Thinking hegemony otherwise – an educational critique of Mouffe’s agonism

ABSTRACT

The question ‘What is to be done?’ underpins Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic theory of democratic politics. Yet, despite this affirmative tone that distinguishes her from other radical theorists, her theory neglects the cultural work required for hegemony-building. This omission has resulted in operational difficulties when agonistic democracy is put into practice. This article shows how academics inspired by Mouffe unintentionally depend on theoretical resources from competing democratic theories. As a result of this, agonistic practices risk to reinforce neo-liberal regimes instead of developing counter-hegemonic alternatives. To meet this challenge, and to expand the scope of Mouffe’s agonism, we draw on educational theory to provide a more developed theorization of the cultural work required for hegemony-building. We propose that only by embracing different conceptualisations of education, we can activate cultural interventions that facilitate counter-hegemonic ventures.

KEYWORDS:

• Democratic theory
• hegemony
• agonism
• Mouffe
• Biesta
• education

1. Introduction

From her first book ‘Gramsci and Marxist Theory’ (1979) until the latest ‘Towards a Green Democratic Revolution’ (2022), Chantal Mouffe has been one of the most influential political theorists in post-1989 Europe. Her analytical insights trace the recent rise of right-wing populism and democratic disaffection to the context of post-politics resulting from neo-liberal¹, rationalist and ‘consensual-orientated’ hegemonies. Her affirmative theory of agonistic democracy, emphasizing the unavoidability and desirability of political conflict, has been a source of inspiration for political and theoretical endeavours alike. Her work, sometimes with Laclau, has underpinned Left populist strategies such as Podemos in Spain, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the UK, and Bernie Sanders in the US. Her central appeal to democratic theorists to build a different (agonistic) articulation of the political space has influenced abundant and diverse theoretical and empirical inquiries.

The process of operationalizing Mouffe’s agonism, however, has proved to be challenging, to the extent that some commentators have questioned whether these difficulties result from inner tensions at the core of her theory (e.g. Asenbaum 2021; Athanasiou 2017; Mihai 2014; Roskamm 2015). Drawing on these concerns, this article claims that there is an intrinsic political-cultural gap between her critical analysis and affirmative theory. Mouffe relies on the Gramscian notion of hegemony to develop her political propositions, yet she underplays the ‘cultural’ work required in the construction of any common sense – also an agonistic one. As her theory lacks the necessary cultural resources, Mouffe-inspired academics have been too dependent on theoretical resources from competing democratic accounts. Consequently, agonistic attempts have unintentionally reproduced problem-solving, individualistic, and rationalistic framings at odds with Mouffe’s agonism.

This article aims to supplement Mouffe’s theory by providing an educational perspective on the cultural work required for agonistic politics. Despite her early acknowledgement that ‘[t]ime and time again Gramsci stresses the fact that every single hegemonic relation is necessarily pedagogic’ (1979, 193), education remains a neglected and under-theorised socio-cultural aspect within Mouffe’s agonism. By utilizing educational theory to interrogate the cultural work needed, we endeavour to address the political-cultural breach in Mouffe’s work and consequently facilitate new agonistic ventures.

Our contribution comprises six sections. Firstly, we discuss the core of Mouffe’s theory, particularly the way she conceptualizes ‘the political’ as the space of conflict and collective identities. Secondly, we outline the singularities of Mouffe’s agonism and her emphasis in building a new agonistic space. Thirdly, we consider the challenges encountered in attempted operationalisations of her theory. Fourthly, we introduce Gert Biesta’s educational philosophy to inform the cultural work of hegemonic constructions. Fifthly, Biesta’s educational theory enables us to interrogate the interface between dominant framings of democratic politics and neo-liberal regimes of learning. We argue that the counter-hegemonic attempts to concretize Mouffe’s agonistic theory are prone to reproduce neo-liberal regimes of learning. In section six, we outline an educational supplement to Mouffe’s theory. We argue that understanding education as ‘weak’, where the intentions of learning do not prescribe given outcomes, in contrast to outcome-oriented neo-liberal regimes of learning, is more compatible with agonistic endeavours and attempts to turn Mouffe’s agonistic theory into practice. More broadly, our contribution highlights the importance of addressing educational perspectives that are implicit in social theories. Without critical attention to the educational assumptions that underpin social theories, there is a risk that counter-hegemonic ambitions reproduce hegemonic regimes. In this sense, our theoretical complement to Mouffe’s agonistic theory can have a wider relevance outside the specific scope of Mouffeian agonism. By providing an educational perspective on the cultural dimension of hegemony, we hope our contribution will be relevant to other social and political theorisations.

2. Chantal Mouffe and the political

From Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, written with her late husband Ernesto Laclau in 1985, Chantal Mouffe has developed a democratic theory of agonism. The central aim of agonism as a democratic theory is to bring the conflictual tendency that is immanent in political life back into democratic theory and practice. Indeed, Mouffe’s development of agonism during the 1990s was built through dissatisfaction with aggregative and deliberative understandings of democracy that were respectively dominant in democratic politics and theory at the time. Aggregative models, aligned with neoliberal rationales, framed democracy as a marketplace of ideas, whereas deliberative proposals relied on liberal principles to resolve conflict through reason and morality. The risk that Mouffe (1999b, 2000) predicted was that the neo-liberal marriage, in what they claimed being broad consensual centric position, would deprive party politics of its necessary conflictual dimension. Without alternative visions of society, or competing hegemonic projects provided by political parties, there would be no meaningful conflicts between alternative visions of society, and thus no political work to be done.

This can sound promising, given the violent history of the European political landscape, but Mouffe thought the neo-liberal hegemony of political consensus risked the loss of any meaningful formation of collective political identities to which people could ascribe. The failure to articulate differences could inadvertently lead to an intensification of violent antagonistic conflicts, and the failure of democratic institutions to accommodate distinctive hegemonic projects could trigger political identifications with unforeseen collectivities and imaginaries. Mouffe feared such identities would lean towards moral, religious, or ethnic ideas about ‘who we essentially are’ rather than politically articulated identities around ‘what we want’. Boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ based on a perceived essentialism could erupt into antagonistic conflicts where the other would be seen as a natural enemy and not as a legitimate political adversary. Mouffe (2013) cited the disintegration of Yugoslavia as she explained, ‘I have often argued, when institutional channels do not exist for antagonism to be expressed in an agonistic way, they are likely to explode into violence’ (122). More recently, she (2018; 2022) has claimed that her predictions have been realized as many liberal democratic societies experience a growing context of polarization and democratic disaffection.

Mouffe draws upon the concept of ‘the political’ as developed by the far-right wing political/theological scholar Carl Schmitt. As Schmitt, Mouffe understands ‘the political’ is always concerned with collective forms of identification built through antagonistic relations, with the formation of a ‘we’ in opposition to a ‘they’. Whilst the antagonistic nature of politics cannot be eliminated, we can use ‘Schmitt against Schmitt’ (2005, 14) to reimagine a new form of agonistic democratic politics. The key, for Mouffe, is not to deny the antagonistic and affective nature of politics but to ‘envisage how the dimension of antagonism can be “tamed”' (2005, 20–21). In other words, ‘pure’ antagonistic conflict might lead to the same destruction of the political association, but these destructive tendencies might be controlled if there is a common symbolic space between the adversaries in which conflicts can be played out. For Mouffe, the common symbolic space for democratic politics is when there is an expectation that all parties pledge to the democratic values of liberty and equality. She defines this as ‘conflictual consensus’ (2013, 55–56) which is a precondition for agonistic, rather than antagonistic, conflicts. Democratic institutions face the double task of upholding the values of liberty and equality for all, whilst allowing for different interpretations of their meaning to be in conflict with each other.

Given this alternative route, Mouffe identifies two main theoretical problems with how neo-liberal scholars approach ‘the political’. Firstly, liberal theoretical perspectives are underpinned by an ontological and methodological individualism. They are unable to grasp the collective yet partisan nature of politics. Aggregative models frame democracy as politics where ideas are sold and bought, whilst deliberative proposals aim to regulate disagreements through reason and morality. This leads to political doctrines that are, economic or moral per se, yet apolitical. Secondly, with their emphasis on rational consensus – communicative rationality in Habermas and moral reasonableness in Rawls  – deliberative scholars are theoretically self-defeated and practically condemned to fail. In Mouffe’s view, Habermas seeks to create inclusive conditions of political participation by separating the process through which disagreement takes place (i.e. impartiality seeking for common good) from the object of disagreement. Yet, Mouffe argues, this deliberative analysis fails to recognize the impossibility of ‘rational consensus without exclusion’ (2000, p. 45), since ‘any form of social objectivity is ultimately political and [bears] the traces of the acts of exclusion that govern its constitution’ (2013, p. 4).

3. The singularities of Mouffe’s agonism

Mouffe’s critical interrogation of politics broadly aligns with other contemporary radical, post-Marxist and agonistic scholars (e.g. Jacques Rancière, Bonnie Honig). All agonistic theorists share a commitment to equality and plurality and an understanding that conflict is unavoidable and a precondition and a legitimate enactment of democratic politics (Mouffe 2013). Yet, Mouffe is distinguished in her emphatic and singular appropriation of the term ‘agonistics’ in expanding her negative ontology towards a more affirmative thinking of implications for democratic politics. Whilst ‘Associative agonists’ (Mouffe, cited in Glover 2012, 83) or ‘agonistics without antagonism’ (Mouffe 2013, 10) such as Hannah Arendt, Bonnie Honig and William Connolly, tend to ‘envisage the political as a space of freedom’ (Mouffe 2005, 9), Mouffe conceptualizes ‘the political’ as the ‘space of power, conflict and antagonism’ (2005, 9). Disagreement, for her, is an ontological consequence of the impossibility of the social, and a requirement for establishing the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

This leads to a second crucial difference between Mouffe and other agonistic scholars. According to Mouffe (2013), counter-hegemonic political actions demand two different types of struggles: (a) ‘disarticulation’ or ‘fight against closure’ (2013, 14) and (b) ‘articulation’ of a new counter-hegemonic project. The problem is that associative agonists only rely on disarticulation of hegemonies and never on re-articulation, which leaves the hegemonic space open for others to fill. Glover (2012) pinpoints Mouffe’s argument: ‘[t]he hegemonic space periodically disturbed by agonism’s valorisation of multiplicity and contestability must eventually be filled by something.’ (90, [italics in original]). We are left with the key questions of how the hegemonic space should be filled and with what, both issues evaded by associative agonists. In doing this, Mouffe argues, these theorists neglect both asking and answering the question: ‘what is to be done?’.

Mouffe’s answer lays in the construction of an agonistic project that challenges the neo-liberal hegemony.² But, to do so, difficult decisions need to be made regarding the setting of inclusions and exclusions and the forms of power required to build agonistic democracies. It is following this line of argument that Mouffe moves away from macro-political analysis to micro-cultural implementations. Because of ‘the belief in the existence of a necessary link between the two sides of the Enlightenment, the political and the epistemological’ (2022, 26–27), democratic theorists, Mouffe argues, have been asking the wrong questions and attempted to secure liberal democratic institutions on rational grounds. Instead, democracy requires an affective identification with its values. The ‘creation of democratic citizens’ relies on the ‘availability of democratic forms of individuality and subjectivity’ (2000, 95) through which different forms of democratic identification can take place. Two additional movements here separate Mouffe from other radical accounts. Firstly, Mouffe rejects the view that any counter-hegemonic attempt should take place outside existing institutions. For her, imminent tensions within institutional configurations are inevitable and can be exploited in re-articulating counter-hegemonic struggles. Secondly, Mouffe claims that working through micro-politics is not enough. There must always be a movement from the micro to the macro. The intellectual task according to Mouffe, is precisely the discursive articulation of these different agonistic (micro-cultural) practices to build a (macro-political) counter-hegemonic intervention. For that to be achieved, left politicians and academics must create different and multiple channels of agonistic disagreement where antagonistic passions can be tamed. In one of her most influential books on agonism, On the Political, Mouffe (2005) concludes ‘[i]t is not in our power to eliminate conflicts and escape our human condition, but it is in our power to create the practices, discourses and institutions that would allow those conflicts to take an agonistic form’ (130).

4. The ‘practical’ challenge of hegemony

Mouffe’s affirmative tone likely explains her wide influence across theoretically-informed social sciences, arts and humanities. Yet, increasingly, concerns have been raised about the applicability of Mouffe’s theory. At one end, some theorists have asked whether the availability of agonistic practices can indeed foster democratic identifications. In this line of thought, Mihaela Mihai (2014) has made an explicit case for ‘the educability of emotion’ (40) or the socialization of citizens’ passions through processes of reflective engagement. More subtly, Stavrakakis and Jager (2018) have called for democratic theorists and politicians to follow Mouffe and embrace the affective dimension of politics, whilst ‘educating’ its implications (563). At the other end, agonistic and non-agonistic scholars alike have questioned whether the enactment of agonistic theory unavoidably leads to aggregative/deliberative (neo-liberal) practices. Asenbaum (2021) has interrogated whether the movement from antagonism to agonism unavoidably leads to top-down perspectives attempting to secure the stablished order. Bäcklund and Mäntysalo (2010) have argued that ‘embedded in the institutionalized structures and normative prescriptions of good governance’ (348) underpinned by rationalist and aggregative assumptions, agonist approaches only represent a shift in theory. More broadly, there is also the possibility that Mouffe’s challenge mirrors a wider gap in poststructuralist thought. Van Dyk (2022) appears to summarize Mouffe’s challenge when she recently wrote about how the ‘self-evident tendency to combine (de)constructivist perspectives with progressive movements and attitudes’ has led a lacuna in ‘the theoretical toolkit and the scholarly practice’ (42): ‘the analysis of concrete measures’ (48). Yet, Van Dyk continues, ‘Die-hard Habermasians and deconstructivists are likely to find themselves in surprisingly close proximity when considering these more concrete issues’ (48). Bringing these analytical insights together, we can question whether these practical challenges are a consequence of Mouffe’s lack of interest in micro-cultural issues or whether they evidence deeper intrinsic tensions at the core of her theory (e.g. Athanasiou 2017; Glover 2012; Roskamm 2015).

Our underlying analysis in this article is that these challenges and explanations are connected: there is a macro–micro/political-cultural gap between Mouffe’s critical analysis and her affirmative theory, between her argument for the availability of agonistic practices and her counter-hegemonic strategy. Mouffe’s work, overall, is a theory of the (conflictive) political through which she provides a critical diagnostic of dominant neo-liberal democratic theories and its enactments. Yet, her appeal to articulate a ‘vibrant “agonistic” public sphere of contestation’ (2005, 3) ‘in an effort to install another form of hegemony’ (2013, 2) unavoidably leads to micro and cultural considerations. In Agonistics, she emphasizes the potential role of cultural and artistic practices in reproducing or disarticulating a given hegemony, but beyond this, many questions are unresolved. What type of practices are to be articulated? How are these practices to be articulated? How can these practices/and their chained articulation generate affective identifications with democratic politics? Mouffe’s strategy is secured at the ontological/foundational level but limited in offering guidance for the type of cultural work that is required from intellectuals (in Gramscian sense). She pays little attention to the theorization of cultural practices that need to be undertaken to build an agonistic alternative to hegemonic democratic politics. As we shall examine later, this leaves those willing to operationalize Mouffe’s theory dependent on theoretical resources from competing democratic projects, which ultimately result in the assimilation of agonistic practices into aggregative/ deliberative rationales and the self-defeating of agonistic endeavours. What is missing to operationalize Mouffe-inspired agonistic theory is, therefore, an analytical bridge.

It is here where we hope to supplement Mouffe’s theory and where our main contribution lies. As Gramsci highlighted, the type of cultural work needed for any hegemony-building requires educational consideration. Indeed, as mentioned, Stavrakakis and Jager (2018) describe the movement from antagonism to agonism as an ‘educational’ process, and Van Dyk (2022) positions education as one of the two concrete issues that need to be urgently pinned down by theorists. As previously discussed, the educational dimension is likely one of the most neglected aspects within Mouffe’s theory and, as we shall see, it poses a challenge to the same. Her engagement with Schmitt, who briefly refers to education as neutralization and depoliticalization of the political (2007, p. 69), suggests an implicit understanding that education falls within the terrain of morality, corrupting the political. Beyond these implicit discussions and some punctual mentions of critical pedagogy and the educational role of museums, Mouffe shows a lack of interest in educational issues. Yet, whilst educational theorists have increasingly considered the pedagogical implications of Mouffe’s theory³, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no attempt to seriously engage with educational theory to expand Mouffe’s agonistic theory. We are here not referring to the role of education institutions in re/producing discourses (for example, through Althusser’s notion of Ideological State Apparatuses), but more widely to the potential educational force of all cultural institutions and sites. As mentioned in the introduction, the aim of the article is to supplement Mouffe’s theory by providing an educational perspective on the cultural dimension of hegemony. In order to achieve this, and to ultimately bridge the gap between Mouffe’s macro and micro analysis of hegemonic constructions, we need to first engage with an educational theory suitable for such a task. For that we rely on the work of Gert Biesta.

5. Biesta’s educational theory

Education, for Gert Biesta, is primarily a deliberate and programmatic intervention in the public space, ‘which has to do not only with the impact and effectiveness of such interventions but also with their justification and meaning’ (2012a, 684). He sees the political as the terrain where human togetherness enables freedom to appear and education has a key role in this. Education is absolutely not to be understood as a passive socialization force, which is not to say it has not been that in many instances, or even that it has been the norm. This claim is not new in educational theory.⁴ However, Biesta, as one of the more prominent contemporary advocates of this positive direction, uses these theoretical lenses to examines current neo-liberal practices, thus more clearly aligning with Mouffe’s productive political aspirations.

Biesta is particularly wary of a process he names ‘learnification’, a process through which the question of purpose has disappeared from the educational agenda. As he explains,

“the word ‘learning’ is in itself neutral with regard to content, direction and purpose. To suggest that learning is good or desirable – and therefore as something that should go on throughout one’s life and that should be seen as a human right – does not really mean anything until it is specified what the content of the learning is and, more importantly, until it is specified what the purpose of the learning is” (2012b, 6)

The learnification of society, in Biesta’s account, has contributed to framing social and political problems into learning problems. To any social and political debate, the solution appears to ‘learn’ something, assuming that learning is unavoidably resolutive. Yet, as Biesta explains, in contrast with ‘education’, ‘learning’ is an ‘individualistic and individualising term’ (2012b, 6) which avoids consideration of institutional practices and concerns for the collective. In framing socio-political concerns as learning problems, a wider individualistic/individualizing, decontextualized and problem-solving discourse is reproduced. The learnification of education, Biesta argues, has also had devastating effects on the way we conceptualize education. Education is framed in merely instrumentalist/functionalist terms – where the purpose of education is fully designed from above and elsewhere (e.g. to fulfil the needs of the economy, of the society, etc.).

To counteract this instrumentalist tendency, he commits himself to the ‘task of outlining the parameters of what I think should frame discussions about the aims and ends of education’ (2009a, 39). He describes three overlapping educational functions: qualification, socialization, and subjectification. Put simply: qualification refers to the transmission of [or ‘making available’ (2020, 92)] knowledge, skills, and dispositions; socialization refers to the ‘insertion’ of learners within particular social, cultural, and political ‘orders’; and subjectification relates to gaining qualified freedom from such orders. Although he describes the socialization and the subjectification purposes as opposites, he also acknowledges that the three domains are intrinsically interconnected. Indeed, Biesta first represented the three domains in a Venn-diagram (2015) to later amend himself by instead arguing that a better representation would be three concentric centres, with the subjectification purpose at the core (2020).

Biesta explains that the subjectification domain is ‘difficult to grasp’ (2020, 93), as it is easy to confuse with questions of identity, personality, moral responsibility, or self-development, yet he uses the work of Arendt to unpack the complexity of this domain. He explains,

“Hannah Arendt’s reflections on action and freedom are actually quite helpful here, because she suggests a more precise definition of human action that amounts to a more precise understanding of human freedom. Arendt distinguishes between the human capacity to begin, to take initiative, and what it means for those initiatives to become real, to arrive in the world” (2020, 96).

We can see how this subjectification purpose does indeed relate to Arendt’s definition of the political (Biesta 2011). Or otherwise, education, in its subjectification mode (or weak education as Biesta calls it on occasions), considers how human togetherness might enable freedom to appear. Linking it explicitly to Mouffe, Biesta discusses how, through subjectification, citizens ‘should not be precluded from engagement in the many manifestations of what is meant to act and live with reference to the ideas of liberty and equality’ (2011, 65), knowing there is no guarantee about what can be learn from this engagement.

Obviously, Biesta is entirely aware of the ‘Rousseauian paradox according to which men should be obliged to be free’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1989/2001, 183). In his discussion on public pedagogy, Biesta considers how, in their attempt to facilitate political action, social theorists have repeatedly fallen into the learnification trap and ultimately end up in the paradox of bringing politics into a regime of learning. Regardless of their political orientation, such a regime ‘demands a particular relation of the self to the self, that is a relation of awareness, reflection and conclusion’ (2012a, 693), and, in a context of learnification, easily falls into instrumentalist logics, disavowing collective concerns and the subjectification domain. This is also the case, Biesta (2012a) argues, of critical pedagogy accounts (e.g. Giroux 2004) that, despite their much better connection to plurality, they come ‘with a particular conception of political agency in which (political) action follows from (…) the right, correct or true [political] understanding’ (692).

Biesta cautiously provides detailed account of what educators can do to maintain subjectification at the core of their practice. Indeed, to an extent, there is ‘nothing to do, as the singularity of the subject cannot be “forced” or “produced.”’ (2009b, 361). However, in contrast with ‘strong’ forms of education that aim to secure the results or outcomes of educational encounters or in which ‘educators’ themselves enact their political freedoms – in Biesta’s sense of enabling freedom to appear –, Biesta defends a ‘weak’ programmatic approach which understands that what education can do is ‘at most is prepare the terrain for political action’ (2012a, 694). Educational interventions that position subjectification at the core seek to make the political possible for others, or at least, to not make it impossible. The question here is not how education can work for the political, but how education can work with the political in such a way that education generates a political appetite, without precluding ‘any encounters or experiences that have the potential for singularization’ (2009b, 361).

6. Hegemonic reproduction through neo-liberal regimes of learning

Through Biesta’s theory, we are now in a better position to return to the first part of our argument and to expand Mouffe’s analysis by examining some of the ways in which educational forces help to discursively reproduce neo-liberal hegemonies, even when Mouffe-inspired intellectuals attempt to culturally confront such hegemony.

In a recent contribution, Habermas explained that the establishment of a liberal democratic culture requires ‘customary patterns of political socialisation’ including ‘institutionalised patterns of political education’ and ‘an extensive network of historical memories and traditional beliefs, practices and value orientations’ (2022, 154). In his account, political disagreement was implicitly portrayed as one of these practices benefiting liberal socialization. We quote,

“To argue is to contradict. Only in virtue of the right, and even the encouragement, to say ‘no’ to each other can the epistemic potential of conflicting opinions unfold in discourse; for the latter is geared to the self-correction of participants who, without mutual criticism, could not learn from each other. The point of deliberative politics is, after all, that it enables us to improve our beliefs through political disputes and get closer to correct solutions to problems” (Habermas 2022, 152)

Habermas’ account here helps us to illustrate some of the ways in which educational concerns are directly interconnected with political practices and institutions. It is not only that education is often instrumentalised to bring about ‘good citizens’ (Biesta 2009a), but also political institutions and practices are seen to produce educational activity. Through participation in politics – from electoral participation to civil disagreement – citizens ‘learn from each other’. These political-educational entanglements are not exclusive to Habermas’ theory. They follow a long tradition in democratic theory (from JS Mill to Gramsci, from Dewey to Barber) that has emphasized both, the critical importance of educational institutions – like schools or museums – and the pedagogical potential of political participation in a democratic culture. In other words, education and politics are mutually instrumentalised: (socializing) education is needed for politics as much as politics are needed for (socializing) education. We can see here how not only educational institutions, but also political ones fulfil the socialization task to reproduce neo-liberal hegemony. As such, any cultural intervention even within explicit political institutions and practices requires consideration of how political and educational concerns operate interdiscursively.

Particularly relevant for us here, Habermas’ contribution also illustrates how the political and the educational jointly manifest in the way we understand political disagreement. As we have seen earlier, Mouffe’s theory is a theory of macro-politics, not of interpersonal disagreements. Yet, within her theory, disagreement plays an important role, it demonstrates plurality, and it potentially fosters political mobilization and the generation of collective identities. Disagreement is the ‘stuff’ of politics (2000, 114). But disagreement, as hegemonically presented by the neo-liberal tradition, is different to Mouffe’s understanding. It is a procedural, provisional, and pedagogical tool, through which we ‘learn from each other’. Indeed, we find this pedagogical dimension in the foundational accounts of liberal democracy, where disagreeing encounters were often seen as the most appropriate tool of political education. John Stuart Mill, for instance, explained how,

[Man] is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument; but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it. (Mill 1999, p. 41; cited in Dutilh Novaes 2021, 878).

What Mouffe fails to account for is that, in positioning disagreement as ‘learning’, the neo-liberal hegemony reproduces a problem-solving rationale with a strong epistemological orientation. Disagreements, widely understood as any form of agonistic encounter, are often presented as learning problems that ought to be resolved through knowledge. Learning is here an instrument for political consensus. But, simultaneously, political disputes are considered educational instruments. Indeed, Habermas and Mill’s accounts fall into what Dutilh Novaes (2021) describes as the epistemic telos of argumentative practices. We can track the origins of this dialectical form of knowledge-seeking in ancient societies, with Plato, for instance, famously using Socratic dialogue, a pedagogical (and elitist) form of interrogation to generate more accurate knowledge by leading others to find the falls in their arguments (see, e.g. Tannen 2002). The transmission of knowledge – the qualification domain of education to use Biesta’s term – is instrumentalised for political purposes as much as political practices are instrumentalised for qualification purposes.

In operationalizing Mouffe’s theory, agonistic scholars often work with cultural institutions that may pursue this double politico-educational role. They often ‘make use’ of disagreement practices that may also be discursively constructed as practices of learning. It is not only that institutional practices are underpinned by rationalist and aggregative assumptions (see Bäcklund and Mäntysalo 2010), but also that institutionalized disagreement is ‘learnified’ – i.e. instrumentalised to learn the correct solutions to our problems. As Mouffe’s account does not provide any alternative educational theorization, it is easy to see how when seeking to domesticate disagreement for agonistic purposes, agonistic scholars use the educational resources available to them. For instance, Mihai’s (2014) educational proposition to go beyond Mouffe’s availability of options leads to discussions around socialising passions by means of ‘individuals’ been ‘democratically encouraged to take responsibility for their emotions’ (42). Agonistic scholars inadvertently reproduce individualistic, rationalistic, and top-down discourses and theoretical presuppositions that are contrary to Mouffe’s ontological standpoint. Intentionally or not, they approach the relationship between politics and education instrumentally. Let us use an example to illustrate this point.

In the article ‘Unsettling Play: Perceptions of Agonistic Games’, De Angeli et al. (2021) examined the impact of two agonistic games, installed at an exhibition on War and Violence at the Ruhr Museum, on visitors’ views on unsettling historical events. In the context of a wider research project aimed at creating agonistic channels to tame antagonistic passions associated with recent European history, the authors designed the games based on three premises: the games should provide unsettling choices, they should encourage engagement with multiple perspectives for a given scenario, and this scenario should resonate either with the player or with the context where the game is placed. The games were placed in the exhibition and researchers later examined (through observations, interviews, and comments analysis) the perception of players and non-players of the games, and whether the games had fulfilled their purpose in unsettling memories and in generating critical reflection. The researchers found that visitors were troubled about the possibility of a game engaging with sensitive topics and were frustrated when the game did not result in a win or a defeat. For the researchers, this was not a limitation of agonistic games, but rather than games, overall, ‘are not yet widely accepted as a sufficiently nuanced tool for handling topics of intellectual and emotional weight’ (15:21). Researchers concluded that, in order to stimulate critical analysis to foster agonistic subjectivities, a debriefing session was essential, as only through debriefing, players were able to ‘reflect on their gaming experience and to turn it into learning’ (15:21). For De Angeli et al. (2021) this suggests that playing an agonistic game ‘is merely an experiential phase in a wider framework for critical reflection; a tool that can support an agonistic mode of remembering but cannot achieve it independently’ (15:21).

In our analysis, what this example illustrates is how in their attempt to build a counter-hegemonic agonistic project, agonistic scholars are easily drawn by educational rationales that help to perpetuate the status quo. De Angeli et al. (2021) were troubled that the experience of the agonistic games was not able to generate the desired ‘learning’. They expected that disagreeing views on historical events would lead to an agonistic mode of remembering, without considering that disagreement practices – particularly in the context of a pedagogical institution – were likely to trigger feelings that only one view could be morally or epistemically ‘right’. As in their perspective, the availability of agonistic practices within museums had not resulted in the desired agonistic subjectivities, they followed Mihai’s theoretical advice that ‘beyond the availability solutions’, agonists need to incorporate ‘an account of how individuals can be democratically encouraged to take responsibility for their emotions’ (2014, 42). Thus, researchers moved away from potentially experiential learning in agonistic games to critical (rationalist) reflection in debriefings. This movement is critically significant for us here. It signals the moment in which through the cultural navigation of the politico-educational interdiscursive space agonistic scholars ended up falling into a hegemonic learning regime, and ultimately requested the subject to submit to ‘the dominant order’ (Asenbaum 2021, 91). It explains (at least partially) why, when considering practical and concrete issues, Habermas and Mouffe-inspired scholars are in close proximity as Van Dyk (2022) rightly concluded.

The problem is that, by falling into this hegemonic regime of learning, agonistic scholars are condemned to defeat their own arguments. As Biesta explains, the seeking of a particular modality of learning, even that of critical reflection, ultimately demands a particular form of political subjectivity, which ends up being naturalized as in the case of neo-liberal accounts. By trying to establish ‘secure’ and ‘strong’ links between practices of disagreement and learning, agonistic scholars are at risk of instrumentalising the same practices of disagreement, filling the empty agonistic space of liberty and equality, with specific contents to be ‘learnt’. More widely, the difficulties of operating at the intersection between politics and education often draw agonistic operationalisations purely into the educational logic, turning ‘social and political problems into learning problems, so that, through this, they become the responsibility of individuals rather than that they are seen as the concern of the collective’ (Biesta 2012a, 693). Through this hegemonic cultural intervention, ‘the political’ becomes domesticated by learning and agonistic subjectivities become something to be individualistically and rationalistically learnt through critical reflection. This is all at odds with Mouffe’s critical account of political subjectivity, her understanding of the political in relation to collective forms of identification, and her approach to agonistic democracy where there will always be disagreement concerning the meaning of democratic values and ‘the way they should be implemented’ (Mouffe 2005, 31). In their attempt to build a counter-hegemony using the master (pedagogical) tools, agonistic scholars paradoxically found themselves at the core of Mouffe’s paradox. As Athena Athanasiou (2017) asks, is Mouffe agonism condemned to an ‘administrative logic akin to deliberative liberal configurations?’ (296)

7. The educational dilemma

If we take this analysis on board and consider that the political and the educational are interconnected in many of the discourses, institutions and practices that can be ‘agonised’, two possibilities open for those willing to operationalize Mouffe’s theory. A first possibility is that any attempt to operationalize Mouffe’s theory requires a disarticulation of the politico-educational entanglement in operation in cultural practices. Indeed, if we take Mouffe’s definition of the political as starting point – i.e. the political as the space of collective forms of identification, the realm of power and antagonism – and Biesta’s three domains of education, any educational practice aims at domesticating the political. Thus, if we adhere – in an orthodox manner  – to Mouffe’s explicit definition of the political and implicit account of education, we are left with no other choice other than to attempt to disrupt the interdiscursive space between education and politics. And here is where the educational dilemma of Mouffe’s theory lies. Whilst her critique could potentially lead to the disarticulation of the politico-educational links, her genuine ‘agonistic’ contribution is directed at agonistically ‘domesticating’ the political. Despite her disinterest in educational issues, Mouffe does acknowledge the strategic importance of ‘the production of subjectivity’ (2013, 88) and how agonistic democracy requires working with cultural institutions in the ‘making’ of democratic individuals (2000, 95). A theory of cultural hegemonisation within Mouffe’s agonism cannot fully disarticulate politics from education, because this articulation is needed in the production of any subjectivities, including counter-hegemonic ones. So the question then is, what type of educational intervention, if any, would facilitate the production of agonistic democratic subjects?

Whilst the educational dilemma cannot be fully resolved, Biesta’s educational theory can provide some helpful insights in operationalizing Mouffe’s agonism differently. It is a matter of debate of whether education can make space for the political. But, if we consider educational interventions in a more nuanced manner that potentially encompasses not only socialization and qualification, but also subjectification, we now can see the political-educational relationship in different terms to Schmitt’s approach. Schmitt thinks of education only in relation to despolitization or the domestication of antagonistic passions, but Biesta argues that education contains in itself the seed of this despolitisation but also the seed of further politicization. As he discusses, ‘[p]olitical knowledge and understanding (qualification) can be an important element for the development of political ways of being and doing (subjectification), just as a strong focus on socialisation into a particular citizenship order can actually lead to resistance which, in itself, can be taken as a sign of subjectification’ (2009a, 42). So the suggestion is to think education differently, not only in its content, but also in its form. As Gramsci explained, ‘to give it a new form which is specific to the given group’ (Gramsci, cited in Mouffe 1979, 191).

This theoretical movement allows us to reconsider cultural enactments in three different ways. Firstly, as Biesta indicates, at the intersection of the educational and the political, it is too easy to be drawn by the learnification society individualizing and rationalizing any cultural intervention. For that, it is helpful to remember that cultural interventions within Mouffe’s agonism need to keep the ‘political’ at the core of the programmatic agenda. The intellectual task – the ‘what can be done’ – is a collective endeavour. It is not through individual cultural interventions framed as learning experiences (rationalist or not) that the counter-hegemony is built. Rather, it is through the affective articulation of these interventions in such a way that it creates a new common sense. As such, the analytical question should move from deciding whether agonistic interventions are/are not successful, to thinking how we can assemble and affectively articulate these practices. This is where Mouffe’s agonism can rely on and expand from the work of other agonistic and radical scholars. Cultural interventions, in this respect, require a double movement of selection of practices which align with democratic values (in an agonistic sense) and the gradual articulation of these practices against hegemonic neo-liberal rationales. Cultural interventions are not to seek to domesticate disagreements, but to participate in them. Ultimately, despite his emphasis on pedagogy, Gramsci does not position intellectuals as pedagogues, but as political strategists who know how to deploy their pedagogical tools.

Secondly, thinking with Biesta, to keep the ‘educational’ ‘tamed’, cultural interventions within Mouffe’s agonism need to operate in ‘weak’ mode. This implies separating the process (i.e. what do we do) from the outcome (i.e. what do we expect/seek to happen) in both the selection and articulation of agonistic practices. Rather than aiming to create institutions, practices and discourses that foster the development of agonistic subjectivities, to the actual engagement with institutions, practices and discourses that do not preclude these subjectivities to emerge. Instead of attempting to produce identifications with particular conceptualisations of democratic values – equality and liberty – to work with practices that open these values to contestation. In the example of agonistic games, perhaps the question is not whether the agonistic games resulted in programmed agonistic subjectivities, but whether these games were less likely to hinder these subjectivities than other types of museum interventions. That is, it is not so much whether the agonistic games produced an agonistic mode of remembering but rather whether they prepared the terrain for such evocation. Thus, democratic theorists can ask, how can we articulate existing hegemonic disruptions ‘without knowing, without being able to know, and, in a sense, without even wanting to know what the impact of such experiences might be’ (Biesta, 2009b, p. 361)?

Thirdly, and more widely, if democratic theorists wish to remain within Mouffe’s agonism (and other counter-hegemonic) framework(s), there is a need to take the educational question seriously. If, as Van Dyk (2022) argues, different schools of democratic thought are prone to find themselves in close proximity when considering concrete education-related issues, it is not because all democratic theories lead to the same democratic education approaches (see, e.g. Sant 2019). Rather, because the educational question is often neglected. The educational domain is firmly embedded within existing cultural practices. Avoiding or discarding educational considerations for its ‘despoliticizing’ potential will not disarticulate the learnificated society, nor more widely, the neo-liberal hegemonic production. Instead, neglecting the analytical dimension of the educational domain of cultural practices is more likely to result in the further learnification of democracy, even by those who seek to build counter-hegemonic projects. Paradoxically, only by critically engaging with the educational question, theorists might be able to avoid been swallowed by educational powers, ultimately falling into neo-liberal regimes of learning.

8. Concluding remarks

Mouffe’s theory of agonism has had a major impact on revitalizing democratic theory and practice. Yet, our first concern in this article has been that Mouffe’s agonism will not be able to generate a counter-hegemonic democratic project without considering the necessary cultural work that goes along with it. This requires analytical consideration to critically interrogate available cultural institutions and practices, design agonistically appropriate cultural interventions, and ultimately bridge the macro/political  – micro/cultural gap in Mouffe’s theory.

Second, by engaging with the educational theory of Gert Biesta, we have contributed to interrogating how the political and educational dimension interdiscursively operate in cultural institutions and practices agonistic theorists often engage with. These politico-educational synergies tend to draw cultural interventions to hegemonic (top-down, individualizing and rationalizing) regimes of learning that ultimately challenge the agonistic project. Third, and following from here, our contribution has been that only by keeping ‘the political’ at the core and by switching ‘the educational’ from a strong to a weak mode, we might be able to design cultural interventions that operate within the framings of Mouffe’s agonism. The question for democratic theorists is then not so much how to create new institutions that produce agonistic subjectivities, but rather how to articulate existing democratic disruptions in such a way that they resonate with people's desires without precluding possibilities of alternative democratic engagements.

Our fourth and final contribution has been to highlight that Mouffe’s agonism and other counter-hegemonic projects should take the educational question seriously. To be clear, we are not arguing that political theory should become pedagogical. In our analysis, democratic theories are not theories of public pedagogy – where education and politics work in the ‘intersection’ (Biesta 2012a, 693) – and it would be self-defeating to say otherwise. Yet, democratic theories often rely upon some form of open (Habermas) or obscure (Mouffe) conceptualisations of education. What we hope to have more widely shown in this article, through Biesta’s theory, is that there are difficulties in separating educational considerations from political endeavours, and risks in letting educational aims prevail over political ones. Thinking education ‘educationally’ rather than ‘instrumentally’ might be a preferable strategy to support the development of future democratic social theory.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for the valuable and constructive comments offered by the reviewers as well as Professor Tony Brown (Manchester Metropolitan University). We also would like to thank participants in the ‘Symposium: “Productive tensions? Engaging with pluralism, politics and conflict in education”’ and the ‘Meaningful Disagreement seminar series’ for the discussions that facilitated the development of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edda Sant

Edda Sant is a Senior Lecturer in Education at The University of Manchester. She has extensively written in the fields of political, democratic, and citizenship education. Her more recent monograph ‘Political Education in Times of Populism’ was published by Springer in 2021.

Ásgeir Tryggvason

Ásgeir Tryggvason is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Örebro University and coordinator of the research group ESERGO. He is interested in the role of emotions/passions, identities and conflicts in teaching and other questions related to ‘the political’ in education. He has written about agonism in democratic education and environmental and sustainability education.

Notes

1 We use the term neo-liberal as an umbrella concept to encapsulate neoliberalism and classic liberalist theory.

2 In her writings, particularly in the later ones, Mouffe implicitly discusses two interconnected yet different counter-hegemonic projects: the project of agonistic democracy or the creation of a new democratic common sense and the left populist strategy within party politics. This article focuses on the former.

3 See, for instance, Ruitenberg (2009), Tryggvason (2017), Sant (2021), and Koutsouris et al. (2022).

4 For a revision of other perspectives see, for instance Howlett (2013).