Political judgment with a difference: Agonistic democracy and the limits of "enlarged mentality"

Polity

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 1-24

  Feldman, Leonard C ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0033276033     PISSN: 00323497     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3235331     Document Type: Article

References (86)

1. These two impulses feed off each other - the frustrated quest for a general will, a singular rule applicable to all cases often leads to the defeated admission, "I guess it all depends where you're coming from." Such a statement may reflect not merely the appreciation of multiplicity and the impossibility of consensus, but also paralysis, and a withdrawal from engagement with the other.
2. Stephen White coins these terms in discussing the ethical-political promise of postmodern thought. White argues that a key characteristic of modernity is the emphasis on the responsibility to act. Postmodern theorists, inspired by Heidegger, develop an alternative sensibility - an attunement to dimensions of existence excluded in our drive to take charge of the world. See Stephen White, Political Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
3. My argument is heavily indebted to William Connolly's work on the politicized dynamics of identity/difference. My account of the destabilization of self-understandings that can occur through genuinely enlarged thought echoes Connolly's discussion of "critical responsiveness": As Connolly argues in The Ethos of Pluralization: "Hegemonic identities depend on existing definitions of difference to be. To alter your recognition of difference, therefore, is to revise your own terms of self-recognition as well. Critical responsiveness thus moves on two registers: to redefine its relation to others a constituency must also modify the shape of its own identity" (William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995], xvi). See also William Connolly, Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
4. My argument is heavily indebted to William Connolly's work on the politicized dynamics of identity/difference. My account of the destabilization of self-understandings that can occur through genuinely enlarged thought echoes Connolly's discussion of "critical responsiveness": As Connolly argues in The Ethos of Pluralization: "Hegemonic identities depend on existing definitions of difference to be. To alter your recognition of difference, therefore, is to revise your own terms of self-recognition as well. Critical responsiveness thus moves on two registers: to redefine its relation to others a constituency must also modify the shape of its own identity" (William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995], xvi). See also William Connolly, Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
5. Doubts that multiplicity can be overcome in judging well do not entail a claim of absolute difference and absolute incommensurabilities. Indeed, careful attention to dynamics of identity and difference reveals how subject positions constituted in mutual opposition share precisely the dynamic of their constitution. As David Harvey argues, "situatedness is not seen as separate and unrelated difference, but as a dialectical power relation between oppressor and oppressed. Both need the other and both internalize a relation to the other in their own identity" (David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference [Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996], 355, emphasis in original).
6. Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance," Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 222.
7. Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 98.
8. Arendt, "Crisis in Culture," 218, emphasis in original.
9. Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 61.
10. Arendt, Kant's Political Philosophy, 66.
11. Arendt, Kant's Political Philosophy, 68.
12. Arendt, Kant's Political Philosophy, 67.
13. Arendt, "Truth and Politics," Between Past and Future, 241.
14. Arendt, "Crisis in Culture," 221. However, Iris Young argues that imaginatively occupying the standpoint of the other should not be the basis of a communicative ethics in the context of social hierarchies, where the result is frequently the domineering projection of one perspective onto the assumed position of the other. She argues instead that "careful listening" is needed (Iris Young, Intersecting Voices [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997], 42). While I endorse Young's construction of an ethic of listening, the moment of understanding within the dialogic situation remains undertheorized in Young's argument, and Arendt's case for the centrality of the imagination remains compelling. Furthermore, as I argue in Part III, imaginative identification may not be something we can retain or relinquish at will: From a psychoanalytic standpoint, certain disavowed imaginative identifications have already been made.
15. Arendt, "Crisis in Culture," 221. However, Iris Young argues that imaginatively occupying the standpoint of the other should not be the basis of a communicative ethics in the context of social hierarchies, where the result is frequently the domineering projection of one perspective onto the assumed position of the other. She argues instead that "careful listening" is needed (Iris Young, Intersecting Voices [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997], 42). While I endorse Young's construction of an ethic of listening, the moment of understanding within the dialogic situation remains undertheorized in Young's argument, and Arendt's case for the centrality of the imagination remains compelling. Furthermore, as I argue in Part III, imaginative identification may not be something we can retain or relinquish at will: From a psychoanalytic standpoint, certain disavowed imaginative identifications have already been made.
16. Arendt, "Truth and Politics," 242.
17. Arendt, Kant's Political Philosophy, 72.
18. Arendt, Kant's Political Philosophy, 54.
19. Arendt, Kant's Political Philosophy, 55.
20. My reading of the role of "distance" in Arendt's account of political and aesthetic judgment follows Joel Weinsheimer's analysis in Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). As Weinsheimer argues, "detachment defines all sound judgment, according to Arendt, not only aesthetic judgment but political and historical judgment as well" (60).
21. Ronald Beiner, "Interpretive Essay: Hannah Arendt on Judging," in Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 145-52.
22. Another possible explanation emerges in Arendt's essay "The Crisis in Culture" (210). Here as well Arendt points to the virtue of a distanced relationship between the self and the political or aesthetic appearances under judgment. Arendt's main concern is with the consuming life processes that threaten to obliterate the space of both art and politics. Following Kant, Arendt equates self-forgetting (establishing a distance between oneself and one's interests and desires) with aesthetic distance (establishing distance between the self and the object of aesthetic experience and judgment). In the next section I argue that, on the contrary, self-forgetting requires diminishing the distance between self and art - only through direct involvement (being "drawn in") can one come to forget oneself.
23. As Richard Bernstein writes, "Like Gadamer, [Arendt] seeks to show the importance of taste as a communal civic sense, a sensus communis that is basic for aesthetics, understanding, and politics. . . . Judgment is communal and intersubjective; it always implicitly appeals to and requires testing against the opinions of other judging persons" (Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983], 219).
24. See Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 219.
25. See Beiner, Political Judgment (London: Methuen, 1983), chapter two, for a similar reading of Gadamer's exploration into the humanist tradition.
26. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1995), 38.
27. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 39.
28. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 36, emphasis in original.
29. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 35, 38.
30. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 41.
31. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 43.
32. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 105.
33. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 106.
34. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 128.
35. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 132.
36. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 128.
37. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 131.
38. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 130, 131.
39. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 133.
40. Charles Taylor, in his essay on multiculturalism also draws on Gadamer's hermeneutic philosophy to develop a political theory sensitive to issues of cultural difference and the encounter with an other. Taylor emphasizes Gadamer's metaphor of a "fusion of horizons" in suggesting that the exploration of different cultures can transform the standards we use to judge a culture's worth. However, Taylor's appropriation of Gadamer plays down the destabilizing effects of such an encounter, and provides a more reassuring description of transformation as cultivation and expansion. While not disagreeing with Taylor's reading, I am attempting to tease out of Gadamer's philosophy a less reassuring narrative of the encounter with an other. Doing so requires abandoning Gadamer's assumptions about the continuity of tradition and the singularity of the world - raising the possibility of incommensurabilities and differences that lurk within identity. I turn to Bourdieu, Kristeva, and Butler in Section II to explore such a narrative (Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994], 67).
41. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 128.
42. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 128.
43. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 133.
44. As Joel Weinsheimer develops the contrast between Kantian and Gadamerian aesthetics, "The pleasure that Kant posits as the criterion of aesthetic judgment is disinterested and detached from its object, so that the pleasure one experiences in art is that of someone who remains uninvolved and only watches.... For Gadamer... detached spectation fails to account for the impact of art at all" (Weinsheimer, Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory, 59, 62).
45. Bonnie Honig, "Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home," Social Research 61 (Fall, 1994): 563-98.
46. For a helpful discussion of the differences between Gadamer's notion of play and Derrida's, see Gary B. Madison, "Beyond Seriousness and Frivolity: A Gadamerian Response to Deconstruction," in Gadamer and Hermeneutics, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (New York: Routledge, 1991), 119-35.
47. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 32.
48. Dana Villa, "Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action," Political Theory 20 (May 1992): 274-308.
49. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 56.
50. Bourdieu, Distinction, 6.
51. Bourdieu, Distinction, 486.
52. Bourdieu, Distinction, 488.
53. Bourdieu, Distinction, 489.
54. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 5.
55. Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 55.
56. Oliver, Reading Kristeva, 56.
57. Bourdieu, Distinction, 489.
58. Bourdieu, Distinction, 489.
59. Arendt, Kant's Political Philosophy, 72.
60. Arendt, Kant's Political Philosophy, 71.
61. Arendt, Kant's Political Philosophy, 71.
62. I borrow this term from Marina Vitkin's analysis of Gadamer's "fusion of horizons." Its sense seems equally applicable to Arendt, though, in that it refers to a form of intersubjective understanding in which one seeks to rise above one's personal horizon to understand the other, but at the same time one never completely leaves one's horizon behind, though of course the outcome may be a radical transformation of one's self-understandings and horizon. See Marina Vitkin, "The Fusion of Horizons on Knowledge and Alterity," Philosophy and Social Criticism 21 (1995): 57-76.
63. Arendt, Kant's Political Philosophy, 73.
64. Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 194.
65. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 96.
66. Butler, Bodies, 112.
67. Butler, Bodies, 112.
68. The identity of the home-dwelling citizen may be similarly constituted through the abjection of the homeless. It is possible that the punitive judgments about homeless persons, deemed agents responsible for their own plight and therefore subject to a barrage of punitive sanctions such as those criminalizing sleeping in public, "aggressive" panhandling, and sitting on sidewalks, stem from such a recoiling from the abject by the bourgeois subject who moves between public and private, when encountering the street person who is confined to public space. For an analysis of publicity and abjection in the current wars against the homeless, see Samira Kawash, "The Homeless Body," Public Culture 10 (1998): 319-39.
69. Christine Di Stefano, "Autonomy in the Light of Difference," in Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory, ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Christine Di Stefano (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 109.
70. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8.
71. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8.
72. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 191.
73. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 191-92.
74. Beiner, Political Judgment, 34.
75. Arendt, "Crisis in Culture," 222.
76. This problem in Arendt's discussions of judgment was brought to my attention by Nancy Fraser.
77. Arendt, "Truth and Politics," 242, emphasis added.
78. Arendt, "Truth and Politics," 242.
79. Arendt, "Crisis in Culture," 222.
80. As Marina Vitkin argues, "Gadamer's reliance on the immutability..., the self-sameness of the object - and of the world - of which texts from different historical epochs and different traditions speak . . . underlie[s] his claim that inter-traditional understanding proceeds by fusion of horizons" (Marina Vitkin, "Fusion of Horizons," 62, 61).
81. Marina Vitkin, "Fusion of Horizons," 57.
82. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 447, 446.
83. Vitkin, "Fusion of Horizons," 70.
84. Discussing the moral dilemma faced by "George," Bernard Williams' example of a chemist who gains "integrity" by withdrawing from the military-industrial complex and affirming his pacifist principles at home, Honig argues, "George's integrity is both supportive of and supported by the institutions from which George would like to stay away. Indeed, if he is able to announce his integrity with the celebrated catchphrase 'Not through me,' it is because he is positioned to do so by a variety of forces - discourses, powers, privileges - at work through him and through those around him" (Honig, "Difference," 577).
85. Lawrence J. Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1995), 185.
86. I am drawing upon Leo Strauss's interpretation of Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political here. Strauss sees Schmitt's main concern in preserving the autonomy of the political as a concern for preserving the seriousness of existence in the face of forces of trivialization. Leo Strauss, "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political," in Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).