Global politics is often considered to be an arena of transformation and change, perhaps more so now than ever. The economic crisis, the Arab spring, and the ongoing Occupy Wall Street movements signal dramatic new developments in global politics, inspiring and manifesting new forms of resistance and response around the world. There is a feeling that something links these and other events with one another, something pointing to a more profound change in our ways of thinking, being and acting, and in our understanding of, and engagement with, democratic politics.
The suggestion that receptivity could be the basis of or a key to the renewal of democratic politics will surely strike some as more than a little naïve, a reaction that would not come as a surprise to any of the contributors to this special issue of Ethics and Global Politics. For most political theorists, receptivity does not register as something distinctly political. If it registers at all it will be as something merely ‘ethical,’ which something is said to be distinct from politics, something whose introduction into politics would surely have a depoliticizing effect. But the fact that the idea of receptivity does not arise from within political theory proper, but from its edges and beyond (from the work of Emerson, Adorno, Heidegger, and Cavell, from feminist ethics, and from religious or spiritual texts) not only provides political thinking with some much needed alternatives, it also brings it into contact with other sources of normativity. The contributors to ‘A Politics of Receptivity,’ seek radically to change the perception of receptivity as something that is deeply and irremediably apolitical, and to place their reconceptualizations of receptivity at the very center of a transformed democratic politics.
Although the contributions of Romand Coles, Nikolas Kompridis, Jennifer Nedelsky, and Aletta Norval, do not share a single, univocal conception of receptivity, they do elaborate the role that different practices of receptivity, both narrowly and broadly construed, can play in a renewed democratic politics. Their essays reveal connections between receptivity and parresia (Norval), receptivity and reflective judgment (Nedelsky), receptivity the disclosure of new possibilities (Kompridis), and receptivity and affective resonance (Coles). The exploration of these connections also reveal the cognitive, affective, normative, corporeal, and ontological dimensions of receptivity, all of which are in some sense mutually implied in each one of them. Thus, the cumulative effect of these essays helps us see that receptivity, far from being a merely ‘ethical’ or merely ‘aesthetic’ phenomenon, is directly and actively implicated in a diverse and multiple set of practices, modes of behaviour, and normative expectations that traverse the domains of politics, ethics, and everyday life. But above all, these essays help us see just how very salient is receptivity to politics, and why we need a politics of receptivity.
Aletta Norval, in her essay on ‘Moral Perfectionism and Democratic Responsiveness,’ draws on the work of Stanley Cavell to show that democratic politics should not be identified exclusively with democratic practices of reason giving, but rather, with a larger and broader set of practices with which agents engage in order to make themselves intelligible to themselves and to one another. To this quest for voice and intelligibility, Cavell gives the name ‘moral perfectionism.’ Norval follows Cavell in thinking that there is an internal link between moral perfectionism and the possibility of democracy, between the search for voice and intelligibility and the democratic responsiveness or receptivity that is required to ‘maintain relationships, when the divergences of our cares and commitments threaten their continuation.’ In the second part of her essay, Norval complements Cavell's vision of democracy with the late Foucault's vision of agonistic politics at the center of which is an ethos of parresia, of courageous speech that speaks truth to power. ‘In parresia … the irruption of true discourse determines an open situation, or rather opens the situation and makes possible effects which are, precisely, not known. Parresia … opens up an unspecified risk.’Footnote1 Examples of parresia can then ‘manifest for the other another way’ and thereby open up new political possibilities and new political relationships.
Jennifer Nedelsky's essay on ‘Receptivity and Judgment,’ explores the connection between practices of attentive mindfulness and reflective judgment, showing how ‘receptivity is essential to judgment’ and how ‘judgment is a necessary complement to receptivity.’ Drawing on research on mindfulness practices, Nedelsky outlines how these practices foster sensitivity to the novelty in our everyday experiences, novelty that is suppressed or hidden from view by ‘automatic’ modes of response. Moreover, foreshadowing Romand Coles's discussion of mirror neurons and the potential elasticity of the human brain's neuronal behaviour, Nedelsky draws on research that indicates that such practices of mindfulness can awaken agents from ‘automaticity’ and release them from ‘enslaved’ patterns of mental processing. The capacity to be receptive to novelty is essential to the successful exercise of reflective judgment; but without the complementary intervention of judgment, the feeling for novelty that mindfulness fosters can quickly dissipate. ‘Action, however mindfully undertaken, will require a shift to the judgment end of the spectrum of engagement.’
In my essay, ‘Receptivity, Possibility, and Democratic Politics,’ I argue for an ontological and a normative view of receptivity, each of which is interrelated and ultimately inseparable from the other. Drawing on early and later Heidegger, I argue that we are always already receptive, and such prereflective receptivity is a necessary condition of intelligibility and possibility. However, at this ontological level, we are receptive in highly selective, often unjust and unjustifiable ways. Which is why this prereflective stance of receptivity needs to be unsettled, decentered, and transformed by a reflective stance of receptivity, which can arise only in and through our normative relationships to others. In its reflective phase, receptivity facilitates the disclosure of new possibilities for thought and action by responding to normative demands for change—the kind of change democratic politics cannot do without if there is to be a democratic politics.
Finally, in his essay, ‘The Neuropolitical Habitus of Resonant Receptive Democracy,’ Romand Coles explores the fascinating possible and actual connections between mirror neurons and democratic politics. Drawing on the vast and fluid literature on mirror neurons, Coles argues for links between our capacities to be receptive and our resonant being, a special case of the elementally resonant being of the universe itself. ‘[W]e could say that with human beings, resonant energies that are an elemental aspect of the universe have acquired particularly receptive, interactive, and adaptive powers through which resonance can reflectively modify resonance.’ On the basis of the resonant properties and behaviour of mirror neurons, Coles posits a political and dynamic link between mirror neurons and the human capacity or incapacity to ‘receptively resonate with targeted others as affectively intentional beings in ways that allow us to register and acknowledge them as ‘others’ in the first place.’ If this is indeed the case, then a democratic politics of resonant receptivity will necessary include a neuropolitical dimension, through which and by which democratic politics becomes a ‘game-transformative’ game.
Notes
1. Just before I wrote these words, I read a letter written by Nathan Brown, an untenured assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, demanding in the strongest terms the resignation of the Chancellor of UC Davis for authorizing the use of police violence on non-violent protesters. This would count, I believe, as a pretty fine example of parresia in the context of academic and democratic politics: http://ucdfa.org/2011/11/18/open-letter-to-chancellor-linda-p-b-katehi/ Of course, there are many other examples of parresia where the risk involved includes a risk to one's own life. The events that spread after the Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi set light to himself can, as Norval argues, be seen as another example, albeit a violent one, of such parresia.