Fear, radical democracy, and ontological methadone

Polity

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 254-275

  Lavin, Chad ^a  

^a TULANE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Agency; Conspiracy theories; Fear; Fundamentalism; Liberalism; Radical democracy; William Connolly

Indexed keywords

EID: 33645650389     PISSN: 00323497     EISSN: 17441684     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300045     Document Type: Review

References (88)

1. Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, ed. Richard Flathman and David Johnston (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), ch. 12.
2. For a commanding argument that Hobbes's is a rhetorical and political (not merely explanatory) project, see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
3. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adomo, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming (New York, NY: Continuum, 1972).
4. Hence the "despair and triumph" that, for Hannah Arendt, characterize the scientific quest to perform like Archimedes here on Earth, in The Human Condition, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), Prologue and ch. VI.
5. This argument has found wide expression recently. For examples, see David Altheide, Creating Fear (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2002);
6. Barry Glassner, Culture of Fear (New York: Basic Books, 1999):
7. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998);
8. Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear (New York: Continuum, 1997);
9. and Brian Massumi, Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
10. On interpellation, see Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). Just as a police officer might interpellate us as subjects of Law by commanding our recognition of their authority the culture industry might interpellate us as subjects of fear by bringing us to accept its representations of the world as one of constant threat.
11. John R McCormick, "Fear, Technology, and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany" Political Theory 22 (November 1994), 619-52.
12. See William N. Elwood, Rhetoric in the War on Drugs (New York: Praeger, 1994);
13. Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1997).
14. See Richard Flathman, Thomas Hobbes (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993)
15. and Willful Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
16. Altheide, Creating Fear. 48.
17. Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 29 (emphasis in original).
18. Furedi, Culture of Fear, 52-53.
19. Furedi, Culture of Fear, 63.
20. Timothy Melley Empire of Conspiracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000)
21. and "Agency Panic and the Culture of Conspiracy" in Conspiracy Nation, ed. P Knight (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
22. Recent controversies over high school biology textbooks, pitched as a choice between mutational evolution or "intelligent design," might be seen in the same light.
23. Frederic Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 1988),
24. and Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 38.
25. Hofstadter argues that they are, in fact, ideal for this, as they leave no room for failures or ambiguities ("Paranoid Style," 36).
26. Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984)
27. and "The Liberalism of Fear" in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. N. Rosenblum (Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1989);
28. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston; Little, Brown, 1960), ch. 9.
29. Richard Rorty; Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
30. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 63.
31. For one particularly sophisticated study of the historical development and enduring inadequacies of this model of the subject, see Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)
32. and The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
33. Connolly Ethos of Plurolization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xii. See also Alisdair MacIntyre's claim that the moral vacuity of the Enlightenment demands either a postmodern or a premodem response, in "Nietzsche or Aristotle," m After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984);
34. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 146-50;
35. and Mark Warren, "What Should We Expect From More Democracy? Radically Democratic Responses to Politics," Political Theory 24 (May 1996): 261.
36. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, xviii;
37. Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 8.
38. See also Warren, "What Should We Expect From More Democracy?" 256.
39. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; 73-74, 82-88.
40. Connolly "Review Symposium on Richard Rorty" History of the Human Sciences 3 (1990): 104-08.
41. On the production and distribution of market ideology; see Thomas Franks genealogy of "market populism" (One Market Under God (New York: Random House, 2001))
42. and Sidney Blumenthal's study of the conservative cognoscenti, in The Rise of the Counter-Establishment (New York: Times Books, 1986).
43. For some indication of the resources invested in ideology production, see People for the American Way "Buying a Movement" (www.pfaw.org, n.d.)
44. and National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy "Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations" (www.ncrp.org, 1997).
45. I focus on these three thinkers because I think together they provide a representative picture of a general trend. For their most sustained critiques of liberal identity; see Judith Butlers Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990),
46. "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmodernism," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. J. Butler and J. W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992),
47. and Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993);
48. William Connolly's Identity\Difference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)
49. and Ethos of Pluralization; and Stephen White's Political Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
50. and Sustaining Affirmation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). This last book offers excellent treatments of both Butler and Connolly.
51. Chantal Mouffe, "Democratic Politics Today;' in Dimensions of Radical Democracy, ed. Mouffe (New York, NY: Verso, 1992).
52. Warren, "What Should We Expect From More Democracy?"
53. Wayne Gabardi, "Contemporary Models of Democracy Polity 33 (Summer 2001): 547-68.
54. See also Iris Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch. 1.
55. Gabardi, "Contemporary Models of Democracy," 552.
56. Complicating matters further, contrast Gabardi with Antonio Y Vázquez-Arroyo's recent critique of Connolly for being less interested in democratic contestation than constitutional stability, in "Agonized Liberalism: The Liberal Theory of William E. Connolly" Radical Philosophy 127 (September/October 2004): 9-20.
57. Appraising Connolly's radical credentials seems somewhat beside the point, and my argument would only be more valid for those who find him insufficiently radical. For Connolly's clearest statements of his position, see Identity/ Difference and The Ethos of Pluralization.
58. Alan Keenan "The Beautiful Enigma of Radical Democracy," Theory & Event 1.3 (1997).
59. Keenan's essay is a review of two recent books both entitled Radical Democracy: one by C. Douglas Lummis (Ithaca, NY; Cornell University Press, 1997) and one edited by David Trend (New York: Routledge, 1996).
60. This corresponds roughly to Connolly's explanation of his project as a critique of the restriction of the concerns of democracy to the visible operations of governance, the fetishization of limited government endemic to classical liberalism, and the ideal of consensus forwarded by communitarianism and marxism (Identity\Difference, x-xi).
61. Butler has responded at length to this often-heard misunderstanding, in The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997),
62. 6-18. See also Butler, "Contingent Foundations" and Connolly, Identity\Difference, 158-64.
63. See, for example, Connolly Ethos of Plurolization, 127.
64. For example, "The 'authoritarian personality' is thus not merely a personality type that threatens liberal tolerance. It is also an internal product of the individualist demand for a fixed and fundamental identity" (Connolly, Idenfity\Difference, 80; emphasis in original). Although again contrast with VázquezArroyo's less compromising claim that liberalism is not simply inadequate to democracy but is incompatible with it. In fact, Vazquez-Arroyo's critique of Connolly parallels Connolly's critique of Rorty: both sacrifice democratic contestation for stability. Again, what makes a democrat radical is not so much different ideas, but degree of commitment.
65. In addition to Rorty, see John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
66. Connolly. Why I Am Not a Secularist, 9.
67. White, "Weak Ontology and Liberal Political Reflection," Political Theory 25: (1997): 507;
68. Political Theory and Postmodernism, 128.
69. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 234.
70. White, Sustaining Affirmation, 10.
71. Connolly, "Review Symposium on Richard Rorty" 108.
72. Butler, "Contingent Foundations," 8.
73. White similarly invokes the importance of economic concerns in realizing his vision in the closing pages of Political Theory and Postmodernism. Butler rarely mentions it, even as she discusses the violent reactions that subversions often invite (Bodies that Matter, 133).
74. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, ch. 4.
75. Compare Connolly's 1976 book (co-authored with Michael Best) The Politicized Economy (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1976)
76. with his latest offering Neuropolitics (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
77. Connolly, Neuropolitics, 3;
78. compare with Warren, "What Should We Expect from More Democracy?," 261.
79. White, "Critical Responsiveness and Justice," Philosophy & Social Criticism 24 (January 1998): 73-81.
80. As a complement, see Gayatri Spivak's indictment of Foucault and Deleuze for forwarding a micropolitics of desire which ignores the realities of global imperialism, in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 1988). Spivak does not argue that these analyses are incompatible with an anti-imperialist politics, but only that they tend to be inattentive to their implication in it.
81. Connolly Ethos of Plurolization, 112.
82. Connolly does recognize the importance of these maps, and explicitly denies any culpability for their decline (Ethos of Pluralization, 113, 220n7). In his more recent work, he indicts Freud for contributing to this decline, though he again exonerates himself and his cohort by asserting that though they focus on "sore spots and points of comparative contestability" to reveal the truth of contingency they simultaneously "devise techniques and exercises to diminish existential resentment against the absence of such guarantees in the world" (Neuropolilics, 106). Unfortunately, Connolly gives neither example nor evidence of this compensatory strategy
83. See. for example. Why I Am Not a Secularist, 36, 146-47.
84. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay I, Section 13.
85. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: New American Library. 1958), 137.
86. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; 89. Given Rorty's rooting of liberalism in an aversion to cruelty, intrepid ironism seems quite illiberal.
87. Again, Connolly does recognize the impediments to this project and admits that it might be more appropriate to some populations than others (see Neuropolitics, 105). This realization, however, does not seem particularly well incorporated into his project as a whole.
88. At his least generous, Connolly declares that we are fortunate to have laws protecting us against the homicidal impulses of those " dogmatists" who worry that a politics such as his will not inspire ethical judgment, in "Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault," Political Theory 21 (1993): 388n35. Connolly makes various other statements like this one in that essay and elsewhere, but I am pretty sure this is the only time he actually calls critics potential murderers.