Agonistics

Just a few remarks about Chantal Mouffe's Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013). This is a thin book in which she extends previous arguments to the issue of a multipolar world and devotes more space to discussing the role of art in hegemonic struggles. I won't repeat my criticism of what I see as some of the major shortcomings of her approach. Instead, I will just briefly mention two things I found interesting, namely her criticisms of Arendt and Badiou. I'll end with a remark on her claim that antagonism is inescapable and why I find it problematic.

First, she distinguishes her own agonistic approach from that of Arendt: “In my view, the main problem with the Arendtian understanding of ‘agonism’ is that... it is an ‘agonism without antagonism’” (p. 9f). Arend stresses the element of contention and struggle in her view of the public, but continues to believe in the possibility and desirability of consensus. Therefore “Arendt ends up, like Habermas, envisaging the public space as a space where consensus can be reached” (p. 10). Against those, like Benhabib, who see Arendt and Habermas as exponents for two contrasting models of the public, Mouffe thus claims that Arendt's “pluralism is not fundamentally different from that of Habermas” (p. 10). Although she stresses struggle more than logical argumentation, “neither Arendt nor Habermas is able to acknowledge the hegemonic nature of every form of consensus” (p. 11).

She then turns to thinkers inspired by Arendt, such as Bonnie Honig. Here her criticism changes tack. Honig isn't criticized so much for consensus-orientation as for focusing too much on contestation around identities, forgetting “the necessity not only of challenging what exists but also of constructing new articulations and new institutions” (p. 11). “The main shortcoming of the agonistic approaches influenced by Arendt and Nietzsche is that, because their main focus is on the fight against closure, they are unable to grasp the nature of the hegemonic struggle. Their celebration of a politics of disturbance ignores the other side of such struggle: the establishment of a chain of equivalence among democratic demands and the construction of an alternative political hegemony” (p. 14). Acknowledging that antagonism is ineradicable “requires that we do not elude the moment of decision, and this will necessarily imply some form of closure. It might be that an ethnical discourse can avoid this moment, but a political one certainly cannot” (p. 15). Here I recall her criticism of Occupy activists for focusing too much on disruption, the mere challenging of status quo, and too little on constructive engagement with the political system.

Her criticism of Badiou is that he makes truth a category of the political sphere. He asserts the politics produced by subjects defined by their particular relation to a truth event. “The decision of a subject to remain faithful to an event is what produces a truth” (p. 16). She claims that this emphasis on fidelity privileges an ethical perspective on politics, undermining the political as such. The ethics of unconditional truth is a odds with politics, since the latter deals with the conditional: a hegemonic order is always contestable and “should never be justified as dictated by a higher order and presented as the only legitimate one” (p. 17). Later in the book she also criticizes Badiou for his adherence to communism or the “communist hypothesis”, which she claims connotes an anti-political vision of a society without antagonism (p. 82f).

A few comments. Is this criticism fair? To start with Badiou, fidelity to a truth can be politically important without necessarily leading to the legitimation of order. How about fidelity to the truth of radical democracy, or to some cause such as helping refugees or the homeless? Implicit in her criticism that fidelity implies an "ethical" perspective is the charge that it denies the essentially agonistic quality of politics and hence promotes depoliticization. But this is not convincing: to a large extent it is fidelity of this sort that propels and constitutes political action. Without it, much political action would simply die. Nothing in an ethical perspective per se is inimical to struggle or antagonism. Mouffe's own stress on the role of emotions in political struggles also strongly suggests that something like fidelity to the "truth" embodied in the central nodal points or empty signifiers that serve to unify discourses are constitutive of political struggle. Her defense here would probably be that the "ethical", even where it promotes struggle, projects a possible end-state of restored peace where the political would again be occluded. In other words, her defense would be that fidelity to truth by necessity implies the other great error Badiou commits, namely embracing an anti-political vision of a society without antagonism.

Why is this an error, according to Mouffe? Behind this, of course, lies her idea of antagonism as an inescapable dimension of the political - a dimension so important that she rejects not only all those theories that "post-politically" deny or cover up conflicts in the present but also all utopian visions of a future end to antagonism. This is one of her central ideas. But it's also a very ambiguous idea. While insisting on inescapable antagonism may sound very radical, it also, paradoxically, has very un-radical implications. To put it harshly, insisting on inescapable antagonism is reactionary in the same sense that the realist school of international relations or the idea of a homo oeconomicus driven only by self-interest are reactionary. These ideas all dogmatically assert “war” as an ahistorical constant. Again and again, Mouffe rejects theoretical opponents by simply referring to their supposed neglect of the ineradicable antagonism, but she never explains why antagonism must be a constant. Her idea is ahistorical since it neglects the fact that antagonism too is a historical product - something that is shaped by history and that varies depending on the overall historical or societal situation. A possible defense might be that the assumption of antagonism is "ontological" and hence independent of "ontic" or merely historical circumstance. But the drawback of positing antagonism as ontologically given is that it becomes inexplicable and hence only possible to assert dogmatically. I find it hugely problematic that this dogmatic assertion is used by her as the basis for her strictures on activists and radical intellectuals, who are told to either adhere to her logic - strive for hegemony, but give up your utopias - or face the charge of being "post-political".

A word, finally, on the utopia of consensus. I can't help finding Mouffe's understanding of consensus crude. For instance, she writes that “those who foster the creation of agonistic public spaces will conceive of critical art in a very different way than those whose aim is the creation of consensus” (p. 92). But to Arendt and to critical theorists, consensus is aimed at through critique. How different is that, in practice, from what Mouffe wants to do? She might reply, of course, that her aim is a hegemony that is self-aware of its merely hegemonic and hence transitory nature. But such an approach fails to account for the various Utopias that protesters have aimed at for millennia. Can she declare them all wrong? Isn’t it rather that Utopia always exists as a transcendental element, which is never fully realized but which informs all radical action and serves as a regulative idea (as in the case with Karatani's "X" or even Habermas’s ideal speech situation) which is always presupposed in critique for critique to be effective and persuasive? If so, then Utopia is needed for politically efficatious action. This Utopia doesn't need to to be spelled out or even be given much substantial content. As Bloch pointed out, it exists in rudimentary fashion whenever people feel that "something is missing" (etwas fehlt). In communicative action, the content of a future consensus can never be fixed or stated in advance. Yet even as an insubstantial ideal, it spurs people to engage in protests and criticism, simply because they cannot rest content with letting prevailing viewpoints or opinions dominate society. What activists or protesters long for is usually not just another round of hegemonic struggle, but a better world that is supposed to be the result of that struggle. That longing isn't an obstacle to the struggle, but something that spurs it on. If that is so, then isn't it Mouffe's own strictures on Utopia - rather than the "post-political" striving for consensus - that risk undermining the political? 

Chris Bracey

Arendt on Benjamin

A small warning - this entry will probably only interest a small number of Walter Benjamin-fans ("Benjamin-otaku"?).

I had a look at Hannah Arendt's introduction to Illuminations - a collection of essays by Benjamin translated into English - for the first time today, and was shocked to find what, in my view, must be one of the worst interpretations of Benjamin I've ever seen. It's quite legitimate to start, as she does, with a criticism of Adorno's misunderstanding of Benjamin's intentions in the essay on Baudelaire. Part of Adorno's well-known criticism is that Benjamin's attempt to relate elements of the superstructure directly to “corresponding elements in the substructure” was crude and "undialectical", too reminiscent of vulgar Marxism, and failed to do justice to Benjamin's own insights. By immersing himself in the "wide-eyed presentation of mere facts" - such as barricades or the duty on wine - his study ended up "at the crossroads of magic and positivism", a "bewitched" spot from which the way the elements were "mediated" disappeared from view (letter from Adorno to Benjamin, 10 November 1938).

Arendt defends Benjamin, saying that, yes, he was truly not a good Marxist (“the most peculiar Marxist ever produced by this movement”). She then proceeds to explain that Benjamin’s thinking was “poetical” and “metaphorical”, and that that was why he delighted in material facts. Such facts were metaphors which served to bring out truth.

He had no trouble understanding the theory of the superstructure as the final doctrine of metaphorical thinking – precisely because without much ado and eschewing all ‘mediations’ he directly related the superstructure to the so-called ‘material’ substructure, which to him meant the totality of sensually experienced data. He evidently was fascinated by the very thing that the others branded as ‘vulgar-Marxist’ or ‘undialectical’ thinking. (p.20)

So she rebuts Adorno by claiming that Benjamin’s way of seeing the relationship between superstructure and substructure was a metaphorical one. “Metaphors", she explains, "are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about”. She then proceeds to compare Benjamin to Heidegger, stressing how "close" they were or how much they had “in common” (p. 50, 53). For instance, they both shared the view that truth resided in language and “understood language as an essentially poetical phenomenon” (p. 54).

She is right in insisting that Adorno misunderstood Benjamin. Benjamin never meant to reduce elemenents of the superstructure to any material basis. Baudelaire's poem to the soul of wine wasn't a reflection in the superstructure of the wine tax in the second empire. However, she goes wrong when she tries to explain how Benjamin uses material phenomena to bring out the truth. Benjamin was not interested in “poetically” diving back into the sensual through metaphors. The entire Trauerspiel-book was an attack on art and the pretensions of art – including poetry – to reveal truth. Poetry is not a relation to Being. What, at heart, she misses is that the relationship between material facts and elements of the superstructure is that of a montage. It is neither that of a causal relationship (as in “vulgar Marxism”) nor a metaphorical one. A montage brings out truth by arranging elements into a constellation through which all the individual elements are turned into ruins, robbed of their mythical appearance of naturalness or self-sufficiency. Its effect is to shock the reader by juxtaposing the heterogeneous. It blows mindfulness to high heavens and does not invite contemplation. The montage is similar to what Benjamin calls allegory in his Trauerspiel-book, and allegory is also among the things that Arendt fails to understand. She contrasts Benjamin’s “metaphorical” thinking to the allegory, trying to portray the latter as alien to Benjamin's essentially metaphorical thought (p.19), and thereby completely misses why Benjamin himself preferred the allegory. She talks about the “spirit of Benjamin’s thought”, but the spirit she presents is Heidegger’s.

Arendt, Hannah (1973) ”Introduction Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940”, pp 7-60, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (ed. Hannah  Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn), London: Fontana Press.  

-       

Mobility and politics: notes on Sheller & Urry

Automobility

I'd like to make a short note about Mimi Sheller and John Urry's “Mobile Transformations of `Public' and `Private' Life” (Theory, Culture & Society 20:3, 2003). I read this text because I was interested in how it would treat the relation between public sphere and public space. 

The authors discuss various meanings of public and private - public and private interest, public and private sphere, public and private life, public and private space, and publicity and privacy - and argue that none of these conceptions is suited to capturing the mobility and fluidity of political action today, the age of automobility and electronic communications. To support their claim that these conceptions are "static" or linked to space they refer to a few examples, such as Habermas' discussion of coffee houses and Arendt's of the agora (p.114). Instead of thinking "in terms of ‘spheres’ or ‘spaces’, concepts that are often static and ‘regional’ in character”, the authors emphasize "the increasing fluidity in terms of where (or when) moments of publicity and privacy occur” (p.108). Along with the rejection of static conceptions, the authors also reject the complaint among thinkers like Habermas or Sennett that the boundaries of public and private are being eroded, “colonized” etc.

We show that cars, information, communications, screens, are all material worlds, hybrids of private and public life. Despite the heroic efforts of 20thcentury normative theorists to rescue the divide, the various distinctions between public and private domains cannot survive. The critical theorists reviewed above each in different ways diagnosed the erosion of boundaries between public and private as the cause of democratic decline; maintaining or restoring the boundary, they imply, is crucial to the continuance of democratic citizenship in the contemporary world. We argue, in contrast, that the hybridization of public and private is even more extensive than previously thought, and is occurring in more complex and fluid ways than any regional model of separate spheres can capture. Any hope for public citizenship and democracy, then, will depend on the capacity to navigate these new material, mobile worlds that are neither public nor private. (p.113)

In order to stress the political potential of mobility, the authors mention examples such as Reclaim the Streets. The “proliferation of anti-capitalist, anti-globalization social movements emerged within the context of new mobilities of bodies, capital, objects, money, information and images. Such fragmented and fluid temporalities of public and private exceed any simple notion of boundary erosion or colonization - if anything it is more like ‘creolization’” (p.121). 

A summary of the argument might look like this. The authors attempt to reduce the public sphere to static public space in order to more efficiently criticize it by directing attention to spatial processes that dissolve static space. They then try to suggest a new notion of the public more in tune with these processes.  

I have two criticisms.

Firstly, it strikes me as rather curious that the authors claim that all the conceptions of the public mentioned above are static and linked to space. This is a bit surprising, since the "public sphere" is usually thought of precisely as a despatialized concept. Arendt is explicit in pointing out that the public realm is not place-bound. "The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be” (Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958:198).

Habermas, to be sure, talks of coffeehouses as places where the bourgeouis public sphere once took form. It is quite clear, however, that the public sphere cannot be reduced to deliberations going on in public space. It can occur in a lot of places, some of them private - at the breakfast table, for instance. "Every encounter in which actors do not just observe each other but take a second-person attitude, reciprocally attributing communicative freedom to each other, unfolds in a linguistically constituted public sphere" (Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Polity Press 1996:361). In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas explicitly states that only certain publics are placebound (distinguishing between episodic publics that can arise anywhere, occasional publics that arise when people gather together in certain institutionalized contexts such as concerts or political meetings, and abstract publics that are held together by mass media). It seems strange to claim that cars or the Internet per se are enough to upset a public sphere conceptualized in this fashion.

Secondly, I don’t agree that all “static” or “place”-bound concepts of the public must be discarded. Here I agree with Don Mitchell – what is necessary for public visibility is often "static" public space. If homeless people about to be evicted from a park want to make a public issue of their struggle, they usually do better by staying put in the park and refuse to move than go for an Internet campaign. The uprising in Egypt today may have begun with mobile and elusive gatherings springing up in the alleyways and disappearing just as quickly when the police arrived, but as soon as the protesters grew in strength they started gathering at Midan al Tahrir, occupying the square and guarding it by staying there night after night. Not everyone is mobile, and not everyone wants to move. That's the problem with building a politics only on the idea of mobility and ignoring the importance of sometimes being stationary. What is needed is a combination of both. Politics is about friction. Where capital is already hypermobile, isn’t the most effective way to offer resistance often simply to stay put, to hold on to space, to refuse to go along and escape though the lines of flight? To say “no” when welfare is being cut or the homeless evicted? Isn’t the “public” often what flares up, like fire, through the friction created when capital or authorities encounter resistance?

So the authors are clearly at least half wrong: the idea of “navigating” mobility risks becoming a justification of those who want to obliterate public spaces or the public sphere, an ideology neglecting those who are not or do not want to be hypermobile.

 

But perhaps they are also at least a little bit right. The categories of public and private are problematical. There does exist a realm that is admittedly difficult or perhaps even impossible to theorize in the old terms, something like Deleuze’s nomadic “smooth” space and the new modes of politics that such a space would offer, or the half hidden network “hinterland” that Bey or Negri mention as an indispensible base for revolts. By trying to approach this realm, they sketch a politics for a possible future in which public spaces or static spheres have vanished, and instead everywhere has become a potential point where politics may again flare up on the global “public screen”. 

The limits of agonistic pluralism

Two models of public space

A month or so ago I read through  an interesting booklet, Global Democracy and the World Social Forums, written jointly by no less than twelve (!) social movement researchers. It's nice book, with lots of statistics and some interesting arguments, not least concerning the logic of networking and the role of autonomous forums in relation to the WSF (World Social Forum).

One section, however, struck me as a little too simplistic. The authors claim that there are two models of public space that inform the WSF. The dominant one is a Habermas-inspired model of "deliberative public space" in which the forum is conceived of along the lines of a lifeworld or haven of communicative reason offering resistance to the system. This idea, the authors suggest, is expressed in the WSF charter in which the WSF is conceived of not as an actor in its own right but as a space, neutral in itself, offering the infrastructure for deliberation between a multiplicity of actors. The weakness of this model is that it neglects that the forums are  contested terrain. They are not fully open or neutral, but contain their own hierarchies (p.38).

The other model, that of "agonistic public space", is offered by Chantal Mouffe who in turn is inspired by Arendt. Here the presence of power is recognized. The forum is seen as a "space of appearance" in Arendt's sense, where politics is meant to be enacted in public as theater. The authors add that the forums are excellent examples of how threatrical public spaces emerge outside territorially based institutions. “In this sense, the forum is not only a space for rational discourse, but it is also a space of performance” (p.37). The authors see an interaction between these two models in the way activists set up "autonomous" spaces in an ambiguous  “one foot in, one foot out”-relation to the official main social forum, utilizing the deliberative space provided by the official forum while transforming it into an agonistic space through a mixture of discursive debate and spectacular conflict (p.44-47).

What appears to me to be insufficiently illuminated here is how agonistic public space relates to the issue of exclusion. Early on in the book, the authors stress that they view the WSF as an arena precisely for the excluded. “In this sense, it constitutes a new body politic, a common public space where previously excluded voices can speak and act in plurality”(p.13).The problem, however, is in what sense an "antagonistic" public space is less exclusive than a "deliberative" one. 

The reference to Arendt here is hardly helpful. Indeed, it is precisely because the authors so explicitly raise the issue of exclusion that the reference to her seems so mystifying, and the juxtaposition of these two "models" of public space appears so glaringly insufficient and simplistic. The truth is that in neither of the two models is public space conceived of as a space for the "excluded". In Arendt no less than in Habermas - and, as I will discuss below, in Mouffe - public space is in fact constituted by exclusion. What needs to be thought through, I believe, is precisely this all too common act whereby "openness" or "publicness" is constituted by restrictions on openness itself.

It is correct that for Arendt, the "space of appearance" is where participants appear as political beings by virtue of play-acting, but this is not play-acting in the sense of musical or theatrical performances. What is necessary for public life is play-acting in the sense of a bracketing of private life - of things such as work or labor, of the material and bodily aspects of life.  This is why, to her, public life is threatened by processes such as the "rise of the social", by the rise, in other words, of the labor movement and the welfare state. Seeing her as the forerunner of Mouffe's agonistic pluralism is fine, but one should also recognize that there are limits to her pluralism. Critics of Habermas often refer to the supposedly exclusive nature of his model of consensus-oriented political action and its insensitivity to difference. Even if Arendt doesn't use the word "consensus" as Habermas does, her conception of politics both presupposes a certain consensus (since people must agree on what aspects of the private should should be bracketed in order for a separate sphere of political activity to come into being) and idealizes it in the sense of "acting in concert" or "acting and speaking together". This can be seen in her famous concept of "power". Unlike violence, which is purely instrumental, power  is the “human ability not just to act but to act in concert” and never belongs to an individual but “to a group” and “remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together” (Arendt 1970:44).

Note that I am not claiming that Arendt is idealizing the idea of a possible universal consensus, as Habermas does. There are certainly many differences between Arendt and Habermas. What I want to emphasize is that it is not possible, on the basis of these differences, to claim that Arend's public is less exclusive than Habermas'. A universalist ideal of rationally achieved consensus certainly often tends to be exclusive, but so does Arendt's idea of power.

My aim here is not to criticize Arendt in particular, but to point out that it simply isn't seem sufficient if one really wants to provide a space "for the excluded" to rely on Habermas or Arendt. So what about Mouffe?


Mouffe on agonistic pluralism

I have two criticisms of Mouffe's "Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism": 1. She misunderstands Habermas, 2. Her model of “radical democracy” is insufficiently radical.

Firstly, she criticizes Habermas for "postulating the availability of a public sphere where power and antagonism would have been eliminated and where a rational consensus would have been realized". By portraying the ideal of "impartiality" and of democratic decisions "equally in the interests of all" as possible to achieve through "the appropriate public processes of deliberation that follow the procedures of [his own] discourse model", his model of democratic politics "denies the central role in politics of the conflictual dimension" (Mouffe 1999:747, 752). I doubt that Habermas has ever portrayed "impartiality" or decisions "equally in the interests of all" as actually achievable through the procedures he delineates. From a critical theoretical standpoint, the reason is obvious: that would be ideology. Neither has he ever, as far as I know, portrayed a public sphere without power or antagonism as "available" (denying such availability is the very point of making a distinction between what he calls real and ideal speech situations).

Habermas is, I think, partly a historicizing social theorist inspired by pragmatism (public debate is not perfect but the closest thing to perfection since it is at least more open to input from the other than outright struggle or a reliance on silent empathy). Partly he is also a Kantian who believes in universal consensus  as a regulative ideal transcendentally presupposed in language use (in order to believe something to be true or right we need to believe that it could withstand criticism in an ideal speech situation). He is, in other words, far from the easily demolished strawman Mouffe makes of him. Habermas could, I believe, reply to Mouffe's criticism both in a pragmaticist way (would hegemonic struggle be any less exclusive of the other?) and in a Kantian way (when we engage in discourse struggle, how do we know that we are right in believing in the things we are struggling for?).

As a more "adequate model of democratic politics", Mouffe presents her own "agonistic pluralism", which is based on the recognition of "the ineradicability of power, of antagonism, and of the fact that there can never be total emancipation but only partial ones (ibid 752). Mouffe is quite open about how exclusive this kind of politics must be, partly because it necessarily defines itself against an adversary, and partly because it can only tolerate "legitimate" enemies with whom one shares the same "ethnico-political principles":

Politics aims at the creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity; it is always concerned with the creation of an "us" by the determination of a "them." The novelty of democratic politics is not the overcoming of this us/them distinction – which is what a consensus without exclusion pretends to achieve – but the different way in which it is established. What is at stake is how to establish the us/them discrimination in a way that is compatible with pluralist democracy.

    In the realm of politics, this presupposes that the "other" is no longer seen as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an "adversary," i.e., somebody with whose ideas we are going to struggle but whose right to defend those ideas we will not put into question. This category of the adversary does not eliminate antagonism, though, and it should be distinguished from the liberal notion of the competitor, with which it is sometimes identified. An adversary is a legitimate enemy, an enemy with whom we have in common a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of democracy. (ibid 755)

This, I think, is a remarkable passage. Apart from the fact that Mouffe stresses the constitutive role of the us/them distinction more than Arendt, the resemblances to her are many. We find the same emphasis on acting in concert, the same emphasis on power rather than violence, and the same emphasis on the need to restricting political interaction to those who share a similar set of basic principles. What is a bit surprising is how close Mouffe's vision is to mainstream liberalism (despite her disavowal of the "liberal notion of the competitor") and to the classical liberal defence of the freedom of speech. Although what she calls "discourse" is much broader than mere speech, it is clear from the context that discursive struggle must at least refrain from acts aimed at destroying the opponent. There are echoes of Voltaire here (the statement ascribed to him about being ready to die for the right of opponents to express their views) and of Kant too. Saying that we are free to engage in discursive struggles so long as we refrain from non-discursive ones sounds like one of the most famous sentences from Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?: "Argue as much as you like, but obey".  

What, by the way, are the "ethico-political" principles that Mouffe thinks political adversaries need to share? She doesn't say. What we get is nothing more than the following statement:

To be sure, pluralist democracy demands a certain amount of consensus, but such a consensus concerns only some ethico-political principles. Since those ethico-political principles can only exist, however, through many different and conflicting interpretations, such a consensus is bound to be a "conflictual consensus."(ibid 756)  

But if interpretations of these principles are so conflicting, how can they serve as criteria for "legitimate" adversaries? What are the limits for when the adversary ceases to be “legitimate”? What does the idea of restricting political engagement to "legitimate" enemies mean in reality? It sounds a bit like: there can be no negotiating with terrorists. But how about Nazis? Can't an adversary be "legitimate" even if she or he doesn't share my ethico-political principles - for instance, if he or she belongs to another religion?

Not only does Mouffe, like Arendt and Habermas, presuppose a rather restrictive notion of consensus as the basis of legitimate politics, she also appears to be less radical and less open to "others" than some thinkers, like Rancière, who recognize that democratic politics is more about the public visualization of dissent by previously marginalized or "invisible" groups, than about the struggle of discourses. Such a visualization, Rancière claims, usually takes the form of a "breach of the ordering of the sensible" - or, in other words, of an upsetting or shattering of the discursive field, rather than a discursive struggle among adversaries sharing an ethico-political framework. 

A final quote:

To deny that there ever could be a free and unconstrained public deliberation of all matters of common concern is therefore crucial for democratic politics. When we accept that every consensus exists as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power and that always entails some form of exclusion, we can begin to envisage the nature of a democratic public sphere in a different way (ibid 756) 

Wouldn't such a vision risk leading to a democracy that is openly exclusive and that has given up hope about a stop to exclusion?  I have nothing particular against the assertion that power in a certain (Foucauldian or Arendtian) sense is inescapable in politics or even something good, but to accept exclusion as necessary seems to me to be a far more serious concession. Isn’t there another way out, namely to constantly work against exclusion, even without ever presupposing that end to be realizable? Isn't that the third model that is missing in the account of the models of public space in the WSF?

References

Arendt, Hannah (1970) On Violence, Orlando: Harcourt Books.

Mouffe, Chantal (1999) “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?”, pp 745-758, Social Research 66(3) (Fall).

Smith, Jackie et al (2008) Global Democracy and the World Social Forums, Boulder: Paradigm Publishers

The Commons and the Public Sphere: Five Clarifications

Below I clarify how I view the relation between the commons and the public sphere (plus related concepts such as public property, muen and no-man’s-land).


Clarification 1: The relation of the commons to public and private property

The words public and private are used in many senses. Often, they are used to designate ownership (as in “public sector”). In this sense, the words belong to a wholly other dimension than words like commons or no-man’s-land. The reason is that the latter words have to do with usus, not with dominium or formal ownership. The commons does not negate property. A resource is “free”, according to Lawrence Lessing, if it can be used without permission (or if the permission is granted neutrally). The question is thus not who owns the resource but whether it can be used freely (Lessig 2007). A squat house is a house that has been made into a commons despite being privately or publicly owned. What squatters want is the right to use the house, not to own it. In many countries, public or private land such as forests, mountains and beaches approximate commons since they can be used freely by visitors for camping, making fires, or picking berries, mushrooms or nuts. The commons, then, is what can be freely used, regardless of who owns it.


Clarification 2: The difference between the commons and the public sphere

Many who use the word "commons" focus on the economic aspects of the commons, on its opposition to capitalism and private propoerty (e.g. the fine articles by Nick Dyer-Witheford available here). Here I will highlight the political aspect of the commons by focusing on the relation between the commons and the public sphere.

Affirming what I have called commons or no-man’s land is not incompatible with endorsing a public sphere. To a large extent the public is of course a common, since speech and debate is freed up for circulation (as long as it doesn’t come with copyright). More importantly, the commons is what endows the public sphere with its best and most sympathetic trait: the idea of an arena without hierarchies in which anyone is welcome to participate. My argument for that can be read below. This argument also suggests that the commons is what nourishes the public sphere, the source of the constant renewals without which it would stagnate.

The “public sphere” is, however, a narrower notion than that of a “commons” in three respects.

Firstly, the term “public sphere” evokes a specific form of verbal interaction, namely rational deliberation on shared concerns among citizens, the outcome of which is the “general will”. The sphere of work, family and everyday life, by contrast, are consigned to the private sphere, a sphere in which our statements are denuded of general relevance and whatever we do is our business alone. Compared to the “public” the “commons” is a much wider concept, since it includes not only language and discussion but also nature, environment, all kinds of resources that can be used, the items and activities of a shared everyday life, the toil of work as well as that of festivities. It allows for the expression and manifestation of life, whereas the “public” generally demands that we "behave", that we bracket whatever is private and not of common concern.

Secondly, while one of the chief characteristics of the “public” according to Habermas is its opposition to state power, the commons is much more: any form of shared life partakes of the commons. Intriguingly, the commons appears to work as a concept without having to be counterpoised to anything corresponding to the “private”. Indeed, it is often used in ways that suggest that it includes many of the areas of life – daily life, the economic activities of production and consumption – that are usually considered private.

Thirdly, the “public sphere” has never ceased to be accused of foul play: of complicity with order, of reproducing social hierarchies, of excluding women, slaves, the working classes, foreigners, children, all groups considered beneath the dignity of responsible male bourgeois citizens. In short, of being a club for the privileged. Not only are people excluded. We also see an exclusion of “unworthy” topics, of “unserious” media, of dialects and sociolects (and entire languages), of times and places deemed unfit for serious discussion, and so on. These exclusions contradict the universalistic ideal of openness, but ultimately follow from the fact that public sphere is constituted by, or founded on, a distinction between public and private and on an exclusion of the private. Although the content of exclusion is variable, exclusion as such will probably remain endemic to the public sphere as long as it founds itself on a separation from the private.

Oh sure, there has been lots of resistance too towards this exclusion. The “private” has always reappeared with a vengeance, idealized on the one hand as a “sheltered island” and feared on the other as the unruly abode of the excluded. Think of the working class cafés functioning as “incubators of revolt” (Haine 1996) or the “subaltern counter-publics” that so often have provided disgruntled minorities with “bases and training grounds for agitational activities” (Frazer 1992:124). Typically, these resistances have resulted in an expansion of the public, in the lifting up of topics to be treated in public discussion from the private sphere to which they had been relegated (“the personal is political”), in apparently ever closer approximations of the Ideale Sprechsituation. However, although the borderline between public and private has repeatedly been challenged and renegotiated, the distinction as such has remained firmly in place. It is as if, already from the beginning, as soon as we began thinking the notion of a “public”, the stage was set for a dialectics to unfold whereby the subaltern or excluded would take refuge in the private only to return, emboldened and empowered, to claim their rightful place in the mainstream public and thereby expand its limits without ever abolishing them.

This dialectic cannot be found in the commons. The common does not exclude. It’s where you end up after you are excluded. It’s where the zabbaleen are looking for garbage, where the homeless sleep. It’s what’s left. It’s what always accepts you, no matter how poor it is or how poor you are. It’s where you don’t need keys.

Note that many of the things, and activities found in the commons – take sleeping or eating on the street – are not only distinct from what you find in respectable “public” intercourse. They are also liberated from their confinement in the private. Let’s say that you want to be alone: if you can lock the door around you, then that’s private space, but if not, then it’s the commons. So: how do you do to ensure that you’re not disturbed? Either you walk up into the mountains, or else you ask the others to let you be alone for a while. In either case, you’re in the commons. You manage without keys.


Clarification 3: The persistence of the commons within the public sphere

Here the argument is going to be a bit intricate. I mentioned that the commons somehow inhered in the public sphere, as what constituted the core or foundation of the freedom, egalitarianism and openness which we associate with the idea of the public sphere. This openness and egalitarianism is not simply an ideological pretense but also expressive of a certain “truth-content” which in reality is often betrayed.

Here’s the first step of my argument. To put it simply, we need to relativize the usual explanations of why the public would be a well-spring of freedom, egalitarianism or openness. In the canonical account by Habermas, this potential is located above all in the force of reason inherent in language or communication, in the fact that whatever is said will survive critical scrutiny only to the extent that it is supported by good arguments. Whenever we try to achieve understanding through communication, we let ourselves be guided by the ideal of a free and egalitarian discussion in which no-one concerned is excluded. There is thus a tendency in language itself to counteract the distortions of the public sphere. To Habermas, the liberating potential of the public sphere is therefore located in language. The more that is transposed from the realm of unquestioned belief to the realm of communication, the greater the emancipatory effect will be. To Arendt too, the freedom inherent in the political act is inseparable from the word, from public speech. “Only sheer violence is mute” (Arendt 1958:178).

My criticism of Habermas and Arendt here will be very mild. All I want to add to their account is the word “sometimes”. Discussion is the best way to increase freedom and equality, but only sometimes. A very easy way to make this point would be to refer to Albert O. Hirschman: sometimes our freedom is best furthered not by “voice” but by “exit”, by deserting rather than protesting. Here, however, I will try to advance a slightly different argument since I’m more interested in where the emancipatory potential of the public sphere actually originates than in attacking the belief in the benefits of communication per se.

My next step is to make a very simple point: even Habermas, in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, mentions a source of freedom and egalitarianism in the emerging public sphere of the 18th century that has nothing to do with language per se. In the coffee houses, salons and Tischgesellschaften, he writes, status was disregarded in social intercourse. The nobility and grande bourgeoisie “met with the ‘intellectuals’ on an equal footing”, and the “sons of princes associated with sons of watchmakers and shopkeepers” (Habermas 1989:33). Neither social hierarchies nor economic dependencies were supposed to have any influence on the discussions, which at least in principle were left solely to the “authority of the better argument”. This certainly indicates the ascendancy over traditional status of communicative reason, to use the term which Habermas would later make famous. Here we should point out, however, that this semblance of equality was also simultaneously the result of a systematic bracketing of status. Space for rational discussion was created by leaving things unsaid. To put it concisely: an important source of freedom and openness in the public sphere was silence.

The realization that bracketing is crucial for freedom can be found in Arendt too, when she points out that participation in public life requires a form of theatre or play-acting. “Theatre”, she says, is the political art par excellence (Arendt 1958:188). The public is the realm to which people, who are normally deeply embedded in a variety of dependencies, withdraw in order to meet as equals, where they engage so to speak as abstract citizens, stripped of the power-relations in real life. This doesn’t mean that public life is “fake” or divorced from reality. On the contrary, to Arendt play-acting is essential for the constitution of the perhaps most emphatic reality we will ever know, the public realm in which we make ourselves visible to the world. “Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest form of intimate life – the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses – lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence...” (ibid 50). Paradoxically, the only way we can become “visible” as political beings, is by keeping our concrete social circumstances and our rootedness in economic and biological necessity invisible.

The public realm is therefore not constituted by communication alone, but rather by a delicate balance between what is said and what is unsaid, by what is visible and what is not.

To avoid misunderstanding, let me underline that the unsaid is not at all mysterious or ineffable. It is silence only from the point of view of the public that excludes it or pretends not to hear it. It is the sound of daily life – the trivial speech that surrounds us like air, the murmur that never makes it to the public, but which nevertheless structures daily life. It is everything said in jest, every irresponsible remark; it is all the speech by which we litter our everyday lives. It’s the criticism that’s too controversial to be “taken seriously”. It can be abrasive speech, garrulous speech, tactless speech, indecent speech, speech with the wrong accent or in the wrong dialect – everything that must be bracketed in order for speech to attain the dignity of public speech.

The best account of this balance between said and unsaid is Georg Simmel’s classical analysis of play and sociability in the salons of the haute bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. In the witty conversations and the coquetry differences in status or wealth were tactfully disregarded. Interaction had a “democratic” character, since everybody behaved as if they were equal. This interaction has the character of play since it aimed at nothing but the success of the sociable moment itself, separating itself from the "objective interests" of the real social world. “Wealth, social position, erudition, fame, exceptional capabilities and merits, may not play any part in sociability”, and “the purely and deeply personal traits of one’s life, character, mood, and fate must likewise be eliminated” (Simmel 1964:46). In other words, the democratic semblance of equality is premised on a systematic bracketing of the real world, on a leaving things unsaid. At the same time, this pretense is fragile. It breaks down whenever social reality reasserts itself - through lack of tact, by bringing up too "serious" subjects for discussion, or by falling in love. It works best when interaction takes place within the same social stratum, and breaks down if class differences are too great.

The democratic semblance is not entirely ideological. As we recall, it is exactly what Habermas extolled as a quality of the early bourgeois public sphere where the nobility would interact with intellectuals and watchmakers on an equal footing. The sociability of salons, cafés or pubs distance themselves from social reality, but at the same time create an atmosphere in which life in social reality can be viewed through a kind of Utopian distortion, as something that can be changed according to the playful imagination unfolding in the public discussions. An inebriated soberness is created in which we get a taste of how human relations without wealth or power might look. The lightness of a sociability divorced from the seriousness of social reality paradoxically means that you are for ever tempted to commit yourself, to fall in love or to become a revolutionary.

Similar mechanisms of bracketing appear to be crucial in all large-scale arenas that have a semblance of egalitarianism. What they all have in common is that they abstract from large areas of social reality, offering at least temporary relief from that realiy. Thus every game creates its own free zones of things it does not thematize. Chess, lottary and soccer allow you to forget about status, wealth or ethnicity. Games creates “equality” in the sense of a separation from the hierarchies of the real or secular order, but can also give rise to new forms of inequality by virtue of their own rules.

We can even generalize a step further: We participate in an arena not only because of what it highlights, its officially stated aim, but also because of what it leaves in the shade. As Simmel points out, the prominent economic role of minority groups like Jews, Armenians or the Parsis can be explained by the fact that the market brackets ethnicity. Karatani Kôjin argues that a similar mechanism holds true for politics. What protects the dissidents and the minorities from the revenge of the powerful, he points out, is not rational debate but anonymity. The “liberal” principle of anonymous voting, along with mechanisms for preventing the concentration of power, are more important than the “democratic” principle of common deliberation. The public is constituted by a freedom to keep silent and not to be a subject, just as much as it is constituted by the freedom of expression and of being a subject (Karatani 1999:128f).

I think the point is clear enough: much of the freedom, openness, egalitarianism and sense of empowerment that can be experienced by participating in the public sphere derives not from the “said” as such, but at least as much from what is “unsaid”. The reason is that a public in which people are allowed to participate on an equal footing can only come into being through bracketing.

What is unsaid is also what is left outside official discourse: unwanted, unidentified, without social definition.

This in turn means that the public sphere itself can only come into being by actively creating socially undefined domains. Such domains are what I have called no-man's-land or commons. They are domains that become off-limits to and unregulated by public speech, and whose fate becomes entrusted to the murmur of daily life.

The commons therefore persists indelibly in the public sphere.

The unsaid is not only the excluded flipside of public communication, but it also a condition and a source of the latter. Excluded, but at the same time reproduced and protected by the public sphere, the common is crucial to the latter’s vitality in two respects. Firstly, creating a commons outside of itself is a precondition of the semblance of openness and equality in the public sphere. As mentioned, this semblance is not totally ideological since it always involves the temptation to realize this equality in the real life of the surrounding society itself.

Secondly, the murmurings of the commons are the seedbed of what may one day become public speech – the speech of subalterns having had enough. This tactless reappearance of the subaltern in public brings about the collapse of the semblance of democratic equality, but also opens up the possibility of political struggle, of a participation in public that is no longer premised on the semblance of equality, and which lifts the reality of inequality up into the realm of the "said" only in order to denounce it. This too contributes to the public, to a better public. The commons is indispensible whenever opposition is to be renewed and counter-publics born. It is what helps turn the public into an arena of political struggle.


Clarification 4: Muen, public, and commons

It is because the commons is so crucial to the public sphere that Amino Yoshihiko can see muen – which I associated with no-man’s-land or the commons in my earlier post – as predecessors of a public sphere in Japan. At first sight this might seem bizarre, since muen didn’t have much to do with public deliberation or rational debate (the practice of kôron, a form of rational debate among monks, was an exception). It did, however, have much to do with bracketing: the cutting off of status relation and all other secular bonds of feudal society, and the semblance of the equality of all living beings in the eyes of Buddha. This bracketing, as I have shown, is just as crucial to the public as communication. Furthermore, bracketing is not only functional for the maintaining a “democratic pretense”, but also for generating movements challenging the established order. Just as salons, cafés and pubs were incubators of revolt, Amino believes that muen inspired the ikki, rebellious federations in late medieval Japan with a strong element of egalitarianism.


Clarification 5: The commons and no-man’s-land

All of what I’ve written so far about the commons also holds for no-man’s-land. However, there may be a point in keeping the two concepts separate. To put it simply, the commons is usually imagined as a space in which the question of sharing is more or less solved, in which people have already agreed, implicitly or explicitly, to let a resource to used freely. I picture no-man’s-land as a slightly wider concept that would also include the wilderness, a space in which nothing is yet resolved. No-man’s-land does not necessarily give birth to a commons. Interaction in no-man’s-land can also take the form of war.


References

Amino, Yoshihiko (1996a) Muen-Kugai-Raku: Nihon chûsei no jiyû to heiwa (Muen, Kugai, Raku: Freedom and Peace in Medieval Japan), Tokyo: Heibonsha.

Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick (2006) “The Circulation of the Common”.

Frazer, Nancy (1992) “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”, pp 109-42, in Calhoun, Craig (ed) Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Habermas, Jürgen (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Haine, W. Scott (1996) The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789-1914, Baltimore & London: The John Hopkins University Press.

Hirschman, Albert O. (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Harvard University Press.

Karatani, Kôjin (1999) Hyûmoa to shite no yuibutsuron (Materialism as humour), Tokyo: Kôdansha gakujutsu bunko

Lessig, Lawrence (2007) “The Vision for the Creative Commons: What are We and Where are We Headed? Free Culture”, pp 36-49, in Fitzgerald, Brian (ed) Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons, Sydney: Sydney University Press.

Simmel, Georg (1964) “Sociability: An example of Pure, or Formal Sociology”, pp 40-57, in The Sociology of Georg Simmel (ed. Kurt H. Wolff), London: The Free Press.