Democracy, pluralization, and voice

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.

• pluralism
• demoi
• Connolly
• Rancière
• responsiveness
• deprivation of voice
• domination
• Cavell
• democratic subjectivity
• demands
• claim-making

The democratic experience is … one of a particular aesthetic of politics. The democratic man is a being who speaks, which is also to say a poetic being.1

What if there is a cry of justice that expresses a sense not of having lost out in an unequal yet fair struggle, but of having from the start been left out.2

1 INTRODUCTION

The terrain of democratic theory can be conceived of as that domain in which the central questions at stake are those concerning ‘voice’: who can speak, when, in what capacity, for whom, with what legitimacy, in what tone? Questions of this sort can be proliferated endlessly, and it is the task of democratic theory to do so. In this article I explore the question of voice in democratic theory in the light of recent work on pluralism. I thus seek to offer an account of voice that is compatible with a conception of democracy that is open to radical pluralization. This will take us onto what has been called the terrain of ‘the new pluralism.’ The new pluralism, as I understand it here, incorporates the concerns of the old pluralism—conventional pluralist theory as it evolved in the British and North American contexts—but it seeks to extend pluralism beyond its traditional concerns to highlight ‘closures in political theory that exclude possibilities for thinking critically about existing constellations and the multiple ways in which they can be reconfigured.’3 This ‘new pluralism’ is associated, inter alia, with the work of a range of contemporary political theorists, including William Connolly, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and Jacques Rancière, on whose writings I will draw freely to develop my arguments.

Although there are many tensions between these thinkers,4 which are important and should not be ignored, I seek to draw together insights from these sometimes divergent thinkers thus enacting the ethos of generosity and engagement informing and sustaining this new pluralism.5 In this spirit I also endeavor to bring considerations highlighted by the ‘new pluralists’ into a conversation with contemporary deliberative political theorists, whose works are situated somewhat uneasily between the old and new pluralism. Throughout these engagements I will explore different dimensions of the politics of voice: not only what it means to have voice and to speak, but also what it means to be heard. Whilst questions of ‘voice’ have traditionally been concerned with a focus on the representation of many voices and hence with inclusion,6 I want to advance the argument that such concerns should be supplemented with an engagement with the possibility of a deprivation of voice. The former is the register in which much deliberative democratic theory operates and which sets the tone for its normative demand that is expressed in the ideal of full inclusion—the representation of all affected—whilst the latter concerns questions of exclusion and sets out normatively to re-focuses our attention on possibilities of domination. These nuances are important, not only theoretically, but also politically, since they focus our attention on different aspects of the question of voice. While an emphasis on inclusion tends to focus our attention on a politics of recognition of extant identities, and thus seeks to include as many voices as possible within a pluralist democratic space, an emphasis on domination as the deprivation of voice seeks to alert us to the ongoing possibilities of exclusion within existing democracies through a politics of pluralization and responsiveness to demands from those who do have not lost out in ‘an unequal yet fair struggle,’ but have a sense of ‘having from the start been left out.’

In this way, I explore different theoretical and political dimensions of an understanding of voice, moving from pluralism—the representation of given identities and interests—to pluralization, a term that indicates a concern with ‘emerging constituencies that press to allow a new identity, right, good, or faith to cross the threshold of legitimacy.’7 Such pluralization is indispensable in our contemporary world, both within existing Western democracies that find the normative and institutional frameworks in which their conceptions of democracy are rooted being questioned, and in the wider world where those struggling for a sense of control over their own lives find themselves in a context in which their very struggles cannot be heard and understood as democratic. In the latter case, there is need for a loosening of the institutional requirements for democracy that are being promoted today by forces from the USA and the EU, with their respective ‘democracy promotion programs,’ while in the former there is a need to interrogate the limits of how we conceive of political struggles. Both cases call for a critical attentiveness to the possibilities of ongoing domination that cannot be discerned simply from ‘within,’ from the perspective of those who already have and hold democratic rights. This article is thus concerned with the difficult process of the emergence and articulation of new struggles and voices, as well as with the requisite responsiveness to these claims, and the demands they place on the way in which we theorize and practice our democratic politics.

2 VOICE: THE POSSIBILITY OF IT REPRESENTATION

In democratic theory, voice is often treated under the category of representation. It is not accidental that there is such a resurgence of attention to the question of representation today.8 As many commentators have made abundantly clear, it is precisely in a context in which there is an abundance of new demands and a proliferation of new sites of contestation, as well as an increased awareness of diversity and plurality, that questions of representation are raised anew and that we need to think again about the criteria of representation that are deployed in the various sites of democratic representation.9 Drawing on a vast array of empirical studies and developments Castiglione and Warren for instance note the increasing demands for group recognition as well as demands related directly to people's needs, characteristics and identities, coupled with more informal structures and opportunities for democratic representation. Together they necessitate a rethinking of the problems and potentials of political representation under these emerging conditions. Indeed, Castiglione and Warren go so far as to suggest that what is at stake here is the theory of representation in democracies.10

Whilst much recent work in this area has taken the form of a rereading of Hannah Pitkin's seminal work on representation, several authors have also endeavored to highlight areas of analysis where Pitkin's work needs to be further deepened and supplemented. These areas are related to the symbolic work of representation,11 as well as the theoretical structure of the representative relation, arising from the paradox of representation. Runciman puts it thus:

At the heart of the idea of political representation lies an intractable puzzle, which … I will call the paradox of presence. This is not a formal or logical paradox, but a linguistic one, and has its roots in the etymology of the term: ‘re-presentation’ implies that something must be present in order to be ‘re-presented’ but also absent in order to be ‘re-presented’.12

Developing this paradox, a number of authors draw on Derrida's work on writing and communication to suggest further that the absence of the represented from the place of representation is not a mere empirical feature of the process of representation, but also harbors an ontological or structural impossibility. As Derrida puts it with respect to the structure of the written mark of communication:

To be what it is, all writing must … be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of the presence, it is a rupture in presence, the “death” … of the receiver inscribed in the structure of the mark. … What holds for the receiver holds also, for the same reasons, for the sender or producer.13

Post-structuralist inspired writings have tended to flesh out the paradox of representation through a deconstructive reading that highlights the impossibility of a full or pure representation, and its implications for the manner in which the relation of representation, as well as the identities of the represented and representative are theorized.14 Deliberative theorists have made a serious contribution in elaborating what these insights might imply for the practical organization of democratic representation and deliberation, and the manner in which we need to rethink the criteria for democratic representation outside of traditional sites of political representation. Both of these are important, indeed crucial, if one is to begin to address the complexities of the issues at stake here.

Seen from the perspective of my inquiry into the question of ‘voice,’ there are a number of important features of this renewed engagement with representation that I wish to reflect upon. Despite the sophistication of work in this area, the very question of the subject of representation is paradoxically both raised and effaced. This is visible in two key assumptions that have increasingly been put into question in contemporary democratic theory, namely, that of a coincidence between voice and subject (or between the author of the law and the citizen-subject), which goes along with the given character of the represented. With respect to the former, recent work on representation devotes considerable attention to the positions from which we speak, and hence the subject positions we occupy. Much theoretical and empirical work has investigated the impact of such enunciative positions upon democratic forms of representation, placing particular emphasis on the fact that each one of us occupies multiple subject positions simultaneously, and that at any one time, in seeking representation, we may emphasize one such position over another or over a set of others.15

There is also a further acknowledgment of the need to think about the ways in which practices of representation themselves constitute ‘the people.’16 Pettit, for instance, in a recent paper, notes that ‘there is no collective will-formation without collective will-construction.’17 Similarly, Laclau's recent work focuses almost entirely on the theoretical and conceptual issues raised by the construction of the category of ‘the people.’18 Nevertheless, in much work in this area, the question of subjectivity and its relation to representation is not fully developed. While recent work in this domain constitutes a significant advance over untenable assumptions of ‘essentialist’ identities, there is still a risk of not taking the constitutive non-completion of the subject and its consequences for democracy seriously enough. This is particularly evident in deliberative democratic theory, where the pluralization of the subject of democracy has not been accompanied by a simultaneous deepening of the conceptual apparatus of the constitution of subjectivity. This deepening is required if the full implications of a radical pluralization of democratic politics is to be taken on board.

The important work of James Bohman is instructive in this regard for he explicitly thematizes the move from demos to demoi in order to address what he rightly sees as one of the key problems of (international) politics, namely the vulnerability of persons to domination despite their status as citizens.19 I will return to this characterization of domination at a later point. But here I wish to consider in more detail why and how Bohman foregrounds the movement from demos to demoi. For Bohman, this move entails two important elements. The first is a recognition of the fact that the ‘very idea of a self-legislating demos, of citizens ruling and being ruled in return, requires a delimited political community of citizens, consisting of all those and only those who are full citizens and thus both authors and subjects of the law.’ Hence, the idea of the self-legislating demos also entails an ideal of a coincidence between subject and author of the law, which nevertheless ‘constitutes a fundamental gap in any real democracy.’20 To accommodate either the demands of political inclusion at the global level, or to be applicable to large scale, complex and pluralistic societies, Bohman suggests that both the assumption of a single demos, and with it that of a single deliberative forum must be abandoned.21

Historically this has taken the form of an institutional decentering along two dimensions. At a micro level there is a proliferation of decision-making sites and processes, while at the macro level there are ‘interlocking levels of governance’ that ‘do not resolve themselves into some higher order convergence.’ Hence, we have a movement from the demos as singular to demoi. The latter, for Bohman, is particularly, though not exclusively, associated with and appropriate to transnational polities.22 In order to develop his account of transnational politics, Bohman draws upon a federalist republican tradition of democratic thought where the polity is not understood ‘in terms of the self-governance of citizens as members of a single demos,’ but rather in terms of multiple and overlapping demoi, where there is no institutional requirement that all must participate in the same set of institutions.23 According to Bohman, this offers a less juridical and better way to think about democracy since it allows one to specify a ‘democratic minimum,’ which is sufficiently demanding but which is not overly prescriptive about the precise institutions and roles needed in a democracy.24 It thus facilitates a shift away from a set recipe of democratic institutions that need to be promoted in the international domain.25 This view has a clear advantage especially with respect to its emphasis on the need to avoid being overly prescriptive in terms of the precise institutional form democratic arrangements should take. In this respect, his work echoes that of others, and traverses the traditional divide between deliberative and agonistic models of democracy.26

Despite the pluralizing movement from demos to demoi, coupled with the emphasis on the opening up of the institutional terrain, questions remain about the limits of the underlying conception of pluralism that informs this movement. The risk here is that the unicity associated with the demos is carried over to each of the demoi. Hence, there may be a multiplication of demoi, but it may still be a pluralization of a very conventional kind. Much here depends on how exactly the question of voice is treated and in what relation it stands to democracy. In this respect it is notable that Bohman develops his account against both a top-down gradualism that he argues seeks ‘to democratize cosmopolitan law,’ and a ‘transformationalism’ that seeks to replace legislation with contestation as a mechanism for democratization under the circumstances of globalization.27 Particularly important for our purposes is that Bohman's ‘federalist’ republicanism shuns what he sees as a ‘bottom-up’ strategy that begins with ‘robust transnational civil society as the non-juridical basis for an alternative to the subordination of all to institutions of public law.’28 This approach, he suggests, is inadequate since it lacks ‘any account of success and of the ability of publics to entrench their claims institutionally’; it amounts to mere ‘piecemeal resistance’29 rather than (proper) democratization. Instead, he proposes a conception of democratization that focuses on ‘vigorous interactions between publics and institutions’ as an ‘ongoing source of democratic change and institutional innovation.’ Two sets of questions arise here: (1) how is this ‘vigorous interaction’ to be understood? How does it take place? And (2) how, and does it result in democratic change and institutional innovation? To put it differently, if the problem is one of potential domination, is the conception of pluralism underpinning Bohman's account of democratization as ‘the development of powers, statuses and freedoms’ strong enough to address potential sources of domination?

To address these questions we need to look more closely at how Bohman fleshes out his republicanism. We have already noted the requirement of democratization rather than piecemeal resistance, that is, the requirement that the distribution of powers of decision making could be transformed.30 This is what he calls ‘recursive democratization,’ which results from the interaction of publics and institutions. Bohman explains the process as follows:

When the institutional alternative implicitly addresses a different public than is currently constituted by evolving institutional practice and its consequences, the public may act indirectly and self-referentially by forming a new public with which the institutions must interact. Such interaction initiates a process of democratic renewal in which publics organize and are organized by new emerging institutions with an alternative set of political possibilities as a new political form. This is a difficult process.31

Bohman cites examples that may approximate this process.32 In addition, he suggests that the key issue here is ‘whether or not someone has the normative power to make a claim that others will genuinely deliberate about’33 and this comes down to whether someone has the ability to initiate deliberation, which is something reserved for the citizen and absent from the slave.34 This ‘capacity to begin,’ following Arendt, provides for Bohman the ‘basic measure for the statuses and persons required for democratization.’35 It entails both the capacity to amend the basic normative framework and the power to ‘set an item on an open agenda and thus to initiate joint, public deliberation.’36

Bohman is no doubt correct to assert that the capacity to begin is crucial: a necessary if not sufficient condition of having a democratic voice. However, the issue is more complicated than he suggests. At a crucial point in the argument he falls back onto the citizen/slave distinction as inaugurating that right: the citizen has it, the slave does not. As Bohman puts it, ‘whatever freedoms are granted the slave, she remains dominated and thus lacks any intrinsic normative authority even over herself; at best, she may only respond to the initiatives of others.’37 The solution follows quickly. It is to ‘affirm humanity in ourselves and to address the humanity in others,’ which is operationalized by the capacity to amend the normative framework of the polity and to initiate joint public discussion. This argument is, however, circular. It notes the problem of domination and then overcomes it by invoking the capacities of citizens in a democratic polity. In this way it precisely avoids the issue of domination in its most common form, namely, that of the deprivation of voice, which occurs both in non-democratic and in constitutionally democratic polities. I now turn to discuss the question of voice and its deprivation (rather than representation) before returning again to an account of democratic pluralization.

3 VOICE: FROM CONSTITUTIVE DIVISION TO DEPRIVATION

[I]n order to understand the political, we have to discern the mere voice on the one hand and speech, the intelligible voice, on the other. There is huge divide between phone and logos, and everything appears to follow from there.38

Mladen Dollar notes that ‘the very institution of the political depends upon a certain division of the voice, a division within the voice, its partition.’39 It is crucial to note this constitutive division of voice if we are to develop a sufficiently radical conception of democratic pluralization. There are many different routes one may follow from here. These include an exploration of a certain primacy of voice in the phenomenological tradition, so decisively problematized in Derrida's Speech and Phenomena, which is not without consequence for what one could conclude concerning the character of voice in democracy and in democratic theory. The argument I wish to develop here does not follow the Husserlian picture of the full and transparent presence of the self to the self in unmediated voice.40 Nor does it endorse the political variant of this argument that over-valorises the self-present voice found in non-representational accounts of democracy, by seeking to locate and ground democracy in the immediacy of the voice. Moreover, it seeks to question the denial of the human voice in philosophical discourse, which paradoxically also marks Derrida's engagement with Husserl and Austin even at the very moment in which he sets out to question the metaphysics of voice as self-presence.41 Rather, I would suggest that from its very beginnings in classical political theory ‘voice’ is divided. To put it differently, there is no pure, original moment or site in which the voice is present to itself; there is no immediacy which can be clearly heard without mediation and which we have somehow lost in contemporary societies.

But if voice is not unitary, neither is it only or simply a matter of a multiplicity of voices with which we have to contend. As I have suggested earlier with respect to the move from demos to demoi, it is not sufficient to move from the thesis of a unicity of voice, and with it the possibility of its full representation, to that of a multiplicity of voices and a multiplication of sites of representation. Whilst important, this move would nevertheless run the risk of simply multiplying the number of voices, each of which may still be conceived of in unitary terms. Rather, the thesis of voice as inherently divided, means not only that we need to take account of the multiplicity of voices that clamour for our attention, but also that we need to be aware of and think through the consequences of the division of voice, of every voice.

This requires an approach to the issue that does not simply assert a set of ontological possibilities as if political consequences could somehow be read off from those possibilities. Rather, careful attention must be given to the question of political articulation.42 The point here is the following: nothing automatically follows from a certain set of ontological presuppositions. They are important in so far as they alert us to and allow us to deepen our understanding of the possibilities of the deprivation of voice. This acknowledgment, however, does not lead in one or another political direction. Arguments could be made, politically, to close off this space of openness, or indeed to celebrate and extend it. Which of these possibilities is eventually taken up depends upon complex processes of political articulation, and the latter raises important analytical issues. To avoid an overly abstract discussion of the issue, let me turn to the writings of two theorists—Jacques Rancière and Stanley Cavell—each of whom in different ways demonstrates acutely what is at stake here.

The question of voice, and its division or partition is vividly presented in Rancière's reading of Pierre-Simon Ballanche's writings (dating from 1829) that recount the tale told by Livy of the secession of the Roman plebeians on the Aventine Hill. Livy's tale ‘links up the end of the war with the Volscians, the retreat of the plebs over the Aventine Hill, the ambassadorship of Menenius Agrippa, his famous fable, and the return of the plebs to order.’43 For Rancière, the significance of these events as retold by Ballanche lies in the fact of Livy's inability ‘to think of the event as anything other than a revolt, an uprising caused by poverty and anger and sparking a power play devoid of all meaning.’44 Livy is not able to supply the meaning of the conflict because he does not put it in the right context, namely, that of ‘a quarrel over the issue of speech itself.’ Rancière suggests that Ballanche, in his retelling of the tale and by focussing on the discussions of the senators and the speech acts of the plebs, effectively restages the conflict as one in which the ‘entire issue at stake involves finding out whether there exists a common stage where plebeians and patricians can debate anything.’45 This is the crucial question that is at stake in thinking about domination from the point of view of the possibility of having voice in a democracy: is there a stage upon which plebs and patricians could debate anything, and if so, how is this possible? How is the common stage, which cannot be assumed always already to be in place, to be instituted? Rancière's own account of politics focuses precisely on this possibility of the staging of demands, of the becoming visible of demands that have no business being heard or seen. It is through this lens that he rereads Ballanche's account as one in which the plebs move from a position of not being able to appear on the stage as speaking beings, to one in which they claim or verify the right to be counted as speaking beings. They move from a position in which what they could utter could only be understood or heard as ‘noise’ to one of ‘having speech.’ As Rancière puts it:

The position of the intransigent patricians is straightforward: there is no place for discussion with the plebs for the simple reason that plebs do not speak. They do not speak because they are beings without a name, deprived of logos – meaning, of symbolic enrolment in the city. … Whoever is nameless cannot speak. … Between the language of those who have a name and the lowing of nameless beings, no situation of linguistic exchange can possibly be set up, no rules, no code of discussion. … The order that structures patrician domination recognizes no logos capable of being articulated by beings deprived of logos, no speech capable of being proffered by nameless beings, beings of no ac/count.46

For the plebs to make the transition from nameless beings to those with speech, they have to verify their equality through staging a non-existent right. This they do, inter alia, through giving themselves names, through consulting oracles, through speech acts that link ‘the life of their bodies to words and word use.’47 I will return at a later point to this important question of the mechanisms that allow movement from noise to speech, from inaudiblity to audibility, for it has important implications for how we think of democracy and democratic activities, as well as the norms we postulate and how we postulate them.

For the moment, it is necessary to take note that this account of the division between plebs and patricians, between those with and without speech, is not something that Rancière thinks is a historical feature of our past that has been or could be overcome. Rather, it is constitutive of democratic political community:

Democracy is the community of sharing, in both senses of the term: a membership in a single world which can only be expressed in adversarial terms, and a coming together which can only occur in conflict. To postulate a world of shared meaning is always transgressive.48

Hence, for Rancière politics is a matter of

conflict over the existence of a common stage and over the existence and status of those present on it. It must first establish that the stage exist for the use of an interlocutor who can't see it and who can't see if for good reason because it doesn't exist. Parties do not exist prior to the conflict they name and in which they are counted as parties. … Politics exist because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account, setting up a community by the fact of placing in common a wrong that is nothing more than this confrontation.49

Much more needs to be said about this and in particular about Rancière's conception of democracy. It is clear, for instance, that Rancière has little patience with the ordinary business and concerns of democracy. Nor does he think it has anything to do with participation,50 or with an ethos or a way of life. Despite the apparent distance of his concerns from most of what falls under democratic theory today, I wish to insist on his relevance, for he is one of a very few theorists who persistently raises the question of the limits of political community, which is a matter of voice, of whose voice may be heard and of how the space of argumentation itself it delimited. It is these questions that fall out of the picture when we limit ourselves to the concerns of citizens of already extant democratic states, for these concerns negate the basic question of domination. Domination occurs both outside democratic states and inside well-established democratic polities, and is usefully thought here through the category of voice: there is domination where there is deprivation of voice.

A no less political example is discussed by Cavell, who provides us with a differently inflected discussion of what it means to suffer deprivation of voice. In his reading of Ibsen's A Doll's House, Cavell aims to capture the difficulty of expression of senses of injustice that do not fit the parameters of current moral and political discourse. In the play, Nora struggles to express her sense of injustice to Thorvald, her husband of eight years. When challenged by him as to why she borrowed money in secret and then skimped on household expenses to repay interest, she says: ‘it's hard to say; I really don't know—I'm so bewildered about it all. All I know is that I think quite differently from you about things.’51 And, ‘I know quite well that most people would agree with you, Thorvald, and that you have warrant for it in books; but I can't be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what's in books. I must think things out for myself and try to understand them.’ Thorvald, in turn, questions her having a moral sense, and accuses her of ‘talking like a child,’ like one who does not understand the world she lives in, so depriving her of a voice.

Through the example of Nora, Cavell captures the experience of a sense of injustice that is inexpressible in the terms of prevailing discourse but where, as he puts it, misery is clearly unmistakable. It is important to note that on Cavell's characterization, the deprivation of voice is not the work here of a scoundrel, but of moral consensus itself.52 And then the question arises: what does one make of such an experience in a context governed by a democratic grammar? Cavell argues that Nora here stands as an exemplar.53 She embodies a claim exceeding existing discourse, one that acts as a call to open ourselves up to other, foreign possibilities since there are no readily available responses to her. The given terms of discourse would simply require of her to submit herself to an intolerable denial of her voice. Hence, it is not satisfactory simply to repeat, ‘this is just the way we do things here.’

In questioning the adequacy of responses such as this, Cavell alerts us to the fact that Nora's claim, even if it fails to find expression in the dominant discourse, nevertheless has an impact upon it, provoking an engagement with her claims. If such a claim is denied, one will at the very least have to restate the terms and reasons for the denial of the claim. In this situation, Cavell argues, one will have become aware of the ‘painful distance’ from ‘perfect justice’ in the current order.54 The prevailing order cannot simply be affirmed: it will be marked by the engagement. Closure cannot be complete here. It is precisely here that Cavell's account moves us beyond a focus on the interruptive, to the consequences of such interruptions for thinking through the demands of democratic subjectivity, of which the need to acknowledge such senses of wrong, is a key moment.55 This responsiveness lies at the heart of the democratic relation: the demand and the ability to respond, the response-ability to respond to inchoate articulations of senses of wrong.56

As is clear from the foregoing discussion, a focus on domination as deprivation of voice highlights several aspects that are important to our concerns. As Bohman suggests, it is a matter of being attentive to the ‘normative power to make a claim.’ However, the different aspects of this normative power need to be addressed. It is not simply a matter of having the status of a citizen. Rather, we need analytically to focus on the practices of claiming such a status.57 Of critical importance in this regard is the staging of claims and demands, highlighted by Rancière. This directs our attention to the intricate political processes involved in the articulation of claims, which potentially take us beyond the terrain of a ‘piecemeal resistance’ to a more serious engagement with the ordinary.58 Both Rancière and Cavell also highlight the issue of the constitution of the identities of the addressee and the claimant in the process of the articulation of claims. The discussion of the staging of demands must also entail a critical engagement with the extant dominant order (the order of the police, for Rancière, and the voice of moral consensus for Cavell), which facilitates a focus upon other dimensions of the politics of democratic claim-making, such as the demand of responsiveness, so clearly expressed in Cavell's discussion of A Doll's House. Attention to all of these areas is crucial if a sufficiently strong account of pluralization that is capable of challenging domination—conceived here as the deprivation of voice—is to be developed. I now turn to a more in-depth discussion of these issues, first taking up the question of practices of political articulation, before returning to the implications for the way in which we think of democracy.

4 VOICE AND ITS VERIFICATION

It is important to note that Rancière does not simply state the limits to democratic community as an ontological presupposition. Rather, it is something that becomes visible through the verification of equality. Hence, thinking about the limits of democratic community and of questions of inclusion cannot proceed through a mere ‘logical’ deconstruction, nor is it a matter of thinking from the ‘inside’ of the demos, from the position of a part who has a part, about the need for inclusion. To put it differently, the limits of a democratic community only become visible from enunciative positions that fall outside it, from speech acts by the part of the community who has no part, who is of no account.59 If, however, such limits are only made visible from an outside, how does it occur? This takes us back to the question posed but not answered by Bohman, namely, that of the ‘vigorous interactions between publics and institutions’ as an ‘ongoing source of democratic change and institutional innovation.’ Bohman, we have seen, poses this question, but does not provide us with an account of the mechanisms of democratic change and institutional innovation.60 My reading thus far has suggested that Rancière's account of the movement from inaudibility to audibility of the slaves on the Aventine Hill may be of some help. It highlights an awareness of the closures that are present even on stages of argumentation that consider themselves governed by an ethos of inclusion. It is in this respect that the force of the new pluralism, as conceived by Connolly and others, is felt. What is at stake is precisely an ethos of attentiveness to the ways in which existing political constellations may need to be reconfigured. All too often, insights such as these are brushed aside as a mere concern with an ethos, with a sensibility that, apparently, does not have much to offer besides itself. However, if the narrative of the Aventine Hill is taken seriously, the potentially radical impact of an ethos of attentiveness to the possibility of a deprivation of voice comes into clearer focus. What is at stake here is an aspect change from one that views freedom as something granted, to that of freedom claimed by the part who has no part. Let us now turn to a further example, which highlights how this movement from invisibility to visibility, from mere noise to voice, takes place. And to avoid the charge that the example of the slaves on the Aventine Hill is too extreme, let us turn to a more commonly experienced occurrence.

As is the case in much contemporary democratic theory, Rancière turns to an example of the articulation of political demands in relation to extant law. More precisely, he explores the strike of the 1833 tailoring workers who went on strike because the master tailors refused to respond to their demands relating to pay, working hours, and conditions. This is familiar enough territory. This strike took place in the aftermath of the revolution of 1830 in France, where there was a proliferation of working-class publications, pamphlets and newspapers, all asking the same question: are the French people equals or are they not? The manner in which Rancière reads these events, however, departs in significant ways from standard treatment of claims to inclusion.

Rancière reads the proliferation of working-class publications that went hand in hand with strike activity as texts intervening in an argument in the form of a syllogism. The work of this syllogism is not that ‘it replaces strife by talk. Rather, it establishes a common space as a space of division.’ Rancière outlines one possibility of construing the syllogism in this case as follows:

Major premise: The Charter promulgated in 1830 says in its preamble that all French people are equal before the law.

Minor premise: M. Schwartz (head of the master tailor's association) refuses to listen to the workers’ case and their demands for improved pay. His refusal means that he is not treating the workers as equals.

Therefore he is contradicting the equality inscribed in the Charter.

In this instance, the major premise contains what the law has to say, whilst the minor premise denotes what is said or done elsewhere, in a manner that contradicts the fundamental legal affirmation of equality. Now, Rancière argues that there are different ways of conceiving of the contradiction between minor and major premise: the first takes the form of a ‘strategy of demystification’; whereas the second takes the form of a ‘strategy of verification.’

A strategy of demystification opposes words to deeds. It holds law to be illusory (mere words): the equality asserted in law, it suggests, is a mere façade to mask the reality of inequality. This, he proposes, ends up in a logic of damnation. The power struggle literally ends up in ‘damnation’: when dissatisfied with the employers of a town, workers ‘damned’ the town (they left with bag and baggage and sought to prevent others from replacing them). Moreover, this strategy starts from inequality and works on strategies to reduce inequalities. But it is a self-disarming strategy for it simply ends up creating hierarchies of inequality. It is a strategy which is a demand upon the other; which puts pressure on the other.

By contrast to this, a strategy of verification opposes word to word and deed to deed,61 suggesting that either major or minor premise must be upheld. If M. Schwartz is right to hold the position he holds; the Charter should be deleted; or, the Charter is correct and M. Schwartz must speak and act differently. The striking workers took what is treated as a ‘groundless claim’ and turned it into the grounds for a claim—a space of dispute:

A word has all the power originally given it. This power is in the first place the power to create a space where equality can state its own claim: equality exists somewhere; it is spoken of and written about. It must therefore be verifiable. Here is the basis for a practice that sets itself the task of verifying this equality.62

How can words be verified? On this account it occurs through actions, which here work as ‘logical proofs.’ The practice of striking seeks to transform the alignment of forces into a ‘logical confrontation’ that has to demonstrate equality. The strike of 1833 included demand for ‘relations of equality’ with masters: ‘there are masters, but masters are not the masters of their workers.’ Social relations are unequal; and a legal relation exists in the form of an inscription of equality in Declaration of Rights of Man and in the Preamble to the Charter; which must engender a new reality:

It is an equality enshrined as a potentiality in legal/political texts, then translated, displaced and maximized in everyday life. Nor is it the whole of equality: it is a way of living out the relation between equality and inequality, of living it and at the same time displacing it in a positive way. This is the definition of a struggle for equality which can never be merely a demand upon the other, nor a pressure put upon him, but always simultaneously a proof given to oneself.63

Proving to the other that there is only one world and that one can prove the legitimacy of one's actions within it, means first of all proving this to oneself.64

Hence this movement emerges from a minority status by proving that its members belongs to society; it proceeds not though a founding of a counter-power but by demonstrating a capacity which is also a demonstration of community. Before moving on it is important to note a distinctive, important feature of Rancière's argument, namely the emphasis he places on the specificity of what may count as politics, as a challenge to the dominant order. As mentioned earlier and is underlined in the historical examples on which he draws, not all challenges or contention counts as political for Rancière. More precisely, he characterizes politics as: ‘a mode of expression that undoes the perceptible divisions of the police order by implementing a basically heterogeneous assumption, that of a part of those who have no part, an assumption that, at the end of the day, itself demonstrates the sheer contingency of the order, the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being.’65 Hence, politics proper demonstrates the ‘sheer contingency of the order,’ and while it makes visible the presupposition of equality, this always occurs in specific cases, with reference to specific miscounts and not simply as a result of some ontological possibility or constitutive openness. This indeed, is one of the distinctive strengths of Rancière's work.66

What conclusions may we draw from this discussion for our concern with voice? Whereas the account of the slave revolt on the Aventine Hill, and Nora's relation to Torvald alert us to the ever-present possibility of its deprivation, the account of the 1833 strike more clearly draws attention to vigorous interactions between new publics and institutions. Not treating the space of argumentation as always already open, Rancière's account focuses on the actual mechanisms through which new claims become visible as claims: the verification of claims that succeed in making claims audible because it shifts the very terrain of argumentation. From this it is clear that Rancière shares Bohman's concern with the limitations of mere ‘piecemeal resistance,’ hence his focus on the possibilities and indeed the necessity to shift the terrain of argumentation itself. As his and many other historical examples show, the very shifting of the terrain of argumentation consists in an institutional entrenching of claims in the most significant sense of the term: voice is present where previously only noise was audible.67 We have moved from a situation of domination, of deprivation of voice, to one where domination is challenged and voice is gained. The significance of this shift in emphasis should not be underestimated. One is no longer here on a terrain that is characterized as one in which ‘freedoms are granted the slave,’ but where the dominated claim their freedoms and take their rights.68

5 VOICE: THE TWOFOLD CHARACTER OF ITS DEPRIVATION

These arguments and examples discussed provide useful illustrations of two dimensions, each of which has to be addressed for us to come to a fuller understanding of the possibilities of radical pluralization when thought through the category of voice. On the one hand, I have suggested that what is at stake here is the very possibility of speaking and of being heard. On the other hand, I have argued that attention needs to be given to the mechanisms through which inchoate senses of wrong are articulated and become visible in the public sphere. In other words, we are dealing with a situation in which we need to address ‘unrepresentable,’ heterogeneous or inchoate ‘demands,’ that is, demands that fall outside of the extant terrain of representation, where there is a deprivation of voice. Such demands have a twofold character that could usefully be expressed in terms of the ontic-ontological distinction69:

• On the one hand, they are representative of the impossibility to fully represent the social as such; they are witness to, so to speak, of the impossibility of a full representation.70 In this sense they have an ontological status.71

• On the other hand, they are also ontical in character: those demands that cannot find expression in this particular order. They are demands that cannot be brought into play in a particular imaginary/order of representation, since they clash, contingently, with the principles organizing the domain of representation.

What is important here is that neither the ontological nor the ontic does or should predominate. Rather, they are to be conceived of as constituted in relations of mutual imbrication. Analytically, the emphasis here is on the movement from invisibility to visibility, from inaudibility to audibility, from noise to voice, that has this twofold character. My central argument is that unless we take account of both of these dimensions we cannot escape, on the one hand, the limitations of conventional pluralist forms of representation nor, on the other hand, the limits of an overweening ontologizing of politics.

Let us now draw out what is required if one is to take on board the full implications of the ontological dimension, since it also has important consequences for the way in which we think about and treat the ontical level. First, as we have seen, acknowledgment of the argument concerning the impossibility of full representation shifts attention to the need to focus on the movement from invisibility to visibility. It is important to be clear about what is at stake here. It is not a matter of simply highlighting a set of ontological possibilities; rather, it is a matter of making visible the importance of the practices constitutive of that movement from invisibility to visibility. As I have argued, this requires serious analytical engagement with the fact that spaces of argumentation are not simply always already available for the inscription of more and more demands. For new demands to appear on the stage, the space of argumentation itself has to be reconfigured. This is a crucial structural feature, which needs to be considered if one is serious about democracy beyond the representation of already existing positions, beyond the representation of given identities, interests, and concerns. Analytical tools for this exploration can be gleaned from a range of theorists, and a variety of approaches are available here. Above we have looked at one such candidate, namely Rancière's analysis with its focus on different strategies to reconfigure spaces of argumentation, which highlights the crucial importance of the world-disclosive character of political contestation.72

Moving onto the ontic level where we deal with representation of a plurality of voices, the analytical focus in democratic theory and practice needs to be enlarged to consider the representation, in a wider sense, of claims and demands arising in the wider public sphere. Here we need to get rid of prejudices concerning the politics of contention that still limit critical engagement with this terrain.73 In opposition to attempts to develop a logical language to perfect ordinary language, Wittgenstein has argued that ordinary language is perfectly in order. So it is with political languages. Rather than seeking to deny the ordinary human voice, analytical attention to the question of voice in all its dimensions and complexity suggests that not only are ordinary and often marginalized peoples capable of expressing their demands in rational and intelligible terms, but they are also able to do so critically. Wittgenstein's use of the ordinary voice often unsettles. So it is with political arguments expressed and articulated on the terrain of mass politics. As is well known, prior to the eighteenth century, ‘democracy’ as a term was used routinely ‘as a term of abuse to refer to the “people” assembling together and demanding a direct voice in the specific manner in which they were governed’; democracy was condemned as ‘popular, contentious’ and ill-suited to modern conditions.74 Macpherson characterized this worry as a particularly liberal fear of the masses. If we are going to take the wider terrain of wider contentious politics seriously as a terrain of political argumentation and negotiation, which potentially has positive, critical and world-disclosive implications for the traditional institutional spheres in which democratic representation is played out, then these prejudices have to be questioned. Without such a questioning we run the risk of remaining blind to the fact that contentious politics is not merely or necessarily piecemeal—although no doubt it could be—but often results in significant institutional shifts, which are not only present, but also amenable to systematic analysis. Rather than treating the terrain of contentious politics as, per definition, problematic, unreasonable, ‘wild,’ and a wasteland of non-reflective non-deliberation,75 close attention, both to the ways in which new spaces of argumentation are opened up and to the voicing of demands brings us to the contrary conclusion. Instead of a lack of deliberation and reflection, we in fact have very articulate processes of argumentation and extremely reflective engagements that are able to give expression to deeply felt senses of injustice and wrongs.

In this respect it is important that there is a significant body of work that focus theoretical attention on the processes and mechanisms through which demands are articulated into broader political discourses. For instance, Laclau in his recent work argues that the minimal unit of social analysis is the category of ‘demand,’ which presupposes that a social group is not a homogeneous group or referent, but rather ‘that its unity should … be conceived as an articulation of heterogeneous demands.’76 Demands, for Laclau, tend to start as requests, addressed to the institutions of power. When those demands are ignored or not responded to, these requests are turned into claims, which may be addressed to or against institutions.77 An account of the articulation of demands also allows us to question the notion that ideas are simply ‘transmitted’ from one domain to another, from the informal to the formal political sphere. The very metaphor of transmission serves to occlude the complex political processes involved in forging together of demands and of their articulation into political projects that may inform, strengthen or indeed challenge the existing shape of political debate.78 As we have seen, this process, moreover, also involves the constitution of the identity of the claimants and that of the addressee of the claim.79 Analytically, such engagement presupposes some conception of subjectivity that is able to distinguish between the different ‘subject positions’ inhabited by any one individual, and ‘the subject as such,’ where the emphasis is on the impossibility of ever achieving a full representation.80 Once this conceptual distinction is in place, one could avoid collapsing subject positions into the place of the subject,81 and voice into represented demands. Keeping open this gap is not a mere feature of ontic-political life.82 It is a precondition for a critical engagement with questions of representation, for it facilitates awareness of the distance between the ontic and the ontological, between the fact of this representation—of individuals, groups or demands—and representation as such, as mechanisms of inscription that can never fully capture that which is being inscribed in the space of representation, that opens the critical space of a radicalized democratic pluralization.83 Hence, deprivation of voice is always both an ontic and ontological possibility, and this should be reflected in the way in which we think of democracy and our critical engagements with democratic practices. Let me thus, conclude with some of the implications of this excursus on voice are for thinking about democracy more generally.

6 DEMOCRACY RETHOUGHT

Voice is a complex element of thinking and its experience. Tracing voice, we may be able to expand upon our possibilities for being free.84

If we not only take the demand for the representation of different voices, but also the critical engagement with deprivation of voice seriously, and if, moreover, we think of voice as constitutively divided, what does this imply for the manner in which we think of democracy and of the critical work that our conceptions of democracy are expected to do? As many commentators have noted, not only recently, but as far back as 20 or 30 years ago, our dominant conceptions of democracy—be they liberal, deliberative or radical—reflect and contain many context-specific dimensions, which may potentially be as limiting as they are emancipatory. In this sense, it is useful to remind ourselves that the term democracy, as Tully notes, ‘formerly stood for any ad hoc assembly of people in negotiation’ and came to be associated with ‘representative democracy’ only in the late eighteenth century.85 Reminding ourselves of the historical contingency of our institutional arrangements has the advantage of opening up the possibility to think more creatively about democracy in a comparative perspective. In order to be able to recuperate and maintain the critical, world-disclosive role of contentious democratic politics, our very conception of democracy needs to be more ‘minimal,’ closer simply to the idea of ‘having a say over the way one is governed.’

Such a shift requires a different conception of the grammar of democracy. Historically, this possibility can be situated in the lineage of radical conceptions of democracy that are opposed to a reduction of democracy to a specific set of procedures. One such conception of democracy treats it as practical and processual, but not procedural.86 Democracy is constituted in and through practices; it is always incomplete and in process.87 Although more or less institutionalized forms of rule may develop from it, rule-formation is not conceived of as the telos of democracy. Conceiving of democracy in this way enables one to focus on those dimensions of political argumentation and subject formation inherent in practices of contestation, claim-making and negotiation that are not reducible to, nor occur in the sites associated with traditional representative democratic institutions. Although struggles in and over the latter are crucial, democracy cannot be limited to these struggles, and they even exist in the absence of such institutions. Not to recognize this is to deny the existence of most of what one may want to count as democratic struggles in our contemporary world. Crucial to these practices of contestation—embodied in the variety of attempts to exert control over the way one is governed—is an ethos of questioning, responding, negotiating, challenging, and disruption. This critical ethos focuses on the activities of citizen-subjects, who are not satisfied to let others speak for them and who question the ordering of prevailing institutions and practices of governance.

On this reading, then, democratic activity does not presuppose the existence of elaborate systems of rules and law imbedded in particular institutional forms. To put it differently, people are not democrats by virtue of the existence of institutions, laws and rights. They become democratic subjects by exercising their capacities for questioning, affirming, negotiating, and contesting the regimes and micro-practices of governance that shape and limit their lives. Now, if democracy is conceived of in this sense, then the analysis of democratic practices and activities must take the form of attentiveness to the specificities of the actual practices, traditions and forms of contestation that challenge divergent forms of domination. Critical practices do not take a singular form, and the forms of subjectivity they inspire necessarily also vary widely.88 I would suggest that this means that we ought not to prejudge either the sites where democracy may erupt or the actors who may engage in such activities.89 The terrain of democratic contention is an uneven one, marked by asymmetries between participants. Attentiveness to the very processes through which democratic demands are formed and expressed, and the way in which such practices of claim-making are also constitutive of the identities of the individuals and groups involved in them, does not lead to an uncritical acceptance of those asymmetries. Rather, as I have argued, they are more often the sites where wrongs become visible, where domination is questioned, and where the limits of traditional ways of thinking about democracy, representation and pluralism are shown, in the Wittgensteinian sense. My wager is that if we take seriously these sites and demands, the voices in which they are expressed and the challenges they pose to us, we also need to rethink the way in which we conceptualize democracy and the critical tasks of democratic theorists.

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.