The force of political argument

Political Theory

Volumn 32, Issue 6, 2004, Pages 825-848

  Panagia, Davide ^a  

^a TRENT UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Aesthetics; Essay; Grotesque; Habermas; Hazlitt; Performative contradiction; Sincerity

Indexed keywords

EID: 10144249609     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591704265729     Document Type: Review

References (84)

1. David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste," in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1987), 244.
2. Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 112.
3. See Bill Reading, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), and Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Touchstone, 1988). Consider also this recent statement by Michael Sandel in a New York Times report on higher education in America: "If colleges and universities are to be something more than places that provide basic training for the world of work and consumption, they have to concern themselves with larger moral and civic purposes. . . . The purpose of higher education is not just to train students to enter the labor market, it is to shape citizens who can participate effectively in democratic life. That means that colleges and universities have to engage moral and civic questions as institutions, beyond the classroom." Karen W. Arenson "The Moral Compass on Campus," New York Times, June 10, 2001.
4. See Bill Reading, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), and Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Touchstone, 1988). Consider also this recent statement by Michael Sandel in a New York Times report on higher education in America: "If colleges and universities are to be something more than places that provide basic training for the world of work and consumption, they have to concern themselves with larger moral and civic purposes. . . . The purpose of higher education is not just to train students to enter the labor market, it is to shape citizens who can participate effectively in democratic life. That means that colleges and universities have to engage moral and civic questions as institutions, beyond the classroom." Karen W. Arenson "The Moral Compass on Campus," New York Times, June 10, 2001.
5. See Bill Reading, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), and Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Touchstone, 1988). Consider also this recent statement by Michael Sandel in a New York Times report on higher education in America: "If colleges and universities are to be something more than places that provide basic training for the world of work and consumption, they have to concern themselves with larger moral and civic purposes. . . . The purpose of higher education is not just to train students to enter the labor market, it is to shape citizens who can participate effectively in democratic life. That means that colleges and universities have to engage moral and civic questions as institutions, beyond the classroom." Karen W. Arenson "The Moral Compass on Campus," New York Times, June 10, 2001.
6. See Bill Reading, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), and Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Touchstone, 1988). Consider also this recent statement by Michael Sandel in a New York Times report on higher education in America: "If colleges and universities are to be something more than places that provide basic training for the world of work and consumption, they have to concern themselves with larger moral and civic purposes. . . . The purpose of higher education is not just to train students to enter the labor market, it is to shape citizens who can participate effectively in democratic life. That means that colleges and universities have to engage moral and civic questions as institutions, beyond the classroom." Karen W. Arenson "The Moral Compass on Campus," New York Times, June 10, 2001.
7. The problem has recently resurfaced in public debates regarding forms of political writing and argument. Consider, in this respect, Martha Nussbaum's admonitions against Judith Butler's style of essay writing: the "implied reader" of a Butler essay, Nussbaum asserts, "is expected not to care greatly about Butler's own final view on many matters. For a large proportion of the sentences in any book by Butler - especially sentences near the end of chapters - are questions. Sometimes the answer that the question expects is evident. But often things are much more indeterminate. . . . Mystification as well as hierarchy are the tools of her practice, a mystification that eludes criticism because it makes few definite claims. Martha Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody," New Republic, February 22, 1999, 38. Nussbaum holds that philosophical writing should always be didactic, beginning with questions and ending with answers. This limits the possibility of mistaken interpretations and, indeed, of mystification and hierarchy. What some collegiate writing handbooks refer to as a "classical style" should be the dominant form for the exposition of knowledge. Nussbaum also celebrates this vocational sentiment in the first sen-tence of her Love's Knowledge (London: Oxford University Press, 1990): "How should one write, what words should one select, what forms and structures and organizations, if one is pursuing understanding? (Which is to say, if one is, in that sense, a philosopher?)" Rather than ending with questions, Nussbaum begins with them, leading her reader to believe that she will provide answers. But in her litany, several questions remain unasked: What is "the sense" that characterizes the philosopher? Nussbaum criticizes Butler's philosophical sloppiness, which, when pushed to its polemical extreme, amounts to the charge of sophistry. But is Nussbaum's sense of philosophical writing the same as Butler's sense of political writing? Or even political philosophical writing? Simply put, what kind of writing is political writing? See also Michael Warner's excellent discussion of Nussbaum's review in his Publics and Counter-Publics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
8. The problem has recently resurfaced in public debates regarding forms of political writing and argument. Consider, in this respect, Martha Nussbaum's admonitions against Judith Butler's style of essay writing: the "implied reader" of a Butler essay, Nussbaum asserts, "is expected not to care greatly about Butler's own final view on many matters. For a large proportion of the sentences in any book by Butler - especially sentences near the end of chapters - are questions. Sometimes the answer that the question expects is evident. But often things are much more indeterminate. . . . Mystification as well as hierarchy are the tools of her practice, a mystification that eludes criticism because it makes few definite claims. Martha Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody," New Republic, February 22, 1999, 38. Nussbaum holds that philosophical writing should always be didactic, beginning with questions and ending with answers. This limits the possibility of mistaken interpretations and, indeed, of mystification and hierarchy. What some collegiate writing handbooks refer to as a "classical style" should be the dominant form for the exposition of knowledge. Nussbaum also celebrates this vocational sentiment in the first sen-tence of her Love's Knowledge (London: Oxford University Press, 1990): "How should one write, what words should one select, what forms and structures and organizations, if one is pursuing understanding? (Which is to say, if one is, in that sense, a philosopher?)" Rather than ending with questions, Nussbaum begins with them, leading her reader to believe that she will provide answers. But in her litany, several questions remain unasked: What is "the sense" that characterizes the philosopher? Nussbaum criticizes Butler's philosophical sloppiness, which, when pushed to its polemical extreme, amounts to the charge of sophistry. But is Nussbaum's sense of philosophical writing the same as Butler's sense of political writing? Or even political philosophical writing? Simply put, what kind of writing is political writing? See also Michael Warner's excellent discussion of Nussbaum's review in his Publics and Counter-Publics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
9. The problem has recently resurfaced in public debates regarding forms of political writing and argument. Consider, in this respect, Martha Nussbaum's admonitions against Judith Butler's style of essay writing: the "implied reader" of a Butler essay, Nussbaum asserts, "is expected not to care greatly about Butler's own final view on many matters. For a large proportion of the sentences in any book by Butler - especially sentences near the end of chapters - are questions. Sometimes the answer that the question expects is evident. But often things are much more indeterminate. . . . Mystification as well as hierarchy are the tools of her practice, a mystification that eludes criticism because it makes few definite claims. Martha Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody," New Republic, February 22, 1999, 38. Nussbaum holds that philosophical writing should always be didactic, beginning with questions and ending with answers. This limits the possibility of mistaken interpretations and, indeed, of mystification and hierarchy. What some collegiate writing handbooks refer to as a "classical style" should be the dominant form for the exposition of knowledge. Nussbaum also celebrates this vocational sentiment in the first sen-tence of her Love's Knowledge (London: Oxford University Press, 1990): "How should one write, what words should one select, what forms and structures and organizations, if one is pursuing understanding? (Which is to say, if one is, in that sense, a philosopher?)" Rather than ending with questions, Nussbaum begins with them, leading her reader to believe that she will provide answers. But in her litany, several questions remain unasked: What is "the sense" that characterizes the philosopher? Nussbaum criticizes Butler's philosophical sloppiness, which, when pushed to its polemical extreme, amounts to the charge of sophistry. But is Nussbaum's sense of philosophical writing the same as Butler's sense of political writing? Or even political philosophical writing? Simply put, what kind of writing is political writing? See also Michael Warner's excellent discussion of Nussbaum's review in his Publics and Counter-Publics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
10. Montaigne's essays are primarily reflective, representing his thoughts on a variety of topics including love, friendship, death, and commerce; that is, things that pertain to the relationship of one's self to one's life. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the essay shifts emphasis "developing into a tool that represents the previously unremarked spaces of civil society in their own terms." Scott Black, "Social and Literary Form in the Spectator'' Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 1 (1999): 25. What distinguishes the Enlightenment essay from its early-modern predecessor, then, is its distinctly modern commitment to representing a public by describing the activities occurring in salons, coffee houses, public squares, and the like.
11. See Locke's "Epistle to the Reader" in his An Essay Concerning Understanding (Kent, UK: Wordsworth Classics, 1998).
12. Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other (Boston: MIT Press, 1998), 37.
13. Seyla Benhabib explains how freedom is, in fact, the first principle of Habermas's communicative ethics: "Freedom means the suspension of all internal and external constraints of action and the right to follow the 'force' of the better argument only." Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 289.
14. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. "Grotesque."
15. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 32. See also Rosalie Colie's unparalleled discussion of the tradition of paradox in the Renaissance in her Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
16. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 32. See also Rosalie Colie's unparalleled discussion of the tradition of paradox in the Renaissance in her Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
17. Michel de Montaigne, "Of Friendship," in The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 135.
18. Ibid., 135.
19. Michael Camille, Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet Illuminator (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 15.
20. In Book VII of his Confessions (New York: Penguin Classics, 1989), Augustine discusses the spatial and temporal dimensions of god. "Whatever had no dimension in space," he concludes, "must be absolutely nothing at all. If it did not or could not have qualities at all, it must be absolutely nothing at all" (VII, 1); and further, "that if things are deprived of all good, they cease altogether to be; and this means that as long as they are, they are good. Therefore, whatever is, is good; and evil, the origin of which I was trying to find, is not a substance, because if it were a substance, it would be good" (VII, 12). For an extended discussion of the theological implications of nothingness and its associations with debates over the use of the cipher "zero" in the early-modern period, see Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing (London: Macmillan, 1987), and Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
21. In Book VII of his Confessions (New York: Penguin Classics, 1989), Augustine discusses the spatial and temporal dimensions of god. "Whatever had no dimension in space," he concludes, "must be absolutely nothing at all. If it did not or could not have qualities at all, it must be absolutely nothing at all" (VII, 1); and further, "that if things are deprived of all good, they cease altogether to be; and this means that as long as they are, they are good. Therefore, whatever is, is good; and evil, the origin of which I was trying to find, is not a substance, because if it were a substance, it would be good" (VII, 12). For an extended discussion of the theological implications of nothingness and its associations with debates over the use of the cipher "zero" in the early-modern period, see Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing (London: Macmillan, 1987), and Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
22. Montaigne, "Of Friendship," 135.
23. Theodore Adorno, "The Essay as Form," in Notes to Literature: Volume 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 16.
24. Ibid., 22.
25. Ibid., 4.
26. Ibid., 18.
27. Ibid., 23.
28. Black, "Social and Literary Form," 27.
29. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 135.
30. Ibid., 211.
31. I base this chart on Habermas's discussion in Moral Consciousness, 137.
32. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 136.
33. Ibid., 134.
34. See especially Iris Marion Young's essay in Seyla Benhabib, Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
35. See especially Iris Marion Young's essay in Seyla Benhabib, Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
36. David Hume makes a similar point in his analysis of the obligation of the promise. He explains how the nature of the promise is of the new, and how each promissory utterance creates a new obligation that supposes new sentiments to arise. Because of its inventive, artificial character, there can be no natural grounding for the moral obligation implied in the promise. Rather, the ground is to be found in an interest in society per se. All commerce, exchange, and social interaction is governed by this "certain form of words," and by using these "transubstantiating" incantations, individuals subject themselves "to the penalty of never being trusted again in case of failure." David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Section V (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1978). The invocation of trust as a binding force between individuals in civil society is key. Since Hume makes it impossible for us to ground moral obligation on anything "natural," the only real grounding for the obligations we impose on ourselves is our own free will and our own interest in being trusted by others. The promise, then, is an instance of pure artifice but it is precisely its artificial nature that guarantees the possibility of civil society. The faculty of the imagination thus allows us to represent to ourselves an image of what life would be like if we were to enter into a relation with an other. Because the interest in commerce is not based on friendship, the artifice of the promise is required in order to build trust.
37. I am indebted to a blind reviewer for Political Theory for this lucid and succinct formulation of the problem.
38. Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, 294-95.
39. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, 100-1.
40. See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
41. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Boston: MIT Press, 1996), 89. It is worth noting that reputation insists on both a moral and aesthetic evaluation of an other's character. A judgment of taste thus allows one to determine the value of an other's person, thereby determining further how they will be included in sociopolitical life.
42. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 41.
43. For a discussion of the "human situatedness of reason" and Habermas's debt to Hegel, see Seyla Benhabib, "In the Shadow of Aristotle and Hegel," in Situating the Self (New York: Routledge, 1992). Also see Alessandro Ferrara, "Democracy, Justice and Discourse," in Justice and Judgement (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1999).
44. For a discussion of the "human situatedness of reason" and Habermas's debt to Hegel, see Seyla Benhabib, "In the Shadow of Aristotle and Hegel," in Situating the Self (New York: Routledge, 1992). Also see Alessandro Ferrara, "Democracy, Justice and Discourse," in Justice and Judgement (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1999).
45. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 31.
46. Ibid., 42.
47. Habermas's main example is the debates and discussions that revolved around Samuel Richardson's "best seller" Pamela (1740). Richardson's psychological novel is organized around a series of letters where the main characters reveal themselves through letter writing. In the "literary form" of the letter, individuals discovered the means by which they could reveal the truth of themselves to others: "It is no accident," Habermas explains, "that the eighteenth century became the century of the letter: through letter writing the individual unfolded himself in his subjectivity." Habermas, Structural Transformation, 48.
48. Habermas's main example is the debates and discussions that revolved around Samuel Richardson's "best seller" Pamela (1740). Richardson's psychological novel is organized around a series of letters where the main characters reveal themselves through letter writing. In the "literary form" of the letter, individuals discovered the means by which they could reveal the truth of themselves to others: "It is no accident," Habermas explains, "that the eighteenth century became the century of the letter: through letter writing the individual unfolded himself in his subjectivity." Habermas, Structural Transformation, 48.
49. Habermas, Inclusion of the Other, 37.
50. Jürgen Habermas, "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," in Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 427.
51. See the distinction he makes in the "Preface" of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
52. Habermas, "Further Reflections," 426.
53. Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 7.
54. Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre, and English Romanticism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 173.
55. This is the thesis of Dart's reading of The Prelude, 178.
56. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin," in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), vol. 3, pt. I, 368.
57. Dart, Rousseau, 215.
58. In her "Taking Liberties in Foucault's Triangle," in Identities, Politics, and Rights (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 149-92, Kirstie McClure makes a similar point, describing Hazlitt's political subject as "prickly," resisting permanent allegiances or social stasis.
59. For an extended treatment of this theory of interpretation, see Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), as well as my review of his oeuvre, '"Words Cloth'd in Reason's Garb' : Stanley Fish's Aesthetics and Politics," Political Theory 31, no. 5 (2003): 720-33.
60. For an extended treatment of this theory of interpretation, see Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), as well as my review of his oeuvre, '"Words Cloth'd in Reason's Garb' : Stanley Fish's Aesthetics and Politics," Political Theory 31, no. 5 (2003): 720-33.
61. The contrasting view that democracy implies a theoretical commitment to mimesis (the idea that anything is, in principle, representable) versus democracy as a principle of unrepresentability is, perhaps, most famously illustrated in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Penguin Classics, 1986) where he invokes his aesthetics of the sublime to describe the "monstrous" and grotesque events of 1789: It looks to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than Europe. All circumstances taken together, the French revolution is the most astonishing that has hereto happened in the world. The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and apparently, by the most contemptible instruments. Every thing seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragicomic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; and alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror, (pp. 92-93) I discuss this important poetic debate in democratic theory in the third chapter of my Images of Political Thought: An Inquiry into the Poetics of Political Thinking (forthcoming).
62. The contrasting view that democracy implies a theoretical commitment to mimesis (the idea that anything is, in principle, representable) versus democracy as a principle of unrepresentability is, perhaps, most famously illustrated in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Penguin Classics, 1986) where he invokes his aesthetics of the sublime to describe the "monstrous" and grotesque events of 1789: It looks to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than Europe. All circumstances taken together, the French revolution is the most astonishing that has hereto happened in the world. The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and apparently, by the most contemptible instruments. Every thing seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragicomic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; and alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror, (pp. 92-93) I discuss this important poetic debate in democratic theory in the third chapter of my Images of Political Thought: An Inquiry into the Poetics of Political Thinking (forthcoming).
63. On Hazlitt's indebtedness to Montaigne, see David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 345-51.
64. William Hazlitt, "On Familiar Style," in Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners (1822), http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/TableTalk/FamiliarStyle.htm.
65. I b i d.
66. I b i d.
67. William Hazlitt, "Malthus," in William Hazlitt Selected Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 79; originally published as A Reply to the Essay on Population (1807).
68. William Hazlitt, "Malthus," in William Hazlitt Selected Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 79; originally published as A Reply to the Essay on Population (1807).
69. Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, 345.
70. Quoted in Dart, Rousseau, 232.
71. William Hazlitt, "On the Pleasure of Hating," in The Plain Speaker: The Key Essays (London: Blackwell, 1998), 102.
72. Ibid., 102.
73. Ibid., 103.
74. Ibid., 106.
75. Ibid., 106.
76. William Hazlitt, "On a Portrait of an English Lady, by Vandyke," in The Plain Speaker, 170.
77. "Never have two men judged alike of the same thing," Montaigne asserts, "and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men, but in the same man at different times." "Of Experience," in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, 337.
78. "For what is the People? Millions of men, like you, with thoughts stirring in their minds, with the blood circulating in their veins, with wants and appetites, and passions and anxious cares. . . ." From "What Is the People?" in William Hazlitt: Selected Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3.
79. William Hazlitt, "The Same Subject Continued," in The Plain Speaker, 30.
80. Ibid., 30.
81. Hazlitt, "What Is the People?" 3.
82. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. "Grotesque.
83. For more on democratic litigiousness, see Jacques Rancière's ninth thesis in "Ten Theses on Politics," theory&event, 5, no. 3 (2001), as well as Rancière/Panagia "Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière," Diacritics, 30, no. 2 (2000): 113-26.
84. For more on democratic litigiousness, see Jacques Rancière's ninth thesis in "Ten Theses on Politics," theory&event, 5, no. 3 (2001), as well as Rancière/Panagia "Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière," Diacritics, 30, no. 2 (2000): 113-26.