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Abstract
This article explores different theoretical and political dimensions of voice in democratic theory. Drawing on recent developments in political theory, ranging form James Bohman's work on the movement from demos to demoi in transnational politics, to William Connolly's writings on pluralization, it develops a critical account of the emphasis within conventional pluralism on the representation of extant identities. Instead, it foregrounds the need to engage with emerging identities, demands, and claims that fall outside the parameters of dominant discursive orders. Building on the works of Rancière and Cavell, it highlights the importance of an analytical engagement with the emergence and articulation of new struggles and voices—the processes through which inchoate demands are given political expression—so as to counter the ongoing possibilities of domination, understood here as a ‘deprivation of voice.’ The article develops an account of the centrality of the category of responsiveness to such claims and demands for democratic theory, especially in relation to a range of democratic struggles in our contemporary world. In so doing, it contributes to a growing body of work that questions the taken for granted character and status of the institutional forms of liberal democaracy.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions on this article.
Notes
1. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics (London: Verso, 1995), 51.
2. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), xxxviii.
3. M. Schoolman and D. Campbell, ‘Introduction: Pluralism “old” and “new”’, in The New Pluralism. William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition, ed. D. Campbell and M. Schoolman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 1.
4. There is a considerable literature on the divergences, differences as well as convergences between these authors. See, for instance, D. Howarth, ‘Ethos, agonism and populism: William Connolly and the case for radical democracy’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 10, no. 2 (2008): 171–93; A. Keenan, Democracy in Question. Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Aletta J. Norval, Aversive Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); M. Wenman, ‘Laclau or Mouffe: Splitting the difference’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 29 (2003): 581–606; S.K. White, ‘After critique: Affirming subjectivity in contemporary political theory’, European Journal of Political Theory 2, no. 2 (2003): 209–26.
5. Dumm develops this point with reference to Connolly's style of engagement with his interlocutors, noting for instance that in his dialogue with Augustine Connolly never denies and always appreciates ‘the power of the moraline force that both attracts Connolly to Augustine and forces a confrontation with him.’ This forms a key element of the ‘rhetoric of democratic negotiation’ Connolly proposes and enacts in his writings. See, T.L. Dumm, ‘Connolly's voice’ in The New Pluralism, 72.
6. Traditionally this is expressed in the familiar Habermasian injunction that there should be ‘no barriers excluding people or groups from debate,’ translated into the more practical suggestion that ‘as many voices as possible should be heard.’ One of the most recent candidates for regulating who ought to be included is the ‘all affected principle.’ See, R.E. Goodin, ‘Enfranchising all affected interests, and its alternatives’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 35, no. 1 (2007): 49–51.
7. Connolly in M. Schoolman and D. Campbell, ‘An interview with William Connolly, December 2006’, in The New Pluralism. William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition, 307 (emphasis added).
8. See, Ernesto Laclau, ‘Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony’, in Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London: Routledge, 1997), 47–68; D. Castiglione and M.E. Warren, ‘Rethinking Democratic Representation: Eight Theorerical Issues’, mimeo, http://www.politics.ubc.ca/fileadmin/template/main/images/departments/poli_sci/Faculty/warren; (accessed: May 13 2009); M. Saward, ‘The representative claim’, Contemporary Political Theory 5, no. 3 (2006): 297–318; D. Runciman, ‘The paradox of political representation’, Journal of Political Philosophy 15, no. 1 (2007): 93–114.
9. Castiglione and Warren, ‘Rethinking Democratic Representation’.
10. Ibid. Much of this work has taken the form of a rereading of Hannah Pitkin's The Concept of Representation.
11. See, for instance, Saward's claim that Hannah Pitkin's analysis screens out the way in which the process of representation ‘constitute certain ideas or images of their constituents,’ reducing the important role of the representative as ‘maker’ of representations (Saward, ‘The representative claim’, 300). Ernesto Laclau also takes issue with Hannah Pitkin, arguing that her work sidesteps the issue of ‘what happens if we have weakly constituted identities whose constitution requires, precisely, representation in the first place?’ since she treats reasons (for accepting a leader) as existing independently of any identification and hence, outside of all representation (Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 160–1).
12. Runciman, ‘The paradox of political representation’, 93.
13. J. Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 8.
14. See in this regard the important piece by Ernesto Laclau (‘Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony’), published a good ten years before the recent resurgence in interest in questions of representation. Ernesto Laclau's analysis makes clear that the practice of democratic representation is structured around the impossibility of full or pure representation. He argues that ‘if the represented need the relation of representation, it is because their identities are incomplete and have to be supplemented by the representative. This means that the role of the representative cannot be neutral, and he [sic] will contribute something to the identities of those he represents. Ergo, the relation of representation will be, for essential logical reasons, constitutively impure’ (‘Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony’, 49).
15. Castiglione and Warren, ‘Rethinking Democratic Representation’.
16. Whilst this has long been a theme of post-structuralist political theory it is only in recent work on deliberative theory that the constituted character of ‘the people’ has been thematized. See, for instance, Dryzek and Niemeyer, who draw on Ankersmit to make this point (J.S. Dryzek and S. Niemeyer, ‘Discursive representation’, American Political Science Review 102, no. 4 (2008): 484.)
17. P. Pettit, ‘Three conceptions of democratic control’, Constellations 15, no. 1 (2008): 48.
18. See, Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason.
19. See, James Bohman, ‘From Demos to Demoi: Democracy across Borders’, Ratio Juris 18, no. 3 (2005): 293–314.
20. Ibid., 295.
21. Ibid., 296.
22. Ibid., 298.
23. Ibid., 300.
24. Ibid., 308.
25. Ibid., 305.
26. Similar arguments are developed by other theorists. See Ernesto Laclau, ‘The future of radical democracy’, in Radical Democracy. Politics Between Abundance and Lack, ed. L. Tonder and L. Thomassen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); A. Fung, ‘Recipes for Public Spheres: Eight Institutional Design Choices and their Consequences’, Journal of Political Philosophy 11 (2003): 338–67; G. Smith, ‘Studying Democratic Innovations: From Theory to Practice and Back Again’. Paper presented to the “Democracy and the Deliberative Society” Conference, University of York, UK. July 24–26, 2009.
27. Bohman suggests that David Held and John Dryzek's work are examples of these two perspectives.
28. James Bohman, ‘From Demos to Demoi’, 304.
29. Ibid., 305.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 305–6, emphasis added.
32. Bohman draws on the work of Charles Sabel and others, who have discussed interactions between publics and institutions that facilitate their influence over dispersed but empowered decision-making processes, such as the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in the European Union.
33. Bohman, ‘From Demos to Demoi’, 310.
34. Ibid., 311.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 312.
37. Ibid., 311, emphasis added.
38. Mladen Dollar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 105.
39. Dollar, A Voice and Nothing More, 105.
40. For Husserl, the voice of the self can be fully present to itself, without mediation, in solitary internal monologue.
41. Stanley Cavell notes that even though Derrida shares with Austin and Wittgenstein an opposition to the metaphysical voice, he nevertheless fails to grasp the full extent of Austin's opposition to positivism. Not only does Derrida miss an important dimension of Austin's voice, but in contrast to Austin, he sees it as an important task to ‘monitor and to account for its [the metaphysical voice] encroachments while seeming … that he means to be speaking in it.’ (Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 62). In this sense, Cavell suggests that deconstruction repeats the denial of the human voice in philosophy in its flight from the ordinary.
42. The practice of articulation focuses attention on the processes through which identities, demands, and claims are expressed and put together into political programmes. It starts from the theoretical premise that there are no demands, interests, or identities that per definition or in essence belong together. Rather, much of the work of politics consists in rhetorically producing alliances, forging together demands and giving content and expression to interests. Significant work has been done in this respect to foreground the serious role of rhetoric in political analysis. See, for instance, Q. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); S. Toulmin, Return To Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); D. Panagia, ‘The Predicative Function in Ideology: On the Political Uses of Analogical Reasoning in Contemporary Political Thought’, Journal of Political Ideologies 6, no. 1 (2001): 128–55; B. Fontana, C.J. Nederman, G. Remer, eds., Talking Democracy. Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (Pennsylvania: University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).
43. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 23.
44. Ibid., 23.
45. Ibid., italics added.
46. Ibid., 23–4.
47. Ibid., 25.
48. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 49.
49. Rancière, Disagreement, 27.
50. See his account of participation, in Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 60–1.
51. Ibsen, A Doll's House.
52. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), xxxvii.
53. Cavell's treatment of this example takes place against the backdrop of an engagement with Rawl's account of justice. For a fuller discussion of this dimension of his argument, see S. Mulhall, ‘Promising, Consent, and Citizenship: Rawls and Stanley Cavell on morality and politics’, Political Theory 25 (1997): 171–92. For a further discussion of the question of exemplarity and its role in democratic politics, see Norval, Aversive Democracy, 168–83.
54. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 107.
55. Elsewhere I have developed this argument further in terms of outlining a democratic politics of responsiveness. (Cf. Aletta J. Norval, ‘A Democratic Politics of Acknowledgement: Political Judgment, Imagination and Exemplarity’ APSA Boston, August 2008.) Zerilli, drawing on Stanley Cavell and Arendt, makes a similar point in the context of her insightful discussion of political judgment, namely, that the practice of making claims is not exhausted by a classical account of knowledge. Rather, it ‘entangles us in questions of acknowledgement: I have to be willing to count that groan as an ideation that you are in pain or—as Jacques Rancière will show us—count your speech as political speech rather than just a subjective expression of discontent.’ L.M.G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 141.
56. I draw here upon my discussion of deconstruction and responsibility, which I take to resonate in important ways with Stanley Cavell's insights in this respect. Cf. Aletta J. Norval, ‘Hegemony after deconstruction: the consequences of undecidability’, Journal of Political Ideologies 9, no. 2 (2004): 139–57.
57. In this sense, Jacques Rancière's work echoes that of philosophers, such as Stanley Cavell, who seek a return to voice in the face of the repression of the human voice and the flight from the ordinary in philosophy.
58. Following Cavell, I understand the ordinary to be that which unsettles philosophy. For a detailed discussion of the status of the ordinary and its relation to criteria, see Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 64–100.
59. Cavell's reading of Nora's position in the Doll's House develops analogous themes. I discuss this further in Aversive Democracy, 180–83.
60. Bohman cites examples, but does not attempt to outline an analytic of the democratic politics of claim making.
61. This, of course, is reminiscent of Austin's emphasis on the fact that our word is our bond.
62. Rancière, Shores of Politics, 47.
63. Ibid., 48.
64. Ibid., 50. Rancière makes this point repeatedly: ‘Those who say on general grounds that the other cannot understand them, that there is no common language, lose any basis for rights of their own to be recognized. By contrast, those who act as though the other can always understand their arguments increase their own strength’. Ibid.
65. Rancière, Disagreement, 30.
66. It does, however, come at a price. For Rancière, not only do we have to be attentive to specific miscounts, but moments of politics proper are quite rare, reserved for what are conceived of as moments that are interruptive of a dominant logic. The historical examples to which Jacques Rancière returns repeatedly affirms the rarity of proper political moments. This view runs the risk of over-valorizing a ruptural conception of politics at the expense of contentious activities that do have the potential to question and to reconfigure the sensible but that do not have the character of large historical moments of reconfiguration.
67. For historical examples drawing, inter alia, on Jacques Rancière's work, see, A. Schaap, ‘The absurd proposition of aboriginal sovereignty,’ and Aletta J. Norval, ‘Passionate Subjectivity, Contestation and Acknowledgement: Rereading Austin and Stanley Cavell’, in Law and Agonistic Politics, ed. A. Schaap (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).
68. See, B. Honig, ‘The time of rights: emergent thoughts in an emergency setting’, in The New Pluralism, ed. D. Campbell and M. Schoolman, 85–120.
69. Deploying this distinction does not suggest that the works of all the thinkers under discussion could simply be fitted into this framework. It is clear that the importance of this distinction in Ernesto Laclau's work is not echoed in that of Connolly, who prefers an ontopolitical register, and Jacques Rancière who questions the usefulness of a turn to ontology. However, I do think that the distinction captures an important dimension that is at stake in all non-positivist forms of political theorising, though it receives a different inflection in different thinkers. In Stanley Cavell's writings it could be argued that similar work is done in his invocation of Emerson's distinction between the present state of the self/world and the future self/world; similarly, in Jacques Rancière, the distinction between politics and the police opens up a gap that also plays the role of keeping open the present for critique.
70. It should also be noted that despite other differences, thinkers as diverse as Austin, Cavell, Derrida and Laclau share the thought that ‘the thing itself always escapes,’ or that there is an excess of being over our categories (Cavell, The Pitch of Philosophy, 85).
71. I use this distinction, drawn from Heidegger, as it is deployed by Glynos and Howarth. They argue that an ontical inquiry ‘focuses on particular types of objects and entities that are located within a particular domain or “region” of phenomena, whereas an ontological inquiry concerns the categorical preconditions for such objects and their investigation.’ Take, for instance, a case of an investigation of a ‘national identity.’ If the researcher takes for granted the notion of national identity, the research is ontical in character. If, however, the research inquires into ‘the underlying presuppositions that determine what is to count as an identity or role, how these phenomena are to be studied, and that they exist at all, then the research incorporates an ontological dimension.’ J. Glynos and D. Howarth, Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory (London: Routledge, 2007), 108–9.
72. Zerilli also notes the importance of the world-disclosive character of political argumentation in her discussion of feminist politics. See, Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom.
73. I cannot explore these matters in depth here. There is, however, a plethora of recent works on political argumentation and rhetoric that addresses these and similar concerns. See, for instance, The Ends of Rhetoric, ed. J. Bender and D.E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Fontana, Nederman and Remer, Talking Democracy.
74. J. Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, volume II, Imperialism and Civic Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 55.
75. Chambers suggests that this is the deliberative view of ‘mass politics.’ See, S. Chambers, ‘Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Has Deliberative Democracy Abandoned Mass Politics?’ Political Theory 37, no. 3 (2009): 333.
76. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 73–77.
77. Ibid., 74.
78. The metaphor of transmission further relies on a questionable conception of communication and representation, that renders invisible the formation and transformation of subjectivities in the process of articulation of demands.
79. For Laclau, this takes place through the development of equivalential chains of argumentation and the formation of political frontiers. See, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), Chapter 3; Aletta J. Norval, ‘Frontiers in question’, Acta Philosophica 2 (1997): 51–76.
80. I emphasise ‘some’ here since this distinction can and does take many forms, ranging from a Lacanian-inspired conception of subjectivity to an Emersonian account of the self as divided between a present and future self. Which conception one takes up and develops clearly will have further consequences and lead in directions that may well be radically diverging.
81. Following Laclau, the subject is understood here as a ‘the distance between the undecidable structure and the decision.’ This opens up the space for a subject of the decision that is not collapsed into the subject positions occupied by the individual. See, Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990).
82. This is how James Bohman and other deliberativists treat it, as a gap between subject and author of the law that exists in fact, but not under ideal conditions.
83. There is also an extensive body of works that seek to analyze these processes in particular empirical contexts. See, for instance, S. Griggs and D. Howarth, ‘A transformative political campaign? The new rhetoric of protest against airport expansion in the UK’, Journal of Political Ideologies 9, no. 2 (2004): 167–87; and Aletta J. Norval, ‘“No Reconciliation without Redress”: Articulating political demands in post-transitional South Africa’, Critical Discourse Studies 6, no. 4 (2009): 311–322.
84. Dumm, ‘Connolly's voice,’ 72.
85. J. Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, volume I, Democracy and Civic Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 155–6; emphasis added.
86. There are, of course, a wide variety of candidates for a more radical form of democracy. The conception I advocate draws on and develops an agonistic vein of thinking in this tradition and seeks to develop an account of democracy that fleshes out Wittgensteinian insights. For one such an account of processual democracy see, D. Owen, ‘Democracy, perfectionism and “undetermined messianic hope”’, in The Legacy of Wittgenstein: Pragmatism and Deconstruction, ed. Chantal Mouffe and L. Nagel (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), 139–56; see also J. Norval, Aversive Democracy.
87. The incompleteness of democracy is not here understood in the Habermasian sense of the unfinished project of modernity. Rather, I draw on Derrida's account of democracy-to-come.
88. See, for instance, the discussion of subjectivity in S. Mahmood, Politics of Piety. Islamic Renewal and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
89. This argument was first developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their seminal text Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.