![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
Starting from existing interpretations of Cavell's account of moral perfectionism, this article seeks to elaborate an account of democratic responsiveness that foregrounds notions of ‘turning’ and ‘manifesting for another’. In contrast to readings of Cavell that privilege reason-giving, the article draws on the writings of Cavell as well as on Foucault's work on parrēsia to elaborate a grammar of responsiveness that is attentive to a wider range of practices, forms of embodiment and modes of subjectivity. The article suggests that a focus on the notions of ‘turning’ and ‘manifesting for another’ is crucial if we are to account for the processes through which political imagination is opened up so as to bring about novel ways of being and acting. The arguments are illustrated with reference to recent events in the Arab Spring as well as to the politics of redress in a post-transitional social movement, Khulumani.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the anonymous referees as well as a number of colleagues and friends, for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I delivered a version of this piece at the Western Political Science Association Conference in San Antonio, Texas, where I benefitted from comments by the audience as well as my panel members, Davide Panagia, Thomas Dumm and Verity Smith. A further version was delivered at a Receptivity workshop organised by Nikolas Kompridis and held at the University of Western Sydney, where Nikolas Kompridis, Romand Coles and Sofia Näsström amongst others provided me with valuable feedback. Finally, I am indebted to Morton Schoolman who generously provided extensive written comments on this piece, not all of which I could respond to in this version.
Notes
1. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words. Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 330.
2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, in The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 142.
3. Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, 147.
4. For a discussion of this movement see, inter alia, Tshepo Madlingozi, ‘Good Victim; Bad Victim: Apartheid's Beneficiaries, Victims and the Struggle for Social Justice’, in Law, Memory and the Legacy of Apartheid, ed. W. Le Roux and K. Van Marle (Pretoria: Pretoria University Law Press, 2010), 107–26; Aletta J. Norval, ‘“No Reconciliation Without Redress”: Articulating Political Demands in Post-Transitional South Africa’, Critical Discourse Studies 6, no. 4 (2009): 311–21.
5. Madlingozi, ‘Good Victim; Bad Victim’, 107–26. This division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ victims echoes the distinction between good and bad cynics in Foucault. As McGushin puts it, ‘The good Cynics are those who are not too disturbing, not too critical, who, in fact, pretty much resemble everyone else. The bad Cynics, on the other hand, are too radical in their critique of cultural norms or principles of reason’. See, Edward F. McGushin, Foucault's Askēsis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 163.
6. There is now a significant number of works taking up the question of the visceral register in politics. See, inter alia, William E. Connolly, Neuropolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and Sharon Krause, ‘Bodies in Action: Corporeal Agency and Democratic Politics’. Political Theory 39 (2011): 299–324.
7. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. The Carus Lectures, 1988 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), xxxii.
8. Flathman reminds us of some important distinctions within perfectionist approaches as understood by Cavell. He calls Cavell's account a conception of moral and political perfectionism (MPP), (or Emersonian Perfectionism), which should be distinguished from other versions of perfectionism, ‘in particular those that claim to have identified the telos toward which all human thought and action should be directed’. Flathman calls the latter ‘perfectionist perfectionism’ (PP). See, Richard Flathman, ‘Perfectionism Without Perfection: Cavell, Montaigne, and the Conditions of Morals and Politics’, in The Claim to Community, ed. Andrew Norris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 99. Whenever I use the term ‘moral perfectionism’ in this paper, I mean it to indicate the non-teleological perfectionism of the Emersonian kind espoused by Cavell.
9. Matteo Falomi, ‘Perfectionism and Moral Reasoning’, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy II, no. 2 (2010): 93.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 94.
12. S. Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) quoted in Falomi (‘Perfectionism and Moral Reasoning’, 94), who points out the continuity of concerns between Cavell's early and later writings.
13. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, xxxi–xxxii.
14. McGushin, Foucault's Askēsis, xx.
15. Cavell, Cities of Words, 42.
16. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 62.
17. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 116–7.
18. Cavell, Cities of Words, 24 (emphasis added). In this sense, it differs from utilitarianism and Kantianism that propose means to calculate the good of an action and the rightness of an action, respectively.
19. Ibid., 25.
20. Ibid., 329.
21. Ibid., 25.
22. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 62. The similarity with Wittgenstein's discussion of the practice of ostensive definition here immediately springs to mind: like ostensive definition, the ability to manifest something for another depends on having an array of virtues, being bound by one's words in a certain manner and so forth. Without the presence of these practical elements, the speaker's words would not have the desired effects.
23. Cavell, Cities of Words, 27. Cavell suggests that perfectionism is distinctive in the absolute value it places on friendship.
24. Ibid., 32.
25. Ibid., 33.
26. White makes a similar argument relating to extraordinary experiences that allow us to break out of ordinary frames of reference. See, Stephen White, ‘Fullness and Dearth: Depth Experience and Democratic Life’, American Political Science Review 104, no. 4 (2010): 800–16.
27. Cavell, Cities of Words, 22.
28. Foucault's work displays an almost identical treatment of ‘turning’. McGushin (Foucault's Askēsis, xxi) argues that care of the self is an ‘activity of philosophical conversion’, a turn ‘not inward but rather a turn toward the world as that evolving web of relations, practices, and knowledges in and through which my self manifests itself’.
29. Cavell, Cities of Words, 23.
30. Ibid., 330 (emphasis added).
31. Ibid., 273.
32. Cavell, in one of his commentaries on Rawls’ claim that perfectionism is undemocratic, argues that ‘the particular disdain for official culture taken in Emerson and in Nietzsche (and surely in half the writers and artists of the last 150 years since ‘The American Scholar’, or say since romanticism) is itself an expression of democracy and commitment to it. Timocrats do not produce, oligarchs do not commission, dictators do not enforce art and culture that disgust them. Only within the possibility of democracy is one committed to living with, or against, such culture’ (Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 50).
33. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 56.
34. Cary Wolfe, ‘“The Eye is the First Circle”: Emerson's “Romanticism”, Cavell's Skepticism, Luhman's Modernity’, in The Other Emerson, ed. Branka Arsić and Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 280.
35. This is already evident in Emerson's writings. In a journal entry on ‘What is Democracy’, Emerson writes the following: ‘When I spoke or speak of the democratic element I do not mean that ill thing vain & loud which writes lying newspapers, spouts at caucuses, & sells its lies for gold, but that spirit of love for the General good whose name this assumes. There is nothing of the true democratic element in what is called Democracy; it must fall, being wholly commercial’. (quoted in Russel B. Goodman, ‘Moral Perfectionism and Democracy: Emerson, Nietzsche, Cavell’. ESQ 43, no. 1–4 (1997): 170.
36. Cavell argues that his work is not that far removed from the tradition of virtue ethics, with the important exception that non-teleological perfectionism prevents and avoids the specification of a list of virtues to be cultivated.
37. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983, trans. Graham Burchell and ed. Francois Gros (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 158.
38. Foucault, Government of Self and Others, 158.
39. As he puts it: ‘we can say again that parrēsia is very precisely a notion which serves as the hinge between politeia and dunasteia, between the problem of the law and the constitution on the one hand, and the problem of the political game on the other. The place of parrēsia is defined and guaranteed by the politeia; but parrēsia, the truth-telling of the man, is what ensures the appropriate game of politics. The importance of parrēsia, it seems to me, is found in this meeting point’ (Foucault, Government of Self and Others, 159).
40. David Owen, ‘Perfectionism, parrēsia, and the Care of the Self: Foucault and Cavell on Ethics and Politics’, in The Claim to Community, ed. Andrew Norris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 128–55.
41. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 9.
42. Ibid., 6–7.
43. Ibid., 53.
44. Ibid., 55.
45. Ibid., 32.
46. Ibid., xxxii.
47. Ibid., 72.
48. Ibid., xxxii.
49. Cavell, Cities of Words, 297.
50. Foucault, Government of Self and Others, 43.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 159.
53. Ibid., 59.
54. Ibid., 42.
55. Ibid., 43.
56. Ibid., 69.
57. Ibid., 68.
58. McGushin, Foucault's Askēsis, 10.
59. Foucault, Government of Self and Others, 153. Ion brings together a range of practices of truth-telling, including political, moral and judicial parrēsia. Neither its moral form (the confession of an offence that weighs on one's mind to someone who can guide as, as in Cruesa's confession to her father) nor its judicial form (the practice connected to an injustice, the cry of the powerless against one who misuses power) are called parrēsia in Ion but, as Foucault carefully notes, they will be called so later (Foucault, Government of Self and Others, 154).
60. Ibid., 133.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., 69.
64. Ibid., 69–70.
65. Hence, political parrēsia occurs in two major historical forms: ‘that of a discourse addressed to the Assembly, to all citizens by an individual concerned to make his conception of the general interest prevail (democratic parrēsia); [and] that of the philosopher's private discourse intended for the prince's soul in order to encourage him to follow the right path and to get him to her what flatterers conceal from him (autocratic parrēsia)’. [Frédéric Gros, ‘Course Context’, in Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983, trans. Graham Burchell and ed. Francois Gros (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 380].
66. Parrēsia is not, Foucault emphasises, to be confused with persuasion and the art of rhetoric. It could draw on rhetorical techniques, but it does not have to do so. Given that rhetoric aims at persuasion, it does not require truth-telling. Moreover, parrēsia does not aim at persuasion; it is more akin to a judgement (Foucault, Government of Self and Others, 54). And, while it has an agonistic structure—two characters confronting and struggling over the truth—it is not a form of debate. Its specificity is not to be found within the internal forms of discourse or discursive strategies.
67. Ibid., 105–6.
68. Gros, ‘Course Context’, 388.
69. Foucault, Government of Self and Others, 68.
70. Ibid., 56.
71. Ibid.
72. I understand ‘grammar’ here in a Wittgensteinian sense to mean the ‘network of discriminations that inform our capacity to word the world’, as Mulhall puts it (Stephen Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 176). Grammar thus delimits the possible.
73. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 99.
74. Ibid., 76.
75. Foucault, Government of Self and Others, 54 (emphasis added).
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., 104.
78. I would like to thank one of the anonymous readers for drawing my attention to Merleau-Ponty's work in this respect as well as Morton Schoolman who suggested that Whitman also provides an account of turning that focuses on ‘how another appears visually’ so that the body and its affects come into play.
79. Cavell, Cities of Words, 330.
80. Crossley, in his discussion of Merleau-Ponty and Foucault's respective positions, draws a distinction between the former's emphasis on the body as lived and the latter's as inscribed, while maintaining that these positions can be construed as complimentary. I agree with this reading. See, Nick Crossley, ‘Body-Subject/Body-Power: Agency, Inscription and Control in Foucault and Merleau-Ponty’. Body & Society 2, no. 2 (1996): 99–116.
81. This line of argument could then also be developed so as to open up onto a consideration of ‘emergent agentic capacities’ within and across lifeworlds, as Coole suggests. See, Diana Coole, Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 176.
82. Foucault, Government of Self and Others, 62.
83. Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 180 (emphasis added).
84. Foucault, Government of Self and Others, 65.
85. Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, 180 (emphasis added).
86. Foucault, Government of Self and Others, 66.
87. Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, 181 (emphasis added).
88. This also has further implications. It is not only that the response cannot be pre-determined but also that responsiveness—the responsibility to respond—is required no matter where the demand originates from and even regardless of the character of the demand. That is, an ethos of responsiveness requires a considered response, rather than a turning away (as Cavell argues Rawls does in cases where no institution can be shown to be responsible for an injustice) or a suppression of the demand/source of the demand. A similar point is developed by Kompridis in his discussion of receptivity as ‘a reflective state of judgment’. [Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 207.] I discuss the relation between responsiveness, judgement and exemplarity further in, Aletta J. Norval, ‘A Democratic Politics of Acknowledgement: Political Judgment, Imagination and Exemplarity’, Diacritics 38, no. 4 (2010): 59–76.
89. For Foucault as for Cavell, virtue is an important dimension of the practice of manifesting for another. Foucault emphasises courage in the case of parrēsia; Cavell suggests that his could be aligned to a virtue ethics, so long as one did not work with a pre-specified set of virtues to be achieved. Kompridis also treats receptivity as a cognitive and affective capacity to be developed and intensified (Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 59.)
90. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 16.
91. Gros, ‘Course Context’, 382.
92. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 55.
93. This is not to say that Khulumani's activities do not also have radical implications. They do—witness the international court case seeking to establish corporate guilt for aiding and abetting the apartheid regime its abuse of human rights. I discuss this case and the manner in which the case it brought under the Aliens Tort Claims Act broadened out discussion of the unfinished business of the TRC elsewhere. See, Norval, ‘No Reconciliation Without Redress’, 311–21.
94. For a discussion of the importance of staging in politics, see, J. Rancière, Disagreement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For an important analysis of the role of images in such moments of appearance, see also David Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
95. I discuss the idea of redress at work here in Norval, ‘No Reconciliation Without Redress’, 311–21.
96. A similar process is underway today in Tibetian resistance politics.
97. I have developed this argument elsewhere in more detail, drawing on Rancière's work in particular. See, Aletta J. Norval, ‘Democracy, Pluralization and Voice’, Ethics and Global Politics 2, no. 4 (December 2009): 297–320.
98. Both cases are also generalisable, thus fulfilling one of the conditions Cavell sets for taking something as an example of an Emersonian perfectionism (Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, xviii–xix).
99. I discuss Wittgenstein's account of aspect dawning in relation to democratic identification and political change in Aletta J. Norval, Aversive Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 105–40.
100. This is what Owen calls the processual character of perfectionism. (See, David Owen, ‘Democracy, Perfectionism and “undetermined messianic hope”’, in The Legacy of Wittgenstein: Pragmatism and Deconstruction, ed. C. Mouffe and L. Nagl (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), 139–56. Cavell argues that his interest in ‘paying attention to the ways in which the initiating impulse to the further self may present itself in different temperaments of thought’ arises precisely from the kind of perfectionism he seeks to adumbrate, namely, one that does not envisage and even deplore ‘the prospect of arriving at a final state of perfection’. (Cities of Words, 315).
101. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, xix.