace of power. As Laclau writes: ‘To study the conditions of existence of a given social identity, is to study the power mechanisms making it possible’ (Laclau 1990: 33).

Politics, idealisation and performativity 65

Performativity and idealisation in political theory The conclusion that any decision, while appearing reasonable, must imply the presence of power, brings me back to the question of universal pragmatics in Habermas’s work. It should already be obvious that different accounts of performativity have consequences for how one understands the constitution of political identities, and the relation between reasonable argument and persuasion. The idea of a final court of rational appeal is, from Laclau’s perspective, anathema to politics. It seems already to predetermine precisely what a hegemonic politics should be about. Laclau objects to the positing of a principle of neutrality, an idealisation which is not itself susceptible to the undecidability of meaning. Because of a necessary contingency, he contends that established meanings are maintained by power. At the foundation of the political for Habermas, however, there appears to be an underlying rationality presupposed by communicating subjects. Laclau holds that the very ideal of this consensus is an attempt to avoid the necessity of power, and the impossibility of objectivity. According to Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy delineated an approach that asserts that any social objectivity is constituted through acts of power. This means that any social objectivity is ultimately political and has to show the traces of the acts of exclusion that govern its constitution. (Mouffe 1996: 249) This argument appears to reduce politics to a matter of power, and the question of validity to the ability to use valid arguments in justifying decisions which finally are determined by power. Yet Mouffe’s own argument suggests that more is at stake. She asserts: The main question of democratic politics is not how to eliminate power, but how to constitute forms of power that are compatible with democratic values. (Mouffe 1996: 248) If this is the case then a slightly different inflection of her own argument is necessary. If not then the choice of democratic politics itself seems an arbitrary presupposition. Rather than power being at the root of democratic politics, the performative undecidability I have outlined suggests a mutual contamination between validity and power. Again this is best expressed in terms of the two extremes. If democracy was purely about a validity uncontaminated by power, the need for debate, decision and disagreement would dissolve. Likewise a society based wholly on power would have to eliminate all intersubjective forms of communication, as these imply a mutuality which the brute exercise of power would have to expunge. Mouffe’s argument elides crucial questions. Which reasons are more persuasive than others, and why? Is it

66 Politics, idealisation and performativity plausible to distinguish between different types of decision, arguing that some are more valid than others? Is the existence of democracy simply a contingent matter, which receives no other corroboration than the mistake of its occurrence? Without answering these questions Mouffe’s commitment to democratic principles appears arbitrary. What then is the relation between validity and power? Is there something about this relation which allows us to distinguish different forms of hegemony, without falling into a simple taxonomy which in no manner effects the assumptions of the theory itself? This question receives what some may deem a surprising affirmation from Derrida. He writes: I am in complete agreement with everything that Ernesto Laclau has said on the question of hegemony and power, and I also agree that in the most reassuring and disarming discussion and persuasion, force and violence are present. Nonetheless, I think that there is, in the opening of a context of argumentation and discussion, a reference – unknown, indeterminate but nonetheless thinkable – to disarmament. I agree that such disarmament is never simply present, even in the most pacific moment of persuasion, and that therefore a certain force and violence are irreducible, but nonetheless this violence can only be practised and can only appear as such on the basis of a non-violence, a vulnerability, an exposition. I do not believe in non-violence as a descriptive and determinable experience, but rather as an irreducible promise and of the relation to the other as essentially noninstrumental. (Derrida 1996: 83) This quote touches on the key debates which structure this book. Derrida suggests that implicit in any context of argumentation is a disarmament, a certain vulnerability;2 this unknown reference, what he terms a messianic promise in other writings, is found in conjunction with an irreducible violence; which intimates towards a relation with the other which is essentially non-instrumental. Derrida situates this possibility in the context of argumentation and discussion. One cannot fail to note the similarity of this to Habermas’s formulation of communicative reason as rooting the critique of instrumental reason. Laclau agrees with Derrida that deconstruction points to ‘a terrain of constitutive undecidability, of an experience of the impossible which, paradoxically, makes possible responsibility, the decision, law and the messianic in all of its forms (Laclau 1996: 77) but rejects the link of this contingency to an ethico-political injunction. For Laclau, even if a promise is implicit in language, it is indifferent to its contents. We cannot jump from an indeterminate structure of signification to an ethics of any sort: The illegitimate transition is to think that from the impossibility of a presence closed in on itself, from an ontological condition in which the openness to the event, to the heterogeneous, to the radically other is constitutive, some

Politics, idealisation and performativity 67 kind of ethical injunction to be responsible and to keep oneself open to the heterogeneity of the other necessarily follows. (Laclau 1996: 79) Laclau suggests this for two reasons: first, if the promise is constitutive of all experience, then it precedes any injunction, ethical or otherwise. Second, there is no logical necessity linking the simple facticity of constitutive openness to a particular ethic. Any number of decisions could follow from this structural undecidability. From an ontological experience of impossibility, no ethical conclusions follow. He concludes that ‘…undecidability should be literally taken as that condition from which no course of action necessarily follows. This means that we should not make it the necessary source of any concrete decision in the ethical or political sphere’ (Laclau 1996: 81). This argument precludes the derivation of an ethics from a constitutive undecidability, or from any implicit communicative offer made in the speech act. By contrast an ethical interpretation of deconstruction suggests the continued suspension of any claim to achieve an ideal of perfect symmetry. This uncertainty about the relation between ethics and politics in deconstruction extends to other writers as well, and is beautifully illustrated by Druscilla Cornell’s reading of Derrida. She writes: Derrida, in my interpretation, endlessly returns us to how language also points beyond itself to an ideality that operates precisely through the limit of theoretical reason’s ability to fully articulate or encompass facticity as fully knowable. Thus, Derrida … argues both that the unsurpassable tension between ideality and facticity is inherent in any analysis of language and can operate ethically in the sense that it preserves ideality as a beyond that can never be collapsed into the real. This preservation of the otherness of ideality is what I call the inescapable utopian moment inherent in Derrida’s deconstruction. (Cornell 1995: 192) Cornell’s distinctions require close reading in the context of this debate. She contends that any analysis of language implies the unsurpassable tension between ideality and facticity. This parallels the claim that communication implies a reference beyond its context to an ideal of consensus. But Cornell does not specify any content for this ideality. This is followed by a second more precarious claim: the unsurpassable tension ‘can operate ethically in the sense that it preserves ideality as a beyond that can never be collapsed into the real’. What exactly is the status of these two instances of ‘can’? The second bears the force of a necessity which cannot be surpassed. The ideal cannot be collapsed into the real now or ever. In itself this claim bears no moral force. The ideal which cannot be predetermined – if it could then it would already be part of the real – may shatter a constituted reality with negative consequences. This openness to the utterly abyssal within the given may be an openness to a horror which could not have been calculated.

68 Politics, idealisation and performativity The force of the first can is somewhat different though: it functions equivocally. This equivocation points to a possible means of harmonising these different positions: deconstruction points to the impossibility of dissolving the ideal into the real. Given this any claim to represent the ideal should be viewed as an attempt to hegemonise and control a space which ultimately cannot be closed down. There are any number of different ways in which this tension could be managed; as Laclau contends these particular alternatives do not follow from the facticity of this tension, but can only be determined in particular contexts. However, we could read this equivocation on Cornell’s part as suggesting that moral/political theory has to account for this tension, not run from it. Laclau and Mouffe suggest exactly this type of reading in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy when writing: This moment of tension, of openness, which gives the social its essentially incomplete and precarious character, is what every project for radical democracy should set out to institutionalise…. The advancing of a project for radical democracy means, therefore, forcing the myth of a rational and transparent society to recede progressively to the horizon of the social. This becomes a ‘non-place’, the symbol of its own impossibility. (Laclau 1985: 190) While Laclau refuses to attribute any morality to this moment of tension, he does suggest that this tension be institutionalised as a precondition for a project of radical democracy. How though is it possible to institutionalise an unrealisable ideal, or a tension which is constitutive of all sociality? The answer inevitably is democracy. The equivocation in Cornell’s statement then implies that democracy is impossible if this moment of tension is excluded from the social. Read in this light the tension between an absolute refusal of any implicit morality, and the claim that deconstruction already suggests a moral in the preservation of this tension starts in the wrong place. Given the theoretical claim that indeterminacy is an always already which cannot be overcome, I would argue that this indeterminacy is an essential condition of possibility for the institutionalisation of democracy, and for the preservation of an irreducible ideality. While indeterminacy does not predetermine any particular ethical action, it is a precondition for the thinking of an ethics. This is the subject of Chapter 9 which addresses explicitly the question of ethics in post-structuralist theory. There however I go beyond the interpretation offered by both Laclau and Cornell. For Derrida then the generalised performativity of language implies a promise that things may be otherwise, that the present is never simply at rest with itself. Yet Derrida’s explication of the messianic is not equivalent to Habermas’s discussion of communicative action. The messianic, in the secular sense in which Derrida uses the term, resists any reduction to facticity, to an is. In this respect it bears some resemblance to the thought of a constellation in the work of Adorno and Benjamin.3

Politics, idealisation and performativity 69 The promise arises from a consideration of the tension between the transcendental and the empirical. Richard Beardsworth has attempted to translate this tension into terms more familiar to political theory. In Beardsworth’s account any attempt to establish a transcendental horizon hides the empirical conditions of its own possibility. But this does not mean that we should simply turn to a consideration of empirical decisions, and ignore the transcendental. Rather the two are caught in a double bind. The necessity of iteration points to the possibility of idealisation, emerging out of empirical instantiations and transcending their particularity. But while iteration alludes beyond context, it also undermines the attempt to leave context behind altogether. This tension points to the decisions which underlie the maintenance of any institution. Given that no power is simply natural, all institutionalisation has to account for the contingency of its own maintenance. It is the recognition of this contingency which allows, Beardsworth argues, for a lesser violence. Beardsworth, following Derrida, discusses three dimensions to violence: the originary exclusions which undergird all systematicity; the invocation of law to maintain this systematicity; and lastly the empirical possibility of phenomenal violence in punishing ‘illegality’. A judgement aware of its own contingency, which acknowledges its own prescriptive force: … may make one more ready to transform the field that is posited by the nature of one’s decision – given that the field, together with its frontiers, is the result of a decision and not the representation of a preceding ‘real’. This is the argument of a lesser violence in a general economy of violence. (Beardsworth 1997: 12) Consideration of this general economy allows reflection on the violence underlying any decisions. This double bind of the transcendental–empirical points to the promise of democracy to come. But Beardsworth desists from ascribing to this possibility that things may be other than any positive content. Deconstruction is reduced to a reflection on what makes politics possible – the Political as a condition of possibility of any identity. This possibility follows from the essential undecidability of any determination, what Beardsworth terms an affirmation of the future, or in Derrida’s words a ‘democracy to come’. The political thrust of Beardsworth’s argument then is limited to pointing to the possibility of a lesser violence in the decisions we make; and intimating towards the ultimately empty promise that things may be otherwise. In this view democracy is not linked to any substantial account of the relation between community and individual rights. Deconstruction is a ‘method of analysis which accounts for the tertiary structure of a discipline’s (or institution’s) foundation, its exclusions and its consequent contradictions’ (Beardsworth 1997: 19).This accounting insists that there can be no politics of deconstruction. Rather, recognition of the structure of violence underlying our decisions allows their renegotiation, without certain grounds. There is little surprise in Beardsworth’s conclusion that ‘deconstruction forms firstly an account of why all political projects fail’ (Beardsworth 1997: 19).

70 Politics, idealisation and performativity Nonetheless attention to the violence underlying any decision, has important implication for the thinking of politics. These last considerations allow me to return to the relation between the two different theories of performativity and politics. Here I begin to develop the argument which is the basis of Chapter 7. I focus on four key themes. First I discuss the general points raised in previous sections which orient this discussion. While deconstruction provides a negative delimitation of the political I suggest that there are crucial issues which it poses for any account of politics. I then turn to three key issues for political theory: the critique of instrumental reason which is found in both Derrida and Habermas; the extent to which political theory can rely on an account of communication which is inner worldly; and the relationship between generalised principle of morality and the singularity of specific instances of wrongdoing. Laclau’s basic thesis is that every signifying system is always already internally subverted; a constitutive undecidability penetrates all structural arrangement (Laclau 1994: 168). This suggests that meaning is not natural, but is only maintained in being performed. Put in other terms, what Laclau develops in terms of a logic of signification and its limits, points to the impossibility of society ever constituting itself as a self-referential totality.4 Yet for Laclau the limits of signification of any meaningful totality does not necessarily ensue in an account of modern democratic politics. In fact it is neutral vis-à-vis politics. The problem is familiar: theoretical reason fails to provide a final determination of practical reason. Even in Derrida’s account of the messianic promise of language there seems to be no particular reason to defend one form of politics over another: Beardsworth’s suggestion that deconstruction alludes to the possibility of a lesser violence is elusive in providing no orientation for deciding what would amount to the lesser violence. However, my discussion earlier indicates a few issues which may supplement Habermas’s concept of communicative action. Deconstruction points to a promise which cannot be positivised. At the same time the breach within the ideal, undermines the very positing of such an ideal. Following Cornell this may be read to hold ethical implications, though not to imply any necessary morality. Preserving this moment as other, allows for a consideration of that which cannot be integrated within the symmetrical relation of obligation implied by the communicative account of rationality. A defence of democracy has to account both for the asymmetries of power, and for those symmetrical relations that bind participants to a community. If the ethical moment cannot be accounted for in a theoretical discourse, there are nonetheless good reasons for defending certain decisions over others, as I argue in my concluding chapters. For Habermas, all speech acts are split between their pragmatic conditions of articulation, and the necessity of a reference to a potential universality which is a consequence of the performative presuppositions of communication. Thus significance is divided between meaning and validity, full validity representing a state in which there would no longer be any dispute over meaning. Validity is that dimension of context which insures that it never becomes so internally

Politics, idealisation and performativity 71 coherent that no reference to an outside occurs. By posing the relation in this way I have surreptitiously prepared for the integration of an asymmetrical view of the relation between universal and particular. Above I noted that iterability is that infrastructure which both makes possible meaning and at the same time undermines its purity – it is the condition of possibility of its rearticulation and therefore deflection along a variety of axes, essentially indeterminate. The point in this case is not simply that a universal has to refer to some particular, but rather that the internal coherence of a position which defends the pure interiority of either universal or particular is denied. If we accept the performativity argument proposed by Derrida the possibility of pure symmetry is necessarily undermined. This approaches the heart of the dispute between critical theory and poststructuralism. For Derrida the performative aspect of language is precisely what resists the reduction to a discourse of science. Without this essential vulnerability to indeterminacy, language would operate in the form of a law which allows of no response. This is what Derrida points to in his discussion of justice. There can be no justice if language is reduced to the technical application of a principle. If meaning is essentially indeterminate then all speech acts are open to rearticulation. This vulnerability would infect any agreement which has the appearance of finality. The ideal is itself subject to the instability. What makes critique possible, namely the impossibility of it ever laying claim to that real which constative utterances presumed to have access to, is also what makes it an all the more urgent task. What does this mean for the enlightenment ideal of a non-instrumental form of reason? In Chapter 1, I argued that this same impulse motivates Adorno’s account of the limits of reason. The critique of instrumentality, of the reduction of humans to objects in an anonymous production process, also underlies the Marxian critique of capitalism. Paradoxically twentieth-century Marxism viewed the extension of the instrumental relation as the basis for political transformation. In this case the possibility of a democratically self-regulated polis coming into existence is, in the last instance, dependent upon elimination of conditions of scarcity. The assumption is that all social conflict is reducible to a struggle for control of the social product. Both deconstruction, and the more politically sensitive theory of communicative rationality, suggest that the struggle for recognition, and the politics of identity are as central to ascertaining and addressing problems of social conflict as modes of economic distribution. Theorising the limits of instrumental modes of reasoning (especially insofar as these are institutionalised in modern forms of bureaucratic and capitalist power) underlies the enterprise of critical theory. Politics becomes a space in which we search in common for a solution to disagreements, on a reconstructed model of the Greek polis. However, if politics is now as much about a struggle for recognition, as it is about resolving disputes over economic management, the question arises as to whether or not the model of reconciliation inherited from the Marxian project still holds. That is, can we imagine a state in which conflict no longer arises, a time in which we are at rest with ourselves and

72 Politics, idealisation and performativity others? The argument of this chapter, and the rest of the book suggests that this is neither possible, nor desirable. Yet Derrida maintains that the messianic element of Marx’s work should not be effaced: We believe that this messianic remains an ineffaceable mark – a mark one neither can nor should efface – of Marx’s legacy, and doubtless of inheriting, of the experience of inheritance in general. Otherwise, one would reduce the event-ness of the event, the singularity and alterity of the other. Otherwise justice risks being reduced once again to juridical-moral rules, norms or representations, within an inevitable totalising horizon. (Derrida 1994: 28) Habermas though is sensitive to the limits of a purely worldly transcendence. There are at least two reasons for this, both of which have interesting implications for the relation of communicative reason to deconstruction and post-Marxism. First, Habermas now acknowledges the need for some transcendent power beyond the imperatives of a purely inner worldly rational transcendence. As he puts it in his most recent book Between Facts and Norms: The fact that everyday affairs are necessarily banalised in political communication also poses a danger for the semantic potentials from which this communication must still draw its nourishment. A culture without thorns would be absorbed by mere needs for compensation; … it settles over the risk society like a foam carpet. No civil religion, however cleverly adjusted, could forestall this entropy of meaning. Even the moment of unconditionality insistently voiced in the transcending validity claims of everyday life does not suffice. Another kind of transcendence is preserved in the unfulfilled promise disclosed by the critical appropriation of identity-forming religious traditions, and still another in the negativity of modern art. The trivial and everyday must be open to the shock of what is absolutely strange, cryptic, or uncanny. Though these no longer cover for privileges, they refuse to be assimilated to pre-given categories. (Habermas 1996: 490) This passage ends a long essay defending a procedural concept of popular sovereignty, which translates his communicative ethics into an analysis of the principles of modern democratic will formation. He worries about the sobriety of an egalitarian mass culture which has so disenchanted the world, that it becomes a boring place, a world rational but bereft of happiness, rational but closed off from the radically other. This apparent convergence with Derrida concerning the experience of the impossible however, is not reflected in the basic premises of the communicative account. Derrida views the path through the aporia as an indispensable requirement of a justice, which avoids pure calculation, and responds to every decision in its unicity.

Politics, idealisation and performativity 73 Habermas limits philosophy to a redescription of what he takes to be the implicit reasoning structure of all language, excluding it from contact with the extraordinary. This is allocated to the aesthetic and religious spheres. Here it seems that Habermas’s desire to write a philosophy without metaphysics is caught in trying to draw limits which it cannot easily draw. He writes in an earlier essay: The projection of an unlimited communication community serves to substitute for the infinite character of ‘unconditionality’ the idea of an open but goal-directed process of interpretation that transcends the boundaries of social space and historical time from within, from the perspective of a finite existence situated within the world. (Habermas 1983: 53) Yet Habermas himself argues that there is a strong need for one of the great religions to be transformed into an inner worldly rationality reinvigorating the lifeworld with its transcendent energy. With Derrida we should question whether or not the reduction of philosophy to a guardian of reason, and the defence of it in terms of validity criteria which can never be realised, has to address the abyssal within itself. Does the too quick drawing of boundaries not exclude the world disclosing power of art and religion from precisely the sphere in which it is most apposite, namely the space in which our self disclosure runs up against that of others? If it is admitted that traditions within the lifeworld demand regeneration from a transcendentalism linked to religious motifs (admittedly secularised) then the defence of a purely internal reproduction of rational structures of legitimation would have to incorporate this need within those very limits.

Conclusion This chapter has raised many different though related issues. Before proceeding to an account of the quasi-transcendental in the next chapter, I briefly emphasise a number of the essential arguments I have made. I began with an account of theories of performativity. My intention here was to displace the idea that communication admits of an ideal of symmetrical consensus. A number of related steps underpin this argument. I reject the idea that the meaning of speech acts may be referred back a priori to the intentionality of the speaking subject. This is not to suggest that intentionality is irrelevant. Rather, because intentionality can only be expressed in terms of systems of meaning, I argue that the speech act can never finally be controlled by the subject who emits an utterance. This allows for a space of contestation and slippage to which all speech acts are subject. I rejected too the thesis that the structure of communication implicates us in an unavoidable orientation towards consensus. This may be approached purely in terms of a logical account of signification, which points to the undecidability underlying even the idealisation of consensus.

74 Politics, idealisation and performativity It holds implications too for the singularity of instances which may disorient any idealisation. As Derrida writes: What also resonates in ‘Marx’s three voices’ is the appeal or the political injunction, the pledge or the promise … the originary performativity that does not conform to pre-existing conventions, unlike all the performatives analysed by the theoreticians of speech acts, but whose force of rupture produces the institution or the constitution, the law itself, which is to say also the meaning that appears to, that ought to, or that appears to have to guarantee it in return. (Derrida 1994: 31) A number of points follow from this general account. I have suggested that the logic of performativity does proffer a promise, which has ethical implications. But no particular morality follows from a neutral account of this general logic. Rather, I have argued that a theory of justice, or morality has to maintain the open space of a promise which is necessarily unrealisable. This allows, within an account of communication, for the emergence of the uncanny, that which Habermas himself acknowledges is irreducible to an inner worldly transcendence. Moreover, it allows that in concrete situations of claims to justice, decisions may have to be made which traduce the principle of equality central to the universalisation principle. Expressed simply, acting justly sometimes necessitates acting unequally. This is relevant not only for the application of moral norms, but in the very formulation of the principle of morality. The logic of a general performativity, when translated into an account of politics suggests that power is an ever present element of all sociality. However, there is also a mutual contamination between validity and power, suggesting that both are necessary elements of political order. Neither validity nor power are eliminable from a democratic hegemony. I agree with Habermas then that here is a claim to disarmament opened up in all dialogue. But this claim works alongside an irreducible violence. The question for a democratic society is not simply how to make power and democracy compatible, but to demonstrate that because they go together validity and power need to be balanced in a manner which mutually undermines the ability of each to suffocate the other. Part of the claim to legitimacy of a democratic society then is that power is necessary. These issues will be elaborated in greater detail in the concluding chapters.

5

Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory

In discussing the logic of performativity I concluded that any idealisation must take account of the constitutive impossibility which inhabits and inhibits its realisation. This is by no means a novel conclusion, although the relation of this account to different developments of the key concept of performativity allows for a reflection from a different angle on key debates concerning the legacy of modernity and enlightenment. Here, I investigate the status of these conclusions. Both accounts of performativity make strong universal claims yet the provenance of these claims is rarely addressed. The term used to describe this uncertainty is quasi-transcendental. For Laclau, the term describes conditions of possibility that are at the same time conditions of impossibility of any idealisation. Recall, for example, the infrastructure of iterability, which both makes possible and simultaneously undermines idealisation, in an investigation of the necessary imbrication of universal and particular. Habermas uses the term to suggest a rapprochement or blurring of the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori. In spite of this generalised use of the term few authors offer any detailed accounting of either its derivation, or precisely what it signifies. In this chapter I link these different accounts of the quasi-transcendental. I assess the status of Habermas’s reconstructive science and of the infrastructural analysis carried out by Laclau. The chapter has a number of systematically linked aims. In the first section I briefly outline Kant’s defence of transcendentalism. This establishes the framework within which the debate regarding the quasi-transcendental occurs. In the next section I evaluate the quasi-transcendental status of Habermas’s universal pragmatics. I outline Habermas’s justification of the minimal claims of reason, but question whether a reconstructive science, relying on the ultimately contingent results of science, can make transcendental claims. Following my criticisms of Habermas I turn, in the section on discourse theory and quasi-transcendentalism to the political theory of Ernesto Laclau. Laclau too relies on a quasi-transcendental argument. Here, I develop my discussion of performativity, drawing on recent philosophical attempts to defend the quasi-transcendental status of deconstruction. Given that the quasi-transcendental status of Laclau’s account has not been fully developed in his own work, I integrate certain of his concerns, with those of Habermas, in order to begin the outline of a quasi-transcendental account of the political. The final section discusses the implications of this for a critical political theory.

76 Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory

Kant: the transcendental presuppositions of human knowledge A central preoccupation of modern political thought concerns the conditions apposite to the realisation of freedom. Indeed, for modernity, it is perhaps the key question of democratic theory. Kant’s account of the transcendental preconditions of human knowledge suggests the limits to our knowledge of freedom, yet simultaneously analyses the formal preconditions for its realisation. Kant defends his transcendental account of human knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason. I begin this discussion with an account of Kant’s theory of the understanding and his deduction of the conditions of possibility of human knowledge. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason suggests that human knowledge depends upon synthetic principles which are the necessary presuppositions of experience (Kant 1929: A10). These presuppositions are not inferred from particular experiences, but are the precondition of any experience. In the first critique Kant investigates these synthetic principles. As presuppositions of knowledge they can be neither empirically derived nor logically deduced. Introducing the term transcendental he writes: I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects insofar as this mode of knowledge is, to be possible, a priori. (Kant 1929: 59) He identifies two classes of synthetic a priori propositions: a priori intuitions, space and time, which govern the appearance of all objects to consciousness; and a priori concepts such as causality, and substance. He summarises his argument succinctly: Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions; they are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts (Kant 1929: B34) These concepts supplement the appearance of objects conceptually, thus making them accessible to the understanding. In a vein reminiscent of Austin’s later critique of logical positivism, Kant refutes Hume’s claim that the concept of causality mistakes constant conjunction for cause, and that we can say no more than that we observe the constant conjunction of events. As Kant summarises it: …in the [field of ] appearance, in terms of which all objects are given us, there are two elements, the form of intuition (space and time), which can be known and determined completely a priori and the matter, the physical element (or content) – the latter signifying something which is met in space and time and which therefore contains an existent corresponding to sensation. In respect to this material element which can never be given in any determinate fashion

Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory 77 otherwise than empirically, we can have nothing a priori except indeterminate concepts of the synthesis of possible sensations, in so far as they belong in a possible experience, to the unity of apperception. (Kant 1929: A723) The a priori particulars, space and time are pure forms of perception, as opposed to the matter of perception. With regard to this matter the only knowledge we can have is of indeterminate concepts which are the preconditions of any knowledge. Judgement, according to Kant, comprises the synthesis of concept and intuition. These two different aspects of a priori knowledge are both necessary in order to form a judgement about reality. Knowledge thus has two sources: first our sensibility, or intuition, in which we access objects only as appearances. Second, the faculty of understanding which allows us to form judgements, and thus knowledge, with the application of concepts. But how is this synthesis brought about? Clearly it is irreducible to the particular subject, as it reaches beyond the individual judgements we all make. It is here that Kant relies on what he terms the transcendental unity of apperception in the knowing subject, the seat of the understanding. Every judgement the empirical subject makes in the world presupposes a pure subject of apperception. The transcendental subject has as its correlate the thing-in-itself. Both are noumena, and cannot be known by the understanding. The transcendental unity of apperception, deduced from an analysis of the conditions of our knowledge, presupposes the unity of our consciousness, a unity which empirical egos could never attain. This transcendental limit to our knowledge has a bearing on how we understand freedom. Because knowledge of freedom cannot be derived from experience, it too is part of this transcendental apperception. The relevance of these claims is elucidated in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Synthetic a priori knowledge is then only a form expressing the universal and necessary laws of the understanding. These laws present us with criterion of truth, but the formal principle is only ‘the negative condition of truth’.1 It reveals only what the subject contributes to organising the empirical world as knowledge. This does not guarantee a true knowledge of the world. Transcendental argument ‘takes over the task of determining and securing the conditions of possibility of valid cognition’ (Gasché 1986: 19). The central role of synthesis is attributed to what Kant terms the imagination. Imagination brings concepts to bear upon experience. The transcendental deduction then severs humanity from access to the absolute. The Critique of Pure Reason deduces epistemic conditions, which at the same time signal the impossibility of communication with the absolute. Kant displaces the fruitless debate between realism and idealism. In his view both presuppose absolute, or theocentric, knowledge of the thing-in-itself. Idealism assumes that human knowledge is adequate to itself, while realism presupposes a simple correspondence between knowledge and the objects of knowledge. Kant’s transcendental idealism, by contrast, deduces the objectivating conditions of human knowledge. He thus rejects an ontology of the thing-in-itself, as well as the reduction of knowledge to experience or sense impression. He does nonetheless presuppose

78 Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory the existence of things in themselves, the noumenon which we cannot know other than through its appearance as a phenomenon (Allison 1983). If for Kant ‘enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’ (the inability to make use of Understanding without another’s guidance) (Kant 1992: 51)1 the full use of reason is restricted by this ultimately negative principle, the thing in itself, or the transcendental subject of apperception (Kant 1992: 54). Reflecting on this sundering of the subject from itself Deleuze usefully quotes Rimbaud: ‘I is another’ to indicate the separation of the transcendental I, from the ego which exists in real time, and which is subject to time and thus receptive. The implications of Kant’s Copernican revolution is not the submission of the object to the subject or vice versa, but the idea of harmony between the two. Phenomena, Kant argues, are neither only appearances nor products of our activity; they affect us as passive receptive subjects and are subject to us because they are not things in themselves. The thing in itself and the subject in itself are impossible objects of knowledge, as shown in the discussion of transcendental apperception (Deleuze 1984: 13). Knowledge begets two elements which go beyond synthesis, namely consciousness and a necessary relation to an object of this consciousness. Ontology presumes that knowledge of the thing in itself, rather than the thing as it appears to humans, is possible. This rejection of any simplistic ontology frames Kant’s outline of an epistemology adequate to human understanding. Despite rejecting ontology Kant still distinguishes the transcendental and empirical dimensions of the subject. While knowledge of the subject at the transcendental level is impossible, empirical subjects exercise these faculties in every judgement they make. This suggests that knowledge is not possible in the domain of morality. The transcendental ideal of freedom acts as an orienting or regulative ideal, but cannot be known. The question the following section investigates is how we orient ourselves towards a moral law, whose primary imperative is a freedom which cannot be known. Again, my discussion of practical reason is by no means exhaustive – I hope only to introduce concerns relevant to recent debates concerning quasi-transcendentalism. For Kant a moral maxim is ‘a pure form with no object, sensible or intelligible other than itself’ (Deleuze 1984: x). We cannot acquire knowledge of the moral law, as we would, say, of some object in the world. Why? Practical reason is a fact of reason, which investigation of the nature of ourselves reveals as necessary. On the other hand we know from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason that unconditionally a priori knowledge of objects is impossible. We can only know objects as appearances, but are constitutionally disempowered with regard to the thing in itself. If the role of practical reason is to discover unconditionally a priori moral truths, which tell us what we are absolutely bound to do, yet knowledge reaches its limit at the unconditionally a priori, is knowledge of the moral law possible? Kant’s answer refers back to his discussion of the exercise of pure reason in the Critique of Pure Reason. There, he had argued that the transcendental deduction reveals the limits to the exercise of reason. However, in discussing morality he argues that there is a legitimate exercise of pure reason, a regulative role in which pure reason takes no object, but provides a moral orientation for the subject. For

Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory 79 Kant this does not amount to unconditioned knowledge, that is, a knowledge which does not acknowledge the perspective of humans in the world. Rather, in being employed regulatively, the ideas of reason, which indeed derive from the unconditioned, guide our actions in the world. Thus moral agents are divided between the empirical and transcendental ego. Roger Scruton neatly sums up the implications of this for a theory of freedom: Freedom is a transcendental idea, without application in the empirical world. And in knowing ourselves to be free we know ourselves at the same time as part of nature and as members of the transcendental world … . Just as there are a priori laws of nature that can be derived from the unity of consciousness, so too are there a priori laws of reason which can be derived from the perspective of transcendental freedom. (Scruton 1982: 61) Put simply pure practical reason is a property of the noumenal subject, not the phenomenal subject of experience. Likewise, moral law cannot be derived from natural law, else it would be necessary and exclude freedom from the realm in which it should be exercised. Determinate knowledge of a pure practical reason would contradict the principle of the autonomy of the will. Theoretical knowledge illegitimately attempts to prescribe necessity to the free moral agent, when that necessity is derived from any sensuous experience. For Kant the moral law is expressed not in the form of theoretical knowledge of an object, but as a categorical imperative which is purely formal, privileges the right over the good and is impartial. The categorical imperative stipulates, in one of its formulations, ‘act according to no other maxim than that which can also have itself as a universal law for its object’, that is, a law which is an autonomous end unto itself. Practical reason thus has a practical interest, ‘bearing upon rational beings as things in themselves, in so far as they form a supra-sensible nature to be realised’ (Deleuze 1984: 43). Here reason gives its own law unto itself, unlike understanding, where reason has the task of elucidating the transcendental ideas, as correlates of a priori concepts, used in securing their application to objects. This confirms Kant’s central moral intuition that human beings should be treated as ends in themselves and not merely as means to an end. While insisting that the moral law ties us to a categorical imperative as free agents, Kant avers that this can only ever be an idea of freedom; we belong to two worlds, the sensible world, and the intelligible world which guides us in what we ought to do. Our actions rarely, if ever, conform to this absolute law, to absolute freedom. We acknowledge the authority of this law, while transgressing it (Deleuze 1984: 85). Given this, the condition of possibility of moral law, a rationally autonomous and free agent, is also its condition of impossibility. We should note though the strange nature of this impossibility. It is a prerequisite of the action of a free subject – a subject with absolute knowledge of pure

80 Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory reason would have no need to exercise freedom, given that all would already be predetermined.2 Practical reason for Kant is then centrally concerned with the problem of freedom. But Kant’s critique necessitates a rectification of the classical conceptualisation of freedom, found in natural law and contract theories. Contract theorists such as Hobbes and Locke presupposed a pre-social right to individual freedom. This freedom has necessarily to be constrained by social sanction, in a functioning society, democratic or otherwise. By contrast Kant argues: … because it is absolutely impossible to give an example of it from experience [… he is here speaking about the idea of freedom as a faculty of absolute spontaneity MD], since no absolutely unconditioned determination of authority can be found among the causes of things as appearances, we could defend the supposition of a freely acting cause when applied to a being in the world of sense only insofar as that being was regarded also as noumenon. (Kant 1995: 51) To know freedom then would place humans in the position of a God. Rather, Kant argues, the moral law infinitely raises my worth as that of an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals a life independent of all animality and even of the whole world of sense – at least as it may be inferred from the final destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination which is not restricted to the conditions and boundaries of this life but reaches into the infinite. (Kant 1995: 169) While freedom can never be known, then, or be an object of a speculative inquiry, practical reason maintains an interest in realising the conditions of freedom on earth. But in so doing practical reason is necessarily implicated in the infinite, an infinite beyond ‘the condition and boundaries of this life’. As a starting point for the development of political theory Kant rejects the ideal of absolute freedom as realisable on earth. Indeed the claim to know the conditions of this freedom, and then force their realisation, may be deemed an illegitimate exercise of the faculty of understanding with potentially disastrous consequences. Kant’s postulation of three distinct interests of reason has as its underside a particular conception of humanity and politics, which twentieth-century linguistic philosophy, and an increased awareness of the relation between language, consciousness and world undermine. A brief example, the positing of a pure subject of apperception, must suffice. Kant’s demarcation of the interest(s) of reason presupposes, as we have seen, a transcendental subject. This subject splits the actual empirical ego of any individual (into its empirical and intellectual sides, or ‘ego’ and ‘I’) and is the foundation of the actions of that real individual. This undermines any knowledge which claims to encapsulate the whole, and any simplistic

Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory 81 correspondence theory of truth. Kant suggests the inherent instability of a subject, sundered from both purely intelligible and purely sensuous experience. Yet he still posits the transcendental ‘I’ as the ultimate arbiter in disputes over the moral law. Given the necessity and universality of the transcendental argument, this presupposition appears to be necessary. Yet Hegel’s rejoinder to Kant seems apposite. Gasché summarises it thus: Hegel’s objections to Kant’s handling of the ‘true a priori’ is that the latter’s reduction of this a priori to the pure formal unity of the I think not only robs the true a priori of its character as an original synthetic unity, but also fixes the formal ego in an opposition with an always unfathomable beyond. With this objection in particular, Hegel’s radical critique of reflection becomes manifest: although it retraces the original synthesis – a synthesis of which subject and world are the necessarily bipartite appearances and products – the metaphysics of reflection proves unable to lift the self reflecting subject out of its opposition to the world of objects. (Gasché 1986: 31–2) Simply put, Hegel’s critique suggests that Kant’s legal deduction makes knowledge independent of the real empirical world, the context which determines its conditions of production. Its formalism necessitates the positing of a subject which exceeds all empirical egos, and loses all touch with the historical becoming of reason. Kant’s defence of the unity of apperception remains purely formal. Building on this critique of the formal nature of Kant’s deduction, quasitranscendental arguments dismiss the supposition of a transcendental subject of apperception. But quasi-transcendentalism itself takes a number of forms by no means compatible with each other. In one prominent version, transcendental validity is established by showing that alternatives are incoherent, or if not incoherent, entail as a presupposition that which they attempt to exclude. Thus transcendentalism claims universality, but a forever provisional universality. It is assumed that there are certain presuppositions which have to made before particular experiences are possible. Habermas, for example, defends a reconstructive science which reconstructs our intuitive communicative presuppositions. This depends upon a transcendental double tack: tackling opponents’ arguments on the principle of reductio ad absurdum, and justifying his own argument with a universal pragmatic accounting of what makes communication possible. Here transcendental argument, contra Kant, comes into contact with the contaminated reality which had been excluded from the realm of pure knowledge. Indeed, it is only in establishing the presuppositions of this dirty realm that knowledge in any way transcends its provinciality. The derivation of transcendental knowledge does not proceed by means of a transcendental deduction. In a second tradition, associated most closely with Foucault’s The Order of Things, the transcendental a priori is historicised. As Foucault expresses it: ‘historians do not realise that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us is not valid for a previous period’ (Foucault 1972: 172) and thus ‘…the history of knowledge can be

82 Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory written only on the basis of what was contemporaneous with it, certainly not in terms of reciprocal influence, but in terms of conditions and a prioris established in time’ (Foucault 1972: 208). Historicising the a priori though has radical implications. The preconditions of universality and necessity no longer hold once apparently transcendental presuppositions are dependent on time. I will address these claims only by implication in what follows. A third tradition, developed most rigorously in deconstruction, refuses the all too easy historicisation of the transcendental. This runs the risk, it is argued, of placing an under-theorised concept of history, or change, in the position of a transcendental presupposition. Rather, the preconditions for a thinking of history itself are investigated. The concern here is that a reversion to history simply positivises what is, without thinking that which makes these positivities possible. The importance of transcendentalism from this perspective is that it forces us out of a pre-reflective reliance on experience. I turn in the following section to Habermas’s appropriation and reworking of the transcendental turn in philosophy.

Habermas: reconstructive science and the quasi-transcendental In Chapter 1, I noted Adorno’s circumspection regarding knowledge of the absolute. This follows from his analysis of the relation between language, conceptuality and rationality. He writes of Kant’s transcendentalism: With Kant’s consequent full confirmation of the scientific system as the form of truth, thought seals its own nullity, for science is technical practice, as far removed from reflective consideration of its own goal as are other forms of labour under the pressure of the system. (Adorno and Horkheimer 1985: 85) Adorno, suspicious of the totalising claims of rational thought, rejects Kant’s epistemic analysis of the conditions apposite to truth. Habermas too refers to the Kantian tradition in reconstructing the universal pragmatics of speech, and with Adorno rejects a number of Kant’s premises. These reservations were raised in a preliminary form in Chapter 1. Habermas objects primarily to Kant’s arrogation of authority to a philosophy which stands over the sciences, clarifying their foundations and delimiting the different domains of reason. In this role philosophy acts as ‘the highest court of appeal’, a ‘cognition before cognition’ (Habermas 1990: 2–3). His alternative is a rational reconstruction of intuitive capacities, which all competent users of language must presuppose, if they are to communicate. A reconstructive science ‘makes individuals aware of the rule competencies which they always already practice … serv[ing] the task of self-reflection in the sense of making individuals aware of what they always already know’. As Benhabib notes reconstructive science is an ‘empirical phenomenology of mind tracing the development of ontoand phylo-genetic competencies’ (Benhabib 1987: 264). It posits laws which all competent speakers have to presuppose, as participants in a common lifeworld.

Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory 83 Reconstructive sciences thus abjure recourse to a transcendental subjectivity. The distinction between the noumenal and empirical subject which founds Kant’s critical philosophy is rejected and the subject is located in the space of communicative networks, mediated by socialisation. Habermas thus adopts a revised version of transcendental argument. He renounces the claim to prove the objective validity of all concepts of objects of possible experience in general. His quasitranscendentalism posits hypothetical claims which are contingent, and open to revision. Despite its nomological nature, reconstructive sciences only make knowledge claims which are hypothetical, in contrast to the nomological claims of logical positivists. According to Habermas the claims of reason inhabit everyday practice, without reference to a realm beyond the temporal. Habermas’s version of reconstructive science is not an epistemological enterprise. It does not seek to finally resolve the realist/idealist debate, as does Kant’s transcendental deduction. It is only within the framework of the various validity claims delineated by the universal pragmatics of language, that the truth conditions of speech acts may be analysed. For Habermas truth is differentiated across a range of discourses, and depends upon the relation between the universal claim to validity, and the contingency of particular contexts. Thus an aspect of dirty particularity always attaches to any claim to speak the truth. What may be reconstructed are the formal preconditions for the attainment of the best possible truth, depending upon the type of validity subject to dispute. In this respect Chambers is a little too quick when arguing: Despite initial similarities between the Kantian and Habermasian enterprises, there are also important differences, which lead Habermas to use the term quasi-transcendental. The first major difference is that Kant’s question is much bigger and more fundamental than Habermas’s. (Chambers 1997: 113) There are of course major differences, but Habermas’s project is in many respects as fundamental as Kant’s. He claims to find the basic structure of humanity’s relations to the world in the various validity claims borne by communicative action. If Habermas is not engaged in an epistemological exercise an important question needs to be answered. Under which of the claims to validity may Habermas’s theoretical account be evaluated? As I argue next, assessing its validity under the claims to morality or sincerity is impossible: the theoretical claim has to be evaluated under the claim to truth with its attention to propositional truth claims. Although evaluated under the claim to truth, the proof of the validity of Habermas’s own enterprise is itself maieutic3 – the universality of the validity claims is subject to review, and may be reconstructed in a theoretical discourse, should there be sufficient evidence for their rebuttal. The a posteriori and a priori are, as a result, not so easily distinguished. Knowledge of what has to be presupposed for successful communication, is derived from a retrospective reconstruction of competencies exercised by subjects. For this reason the mode of discernment

84 Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory of this knowledge is not a transcendental deduction but a fallibilistic reconstruction of intuitive competencies. Despite this apparent modesty universal pragmatics seeks to reconstruct: … exactly that fundamental system of rules that adult subjects master to the extent that they can fulfill the conditions for a happy employment of sentences in utterances, no matter to which particular language the sentences may belong and in which accidental contexts the utterances may be employed. (Habermas 1979: 26) In this case no stronger alternative may be found to the arguments proposed and the validity claims transcend all restrictions of time and place. Philosophy reconstructs these already given presuppositions after the fact, and in delineating them provides a defence of the minimal claims of reason (Habermas 1990: 9). It thus has the role of ‘… an empirical theory with strong claims … [which] plays the part of a mediating interpreter’, relating the different interests of reason to one another and the lifeworld, without grounding them (Habermas 1990: 17). Reconstruction is thus open to a methodological pluralism. It takes into account observer and participant standpoints, it combines interpretive and conceptual analysis with descriptive and empirical accounts, and it acknowledges different strategies of research as well as the validity of their results. The force of his theoretical argument is derived from the reciprocal endorsement of these various disciplines. These hypothetical reconstructions suggest ‘conditions to which any systems of meaning are subject’ (McCarthy 1995: 179). The imbrication of transcendental argument in empirical research means too that the reconstructions are hypothetical – different empirical theories test consonance across disciplines. As Chambers notes then, Habermas steers a path between transcendental deduction, nomological methodology and hermeneutical interpretation. The analysis of the conditions of possibility of communication is not a deduction, as it relies on the testing of hypothetical presuppositions, which may be corroborated by further research. It is not purely nomological in that the claims investigated transcend all particularity, nor is it purely a hermeneutic exposition of context-dependent meaning. The validity claims transcend all provinciality. Importantly the theory is fallible, but not falsifiable, that is, there is no empirical explanation which could falsify its interpretive claims. The reason for this is that the theory itself claims to interpret what has to be presupposed in order for humans to experience facts. Thus its fallibility cannot be proven by a correspondence theory of truth (Chambers 1997: 119). As Habermas writes: Ultimately, there is only one criterion by which beliefs can be judged valid, and that is that they are based on agreement reached by argumentation. This means that everything whose validity is at all disputable rests on shaky foundations. It matters little if the ground underfoot shakes a bit less for those who debate problems of physics than for those who debate problems of

Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory 85 morals and aesthetics. The difference is a matter of degree only, as the post-empiricist philosophy of science has shown. (Habermas 1990: 14) This is true too of Habermas’s own enterprise. In the absence of metaphysical and empirical guarantors, he has to presuppose an ultimate fallibilism. It is important though to distinguish the methodological proposals from the results which Habermas deems to have discovered. While his reconstructive methodology is inherently fallible and, as he consistently acknowledges, subject to either verification or rejection according to the standards of other sciences, this same fallibilism is rarely extended to the results of his analysis. Indeed Habermas has built a compelling and wide ranging social theory around the universal pragmatics of language. Contrary then to the revised theory of performativity which I have outlined in respect of Laclau’s work, Habermas does not view quasi-transcendental argument as pointing to conditions of impossibility which are at the same time conditions of possibility. Rather his idealisations rely on a quasi-empirical, quasitranscendental argument seeking to delineate conditions that are absolutely necessary yet hypothetical. This distinction between the hypothetical and the contingent is fundamental. For Habermas the hypothetical nature of the claims of communicative reason does not imply their contingency. The deep competencies he claims to find render possible communication and communicative action. The reduction of the distance between empirical and transcendental argument has a further implication for the relation between theoretical and practical reason. McCarthy writes: … his [Habermas] theory of communication attempts to find prescriptive norms in the descriptive norms of speech … the whole point of his doing so is precisely to break down the immanent/transcendent, real/ideal, is/ought dichotomies that have haunted Kantianism. Norms that are always already operative in communicative interaction are not ‘external’; idealisations that function as presuppositions of rational discourse, are not ideal as opposed to real. (McCarthy 1995: 179) This illuminates the critical force of Habermas’s argument. If the norms which propel us to challenge existing convention are already implicit in everyday communication, theorising their existence is merely the subsequent reconstruction of a know-how possessed by any competent user of language. There is thus no reason to posit a realm beyond the existent, in order to find compelling reasons for accepting or rejecting different courses of action. The subject is always already socialised and implicated in communicative networks. Any imperative towards freedom is derived from these very networks and the implicit claims borne by them. Kant had argued that transcendental arguments are characterised by universality and necessity. Habermas cannot claim these qualities for his own work. First, he acknowledges the fallibility of his theoretical account. Second, the presupposition

86 Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory of an ‘as if’ is always subject to competing frameworks. Habermas claims that his framework is the best explanation – but the universality and necessity he attributes to his analysis of communication may always be proved incorrect. As Benhabib writes: … if we take seriously the possibility of competing frameworks of interpretation and explanation in reconstructive sciences, then the claim to uniqueness associated with transcendental arguments will have to be abandoned as well. Reconstructive arguments can fill neither the conditions of necessity nor those of uniqueness associated with transcendental argumentations, and still retain their status as empirically fruitful scientific accounts. (Benhabib 1987: 266–7) For Benhabib rational reconstruction is more empirical than transcendental. She suggests that the attempt to give strong justification for the achievements of modernity is not possible. Let me quickly summarise the key points, and proceed to a few points of criticism. Habermas seeks to uncover unavoidable presuppositions of communication. Because unavoidable, these presuppositions are both universal and necessary. However, they cannot be deduced; they are reconstructed post facto so to speak. The claim to know them is itself fallible, and depends upon an argumentative discourse, which proves its validity by being the best possible explanation, at the time. Different forms of research corroborate the claims of communicative reason: universal pragmatics, developmental psychology, linguistics, empirical pragmatics to name only a few. This argument may be termed quasi-transcendental because it uncovers universal presuppositions of any communication, but acknowledges that these are fallible. Yet this fallibility extends only to the methodological precepts adopted by Habermas. It does not translate into an account of contingency which has implications for the deployment of the theory, either as a standard for critical theory, or in its implications for an account of democracy. At the heart of this is a moment of theoretical recursivity. The terms which Habermas outlines as the basis for challenging his own theory, are precisely the terms which the theory finds in its study of communication. As Horowitz writes ‘reconstructive science is used to confirm communicative validity, which is now the only possible ground for reconstructive science (Horowitz 1998: 19). This peculiar circularity is not all that strange if it is remembered that Habermas claims to find exactly the different forms of rationality, and thus world relations, in the structure of language. If his reconstructions are accurate, then they would also delineate the terms on which the theoretical account would be proved wrong. This though brings me to the particular validity claim under which the theoretical account would have to fall. Again Horowitz puts the point well: [communicative action] as a theory must claim validity within one or more … of only three aspects of validity. It obviously cannot establish its own

Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory 87 validity with reference to a normative domain of possible validity: it is not true or false because it might be morally right. And it certainly cannot be true/false because it is what Habermas sincerely feels. The only way that the theory of communicative action can claim validity is as a theory … applicable within the objective world relation. But it cannot be merely any scientific theory among others. It must be one which somehow establishes not only the necessity of scientific theories themselves but also the necessity/possibility and irreducibility of moral rightness and expressive authenticity as well. (Horowitz 1998: 17) The validity of the results of reconstructive science then can only be evaluated in terms of the objective world relation. It is this which prompts Rasmussen to note that: In principle, Habermas attempts to read his emancipation thesis out of a claim about the nature of discourse, rather than out of political theory. The emancipation thesis will then rest upon a scientific assertion about the nature of language. (Rasmussen 1990: 14) If though the emancipation thesis rests upon the fallible results of reconstructive science, it risks what Habermas wants to exclude: the possibility that the results of reconstructive science are contingent, and even context dependent. Moreover if the validity of the enterprise can only be evaluated under the claim to propositional truth, another problem arises. The truth of the objective world is reduced to the realisation of a warranty implied in language, and thus ultimately to consensus. Even if it is claimed that the truth asserted through consensus is only a reaching toward this ideal, the objectivity of an ultimately non-disclosable nature appears to problematise this reduction of truth to consensus. Mary Hesse writes: Habermas appears to reject any element of empirical correspondence in his theory of the justification of truth claims, and to rely upon a theory of argumentation and consensus. But it remains unclear how the empirical constraint operates in the justification of truth claims for descriptive utterance, either in science or in ordinary language, and in particular it is unclear how this constraint is related to the concept of ‘consensus’ truth within discourse. (Hesse 1982: 114) It is not my intention to enter into the complex debate between correspondence and constructivist theories of truth. The flagging of this issue though serves to mark the problems with assuming that truth can be equated with the realisation of a tacit ideal implicit in language. Habermas is himself aware of this problem. He writes in response to Hesse: This does not to be sure exempt the discourse theory of truth from the obligation urged by Hesse, to explain how empirical limitations operate in the

88 Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory process of justifying truth claims connected with descriptive statements. What is above of all of interest here is the role of the experimental action which transforms experiences into data. (Habermas 1982: 275) In the section which follows I suggest that Laclau’s attention to the limits of signification, and thus to the limits on linguistic disclosure of the real, or truth, may help in attempting to resolve these questions. I have two main problems then with Habermas’s defence of the quasi-transcendental status of his claims. The fallibility which Habermas admits of at the level of theoretical investigation does not appear to hold direct consequences for the ideal. Habermas, I suggest requires an account of contingency which effects the knowledge claims that he makes. Instead he recognises the hypothetical nature of the claims he makes, only as a means of according to them a greater legitimacy. This holds consequences for how we consider the limits of the ideal of implicit consensus, especially when this refers to the theoretical claim to truth.

Discourse theory and quasi-transcendentalism Performativity and quasi-transcendentalism I argued in the previous chapter that at the root of disagreements between poststructuralist and critical theoretical accounts is philosophy of language. David Rasmussen has usefully summarised this disagreement in terms of synchronic and diachronic accounts of language. Synchronic accounts hold, to summarise brutally, that language is a synchronous structure, in which the meaning of any one term can only be determined if the elements which belong to the structure are strictly delimited. In Rasmussen’s reading this implies that one cannot predicate the project of modernity on an account of language ‘inasmuch as the emancipatory relation [can] not be associated with a specific temporally discernible form of linguistic apprehension’ (Rasmussen 1990: 19). Habermas, he argues, relies on a diachronic conception of language. The rationalisation processes experienced by modern societies may be understood through a reconstruction of the potentials unleashed by the demand to justify actions communicatively. Communicative rationality represents the highest stage of a learning process borne by societal evolution, and implicit in the structure of communication. Matters are a little more complex though. Insofar as Habermas finds validity claims implicit in all communication his systematisation of speech acts is a synchronic attempt to provide a stable point of orientation for critical theory. This synchronous moment anchors the thesis about social evolution, without attributing any necessity to the path that history may take. It relies on semantic and pragmatic idealisations which correspond to the distinction Habermas draws between sentence and the utterance. Habermas writes: The stable propositional structure of thoughts stands out from the stream of experiences in virtue of an ideal status that furnishes concepts and judgments

Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory 89 with general, intersubjectively recognizable and hence identical contents. This ideality intrinsically refers to the idea of truth. But grammatical invariance alone, that is, the linguistic rule structures that account for the ideal generality of concepts and thoughts, cannot explain the idealisation connected with the unconditional meaning of truth claims. (Habermas 1996: 15) It is this implicit synchronicity which Laclau’s work throws into question. Central to Laclau’s work is an analysis of the conditions under which unequivocal meaning attaches to statements, of whatever sort. He concludes that meaning is inherently equivocal. This argument is derived from a critique of the possibility of a synchronic system of language. He develops this argument with recourse to what he terms a logic of the empty signifier4 situating the limits of signification squarely within a politics. His argument is straightforward: An empty signifier can only emerge if there is a structural impossibility in signification as such and if this impossibility can only signify itself as an interruption (subversion, distortion, etc.) of the structure of the sign. That is that the limits of signification can only announce themselves as the impossibility of realising what is in those limits – if the limits could be signified in a direct way, they would be internal to signification, and, ergo, would not be limits at all. (Laclau 1994: 168) This suggests that the very idea of a purely synchronous structure of signification is self-contradictory. The posing of the problem in terms of limits already suggests a relation to transcendental argument. Indeed Laclau speaks of signification as such. He details a subversion necessary to all signification, and to any system of meaning. Concern with a structure, as such, arises out of a consideration and critique of structural linguistics. Laclau assumes that ‘the totality of language is involved in each single act of signification’ (Laclau 1994: 168). If this totality cannot finally signify its own limits (because in doing so it would simply include the limit as another difference within its differential structure), the drawing of a final limit may be attempted, but is constitutively impossible. For this reason meaning can never finally be delimited. The paradox as Laclau summarises it, in language reminiscent of Kant is that: What constitutes the condition of possibility of a signifying system – its limits – is also what constitutes its condition of impossibility – a blockage of the continuous expansion of the process of signification … we are faced with a constitutive lack, with an impossible object which, as in Kant, shows itself through the impossibility of its adequate representation.5 This argument suggests that the distinction between synchrony and diachrony presumes a prior contingency which undermines the presumption of either a perfect synchrony, or a predetermined telos founded on a diachronous account of language. Rejecting a postmodern validation of incommensurability among language games,

90 Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory Laclau affirms a universal trait common to any meaningful system. This is a moment at one with modernity’s insistence that certain claims have a universal provenance. However, he does not simply propagate the necessity of a positive feature such as a minimal rationality common to all social actors or to all humanity. Rather what constitutes the very possibility of signification is also what constitutes it as (ultimately) impossible. Laclau though is uncertain about the status of the strong claims which he makes: Most people would agree that transcendentalism, in its classical formulations, is today unsustainable, but there is also a generalised agreement that some kind of weak transcendentalism is unavoidable…. But most theoretical approaches are haunted by the perplexing question of the precise status of that quasi. The problem touches on, on the one hand, the question of meta-language; on the other the status, in theory building, of categories that apparently refer to empirical events but that in practice have a quasi-transcendental status, operating as the a priori conditions of intelligibility of a whole discursive domain…. Because of the undecided status of the ‘quasi’ we are confronted with a plurality of alternatives, whose two polar extremes would be a total hardening of those categories, which would thus become a priori conditions of all possible human development, and a no less extreme historicism which sees in them only contingent events, products of particular cultural formations. The first extreme is confronted with the whole array of problems emerging from any transcendentalisation of empirical conditions; the second, with the difficulties derived from not dealing with those conditions which make possible even a historicist discourse. The logic of the quasi tries to avoid both extremes, but it is extremely unclear in what that logic would consist of. (Laclau 1995: 17) This quasi-transcendental claim undermines Habermas’s presumption of an idealisation of meaning. It is necessary though to be clear at what level this difference occurs. While Habermas insists on a semantic idealisation – … linguistic expressions have identical meanings for different users. At any rate, the members of a language community must proceed on the performative assumption that speakers and hearers can understand a grammatical expression in identical ways’ – he does not assume that these idealisations are realisable (Habermas 1996: 11). We may not achieve identical meanings in our everyday communication, but the implicit idealisation allows contextual resolution of misunderstandings. Laclau suggests that this idealisation itself can only be presupposed if it is simultaneously an impossible object in a vein similar to Kant’s notion of a regulative idea. For Laclau a key term in understanding social relations is the discursive. It is here that the transcendental status of this argument is established: Discourse [does] not refer to a particular set of objects, but to a viewpoint from which it [is] possible to redescribe the totality of social life. (Laclau 1994: 435)

Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory 91 Discourse theory focuses instead on the conditions of possibility of meaning of any entity- subject or object. Crucially, for Laclau, meaning determines the being of the object. Investigating the conditions of possibility of meaning, involves an investigation of the conditions of possibility of the being of objects. There is some irony in this. As Henry Allison argues Kant precluded this form of transcendental investigation, and would have equated it with transcendental realism: seeking knowledge of the thing-in-itself (Allison 1983: chapters 1 and 2). Yet Laclau does not revert to a pre-Kantian attempt to grasp an essential being. He maintains that the existence of an object is not what is at stake: … the discursive character of an object does not, by any means, imply putting its existence into question. The fact that a football is only a football as long as it is integrated within a system of socially constructed rules does not mean that it thereby ceases to be a physical object. A stone exists independently of any system of social relations, but it is, for instance, either a projectile or an object of aesthetic contemplation only within a specific discursive formation. (Laclau 1990: 100) Thus being is equated with the meaningful totality within which an object attains its meaning. The mere existence of the object does not presuppose any ontology. Rather, the question of objective, or subjective being, only makes sense from within the discursive. Where Kant deduces the transcendental subject of apperception, which both makes human knowledge possible, and limits its reach, discourse theory holds that the object is not stable, but constituted in specific discursive practices. We are now in a better position to understand the difference between this position and that of Kant. That which makes the object possible as an object also points to its ultimate impossibility. Again this is perhaps not as far from Kant as may first be thought. After all for Kant the thing-in-itself is an impossible object of human knowledge. Yet Laclau’s argument seems to proceed one step further. The analysis of the discursive suggests that the presupposition of a thing-in-itself is itself undermined, given that the being of the object is contingent. For this reason what Laclau terms ‘existence’ has no reference to being whatsoever. Indeed the attempt to speak of it already misses the fact that it cannot be pluralised, put into grammar, or indeed be spoken of. This would seem to accord with Habermas’s assertion that: ‘… thoughts and facts can no longer be located immediately in the world of perceived or imagined objects; they are accessible only as linguistically “represented”, that is, as states of affairs expressed in sentences’ (Habermas 1996: 11). This is not though the case. The key question is how one interprets the implications of the phrase ‘linguistically represented’. For Laclau idealisation of meaning is constitutively impossible; the inaccessibility of the pure object thus has effects within language. Habermas’s idealisation does not take account of this constitutive impossibility, as a limit

92 Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory on idealisation, and thereby runs the risk of reducing objectivity to consensual agreement. The limits of signification and quasi-transcendentalism I have already summarised a number of features which resemble transcendental claims. First, the discursive has the characteristic of an always already. As such it is a condition of possibility of any particular discourse. Second, the discursive necessitates the drawing of limits which establish the bounds of established meaningful totalities. In order to establish the transcendental status of this argument this section investigates the status of the limits which this argument establishes. There are at least two different versions of the limit to be found in Laclau’s work. Limit: version 1 Laclau distinguishes the existence of an object from its being in discursive totalities. Existence denotes the pre-discursive, that which pre-exists any meaningful totality. In positing the existence of a thing-in-itself Kant still presupposed a God’s eye view of an object with meaning, even if humans could not know this object. For Laclau, by contrast, existence connotes that which is prior even to the constitution of differential objects. I assume for the purposes of this discussion that Laclau’s discussion of material elements refers to the establishment of meaningful objects from this realm of mute existence. Laclau acknowledges that, within discourses, material elements differ from linguistic elements: What we have said is that – and this is very different – material objects have an existence independent of any differential context. That’s why we have insisted on the historicity of the being of objects, and have deliberately distinguished that being from their mere existence. There is also no inconsistency in sustaining that a discursive structure is composed of some elements which do have material existence and others which don’t. (Laclau 1990: 218) There is indeed no inconsistency in this argument, but if material elements have an existence independent of differential context, then it is legitimate to establish the relation between this existence and the general impossibility of final signification, which is derived from a logical deduction of what would make determinate signification possible. Let me put this slightly differently. Pre-discursive existence is not a logical consequence of the failure of signification which attention to linguistic structure establishes. While an object may only attain meaning once discursively constituted, it is important to ask, given the limitations that systematicity places on discourse, whether pre-discursive existence has specific effects which demand consideration within a discourse. There is one obvious solution to this problem. Generalised discursivity points to the limits of any significatory system. This implies not only that signification resists determinate meaning, but also suggests

Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory 93 that this failure points to the limits of human intelligibility of a non-disclosable existence. While the world may be constituted for us within signification this does not imply that the effectivity of materiality is reducible to the failures of signification. How these effects are addressed is of course a wholly different matter. Beyond: version 2 The discursive, I argued above, is a generic term covering all systems of signification. Particular discourses are subject to its effects. This extension of the discursive follows from the claim that: formal rules governing the combination and substitution between elements are no longer necessarily attached to any particular substance…[i.e. language]. Discourse is thus a viewpoint from which it is possible to redescribe the totality of social life…. (Laclau 1994: 433)6 Because of the inherent undecidability of all discursive totalities the identity of objects and subjects is to a degree contingent. In this respect Laclau argues: What is being asserted is that the discursive, as the horizon of any objects constitution, cannot possess conditions of possibility, whereas the concrete discourses built within that horizon certainly do possess them. Such conditions of possibility are themselves discursive. (Laclau 1990: 220) As the ‘horizon of the constitution of the being of every object’ the discursive maintains a transcendental status vis-à-vis concrete discourses. The discursive, as a concept, is not subject to the undecidability characteristic of particular discourses. It possesses a universal validity. In this version there is no outside to the discursive, but there is of course to the concrete discourses which are the outcome of political practices. Particular discourses are different: these represent organised ensembles, which are such only because they specifically exclude certain possibilities. A particular discourse has to draw limits, establishing a fixed relation between a set of elements, which is of course not natural, but established historically. The drawing of a limit determines certain acts that may be viewed as transgressive, as well as necessarily excluding others. Thus, what is beyond a specific discourse is that which it excludes: an antagonistic other, which is both excluded, and acts as a point of antagonistic focus unifying the other elements in a discourse. It should be noted that it serves an ambiguous role: it is both anathema to a discursive identity, and the point of focus which creates its unity. Should this point of antagonism disappear the alliance may fall apart into its constituent parts.7 But the general logic of the discursive implies a second notion of exclusion. Particular discourses exclude not only other identities, but also their own contingency. This contingency, according to Laclau, is projected onto that which has been

94 Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory excluded. The argument may be understood in political terms. Most revolutionary discourses are constituted and unified by their opposition to incumbent regimes. Once the regime has been toppled however, it soon becomes evident that the projected vision of a harmonious social order is not achieved with the overthrow of the regime. The overcoming of the enemy is often also the beginning of the disaggregation of movements unified in their opposition to one clearly defined enemy. Two exclusions are then linked. The impossibility of a finally constituted identity tout court, and the specific exclusions made by different discourses, as a means of protecting against this impossibility. This links the general theory of the discursive constitution of objects with specific discourses. Given that the discursive points to the impossibility of objectivity, this impossibility is both the condition of possibility of discourse as practice, and that which points to its ultimate impossibility. Laclau then defends a version of transcendental argument. The discursive, which has no conditions of possibility, marks any established objectivity as contingent. In contrast to Kant’s critique, transcendentalism here points to a condition of possibility which is simultaneously a condition of impossibility of objectivity, identity and meaning. The discursive then indicates that any attempt to speak from the position of the universal is doomed to fail. Instead of positing unavoidable preconditions for objectivity or communication, Laclau suggests that the very search for these universals is already political. There is though a certain indecision in this argument. While the argument undermines any correspondence theory of truth (because objects are discursively constituted they cannot act as determinants of the truth of references even in the last instance), the status of the limit is unclear. On the one hand signification can never be certain, other than within an established second nature. This failure within signification points to the limits of any disclosure of ‘reality’. Access to something called reality is always already subject to the failure of language to enclose the world, across all of the dimensions of validity identified by Habermas. This should always be remembered by those who accuse post-Marxist theorists of a linguistic reductionism. The opposite is in fact the case – what is pointed to is the failure of language to signify everything. However this failure appears primarily as a result of an analysis of the limits of signification. This is of course necessary: we only have access to any identity through language, as both Laclau and Habermas suggest. If however Laclau is to hold onto the distinction between existence and a discursively constituted objectivity then the relation between ‘existence’, and the failure inherent in any signification needs to be more carefully explored. Recalling Habermas’s threefold distinction of possible world relations we could conclude that different conditions of possibility pertain to these different domains of validity. Within the discursive, different modes of verification and organisation are appropriate to different contexts. The classification of elements on the periodic table in terms of molecular structure is not simply an argument. It derives its force as valid, from repetition in different circumstances and under certain rigorous conditions. While these conditions are part of the principle of verification, the force of this argument is entirely distinct from the force of an

Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory 95 argument about moral discourses. What could be taken as proof differs; the mode of ascertainment of proof also differs. This has something to do with the different ways in which limits are conceptualised. At the very least these problems point to the need to (1) develop an account of particular modalities of validity (the relation of subjects to each other, the relation of subject to self, the relation of subjects to materiality once inscribed in discourses, etc.), and (2) the argumentative structure, or forms of proof most valid at the general level of a theory of discourse. Even if an element of power enters into any such discourse, the very need to differentiate between different modalities and realms of theoretical debate is not simply a matter of the failure of signification. Laclau’s focus on the generality of the discursive runs the risk of ignoring: (i) the different types of limit which the failure of signification portends; and (ii) the organisation of these limits in term of modern processes of rationalisation. In this respect Habermas’s distinction of the different validity claims raised in language, and the concomitant processes of rationalisation associated therewith, provide the differentiation missing in Laclau’s account.

Conclusion Laclau and Habermas outline different accounts of quasi-transcendentalism. Habermas specifies unavoidable preconditions for successful communication. His method of derivation of these presuppositions is through a reconstructive analysis. The turn to a reconstructive science necessitates that the a priori come into contact with the a posteriori. To what extent this even deserves the epithet quasi-transcendental is questionable. Habermas acknowledges that the claims his theory makes are ultimately fallible, but this puts him in a difficult position: Reconstructive science, however, is at least in principle fallible – insofar as it attempts to grasp the structural logic of cognitive development it simply offers a description of the growth of the context in which a rationalised but not reified life-world establishes its own horizons. The recourse to reconstructive science is made in order to avoid true transcendentalism, yet since reconstructive science is not immune from the hypothetical power of critical thought, it opens the door to a contextualist relativisation of what can now be taken to be a specific and determined form of the forms of objectivity. (Horowitz 1998: 17) Habermas insists though that the results of his reconstructive science are hypothetical not contingent: were he to admit of an inherent contingency then the results of his analysis would be infected by power, and not simply the outcome of the better argument. I will return to this relativisation in a moment, but a second point is implied by this discussion. I noted earlier in the chapter that a peculiar form of circularity affects Habermas’s argument. Reconstructive science, as a methodological approach, is justified by the thesis concerning communicative rationality. In the last instance reconstructive science works with the assumption

96 Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory that its results are only valid if they are the best possible framework of explanation. Yet this is precisely the conclusion that reconstructive sciences come to, in finding implicit claims to validity in any communication. This discussion leaves two problems for Habermas: on the one hand he seems to presuppose what he has to prove; on the other the hypothetical nature of his claims open the door to some form of contextual relativisation of all theory. We can begin to address this problem with the introduction of a second quasitranscendental moment. No theory can ever hope to represent the world, whichever of the world relations we may thematise. This essential contingency, for which Laclau uses the term discursive, retains the universality and necessity characteristic of transcendental argument. Combined, these two accounts allow for an open form of verificationary argument, which is conscious of the extent to which its own claims are both contingent, and implicated in a discourse of power. For Laclau this ‘as if’ is the necessity of contingency, a structural fault which undermines any claim to finally know. But this contingency is itself necessary. The question which this raises is how we could disprove this necessity? Given the undermining of epistemic knowledge we will not find much help there. What I would suggest, following Habermas, though shifting his emphasis somewhat is that this contingency itself implies the need to participate in an open community of discourse which can never attain a final consensus. For this reason too I would suggest that the grounds for the claims Laclau makes are to be found in the argumentative rigour, and generality of the claims he makes. These are not simply claims to power, but have an internal logic and force irreducible to power. There are a number of advantages to this provisional formulation. The necessary failure of idealisation avoids the reduction of democracy to a perfect symmetry between communicating subjects. Second, theory may pay more attention to the politics underlying any established consensus. Even under the idealised conditions of communication suggested by Habermas this cannot be avoided. Third, and perhaps most important, an integration along these lines avoids the danger that truth (in its various dimensions) is simply reduced to the consensus of participants in an idealised community. This allows for the emergence of the unexpected within settled disputes; it allows for the disruptive effects of a finally non-disclosable ‘external’ nature; as well as for the surprise of an internal nature which will never finally be reduced to the certainty of an ego at home in its own home. In what respect does this retain elements of a transcendental argument? I have argued that the making of transcendental claims cannot be avoided. The transcendental claim which is at the root of this defence of democratic politics however suggests the contingency of any claims which may be established under any circumstances whatsoever. The positing of the problem on these terms should not fail to note that this necessary contingency finds expression in a number of different ways, in different contexts. Habermas’s analysis of the rationalisation of modern societies along three dimensions of validity already suggests a variegated response to this problem. Yet Laclau’s analysis suggests that we view these validity claims as pointing to contingent historical possibilities, rather than the presence of a hidden ideality which we in modernity can finally recognise.

6

The politics of subjectivity

Introduction For much of the twentieth century the political imaginary of the left was dominated by the idea of collective emancipation for the macro-subject of society. Liberal thought, by contrast, starts from the premise of the self-sufficient individual and justifies political institutions through the abstraction of individuals from society. Central to both these traditions is the concept of sovereignty. Previously embodied in the office of the monarch sovereignty was, in the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, claimed for the people. In the United States Declaration of Independence, and French Declaration of the Rights of Man a new form of politics took shape. Individual liberty, the inalienable rights of man and the constitutional state, were the new mechanisms through which subjects exercised political power. Yet key themes of twentieth-century political philosophy,1 in questioning the unity of consciousness presupposed by the ideal of the sovereign subject, apparently weaken these founding principles of the modern democratic state, heir of these revolutions. Vincent Descombes identifies two moments in this critique, the first theoretical and the second practical. The critique of the theory of the subject points to the illusions underlying any attempt to ground political theory in an essential subjectivity; the second, practical moment, rejects the possibility of grounding an ethics, sittlichkeit, or way of life on these foundations (Descombes 1991: 120). This critique of sovereign subjectivity has its origins in the self-critique of the enlightenment. A strand of enlightenment scepticism comes to a head with Nietzsche’s claim that the invocation of the self-conscious subject in enlightenment thought, disguises the coercive imposition of authority. Few contemporary philosophers however defend the view that there is a substantial subject of politics, or that politics can be founded on a theory of the subject (Baynes et al. 1987: 8). The postmodern critique of the substantial subject of politics is, by implication, the critique of a straw subject.2 Nonetheless, the ‘death of the subject’, so often announced, has given way to a grudging acceptance of the need to speak of a subject in regard to politics. Axel Honneth notes this shift in the terms of the postmodern debate: The very intention of criticising metaphysics also carries with it certain normative-political consequences…whoever attempts to uncover the separated

98 The politics of subjectivity and excluded in the thought systems of the philosophical traditions is driven finally to ethical conclusions…. the unmistakable particularity of concrete persons or social groups, as the essential core of every theory of morality or justice. (Honneth 1995: 290) Honneth explores the different ethical implications of a broadly conceived ‘postmodern theory’, referring inter alia to the work of Lyotard, Heidegger and Derrida. In each case, reference is made to subjects excluded, consciously or not, from ethical totalities. Problematically, though, the status of this subject is unclear. The problem here does not lie in specifying conditions for normativity, or even emancipation, but in determining on whose behalf this normativity is exercised. A similar question may be addressed to Habermas’s communicative theory of democracy: does this theory simply specify formal conditions of fairness, or does it imply substantive transformation of the conditions under which subjects, collective and individual, live. If so, what theory of subjectivity is apposite to those formal conditions. My discussion of performativity in previous chapters seemed to beg precisely the question of sovereignty and responsibility. If the subject is not deemed to exercise sovereign control over its utterances, if the scene of utterance is a space of contestation, how might we ascribe responsibility? Does this problem confirm the suspicion that post-Marxist theory sidesteps ethico-political questions? For both Laclau and Habermas the logocentricity of the enlightenment tradition has been surpassed, with a turn towards the study of the relation between subject and language. As noted at length in previous chapters, however, debates about language disclose deep chasms between political theorists. This chapter holds that the premises of the theory of performativity and language developed at length in Chapter 2, point towards a revised theorisation of subjectivity and politics. My argument may be simply stated: an adequate theory of subjectivity must address at least three related dimensions of any theory of the subject: processes of subjectification, the introduction of individuals to the social order; subjection, the domination and ordering of subjects within different discourses and last subjective freedom, that is account for a failure of determination. All too often theorists confuse willy-nilly, subjectification and subjection. Processes of subjectification should not necessarily be conceived of in terms of subjection; the subject should be confused with neither of these as my argument below suggests. In the section ‘Subject of enlightenment’, I briefly outline Descartes’s and Locke’s analysis of subjectivity, in an attempt to situate the shifts marked in the work of Laclau and Habermas. Here I end with a discussion of Freud, pointing towards certain problems that his theory of the unconscious presents for a theory of politics. In the section ‘Communicative competence and subjectivity’, I explore the theory of performativity in relation to Habermas’s account of the subject and politics. A reformulated account of performativity points to the limits of his turn to ego psychology. In the section ‘Undecidable subject of politics’, I link this discussion to my analysis of performativity, invoking Butler and

The politics of subjectivity 99 Laclau’s work, in order to develop both a less formal and a less determinate version of subjectivity than that which the ideal of communicative rationality allows. Such a version of subjectivity will seek to avoid the imperatives Stephen White ascribes to the subject of enlightenment: The individual subject is conceived of as an isolated mind and will; and his vocation is to get clear about the world, to bring it under the control of reason and thus make it available for human projects. The modern world, says Derrida, stands under the imperative of giving a rational account of everything, or as Foucault more ominously puts it, of interrogating everything. This modern orientation toward a reason aimed at enhancing human will and control has no limits. It manifests itself finally in the twentieth century as a will to planetary order. (White 1991: 3) A version of subjectivity which rejects this will to order, will have both to demonstrate its explanatory value and indicate the problems it manages to avoid, traditionally associated with the ideal of sovereign subjectivity.

The subject of enlightenment Defending his turn to intersubjectivity Habermas identifies the philosophy of consciousness as an integral aspect of metaphysical thinking: Self-consciousness, the relationship of the knowing subject to itself, has since Descartes offered the key to the inner and absolutely certain sphere of the representations we have of objects. (Habermas 1995: 31) Consciousness occupied the position of a foundation, conferring certainty on knowledge. Habermas distinguishes a rough division of epochs: being, consciousness and language, with three corresponding modes of thought: ontology, the philosophy of consciousness and linguistic analysis. The philosophy of consciousness establishes, he argues, the idea of self-reflection, distinguishing the inner from the outer world, and securing the gradual but progressive control of the subject over the proclivities of nature. Yet if this epoch of consciousness has been philosophically overcome its sediments structure modern politics. It is generally held that Descartes’s Discourse on Method first established the principle that the subject is only itself if conscious of itself. In the Discourse Descartes, specifying the conditions under which humans could become lords and masters of nature, proposes a universal method with which to confront all problems. This method corresponds to a structure of reason which is supposedly found the same in all minds, as form. With the gradual application of correct method to seemingly insoluble problems knowledge would follow. For Descartes self-reflection, the cogito, is the foundation of a world of external objects, and

100 The politics of subjectivity thus, it seems, the foundation of all possible knowledge. Yet, Descartes argues that the ultimate guarantee of this absolute knowledge is God. God provides the crucial link between the inner world of consciousness and the outer world of nature. The certainty of being is secured with reference to a greater being, beyond human subjectivity. Given this, Etienne Balibar argues that there is almost no reference to the subject, as understood in twentieth-century thought, in Descartes’s work. Descartes does not equate the ‘subject as subjectum [with] the ego or the I think/ I am …’ (Balibar 1991: 34). Rather, the ‘intelligibility of the finite is implied by the idea of the infinite’ (Balibar 1991: 36). Descartes’s subject is the subjectus of medieval theology, founded on the authority of an earthly Prince, who in turn receives his authority from God.3 While we may agree with Habermas that Descartes defends a metaphysics of the subject, Balibar’s point is important, as he later suggests that it is only in Kant that the subject comes to occupy a central place in critical philosophy. However, Descartes’s credo ‘Cogito ergo sum’ links knowledge and being, and becomes a key determinant of enlightenment thought often without reference to the infinite. This has implications too for a politics of subjectivity. Locke breaks with Descartes’s argument in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. For Locke the self consists in a continued identity of consciousness, which links memories. He follows this argument to its logical extreme, concluding that the material body is not relevant to the identity of the subject. Provided consciousness links memories and knowledge, the subject maintains responsibility for its own actions (Locke 1924: Book 11). Significantly, identity through consciousness has to be secured in order for concepts such as responsibility, knowledge, politics and contract to maintain their coherence. Indeed Locke implicitly relies on this version of subjectivity in his political tract Two Treatises on Government. There, Locke argues that rational subjects would leave a state of nature in which they enjoy pre-political rights to liberty, life and property. They make a social contract of their own volition, in order to protect these natural rights. Political community regulates the relationships established between sovereign individuals, in order only to secure these rights. Significantly, Locke no longer invokes God in order either to guarantee the certainty of consciousness, or establish the sovereignty of the political community.4 Subjects act to secure their own interests, and secondary benefits, which accrue to the community, follow from the actions of private and sovereign individuals. This presupposes not only natural rights, but also the coherence of those identities involved in making the contract. Sovereign individuals must be capable of effecting decisions for which they maintain responsibility in future, otherwise the contract would be a futile and short-lived exercise. The key term in this lexicon is property, specifically property of the self. Responsibility and ownership of one’s self, protected by natural rights derived from God’s law, secures the individual right to appropriate external property by mixing one’s labour with nature. It was this connection between individualism and property which prompted Marx to criticise individual rights as conducive to the ideological illusion of freedom under capitalist relations of production, a formal freedom without substantive content.5

The politics of subjectivity 101 Locke’s defence of a limited political community is derived from a methodological abstraction which still haunts modern political theory. Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, proposes to reconstruct general intuitions about the organisation of political life under a veil of ignorance, in which subjects, though egoists, have no knowledge of the social position they would occupy in society. In a similar vein Habermas’s positing of an ideal of communication as a counterfactual element of all actual communication, presumes that what orients everyday communicative success is an abstraction implying a formal equality which communicating subjects have not in fact achieved. The account of the subject, which accompanies these abstractions, is equally problematic. Indeed it is tempting to suggest that both Rawls and Habermas, insofar as they hold onto these abstractions, reinvoke a metaphysical concept of subjectivity. Seyla Benhabib is correct to suggest that: … since the thematisation of needs and interests that are systematically blocked off from public discourse are said to only occur under the conditions of an ideal speech situation, the model of participatory democracy required by Habermas’s crises theory, dissipates into a methodological chimera … has the time not come to discard the methodological illusions of modern political theory that the correct procedure of reasoning about political life is by first withdrawing from it through counterfactual abstractions? (Benhabib 1982: 304) An important shift is marked though in the argument that the role of the state is to protect basic and universal human rights. For the subject cannot be conceived of as distinct from the social relations which confer rights and duties. Subjectivity is now linked directly to citizenship and thereby to many of the institutions which characterise modern rationalised societies.6 The most significant political manifestations of this appropriation of sovereignty occurred during the French and American revolutions. The Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen marks this appropriation of sovereignty by the new citizens of the democratic Republic of France. It also points to the articulation of free subjectivity to the rights and duties of citizenship: freedom and equality are limited through their attachment to citizenship. Subjects can only enjoy these liberties if they internalise certain modes of behaviour and being. New forms of constraint accompany the extension of modern liberties. However, the ‘excessive nature’7 of the concepts of both freedom and equality, means that citizenship does not result in a finally ordered and rational polis: rather society is now marked as a project which for intrinsic reasons cannot be completed. Balibar remarks that this citizen-subject, though a member of a society, is forever caught in the play between freedom and equality, self-determination and representation, the making of law and subjection to the law, self-determination and responsibility to the community. In Balibar’s view ‘the wording of the statement always exceeds the act of its enunciation’ (Balibar 1991: 52); there is a performative element which is institutionalised with the forging of these rights. The constitutional principles, which found the rights of man, transcend their place of

102 The politics of subjectivity enunciation; for this reason they are also open to the contingencies of new claims on equality and liberty as the history of the various struggles for political recognition over the last two centuries suggests. The question is how we reach this point, a moment of constitutive undecidability, after traipsing down the path of sovereign determination. How is it that the classical subject of enlightenment, the foundation or hypokeimenon of the Western Polis, comes to be related to the unstable structure of a society which cannot finally found itself ? I began to offer one theoretical explanation for this process when tracing the conditions necessary to the maintenance of a social contract. There I noted that the making of the contract had to both presuppose semantic idealisation, and undermine it at the same time, in order to function as the founding of any polis. A similar structure of idealisation and iteration is implied in Balibar’s argument: To this end equality itself must be thought as something other than a naked principle; it must be justified, or one must confer on it that which Derrida not long ago called an originary supplement. (Balibar 1991: 51) If so, then the notion of subjectivity correlate with the extension of an essential unstable principle of equality demands specification. This will entail a different interpretation of the subject of knowledge, and of the political subject of modernity. It is only once that we have explored these contradictions that the relevance of a theory of subjectivity to contemporary conditions may be assessed. A number of themes in Freud’s work suggest a different approach to the question of subjectivity, and thus to the political questions regarding the relation between the subject and politics suggested by Balibar. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen contends that Freud’s work poses problems for a revised theory of subjectivity on two fronts. First, Freud suggests that the ego is not in full control of its motives and desires. His early distinction of the conscious and unconscious aimed to discern the outlines of an unconscious theory of desire, pointing beyond a simplistic theory of rational and intentional agency. Any theory of political agency is forced to confront the often unconscious motives behind behaviour and action, as well as the uncertainty about subjective agency. A second, though linked line of argument, informs Freud’s later metapsychological essays. There he begins to explore the origins of what he terms the ego, what in Locke’s work was termed the subject. Exploring the origins of the ego points to the blurring of the distinction between unconscious and conscious, id and ego, self and other. The ego itself is viewed as a construct, a construct whose history may be traced through a genetic account of the patient’s history. The structural model of the psyche suggests that the ego is constructed, that it has a history, linked to identification with crucial figures in its early socialisation. Whichever option we explore the relation between intention and action is undermined. The subject may no longer, at least in simplistic terms, be viewed as the author of his/her own actions (Borsch-Jacobson 1991: 61–78).

The politics of subjectivity 103 While Freud did not use the term subject his argument that the ego is built through processes of unconscious identification holds implications for politics and subjectivity. In the two traditions I have discussed in this book different options are pursued. Following Freud processes of individuation may be investigated as a developmental route followed by individuals in accord with the demands of society. Indeed this is the assumption of ego-psychologists, such as Heinz Hartmann. This is the tradition which Habermas draws upon. Habermas elucidates the genesis of individual identities, as they adjust to the normalising strategies of society. Ontogenetic and phylogenetic capacities map onto each other. In this view the ego should be strengthened against the id, conscious mental life strengthened against unconscious and thus uncontrollable motives. The outcome of a normal development is a rational ego. A second tradition refuses the idea that the subject is a representation waiting to occur. What if the subject is that which avoids representation; if it is that moment of failure in which the ego can no longer be posited as in control of itself ? Here we may connect the early and late topographies of Freud. In a 1915 paper The Unconscious, Freud suggests that what is unconscious may be made conscious, and thus reflected upon by the subject. As Michael Henry notes however, another subject comes to light in this process of reflection: Freud in his turn runs up against such a subject, half perceived by Descartes, when he finds himself in the presence of an unconscious that is no longer provisional, no longer one phase in the history of representation, capable of completing itself in itself, in the actualisation of its full essence. The history of our representations refers back to a force that allows them precisely to actualise themselves or that forbids them to do so. It is only this force itself that is irreducible to any representation. (Henry 1991: 165) In this version the unconscious is not simply that which has been excluded from consciousness as a result of repression but comprises too that which cannot be represented, the blind spot, inexplicable yet present in any attempt to finally explain or ground full consciousness. In a similar vein Freud’s description of the process whereby the ego is constituted via various libidinal cathexes, and identifications, cannot finally explain why identification should occur, other than via a retroactive attribution of causality. Whether we stick to the first or second topography, the same problem will emerge: not everything is representable. On this reading Freud’s investigation of the unconscious undermines three key attributes of an autonomous subjectivity: first Freud suggests that there are unconscious motives underpinning action; second Freud argues that the ego itself is at least partially unconscious and last discussion of the unconscious seems to run up against a blind spot, that which cannot be represented yet which has to be presupposed. This argument parallels that I have developed in relation to Habermas’s notion of communicative rationality. A post enlightenment theory of the subject cannot rely either on a pre-social notion of rights, nor on the separation of a pure

104 The politics of subjectivity or transcendental subject from the empirical subject. By the same token the subject cannot simply be reduced to the empirical outcome of a socialisation process over which it has no influence. What are the implications of the preceding discussion for an account of political subjectivity? First, I have rejected the methodological abstraction that marks modern political theory. This abstraction cannot account for the relation of individuals to their communities, nor for the processes of socialisation that frame the constitution of subjectivity. In this respect Freud’s historicisation of the individual subject, as the outcome of a number of crucial identifications in early life is a useful correction to a metaphysics which ignores altogether the engendering of subjects within social relations of production and reproduction. Second, following Balibar I have argued that a central element of political subjectivity is the relation of the citizen to the state. The political subject of modernity does not emerge in abstracto but is concretised and fought for in the various struggles against absolutist and exclusionary rule. The key concepts, in terms of which this struggle has been articulated, are basic rights to equality and liberty. Balibar writes: this thesis is not Kantian: the accent is placed on the citizen and not on the ends of man; the object of the struggle is not anticipated but discovered in the wake of political action; and each given figure is not an approximation of the regulatory ideal of the citizen but an obstacle to effective equality. Nor is this thesis Hegelian: nothing obliges a new realisation of the citizen to be superior to the previous one. (Balibar 1991: 57) This imbrication of the subject in its social conditions of production though indicates a third point I have insisted upon. The subject is not reducible to the outcome of a ‘normal process of socialisation’. This reduction risks a similar abstraction to that outlined earlier. More importantly it misses that which both makes socialisation possible, and at the same time undermines the possibility of an ideal autonomous ego, rationally controlling all of its possible motives. This necessary failure within any process of socialisation points to a space of freedom for the realisation of new forms of life, which rent the curtain of established second nature. It is to the dialectic between this process of subjectivation, and the freedom of the subject that the next sections ‘Communicative competence and subjectivity’ and ‘Undecidable subject of politics’ turn.

Communicative competence and subjectivity In his ‘Concluding Reflections’ to the Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas argues that Freud’s account of psychoanalysis may be reinterpreted along the lines of a theory of communicative action: Instead of an instinct theory that represents the relation of ego to inner nature in terms of a philosophy of consciousness … we have a theory of socialisation that connects Freud with Mead, gives structures of intersubjectivity their due,

The politics of subjectivity 105 and replaces hypotheses about instinctual vicissitudes with assumptions about identity formation. (Habermas 1984: 389) Reading Freud from this perspective acts, he argues, as a reference point for the analysis of ego development, allows for a theoretical account of identity formation and points to intra-psychic barriers to communication, established during the early negotiation of socialisation. Overcoming internalised barriers to intersubjective communication links self-consciousness, self-determination and self-realisation. Only a subject self-conscious and self-determining may fulfil Kant’s enlightenment dictum aude sapere. But self-determination can only be established through a process of socialisation which eventuates in subjects capable of acting autonomously. The ideal form of this process of socialisation is derived from his account of communicative rationality. The reification of interpersonal relations then becomes the point of reference for the analysis of pathogenesis at the subjective level (Habermas 1984: 389). On this evidence it would appear that Habermas runs the risk of reducing different identities to a common formal framework, and to an ideal which potentially collapses their difference. McCarthy claims that this is not the case: Habermas’s position on the essential interdependence of ego identity and intact intersubjectivity provides a basis for responding to criticisms of his moral universalism in the name of individual self realisation … . The socialised version of ethical formalism does not call for the suppression of concrete subjectivity to ensure the individual is identical with the universal. Rather, it presupposes different individuals, with different needs and wants, emotions and feelings, life histories and anticipated futures – in short with different personal identities. What is required is that in those areas of common life subject to binding social norms, the latter be agreed upon in communication free from domination. (McCarthy 1984: 404) Indeed Habermas himself argues that the ideal of communication is only one dimension of rationality, which is not equivalent to concrete forms of life. Yet the issue is a little more complex than McCarthy would have us believe. He goes on to note that the notion of communicative rationality ‘serves as the fundamental concept in an interpretive framework for social research’. This is why the section ‘Subject of enlightenment’ of this book centres on this aspect of rationality. More importantly ‘… the entire edifice of his theories of individual and social development are built upon it. Practically it provides the key to diagnosing the sociopathologies of modernity and a way of sorting out proposed remedies to these ills’ (McCarthy 1984: 405). In this case communicative rationality is more than an interpretive foil: it provides a formal outline against which social and individual pathologies may be judged. Before returning to McCarthy’s point I investigate this interpretive foil in terms of the question of subjectivity.

106 The politics of subjectivity Freud provides one of the earliest models of intersubjective rationality. In Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas identifies the ideal of communication with an overcoming of the systematically distorted development of an individual’s communicative capacity. The enlightened subject is capable of translating dreams, parapraxes and symptoms into the normal language of intersubjective communication, thus restoring an ethical community of the self. From this perspective psychoanalysis adapts a hermeneutical model of philological research to consider an altogether new domain. While the meaning structure of the texts studied by hermeneutics is always threatened by the impact of external conditions (Habermas 1971: 216) the symbolic structures that psychoanalysis comprehends are threatened by internal conditions. The analyst traces textual distortions internal to another subject: the analysand is plagued by a latent self-deception, an internal foreign territory that escapes his consciousness and distorts it. Parapraxes and symptoms are thus ‘scars of a corrupt text’ that confronts the author as incomprehensible (Habermas 1971: 219). Habermas writes: The clinical pictures of conversion hysteria, compulsion neurosis, and the various phobias appear only as the pathological limiting case of a scale of misbehaviour, which in part falls within the realm of normality and in part actually sets the standard of what counts as normal. In the methodically rigorous sense ‘wrong behaviour’ means every deviation from the model of communicative action, in which motives of action and linguistically expressed intentions coincide. In this model split off symbols and the need dispositions connected with them are not allowed. It is assumed either that they do not exist or, if they do, that they are without consequence on the level of public communication, habitual interaction, and observable expression. This model however, could be generally applicable only under the conditions of a non-repressive society. Therefore deviations from it are the normal case under all known social conditions. The object domain of depth hermeneutics comprises all the places where, owing to internal disturbances, the text of our everyday language games are interrupted by incomprehensible symbols. (Habermas 1971: 226) The model posits an ideal of the self in full consciousness of itself disallowing the expression of dispositions associated with split-off symbols, but acknowledges that this ideal would only be applicable in a non-repressive society. Its realisation is impeded for empirical not necessary reasons. Analysis translates normal neurosis into a transference neurosis before allowing this repetition to bring home to the analysand her distorted ideal. From the perspective of communicative action theory then, psychoanalysis is a ‘reflection induced by enlightenment … through which the subject frees itself from a state in which it had become an

The politics of subjectivity 107 object for itself’ (Habermas 1971: 247). This implies that analysis cannot be reduced to a techne, or scientific knowledge. Habermas must insist on this line of argument; if not the subject may later be reduced to the outcome of an instrumental process in which normativity cannot be derived from an alternative conception of communicative rationality. Habermas thus takes from Freud the idea that we internalise social sanctions as learning mechanisms and later come to relate to these more critically. Given that for Habermas socialisation entails the learning and internalisation of rules which determine the latent (meta)-grammar of language games, personality deviations are understood in terms of this model. This ideal finds corroboration in an ontogenetic account of developmental stages, which most healthy individuals pass through. In a later piece dedicated to Kohlberg, Habermas writes: In what follows I will defend a thesis that does not sit well with the spirit of the times: that anyone who has grown up in a reasonably functional family, who has formed his identity in relations of mutual recognition, who maintains himself in the network of reciprocal expectations and perspectives built into the pragmatics of the speech situation and communicative action, cannot fail to have acquired moral intuitions … (Habermas 1990: 114) These moral intuitions derive from Habermas’s analysis of communication. However, they receive justification from a reconstruction of the structures of consciousness, and levels of learning ability found within society. Communicative action theory takes the form of a narrative depicting the psychodynamic development of the child as a socialisation process in which typical role assignments, basic conflicts and recurrent patterns may be schematically outlined. This ontogenesis culminates in: the final state of a self formative process [when] the subject remembers its identifications and alienations, the objectivations forced upon it and the reflections it arrived at as the path upon which it constituted itself. (Habermas 1971: 261) The general interpretation of ego development is corroborated retrospectively when the subject comes to accept this history as her own. Habermas outlines his account of the different stages of learning development in Communication and the Evolution of Society, and in an earlier essay ‘Moral Development and Ego Identity’ (Habermas 1979: 70–94). He suggests that it is possible to provide a formal analysis of meaning constellations, allowing a subsequent empirical reconstruction of worldviews as a series of learning steps undergone by both the individual and society. He writes: I am convinced that the ontogenesis of speaker and world perspectives that leads to a decentred understanding of the world can be explained only in

108 The politics of subjectivity connection with the development of the corresponding structures of interaction. If, like Piaget, we start from action, i.e. from the active confrontation and interaction between an individual who learns constructively and his environment, it makes sense to assume that the complex system of perspectives sketched above develops from two roots: the observer perspective, acquired by the child as a result of his perceptual manipulative contact with the physical environment, and the reciprocal I-thou perspectives that the child adopts as a result of symbolically mediated contact with reference persons (in the framework of interactive socialisation processes). (Habermas 1990: 139) These structurally described levels of learning ability alter the relations between practical reason, objectivating thought and the expressive capacity of individuals. In general, structural evolution marks a progressive decentring of egocentric views of the world, and a separating out of the different aspects of validity under which actions may be judged. Increasingly, individuals take responsibility for their own decisions, and responsibility for possible consequences of actions. Here Habermas follows a basic schema outlined originally by Kohlberg: Lawrence Kohlberg distinguishes three levels of moral development: the preconventional level, on which only the consequences of action are judged, the conventional level, on which the orientation to norms and the intentional violation of them are already judged, and finally the post-conventional level, on which norms themselves are judged in the light of principles. (Habermas 1984: 174) Each of the stages of moral development demarcated by Kohlberg, is correlated by Habermas with a different stage of interaction between individuals and different social perspectives. The shift from egocentric views, to increasingly decentred perspectives is reflected at the level of social learning. The last post-conventional stage of moral development accords with the institutional realisation of the principles of communicative reason derived from Habermas’s analysis of the universal pragmatics of communication. This institutionalisation at the post-conventional level, demands orientation towards a procedural perspective for the justification of norms. The realisation of freedom for the individual, an uncoerced and non-instrumental relation to the self, would reflect the end of any systematic distortion of internal communication. Likewise, only a society that has developed beyond simply accepting sanctions, and which judges sanctions in line with the principle of universality can hope to socialise healthy post-conventional individuals. Where Kohlberg identifies six stages of moral development (two at each of the three levels), Habermas introduces a seventh stage. The political implication of the development of ego identity, in line with a progressive decentring of worldviews, is most obvious at this level. For Habermas the seventh stage of moral development entails the realisation of moral and political freedom, the idealisation of a fictive world community of subjects and the introduction of a universal

The politics of subjectivity 109 ethics of speech. This universal ethics allows that individual need interpretations become the object of practical discourse. What individuals interpret as being their particular true interests are now to be vindicated communicatively (Habermas 1979: 88–90). While Habermas is quick to note that: A paradoxical relation is expressed in the identity of the ego: as a person in general the ego is like all other persons but as an individual he is utterly different from all other individuals. (Habermas 1979: 90) it is not clear that the implications of this paradox are fully appreciated. A postconventional society would accord with a fully decentred understanding of the world. On the one hand this level of development represents a society in which egos are less stable – yet at the same time it represents increased knowledge of both self and world. The reflective attitude attained with full rationalisation of the lifeworld seems to threaten the ego, yet at the same time give it full consciousness of self in relation to other. While a post-conventional morality requires a stable ego identity it also presupposes that particular identities may be challenged, and thus rendered less stable in situations of practical discourse. Does Habermas have to presuppose an underlying core identity of the subject which is not disturbed by this practical discourse on need interpretation? For if so he has not provided an adequate defence of the subject on whose behalf democratic procedures and practices are institutionalised. A similar point may be made in terms of the relation between lifeworld and critique, or ontology and critique, which Habermas attempts to establish. Habermas defends the power of critical rationality against the contextuality of ontological arguments. Enlightenment adjudges claims to validity, independent of historical and cultural context. Thus too the individual subject cannot rely on his particular life narrative to provide the terms of inner reconciliation. Rather, the search for causes of pain, invokes a theory of distorted communication with universal validity. Here narrative and depth hermeneutics rest uneasily together. Jay Bernstein makes the point forcefully: As in Kant’s own transcendental presentations, what it is for anyone to be a self-conscious agent is left unspecified, or rather in Habermas’s theory it is made a function of the categorical determinations of undistorted communication itself. Thus the conditions for subjectivity come to replace subjectivation itself, and, as Habermas’s procedures elegantly demonstrate, subjectivity can be read out of the argument altogether. (Bernstein 1995: 81) These points receive further corroboration if we consider Michael Henry’s argument, with regard to Freud, noted above. Henry suggests that a theory of the unconscious does not presuppose, even as an ideal, that analysis will result in full self-consciousness. As he maintains representations, in order to be actualised,

110 The politics of subjectivity require a force which is irreducible to representation. At the same time this force forbids complete representation. If this is so then the attempt to represent maturity as the attaining of full consciousness is itself internally blocked. It is blocked not simply at the level of individual self-consciousness; in this case a subject which could communicate perfectly with itself would not need to externalise itself to communicate with other subjects. More importantly full representation would imply that the self is complete, that it no longer needs to identify with other individuals, groups or ideologies. Such a subject would not be a subject at all. The intersubjective constitution of the subject cannot then allude, even if only in the form of an ideal, to a full representation. Bearing this in mind let me return to McCarthy’s presentation of Habermas’s work. I noted that for McCarthy moral universalism refers only to limited areas of life which may be subject to binding social norms. This does not privilege particular versions of the good life, nor the ways in which individuals may lead their lives. Instead the ideal provides a framework within which these differences may be fostered. It is important to note though that only certain differences are compatible with this ideal. Chapter 5 makes this point at some length. Second the ideal of consensus, even if only an orienting ideal, performatively refutes itself in that individuals who attain the ideal would no longer need to raise claims to validity with their utterances. Their speech acts would be perfect, and communicative rationality a nullity. The argument that there is a force which cannot be represented, but which nonetheless makes representation possible, links up Freud’s account of the unconscious with a subjectivity which can never be finally constituted for intrinsic reasons. The matter though is incomplete if left there. Habermas leaves us with an account of the subject which does not have to rely on a meta-theoretical idealisation. He insists that an account of subjectivity in modern democratic societies cannot rely on idealisations without corroboration from an analysis of the limits that social structures place on ego identity. An understanding of the sociopathologies of modernity accounts for those instances in which the fostering of autonomy fails. In order to ground this account though Habermas relies on an ideal account of development, which necessarily judges other paths as dysfunctional. In developing this idea of a representation which cannot finally justify itself, the following section elaborates a modified account of subjectivity, which retains Habermas’s concern that political theory does not rely on a metaphysics of subjectivity. Although my discussion here is limited to an analysis of Habermas’s account of ego autonomy, my discussion in Chapter 7 points to the relevance of this to an account of democratic subjectivity.

The undecidable subject of politics The model of communication as action, when translated into developmental psychology, amounts to a strategy of identifying normal processes of development, and setting these off against abnormalities which may be cured through dialogue – analysis for individuals, and in its ideal form the reaching of consensus for groups.

The politics of subjectivity 111 For Habermas the fact that communication fails is not evidence of a necessary failure, but it points symptomatically to a model in which there is no failure. This model reaches its limits however at its own margins: in its full realisation there would ironically be a revision to a stage in which the ego is less stable, and has to consistently reinvent itself. As I argued in earlier chapters we can agree that language acts, but the vulnerability, which the theory of performativity implies, cannot be reduced to that of a formal ideal of symmetrical communication. We can agree with Habermas that certain crucial formative processes occur through a child’s introduction to the symbolic order. But the introduction to the symbolic order is surely a more complex process than Habermas allows. If we think only of what has been occluded in this reconstruction of Freud it seems that key issues require revisiting. Habermas does not consider in any detail infantile sexuality, nor does he consider the relation between the body of the subject to be, the infant that cannot recognise its own self, or control its own limbs and the construction of this self-image in the formation of self-identity. Because his concern is the process of formation of an ego identity suitable to the demands of a democratic citizenship the potential distortions of civilisation itself are written out of the picture as failures to become civilised rather than as intrinsic to ‘civilisation’ itself. To be sure Habermas does not reduce the process of individual self-formation to that of political citizenship. It is however the case that he presupposes a ‘normal’ model of subjectivity as a standard against which to judge deformation. The deformation is not intrinsic to this standard. Judith Butler argues, contra Habermas, that we can never presuppose a univocal or unequivocal meaning transmitted by speech acts (Butler 1996: 141). She contends, in line with the argument developed earlier, that the illocution of the speech act indicates certain necessary and irreparable disjunctures: The disjuncture between utterance and meaning is the condition of possibility for revising the performative, of the performative as the repetition of a prior instance, a repetition that is at once a reformulation … . The political advantages to be derived from insisting on such a disjuncture are starkly different from those supposedly gained by following Habermas’s notion of consensus. For if one always risks meaning something other than what one thinks one utters, then one is, as it were, vulnerable in a specifically linguistic sense to a social life of language that exceeds the purview of the subject who speaks. (Butler 1996: 87) Butler is a little too hasty in characterising Habermas’s arguments in this vein – after all he does not suggest that the ideal of consensus is in any manner equivalent to a form of life. There is nonetheless a crucial difference. Butler refuses the image of an idealisation invulnerable to rearticulation Butler assumes that ‘If we are formed in language, then that formative power precedes and conditions any decision we might make about it, insulting us from the start, as it were, by its prior power’ (Butler 1996: 2). She theorises

112 The politics of subjectivity subjectivity in terms of the relation between interpellation and response to interpellations. Whereas, she argues, for Austin the subject who speaks preexists its utterance, for Althusser the subject is constituted as an answer to interpellation. Butler contends that these alternatives are mistaken: Neither the Austinian promise nor the Althusserian prayer require a preexisting mental state to ‘perform’ in the way that they do. But where Austin assumes a subject who speaks, Althusser in the scene in which the policeman hails the pedestrian, postulates a voice that brings that subject into being. (Butler 1996: 26) In the case of interpellation the subject is reduced to a subject position, without agency. In the case of an intentional theory structural limitations on the subject are secondary instances of a prior intentionality. Butler argues instead that neither structure nor subject are sovereign. Rather they reciprocally presuppose and undermine each other. It is for this reason that language can act, can injure or indeed pacify. Speech acts maintain a certain disruptive force which resists final determination. Neither social structures nor subjectivity can fully escape this indeterminate performativity. Thus any force a structured discourse may have is the flipside of an essential vulnerability. In a similar fashion the individual subject is dependent for the assertion of its identity on language (Butler 1996: 16). Butler’s argument parallels that of Laclau regarding the relation between subject and structure. For Laclau all social structures have a limited ability to predetermine fully constituted subject positions. Likewise subjects do not exist wholly independently of those structures which interpellate them. The condition of possibility of this interpellation is that it can never finally be successful. Laclau describes the subject as the distance between the undecidability of the structure and the decision. Decisions do not necessarily follow from the structure but are the undecidable development of one of its possibilities. The decision taken represses other possible decisions and is thus always an act of power. The subject exists (and ek-sists) because the structure is indicted of non-identity with itself. The subject functions as the metaphor of an absent structure constructing his/her identity through acts of identification.8 This argument is more radical than at first may appear to be the case. The subject is equated with moments in which determination fails, when structures cannot finally determine choices or identities. This is the reverse side of the argument presented by Habermas which, taken to its extreme, runs into similar difficulties. For it suggests that the subject is a zero point, an impossible moment of sovereign determination independent of all structural constraints. The other side of this for Laclau is that we are constantly subjected through processes of subjectivation. This calls for the conceptual distinction of two instances. On the one hand subject position refers to those identifications which already in some manner fix the identity of subjects, either collective or individual. But the concept of subject refers to the spaces in which identity has not been fixed. In its ideal form of course this would

The politics of subjectivity 113 refer to a moment of absolute freedom – a sovereign subject acting without any form of determination. The other extreme would be a subjectivity with no freedom whatsoever, fully interpellated, and therefore not able to make choices. The two instances would be mirror images of each other presupposing an absolute fixity of identity. This might usefully be understood as a reformulation of aspects of Adorno’s argument regarding the necessary failure of totalisation. For Adorno modern sociality relies on a repression of this constitutive moment of undecidability, a repression that consumes, and hides dislocation. Importantly the above discussion implies that we distinguish, in a manner foreign to Adorno, the ego from the subject. The ego is that moment of closure in which the subject is repressed as an internal foreign territory, as an object of the system – an object with little freedom. Ego is another name for the sedimentation of decisions already taken. The crucial step which distinguishes Laclau from Adorno, is that Laclau suggests that the lack of systemic structuration opens up a space within which subjects – both individual and social – may act politically. Sedimentation, like Adorno’s second nature, names the repression of a constituted subject’s historicity, which is naturalised as the truth. However, dislocation implies that all sedimentations are, at least potentially, subject to revision. For Laclau, given that all structure is constitutively undecidable, decisions or identifications have to be made, which give coherence to social identities. He thus adds to deconstruction’s analysis of an essential undecidability, the necessity of a decision, constitutive of established social relations. It should be noted that Laclau does not develop a concept equivalent to that of Habermas’s ‘lifeworld’, which indicates the set of background assumptions and practices which constitute the unquestioned domain of everyday life. For Habermas these various world relations sedimented in the lifeworld may be thematised as worlds, and thereby challenged, but the lifeworld is never simply available for rational manipulation by subjects. Interpretation of the theory of hegemony sometimes falls into the mistake of confusing ultimate contingency with the assumption that because all world relations are contingent they are simply available for hegemonic rearticulation. This is clearly not the case, and without a concept to signify this quick readers of a theory of hegemony may confuse it with a weak version of voluntarism. The position developed by both Laclau and Butler has its origins in the critique of philosophical anthropology initiated by Heidegger, and carried further by Derrida and Foucault, inter alia.9 This critique refuses the attribution of essence to the concept of man, or subject, and points to the historical constitution of man as a subject. Yet Laclau also points to the failure of history to finally encapsulate the subject. There is something about the subject which is excessive, to recall Balibar’s formulation. Balibar notes that the critique of philosophical humanism initiated by Heidegger ignores the cosmopolitical context within which the metaphysics of the subject outlined by Kant was originally defined: To ask ‘What is Man?’ for Kant is to ask a concrete question, a question which is therefore more fundamental than any other, because it immediately

114 The politics of subjectivity concerns the experience, knowledge and practical ends of Man as a citizen of the world. (Balibar 1994: 6–7) In the late 1700s and early 1800s the concepts of man and subject are linked to that of citizenship. The revolutions of this period mark the point when the medieval subjection of man to the authority of a greater power, God or the earthly lord, is overthrown: man ceases to be a subjectus, a subject, and therefore his relationship to the Law and the idea of law is radically inverted: he is no longer the man called before the Law, or to whom an inner voice dictates the law, or tells him that he should recognise and obey the law; he is rather the man who, at least virtually, makes the law … The subject is someone who is responsible or accountable because he is a legislator, accountable for the consequences, the implementation and non-implementation of the law he has himself made. (Balibar 1994: 11) Subjects both make the law and are subjected to the law: subjects as sovereign are both judge and judged. The nature of subjection to the law is thus radically different from a subjection in which individuals have no say; the rights, which are attributed to all individuals, are won and fought for collectively. These principles are institutionalised in secular democratic societies, at least nominally, in Balibar’s view. The important point for Balibar is to rescue this political motif, without falling foul of the critique of essentialism. He marks this by noting that the notion of citizenship, and the associated concepts of liberty and equality are excessive: Now what kind of citizen is this? It cannot be only the citizen of some particular state, some particular nation, some particular constitution. Even if we do not accept the idealised notion of the Kantian ‘cosmopolitical right’, we can still maintain that it alludes to a universal claim, possibly to an absolute one … . In other terms this equation means that the humanity of man is identified not with a given or with an essence, be it natural or supra-natural, but with a practice and a task: the task of self emancipation from every domination and subjection by means of a collective and universal access to politics. (Balibar 1994: 12) Balibar’s recuperative reading of the history of ‘subjectivity’ rescues the political motifs of enlightenment without the metaphysical baggage. Crucially too it maintains the tension which the word subject connotes – of one who is both subjected and one who subjects. This provides some historical ballast to the initially logically developed idea that interpellation is bound to fail. It also allows for links to be drawn between a particular conception of subjectivity and democracy. Democratic societies, as I argue in the next chapter, institutionalise uncertainty.

The politics of subjectivity 115 The two principles of liberty and equality, with their necessarily excessive nature, allow for the remaking of subjectivity. Reflection on the concept of subject then requires consideration of a complex, the elements of which are overdetermined. Any conception of political subjectivity presupposes citizens capable of making decisions, subjects whose decisions are not blocked by internal constraints or the result of external subjection. Thus the distinction between subjected subjectivity and free subjectivity must be maintained even in light of arguments developed by Foucault which suggest that the free subject is constituted through a variety of mechanisms of exclusion, and thus that the freedom of the subject is not so easily distinguished from its subjection. Such a freedom however relies upon historically realised conditions of socialisation. Habermas’s account of ego development suggests this intrinsic link between any notion of subjectivity and specific historical conditions requisite to the fostering of subjectivity. This however requires an analysis at a number of different levels. The key nexus of Freud’s work lies in his exploration of the earliest phases of ego development, and the repressions constitutive of the ego. For Freud these earliest identifications exercise a determinate force in the life of any subject and the psychoanalytic practice not only makes the subject aware of inner distortions, but also requires a change in the being of the subject. Knowledge is a precondition of, but not sufficient for, a transformation of the patient’s own self-interpretation. These processes which determine the requisites of any identity are different in kind from processes of subjectivation, when the maturing child and later teenager, adjusts to the demands of symbolic structures which do not fundamentally alter the identity established in the earliest phases of individuation. This is not to say that there is no continuum of development, but to note that the expression of need is far more complex, and determined by far more intimate processes, than any general theory of communicative socialisation could ever allow. Moreover both later processes of subjectivation, and the earliest phases of identity formation may be characterised by forms of subjection which paralyse any notion of subjective freedom, as a consequence of either internal or external repression. If then we maintain a concept of the subject which cannot be explained in terms of either identity formation, subjectivation or subjection it is to insist that any conceptualisation of freedom entails that the making of a decision is not simply that of a calculus which can be explained in terms of all that has occurred before.

Conclusion Where does this leave an account of political subjectivity? First, I have argued that no subject is or can be an ideal abstraction, determinate in and of itself. This metaphysical ideal is surely one of the fatalities of modern political theory. The jettisoning of this ideal should not though ensue solely in an empirical or historical account of the different forms of subjectivity. Rather the subject is now viewed as both constituted and constituting, as determined, but also never finally determined. The communicating subject of politics then is a subject who both adheres to certain structural constraints on action (here we may

116 The politics of subjectivity speak in terms of a developmental psychology, lifeworld and the like) but these constraints at the same time imply a certain subjective mobility institutionalised in democratic societies, a mobility allowing the reformulation and a rearticulation of what is communicated in any given context. Second, this implies the need to take seriously the self-reproduction of society through its various modes of subjectivation, and socialisation, allowing a more fully explicated account of personal and collective life histories. Habermas’s account of ego development is both useful and incomplete in this respect. Clearly any account of subjectivity appropriate to democratic societies has to presuppose certain modes of socialisation, and collective life history which are more appropriate than others. Moreover the maintenance of stable ego identities is central to any account of political autonomy and democracy. This should not though prevent an account of the instability which goes with such an ideal. Finally, such a theory of politics suffers the indignity of not being able to determine the contents of all political struggles. Unlike Marxism which sought not only to explain, but also to offer guidance in action to its chosen subject, the proletariat, political theory forsakes the position of privilege once accorded to the revolutionary vanguard. Political philosophy here performs an a posteriori reconstruction of the conditions of this possibility, and acknowledges the force of a desire where theory steps over the line to give advice.

7

Deliberative or radical democracy? The politics of performativity

Introduction The first section of this book investigated the conceptual, or quasi-transcendental, underpinnings of modern critical theory. This took the form of a critical reading of Habermas’s account of universal pragmatics and communicative rationality, through the lens of contemporary post-Marxist theory. According to Habermas an analysis of the category of the performative in speech act theory alludes to semantic and pragmatic idealisations implicit in our everyday communication. These idealisations provide an orientation for critical theory, most notably in moral discourses which derive their force from norms implicit, though never realised, in communication. In this chapter I evaluate whether my critical analysis of the logic of performativity holds implications for a theory of deliberative and radical democracy. Earlier discussions of the conceptual underpinnings of performativity suggested that idealisation will always be marked by its failure; this for conceptual, not only empirical reasons. This failure marks what counts as theoretical knowledge with an inevitable provisionality, and necessitates taking seriously the claims of the asymmetrical other in moral discourses. Underlying much of the argument thus far are two rather different theoretical defences of democracy. Radical democratic and deliberative versions of democracy both take into account modern recalcitrance about strong substantive claims – but their respective emphases are different. In the section ‘Democracy and performativity’, I summarise certain underlying assumptions, shared by both models, which are necessary to an adequate theoretical and empirical defence of their respective claims. Contrary to those who suggest that these two versions of democracy are incompatible, this section emphasises their complementary assumptions. These similarities are primarily methodological and theoretical. Both traditions address the same problems of modern political theory: that no metaphysical or empirical justification of democracy is plausible; that the modern debate between liberals and radicals (equality versus liberty, rights versus popular sovereignty, individual versus community) has been subverted, undermining the presuppositions of both; and lastly that a justification of democracy presupposes an incontrovertible pluralism, which invalidates all comprehensive principles of democratic legitimisation. Despite occupying the same post-metaphysical terrain however, the

118 Deliberative or radical democracy projects of deliberative and radical democracy fork, both theoretically and in terms of their accounts of democratic will formation. In the section ‘Deliberative democracy’, I indicate my reconstruction of this debate within democratic theory regarding deliberation and decision, rights and sovereignty, hegemony and consensus. In reconstructing a formal understanding of deliberative democracy, I argue that the problems outlined in the account of performativity recur at the level of an account of democratic deliberation. However, there are at the same time countervailing elements in Habermas’s reconstruction of democratic deliberation which offer scope for an integration of certain key themes of radical democratic thinking into his work. These include the radical democratic emphasis on the structural necessity and legitimacy of legal decision and violence, a performative undecidability which undermines the framing of constitutional liberal rights theory, and lastly a reconsideration of the relation between substantive and formal accounts of this deliberative model. After developing a critical reading of Habermas in the section ‘Discourse principle of democracy’, I develop these themes in the section ‘Structure of the constitutional state’. This chapter attempts, in the words of Seyla Benhabib: … at the theoretical level to describe a deliberative vision of democratic politics which can also do justice to the agonistic spirit of democracy. (Benhabib 1996a: 9)

Democracy and performativity Let me begin by drawing out more explicitly the implications of earlier chapters, in order to delineate the framework I employ to talk about democracy. Here I discuss in turn: the relation between empirical and normative political theory; the idea of a reconstructive sociology of modern democracy; a conceptualisation of subjectivity which goes beyond both republican and liberal accounts; an account of social reality as ‘second nature’; a defence of value pluralism and an analysis of the public sphere as never finally closed. My first claim is that democratic theory must combine normative with empirical insights. Proponents of democratic theory, regardless of their persuasion, inevitably combine normative with empirical claims about democracy. One wellknown account of democracy illustrates this point. Early pluralist1 accounts, regardless of their methodological commitment to an empirical approach divested of all normative claims, inevitably proffered a normative model of equal and legitimate access to the decision-making processes and apparatus of government and the state. This implicit normativity was retrospectively confirmed by the neopluralist admission that most modern, democratic and pluralist societies, the polyarchies described by Dahl, are pervaded by asymmetrical access to, and influence over, the political constitutional apparatus. Dahl’s later work acknowledges that this access is constrained by economic power (Dahl 1985: 55). The Madisonsian pluralism professed by Dahl reveals itself not as an empirical account of life in democratic America, but as a normative account of the shortcomings of modern

Deliberative or radical democracy 119 democracy. We might in a similar manner relate Plato’s defence of aristocratic reason in The Republic, both to the failures of democratic Athens, and to the Athenian’s metaphysical understanding of the polity. Any description of democratic society is tinged with normative assumptions; any purely normative theory cannot escape the empirical conditions which partially allow for its theorisation. There is no pure theory of democracy located in a noumenal realm beyond the phenomenal order, nor a wholly acontextual standpoint. This claim accords with my discussion of the relation between the transcendental and empirical in Chapter 5. This argument holds implications for the realistic accounts of democracy offered by inter alia Schumpeter and Weber. Schumpeter in particular, inspired by the findings of sociological research, sought to divest the justification of democracy of any normative content. For him the circulation, and periodic change of political elites finds its justification in the functional needs of a modern complex society, rather than in the expression of a democratic will (Schumpeter 1976). Schumpeter was correct though to express reservations about the existence of any common good, particularly any substantive version of the good. The sovereign people do not have a single will, a single consciousness or even a common interest. As such the people are incapable of decision. Democratic legitimacy should not be viewed from the point of view of a society effecting itself through the sovereign legislature, which in turn acts beneficially upon society (Habermas 1996: 472). This ideal of direct programming is lost under modern conditions of systematic differentiation and social complexity. The failure of sovereign expression is not simply a result of empirical transformations ensuing in an ever more reflexive lifeworld. Indeed, we may locate a conceptual failure in the very idea that the sovereign exercises absolute control over its utterance. A performative cleft, which is the precondition for such sovereign communication, means that the sovereign cannot finally embody its own utterance. This may be interpreted as a critique of semantic idealisation: the ascription of identical meanings to utterances used in communication has to presuppose a vulnerability of meaning, if communication is even to occur. My outline of performativity in Chapter 2, and especially the discussion of the preconditions for a successful contract, relied on this argument. This cleft in sovereign communication effects too the status of the claims a theorist may make. Given that even the most empirically oriented of political theorists cannot claim to finally represent the facts of democracy, the attempt to make good this failure, may be read as an ethical claim shutting down the distance between utterance and the world. I suggest, secondly, that a justification of democracy should begin with an account of those institutions and practices already prevalent in democratic societies, and more importantly, with the principles implicit in their self-understanding (Benhabib 1996). Benhabib and Habermas term this a reconstructive strategy of research. Reconstructions may be carried out at both the philosophical /theoretical level, and at the level of a reconstructive sociology of social action and knowledge. Habermas suggests that social research should be open to a methodological pluralism, taking into account observer and participant standpoints, combining interpretative and conceptual analyses with descriptive and empirical accounts,

120 Deliberative or radical democracy acknowledging different strategies of research and the validity of their results, and accounting for a variety of different actor perspectives. For Habermas all claims to knowledge are subject to an endlessly open process of verification. All theoretical knowledge is fallible. Habermas does not though take seriously his own counsel about the provisional nature of any claim. He argues that this endless process of verification is itself subject to the idealisations implicit in communication. For this reason the theoretical impossibility of a final knowledge, is not translated into an account of the necessary failure of idealisation. The account of democracy developed below takes as its starting point the provisionality of determinate answers, and the necessary trace of power in any attempt to posit an ideal, impossible or not. This brings me the question of epistemology, a much-maligned discipline in recent years. In part this is a result of challenges to certain knowledge which follow from the various critiques of scientific knowledge, behaviourism, the selfdetermining subject and the realisation that there is no neutral object which the subject simply reflects in language. It is of course true that the traditional triad of knowledge – a subject using a neutral language to appropriate the object – has been radically challenged, indeed fatally so. Epistemology, if it is to be understood as a specification of the conditions under which access to truth is secured, will not take us very far. This should not though exempt theoretical claims about society from critical scrutiny, reciprocal validation or challenge. Critical reconstructions never simply reflect social reality: they both reconstruct and repeat aspects of that sociality. Epistemology returns then, not in the guise of a transcendental attempt to ground the certainty of our knowledge, but as a reconstructive, reciprocal model of knowledge validation, always open, and not possessed by any subject, collective or otherwise. This quasi-transcendental approach differs from that outlined by Habermas which allows the project of modernity to rest upon the claims of reconstructive science. This, as I have discussed extensively above, rests the claims of morality and ethics on a philosophy of language. If, though, the implication of our identity in language suggests an ultimate provisionality in all our claims, then Habermas’s idealisation is undermined. This was the purpose of my discussion of the key concept of performativity in relation to his universal/formal pragmatics. Third, a justification of democracy necessarily addresses a far less determinate subject than traditional political theory had postulated. Classical liberal and republican versions of democracy ultimately resort to the idea of a determinate subject, in full control of its capacities. In liberal versions methodological individualism grounds the idea that individuals are possessed of certain natural rights.2 The function of the state is to protect these liberties and rights, punishing their violation. Politics is limited to the protection of negative liberties. Here a state-centred approach to politics is combined with a subject-centred approach to natural rights. This idea of a pre-social subject is immediately undermined by the need to ensure protection socially. As I argue below, far from being pre-political, rights are always contested. What the liberal state protects is a particular social configuration, which glosses over its contradictions with the varnish of nature.3 Today, any account of democracy is confronted with the emergence of forms of

Deliberative or radical democracy 121 political subjectivity which violate the sovereign bounds of the nation state. Having said this, a rejection of liberalism in toto seems to me mistaken. What the previous chapter suggested was that any conception of the subject has to account both for subjective freedom and the relation of individual subjects to their society. The political dimension of the liberal democratic project maintains its importance, though viewed from a perspective wholly different to that of laissez faire economics. In this respect a sociological translation of the concept of performativity rejects Marx’s critique of human rights as the ideological manifestation of exploitative social relations. Classical republicanism, by contrast, analyses politics at the higher level of the social whole. From this perspective it makes little sense to speak of individual development without taking account of the development of all. In its most idealistic versions the social whole represents itself to itself, and government policy is collectively determined, under the constraint of unanimity. The state is simply an administrative body implementing, without complication, decisions which emanate from the gathered citizenry. Bertell Ollman usefully characterises Marx’s notion of administration in a democracy as that of a traffic officer, simply helping people get to where they want to go (Ollman 1977: 33). Drawing on noble lineage from the Athenian polis, communitarians such as Marx and Rousseau presuppose a final reduction of social complexity, the transparency of communication and decision, and the ending of [essential] conflict. Instead of individual subjectivity, we are presented with the transparency of a macro-subject society, which like a healthy body is in full control of all its functions, but unlike a human body does not suffer the complications of illness, age and uncertainty. A key concept in this communitarian lexicon is political virtue. As Joseph Schwartz has argued: ‘The excessively solidaristic project of virtuous communitarianism harks back to a restrictive, pseudo-Aristotelian conception of the good which denies modern conceptions of the good life’ (Schwartz 1995). Twentieth-century political philosophy has undermined both the assumption of determinate subjectivity, and that of the certainty of a macro-subject society. This is partially a consequence of the epistemological and methodological shifts outlined above. It follows too from any analysis of the changing nature of late capitalist societies in which functional differentiation into a variety of different social systems, each with its own language and concerns, tarnishes the proclaimed certainty of those hoping to represent the lost totality of society. Politics is increasingly dispersed across a variety of spheres, nominally concentrated in the administrative–legislative apparatus of the modern state, but extending into the refugee like spaces of the public sphere and beyond the nation state into the global institutions which regulate economic, environmental, moral and legal actions beyond states. No higher-level subjectivity will represent, repair or unite this dirempted totality. Similarly the idea of a subject in full control and possession of itself is an old dream which can no longer ground political society. Our identities are rooted in a common lifeworld which ensures our socialisation and reproduction, and in which we find our rights protected. As subjects we are both constituted in this world, and participate in its constitution either in affirming

122 Deliberative or radical democracy what is, or in challenging and reworking the assumptions which ground our common sociality. This was at least indicated in my critique of Habermas’s notion of performativity, in Chapter 2. Derrida puts this point well: The dimension of performative interpretation, that is of an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets … is a definition of the performative as unorthodox with regard to speech act theory as it is with regard to the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach (‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it’.) (Derrida 1994: 51) Every accepted orthodoxy protects itself by insisting on its determinate meaning. If however this is only an interpretation, the hegemonic determination of what is by particular actors in particular times, the essential vulnerability of all sociality and solidarity is revealed. A post-Marxist reading of the structuralist theory of interpellation is suggestive of this. One of the problems that Althusser’s theory of interpellation had to address was who or what responded to the interpellation. Without addressing this problem a structuralist theory of capitalist organisation runs the risk of reducing the subject of politics to an effect of the subject position with which it identifies. In effect this theory does away with the subject, reducing it to the anonymous effect of an anonymous system, whose every action is in the last instance programmed. By contrast, the presumption of an irreducible performativity suggests that there is a certain contingency to this relation of subject and social structure. Neither subject nor structure should be conceived of as closed entities. Both are afflicted by a structural indeterminacy. I have argued, fourth, that the concept of performativity points to the historically constituted nature of modern capitalist societies; to ‘social reality’ as a second nature. Critique derives its force then from at least two sources: first the essential indeterminacy of all social order which the fully developed concept of performativity pointed to; second the implicit ideals which regulate our everyday interaction and may be reconstructed as underlying assumptions pervading modern sociality. However, we should not, nor can we, attribute to this reconstruction the status of the universal. While it may hark in that direction, even the formal outline of such a claim, runs the risk of hypostasising itself as necessary. This reconstruction may be the best for us, may even be the best for others, but it is an ongoing project fallible, and hypothetical through and through. As Butler expresses it: To claim that the universal has not yet been articulated is to insist that the ‘not yet’ is proper to an understanding of the universal itself: that which remains ‘unrealised’ by the universal constitutes it essentially. The universal begins to become articulated precisely through challenges to its existing formulation, and this challenge emerges from those who are not covered by it … the ‘universal’… emerges as a postulated and open-ended ideal that has not yet been adequately encoded by any given set of legal conventions. If existing and accepted conventions of universality constrain the domain of the speakable,

Deliberative or radical democracy 123 this constraint produces the speakable, marking a border of demarcation between the speakable and the unspeakable. (Butler 1996: 90) Fifth, these conjectures privilege value pluralism, while being suspicious of versions of political theory which negate a plurality of life projects, worldviews and life choices. If no substantive vision of the good life can claim absolute precedence, then any theory of democracy defends a framework within which difference is valued. However, outlining this framework immediately necessitates the exclusion of certain substantive versions of the good life. This element of power, which necessitates exclusion, has to be accounted for when attempting to describe the lineaments of a democratic order. Moreover, a theory of modern democracy must account both for this value pluralism, and for a subject which is uncertain of its own constitution enough to make its own identity, and certain enough of its identity to feel safe in committing breaches within the acceptable. Finally, and importantly, the dispersal of the spaces in which politics occurs points to the need to think of a politics beyond the party form, and the modern state. The party is no longer capable of representing society nor the dispersed public spaces in which politics is performed. For this reason an account of democracy needs to consider not only the institutional framing of representative government, the agreed political grammar, but also (i) the basic framing of the social bond at the ideological level, and the tenuousness of this framing; (ii) the dispersion of power both downwards and upwards away from the state; (iii) perhaps most importantly the possibility of democratic control being exercised over those systems and political bodies which have carved out within a rationalised lifeworld, their own self-regulating spaces for the exercise of power. While much of this can only be answered empirically, it is my contention that a reconstructive account of the democratic public sphere, combined with increased attention to the contingency of theoretical claims, provides the beginning of a post-metaphysical justification for democratic politics. A justification of democracy then includes: 1

2

3

An account of modern democratic institutions which reconstructs potentials latent within modern societies, both in order to posit a normative model which has some validity, and in order to critically address the empirical shortfalls in modern democracies which consistently betray their own self-understanding; A methodological pluralism in which the results of research are themselves subject to the counter-factual possibility of future challenges; the counterfactual does not then point to the ideal of a final consensual establishment of truth, but rather to the contingency of the truths we may now claim to have; A determined opposition to overly substantive versions of the good life, and a valuing of a pluralism which is never finally complete;

124 Deliberative or radical democracy 4

An uncertain subjectivity both constituted in, and capable of participating as, a transformative agent in society.

In my view two versions of democracy most closely approximate these conditions: radical democracy, which arises out of the concerns of the new left, and deliberative versions of democracy which attempt a political theoretical translation of the ideal of communicative rationality. As in previous chapters I will begin with accounts inspired by the ideal of open communication.4 An internal critique of Habermas’s version of deliberation necessitates the introduction of certain precepts presupposed in radical accounts of democratic will formation.5

Deliberative democracy The idea of deliberative democracy was first proposed in the mid-1980s by among others Bernard Manin, Joshua Cohen and Bruce Ackermann. All of these works draw upon the critical theory of Jurgen Habermas, attempting a political theoretical translation of the ideal of communicative rationality. In the mid-1990s Habermas himself reconstructed his theory of communication in a manner apposite to the analysis of democracy in modern states. Deliberative democracy has also been used to ground various suggestions for institutional design, most notably by James Fishkin (Fishkin 1991). I will not in this chapter analyse particular suggestions for institutional design, but focus on the theoretical assumptions, and the relation of these to the development of modern democracies. Habermas, it will be recalled, argues that a pragmatic analysis of language use reveals an implicit rationality in everyday communication. An ever present, though seldom redeemed claim to reason is raised in communication. This binds each individual to an intersubjectively realised consensus, and functions as an orienting ideal in instances of social breakdown. Habermas expresses this necessity thus: In seeking to reach an understanding, natural language users must assume, among other things that the participants pursue their illocutionary goals without reservations, that they tie their agreements to the intersubjective recognition of criticisable validity claims, and that they are ready to take on the obligations resulting from consensus and relevant for further interaction. These aspects of validity that undergird speech are also imparted to the forms of life reproduced through communicative action. Communicative rationality is expressed in a decentred complex of pervasive transcendentally enabling structural conditions, but it is not a subjective capacity telling actors what they ought to do. (Habermas 1996: 4) This ideal of communicative consensus proffers the possibility of exercising democratic control over those modern institutions which increasingly control and delimit everyday life, notably bureaucratic and economic systems. In such a society all participants would exercise reciprocal rights of participation and deliberation. Habermas insists though that the ideal of communicative reason is not in itself equivalent to a concrete form of life, and does not intimate full transparency or

Deliberative or radical democracy 125 unity of the self. How then does this ideal relate to a concrete form of life? The particular validity claim which concerns us in this case is that of morality. Developing this intersubjective claim to validity Habermas arrives at a discourse principle of universality. The discourse principle of universalisation is derived from the basic structure of everyday speech. It is deceptively simple, as my discussion in Chapter 1 noted: D: Just those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourses. (Habermas 1996: 107) This principle does not detail undisputed rational norms. In a post-metaphysical society all that philosophy can do is outline the ‘rational conditions of the procedure under which norms can and should be grounded by people in the context of their lifeworlds’ (Def lem 1994: 9). If this principle is to be relevant to democratic societies two important worries have to be addressed. First, having derived this discourse principle from the universal pragmatic analysis of speech acts,6 Habermas faces the more difficult task of illustrating that the principle indeed has some force, that it is not the expression of a moral universality which says nothing about concrete forms of life. While then it may not be equivalent to a form of life, he still needs to determine its relation to the realm of political and social life, which may appear wholly unrelated to the principle. How are the validity claims which undergird speech imparted to forms of life; how is the general principle relevant to democratic societies? Second, critics have argued that Habermas posits consensus, while disregarding the politics of difference. Diana Coole puts the objection thus: The politics of alterity, and the aesthetic ‘emancipatory’ interventions within it, thus proliferate on a level that is quite alien to Habermas’s aspiration for mobilising the unfinished project of modernity, yet it is difficult to see how that project as he presents it could engage in these circuits of the non rational. Indeed … his entire theory is predicated on an exclusion of the dimension of the Other. (Coole 1996: 242) As I noted with regard to formal universalism in Chapter 2, morality entails respect for the symmetrical other, but seems to exclude the possibility of an asymmetrical demand for justice. As a normative critique of modern sociality the idea seemed plausible; as a plausible account of modern democracy hopelessly utopian. Rorty, for example, has argued that while the idea of an undistorted communication ‘is of the essence of liberal politics’, there is no need for Habermas to make universalist claims for the ideal, with a theory of communicative action which exceeds the bounds of all particular community (Rorty 1985: 173). We will need then to assess the relation between the universal claims of communication, and the particularity of modern democratic politics.

126 Deliberative or radical democracy In Between Facts and Norms the attempt to relate the discourse principle to politics and legality, leads Habermas to defend a number of the general points made in the first section above. He rejects the republican ideal of a collectively acting citizenry. Communicative rationality does not issue in such a substantive vision of community and legitimacy. He rejects too the rational grounding in natural law of a particular polity. Finally, he acknowledges that modern societies are constituted by an irreducible pluralism. In the absence of fixed natural laws, and any single version of the good life, a universal grounding of deliberative politics appears anachronistic. Yet Habermas simultaneously retains the founding premise of his thought: that an implicit communicative rationality grounds our common sociality. I argue that the reconstruction of democratic legitimacy in terms of a theory of communicative rationality recursively undermines its own premises. A revised theory of performativity accounts for this fissure which opens in the relation between ideal and real, while maintaining many of the insights of a deliberative vision of a democracy to come. Implicit in this critique is my assumption that Habermas’s version of deliberative democracy cannot address antagonisms which cannot be resolved by democratic means, and that it is undermined with the emergence of new forms of politics which require thinking beyond the constitutional limitations he places on democratic sovereignty. This is addressed in more detail in the next chapter. Habermas’s reconstruction begins with an account of democratic selfunderstanding. There are two main aspects to this political theory which I will consider in turn: the structures of the constitutional state, and the relationship of the constitutionally regulated state to informal networks of communication in the public sphere. First though I need to outline the fundamental reconstructions of the theory of communicative action once it attempts, in Habermas’s words, ‘to performatively refute the objection that the theory of communicative action is blind to institutional reality’ (Habermas 1996: xl). The discourse principle of democracy In attempting to derive a universal morality from the structure of communication Habermas defended what he terms a discourse principle of universalisation. This discourse principle, he initially suggested, entailed a universally valid principle of morality. In Between Facts and Norms this changes, and he now distinguishes the discourse principle from the moral principle, with important consequences for the conceptualisation of deliberative democracy: In my previous publications on discourse ethics, I have not sufficiently distinguished between the discourse principle and the moral principle. The discourse principle is only intended to explain the point of view from which norms of action can be impartially justified; I assume that the principle itself reflects those symmetrical relations of recognition built into communicatively structured forms of life in general. (Habermas 1996: 109)

Deliberative or radical democracy 127 The discourse principle specifies a general point of view for all norms of action. Yet of what relevance is this principle to the varied types of ethico-political discourse and their different sets of rules? Habermas identifies inter alia pragmatic, ethical and moral questions. If the principle of morality is not equivalent to the principle of discourse, but one of its constituent elements then the political conditions for its realisation do not follow directly from the moral principle. Instead the moral principle, as a specification of the discourse principle: … first results when one specifies the general discourse principle for those norms that can be justified if and only if equal consideration is given to the interests of all of those who are possibly involved. (Habermas 1996: 108) The moral principle of universalisation applies when one is attempting to justify moral norms in general. It is supplemented by a principle of appropriateness, when moral norms are applied to particular cases. I have already suggested the tension that this introduces to Habermas’s account of moral and ethical discourses, but in Between Facts and Norms he introduces a wholly new differentiation designed to link the principle of universalisation to democratic communities. This principle of democracy establishes a procedure for legitimate law making … this principle explains the performative meaning of a practice of self-determination on the part of legal consociates who recognise one another as free and equal members of an association they have joined voluntarily. (Habermas 1996: 110) We can already begin to glimpse some of the problems this will introduce for a theory of democracy. Habermas specifies that the principle extends to legal consociates who have joined the association voluntarily. Contemporary democracies are confronted with a problem which challenges this restriction: immigration undermines the focus on legality, while voluntary joining of a community is often used as a means of excluding those who wish to join as a consociate later. Habermas already seems to have written the real problems of democratic legitimation out of his account. The crucial move here is that the discourse principle becomes a principle of democracy only by way of legal institutionalisation (Habermas 1996: 121). A useful basis of distinction between this and the moral principle is to analyse those reasons that count as appropriate in the case of each. Legal norms, unlike moral norms, may draw upon pragmatic, ethical, political and moral reasons for their justification. Where moral principles claim a universality without spatio-temporal limitation, ethico-political questions refer to specified political communities. A number of critical points follow from this distinction. Given their importance to a theory of deliberative democracy, I elucidate them at length, before turning to a more critical engagement.

128 Deliberative or radical democracy The question Habermas tries to answer is the means whereby legitimate government may be maintained in a post-metaphysical world. In this respect his intention is no different to that of most modern political theorists. Given that the moral principle in itself cannot secure the bind necessary to hold together a political community, he argues that law removes the tasks of social integration from overburdened social actors, while maintaining a legitimacy derived from public deliberation. The principle of discourse secures an internal relation between law, politics and morality. This internal relation may be deduced from a working out of the institutional preconditions necessary to the achievement of the universality of the discourse principle. The theoretical deduction is itself confirmed in a reconstructive account of how participants themselves understand their relation to the law. The internal relation between these three different orders means too that none of the three is reducible to the other. Habermas is particularly concerned to reject the reduction of law to a moral principle,7 or the reduction of law to an action system for power.8 Rather it serves as a mechanism for integrating and relating the two different orders of morality and power. This attempt to outline the principles necessary to the justification of the exercise of power, finds stark contrast in theories which reduce law to the exercise of power. Consideration of modern law purely from the perspective of its integrative functions misses, according to Habermas, the role it plays in translating communicative power into administrative or political power. Law performs this function in securing the basic framework necessary to the delivery of popular sovereignty. Crucially though popular sovereignty is now understood in procedural terms. This in turn provides the terms of a reconciliation between liberal and communitarian political theories. David Rasmussen has expressed Habermas’s intentions clearly: From the sociological perspective, law must be authoritative enough to force social integration after the great religious traditions have lost their normative authority. From the philosophical perspective law must have some kind of basis in justice, which will enable, particularly in a burgeoning democratic society, wilful assent to its legitimacy. (Rasmussen 1994: 26) A useful perspective on this problem is offered by Mouffe’s account of radical democracy. With Habermas, Mouffe links democracy to two traditions: political liberalism, (the rule of law, the separation of powers and individual rights) and popular sovereignty. These two traditions are the pillars of Habermas’s account. Mouffe though renounces the universalist perspective of the discourse principle. This, she argues, ‘… denies the fact that, like any other regime, modern pluralist democracy constitutes a system of relations of power and renders the democratic challenging of those forms of power illegitimate’ (Mouffe 1996: 254). She argues that the meaning of the universal can never be fixed. The universal should be conceived of as an unreachable horizon and universal harmony ‘is a self refuting ideal because the very moment of its realisation would coincide with its disintegration’ (Mouffe 1996: 254). Mouffe though avoids the problem implicit in her

Deliberative or radical democracy 129 own phrasing. While a democratic regime is certainly partially constituted by power, by what criterion does she determine that challenges to that power are themselves democratic? What differentiates democracy from other regimes, if it, like any other regime, is simply another system of power? Indeed what rationale lies behind the attempt to defend a theory of radical democracy, if it is ultimately a particular and contingent system of power? Seyla Benhabib makes the point stingingly: Agonistic visions of democratic politics inevitably invite the question, How can we be so sure that the agon of episodic politics, or the contest of pluralisms that cannot be adjudicated at the higher level, will all be instances of good and just democratic politics as opposed to being instances of fascism, xenophobic nationalism, right wing populism? (Benhabib 1996a: 8) Without some motivational account of why we should trust in a democracy, and without an outline of reasons why democracy is better than other forms of political organisation, Mouffe risks reducing democratic legitimation either to context or to power. While I accept with Mouffe that the universal can only be conceived of as a broken promise, one of the reasons for supporting democratic organisation is in order to allow for constant challenge and reinvigoration of established procedures and principles. For Habermas the democratic deficit which opens up in Mouffe’s account can only be redeemed with reference to the discourse principle and its institutionalisation in a system of rights. In the first instance law grants conditional liberties to citizens in their capacity as private individuals. These rights may be exercised negatively, in order to delimit a space in which the subject is freed from social and political obligation, as in Berlin’s account of negative liberty. Habermas contends that to leave the issue here misses the internal relation between rights and popular sovereignty: … individual private rights cannot even be adequately formulated, let alone politically implemented, if those affected have not first engaged in public discussions to clarify which features are relevant in treating typical cases as alike or different, and then mobilised communicative power for the consideration of their newly interpreted needs. (Habermas 1996: 450) The constitutional system of rights functions as an enabling condition for the expression of sovereignty rather than as a limit as classical Marxist theory has contended. In this case the ‘genesis of these rights comprises a circular process in which the legal code, or legal form and the mechanism for producing legitimate law – hence the democratic principle – are co-originally constituted’ (Habermas 1996: 122). Put simply Habermas believes that the notion of popular sovereignty presupposes basic rights and liberties, which are intrinsic to its delivery.

130 Deliberative or radical democracy In order to derive these rights Habermas begins with the discourse principle: The scope of citizens’ public autonomy is not restricted by natural or moral rights just waiting to be put into effect, nor is the individual’s private autonomy merely instrumentalised for the purposes of popular sovereignty. Nothing is given prior to the citizen’s practice of self determination other than the discourse principle which is built into the conditions of communication in general, and the legal medium as such. (Habermas 1996: 128) In the legal system private and public autonomy are secured, and reflected in the tension between the facticity of law and its claim to legitimacy. The principle of popular sovereignty, that all government authority derives from the people, is specified in the system of rights. This public dimension of individual rights reveals that subjective liberties, if they are to be legitimate, are secured with reference to the practice of communicative freedom which they enable. Paradoxically, for Habermas, communicative freedom is institutionalised in the form of individual rights. These include rights to equal liberties, community membership rights, rights to legal protection and basic rights of participation in the determination of political autonomy. Controversially, Habermas also includes what have been termed capability rights, rights obliging the state to ensure a relative degree of material equality, ensuring fair participation as a legal consociate (Habermas 1996: 122 ff). This ‘symmetrical juridification of communicative action’ in law, to use Habermas’s rather technical phrasing, links sovereignty and right. In their private capacities citizens are the addressees of rights; in their public capacity they assume the position of authors of these rights. Let me briefly take stock. Habermas insists that despite the historical variability of systems of rights, which are context dependent, each is a different reading of the same set of rights. This follows from the justification of rights as an elucidation of the discourse principle. Second the discourse principle still functions as the propadeutic for the interpretation of modern democracies. Its derivation is independent of the empirical instantiations of democracy, though it may be retroactively verified through an analysis of functioning democracies. Third, despite insisting that the same basic system of rights underlies all democratic systems, Habermas acknowledges that constitutions are only ever relatively fixed. They are living projects, continually carried forward by different generations. If this is the case we might be tempted to question the claim that particular systems are simply different elucidations of the same universal principle. The gap which opens between particularity and universality is not that easily closed down. As I have contended throughout this book ‘If the assumptions about speech-act theory cannot be justified how can the central thesis about communication …?’ (Rasmussen 1994: 43). I will suggest a revision of certain of the founding premises in order to make good this claim. Before doing so this argument cannot be completed without a critical tracing of Habermas’s account of the constitutional state, and informal public sphere.

Deliberative or radical democracy 131 The structure of the constitutional state In reconstructing the democratic self-understanding of modern societies, then, Habermas begins with principles underpinning the modern constitutional state. Most constitutional states ensure a complex system of rights and liberties. Liberal theory considered these rights as individual, submitting that the public weal operates only to protect individual liberties. As recently as 1974 Robert Nozick claimed ‘… there are only individual people with their individual lives’, and thus that individuals are the only political entity (Held 1996: 255–7). The communitarian critique of rights takes these claims at face value, and, having rejected methodological individualism disregards the role of rights in securing a realm of autonomy. Thus as Held notes, even in the writings of the new left who acknowledge the importance of rights, (authors such as Pateman and McPherson), a theory of rights is not developed (Held 1996: 309). While these authors insisted on the necessity of an open institutional system, direct participation, freedom of information and the like they underestimate the engendering role rights have played in framing sovereignty. Indeed rights generally considered individual are very obviously social. The social aspect of rights is most obvious in instances such as free speech, and freedom of association. Rights considered in this light do not receive their justification from a natural order, but because of the enabling and limiting role they play in the constitution of democratic society. The burden of protecting these rights falls to the law. Most democratic societies are regulated by their original constitutions, and by the positive law passed in their lifetimes or established by precedent. Up to this point I am in agreement with Habermas’s argument. For Habermas law represents a translation of the ideal of a deliberative democracy, delimiting the conditions of open and free communication. As I argued in the previous section, there are no meta-social guarantors. Justification of our action is inner worldly and intersubjective. The burden of social integration falls to the law, its institutionalisation and interpretation. Because we cannot all participate in every decision made law, in its ideal, takes on the burden of this participative model. Thus far we have noted two aspects of law. The first, its legitimacy, has to be secured beyond the purely functional need for decision and co-ordination. Habermas agrees here with Rousseau: the justification of a social bond has to reach beyond its force. Law makes a claim to be valid, demanding observance not simply through the threat of sanction, but also because of its impartiality and general acceptability. In the terms developed by Habermas legality is measured against the discursive redeemability of its claim to be valid when demanding obedience. Law thus harbours a democratic ideal, imperfectly realised, but always present in its strictures. The second aspect of law, its facticity, provides it with the possibility of regulating social interaction, without having to validate its every move. This follows from the functional complexity, and demands on time made by modern society. Let me focus on the question of legitimacy, a legitimacy that transcends force. The discursive level of public debate is generally mediated via a parliament, and

132 Deliberative or radical democracy the core democratic features of elections, free speech, equal rights to participation and the like. According to Habermas these institutional features point beyond themselves to the constitution of an open and active public sphere. Democratic self-understanding requires that channels of communication between state, public and civil society are open, and transparent – though real political life rarely accords with these requirements. The constitutional structure of the state guarantees these conditions. Rights ensure sluices of rationalisation, which attribute to administrative and legislative decisions a provisional validity. The strength of the claim being made should be emphasised: Habermas believes that the constitutional state and concomitant legal structure embody a certain spirit of reason, an implicit ideal, which they rarely live up to, but which allow for consistent challenge and reinvigoration of a democratic order. What differentiates this legal structure from others, is that while it takes up the burden of decision, that burden is constantly checked against a principle of justification. Habermas summarises: In the principle of popular sovereignty, according to which all governmental authority derives from the people, the individual’s right to an equal opportunity to participate in democratic will formation is combined with a legally institutionalised practice of civic self-determination. This principle forms the hinge between the system of rights and the construction of a constitutional democracy. By starting with discourse theory, we arrive at (a) a special interpretation of the principle of popular sovereignty. This yields (b) the principle of comprehensive legal protection for individuals, which is guaranteed by an independent judiciary; (c) the principles requiring that administration be subject to law and judicial review (as well as to parliamentary oversight); and (d) the principle of the separation of state and society, which is intended to prevent social power from being converted directly into administrative power, that is without first passing through the sluices of communicative power formation. (Habermas 1996: 169) Such a constitutionally brokered sphere of rights, liberties and obligations has as its other face a democratic habitus. It draws upon lifeworld resources, such as an enlightened socialisation and education; it demands the proliferation of opinion building associations, which cannot easily be harnessed under direct political control, and which rarely have direct access to the state and its regulatory capacities; finally it relies upon informal networks of communication, which provide a context of justification as well as a context of discovery and invention. This brings me to the second aspect of a deliberative model of democracy. Informal and structured communication in the public sphere I noted above that communitarian models of political will formation tend to overburden the capacities of the citizen of a democratic polis. Often this results in a rejection of the sphere of guaranteed rights and liberties, and an idealisation of the potential for direct participation. Drawing on earlier Republican versions

Deliberative or radical democracy 133 of democracy, this tradition tends to reduce politics to its habitus, while ignoring the need to foster precisely those ideals it harbours through a regulated system of rights and liberties. Moreover, the communitarian cannot account for those communities whose values seem to circumvent the democratic understanding of community espoused. This in no way dispels the need to relate the basic framework of a democratic polis to its habitus. Indeed a political framework can only claim a modicum of legitimacy if there are direct channels of communication between the periphery and the political centre, mediated by a public sphere. The public sphere9 is defined by Habermas, Benhabib and others as the unregulated sphere of private and social interactions. According to these authors there is a direct link between the basic system of rights and the public sphere. Here citizens interact with the variety of different systems and networks which comprise the state apparatus. As citizens we exercise the rights and liberties guaranteed by the state but we also pay taxes, receive income support, vote in elections, find ourselves in courts or even prison cells. In these and other capacities our everyday lives intermesh in a messy and uncertain manner with the intrusive reality of the modern political system. Importantly, Habermas notes, the public sphere overlaps with the political core of society. Political parties draw their support from within the public sphere, attempting to lure private citizens into the political process, and providing a modicum of legitimisation for their actions which may, or may not, be independent of state policy. The public sphere also comprises the area of privacy, inter alia the integrity of personal life, belief, conscience and movement, and the right to participate in the various modes of communication afforded by the technological revolution, without hindrance – the post and telecommunications networks, e-mail, radio talk shows and the like. This accords with the demand for a plurality of spaces within which a dispersed political contestation may occur, outlined above: episodic publics, for example coffee house culture, occasional publics, attending theatre say, or abstract publics, such as a television audience or internet users. It is notable that in none of these do we find rules of exclusion or hard boundaries as might be found in political movements or struggles. Again I am in broad agreement with Habermas. A democratic public sphere is made possible by the basic structure of rights and liberties, but is not reducible to it. Where politics comes to be all embracing, mobilising action on all fronts, democratic rights and liberties tend to dissolve. Where hard boundaries are drawn communication becomes partial and antagonistic. It is generally under conditions of crisis that this sphere is mobilised politically, and attempts to directly influence the political agenda.10 The most radical example of this is in popular revolutions, when the very principle constituting political society is under threat. In a democratic society, where channels of access allow the translation of problems within the public sphere into influence, such direct forms of intervention should not, Habermas believes, be needed. Noting the contradictions of this form of revolutionary consciousness, heir of the French Revolution, Habermas writes: The holistic concept of political practice has also lost its lustre and motivating power. As the equal participation of all citizens in political will-formation was

134 Deliberative or radical democracy laboriously institutionalised according to the rule of law, the contradictions built into the concept of popular sovereignty itself became manifest. The people from whom all governmental authority is supposed to derive does not comprise a subject with will and consciousness. It only appears in the plural and as a people it is capable of neither decision nor action as a whole. (Habermas 1997: 40) If a state is to claim democratic legitimacy it should conform to a model in terms of which the agenda for the passing of laws is determined from within this anonymous sphere of communicative interaction. In this way the public political process maintains a capacity to react to those noises which follow from severe disturbances of the lifeworld. This implies a dynamic understanding of the law, and of the constitution, as an unfinished project which is remade by every generation, and in which, to recall Tom Paine’s critique of Edmund Burke, the dead weight of tradition does not predetermine our interpretation of rights. Let me briefly recapitulate Habermas’s argument, extending certain of its implications in line with my own reading. Constitutional rights and principles explicate the self-understanding of a democratic community as free and equal. This shifts the demands of direct democracy from substantive to formal procedures of democratic legitimisation. However no constitution is ever fixed in stone. The political system is constrained by those sources of communicative power which emanate from the public sphere, and, ideally, should be sensitised to its demands. This implies the need for sluices of communication between the legally regulated sphere and the demands of an active citizenry, who are not themselves in possession of one single will. Thus, according to Habermas, a mobilised public sphere should be able to influence policy outcome, both at the level of interpretation of basic rights and values, and in terms of the outcome of positive law. This sphere should not be subject to direct control, nor be directly articulated to one substantive version of political good. Where this occurs the basic rights of privacy, liberty, association and communication are threatened. Habermas does not seek to directly represent the reality of what actually occurs in democratic societies. These societies are inevitably subject to the distortions of power and influence. Rather, he claims to reconstruct the intuitive selfunderstanding of modern democracies, through his analysis of rights and sovereignty. This entails recognising an incontrovertible pluralism of worldviews and values and promoting decentred, and autonomous publics, not subject to direct political access (Guttman and Thompson 1996: 357). The communicative legitimisation of political rule and law is now deemed to occur through a highly differentiated, subjectless and diffuse process of public interaction without the direct intervention of a sovereign public. Habermas solves the problem of recursivity – that precisely those rights which establish popular sovereignty have to be presupposed in order for the sovereign to constitute itself as such – by claiming that the two are equiprimordial as principles of justification. Historically, of course, this relation may not have developed in so straightforward a manner, but for Habermas this is of little concern: rather he is concerned here to develop

Deliberative or radical democracy 135 a theoretical justification of a deliberative form of democracy. Many of the elements of a deliberative democracy that he defends are indeed features of contemporary liberal democracies, but these societies do not live up to the ideal of autonomy which underpins communicative rationality. The fact that Habermas outlines an ideal description of a democracy which has not been realised is no reason for criticism; however there are good empirical and theoretical reasons for rejecting certain of the core premises of this argument. It is a measure of the theoretical honesty of Habermas’s work that he has begun to develop a self-critique which addresses certain of its limitations. In what follows I discuss the relationship between globalisation and the nation state, suggest that deliberative democracy defends a particular form of the good which is particular and exclusionary, discuss the relationship between sovereignty and rights and suggest that Habermas cannot deal with the demand of the asymmetrical other. The limits of deliberative democracy? For Habermas the key question when considering the institutional preconditions for the expression of sovereignty is that of complexity. Regardless of technological evolution it is highly unlikely that the sovereign people will ever be able to express its unmediated will, thereby directly determining policy outcome and law. In more recent work Habermas has recognised that economic and political globalisation threaten the model of democracy which Between Facts and Norms defends. In concluding this book Habermas writes: … this paradigm of law [the deliberative] is formal in the sense that it merely states the necessary conditions under which legal subjects in their role of enfranchised citizens can reach an understanding with one another about what their problems are and how they are to be solved. (Habermas 1996: 445) Nation states however are increasingly incapable of providing the conditions under which just such understanding can be reached. Financial networking threatens states with the possibility of capital flight. Under these conditions states find it more and more difficult to redistribute through social welfare structures, and the tax burden weighs down citizens rather than corporations. Communicative networks see the creation of abstract publics which transcend the nation, and international regulatory regimes limit the room for manoeuvre of states. As Habermas notes this creates both efficiency and legitimation gaps, suggesting that democratic theory can no longer be limited by the territorial trap. However the nation state still provides strong guarantees of market and property relations (Habermas 2001: 68). Habermas argues that this does not threaten his account of deliberative democracy because the democratic procedure he defends does not depend upon an old idea of the direct expression of a political will by the sovereign people, but instead relies on a deliberative process which delivers rational results by allowing for a proliferation of public spaces, defends freedom of speech

136 Deliberative or radical democracy and debate and effects indirectly, rather than directly, policy outcomes. This is institutionalised through the mechanisms of democratic law which could potentially be institutionalised at a variety of levels: the nation state, regional bodies such as the European Union and global institutions. But if this is the case then the account of legality offered by Habermas in Between Facts and Norms, which relies on what he terms constitutional patriotism, must be rethought. For Habermas the problem then is that political networks need to catch up with global markets bringing them under political control. This is indeed an admirable project, one which inherits the legacy of Kant’s cosmopolitanism under changed conditions. There is good reason to suggest though that the very logic described by Habermas undermines his own arguments. He notes that increasingly nation states play the role of defending rights to property and free markets, but find it more difficult to defend precisely those rights that he deems necessary to the delivery of a deliberative outcome. Indeed there is little mention here of the key rights that Habermas links to the indirect delivery of a sovereign will in Between Facts and Norms. Recall what those were: equal liberty, community membership rights, legal protection, rights to participation and capability rights. Each of these is threatened in the global order described by Habermas, and more often than not they are used as ideological means to justify the exercise of force by liberal states both in foreign territories and over their own citizens. There is one might argue a form of repressive tolerance which characterises liberal democracies: free speech is fine, the people can take to the streets if they wish, but the institutionalisation of a will contrary to that of markets or dominant elites is excluded as a possibility. Equal freedoms extend to the protection of property and participation in the market, but no further; community membership rights are protected by the consociates of the democratic state while excluding the threatening immigrant and capability rights are undermined as they would burden the ability of the market to generate ever more profit. Habermas is correct then to insist upon a different form of globalisation than that which dominates today, but his own framework for the delivery of this new order misses the key problem. The particular form of autonomy that his version of deliberation delivers increasingly acts as a legitimatory veil for the exercise of imperial power. Autonomy, which Habermas describes as the dogmatic core of his procedural defence of the rule of law, is a formal freedom which is open to different forms of political articulation; its content is not given in advance, and the outcome of its exercise is not necessarily the democratic legitimacy which he suggests its free practice would deliver. The empty shell of freedom which the rights Habermas describes are supposed to defend, mimics the shadow-like world of network transactions which escape substantive control by sovereign publics. The global reorganisation of these rights as justificatory mechanisms for the extension of regimes of accumulation forces a recognition that rights involve the extension of new powers, powers exercised by free citizens which indirectly maintain conditions of exploitation now organised on a global level. In itself this does not have to undermine the ideal described by Habermas,

Deliberative or radical democracy 137 but reflection on this ideal suggests that the challenge that globalisation presents to the account of communicative freedom is symptomatic of other theoretical problems. Let me begin with the question of the good. Democracies necessarily exclude certain versions of the good. Maeve Cooke makes this point clearly: Habermas continues to affirm the desirability and possibility of the neutrality of the law with regard to citizens’ ethical commitments and convictions without making explicit the important condition to which this is subject … liberalism sets certain limits as far as the recognition of- and indeed toleration of – difference is concerned. Once this is admitted it becomes possible to address the question of the appropriate response to liberalism’s denial of equal political recognition to certain social groups. (Cooke 1997: 282) A similar problem is expressed in Habermas’s claim that particular systems of rights are explications of a universal structure of rights which follows, of necessity, from a consideration of how the discourse principle may be institutionalised. The particularity of different histories, and different goods, means that even where a fixed constitutional structure regulates political interaction, the meaning of rights is constituted in the struggle between different conceptions of the good. More than this: rights, which in word appear the same, take on different meanings both between different systems, and even within the bounds of one system. The logic of performativity which I have defended as a basis for the critique of Habermas suggests this. Rights are not simply the explication of conditions necessary to the realisation of a principle of democratic sovereignty, derived from an ex cathedra discourse principle. Indeed, as Cooke suggests, the communicative justification of rights already implies a particular version of the good – linked to the fostering of autonomy – and of necessity excludes certain goods. Yet Cooke does not carry the implications of her critique far enough. Excluded versions of the good are not constituted as such a priori. Rather the interpretations which particular societies give to the discourse of rights may hinder or foster different forms of the good life. If we move from the problem of particular conceptions of the good, to the most basic presumption of Habermas’s argument a similar, though distinct problem arises. Because rights are viewed as enabling conditions for the expression of public sovereignty, it seems that the sovereign cannot overrule these rights without endangering its own existence. Exclusion seems inevitable when particular social groups attempt to overturn the very premises which constitute the sovereign people. Yet given conditions of complexity which Habermas himself analyses so convincingly, it is more than plausible that sovereignty may come into conflict with rights. This is obviously the case when differing interpretations of rights come into conflict. More pertinently, the sovereign may choose to suspend rights, or introduce community rights which override those privileged by Habermas. Sovereignty relies, as I argue in the next chapter, on a principle of

138 Deliberative or radical democracy exception, which undermines its direct link to the rights Habermas describes as its preconditions. Given that modern complexity is a contingent development of different historical possibilities the justification of communicative power in terms of rights is itself the contingent outcome of a long historical process of rationalisation, which necessarily excluded other possibilities. It we turn now to a consideration of my critique of Habermas’s account of performativity, these problems may be viewed in a somewhat different light. Habermas relies on a notion of democracy which attributes reason to symmetrically acting subjects. But what are the preconditions for the establishment of such a notion of symmetry? Its origins lie in Habermas’s thesis about communicative rationality: political symmetry rests on an idealisation which presupposes the counterfactual possibility of a pure form of consensus. David Ingram, a sympathetic critic of Habermas, states the problem thus: Unless Habermas identifies warranted assertability with an infallible notion of rational justification – a move tantamount to retrieving a consensus theory of truth – he will have to concede that reasonable claims might be ideological. Indeed if we accept Habermas’s strong notion of ideology as any belief or practice that is shaped by power relations, but which masks this fact behind an uncritically accepted validity claim, we must conclude that because such beliefs and practices inevitably influence the language in which we reason, all our reasonable claims are at least ideologically tainted. (Ingram 1993: 283) Ingram identifies the key problem, though he does not fully develop its implications for the broader framework of communicative rationality. If one begins with an account of communicative rationality based on an ideal of symmetry, then the sociological translation of this ideal is sure to bear the marks of that assumption. That this is the case is confirmed when considering the problem of particular conceptions of the good. However, if the grounding premises of the communicative ideal are necessarily infected by ideology, if in other terms a non-ideological standpoint is impossible, then the basic principle of justification of a democracy has to be reformulated. It is now possible to link the different criticisms directed towards Habermas’s account of deliberative democracy. Maeve Cooke criticises Habermas for not acknowledging that his justification of democracy necessarily excludes certain conceptions of the good. However, she does not question the status of the ideal which frames Habermas’s conception of political democracy. Ingram’s recognition that we cannot escape ideological tainting points towards a more nuanced theoretical starting point, which incorporates the necessity of the exercise of power and recognises the inevitability of exclusion. This tainting though is not simply an occurrence in the real world, which has no consequences for the ideal of communicative action. While ideal communicative conditions presuppose perfect symmetry, the realisation of such an ideal,

Deliberative or radical democracy 139 would in fact undermine the need for communication. Peter Dews quotes Albrecht Wellmer to good effect: Insofar as the idea of the ideal communication community includes the negation of the conditions of finite human communication it implies the negation of the natural and historical conditions of human life, of finite human existence … ideal communication would be the death of communication. (Dews 1995: 130) That which grounds communication appears at the same time to endanger it. In a similar vein the symmetrical justification of democracy, which has as its starting point the presumption of communicative rationality, risks endangering democracy. Why is this the case? Let me quote Habermas once more: A constitution-founding practice requires more than just a discourse principle by which citizens can judge whether the law they enact is legitimate. Rather, the very forms of communication that are supposed to make it possible to form a rational political will through discourse need to be legally institutionalised themselves. In assuming a legal shape, the discourse principle is transformed into a principle of democracy. (Habermas 1996: 455) This appears innocent but the strong requirement that the discourse principle introduces requires closer scrutiny. ‘Just those action norms are valid to which all possible affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourse.’ Once institutionalised in the form of a legal order the requirement that all affected persons could agree as participants appears odd. This is a consequence not only of incommensurable conceptions of the good, which resist final resolution. As a specification of the ideal communication community, the ideal appears to contradict the terms of its own elucidation. The core of the aporia is a principle of self-contradiction noted by Wellmer, in the quote above. Because that which enables communication if realised would end it altogether, the counterfactual ideal of communicative rationality is not only a condition of possibility of communication: it is also a condition of impossibility which affects the status of the ideal.11 The ideal of communication which appears to specify conditions of perfect symmetry, is in fact structured around a constitutive impossibility, an asymmetry at its core. From this perspective Ingram’s claim that ideology can never be overcome, may be stated somewhat differently. The ideal of pure communicative symmetry is ideological in its attempt to represent, even counterfactually, conditions of rational acceptability for norms. These perfect conditions of rational acceptability if achieved, would dissolve the very basis of their own rationality: communication. Let me conclude by drawing together key elements of this argument. I agree broadly with Habermas’s discussion of the conditions for the institutionalisation of democratic will formation. However, the discourse principle which grounds his analysis appears contradictory for a number of reasons. First, it relies on

140 Deliberative or radical democracy a principle of universalisability which is incompatible with (a) a pluralist conception of the good because it presupposes a particular version of the good, and (b) the consequent need for the exercise of power to be considered as an essential constituent of any normative justification of democracy. All democratic societies will and do exclude certain versions of the good. Second, and this is the core of my critique, the ideal of communication which the deliberative version of democracy relies upon, has of necessity to incorporate a fundamental asymmetry in its very formulation. If this asymmetry is taken seriously, then the principles underlying the deliberative version of democracy may be reconceptualised. This asymmetry may be thematised in a variety of formulations: in terms of a revised account of performativity; in terms of an ultimate failure of subjectivation; or in terms of necessary failure of any ideal. The political upshot is that the line dividing persuasion from consent will never finally be effaced. Moreover, the universal proceduralism of discourse ethics is infected with a particularity which reveals it as privileging certain conceptions of the good over others. A justification of democracy implies both relations of symmetry, and an account of asymmetry which is a necessary part of any ideal. Denying that this is the case is both self-contradictory, and politically naive. Either that, or the ideal represents an avoidance of the necessity of the exercise of an exclusionary power in carrying through a democratic project. The consequence of this is not that the ideal is irrelevant. Rather a common theme of this book has suggested that one can only speak of the subversion of an ideal – whether that be of perfect signification, implicit consensus, or the promise of inclusive communication – if these ideals are unrealisable for intrinsic reasons. The democratic deficit which arises with the different forms of contemporary globalisation is not resolved with this defence of the formal freedoms of deliberation, but is in fact legitimised by them. If any ideal is infected with an asymmetry which introduces a necessary contingency to the symmetrical presuppositions of communication then both the ideal and the model of democratic freedom implicit in deliberative accounts demands rethinking. Consideration of post-Marxist accounts of radical democracy contributes to an analysis of these issues.

Post-Marxism and radical democracy In the first part of the book I suggested that a reformulated theory of performativity points to an impossibility which is constitutive of any discourse of justification. In their 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe outline an account of democracy compatible with this quasi-transcendental principle. They suggest that a left-inspired political project should deepen democracy, extending democratic principles to ever more public spaces. The lineaments of their argument may be traced in three main themes: first a general principle of contingency, second a theory of democracy and decision and third a radical, or axiological, pluralism.12 In considering each of these I argue that the ideal of communicative symmetry presupposes this contingency. However the terms on which Laclau’s radical democratic project, and Habermas’s version of deliberative democracy may complement each other, necessitates a modulation of both.

Deliberative or radical democracy 141 Democracy, Laclau and Mouffe claim, can only be understood in terms of a necessary indeterminacy, which is presupposed in all attempts at the construction of order in society. Any analysis of modern democracy begins with the rejection of privileged points of rupture and the confluence of politics into a unified social space, and the acceptance, on the contrary, of the plurality and indeterminacy of the social. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 156) The maintenance of democratic order and securing of social unity is a project without final foundation or justification. Accordingly, they suggest, no principle grounds the quest for a common identity or indeed of democratic deliberation. Rather democratic societies institutionalise this contingency. This announces a problem, alluded to above: it would appear that democracy itself cannot rest on foundations or on universal principles which are given in advance by a principle of discourse. Given an essential negativity, there is no reason why a society should proceed to establish its democratic credentials. Indeed, the vertigo of uncertainty could just as easily translate into the establishment of a totalitarian order.13 This points to the second axis of their argument, the relation between democracy and hegemony. Because of an essential contingency, the authors suggest that any particular form of social order is maintained hegemonically. Hegemony does not imply the exercise of brute force. Particular processes of socialisation may contribute to the maintenance of certain social structures. Importantly though force can never be finally eliminated in a democratic society. There can be no pure consensus. The authors write: … no hegemonic logic can account for the totality of the social and constitute its centre, for in that case a suture would have been produced, and the very concept of hegemony would have eliminated itself. The openness of the social is thus the precondition of every hegemonic practice. Now this necessarily leads to a second conclusion. The hegemonic formation, as we have conceived it, cannot be referred to the logic of a single social force. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 142) The exercise of hegemony to maintain social order is necessary precisely because no hegemony can ever finally succeed in attaining the monism which its logic suggests. In linking this argument to democratic societies the authors begin with the work of Claude Lefort. Lefort argues that in societies which no longer have a certain centre of sovereignty, and where there are no absolute grounds for legitimating the exercise of power, sovereignty is returned to the people. However the people do not own their sovereignty. Power stems from the people, and may at any time be revoked by them. This principle is institutionalised in the various forms of constitutionally guaranteed competition (Lefort 1986: 303–5). The most important historical moment in this discourse, they argue is the French Revolution which first established the principle that power stems from the people.

142 Deliberative or radical democracy As important however is the discourse of rights, notably the principles of equality and liberty, which extend the egalitarian imaginary into ever-new areas. The egalitarian imaginary broadly speaking consists then in this tension between equality and liberty, a tension derived from the impossibility of negating either of the two poles, without negating democracy altogether. Laclau and Mouffe insist that nothing follows of necessity from their analysis of the essential contingency of a social order, but do privilege the democratic revolution. This is not simply sympathy with a broadly left political project. I quote one more time: This moment of tension, of openness, which gives the social its essentially incomplete and precarious character, is what every project for radical democracy should set out to institutionalise. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 180) This formulation suggests a crucial difference between authoritarian or even totalitarian forms of social organisation and democratic societies. A condition of democracy is that this moment of uncertainty is institutionalised in a variety of social spaces, and in a variety of mechanisms – such as free and fair elections, freedom of speech and allows space for the expression of difference. Other forms of social organisation by contrast do not recognise this constitutive undecidability, but attempt to limit the excessive nature of the social: Every attempt to establish a definitive suture and to deny the radically open character of the social which the logic of democracy institutes, leads to what Lefort designates as ‘totalitarianism’; that is to say, to a logic of construction of the political which consists of establishing a point of departure, from which society can be perfectly mastered and known … the state raises itself to the status of the sole possessor of the truth of the social order, whether in the name of the proletariat or of the nation, and seeks to control all the networks of sociability. In the face of the radical indeterminacy which democracy opens up, this involves an attempt to reimpose an absolute centre, and to re-establish the closure which will thus restore unity. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 188) This contingency suggests that a democratic society is not simply a plural society. Strict pluralism is already excluded in the common identification made by particular versions of the good with a democratic framework. Pluralism is thus undermined by a peculiar pull towards unity. But it is a unity which unifies only on the basis of a common recognition of the contingency of particular versions of the good life. This logic is a little more peculiar than is at first obvious. The existence of a democratic society depends upon the hegemony of the basic rights and liberties associated with the democratic revolution. These rights and liberties though appear to be necessary preconditions for a society in which the competition for hegemony is institutionalised.

Deliberative or radical democracy 143 The discussion thus far seems to beg one question: is there a relation between the contingency of any social bond, and the privileging of radical democracy by these authors? In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy they write: The critique of the category of unified subject, and the recognition of the discursive dispersion within which every subject position is constituted, therefore involves something more than the enunciation of a general theoretical position: they are the sine qua non for thinking the multiplicity out of which antagonisms emerge in societies in which the democratic revolution has crossed a certain threshold. This gives us a theoretical terrain on which the notion of radical and plural democracy … finds the first conditions under which it can be apprehended. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 167) Given that no particular good can ever claim to be the ultimate good, and given that no one set of values can ever claim to represent the substantial will of all, no decision within political society is completely neutral. Contrary to the claims of the enlightenment, the quest for a universal and rational knowledge contradicts the modern democratic project which must absolve itself of all such grounds. Radical pluralism necessitates too the proliferation of public spaces (Mouffe 1996: 246–55). What I characterised conceptually as an essential performativity in Chapter 2 then, should be understood at the level of a sociological translation as pointing to the essential contingency of any established order. Radical pluralism relies on contingency institutionalised at the level of the social whole, and constituting the social space in which political struggle occurs.14 Performativity points to the constant need to maintain order, no matter how well established. This does not mean that society cannot represent itself to itself. In fact democratic politics is concerned with the organisation of all social relations, and not simply the state. Mouffe argues that because there are no foundations grounding democratic civility, the moment of the political institutionalises this impossibility. Liberalism according to Mouffe misses: the dimension of the political … the attempt to construct a we, a collective identity that would articulate the demands found in the different struggles against subordination … To deny the need for a construction of collective identities and to conceive democratic politics exclusively in terms of a multiplicity of interests or of minorities for the assertion of their rights is to remain blind to the relations of power. (Mouffe 1996: 248) This argument relies upon the distinction of politics and the political. Politics is the daily activity of legislation, struggle and other legitimate political activity which is permitted under the aegis of a democratically regulated society. The radical democratic model argues that given the ineradicability of power and violence, democracy consists in the establishment of institutions which set limits to political

144 Deliberative or radical democracy society, premised upon the necessity and ineluctability of antagonism. Mouffe concludes that: To the Kantian-inspired model of democracy, which envisages its realisation under the form of an ideal community of communication … we should oppose a conception of democracy that, far from aiming at consensus and transparency, is suspicious of any attempt to impose a univocal model of democratic discussion. (Mouffe 1996: 255) The political then is the moment of institution of society, the symbolic order which frames all legitimate political activity. Democracy in this case is a particular articulation and organisation of institutional order, which has to be worked for, and once achieved consistently re-invented. Thus general attempts to justify democracy – as for example in consequentialist arguments which argue that democracy promotes some general good, or in natural rights theories which propose certain inalienable human traits – seem to miss their mark. From Laclau and Mouffe’s perspective, the attempt at justification must itself be viewed as part of the process of articulation, as a weapon in the struggle for idea(l)s. In what respects is this relevant to my critique of Habermas, developed throughout this book? I have suggested that the basic principle of discourse, which presupposes symmetrical relations between subjects, cannot account for the asymmetry which is a condition of possibility of its own realisation. Laclau and Mouffe argue that any constituted system of democracy necessarily excludes certain versions of the good. However, what is under-emphasised though implicit in their account is that the necessity of exclusion already presupposes the hegemony of a certain symmetry between subjects. Pointing to the asymmetrical relations of power in a democratic society has as its other face a certain symmetry, which constitutes exclusions. Habermas’s account of deliberative democracy establishes the contours of this symmetry, without including, as an essential element of its founding principles, an asymmetry which is its precondition. Although for Laclau democracy is not justified through a logical derivation of the necessity of this asymmetry which infects any social structure, I suggested in Chapter 2 that a condition of possibility of democracy is the institutionalisation of a principle of uncertainty. This argument is not unique to Laclau; it has been suggested by inter alia Claude Lefort and Adam Przeworski. Przeworski argues that democracy institutionalises uncertainty in depriving any particular group of the certainty that they will win power, or hold onto power (Przeworski 1986: 58). The institutionalisation of uncertainty though does not imply that the maintenance of democracy is simply contingent. Indeed institutionalisation implies the exercise of power to exclude certain claims, notably those that threaten the agreed rules of the game. There is though a problem in this account. Given the essential contingency of any established set of rules, rights or laws the boundary distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate action appears blurred. If the principles of liberty and equality are, as I have argued, essentially excessive and cannot be

Deliberative or radical democracy 145 finally fixed in stone, what then are the limits which cannot be transgressed without endangering democracy? In one respect this is the wrong question; it could be interpreted as a demand for a final definition of what democracy is. Such a positive determination of democracy would exclude the transgressive force of an ideal which is always to come, and which points to second nature as contingent. There is though a need to proceed beyond this restrictive analysis. Only certain forms of social organisation allow for the promise that things may be other; only certain forms of social organisation take account of their own contingency. Habermas’s account of deliberative democracy comes very close to accounting for the institutionalisation of such a principle of uncertainty. Habermas though relies on too strong a principle of idealisation in this account. The ideal of a perfect communication is not only impossible, but also undesirable. It is precisely the impossibility of perfect communication however, that makes the deliberative model of politics the most attractive. While the line separating communication from persuasion may never be effaced (here we need only think of the influence of the mass media) this does not mean that all politics is about power. These criteria are implicit in the democratic self-understanding of modern societies and implicit in their laws and democratic habitus. Certain conflicts cannot be regulated by deliberation. Indeed in many instances there will be no agreement about different outcomes of different policies. The problem of power is most obvious in the circularity of the argumentative defence of deliberative democracy. Carol Gould puts the point well: rights to freely participate as equals in the body politic are themselves presupposed rather than the outcome of a procedure that in turn would have to presuppose them in order to authorise or legitimate them (Gould 1996: 174). This suggests that rights cannot simply be justified retrospectively in terms of a procedure of argumentative will formation which itself presupposes these rights. At some point a decision has to be taken justifying or imposing the rights regardless of their deliberative justification. This is perhaps most pertinent in the context of those who refuse to play by the rules of the game: the asymmetrical other, who does not conform to the basic laws and liberties, or who, for whatever reason is not covered by these laws and responsibilities. It is pertinent too in the context of disagreement. A model of communicative consensus, as the outcome of a process of deliberation may endanger, according to its own ethical imperative, precisely the values it wishes to see proliferate. Authority is demanded then, not simply for reasons of time (Warren 1996), but in the very act of constituting the deliberative framework. The justification of democracy then should avoid two extremes: on the one hand it avoids simply reinstating contingency as a transcendental principle, which becomes the new coda for the interpretation of all reality. Second it avoids justifying democracy purely immanently to the self-understanding of democratic societies. Justification, unlike foundation, can never be either an immanent or a transcendental exercise. Rather it is in the tension between these two poles that democracy finds its most reasonable defence. Thinking democracy demands an analysis not only of the general conditions of its possibility/impossibility (which we may glean from an analysis of hegemony), but also of the institutional conditions

146 Deliberative or radical democracy and developments most propitious to its realisation. Laclau and Mouffes account, which foregrounds the contingency of the basic rights characteristic of democratic self-determination does not though directly address the problems posed by the undermining of the territorial trap which has framed democratic debate for the past two hundred years. Their insistence however on the contingency of the political bond means that their theoretical framework is more suitable when considered in relation to the emerging political problem of how to conceive of democracy in conditions where the nation state can no longer deliver the promise of the revolutions against absolutism. This would include at the analytic level an account of the development of modern forms of rationalisation, as well as the possibilities opened up as a result of the extension of the egalitarian imaginary into the different domains of every day life. The nuanced translation of the ideal of communicative consensus into an account of deliberative politics reveals how far away Habermas is from presupposing that a consensus can be established. Given this he should not have to rely on a version of communicative rationality premised on a principle of universalisation which is not necessary to the defence of democracy. This ideal defends a non-political moment at the origin of democratic deliberation, which is in fact deeply implicated in the political controversies confronting the waning power of the nation state. The next chapter addresses explicitly the contribution that post-structuralism makes to the debate about democracy.

8

Post-structuralism and democratic theory1

Introduction All disciplines, including political science, are conservative. Disciplines police institutional boundaries in defining appropriate objects of study, in authorising methodological principles and in legitimising accredited subjects as their agents. It is unsurprising then that post-structuralist theory is viewed with scepticism by many political scientists, since it entails a critical interrogation of the objects, subjects and tools naturalised by disciplines. This hostility is frequently justified by invoking the spectre of the relativist, who decries the fundamental tenets of democratic theory and practice. Critics variously contend that post-structuralist theory undermines all moral justification for the critique of inequality (normative Political Theory), disputes the competence of social scientists to generate objective statements about society (behaviourist Political Science, undermines the autonomy of the subject responsible for its own actions (a fundamental tenet of liberal democratic states), relativises the legitimacy of the representative institutions of liberal democratic societies and casts doubt on processes of democratic will formation. Such reproaches pivot on a collective fear of relativism. The inference that knowledge is never independent of power elicits opprobrium from defendants of scientific neutrality and purveyors of moral universality. It is no mistake then that the moral philosophies of Habermas and Rawls have been more readily integrated into mainstream Political Studies. This chapter argues that an adequate defence of radical democracy far from being undermined by post-structuralism, in fact relies on it. This argument demonstrates the pertinence of post-structuralist theory through an immanent critique of the key terms in democratic theory and debate. Here I draw upon elements of my critique of Habermas’s deliberative account of democracy delineated in the previous chapter. Key issues include the remit of the ‘political’ and the nature of sovereignty. In the final section, I extend the defence of radical democracy begun in the last chapter, suggesting that a version of radical democracy which draws upon key aspects of post-structuralism better addresses the democratic deficit and democratic cynicism which afflicts many modern societies.

148 Post-structuralism and democratic theory

Post-structuralism and politics At face value post-structuralism is concerned with two themes, structures and that which undermines or puts structures into question. I dealt with this extensively in relation to performativity, but in the case of political science it entails reflection on the structuring of modern societies, and on the conceptual presumption of the social scientist claiming knowledge of these structures. A post-structuralist approach begins with a critique of the idea of structure, undermining the presumption that modern democracies are constituted as self-defining systems. Many political scientists use, without necessarily dwelling on, the concept of structure (or system) in order to describe modern states and structures of power. This entails four related claims: (i) that the political system comprises certain elements, which act reciprocally on each other; (ii) that these elements may be arranged in a variety of different ways; (iii) that social scientists can predict how the system will react should one or more of the elements be transformed; (iv) that the facts of politics are rendered explicit through the model(s) used to analyse society. (adapted from Levi-Strauss 1963: 279–80) Contemporary political science supposes the ‘democratic’ nation state as its key unit of analysis; the nation state is deemed to comprise a number of key institutional features (parliament, bureaucracy, parties, citizens, a legal order, regional and local authorities, international relations etc.) which may be organised along a number of different structural matrices; the consequences of transformations within the political system are deemed predictable; and different models are built depending upon the relation between these variables. As a consequence, predictions can also be made about those societies ‘not yet’ democratic. Depending on the relationship between variables – for example, the strength of the landed aristocracy in relation to the military – the transition theorist, for example, seeks to predict the conditions which will ensue in democratisation. Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms represents the apotheosis of this tradition, combining as it does a normative investigation of the justification of democracy with an empirical account of the key institutions of modern democratic states. Two examples lend support to these claims. In an addendum to his classic study, In Defence Of Politics, Bernard Crick characterises political systems as clearly defined societies with territorial boundaries, in which there is a certain amount of complexity, no overarching conception of the good, a large middle class and a degree of political equality (Crick 1996: 171–4). For Crick a political system establishes limits on the remit of its actions, with reference to their legitimacy within the predefined limits of the system. Thus ‘the political system exists within a prior framework of order’, and the study of politics (as opposed to

Post-structuralism and democratic theory 149 International Relations, or Sociology) is properly limited to this order (Crick 1993: 181). As a consequence: International Society is not a political system. It is a proper subject for the study of government; but because it has no common government at all, sadly it cannot exhibit normal political behaviour. (Crick 1993: 181) Strangely, Crick does not treat the establishment of such systemic limits as itself a political act. Instead, he naturalises ‘normal political behaviour’ and excludes from the remit of political studies that which is not a ‘political system’. There is a treble exclusion and establishment of appropriate boundaries at work here: Crick (i) defines normal political systems through the exclusion of international society on the grounds; (ii) that it has ‘no common government’ and thereby authorises; (iii) the marking off of that which is appropriate to the study of politics. Crick, in line with my discussion of the importance of antagonism to politics in the previous chapter, recognises that conflict will not be eliminated from politics: Those who say we desperately lack a consensus of values, and have such a thing to offer, (usually a fighting faith for democracy, or else monotheism), are in fact simply trying to sell us a particular brand of politics, while pretending that they are not, as it were, in trade themselves …. Where such an articulate and systematic consensus does seem necessary is in an autocracy. (Crick 1993: 177) Yet he simultaneously presumes consensus about the appropriate limits of the political system without thematising this prior system of order – that which defines, the properly political system. What though of conflicts regarding the limits and remit of this system? What is excluded from the study of politics, and what is neutralised as non-political, or abnormal, if these restrictions are accepted? In the case of democracy Crick presumes that the question of the limits of sovereignty is resolved. The political scientist studies conflict within this system but these seem not to effect the system itself. A key issue for post-structuralism then is this prior system of order and its relation to conflicts which concern precisely this prior definition of the system. In a second example the problem of sovereign legitimacy is grasped, only to be glibly sidestepped. In a recent work, The Terms of Democracy, Michael Saward contends that conflict concerning the proper remit of sovereign authority can be resolved through democratisation: the problem of political units – supposedly intractable within democratic theory – is not as intractable as it is often presented as being. In principle, what really counts in democratic terms is whether or not a given existing unit is democratically governed. Many empirical disputes over political boundaries would be avoided if the unit in question were fully, or even partially, democratic. (Saward 1998: 142)

150 Post-structuralism and democratic theory Saward contends that democratisation within a ‘given existing unit’ is, in most instances, the solution to intractable disputes concerning the remit of sovereign authority over disputed territorial claims. Unlike Crick he maintains that the nation state is not the unit of political analysis, concedes that the problem of political boundaries is generally taken for granted in ‘Political Theory’, and acknowledges the difficulty of finding a principle to guide the legitimate limitation of territorial sovereignty. Yet he recoils from exploring the theoretical implications of this problem, settling for the weak empirical claim that democratisation solves most disputes regarding territory: Why does an embryonic sub-unit demand some degree of autonomy? Because it lacks the security that democracy, and democratic rights in particular, can provide? Because it lacks the cultural or religious freedom that a properly democratic constitution would guarantee, and which democratic courts could protect? Because basic democratic freedoms, like speech and association, are denied in part or in whole? Because of the fact of past, or the fear of future, persecution and oppression? One suspects that the reasons behind demands for a degree of autonomy from an existing political unit can normally be characterised in one or more of these ways. (Saward 1998: 128) But, this conclusion begs the question Saward poses. While democratisation may ‘solve’ certain of these disputes, this symptomatic solution occludes the violence which the maintenance of ‘democratic boundaries’ necessitates. Saward avoids a problem which does not have a solution comfortable within the terms of democracy he proposes. The political system (as Machiavelli and Weber among others knew), relies on force, and any analysis of democracy must acknowledge the underlying violence which maintains the unity of any ‘given unit’. No principle of justification, regardless of its remit, escapes this necessary imbrication in the politics of statecraft and hegemony. Indeed, more often than not, such tools of justification lend credence to the exercise of force as Crick recognises. Saward’s commitment to liberal democratisation results in a misrecognition of the key problem at the very moment he identifies it: If the boundary problem is largely, though as we shall see not solely, a symptom of a lack of democracy in existing units then we can say that often it will be most effectively addressed by exploring how democracy might be instituted or deepened in these territories. (Saward 1998: 128) The boundary problem may indeed be a symptom of failed democratisation, but it is also symptomatic of a dilemma at the heart of democratic theory. Similarly, Crick’s unquestioned commitment to democratic dissensus relies on a prior commitment to maintaining the order of the political system which is itself

Post-structuralism and democratic theory 151 unthematised. Georgio Agamben, following Carl Schmitt, highlights the centrality of this dilemma in terms of the exception which proves, and gives force to, the rule (law): The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact that the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order … the sovereign is the one to whom the juridical order grants the power of proclaiming a state of exception and, therefore, of suspending the order’s own validity … (Agamben 1998: 15) This paradox has the form of an aporia: all law should be valid, and the sovereign only acquires authority from this validity. However, the sovereign reserves the right to suspend all constitutional means of acquiring validity. Or, put simply, the sovereign has the legal power to suspend the law. This is the structure highlighted by Hobbes’s Leviathan. The Leviathan, as source of the law is not subject to that law. Yet the sovereign only exists as a consequence of the establishment of a legal order which requires a principle of sovereignty in order to function. The state of exception (or state of emergency as many states term it) alludes towards a founding violence which secures the remit of sovereign authority and thus the terms of reference for its own validity. This conclusion puts into question the assumptions shared by Saward, Crick and Habermas. It suggests that the legitimacy of a democratic system is maintained by a violence which is intrinsic to the legitimate political system. A paradox with a similar structure underlies political behaviourism, and its assumption that a science of politics should ultimately have reference to objective facts. The question of the relation between word and world was a key moment in the dominance of positivism within the social sciences, and notably Political Science, in the English-speaking world. Mid-century political science in America and Europe generally rejected the investigation of normative questions as being beyond the scope of the social scientist. Stanley Cavell writes of a: … climate in which positivism was pervasive and dominant in the AngloAmerican academic world from the mid-1940s to the 1950s and beyond, almost throughout the humanities and the Social Sciences, a hegemonic presence more complete I believe than any of today’s politically developed or intellectually advanced positions: positivism during this period was virtually unopposed on any intellectually organised scale. (Cavell 1995: 51) Logical positivism, stated most simply in A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1971) provided the conceptual justification for the behaviourist domination of political science. In essence, Ayer contended that language admits of two forms of truth verification: logic and representation of objective facts. The upshot of this view is that most of the language we use is non-sense, as it is unverifiable either by traditional logic or with reference to a realm of objective facts. Adherence to

152 Post-structuralism and democratic theory this view robbed political science of the ability to make normative statements which were deemed to express the bias of the speaker, as opposed to the objectivity of the scientist. The scientist speaks from a position of neutrality in describing the world: his statements are true, the theorist speaks (interesting) nonsense. However, the political scientist relying on these premises has a problem characterised in philosophy of science as the problem of induction. A conventional methodological conceit is to isolate a number of different factors – say class, political identification, gender and race – and through a complex analysis of the relative importance of each, to explain the occurrence of an event. Crucial to this explanation is repetition. A statement is said to have generality if it holds in a number of different conditions, and has not been falsified by any empirical event. However, the principle of induction, which secures the validity of the claim to empirical truth, is itself neither an empirical nor a logical statement. The principle that truth follows from the generalisation of the particular is itself not a statement which is either empirically or logically verifiable. It can be termed a principle of demarcation, or a stipulative statement but in terms of Ayer’s initial criteria it is simply nonsense. This conclusion is somewhat ironically evinced by Ayer’s lifelong, but unsuccessful, quest to establish an adequate principle of verification for meaningful statements. Indeed, he acknowledged, ‘the continual failure of attempts to formulate the criterion in such a way as to find a middle ground between the over-strict requirement … and the over-indulgent licensing of gibberish’ (cited in Hahn 1992: 302). Various attempts have been made to resolve this aporetic consequence, but of interest here is how it parallels the conclusion, noted earlier, with respect to sovereignty. The principle of induction is the exception which proves the rule. It demonstrates that the attempt to demarcate meaningful from non-meaningful statements cannot be justified in itself. This suggests that there is no proper or necessary fit between language and world. This is not for the conventional, idealist, reason that we can only access the world through language, a claim which runs the risk of reducing the world to language. Rather, as post-Marxist discourse theory insists, it is because any access we have to a world of meaningful objects presupposes the discursive organisation of those objects within a meaningful discourse. The concept of overdetermination specifies the implications of such an analysis for political science methodology. Overdetermination implies that simple determination (i.e. unidirectional causality), and multiple determination, as methods for explaining the occurrence of events or analysing socio-political institutions, are inadequate. Overdetermination implies a mutual implication of factors, and the isolation of independent factors as methodological artifice. The isolation of pertinent factors orders the theoretical expression of an event. The abstraction entailed in restricting research to these relevant factors does violence to the event thus constructed. The attempt to understand an event in its totality commits an injustice, insofar as it implies a blind point which slights the object under investigation (see also Brunkhorst 1999). This failure is a structural necessity, which cannot be controlled by its dismissal on the grounds of either an insufficient

Post-structuralism and democratic theory 153 knowledge, (which will be achieved with time), or a failure of methodology which experience will correct. This is not to suggest that dominant structures should be ignored, or that our relations in the world are wholly arbitrary. This is a crucial point, insufficiently emphasised in what often passes as post-structuralist work. The critique of structurality points to the final contingency of the lifeworld; however this contingency only makes sense in relation to the ways in which we make sense of and control the world. If, relying on the thesis of an essential contingency, we assert that there are no structural limits to political identity, we advocate an abstraction which presumes a subject undetermined by any social structure. This abstraction misses the essential relation between contingency and those structured totalities which are the unconscious backdrop, often un-thematised, to our everyday life. A post-structuralist (discourse theoretical) account begins immanent to these structures and theories. In thematising their often unthought assumptions it dislocates social relations disguised in the alluring garb of ‘nature’.

Deliberative democracy reconsidered A number of theoretical approaches to the definitions of politics and democracy rely on the exclusion of an element or moment that they are themselves incapable of accounting for without risking the collapse of their intellectual edifices. The unruly effects of these aporetic structures are not simply a matter of theoretical nitpicking. On the contrary it has capital consequences for the understanding and analysis of democratic politics. This conclusion allows me to return to deliberative accounts of democracy. This requires a perturbation of the conceptual ideal and justification of liberal democracy, that is to say, the presupposition of autonomous subjects, who communicate their collective will via representative institutions, which then act on their behalf. I discuss, in turn, the key themes of autonomy and representation relating them to Habermas’s communicative defence of democracy discussed in chapter 7 (see Habermas 1996). Autonomy The concept of autonomy entails self-rule: the right and capability of the subject to make sovereign decisions regarding his/her beliefs and conduct. The term is often extended to describe groups of people, capable of effecting a sovereign collective will. Since the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648, this conception of autonomy has been articulated to the nation state. The treaty institutionalised what are generally considered to be the normative foundations of the international order: territoriality, sovereignty within that territory, autonomous control over internal and external affairs and consent of international bodies before intervention in the affairs of other states. A defining debate within democratic theory concerns the relationship between public and private conceptions of autonomy. A sovereign individual exercises autonomous control over the decisions concerning him/her, yet most states,

154 Post-structuralism and democratic theory democratic or otherwise, intervene to limit the exercise of private autonomy. Constitutional states limit public sovereignty by guaranteeing fundamental rights and liberties to individuals; by the same token the protection of essential social goods in most liberal democracies entails the limitation of private sovereignty. This suggests a tension within liberal rights discourse, judiciously summarised by Claude Lefort: the rights of man appear as those of individuals, individuals appear as so many little independent sovereigns, each reigning over his private world, like so many micro-entities, separated off from the social whole. But this representation destroys another: that of a totality which transcends its parts. It discloses a transversal dimension of social relations, relations of which individuals are only the terms, but which confer on those individuals their identity, just as much as they are produced by them. (Lefort 1986: 257) Considered in this light, rights do not receive their justification from a natural order, but because of the enabling and limiting role they play in the constitution of democratic society. On this account private and public autonomy are mutually constitutive and mutually delimiting. This is the founding premise of Habermas’s defence of deliberative democracy. He contends that the enshrining of autonomy in a rights-based constitutional order is not a means of limiting the sovereign people but is constitutive of sovereignty. From this perspective the violation of fundamental (individual) rights by the sovereign is an attack on the principle of sovereignty itself. Thus, individual rights are deemed conditions of possibility for the exercise of sovereign authority. For example, no form of democratic sovereignty is plausible without the protection of the right to freedom of expression. Limitations of this freedom may endanger the ‘rational’ expression of sovereignty. The concept of sovereign autonomy is intrinsic to a second key delimitation of modern political thought: territoriality. The proper, autonomous exercise of sovereignty by citizens requires legally defined borders and the clear specification of spheres of authority. This depends upon four clear delineations: who the sovereign is, what the territorial limits of sovereign authority are, why this authority is justified and the specification and division of the right to exercise this authority. In brief the ‘proper’ remit of sovereignty requires specification. It is no mistake that most nation states struggle, internally and externally, to define and redefine these limits. Political science for a long time relied on an exposition of democratic autonomy which tied the citizen to the nation state, and justified the existence of that state through the rights the citizen exercises as a sovereign subject with a free will. It is now clear that no nation state has the capacity to exercise sovereign authority over either its own territory economy or people. Global institutions and regulatory frameworks, environmental crises, technological changes and the restless progression of multinational capital, all threaten the ability of representative institutions to exercise sovereign authority on behalf of their constituents. The attempt to draw clearly defined boundaries for the exercise of democracy may

Post-structuralism and democratic theory 155 have the opposite effect that is to limit possible responses to unpredictable and previously un-thought challenges to democratic rule. Whatever else one’s response to the globalisation debate it has finally denaturalised the legitimacy of nation state authority putting into question, both empirically and conceptually, sovereignty. Let me relate this to the discussion of the sovereign exception in the previous section. There, drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s work, I noted that the sovereign is entitled to suspend the law yet is also subject to the law. The status of this exception is intrinsic to the maintenance of democratic order. In logical terms the power of the sovereign relies on the maintenance of a structural presupposition which has no grounding. Once this presupposition, without foundation, is seen to hold the empty place of the universal, which theories of sovereign right attempt in vain to ground, we are compelled to reassess the various strategies of (universal) justification which characterise debates in contemporary political theory. It is significant that Habermas acknowledges that communicative rationality is an impossible ideal and that Rawls has to presuppose a veil of ignorance in order to adduce the difference principle. It is this final lack of justification which persuades Ernesto Laclau to conclude that ‘the universal is an empty place, a void which can be filled only by the particular, but which, through its very emptiness, produces a series of crucial effects in the structuration/destructuration of social relations’ (Laclau 2000: 34). This recognition implies a different rendering of autonomy. We can agree that autonomy is a peculiar and particular achievement of modernity. We can recognise the repressions and exclusions constitutive of modern forms of autonomy: the constitution of unreason in the definition of the reasonable. We can also recognise the potentially repressive affects and effects which the attainment of the ideal of autonomy might entail. Finally, we can recognise the exclusions constitutive of both public and private autonomy. All of this leads to an avowedly political conception of autonomy rather than one derived from an ethical ideal which transcends the particularity of social and political struggles. This suggests two problems: first, the linking of private autonomy to public, state autonomy, is rendered contingent. It is an act of sovereign fiat which belies justification. Second, the limitation of autonomy to nation states is revealed as a contingent political act which is today under threat. Critics of post-structuralism more often than not present a caricature of this rendering of autonomy in order to dismiss its pertinence. Maeve Cooke, for example, writes thus of the post-structuralist challenge to liberal autonomy: For writers such as Butler and Flax the notion of autonomy is problematic from two points of view: first because it postulates an ideal of self, thereby effecting a closure; second, because it affirms the value of attributes such as coherence, resolution and unity at the expense of values such as fragmentation, fluidity and multiplicity. (Cooke 1997: 181) Cooke chastises this post-structuralist exposé for two reasons. First, she claims that post-structuralism treats subjectivity as a purely linguistic effect, and identity

156 Post-structuralism and democratic theory as the effect of systems of meaning; second, she contends that post-structuralism as political theory makes normative claims which it cannot justify. The norms invoked seem arbitrary. However, she misconstrues the implications of post-structuralism on both counts. The post-structuralist critique of autonomous subjectivity analyses the limits of subjective expression in language. It does not assume that subjectivity is an effect of language. This is implied in the relation between constituting and constituted subjectivity. The failure of any discourse to fully delimit the ‘real’ entails the possibility of resistance to established convention. This should not be confused with the defence of fragmentation, fluidity and multiplicity. I have noted already the necessity of addressing seriously those structures that delimit everyday life and not simply valorising fluidity. Moreover, in recognising the implicit normativity underlying any claim to represent the universal, post-structuralism addresses the question of normativity head on. This is in stark contrast to Habermas’s argument that a universal claim to morality is implied in all communication. This move neutralises morality by presenting it as necessary to any interaction, and thus independent of politics. In this case the wager of taking seriously our moral commitments relies on a universality which warrants the wager, before it is even taken. The discussion which follows suggests that the ideal of sovereign representation is beset by similar problems. Representation If the proper conceptual limits of autonomy and sovereignty are inherently undecidable, then the concept of representation is plagued by similar difficulties. In Political Science the term representation binds at least three discursive practices: (i) It is a term used in debates regarding the relation between words and things, and thus concerns the verifiability of statements social scientists make in representing the world. (ii) It is the most common form of democratic legitimation within the nation state. (iii) It refers to the objectification of ‘nature’ associated with the expansion of productive activity over the past two hundred years. The relation between language and the ‘real’ has already been discussed in relation to logical positivism. The present discussion examines the uncertainty pervading the conceptual economy of the term ‘representation’ as used in the other two discursive practices. Democratic theory contends that government has a duty to represent the interests of its constituents. Systems of representation vary, from Rousseau’s republican defence of the idea that the executive is merely the administrative body of the general will, to the liberal conception that government acts on behalf of the people having being elected as their representative (thus exercising

Post-structuralism and democratic theory 157 its will without constant recourse to referenda). The principle remains the same: government represents the best will of its constituents. Democratic theory is, however, beset by the threatened distortion of the relationship between the representative and the represented by sectional interests. Thus, Rousseau resists the term representation, viewing it as a distortion of the purity of the general will. On the Social Contract, for example, details a struggle to maintain the purity of the general will against the private, corporate and common wills. The manifest intent of Rousseau’s text betrays itself, demonstrating that representation is necessarily hegemonic, impure and that sectional interests will always compete to represent universal interests (Rousseau 1980). Ernesto Laclau expresses this point well: The task of a representative in parliament does not simply consist in transmitting the wishes of those he represents; he will have to elaborate a new discourse which convinces other members – by, for instance, arguing that the interests of the people in his constituency are compatible with the national interest, and so on. In this way he inscribes those interests within a more universal discourse and, in so far as his discourse also becomes that of the people of his constituency, they also are able to universalise their experience. The relation of representation thus becomes a vehicle of universalisation … (Laclau 2000: 212) Today the representative powers of national governments are challenged by global powers, such as multinational corporations, international bodies and subnational political movements, which impinge upon their capacity to represent a clearly demarcated people. Representation is an impossible ideal, always beset by uneven distributions of, and differential access to, power and resources. This is especially important in respect of political doctrines which hold to the ideal of fully transparent representation: not only would such an ideal, if achieved, mark the end of representation tout court – its achievement would sanction the repression of the pluralism which is essential to any democracy. We should note, however, Laclau’s insistence that representation becomes a vehicle for universalisation. At first blush, this statement seems contrary to the popular conception of a post-structuralist politics. The insistence on the importance of universalisation belies the uninformed misconception that poststructuralism is simply about the particular, the contingent, about exclusion and not inclusion. Laclau insists on the necessary link between universal and particular: representation suggests that particular interests are hegemonically represented in discourses which extend beyond their particularism. He makes the point that the two ideals, that of particular interests that are completely self-enclosed and that of a universalism with no reference to particularity, would mirror each other. They are impossible ideals which if achieved would signal the end of all representation. Representation presupposes the necessary failure of universalisation, as well as the continued struggle to achieve the ideal. If there were no such failure then the need for representation would evaporate.

158 Post-structuralism and democratic theory The problematic of representation may also be traced in the critique of instrumental reason that has been a keynote of western Marxism since Adorno and Horkheimers’ (1985) Dialectic of Enlightenment. This brings us to the third of the discursive practices of representation listed earlier. On this account the autonomous subject, represented in liberal democratic polities, is constituted by a system of oppression of which she is a symptom. The autonomy, so highly prized by democratic society, has an underside – the internalisation of authority and participation in a system dominated by the particular interests of state and capital. The autonomy of the enlightened subject is wrought at the expense of an objectification of the material world, the subject and her body. This analysis braids together the modulations of representation delineated earlier: the autonomous subject of democratic society, who represents himself, and is represented by public institutions, is deemed a constituent element of, and participant in, an inequitable social structure. Nevertheless the liberal claim to autonomous representation is not simply false: in its ideal formulation it functions as an implicit critique of the failure of the autonomous subjectivity to meet its own promise. These different conceptions of representation all fall foul of defining the limits of what is proper to the self which represents itself. This is precisely the subject presupposed in both Habermas’s and Rawls’s accounts of democracy. The invocation by the former of an ‘ideal speech’ situation and by the latter of an original position, both presuppose perfectly symmetrical subjects, whose speech is not distorted. I suggest that an essential asymmetry distorts any such idealised account of symmetry. This asymmetry, inflected towards a critique of contemporary democratisation, challenges the legal and political status of the proper self, the relation of this proper subject to property and legality, and the relation between instrumental rationality and the autonomous self. The post-structuralist critique of representation urges wariness of the illusion that property (both individual and objective) is natural, and it links the two in suggesting that the liberal conception of autonomy underpins a system of inequitable property relations. It parts from the Marxist critique of capitalism in refusing the suggestion that political transformation is effected as a consequence of further instrumentalisation of the external world, and insists on the necessity of a hegemonic struggle for radical democracy, a struggle with no warranty. This critique of representation holds implications for Habermas’s reliance on communication as the premise of democratic deliberation. Classical political theory rarely theorised communication, but it is intrinsic to any consideration of democratic accountability. Democracy presumes that the people are capable of communicating a clear, and stable will that can act as the basis of decision making. This is the case whether decisions are made by a representative legislature, or by the sovereign acts of a general will. The contingency of the principles of autonomy and representation suggest that this ideal of communication requires revisiting. The apparently legitimate communication of a sovereign will always represents a particular expression thereof. This does not mean that the communication of a democratic will is anathema to politics, but recognises the politics

Post-structuralism and democratic theory 159 underlying the claim to represent the general will. Expressed in other terms, the communication of an apparently sovereign will inevitably reflects the hegemony of a particular conception of the good; communication is not controlled by any sovereign utterance, but is a site of undecidability inherently open to contestation. Habermas’s projection of a community of ideal communication performs the dual task of providing a non-ideological standpoint, which is neutral as regards particular life practices, and of securing a semantic space undisturbed by the sonorous argument of constituted identities. Both of these moves enact the classic task of founding a pre-political realm to justify political action. However, the attempt to found such premises already entails the operation of a political will attempting to justify its politics. This strategy of occluding the violence of the moment of founding is of the essence of politics.

Post-structuralism, deliberation and democracy It is often claimed that post-structuralism cannot provide a defence of democracy to supplement the deconstruction of key tenets of democratic theory, such as subjectivity, autonomy and representation. There is widespread suspicion, moreover, of an alleged ethical void at the heart of post-structuralist theory. These challenges rely on the two strategies touched on in the preceding discussion: empiricism or rationalism. The empirical political scientist claims to discover certain facts beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion; the theorist of rationality (in this case communicative rationality) relies on a claim to reason implicit in any communication. Let me briefly summarise that discussion in order to weigh the limits of such interventions. Representation of (social) facts, I suggested, depends on forms of signification which are essentially contested. Brute data is always interpreted data. Furthermore, the isolation of social facts cannot do justice to the meaningful activities of which the facts are selective abstractions. Charles Taylor makes a similar point in arguing that the political scientist ignores the intersubjective meaning of social acts, that social facts are practices, not individual actions, and that, as a consequence, their interpretation can only proceed along hermeneutic lines (Taylor 1995: 28). This behaviourist reduction of social practices presupposes an oft-criticised form of autonomous subjectivity. Subjects are viewed as atomistic individuals, in full control of their actions, and responsible for them. This ignores the social discourses which interpellate and structure possibilities for individual choices and action. Finally, the political scientist cannot justify the move from universal to particular without relying on premises which s/he would reject. The problem of induction indicates that the decision to derive general claims from particular facts cannot itself be grounded in facts or in logic. The empiricist response to the post-structuralist – either return to the facts or face relativism – rings hollow if the empiricist cannot herself justify the theoretical decisions made without the invocation of a principle which appears arbitrary. If empirical political science escapes contested signification by presupposing a realm of social facts, the rationalist opens the latch with different keys.

160 Post-structuralism and democratic theory Habermas’s notion of communicative rationality, for example, seeks to escape the double hermeneutic of the social sciences – the problem that the language of the social sciences uses the same language as that of the domain it seeks to understand, potentially placing understanding in a context bound vortex of interpretation – by reconstructing universal presuppositions of validity underlying all communication. This reconstruction provides a critical orientation for the exercise of judgement by autonomous subjects, in control of the significance of their utterances. Habermas presumes that what orients communicative action is the claim to universal semantic and pragmatic agreement. This presupposition orients a leftist political project, co-ordinated by the ideal of autonomous interaction between rational subjects. But what if the speech act is a site of enunciative struggle which does not admit of such idealisation? What if consensus cannot escape the implication of a power which is never finally justified, and such a consensus always represents the hegemony of particular not universal claims? It is this conclusion which post-structuralist theory endorses. While Habermas can acknowledge that any actual consensus is not equivalent to the ideal of communicative rationality, he cannot admit that this failure is necessary and not simply empirical – that failure is intrinsic to any claimed universality. My discussion of autonomy and representation connotes an irreducible negativity which cannot be domesticated within any discourse, democratic or otherwise. Diana Coole is acutely aware of the resistance of the negative to description in her Negativity and Politics: [The negative] to borrow Derrida’s phrase, has many non-synonomous substitutes: dialectics, non-identity, difference, différance, the invisible, the semiotic, the virtual, the unconscious, will to power, the feminine. These cannot be reduced to the various signifiers of a common referent … (Coole 2000: 2) This resistance of the reduction of the negative to the precarious signifiers of a common referent signals the febrile terrain which post-structuralism mobilises. A key question in the context of this chapter is the bearing of the negative on a conception of democracy. Any such answer must reveal, even as it dissimulates, the blind spots of democratic theory. What is more, post-structuralism does not presume a direct link between these conclusions and a particular political project. If theoretical premises implied the privileging of particular forms of action then the responsibility for those actions is seconded to the theory. It is understandable that political theorists concerned with the extension of equality and liberty in democratic societies should chafe at such scruples, but I would contend that such scruples are crucial contributions of post-structuralism to the ongoing discussion of democracy. The conclusion that a post-structuralist perspective does not prescribe either an ethical or a political project would seem to leave the critic concerned with radical transformation of existing institutions at an impasse. This is not the case. Most accounts of morality and democracy seek principles which either guide the taking of decisions or shift responsibility for decision taking onto the principles.

Post-structuralism and democratic theory 161 Post-structuralism refuses this necessary link between universal principles of justice and legitimate decision-making. The radical absence of such principles does however have implications for political action and choice. An example demonstrates this. Think of the fascist confronted with the spectre of radical contingency. For the fascist, contingency should not be identified with but overcome through the introduction of a principle of order. The fascist identifies with the principle of order as the basis for the organisation of political life – the state, the body politic, the fraternity of Aryan man and the like. By contrast, the radical democrat sanctions contingency as necessary, and, ironically, not contingent. This recognition entails (social) identification with radical contingency and the insistence that all political decisions require justification. A properly ethical decision does not rely on any principles or laws which precede it. This has the slightly bizarre consequence that a properly ethical decision would be taken by a wholly indeterminate subject, independent of all social practice. Given that such an ideal of subjectivity is precisely what post-structuralist thought rejects, this ideal of sovereign decision making requires revising. It returns as the condition of possibility for autonomous action and the condition of its impossibility. Sovereign decisions cannot be taken, but they must be taken. It is this structure of indeterminacy that opens a realm of freedom in which subjects can begin to question the laws given to them, and recognise that the following of a law presupposes the taking of a decision every time the law is followed. This does not mean that the validity of the legal order is simply suspended. Rather, it is to recognise the violence which goes hand in hand with the forms of legitimation intrinsic to liberal democracies. Identification with an ultimate contingency implies that the ethical, as an impossible ideal, should be contrasted with any particular normative order which attempts to achieve that ideal. The starting point of a democratic order is the recognition that no principle precedes those principles that we give to ourselves, thus constituting ourselves as a community of selves. This forces the acknowledgement of the contingency of the community of selves thus constituted and the possibility of disruption of the community thus constituted. Connolly terms this a democratic politics of disturbance which requires a constant contestation of all those rules which demarcate the demos, a constant reinvention of the laws which also means their constant amelioration (Conolly 1995). The identification with contingency, and thus with an essential value pluralism, distinguishes the radical democrat from the liberal. The liberal endorses value pluralism without acknowledging that this pluralism is constituted by a radical moment of indecision, which undermines the claimed legitimacy of the decision. Thus, the liberal struggles to justify the exercise of force in order to maintain the norms previously endorsed. The radical democrat, in recognising the contingent foundation of any order, also recognises the (illegitimate) violence required for the maintenance of that order. This is why the radical democrat can take responsibility for the decision which underpins the exclusions constitutive of the community, and take on the burdensome task of their constant revision. I suggested earlier that no principle of justification can finally justify the forms of order constitutive of political community. If so then the constitution of democratic

162 Post-structuralism and democratic theory community requires not just exclusion of those who would endanger such contingency but ongoing deliberation between those who do. Where Habermas defends deliberative democracy on the grounds of a universal ideal of communication implicit in the structure of the speech act, the radical democrat endorses deliberation precisely because the speech act does not admit of such an ideal. In recognising the failure of any principle of justification to ground a particular politics the radical democrat insists on the proliferation of the spaces and places in which politics takes place, and refuses the limitation of the political to the state, or to the ideal of perfect community. But this endorsement of deliberation runs hand in hand with the acknowledgement and defence of the creation of antagonistic political frontiers between interlocutors. Often, even in a democratic state, these interlocutors will not acknowledge the validity of the arguments put forward by the opponent. No appeal to higher principles, to the facts, to a common humanity will resolve such disputes. These debates are won through persuasion and manipulation of the public political agenda not through cautious rational persuasion. The radical democrat then, drawing on post-structuralism, insists on the precarious institutionalisation of fora of debate and decision making which allow both for rational deliberation, and for the agonistic, sometimes antagonistic, struggles to dominate public space and the policy agenda. She critically appropriates democratic theory, specifically deliberative accounts of democracy, without falling foul of the positivist mistake of hypostasising what is, as what should be. This leech like appropriation of classical conceptions of democracy relies on the acknowledgement that certain structures are hegemonic in contemporary societies, and that alternative hegemonic visions must be articulated.

9

Ethics and politics in discourse theory

The Greek word ethos and the Latin word mos are both commonly translated as custom. They are also the respective etymological roots of the words ethics and morality. Despite their ‘customary’ meaning conventional use of these words presupposes the faculty to judge and guide actions with reference to principles, which transcend the deliberation of individuals in particular, communities. This tacit appeal to a universal law derives from religious and mythical worldviews which subordinate human law to the moral prescriptions of a being(s) or realm whose dictates are only ever approximated. On this account ethics presupposes distinctions between the divine and the human (the ultimate source of the law as opposed to those subjected to the law), the human and the natural and the human and the animal (those not subject to the law, and therefore never subjects of the law). It is thus too that ethics is caught up in questions of means – end or instrumental rationality. An ethical act assumes a cut between the human, the divine and the natural realms, which entails a particular set of (instrumental) relations between them. Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer 1985), for example, suggest that early forms of human sacrifice and moral law are ruses of an instrumental rationality: sacrifice to the Gods is both an attempt to appease their wrath and to establish control over a threatening internal and external nature. The ethical law participates in a process of engendering enlightened humanity, emphasising the distinction between a civilised/cultured humanity and a natural world which humans use for their own ends. Enlightenment however culminates in the extirpation of any deus ex machina and, at least in Adorno’s view, the instrumentalising of not just nature but also of human beings. What’s more, enlightenment eventually hollows out all justification of an ethics which relies on some form of metaphysical appeal. On this view a metaphysics bereft of signification appears to provide no guidance for the resolution of ethical dilemmas. Likewise, the confinement of ethics to inner worldly norms seems to render all principles subject to the contingency of choice, and the distinction between strategic and practical reason difficult to draw. This holds consequences for any discussion of the relation between ethics and politics. Early modern political theory, building on the distinction between the City of God and the City of Man elaborated by Augustine, rests political community on a universal ethics.1 Likewise, much contemporary political philosophy maintains

164 Ethics and politics in discourse theory the distinction between ethics and politics while divesting itself of the religious overtones. Will Kymlicka, writing in Contemporary Political Philosophy, for example argues: I believe there is a fundamental continuity between moral and political philosophy. First, as Robert Nozick puts it ‘moral philosophy sets the background for, and boundaries of, political philosophy….’ I agree with Nozick that the content of our responsibilities, and the lines between them, must be determined by appeal to deeper moral responsibilities…Political philosophy is a matter of appeal to our considered convictions. (Kymlicka 1990: 6) This antediluvian strategy situates moral philosophy beyond the fray of political contestation, thus grounding and/or justifying (in no matter how weak a sense) political institutions and actions. Moral philosophy officiates as an ideal ‘as if’ orienting political and social actions. Following Adorno’s cue this chapter contends that such an ethical reduction of politics is itself politically motivated. In line with a venerable tradition of ideology critique I hold that these arguments veil the political intentions underlying any ethical claim. However, I reject too the political reduction of the ethical, that is the claim that ethics is simply the strategic exercise of concealed power. Indeed, the key to any political theory worth its salt is an account of justice and its relation to the good life. Political theories which, in refusing all ethics, analyse politics as a strategic game of rational, or irrational, choice hollow out the complexity of tradition and lifeworld. I argue that a contemporary account of ethics has much to learn from absolutist ethics, though the absolutism I defend would be barely recognisable or acceptable to any proponent of absolutism. This argument is developed through an exploration of the ‘join’ between politics, ethics and instrumental rationality in the work of Ernesto Laclau. All ethics I suggest entails an instrumental-cum-teleological account of the human and the world – the ethical moment of this entailment concerns the limits of such an instrumental reduction. Or, in other terms, ethics is caught in a double bind. Ethical theory appeals to a moment of non-instrumentalisation, a vision of a world in which others are treated as ends in themselves, not as means to an end. Kantian ethics puts this claim at its centre, but it is foreshadowed in Augustine’s distinction between the City of God and the City of Man which in turn draws on classical Greek privileging of the Good. For Augustine humans live in time, and are thus subject to change and fickle nature. God however cannot change and is not subject to time. The City of God is a condition in which human identity, subject to the exigencies of space and time, could not be maintained. Indeed we cannot know God. As McLelland writes: For Augustine what we call human history is only a moment in the divine scheme of things. God’s reason for creating what we call space and time is not all that clear. What is certain is that there was a time, so to speak, when time itself did not exist, and it is equally certain that there will come a time when time itself comes to an end. Time therefore is meaningless to him …

Ethics and politics in discourse theory 165 There is properly speaking no ‘after’ after the last judgement, when the last saved soul enters the city in triumph. There is properly speaking no after the last judgement because nothing ever changes any more. The heavenly city is a city of being not becoming. Eternity is now and forever. (McLelland 1998: 100) It is no mistake that this description bears close resemblance to Derrida’s conception of the messianic as a future to come, which is always already here. The logic of the empty signifier in the work of Ernesto Laclau is not dissimilar. If the City of God is a City of pure being, the City of man is caught between this empty signifier of being, which is not subject to contingency, and the everyday contingency of a world of becoming. Any human attempt to signify this empty signifier must fail – indeed it is necessary that it should fail both for religious justifications of ethics, and for a post-enlightenment conception of ethics. This suggests that a discussion of ethics should begin with an account of the limits of instrumental rationality and an exploration of the implication of a failure of all signification when confronted by the ethical. I argue that Laclau’s analysis of the empty signifier provides both the beginnings of a critique of instrumental rationality, and an account of ethics which addresses the limitations of a metaphysical foreclosure of ethical questions.

Post-Marxism and instrumental rationality A key tension in Marxist theory during the twentieth century concerned the relation between its ethical and scientific claims. The force of the moral critique of exploitation implicit in Marx’s work vies with a deterministic account of capitalist development which is allegedly steered by a fundamental tension between the forces and relations of production. This tension, it is claimed, necessarily ensues in antagonism and revolt against the bourgeois class, and the establishment of a socialist state which unchains the capacity of technological development. An extrapolation of the logic of the capitalist process of production infers that change is inevitable and class identity determined by this structure. From this perspective proletarian struggles are epiphenomenal effects of a more profound tension. It is thus that the oft-unspoken normative anxiety of Marxism is reduced to a strategy: ethical appeals serve to mobilise the masses for their historical task. This strategy neutralises and naturalises the force of the performative utterance. Yet the normative or messianic dimension of Marx’s analysis acts as a supplement, both giving force to the scientific analysis, and detracting from its systemic purity. The account of exploitation, of alienated labour, the call to arms implicit in the Manifesto derive a performative force from the moral horror implicit in their statement, rather than from a science of history. As Derrida maintains, the messianic solicitation of Marx’s work should not be effaced: [the] messianic remains an ineffaceable mark – a mark one neither can nor should efface – of Marx’s legacy, and doubtless of inheriting, of the experience of inheritance in general. Otherwise, one would reduce the event-ness of the event, the singularity and alterity of the other. Otherwise justice risks being

166 Ethics and politics in discourse theory reduced once again to juridical-moral rules, norms or representations, within an inevitable totalising horizon. (Derrida 1994: 28) Laclau and Mouffes’ 1985 text Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, scrupulously deconstructs the deterministic elements of western Marxism, reading the category of hegemony as a supplementary moment which explains why classes have not assumed their historical task and which indicates the limits of Marxism as a privileged science of history. Delineating a logic of hegemony in Marxist theory ensues in the marginalisation of determinism, and the privileging of contingency and non-dialectical negativity as necessary. However, the deconstruction of the tenuous logic of determinism appears to leave untouched the ethical spectre which haunts Marxism. Well, this is not quite true: the deconstruction of determinism casts shadow on that spectre but little light. I argue that there is another logic implicit in this text: a ‘radical’ critique of instrumental rationality. This critique, which disorients any means end rationality, holds profound implications for any consideration of ethics as I suggested in Chapters 3 and 4 of this book. At least five arguments concerning instrumental reason are raised in this and other texts. These suggest a different orientation to the relation between politics and ethics which Laclau has begun to explore in his most recent work. Instrumentalising nature Marx located the source of political transformation and enlightenment in the instrumentalisation of nature by human beings. In transforming the external world human beings transform themselves. This relation is both neutralised and naturalised. It is neutralised in the unquestioned assumption that the instrumentalisation of the inner and outer worlds is the key to the emancipation of human beings from their self-imposed immaturity (to abuse Kant). Discourse theory argues that nature can only ever be considered as articulated within discourse, and that the ‘real’ of nature resists instrumentalisation, that it is always already second nature. Nature, ‘in itself’, escapes discourse and potentially threatens it as a real which cannot be domesticated. Such a reading provides orientation for an interpretation of environmental politics which avoids the idealisation of an original nature, while resisting the assumption common to both Marxist and capitalist modernisation that nature is an object there for our use. Crucially for my argument ‘existence’ threatens the security of any discursive organisation of the real, pointing to the limits of an instrumental attitude towards the object nature. My discussion of the discursive in Chapter 5 presupposes this analysis. Instrumentalising the subject Discourse theory implies second a critique of the instrumentalisation of the ‘subject’ of politics. Marxists, for the most part, presumed that the working-class

Ethics and politics in discourse theory 167 subject of history would achieve the knowledge necessary to its preordained historical task. This assumption works in at least two related ways: on the one hand a pluralism of subject positions are deemed secondary to class; on the other it is presumed that the subject of knowledge can grasp the concrete through the short circuit of abstraction. Discourse theory views the subject as both subjected and a source of resistance to subjection. The failure of the subject to fully embody knowledge points to the dislocation of identity, the recognition that the subject is never at home in its own home, and is constitutively impaired in its attempts to instrumentalise both self and other. For Laclau all social structures have a limited ability to predetermine fully constituted subject positions. Likewise subjects do not exist independently of those structures which interpellate them. The condition of possibility of this interpellation is that it can never finally be successful. This is the key claim made in Chapter 4 of this book. Instrumentalised knowledge If discourse theory implies suspicion about the subject of knowledge, it is also a critique of instrumental or objectivating forms of knowledge. It rejects the assumption that the social is an object which may be simply represented in theoretical discourse. Rather discourse is constitutive of a world for us. The claim to know, in no matter what field, may be read as an attempt to domesticate a constitutive undecidability. Discourse theory is, in one sense, a modern version of Kantian transcendental argument, but it sidesteps the epistemological question, focusing instead on the conditions of possibility of meaning of any entity – subject or object. As argued in Chapter 3 for Laclau, meaning determines the being of the object. Investigating the conditions of the possibility of meaning, involves also an investigation of the conditions of possibility of the being of objects. The question of objective, or subjective being, only makes sense from within the discursive. Where Kant deduces the transcendental subject of apperception, which both makes human knowledge possible, and limits its reach, discourse theory holds that the being of the object is not stable, but constituted in specific discursive practices. Instrumentalising society Fourth, discourse theory implies a critique of the establishment of purely inner worldly norms, justified solely within the pragmatics of everyday discourse. This follows from the claim that society is an impossible object. It is thus no longer an object which can, at least simply, be objectified for us or which presupposes norms natural to this object. If the representation of society as such is impossible then the various forms of representation of the object society should be viewed as hegemonic attempts to establish political control. In themselves none of these hegemonic projects are possessed of a morality which precedes the political attempt to establish power, what Kymlicka terms our considered convictions which in his view frame political action. Rather, moral discourses are themselves

168 Ethics and politics in discourse theory implicated in the struggle for (instrumental) power and control over social and political institutions. As suggested earlier such moral discourses are constitutive of certain political claims regarding the status of man, as opposed to nature or animals. This must have ramifications for how we can consider an account of ethics in light of discourse theory. Instrumentalised language Discourse theory rejects last the view that language is merely an instrument with use value, either as a tool of representation or as a tool of communication. Language is not simply a tool for use, but is constitutive of our relation to various worlds, subjective, intersubjective and instrumental. Yet our language always fails us. Laclau writes: An empty signifier can only emerge if there is a structural impossibility in signification as such and if this impossibility can only signify itself as an interruption (subversion, distortion, etc.) of the structure of the sign. That is that the limits of signification can only announce themselves as the impossibility of realising what is in those limits – if the limits could be signified in a direct way, they would be internal to signification, and, ergo, would not be limits at all. (Laclau 1994b: 168) What is left unsaid in this quote is that the empty signifier points to the im/possibility of a non-instrumental relation with the other, a relation in which language is no longer means to an end, but an opening towards an other which cannot be included in the signification of communication. These brief suggestions regarding an implicit critique of instrumental rationality in the work of Laclau should indicate that I consider Laclau’s work a more fruitful exploration of the limits of instrumental reason than that of Habermas, and, as a consequence, of the relation between the ethical and the political. As we shall see though this entails pushing discourse theory in previously unexplored directions. In light of the above let me consider the relation between ethics and politics in Laclau’s work, linking this to the question of instrumental rationality.

Discourse theory, ethics and politics In the discussion earlier I characterised Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory as alluding towards a critique of instrumental rationality in its various guises. I characterised instrumental reason very broadly, as a form of rationality which treats either subjects, objects or language as a means to an end. This critique of instrumental reason relies ultimately on an account of a structural impossibility in all signification, what Laclau terms the empty signifier, which at the same time makes any signification possible. However, Laclau has also argued that this constitutive undecidability does not entail a particular version of ethics or indeed of

Ethics and politics in discourse theory 169 politics. Rather this essential contingency is ethically and politically neutral, representing the most general, and for that reason formally empty, conditions of im/possibility of society. This way of presenting the matter is somewhat deceptive and belies a number of important distinctions. While radical democracy may not receive any ethical warranty from such an ontological condition, this does not mean that, to use William Connolly’s words, the onto-political implications of taking contingency ‘seriously’ are empty. Two initial points should clarify this. I suggested in the previous chapter that a consideration of the different positions of the fascist and the radical democrat vis-à-vis undecidability suggest that such an investment not only orients, but also excludes certain forms of institutional, political and indeed moral articulations. Consider, second what such an onto-political investment of necessity excludes in terms of possible versions of ethical or moral theory. The analysis of undecidability is clearly incompatible with one major strand of moral theorisation: absolutism. All absolutist versions of the good are incompatible with a theoretical attachment to undecidability. The best-known example is Plato’s The Republic. For Plato moral actions are guaranteed by correct knowledge. In an ideal Republic the knowledge of the guardians of reason approximates knowledge of the absolute good: this knowledge accords to them the right to rule. Plato thus links knowledge, morality and power. This political argument rests on the claim that there is an ideal form of the good independent of its particular instantiations. True knowledge of morality does not depend on either sensory perception or experience, but is indubitable and absolute regardless of circumstance (Plato 1993). Such a version of moral universalism is incompatible with Laclau’s argument on a number of grounds: it privileges a particular version of the good on the basis of a theoretical claim about the nature of all life, that is an ontology of the social; it cannot admit of any other good and ignores its own contingency in linking a theory of knowledge to a theory of morality; perhaps most importantly, the presupposition of an absolute good wholly distinct from its instantiations delinks the good from communal and social life. The bearing of such an account of the good on moral life is impossible to judge, as knowledge of the good is equivalent to experience of an other-worldly realm. This is reminiscent of Augustine’s distinction between the cities of God and Man. In that case the City of God is presented as a realm bereft of time, space and indeed difference. The bearing of such a realm on human moral laws – which have after all to be articulated in time and space, and with reference to articulated ‘proper’ bounds (what is proper to the self, what is proper to the state) – is difficult to fathom. However, we should not too quickly dismiss absolutism. A moral absolutism which makes reference to another realm echoes Laclau’s analysis of all signification as reliant on what he terms the logic of the empty signifier. Moreover for Laclau this impossible object is the only object of ethical investment. A long and esteemed tradition of ethical enquiry makes a very similar claim – primarily on religious grounds. We will need though to inflect this tradition in a manner which its adherents would reject if its value to a post-Marxist account of ethics were to be determined.

170 Ethics and politics in discourse theory Likewise two other significant versions of ethics/morality are a priori ruled out: subjectivism and objectivism. I generalise for the purpose of argument here. Subjectivist theories hold that morality is a matter of preference, and cannot be objectively determined. However, this subjective relativisation of ethics only goes so far, as it cannot acknowledge the relation of subjects exercising ethical preferences to the social and political structures which provide the context of any ethical decision. Moreover subjectivism tends towards a mirror imaging of objectivism in leaving ethics to the arbitrary decision of a fully determinate subjectivity. Such a determinate subject could not take an ethical decision: the decision would be pre-programmed by a subject which pre-exists any decision that may be taken, like a loop in a computer-programmed language. Objectivist theories, by contrast, hold that the moral viewpoint admits of universalisation and can be known in a similar vein to, for example, the laws of thermodynamics. There are thick and thin versions of such moral objectivism, but all tend to remove the weight of ethical decision, in demarcating appropriate actions and behaviours regardless of context or contingency. Likewise investment in the onto-political orientation suggested by Laclau’s work must reject utilitarianism which assumes the plausibility of determining the greater good, or the maximal pleasure, in a manner which outlaws difference. Consequentialist accounts which presume to determine the moral standing of an action on its outcome cannot admit of the possibility of different forms of outcome, different responses to the same action and are notoriously slippery in defining precisely how the good is to be both defined and measured. Similar objections might be made against other ethical accounts including deontological and virtue ethics. Proceeding negatively we may infer that the strict distinction of a theoretical from a normative claim is not plausible. It could though be suggested that my argument presumes too much: an essential contingency does not proscribe any particular ethics but is their neutral condition of possibility. This argument is mistaken. First, it ignores that most moral theories would reject the starting premises of Laclau’s analysis. Second, the self-referential nature of Laclau’s argument places even the theoretical claims he makes in the realm of contingency. As such they must be subject to argumentative justification and challenge. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Laclau defends an ontology of the social. Any ontology of the social assumes, no matter how deeply they may be hidden, certain normative presuppositions. Laclau’s participation in various debates about universality and particularity, radical and liberal democracy and the limits of tolerance all presume a stronger link than his initial formulation seems to allow. To deny that the account of hegemony and contingency elaborated by Laclau has certain ethical implications would amount to a form of performative self-contradiction. However, the acceptance of the argument I have just proposed results in a different version of performative contradiction. It is on the horns of this aporia, outlined later, that the ethical weight of discourse theory rests. Let me summarise the view I defend before proceeding to the question of performative contradiction.

Ethics and politics in discourse theory 171 First, the discussion of undecidability already contours a debate regarding ethics in certain directions. These contours include inter alia: (i) a refusal to endorse the ethical closure of particular communities, as well as the formalism associated with most deontological moral theories; (ii) a recognition that power is a necessary feature of any moral decision; (iii) the conclusion that too rigid a separation of a primitive ontology of the social from morality and sociality repeats Kant’s implausible distinction between the epistemological and the moral. Of course Laclau himself would reject such a strict distinction, as his more recent work on ethics makes explicit. This argument is not wholly incompatible with three key claims Laclau makes regarding ethics in his more recent work. These lend support to my argument but leave certain questions unanswered. Laclau defines the ethical as the moment of the universality of the community. This universality is however both a condition of possibility of any community, as well as its condition of impossibility. For Laclau ‘universality’ presupposes a logic of the empty signifier which cannot be represented as such. Instead particular discourses struggle to establish their hegemony. He writes: The ethical substance of the community – the moment of its totalisation or universalisation – represents an object which is simultaneously impossible and necessary. As impossible, it is incommensurable with any normative order; as necessary, it has to have access to the field of representation which is possible only if the ethical substance is invested in some form of normative order. (Laclau 2000: 84) The ethical is linked then to the presence of empty symbols in the community which make ethical life possible. These empty symbols – for example, equality – are gradually emptied of particular contents as they come to represent a variety of different social struggles. These may well conflict with each other, and compete to give content to the empty symbol. While this ‘empty symbol’ can never quite become ‘empty’, it intimates towards a moment of unconditionally empty signification, a signification which (to recall Augustine’s characterisation of the heavenly realm) would be devoid of any human reference to time, space or content. This makes clear the grip of metaphysics on Laclau’s conception of the ethical. It also indicates that we should not too quickly dismiss absolutist versions of the ethical. Indeed they betray an important element of any post-metaphysical ethical theory. Laclau argues next that particular orders or norms represent an ethical investment through which the universal is incarnated. This follows the logic of his analysis of hegemony in earlier texts.2 The representation of universality is an ethical moment hegemonically institutionalised. It does not represent the prior existence of an ethical absolute. In this sense it might be said, to refer back to Augustine once more, that the ethical as an impossible reference to a state of being, necessarily implies its institutionalisation as a state of becoming. There is

172 Ethics and politics in discourse theory a necessary, though contingent, relation between the City of Man and the City of God. Laclau concludes third that the object invested in is the only object of ethics. This (impossible) ethical object does not dictate the particular forms of ethical investment incarnated in different normative orders. Rather: This investment, as it shows no inner connection between what is invested and the social norms which receive the investment, depends on the central category of decision, conceived as an act of articulation grounded on no a priori principle external to the decision itself. (Laclau 2000: 84) I have indicated that in my view the onto-political orientation implied by Laclau’s work does suggest that certain versions of ethics and indeed certain ethical decisions would be precluded if this prior investment in the necessity of contingency has been made. Indeed were Laclau himself not to propose an ethics and a politics broadly compatible with the claims he has made then he would rightly be subject to the charge of performative contradiction, as Habermas would doubtless be quick to note. This leaves things a little too simple though for the charge of performative contradiction may be made against my argument, though on different grounds. On my account we presuppose a subject who/that recognises the contingency of any identification, and takes seriously the impossibility of a finally constituted subjectivity. This entails the exclusion of certain actions and an argument which justifies this exclusion. But who or what is this subject which makes the investment in such a contingency? Does it/she precede the decision? Well no, for if so there would be no decision proper. Is s/he constituted by the decision? Well not quite, otherwise there would be no subject capable of deciding. This question of the subject is suggested indirectly in a seemingly innocuous preface to Laclau’s discussion of ethics. He writes: hegemony is a theoretical approach which depends on an essentially ethical decision to accept as the horizon of any possible intelligibility the incommensurability between the ethical and the normative. (Laclau 2000: 81) The key issue here is that of decision, more precisely, the essentially ethical decision to accept a hegemonic theoretical approach. This ethical decision suggests the type of ontological orientation I suggested earlier. With such an orientation one could not, at the risk of performative contradiction, engage in certain actions or hold to certain ethical theories. Incommensurability is then the object of ethical investment for the radical democrat. As I indicated earlier the fascist would not make such an ethical decision, viewing incommensurability as a defect within the body politic. It is overcome through the imposition of an order which seeks to eradicate the distance between the normative order and the impossible object of ethical investment.

Ethics and politics in discourse theory 173 The decision to adopt a hegemonic approach to politics presupposes a subject that is on the one hand capable of effecting this as a decision, but on the other is not at home in itself. Such a subject is radically disjunctive from the traditional subject of ethics which is either objectively determined in its ethical decision by a prior moral order, or which makes ethical decision as a subject capable of justifying every decision it may make. The ethical subject is instead defined precisely through a failure of justificatory principles, and a responsibility towards this failure as was argued in Chapter 6. This characterisation of the ethical leaves us on the horns of an aporia then. The decision to adopt a hegemonic approach, as ultimately ethical, receives no justification from any prior ethical framework. There is a certain madness in this decision, which is not a decision of the subject, or a decision imposed on the subject. Instead it unhinges the subject. Moreover once this onto-political orientation is invested in it provides no certainty to the subject which has invested precisely in its own uncertainty. The performative contradiction arises because, as Laclau notes time and time again, the logic of the empty signifier does not in itself presuppose an investment in this logic at the level of ethical decisions. In fact, to suggest that contingency is necessary is a proposition of the type ‘I am lying’. For if contingency is necessary then this claim must itself be contingent; if necessary then there is no possibility of absolute contingency. The claim that contingency is necessary already presupposes an ethical investment which itself receives no warranty from the mere existence of contingency. So then, two performative contradictions: to make a claim for the necessity of contingency seems, at the risk of contradiction, to refuse the affirmation of certain ethical assumptions; however, to accept this argument is to affirm that contingency is itself not contingent, for it is necessary. This aporetic conclusion is unavoidable, but not disabling. Let me make a few suggestions which lend support to my claim for the exclusion of certain ethical presumptions, and implicit support for others. The argument for contingency, I suggest, must be defended as necessary. If this defence is not made then the relation between the theoretical claims made by Laclau, and particular instantiations of political orders is impossible to maintain. On these lines we do well to recall that Laclau’s original arguments regarding contingency arise from a critique of a very particular tradition, namely Marxism. Indeed the argument itself depends on a particular history and tradition as its condition of possibility. Given this, the dislocation performed by Laclau within and without of the Marxist tradition holds implications for the messianic conception of justice briefly alluded to in the comments earlier. The risk of denying any link between an onto-political orientation and a certain political and ethical orientation is that the account of hegemony becomes simply a theoretical fact – the fact of contingency – which has no bearing on ethico-political debate. However, the ethical decision to adopt a hegemonic approach (as Laclau expresses it) functions rather differently than for a traditional ethics. For one it does not predetermine ethical decisions in advance. It entails serious accounting for every decision, as particular decisions are not prescribed. It entails too that this accounting will only go so far: on the precipice of decision the accounts never

174 Ethics and politics in discourse theory quite add up. Nonetheless, while no decision or action is predetermined by this stance certain ethical decisions are excluded if contingency is deemed necessary. This contours the forms of debate appropriate to ethics, without determining what is or is not an ethical decision. Indeed there is no ethics as such, only an orientation towards the ethical which entails treating contingency seriously, and refusing an absolutism of either the subject or object. Finally, discussion of the ethical implications of contingency is in itself inappropriate if not tied to a politics. For what the radical critique of absolutism demonstrates, irrevocably, is that the ethical does not precede or frame political institutions but is linked to them in an intimate extimacy. Intimate because the only form of realisation of ‘an ethical life’ is through processes of decision and will formation which presuppose this contingency; extimate because no particular order can claim to express or manifest this impossibility. This argument parts with the Marxist assumption that the normative order is the secondary expression of deeper, hidden interests. Rather the ethical radically shortcuts any absolutist or teleological ethics premised on interest. The defence of radical undecidability then may not issue in a prescriptive definition of the ethical but it does have normative implications. Any claim to represent the ideal should be viewed as an attempt to hegemonise and control an impossibility which resists such final determination. However, we might read this equivocation as suggesting that moral/political theory has to account for this tension not run from it. Laclau and Mouffe suggest precisely this reading in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy when writing: This moment of tension, of openness, which gives the social its essentially incomplete and precarious character, is what every project for radical democracy should set out to institutionalise … . The advancing of a project for radical democracy means, therefore, forcing the myth of a rational and transparent society to recede progressively to the horizon of the social. This becomes a ‘non-place’, the symbol of its own impossibility. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 190–1) This non-place, a symbol of the impossibility of a finally instrumentalised world, is in Laclau and Mouffe’s view a precondition of the thinking of radical democracy. It is also, as noted earlier, a precondition, indeed the very location of, any ethical object and subject. However, the content given to this ethical object depends upon the various forms of normative investment constitutive of particular orders. Radical democracy proposes then the institutionalisation of this uncertainty, the contouring of democratic society in such a way that the place of power is never fully incarnated. This already predetermines certain features of a hegemonic left project. It cannot privilege particular versions of the good, in the way that the Marxian project for example did. Once we begin to consider democratic politics, however, the defence of radical democracy reaches beyond its initial premises to engage in an argument about the efficacy of certain means and ends.

Ethics and politics in discourse theory 175 It has to make an argument, an argument which in democratic societies will be based on persuasion and agreement between consenting subjects. Moreover the radical democrat precludes the unnecessary exercise of force in the name of truth, as witnessed in various leftist experiments of the twentieth century. There is a melancholy attached to the realisation that democracy is, to abuse Trotsky, the institutionalisation of permanent revolution. The melancholic disposition, as Freud argued, laments the lost object while internalising the pain of that loss against the ego. The danger of this is a narcissistic self-obsession which holds onto the lost object and punishes the ego of the subject. The pained attachment of the revolutionary socialist to the absolutism of a certain spirit of Marxism suggests precisely such narcissistic self-immolation. Melancholy at the social level then points both to the dependence of any political identity on that of the other, and to the dangers induced by a general sense of dislocation for the leftist imaginary. This brings me back to the discussion with which I began this chapter: ethics and instrumental reason. What are the implications of this melancholic attachment to an impossible object for the radical imaginary, and for the relationship between the ethical and the political?

From the City of Man to the City of God: ethics and instrumental rationality The ethical, as the impossible object of investment, is, I have suggested, bereft of any instrumental/means–end rationality. It is also though impossible to speak or conceive of. Naming such an impossibility is already to attach a content, no matter how minimal, to the indeterminate. Yet, Laclau insists on maintaining the name ethical for this impossible object. Certainly this insistence maintains a relation to absolutist and religious versions of ethical reflection. Indeed Laclau notes as much: Naming God is impossible … because, being the absolute, transcendens, He is beyond all positive determination. If we radicalise the logical implications of this impossibility, we see that even the assumption that God is an entity, even the assumption of oneness – if oneness is conceived of as the unicity of the entity – is something which is already an undue interpretation, because it is to attribute a content to that which is beyond any possible content … The historical importance of the mystical discourse is that by radicalising that beyond, it has shown the essential finitude which is constitutive of all experience; its historical limit has been, in most cases, its having surrendered to the temptation of giving a positive content to the beyond – the positive content being dictated, not by mystical experience itself but by the religious persuasion of the mystic. (Laclau 1997: 12) As a consequence however, any actions, immoral or otherwise, are an expression of God as the absolute, or the ethical as an impossible object. The ethical appears

176 Ethics and politics in discourse theory to offer no basis for discrimination between actions, behaviour or norms. It is wrong to suggest though that this absolute is neutral, or representative of degree zero. Rather it can only ‘appear’ in forms of signification which seek to represent the universal yet must of necessity fail. It is not, yet it is. This places the ethical in a peculiar position. On the one hand it is an impossible object of normative investment; on the other this impossible object has to rely on constitutively inadequate forms of representation if it is to be made manifest. Moreover, I have argued that investment in the necessity of this impossibility entails the exclusion of certain versions of ethics, and thus the contouring of ethics in particular ways. Now, all representation relies to some degree on the instrumentalisation of language. We cannot then invoke the logic of empty signification as a critique of this instrumental necessity, especially as it is its condition of possibility. What can be done is to argue that once an investment in such an onto-political orientation is made, certain forms of instrumental action can be deemed unethical, that is, incapable of accounting for the constitutive impossibility which is their condition of expression. They perform what Derrida once termed a transcendental contraband, veiling their conditions of possibility, in presenting themselves as necessary. Expressed in other terms such discourses either deny the necessity of the transcendental invocation of this ethical moment (and thus deny the constitutive impossibility which infects their performance), or alternatively deny altogether that their forms of expression are particular. Any process of normative investment in the ethical will have to rely on a means–end rationality. If so then the ideal of transparency, or the Kantian ethical ideal of the subject as an end in itself, recedes. However it becomes a condition of possibility of conceiving of such a project. In contrast to the Habermassian version of morality, which presupposes the possibility of an ideal orienting political practice – symmetrical communication between mature subjects – the ethical is also a condition of impossibility. There is then a secret history to ethical philosophy, a constitutive tension between an impossible reach for transcendence freed of any means–end rationality, and the necessary implication of any moral discourse in instrumental rationality. If so a number of implications for the analysis of instrumental rationality follow. This allow for a determinate analysis of the various modes of instrumentalisation in contemporary global conditions. In the section ‘Post-Marxism and instrumental rationality’ of this chapter I briefly ran through these at the theoretical level, but theory is not isolated from political practice and the forms of instrumentalisation noted there find expression in a variety of different contexts. This entails too an inflection of the traditional critique of instrumental rationality found in critical theory. Rather than rooting this critique in an ideal of transparent communication we can engage with instrumental forms of reason on their own terms, suggesting that the claim to objective necessity which underlies varied modalities of rationality cannot account for their necessary failure. I noted earlier that the ethical is caught in a double bind. On the one hand most ethical accounts make reference to an ideal which transcends all particularity. On the other hand ethics has to make reference to particular communities, laws,

Ethics and politics in discourse theory 177 conceptions of what is proper and what is improper. This tension recalls the classic distinction between the City of Man and the City of God in the work of Augustine. The City of God is a realm devoid of time and space. Properly speaking it cannot be spoken of or conceived. Yet Augustine in the closing books of his Confessions constantly runs up against the problem that if God is to have any bearing on the lives of humans then He must be spoken of (Augustine 1992). This injunction both breaks the prohibition on the representation of God as the ethical Absolute, and keeps the prohibition in place in recognising that He cannot finally be presented. A contemporary ethics plays a similar game. Caught between determining what is properly ethical and the acknowledgement that the ethical is an impossible object of investment which can never be finally determined twentyfirst century ethical debates return to the question addressed centuries ago by Augustine. It is this paradox which any defence of radical democracy must take seriously as I have argued in Chapters 7 and 8. The identification with contingency, and thus with an essential value pluralism, distinguishes the radical democrat from the liberal. The liberal endorses value pluralism without acknowledging that this pluralism is constituted by a radical moment of indecision, which undermines the claimed legitimacy of the decision. Thus, the liberal struggles to justify the exercise of force in order to maintain the norms previously endorsed. The radical democrat, in recognising the contingent foundation of any order and its justification, also recognises the (illegitimate) violence required for the maintenance of that order. This is why the radical democrat can take responsibility for the decision, which underpins the exclusions constitutive of the community, and take on the burdensome task of their constant revision.

Notes

1 The ends of Marx(ism)? 1 Despite the diversity of interpretive traditions within the Marxist tradition, most are held hostage by the need to deal with the spectre of economism. This is true even in instances when Marxist theorists seem to have developed other aspects of the Marxist tradition such as the analysis of ideology as a means of addressing polyphony in interpretive terms. Economic determinism is invoked as an insurance policy on epistemological security, ontological certainty and political action. 2 For a good discussion of the vicissitudes of these debates see Daly, Glyn (2002) ‘Globalisation and the Constitution of Political Economy’ in Politics and Poststructuralism: An Introduction (ed.) Valentine and Finlayson, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 112–130. 3 These arguments were of particular importance in post-colonial societies. The South African left, opposition to apartheid was rent apart by debates regarding the relative dependence of racial politics on class. Many Marxist critics could not allow that forms of racial subjection were not simply the epiphenomenal appearance of class politics. All sorts of contortion tricks were invoked to demonstrate the thesis that South African capitalism was structured along class lines, and that racial prejudice was simply the most efficient expression of class exploitation. 4 Williams is fully aware of these problems as even a cursory reading of his discussion of class in Keywords shows. 5 For an excellent discussion of this see Diana Coole’s Negativity and Politics, pp. 45–51. 6 Marx notes in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte the proletariat undergo a long and often painful process of learning until finally they rely only upon themselves for the revolutionary challenge to Capital. 7 It was thus that Marx elided the progressive changes wrought with the growth of bourgeois formal law, as well as the forms of conflict which might arise with the growth of a state bureaucracy, implementing this law. Finally, contradictions which emerge in the sphere of politics are to be attributed to a structural necessity which follows from the form capitalism takes. 8 Habermas’s discussion of Marx in his ‘Concluding Reflections in the Theory of Communicative Action is a particularly good critique of the limitations of Marx’s analysis of domination and exploitation in modern societies. 9 When I wrote this book I had not read Hardt and Engross’ Empire. Whatever problems one has with this text it does represent a break with the theoretical debates of the past twenty years which have either sought to defend Marx in a reactionary defensive manner, or have broken altogether with the Marxist legacy. Hardt and Negri are determined neither to dispense with nor defend, but instead engage in an illuminating and challenging critique of contemporary globalisation. 10 In Althusser’s language generalities I, II and III. 11 This is the case whether the theory is Marxist or not.

Notes 179 12 See in particular Michele Barrett’s discussion of this in her Politics of Truth. 13 This is in short Foucault’s point in his discussion of panopticism. As he expresses it: ‘… to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its exercise unnecessary’ (p. 201). From this perspective the rational subject appears not as a leap forward in human progress, but rather as the effect of an ever more subtle power exercised by the enlightened subject on its self. 14 This optimism was not only a feature of Marxism theories. Liberal accounts of modernisation defended the expansion of capitalism as the basis for the expression of human freedom in similar terms, though with a radically different political agenda. 15 Of course Lukács is not consistent in this view. The duty of the revolutionary party is to induce the proletariat to a subjective knowledge of their objective exploitation, thus suggesting a politics of articulation. 16 Rationalisation results too in the differentiation of the spheres of: (i) material production, involving the organised exploitation of nature; (ii) cultural reproduction in which the extension of mass communication leads to an organised mass culture; and (iii) politics, that sphere supposed to act on behalf of a general will, which is in fact dominated by a highly specialised economic sphere, and the extension of bureaucratic rationality. Within each of the spheres special communications predominate making transfers of knowledge difficult, and excluding those unfamiliar with the rules of the game. Specialisation also makes co-ordination of all of the different spheres impossible. No longer is it possible to posit a mechanism which can take account of all of the different demands and needs of the different spheres, while at the same time conferring a rational cohesion on the whole. For a detailed discussion of this processes see Offe, C. (1996) Modernity and the State, Cambridge, Polity Press. 17 The Dialectic of Enlightenment begins with magic and myth. In magic the relation between subject and object is already mediated by substitution, the first step on the path to discursive logic and abstraction. Substitution takes place with sacrifice, as in the biblical metaphor where a lamb is sacrificed in place of the first born. In mythical societies the primary unity between subject and object is broken, but the object (nature) still dominates its subjects. Sacrifice however is not only a means of showing respect to nature; it is also the first step towards control of nature. This reflects a fairly widespread view of the road towards enlightenment, but for the authors the emergence of man from his self-induced immaturity has a bitter sting in the tale: a reversion to a world structured as myth. 18 For a discussion of this see Morris, M, ‘On the logic of the Performative Contradiction: Habermas and the Radical Critique of Reason’ from The Review of Politics, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 735–70. 19 It is important to note that this diagnosis depends on the assumption that philosophy can only be understood in terms of its relation to the social totality. Philosophy does not stand above the social totality of which it is a part, and discover universal precepts of reason or logic. 20 These texts were written in 1931 and 1932 respectively. Reading them it is clear that Adorno’s negative dialectics, and his loathing for Heideggerian ontology cannot simply be reduced to his experience of exile, and the tragic death of Walter Benjamin, during the reign of the Nazis. ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ was translated and published in Telos 31, 1977, pp. 120–33, and ‘The Idea of Natural History’ in Telos vol. 60, Summer 1984, pp.111–124. Adorno was thus twenty-eight years old at the time of their publication. 21 Adorno is here referring to Heidegger’s Being and Time which he was critical of throughout his writing career. 22 Adorno here applies the lesson learnt from Lukács that reification extends even into the conceptual matrix of philosophy, but contrary to Lukács affirms Kant’s repudiation of knowledge of the absolute.

180 Notes 23 Of course we are not far away in expressing this concern from the tortured and contradictory moments of Rousseau’s General Will, which fights against the differences within, but claims exemption from the dogfight of particularity in always representing an already presupposed truth which cannot be contradictory to the General Will. Indeed it would interesting, but beyond the scope of this study, to trace the influence of Rousseau on the concepts of nature, history and politics not only in Adorno, but also in the work of the later Habermas, especially in his conceptualisation of Discourse Ethics.

2 Language, communication, performativity 1 For a more detailed discussion of this see Benhabib, Seyla (1987) Critique, Norm and Utopia. 2 Habermas limits his discussion of communication to language but insists that this is not necessary. 3 Thanks to Aletta Norval for drawing my attention to Chambers’ book. 4 It does seems that once (D) has been derived from the analysis of speech acts, (U) is redundant as it would follow logically from developing the implications of (D). I return to this point in Chapter 5.

3 Performativity and politics: from Habermas to Laclau 1 I discuss this in greater detail in the last chapter of this book, but the obvious markers would be Rousseau and Marx in the classical tradition. 2 I deliberately here use the almost predictable statement made by Austin in his How to do Things with Words, precisely because they serve as the location of a problem within pragmatic theories of language meaning which I will attempt to develop in what follows. See Austin J (1962) How to do Things with Words, Oxford, Clarendon Press, p. 2. 3 Derrida’s reading of Austin seems to ignore this important moment in his argument. Austin does not defend a notion of intentionality which relies upon a metaphysical notion of subjectivity. 4 For a useful discussion of this see Thompson, JB (1982) ‘Universal Pragmatics’ in Habermas: Critical Debates, London: Macmillan Press. With regard to the a priori nature of these dialogue constitutive universals it should be noted that the a priori Habermas defends is a reduced and less strong version of transcendental argument. I discuss this in some detail in Chapter 3. 5 Whether this is indeed the case has been the subject of some debate. See, for example, Jeffrey Alexander’s (1991) critical comments in’ Habermas and Critical Theory: Beyond the Marxian Dilemma’, from Honneth (ed.) Communicative Action, Cambridge, Polity Press, pp. 49–74. 6 A crucial theoretical question is how we conceive of this otherness to meaning, which is nonetheless implied in the assertion of meaning. Perhaps I can make clear my position early on before clarifying in more detail in the chapters which follow. Gasché argues that‘ Otherness is, consequently, neither a lack, a substantial void, an absence susceptible of determination, nor the still meaningful reverse side of the positivity of the Hegelian Concept or Notion. … it is more and less than negativity. It is less because it has no meaning, no signification, it is more than negativity because it is the “medium” in which philosophy comes to carve out its contradictions.’ The use of performativity along these lines, instead of emphasising the dimension of a lack, as in Lacanian political theory, has important implications for my later discussion of politics.

Notes 181 4 Politics, idealisation and performativity 1 The arguments which follow are derived from E. Laclau New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, Verso, 1990, and Laclau, ‘Subject of Politics, Politics of the Subject’ (1995a), ‘Why do Empty Signifiers matter in Politics’ from The Lesser Evil and the Greater Good, ed. Jeffrey Weeks, River Oram Press, 1994, and numerous discussions in the PhD seminar in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex. 2 My discussion of performativity already suggests this. If the engagement in a speech act opens the interlocutor to the possibility of challenge, then the act points to a certain vulnerability which no power can control. 3 Benjamin suggested that the time of the present is shot through with chips of messianic time. Messianic time preserves the possibility that in the seeming necessity of what is, there is preserved a messianic cessation of happening, a ‘revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed.’ Benjamin speaks of empty time, of a structure not subject to time as a teleological development. This is a promise that all of ‘the diversity of idioms on earth [which] prevent everybody from uttering the words which otherwise, at one single stroke, would materialise as truth’ in the form of a constellation which escapes the petrification of understanding and presence, thus introducing covertly the messianic back into the time of the present. (see Benjamin, W. (1981) ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ from Illuminations, London, Fontana, pp. 255–66.) 4 The maintenance of systematic closure requires the exercise of hegemony. Given the contingency of any systemic identity, Laclau believes that one element of a signifying structure will represent this systematicity. This he terms an empty signifier. 5 Quasi-transcendentalism and critical theory 1 This is true for the Critique of Pure Reason, though in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant argues that the transcendental subject has a correlate in the practical attempt to be free. 2 This is a modern rewriting of the medieval Catholic problem of compatibility between God’s absolute knowledge, and the exercise of human freedom, first outlined by Augustine. 3 I use maieutic here not to suggest that the claims of communicative reason may be assessed through subsequent reconstruction by communicating subjects of their own presuppositions, but rather to refer to the open and dialogic nature of the process of verification. 4 In the twentieth century empty signification has been associated with literary formalism, notably in the work of modernist poets and novelists. It is a presumed lack of significance which annoys critics into denouncing the self-referential language of modernist literature as socially regressive, even conservative. Adorno (in his various texts on aesthetics) defended the thesis that pure form is a symptom of the limits of a world reduced to the meaning of a universal logos, and thus to the limits of any systemic reduction of the world. Adorno though resisted drawing any conclusions about political change from this failure of signification. This is not to argue that Adorno was not concerned with politics. However, given his overly pessimistic analysis of modern rationalisation he does not develop an account of conditions for political change. 5 The extent to which this argument is correct may go some way towards explaining why the language of literature has so often been seen as avant garde, progressive, pointing to the exclusions we exercise in redrawing the limits of what we can and cannot signify at different times. 6 It should though be noted that Laclau is by no means consistent in the use of terms such as discourse, the discursive, particular discursive totalities and the like. I have adopted terminology in as consistent a fashion as plausible.

182 Notes 7 This may be clear at the level of social totality – national identity is defined in terms of what it excludes, and provides a point of identification for any number of different identities, unified only by the imagined community of nationhood. However, increasingly, identification does not occur at the level of social totality. Insular discourses – religious fundamentalist discourses for example – provide alternative points of identification. Given the dispersion of identities any discourse may be constituted by multiple exclusions, multiple points of defense against what threatens it. Laclau’s focus on the antagonistic other as singular seems to preclude this. 6 The politics of subjectivity 1 Notably the work of Freud on the unconscious, Heidegger’s destruction of a fundamental ontology of being, and the various post-structuralist thinkers influenced by the philosophy of language. 2 Having said this a note of caution is perhaps in order. While political theorists rarely defend the common place notion of a subject in full control of itself, the implication of this decentring of the subject has not made its way into the conduct of empirical political science, which for the most part still relies on the doxa of behaviourism, as a modus operandi. 3 Balibar goes on to note that the attribution of the theory of subjectivity to Descartes, has a long history, originating in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. 4 While Locke still insists that God is supreme, he nonetheless marks a break with the medieval curriculum in attributing the source of political sovereignty to the consent of the people. Indeed the first, and less well read, of his Two Treatises on Government is a concerted effort to undermine the argument that one can trace the authority of monarchs directly back to Adam, and thus to the ultimate authority of God. In the absence of this established certainty sovereignty returns to the people. 5 See for example Marx’s discussion of the distinction between civil society and the state in his On the Jewish Question from Marx and Engels (1984) Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, London: Fontana, 1984. 6 It is thus too that the term subject is appropriate. Derived from the Latin, to be thrown under, it indicates the extent to which modern subjects are to a degree constituted in the world, by particular social relations. This suggests too though the contingency of these relations, as I argue in the section ‘Undecidable subject of politics’. 7 I have taken this notion from Ettienne Balibar’s recent work on the subject, most notably ‘Citizen Subject’ in Who Comes After the Subject. 8 The arguments which follow are derived from E. Laclau New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, Verso, 1990, and Laclau, E (1996) ‘Subject of Politics, Politics of the Subject’ from Emancipations, pp. 47–66 and Laclau, E (1994) ‘Why do Empty Signifiers Matter in Politics’ from The Lesser Evil and the Greater Good (ed.) Jeffrey Weeks, River Oram Press, as well as numerous discussions in the PhD seminar in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex. 9 The best discussion of this which I have read is in Balibar, E (1994) ‘Subjection and Subjectivation’ from Supposing the Subject (ed.) Copjec, J London: Verso, pp. 1–15. 7 Deliberative or radical democracy? the politics of performativity 1 Pluralists such as Dahl and Truman initially believed that empirical political theory, following a descriptive methodology, could simply describe the workings of democracy realistically, and explain their workings with sufficient evidence. See, for example, Dahl, R (1961) Who Governs: Democracy and Power in an American City, and Truman (1964) The Governmental Process.

Notes 183 2 This is true of classical liberal theory, and is maintained as I suggested in Chapter 2 in Rawl’s A Theory of Justice, as well as Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. 3 In this respect at least my discussion is at one with Marx’s critique of the idea of human rights in ‘On the Jewish Question’. 4 The literature is prohibitively large. A representative sample includes: Habermas, Jurgen (1996), Benhabib, S (1996), Guttman and Thompson (1996), Democracy and Disagreement; Cohen, Joshua (1989) ‘Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy’; Fishkin, James (1991) Democracy and Deliberation, Sunstein, Cass (1993) The Partial Constitution, Larmore, Charles (1987) Patterns of Moral Complexity; Manin, B (1987) ‘On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation’; Mansbridge, Jane (1996) ‘Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity’ from Benhabib (ed.) op cit.; Young, Iris Marion (1996) ‘Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy’ from Benhabib (ed.) opcit. pp.120–37 and Cohen, Joshua (1996) ‘Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy’ from Benhabib (ed.), pp. 95–120. 5 Most notable in this regard is the work of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Mouffe, C (1993) The Return of the Political, Mouffe, C (1996) ‘Democracy, Power and the Political’ in Benhabib (ed.) pp. 245–57; Honig, Bonnie, (1996) ‘Difference, Dilemmas and the Politics of Home’ from Benhabib (ed.), pp. 257–78 and Conolly, William (1991) Identity/Difference. 6 In developing this discussion I rely on Habermas’s formulation of these problems in his latest book Between Facts and Norms. This differs from Habermas’s earlier formulation of the problem where he distinguishes the Universalisation principle, that a norm is valid when all effected can accept the consequences, and that its general consequences can be said to be in everyone’s interests, from the Discourse principle, which requires that all people treat each other as free and equal participants in processes of rational argument. In Between Facts and Norms these principles are certainly not dropped, but are modified in important respects, as the following discussion argues. 7 In this respect he is particularly critical of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. 8 Here his concern is to develop a critique of Luhmann’s version of system’s theory. 9 Although the distinction between public sphere and civil society is crucial to the development of this analysis, I will not here enter into a delineation of the two. Suffice to note that an active civil society consists in those elements of the public sphere which have organised in such a way that communicative disturbances are amplified into public issues, in a self-conscious manner. 10 In South Africa during the 1980s for example civil society acted as a bulwark of resistance to apartheid. Without either a democratic polis, or channels of communication to political power various movements within civil society engaged in a politics of frontiers against the state. 11 I have purposefully used quasi-Kantian terminology here, following Rodolphe Gasché’s analysis of deconstruction. Gasché argues that Derrida’s conception of deconstruction points to infrastructures which are both conditions of possibility, and impossibility constitutive of any relation to the world (Gasché, R (1986) The Tain of the Mirror). 12 I will draw upon a variety of articles written by these authors since 1985. Although for purposes of this discussion I represent their views as broadly similar, a closer reading does reveal subtle differences. 13 In this respect I agree with Joseph Schwartz who rejects the argument put forward by Benjamin Barber, inter alia, that the rejection of a foundationalist epistemology is crucial to the defence of an open and democratic polity. Indeed as Schwartz notes both the rejection and insistence upon epistemologically grounded social theories have been used to justify any number of different forms of social bond. Epistemological belief entails very little, if anything about the normative structures of modern political life. 14 The plurality of spaces also puts into question one of the key themes of representative democracy, the idea of sovereignty as expressing the general will of the people. Rousseau struggles to establish the sanctity of the general will in the closing sections

184 Notes of The Social Contract. What should be clear from the above discussion is that the struggle is more interesting than the idea: the general will is always of necessity corrupted, it will never find a singular space from which it can be expressed; nor will that expression ever be at ease. 8 Post-structuralism and democratic theory 1 A version of this chapter was published in Finlayson and Valentine (eds) (2002) Politics and Post-Structuralism, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 176–93. 9 Ethics and politics in discourse theory 1 Obviously this is not so for all ‘modern’ theorists of politics. Machiavelli’s The Prince, for example, establishes the precedence of political rationality over moral qualms. Machiavelli’s view, even in The Prince though, is ambivalent. The book is written as a handbook advising on how to keep power; nonetheless he does suggest that the maintenance of political order has a moral significance irreducible to the means used to maintain authority. 2 Laclau and Mouffe (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. See in particular Chapter 3 of this text.

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Index

Adorno, T. 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 22–31, 32, 33, 40–4, 47, 60, 63, 68, 71, 82, 113, 158, 163–4 Agamben, G. 151, 155 Allison, H. 78, 91 Althusser, L. 20, 21, 112, 122, 178 Augustine 7, 164, 169, 171, 176 Austin, J. 3, 36, 49–59, 76, 111 autonomy 6, 23, 26, 41, 59–63, 79, 110, 116, 130, 131–7, 147, 150, 153–9, 160 Ayer, A.J. 50, 151, 152 Badiou, A. 8 Balibar, E. 21, 29, 100–4, 113, 114 Beardsworth, R. 68–70 Being 15, 27, 60 Benhabib, S. 46, 83, 86, 101, 118, 119, 129, 133 Benjamin, W. 33, 68 Bentham, J. 23 Benveniste, E. 51 Borch-Jacobsen, M. 102 Buck-Morss, S. 26 Butler, J. 3, 56, 98, 111–13, 122, 123, 155 Castells, M. 10, 20 Cavell, S. 49, 151 Chambers, S. 42, 83–4 communicative rationality 2–6, 31–49, 71, 95, 99, 103–6, 110, 117, 124, 126, 135–9, 146, 155–60 complexity 2, 18–20, 29, 119, 121, 132, 135, 137, 148, 164 Conolly, W. 23, 161 contingency 5, 19, 65, 66, 68, 83–90, 93, 95, 96, 113, 122, 123, 140–5, 158–66, 169–74, 177 Cooke, M. 137, 138, 155 Coole, D. 3, 125, 160, 178

Cornell, D. 67, 68, 70 Crick, B. 148, 149, 150, 151 critical theory 1, 2, 9, 11, 21–32, 44, 48, 49, 53, 70, 71, 86, 88, 117, 124, 176 cultural materialism 14 Dahl, R. 118 Daly, G. 16, 178 deconstruction 11, 50, 53, 59, 60, 61, 66–75, 82, 113, 159, 166 Deflem, M. 125 Deleuze, G. 78–80 deliberative democracy 2, 5, 6, 42, 118, 124–40, 144, 145, 154, 161 democracy 56, 60–70, 74, 117–46, 169, 174, 175; post-structuralism and 147–62 Derrida, J. 4, 10, 29; performativity and 51–73, 98, 99, 102, 113, 122, 160, 165, 166, 176 Descartes, R. 98–100, 103 Descombes, V. 97 determinism 11–18, 22, 29, 166, 178 Dews, P. 46, 47, 139 discourse 84–96, 101, 108, 109, 112, 125–40, 141, 144, 152–7, 160, 166–8 Eagleton, T. 10, 11 economy 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 69, 154, 156 emancipation 2, 22, 23, 87, 97, 98, 114, 166 empiricism 4, 159 enlightenment 1, 2, 9, 22–34, 40, 71, 75, 78, 97–106, 114, 143, 163, 165, 166 essentialism 2, 11, 13, 29, 114 Fishkin, S. 124 Foucault, M. 21, 23, 82, 99, 113, 114, 178

192 Index Frankfurt School 17, 23, 33 Freud, S. 43, 98, 102–10, 115, 175 Fukuyama, F. 8, 9 fundamentalism 1, 9 Geras, N. 62 globalisation 6, 10, 135, 136, 140, 154, 178 Habermas, J. 1–7, 9, 11, 22, 29, 30–48, 56–9, 75, 90, 91, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103–15, 117, 168, 172, 178; deliberative democracy 118–40, 144–8; discourse principle 126, 127, 128, 130, 137, 139; idealisation 60–73; moral principle 41, 126, 127, 128; performativity 49–55; post-structuralism 151–61; public sphere 49, 118, 121, 123, 126, 131, 132, 133, 134; quasi-transcendentalism 82–9 Hardt, M. 8, 178 Hegel, G.W. 2, 12, 15, 46, 81 hegemony 3, 5, 10, 14–17, 61–5, 74, 113, 118, 141–6, 150, 158, 160, 166, 170–4 Heidegger, M. 26, 27, 60, 98, 113 Held, D. 131, 157 Henry, M. 91, 103, 109 Hesse, M. 87, 88 Honneth, A. 97, 98 Horkheimer, M. 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 31, 32, 82, 163 Horowitz, A. 86, 87, 95 idealism 4, 9, 13, 26, 77 ideology 9, 25, 28, 32, 138, 139, 164, 178 instrumental rationality 2 Kant, I. 4, 5, 22, 100, 105, 109, 113, 136, 166, 167, 171; critique of 86–94; transcendentalism 75–83 Kohlberg, L. 107, 108 Kymlicka, W. 164, 168 Laclau, E. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 29, 35, 45, 48, 49, 57, 61–9, 75, 85, 112–13, 155–7; ethics 163–75; idealisation 61–9; Marxism 13–22; quasi-transcendentalism 88–98; radical democracy 140–8 Lefort, C. 141–4, 153–4 legitimacy 4, 6, 35, 74, 88, 118, 119, 126, 128, 130–6, 147–51, 154, 161, 177 liberal democracy 1, 8, 9, 10, 153, 170 Locke, J. 80, 98, 100, 102 Lukacs, G. 17, 24, 28

McCarthy, T. 33, 34, 37, 84, 85, 105, 110 Machiavelli, N. 150 Mandel, E. 12, 13 Manin, B. 124 Marx, K. 2, 8–24, 29, 31, 33, 34, 71, 73, 100, 121, 165, 166, 178 Marxism 2, 8–15, 19–22, 61, 71, 116, 157, 165, 166, 173, 175, 178 metaphysics 1, 15, 16, 55, 72, 81, 98, 100, 104, 110, 113, 163, 171 Mouffe, C. 3, 5, 13, 15, 16, 18, 22, 29, 61, 62, 65, 67, 128, 129, 174; radical democracy 140–4 negativity 1–3, 6, 7, 29, 47, 72, 141, 160, 166 Negri, A. 8, 178 Nietzsche, F. 97 Olin Wright, E. 19 Ollman, B. 121 ontogenesis 107 ontology 26, 28, 78, 91, 99, 109, 169, 170, 171 overdetermination 14, 22, 152 performativity 2, 3, 29, 31, 49–59, 61–70, 73, 75, 85, 98, 110, 112, 117–22, 126, 137, 138, 140, 143, 148 Plato 62, 119, 169 post-Marxism 1, 2, 5, 10, 13, 15, 22, 29, 60, 71 property 4–6, 19, 79, 100, 135, 136, 158 Przeworski, A. 144 quasi-transcendental 4, 5, 73, 75–96, 117, 120, 140 Rasmussen, D. 87, 88, 128, 131 rationalisation 5, 23, 24, 31, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 88, 95, 96, 109, 132, 138, 146 reification 11, 17, 24, 32, 33, 40–4, 105 representation 2, 5, 6, 31, 36, 48, 56, 69, 89, 101, 103, 109, 110, 151–60, 167, 168, 171, 176, 177 revolution 9, 24, 29, 50, 78, 133, 142, 143, 175 Rorty, R. 125 Rousseau, J.J. 121, 131, 156 Saward, M. 149, 150, 151 Schumpeter, J. 119 Schwartz, J. 121 Scruton, R. 79 Searle, J. 51, 52, 57

Index 193 signifier 7, 63, 89, 165, 168, 169, 171, 173 social contract 2, 50, 53, 58, 100, 102 sovereignty 4, 5, 6, 59, 72, 97–101, 117, 118, 126–37, 141, 147, 149, 150–4, 156 structuralism 1, 14, 70, 146, 147, 148, 149, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 178 subjectivity 18, 21–9, 40–8, 56–8, 77–81, 97–116, 120–3 Taylor, C. 159

universal pragmatics 34–8, 40–6, 57, 59, 62, 64, 75, 82–6, 108, 117 validity 2, 3, 4, 32–8, 40–2, 46–50, 53–5, 70, 72, 73, 81–8, 93–6, 108–10, 120–5, 151, 152, 159, 161; and meaning 54, 94, 111 Weber, M. 24, 119, 150 White, S. 99 Williams, R. 11–15, 18, 21, 178