1. The Twofold Arbitrariness of Pedagogic Action
"1. All pedagogic action (PA) is, objectively, symbolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power."
- PAs - can include that of diffuse education, family education, institutionalized education
- Applies to "any social formation, understood as a system of power relations and sense relations between groups or classes"
"1.1 PA is, objectively, symbolic violence: first insofar as the power relations between the groups or classes making up a social formation are the basis of the arbitrary power which is the precondition for the establishment of a relation of pedagogic communication, i.e. for the imposition and inculcation of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary mode of imposition and inculcation (education)."
- PA is symbolic violence (SV) in that:
-- Power relations (PR) between groups or classes (G/C) making up a social formation (SF) are the basis of the arbitrary power (AP), the precondition for the est. of a pedagogic communication relation (PCR).
-- Biological dimension of pedagogic imposition (PI) is not non-existent, but social determinations which specify PCR must be accounted for.
1.1.2 - PA's specifically symbolic effect (SSE) can only be produced when social conditions (SC) for imposition and inculcation are provided
1.1.3 - The PA placed in dominant PA (DPA) position within system of PA's (SPA) is "the one which most fully, thought always indirectly, corresponds to the objective interests (material, symbolic, and, in the respect considered here, pedagogic) of the dominant groups or classes, both by its mode of imposition and by its delimitation of what and on whom, it imposes."
- The structure of power relations (PR) and symbolic relations (SR) between pedagogic agencies define the symbolic strength of a pedagogic agency
- This structure expresses the PR between G/C making up the SF
- "It is through the mediation of this effect of domination by the dominant PA that the different PAs carried on within the different groups or classes objectively and indirectly collaborate in the dominance of the dominant classes."
Monday, October 25, 2010
RESC - Book I - 4
"O. Every power to exert symbolic violence, i.e. every power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations with are the basis of its force, adds its own specifically symbolic force to those power relations."
- Gloss 1: To refuse this axiom is to deny the possibility of sociology: all theories built on the basis of other axioms lead to
-- the rooting of symbolic action (SA) in the creative freedom of individuals
-- the annihilation of SA - refusing its autonomy from material conditions of existence (MCE)
- Gloss 1: To refuse this axiom is to deny the possibility of sociology: all theories built on the basis of other axioms lead to
-- the rooting of symbolic action (SA) in the creative freedom of individuals
-- the annihilation of SA - refusing its autonomy from material conditions of existence (MCE)
Bourdieu and Passeron - Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (RESC)
Book I - Foundations of a Theory of Symbolic Violence 1
Book II - Keeping Order 69
-1 Cultural Capital and Pedagogic Communication 71
-2 The Literate Tradition and Social Conservation 107
-3 Exclusion and Selection 141
-4 Dependence through Independence 177
Legend:
PA - pedagogic action
PAu - pedagogic authority
PW - pedagogic work
SAu - school authority
ES - educational system
WSg - the work of schooling
Book II - Keeping Order 69
-1 Cultural Capital and Pedagogic Communication 71
-2 The Literate Tradition and Social Conservation 107
-3 Exclusion and Selection 141
-4 Dependence through Independence 177
Legend:
PA - pedagogic action
PAu - pedagogic authority
PW - pedagogic work
SAu - school authority
ES - educational system
WSg - the work of schooling
Fraser - Rethinking the Public Sphere
I shall begin, in section one, by juxtaposing Habermas's account of the structural transformation of the public sphere to an alternative account that can be pieced together from some
recent revisionist historiography. Then, I shall identify four assumptions
underlying the bourgeois conception of public sphere, as Habermas de-
scribes it, which this newer historiography renders suspect. Next, in the
following four sections, I shall examine each of these assumptions in turn.
Finally, in a brief conclusion, I shall draw together some strands from
these critical discussions that point toward an alternative, post-bourgeois
conception of the public sphere.
---
JH's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
- Notion of the PubS
- crucial concept to clear up confusions regarding the difference between ST.Ap.s and PubArenas of CitDisc/Assoc.
- conflation enabled the effective institutionalization of the socialist vision in authoritarian statist form, instead of Part.Dem. form.
- Within Contem.Fems.
- Pubs - often taken to mean everything outside the domestic/familial sphere
- Conflates ST, official ECO., and Pubs
- Practical consequences of conflation - struggles over women's liberation fail to address potential resubjugation, instead of family, to ST or ECO
JH's PubS
- "designates a theatre in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk. It is the space in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs, hence, an institutionalized arena of discursive interaction."
- conceptually distinct from ST - site for prod./circulation of discourses
- can be critical of the state
- distinct from ECO
- arena for discursive relations - theatre for debating and deliberating, rather than buying selling
JH's subtitle - "An Inquiry into a Category of a Bourgeois Society"
- aim is to identify the specific conditions which enabled the rise of a specific form of the PubS
- upshot: under distinct condtions, the Welfare state mass democracy - WSMD - old Pubs not feasible
---
According to JH
Idea of PubS - body of private persons assembled to discuss matters of public concern / common interest
- Acquired force in early modern Europe - Bourgeois Pubs - BPubs - to serve as counterweights to absolutist states
- To mediate b/w Soc and ST - hold ST accountable to Soc thru "publicity"
- Thru:
- free access of info. re: ST functioning - subject to PubO
- later - transmission considered general interest to ST via free speech, press, assembly, then Rep.Gov.
- PubS - institutional mechanism for rationalizing of political domination - rendering states accountable to some of the citizenry
- Also referred to specific kind of interaction
- Discussion open to all
- Merely private interests to be inadmissable
- Inequalities of status to be bracketed
- Discussants to deliberate as peers
- Result to be PubO - consensus about the common good
Full Utopian Potential - Never Realized
- Open access - never made good
- Premised on SocO in which ST | Soc
- Allowed for exclusion of private interests
- Undermined when other strata of society included
- The "social question" came to fore - polarization by class struggle
- Street demos and backroom compromises replaced PubDeb
- With WSMD - Soc - ST intertwined
- Publicity - became public relations, manufacture of PubO
According to Revisionist Historiography
JH idealizes LPubS
- Official Pubs - rested on / constituted by exclusions
- especially - gender
- constructed in opposition to salon culture - stigmatized as artificial, effeminate, aristocratic
- republican PubS - as rational, virtuous, manly - masculinist gender constructs built into the very conception of the RPubs
- other exclusions
- soil which nourished LPubS - CSoc
- network of clubs/associations not accessible to all
- the arena for stratum of BMen coming to see themselves as universal class - preparing to assert fitness to govervn.
- distinctive culture of CSoc - process of BClass formation - practices defined emerging elite
- distinguished itself from both aristocracy and popular/plebian strata it aspired to rule
- also helped explains women's exclusion - distinction bw PubPri - key signifiers
Irony - discourse of publicity touting accessibility, along with rationality, suspension of status hierarchies - deployed as a strategy of distinction
- Not fatal to project itself, but does suggest complexity between publicity and status
Other PubS
- JH - will not discuss plebeian PubS - understands it to be ephemeral phenomena during FR, nor the plebiscitary-acclamatory PubS of highly dev. industrial societies.
- Women of various classes /ethnicities - constructed access routes to public political life
- For BWomen - counter-CivSoc of alternative woman-only assocations
- For less privileged women - access thru participation thru support roles of male protest activities
- In absence of formal incorporation through suffrage - variety of ways of accessing PubLife and a multiplicity of public arenas
- view of women's exclusion based on class and gender biased notion of publicity
- implicitly accepts BPubs to be the public
- Never the public
- Always competing counterpublics
- Relations always conflictual - elaborated alternative styles of political behavior, alternative norms of speech
- Emergence of BPubs - never solely defined by struggle against traditional authority and absolutism
- addressed the problem of public containment
In contrast to JH's view - exclusions not merely accidental trappings but constitutive
- Consideration of which - "a gestalt switch that alters the very meaning of the public sphere"
- Not simply an unrealized ideal - a masculinist ideological notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule"
- Emergence of PubS - a transformation in the nature of political domination
- Reflects shift from repression to hegemony
- Like repression-based mode of rule - secures ability of one stratum to rule another
- Gramscian lesson - PubS produce consent thru circulation of discourse that construct the common sense, represent the existing order as natural/just. In mature form, PubS permit most people most of the time to recognize themselves in its discourses - even those ultimately disadvantaged by social construction of consent.
Conclusions? Instrument of domination or utopian ideal
- Perhaps both, actually neither
- The revisionist historiography neither undermines nor vindicates the concept of PubS as such. Calls into question assumptions central to the BMPubs
1. since inequalities can be bracketed, social equality is not necessary for democracy
2. the proliferation of PubS is a step away from democracy, one single comp. PubS better to multiple publics
3. deliberation should be limited to common good - private interests, issues not acceptable
4. the functioning of DPubS requires separation between CivSoc and ST
1. Accessibility of all to Pubs in JH's account - central meaning of publicity
- Never actually realized -> question what to make of ideal now that it can, conceivably, put into effect
- Only a matter of time before exclusions overcome - ideal remains unaffected
- Issue can't be reduced to determining whether formal exclusions are still in place - look at process of discursive interaction with the formally inclusive arenas
- individuals were to bracket out difference in order to interact as if they were peers
- differences not effectively bracketed - governed by protocols of style and decorum which were markers and correlates of status inequality
- informal impediments to participatory parity
- fem.pol.theorists - deliberation as mask for domination
- transformation of I intor we can easily mask subtle forms of control
- language used for reasoning favors one way of seeing things, discourages others
- subordinate groups are unable to find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, or when they do, discover they are not heard
- Fostering participatory parity
- Not accomplished thru bracketing of differences
- In most case, more appropriate to unbracket inequalities in the sense of explicitly thematizing them
- Bracketing seems to imply that "a public sphere is or can be a space of zero degree culture, so utterly bereft of any specific ethos as to accomodate with perfect neutrality and equal ease interventions expressive of any and every cultural ethos"
- counterfactual nature of assumption - not accidental
- in stratified societies, unequally empowered social groups tend to develop unequally valued cultural styles
- effect is that powerful informal pressures marginalize the contributions of members of subordinated groups
- pressures are amplified by the PolEco of BPubs - media which constitute the material support for the circulation of views are not accessible by subordinated social grpus
- PolEco enforces structurally what culture accomplishes informally
What is at stake - autonomy of specifically Pol institutions in relation to surrounding societal context
- LPolTheory assumes such an autonomy, and the possibility for democracy on basis of socio-economic/sexual structures that generate systemic inequalities
- Weight of circumstance suggest that deliberation as peers - the achievement of rough equality is necessary, rather than the bracketing of inequality, to counter systematically-generated relations of dominance and subordination
2.
- Past-discussion could be regarded as intrapublic relations - relations within a given PubS
- Now - interpublic relations - those among different publics
Habermas's account - singularity of the B conception of PubS - the public arena
- underlying evaluative assumption - institutional confinement of public life to single PubS is positive, desirable SOA
- and so, proliferation of publics represents departure from dem.
If full parity of participation is not possible, what comes closest to that ideal?
- In stratified societies - arrangements that accomodate contestation among a plurality of competing publics better promote participatory parity than one single overarching public
- Not only does a single PubS fail to bracket effects of inequalities, these effects are exacerbated
- subordinated groups have not arenas for deliberation among themselves about their needs, objectives, strategies
- without such venues, which lack the supervision of dominant groups, they would be less likely to find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, are more likely to keep their wants inchoate, and unmask the false 'we'
Subaltern counterpublics
- in past, subordinated social groups have found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics
- parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses - permit formulation of oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, needs
- not always necessarily virtuous - some explicitly anti-democractic, anti-egalitarian, may practice own forms of informal exclusion and marginalization
- "Still, insofar as these counterpublics emerge in response to exclusions within dominant publics, they help expand discursive space"
- Assumptions previously exempt from contestation will have to be publicly argued out
Not an argument for separatism
- the concept of a counterpublic - against separatism because it assumes an orientation that is publicist
- publics are by definition not enclaves - although these are often involuntarily enclaved
- to interact as a member of a public is to disseminate one's discourse into an ever widening arena
- members understand themselves as part of a wider public - counterfactual body "the public at large"
Dual character of counterpublics
- function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment
- function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics
- Dialectic between these two functions - emancipatory potential resides
- enables subaltern counterpublics partially to offset, not wholly to eradicate the unjust participatory privileges enjoyed by members of dominant social groups in stratified societies
Contestation between publics
- supposes inter-public interaction
- Ely - Pubs in stratified societies - "'the structured setting where cultural and ideological contest or negotiation among a variety of publics takes place'"
- PubSs
- PubSs situtated ina single structured setting that advantages some and not others
- discursive contestation likey to be form of deliberation
In egalitarian societies
- absence of class, racial and gender DoL doesn't mean absence of cultural differnces
Public discourse and social identities
- PubS not merely arenas for discursive opinion formation
- arenas for the formation and enactment of social identities
- participation is not the ability to state propositional contents that are neutral with respect to forms of expression
- participation - the ability to speak in one's own voice - simultaneously constructing and expressive one's cultural identity thorugh idiom and style
PubS - culturally specific institutions
- institutions may be seen as culturally specific rhetorical lenses - filter and alter utterances they frame
- can accomodate some expressive modes, not others
- institutionalization of one PubS - filtering diverse rhetorical and stylistic norms through single, overarching lens
- effectively privlege the norms of one cultural group - requiring assimilation for participation
Inter-public, comprehensive public interaction
- wider debate required for issues which affect everyone
- question as to whether participants would share enough in way of values, expressive norms, protocols to enable deliberation
- not impossible in principle, more plausible if we accept complexity of identities
- even starkly different identities may share common strands
- in conditions of equality, porousness, outer-directedness, open-endedness of PubS could promote inter-cultural comm.
- plurality of POVs presupposed in Pubs, internal differences allowed, discouragement of reified blocs
- unbounded character / publicist orientation of publis - allows for the fact that people participate in more than one public, memberships may partially overlap
3.
Scope of publicity in relation to privacy - object of contestation
Publicity can mean
- state-related; accessible to all; of concern to all; pertaining to common good, shared interest
- each aspect has corresponding notion of privacy
- private can also mean - pertaining to private property, pertaining to domestic, personal, sexual life
-pertaining to common good
- ambiguous - observer's POV - what has objective affect on all or participants' POV - what is recognized as being a matter of common concern by participants
- if idea of PubS is meant to describe an arena of collective self-determination - appeal to observer perspective to delimit its proper boundaries doesn't sit well
- while only participants can decide what's of concern, no guarantee that there will be agreement
- no naturally given, a priori boundaries
- publicity as common good/shared interest - civic republican model
- stresses people reasoning together to promote common good which transcends mere sum of individual preferences
- common good created or disocvered, participants transformed from private individuals to public-spirited collectivity, capable of acting together in the common interest
- private interests either have no place in deliberation, or are merely a starting point of deliberation
- in contrast to LPubs - doesn't assume people's preferences, interests, identities are given exogenously in advance
- these are as much outcomes as antecedents of public deliberation
- critical edge of CRPubs - conflates ideas of deliberation and common good - assumes that del. is framed from standpoint of a "we" - claims of self-interest and group interest are out of order
- less powerful are less able to discover that the sense of we doesn't adequately include them
- common good may be the outcome, as the possibility that differences are real - outcome can't be presumed in advance
- even in egalitarian societies, conflicts of interests may be real, which holds all the more for societies in which the systemic profit of some comes with the systemic detriment of others
- prima facie reason to suspect postulation of a common good
Other meanings of private - pertaining to the market or the family
- Such distinctions exclude issues of debate by personalizing/familializing or economizing them
- Enclaves certain matters - shields them from public debate / contestation - usually to disadvantage of subordinates
4.
Two possible interpretations of the need for separation of ST from CivSoc to make it effective
1. to insist on the need for classical liberal distinction - privacy is meant the privately-ordered capitalist economy
- dismissed with arguments above w/:
- laissez-faire capitalism doesn't foster socio-economic equality
- separation impedes deliberation, rather than enables it
2. civ.soc. - NGAssociations - neither economic or adminstrative
- JH - LPubS - body of private person assembled to form a public - private here meaning non-state officials
- participation in non-state capacity
- doesn't result in decisions - rather eventuates in PubO - deMa that transpires elsewhere
- serves as counterweight to the ST
- extragovernmental quality - independence, autonomy, L of PubO
- weak public
- in BPubS - expansion of PubS authority to include deMa as well as OF - threatens autonomy of PubO
- lack of distinction bw the two - loss of critical discursive check
- major structural transformation - the dev. of Parliament as a PubS within the ST
- strong public - encompass both OF and deMa
- blurs separation of CivSoc and ST
- democratic advance - force of PubO becomes stronger when body representing it is empowered to transform O into De
Relation bw StPub and WePub
- possible proliferation of StPub - as self-managing institutions
- creation of sites of direct / quasi-direct dem.
- leaves open relation of InternalPubs and ExternalPubs - what about those indirectly affected or that have a stake in their decisions
Strict division bw ST and CivSoc - makes impossible questioning of different arrangements
- whether strong internal pub requires balancing by strong external pub, supplemented with smaller weaker pub
- how should the rules for interaction / coordination among these be determined
Tasks of Critical Theory
1. should render visible ways which social inequality taints deliberation
2. show how inequality affects relations among publics - how publics are differentially empowered / segmented /enclaved / subordinated
3. show how labeling of private limits problems and approaches which can be contested
4. show how overly weak character of some pubs denudes PubO of practical force
recent revisionist historiography. Then, I shall identify four assumptions
underlying the bourgeois conception of public sphere, as Habermas de-
scribes it, which this newer historiography renders suspect. Next, in the
following four sections, I shall examine each of these assumptions in turn.
Finally, in a brief conclusion, I shall draw together some strands from
these critical discussions that point toward an alternative, post-bourgeois
conception of the public sphere.
---
JH's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
- Notion of the PubS
- crucial concept to clear up confusions regarding the difference between ST.Ap.s and PubArenas of CitDisc/Assoc.
- conflation enabled the effective institutionalization of the socialist vision in authoritarian statist form, instead of Part.Dem. form.
- Within Contem.Fems.
- Pubs - often taken to mean everything outside the domestic/familial sphere
- Conflates ST, official ECO., and Pubs
- Practical consequences of conflation - struggles over women's liberation fail to address potential resubjugation, instead of family, to ST or ECO
JH's PubS
- "designates a theatre in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk. It is the space in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs, hence, an institutionalized arena of discursive interaction."
- conceptually distinct from ST - site for prod./circulation of discourses
- can be critical of the state
- distinct from ECO
- arena for discursive relations - theatre for debating and deliberating, rather than buying selling
JH's subtitle - "An Inquiry into a Category of a Bourgeois Society"
- aim is to identify the specific conditions which enabled the rise of a specific form of the PubS
- upshot: under distinct condtions, the Welfare state mass democracy - WSMD - old Pubs not feasible
---
According to JH
Idea of PubS - body of private persons assembled to discuss matters of public concern / common interest
- Acquired force in early modern Europe - Bourgeois Pubs - BPubs - to serve as counterweights to absolutist states
- To mediate b/w Soc and ST - hold ST accountable to Soc thru "publicity"
- Thru:
- free access of info. re: ST functioning - subject to PubO
- later - transmission considered general interest to ST via free speech, press, assembly, then Rep.Gov.
- PubS - institutional mechanism for rationalizing of political domination - rendering states accountable to some of the citizenry
- Also referred to specific kind of interaction
- Discussion open to all
- Merely private interests to be inadmissable
- Inequalities of status to be bracketed
- Discussants to deliberate as peers
- Result to be PubO - consensus about the common good
Full Utopian Potential - Never Realized
- Open access - never made good
- Premised on SocO in which ST | Soc
- Allowed for exclusion of private interests
- Undermined when other strata of society included
- The "social question" came to fore - polarization by class struggle
- Street demos and backroom compromises replaced PubDeb
- With WSMD - Soc - ST intertwined
- Publicity - became public relations, manufacture of PubO
According to Revisionist Historiography
JH idealizes LPubS
- Official Pubs - rested on / constituted by exclusions
- especially - gender
- constructed in opposition to salon culture - stigmatized as artificial, effeminate, aristocratic
- republican PubS - as rational, virtuous, manly - masculinist gender constructs built into the very conception of the RPubs
- other exclusions
- soil which nourished LPubS - CSoc
- network of clubs/associations not accessible to all
- the arena for stratum of BMen coming to see themselves as universal class - preparing to assert fitness to govervn.
- distinctive culture of CSoc - process of BClass formation - practices defined emerging elite
- distinguished itself from both aristocracy and popular/plebian strata it aspired to rule
- also helped explains women's exclusion - distinction bw PubPri - key signifiers
Irony - discourse of publicity touting accessibility, along with rationality, suspension of status hierarchies - deployed as a strategy of distinction
- Not fatal to project itself, but does suggest complexity between publicity and status
Other PubS
- JH - will not discuss plebeian PubS - understands it to be ephemeral phenomena during FR, nor the plebiscitary-acclamatory PubS of highly dev. industrial societies.
- Women of various classes /ethnicities - constructed access routes to public political life
- For BWomen - counter-CivSoc of alternative woman-only assocations
- For less privileged women - access thru participation thru support roles of male protest activities
- In absence of formal incorporation through suffrage - variety of ways of accessing PubLife and a multiplicity of public arenas
- view of women's exclusion based on class and gender biased notion of publicity
- implicitly accepts BPubs to be the public
- Never the public
- Always competing counterpublics
- Relations always conflictual - elaborated alternative styles of political behavior, alternative norms of speech
- Emergence of BPubs - never solely defined by struggle against traditional authority and absolutism
- addressed the problem of public containment
In contrast to JH's view - exclusions not merely accidental trappings but constitutive
- Consideration of which - "a gestalt switch that alters the very meaning of the public sphere"
- Not simply an unrealized ideal - a masculinist ideological notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule"
- Emergence of PubS - a transformation in the nature of political domination
- Reflects shift from repression to hegemony
- Like repression-based mode of rule - secures ability of one stratum to rule another
- Gramscian lesson - PubS produce consent thru circulation of discourse that construct the common sense, represent the existing order as natural/just. In mature form, PubS permit most people most of the time to recognize themselves in its discourses - even those ultimately disadvantaged by social construction of consent.
Conclusions? Instrument of domination or utopian ideal
- Perhaps both, actually neither
- The revisionist historiography neither undermines nor vindicates the concept of PubS as such. Calls into question assumptions central to the BMPubs
1. since inequalities can be bracketed, social equality is not necessary for democracy
2. the proliferation of PubS is a step away from democracy, one single comp. PubS better to multiple publics
3. deliberation should be limited to common good - private interests, issues not acceptable
4. the functioning of DPubS requires separation between CivSoc and ST
1. Accessibility of all to Pubs in JH's account - central meaning of publicity
- Never actually realized -> question what to make of ideal now that it can, conceivably, put into effect
- Only a matter of time before exclusions overcome - ideal remains unaffected
- Issue can't be reduced to determining whether formal exclusions are still in place - look at process of discursive interaction with the formally inclusive arenas
- individuals were to bracket out difference in order to interact as if they were peers
- differences not effectively bracketed - governed by protocols of style and decorum which were markers and correlates of status inequality
- informal impediments to participatory parity
- fem.pol.theorists - deliberation as mask for domination
- transformation of I intor we can easily mask subtle forms of control
- language used for reasoning favors one way of seeing things, discourages others
- subordinate groups are unable to find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, or when they do, discover they are not heard
- Fostering participatory parity
- Not accomplished thru bracketing of differences
- In most case, more appropriate to unbracket inequalities in the sense of explicitly thematizing them
- Bracketing seems to imply that "a public sphere is or can be a space of zero degree culture, so utterly bereft of any specific ethos as to accomodate with perfect neutrality and equal ease interventions expressive of any and every cultural ethos"
- counterfactual nature of assumption - not accidental
- in stratified societies, unequally empowered social groups tend to develop unequally valued cultural styles
- effect is that powerful informal pressures marginalize the contributions of members of subordinated groups
- pressures are amplified by the PolEco of BPubs - media which constitute the material support for the circulation of views are not accessible by subordinated social grpus
- PolEco enforces structurally what culture accomplishes informally
What is at stake - autonomy of specifically Pol institutions in relation to surrounding societal context
- LPolTheory assumes such an autonomy, and the possibility for democracy on basis of socio-economic/sexual structures that generate systemic inequalities
- Weight of circumstance suggest that deliberation as peers - the achievement of rough equality is necessary, rather than the bracketing of inequality, to counter systematically-generated relations of dominance and subordination
2.
- Past-discussion could be regarded as intrapublic relations - relations within a given PubS
- Now - interpublic relations - those among different publics
Habermas's account - singularity of the B conception of PubS - the public arena
- underlying evaluative assumption - institutional confinement of public life to single PubS is positive, desirable SOA
- and so, proliferation of publics represents departure from dem.
If full parity of participation is not possible, what comes closest to that ideal?
- In stratified societies - arrangements that accomodate contestation among a plurality of competing publics better promote participatory parity than one single overarching public
- Not only does a single PubS fail to bracket effects of inequalities, these effects are exacerbated
- subordinated groups have not arenas for deliberation among themselves about their needs, objectives, strategies
- without such venues, which lack the supervision of dominant groups, they would be less likely to find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, are more likely to keep their wants inchoate, and unmask the false 'we'
Subaltern counterpublics
- in past, subordinated social groups have found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics
- parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses - permit formulation of oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, needs
- not always necessarily virtuous - some explicitly anti-democractic, anti-egalitarian, may practice own forms of informal exclusion and marginalization
- "Still, insofar as these counterpublics emerge in response to exclusions within dominant publics, they help expand discursive space"
- Assumptions previously exempt from contestation will have to be publicly argued out
Not an argument for separatism
- the concept of a counterpublic - against separatism because it assumes an orientation that is publicist
- publics are by definition not enclaves - although these are often involuntarily enclaved
- to interact as a member of a public is to disseminate one's discourse into an ever widening arena
- members understand themselves as part of a wider public - counterfactual body "the public at large"
Dual character of counterpublics
- function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment
- function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics
- Dialectic between these two functions - emancipatory potential resides
- enables subaltern counterpublics partially to offset, not wholly to eradicate the unjust participatory privileges enjoyed by members of dominant social groups in stratified societies
Contestation between publics
- supposes inter-public interaction
- Ely - Pubs in stratified societies - "'the structured setting where cultural and ideological contest or negotiation among a variety of publics takes place'"
- PubSs
- PubSs situtated ina single structured setting that advantages some and not others
- discursive contestation likey to be form of deliberation
In egalitarian societies
- absence of class, racial and gender DoL doesn't mean absence of cultural differnces
Public discourse and social identities
- PubS not merely arenas for discursive opinion formation
- arenas for the formation and enactment of social identities
- participation is not the ability to state propositional contents that are neutral with respect to forms of expression
- participation - the ability to speak in one's own voice - simultaneously constructing and expressive one's cultural identity thorugh idiom and style
PubS - culturally specific institutions
- institutions may be seen as culturally specific rhetorical lenses - filter and alter utterances they frame
- can accomodate some expressive modes, not others
- institutionalization of one PubS - filtering diverse rhetorical and stylistic norms through single, overarching lens
- effectively privlege the norms of one cultural group - requiring assimilation for participation
Inter-public, comprehensive public interaction
- wider debate required for issues which affect everyone
- question as to whether participants would share enough in way of values, expressive norms, protocols to enable deliberation
- not impossible in principle, more plausible if we accept complexity of identities
- even starkly different identities may share common strands
- in conditions of equality, porousness, outer-directedness, open-endedness of PubS could promote inter-cultural comm.
- plurality of POVs presupposed in Pubs, internal differences allowed, discouragement of reified blocs
- unbounded character / publicist orientation of publis - allows for the fact that people participate in more than one public, memberships may partially overlap
3.
Scope of publicity in relation to privacy - object of contestation
Publicity can mean
- state-related; accessible to all; of concern to all; pertaining to common good, shared interest
- each aspect has corresponding notion of privacy
- private can also mean - pertaining to private property, pertaining to domestic, personal, sexual life
-pertaining to common good
- ambiguous - observer's POV - what has objective affect on all or participants' POV - what is recognized as being a matter of common concern by participants
- if idea of PubS is meant to describe an arena of collective self-determination - appeal to observer perspective to delimit its proper boundaries doesn't sit well
- while only participants can decide what's of concern, no guarantee that there will be agreement
- no naturally given, a priori boundaries
- publicity as common good/shared interest - civic republican model
- stresses people reasoning together to promote common good which transcends mere sum of individual preferences
- common good created or disocvered, participants transformed from private individuals to public-spirited collectivity, capable of acting together in the common interest
- private interests either have no place in deliberation, or are merely a starting point of deliberation
- in contrast to LPubs - doesn't assume people's preferences, interests, identities are given exogenously in advance
- these are as much outcomes as antecedents of public deliberation
- critical edge of CRPubs - conflates ideas of deliberation and common good - assumes that del. is framed from standpoint of a "we" - claims of self-interest and group interest are out of order
- less powerful are less able to discover that the sense of we doesn't adequately include them
- common good may be the outcome, as the possibility that differences are real - outcome can't be presumed in advance
- even in egalitarian societies, conflicts of interests may be real, which holds all the more for societies in which the systemic profit of some comes with the systemic detriment of others
- prima facie reason to suspect postulation of a common good
Other meanings of private - pertaining to the market or the family
- Such distinctions exclude issues of debate by personalizing/familializing or economizing them
- Enclaves certain matters - shields them from public debate / contestation - usually to disadvantage of subordinates
4.
Two possible interpretations of the need for separation of ST from CivSoc to make it effective
1. to insist on the need for classical liberal distinction - privacy is meant the privately-ordered capitalist economy
- dismissed with arguments above w/:
- laissez-faire capitalism doesn't foster socio-economic equality
- separation impedes deliberation, rather than enables it
2. civ.soc. - NGAssociations - neither economic or adminstrative
- JH - LPubS - body of private person assembled to form a public - private here meaning non-state officials
- participation in non-state capacity
- doesn't result in decisions - rather eventuates in PubO - deMa that transpires elsewhere
- serves as counterweight to the ST
- extragovernmental quality - independence, autonomy, L of PubO
- weak public
- in BPubS - expansion of PubS authority to include deMa as well as OF - threatens autonomy of PubO
- lack of distinction bw the two - loss of critical discursive check
- major structural transformation - the dev. of Parliament as a PubS within the ST
- strong public - encompass both OF and deMa
- blurs separation of CivSoc and ST
- democratic advance - force of PubO becomes stronger when body representing it is empowered to transform O into De
Relation bw StPub and WePub
- possible proliferation of StPub - as self-managing institutions
- creation of sites of direct / quasi-direct dem.
- leaves open relation of InternalPubs and ExternalPubs - what about those indirectly affected or that have a stake in their decisions
Strict division bw ST and CivSoc - makes impossible questioning of different arrangements
- whether strong internal pub requires balancing by strong external pub, supplemented with smaller weaker pub
- how should the rules for interaction / coordination among these be determined
Tasks of Critical Theory
1. should render visible ways which social inequality taints deliberation
2. show how inequality affects relations among publics - how publics are differentially empowered / segmented /enclaved / subordinated
3. show how labeling of private limits problems and approaches which can be contested
4. show how overly weak character of some pubs denudes PubO of practical force
Fraser - Rethinking Recognition
I want to argue here that we need a way of rethinking the politics of recognition in a way that can help to solve, or at least mitigate, the problems of displacement and reification. This means conceptualizing struggles for recognition so that they can be integrated with struggles for redistribution, rather than displacing and undermining them. It also means developing an account of recognition that can accommodate the full complexity of social identities, instead of one that promotes reification and separatism. Here, I propose such a rethinking of recognition.
---
Recent political developments have led to the change of the nature of political struggles, from those demanding redistribution to those which aim for recognition.
Problem of displacement - questions of recog. have not supplemented redistributive strugges, but have rather replaced them.
Problem of reification - questions of recogn. have not led to promote respectful interaction, but rather have encouraged separatism, intolerance, authoritarianism, and the dramatic simplication and reificaiton of group identities.
--
Identity model
>Hegel
- identity constructed dialogically, through process of mutual recognition
- recognition designates an ideal reciprocal relation between subjects
- each sees the other as equal and separate
- constitutive for subjectivity - requires recognition by and of another subject
- necessary for a sense of self - without which one suffers a distortion of one's relation to one's self
- Proponents of identity model of recognition
- To belong to devalued group is to be misrecognized by dom. culture
- Encounters with stigmatized gaze of culturally dom. other - internalize negative self-images, prevented from dev. healthy identity of their own
- Aim is for members to reject such images and join collectively to produce self-affirming culture of their own.
BUT! such equations of pol. of recogn. with id pol. encourages the reification of group identities
Displacing Redistribution
- Identity model posits misrecognition as free-floating harm
- Currents
c1. Ignore dist., focus on culture exclusively
c2. Appreciate seriousness of maldist.
c.1
- roots of injustice located in demeaning representations, not socially grounded
- free-floating discourses, not inst.zed significations and norms
- obsfuscate connections - strip them of social-structural underpinnings, equate it with distorted identity
c.2
- appreciates link between cultural and economic injustice, but regards the latter as being det. by the former
- maldistribution is a secondary effect of cultural hierarchies
class oppression is the result of classism
- merely the reverse of vulgar economism
- if 'purely culture' society existed - eco. inequality would be seamlessly fused with cultural hierarchy
- resolution of the latter would resolve the former
- in market based society - eco. mechanisms of dist. partially decoupled from cultural patterns of value and prestige
- neither wholly constrained by culture not subordinated to it
Reification of Identity
- Stressing need to elaborate, display authentic, self-affirming, self-generated collective identity
- places moral pressure on ind. members to conform to given group culture
- dissidence and experimentation are discouraged
- Result is simplified group-identity, denies complexity of lives, multiplicity of identifications, cross-pulls
- Serves as vehicle for misrecognition - obscures the politics of cultural identification, struggles within group for the authority to represent it
- Denies own Hegelian premises
- Implicitly denies dialogical identity formation, valorizes monologism
- Makes cultural identity auto-generated, auto-description
- Denies others are justified in viewing subjects from outside, dissenting form self-interpretation
Misrecognition as Status Subordination
Recognition as a question of social status
- what is lacking recog. is not specific group identity - the status of ind. group members as full partners in social interaction
- not misrecognition of identity leading to its deformation - but social subordination is the issue
- overcome by establishing misrecognized party as full member of society
Examination of inst. patterns of cultural value
- effects on the relative standing of social actors
- when such patterns constitute actors as peers - reciprocal recognition and status equality
- when such patterns constitute actors as inferior, excluded, wholly other, simply invisible - misrecognition and status subordination
Misrecognition
- not psychic deformation, free-standing cultural harm
- institutionalized relation of public subordination
- not simply looked down upon but denied status of full partner in social interaction
- not through feel floating representations - but rather thru institutionalized patterns
- the workings of social institutions that regulate interaction according to party-impeding cultural norms
ex. marriage laws - exclude same-sex partnerships are illegitimate, perverse
social-welfare policies - stigmatize single motehrs as sexually irresponsible scroungers
policing practices - associate certain races with criminality
- interactions are regulated by patterns that constitute certain categories are normative and other as deficient, inferior
In complex, differentiated societies
- values are institutionalized in a plurality of sites, in qualitatively different modes
- core of injustice remains the same - some social actors are consituted as less than full members
- overcoming subordination - calls for the deinstitutionalization of patterns of cultural value which impede parity, replace them with those that foster it
Ex. institutionalization of heterosexism
- root of injustice in marriage law which institutes these values
- redress requires deinstitutionalizationg
- "one way would be to grant the same recognition to gay and lesbian unions as heterosexual unions currently enjoy"
- either by decoupling marriage with entitlements, or by expanding marriage
- in principle, both would promote sexual parity and redress this instance of misrecognition
Enabling Parity
- may require unburdening subordinated parties with excessive distinctness, or acknowledging unaccounted for distinctiveness
- or focus being shifted to dominant groups, which have falsely been parading as universal
- desconstruct the terms in which attributed differences are elaborated
- doesn't accord a priori privilege to approaches which valorize group specificity
- "allows in principle for what we might call universalist recognition, and deconstructive recognition, as well as for the affirmative recognition of difference"
Addressing Maldistribution
Equal participation is also impeded when some actors lack the necessary resources to interact with others as peers
- Two dimensions of social justice - recognition and distribution (at least) - refer to distinct aspect of the social order
- Recognition - refers to the constitution by socially entrenched patterns of cultural value of defined categories of social actors
- Distribution - refers to the economic structure of society - constitution by property regimes, labor markets, of economically defined categories of actors, classes, distinguished by differential endowment of resources
Maldistribution - economic structure of society deprives actors of the resources needed for full participation
- Subordination is ecomic, rather than based on status and is rooted in the structural features of the economic system
Larger Social Frame
- Encompasses both social and economic forms of social ordering
- Two forms are interimbricated in all societies - in capitalist soc., neither is reducible to the other
- Relative decoupling of economic dimension - as in marketized areas in which strategic action predominates, from cultural dimension - as in non-marketized arenas in which value-regulated interaction predominates
Uncoupling is only relative
- Two dimensions interact causally with each other
- Distribution issues have recognition subtexts, and vice versa
- Result can be vicious circle of subordination - status order and economic structure interpenetrate and reinforce each other
Summary:
With attention to distribution, avoids short-circuting the complexity of links between status order and economic structure
- not all economic injustice can be overcome by recognition alone
Avoids reifying group identities
- avoids hypostatizing culture and substituting indentity-engineering for social change
- by refusing to privilege remedies which valorize existing group identities, avoids essentializing current configurations, foreclosing change
By emphasizing participation parity
- avoids authoritarian monologism of politics of authenticity - submits claims for recognition to democratic processes of public justification
---
Recent political developments have led to the change of the nature of political struggles, from those demanding redistribution to those which aim for recognition.
Problem of displacement - questions of recog. have not supplemented redistributive strugges, but have rather replaced them.
Problem of reification - questions of recogn. have not led to promote respectful interaction, but rather have encouraged separatism, intolerance, authoritarianism, and the dramatic simplication and reificaiton of group identities.
--
Identity model
>Hegel
- identity constructed dialogically, through process of mutual recognition
- recognition designates an ideal reciprocal relation between subjects
- each sees the other as equal and separate
- constitutive for subjectivity - requires recognition by and of another subject
- necessary for a sense of self - without which one suffers a distortion of one's relation to one's self
- Proponents of identity model of recognition
- To belong to devalued group is to be misrecognized by dom. culture
- Encounters with stigmatized gaze of culturally dom. other - internalize negative self-images, prevented from dev. healthy identity of their own
- Aim is for members to reject such images and join collectively to produce self-affirming culture of their own.
BUT! such equations of pol. of recogn. with id pol. encourages the reification of group identities
Displacing Redistribution
- Identity model posits misrecognition as free-floating harm
- Currents
c1. Ignore dist., focus on culture exclusively
c2. Appreciate seriousness of maldist.
c.1
- roots of injustice located in demeaning representations, not socially grounded
- free-floating discourses, not inst.zed significations and norms
- obsfuscate connections - strip them of social-structural underpinnings, equate it with distorted identity
c.2
- appreciates link between cultural and economic injustice, but regards the latter as being det. by the former
- maldistribution is a secondary effect of cultural hierarchies
class oppression is the result of classism
- merely the reverse of vulgar economism
- if 'purely culture' society existed - eco. inequality would be seamlessly fused with cultural hierarchy
- resolution of the latter would resolve the former
- in market based society - eco. mechanisms of dist. partially decoupled from cultural patterns of value and prestige
- neither wholly constrained by culture not subordinated to it
Reification of Identity
- Stressing need to elaborate, display authentic, self-affirming, self-generated collective identity
- places moral pressure on ind. members to conform to given group culture
- dissidence and experimentation are discouraged
- Result is simplified group-identity, denies complexity of lives, multiplicity of identifications, cross-pulls
- Serves as vehicle for misrecognition - obscures the politics of cultural identification, struggles within group for the authority to represent it
- Denies own Hegelian premises
- Implicitly denies dialogical identity formation, valorizes monologism
- Makes cultural identity auto-generated, auto-description
- Denies others are justified in viewing subjects from outside, dissenting form self-interpretation
Misrecognition as Status Subordination
Recognition as a question of social status
- what is lacking recog. is not specific group identity - the status of ind. group members as full partners in social interaction
- not misrecognition of identity leading to its deformation - but social subordination is the issue
- overcome by establishing misrecognized party as full member of society
Examination of inst. patterns of cultural value
- effects on the relative standing of social actors
- when such patterns constitute actors as peers - reciprocal recognition and status equality
- when such patterns constitute actors as inferior, excluded, wholly other, simply invisible - misrecognition and status subordination
Misrecognition
- not psychic deformation, free-standing cultural harm
- institutionalized relation of public subordination
- not simply looked down upon but denied status of full partner in social interaction
- not through feel floating representations - but rather thru institutionalized patterns
- the workings of social institutions that regulate interaction according to party-impeding cultural norms
ex. marriage laws - exclude same-sex partnerships are illegitimate, perverse
social-welfare policies - stigmatize single motehrs as sexually irresponsible scroungers
policing practices - associate certain races with criminality
- interactions are regulated by patterns that constitute certain categories are normative and other as deficient, inferior
In complex, differentiated societies
- values are institutionalized in a plurality of sites, in qualitatively different modes
- core of injustice remains the same - some social actors are consituted as less than full members
- overcoming subordination - calls for the deinstitutionalization of patterns of cultural value which impede parity, replace them with those that foster it
Ex. institutionalization of heterosexism
- root of injustice in marriage law which institutes these values
- redress requires deinstitutionalizationg
- "one way would be to grant the same recognition to gay and lesbian unions as heterosexual unions currently enjoy"
- either by decoupling marriage with entitlements, or by expanding marriage
- in principle, both would promote sexual parity and redress this instance of misrecognition
Enabling Parity
- may require unburdening subordinated parties with excessive distinctness, or acknowledging unaccounted for distinctiveness
- or focus being shifted to dominant groups, which have falsely been parading as universal
- desconstruct the terms in which attributed differences are elaborated
- doesn't accord a priori privilege to approaches which valorize group specificity
- "allows in principle for what we might call universalist recognition, and deconstructive recognition, as well as for the affirmative recognition of difference"
Addressing Maldistribution
Equal participation is also impeded when some actors lack the necessary resources to interact with others as peers
- Two dimensions of social justice - recognition and distribution (at least) - refer to distinct aspect of the social order
- Recognition - refers to the constitution by socially entrenched patterns of cultural value of defined categories of social actors
- Distribution - refers to the economic structure of society - constitution by property regimes, labor markets, of economically defined categories of actors, classes, distinguished by differential endowment of resources
Maldistribution - economic structure of society deprives actors of the resources needed for full participation
- Subordination is ecomic, rather than based on status and is rooted in the structural features of the economic system
Larger Social Frame
- Encompasses both social and economic forms of social ordering
- Two forms are interimbricated in all societies - in capitalist soc., neither is reducible to the other
- Relative decoupling of economic dimension - as in marketized areas in which strategic action predominates, from cultural dimension - as in non-marketized arenas in which value-regulated interaction predominates
Uncoupling is only relative
- Two dimensions interact causally with each other
- Distribution issues have recognition subtexts, and vice versa
- Result can be vicious circle of subordination - status order and economic structure interpenetrate and reinforce each other
Summary:
With attention to distribution, avoids short-circuting the complexity of links between status order and economic structure
- not all economic injustice can be overcome by recognition alone
Avoids reifying group identities
- avoids hypostatizing culture and substituting indentity-engineering for social change
- by refusing to privilege remedies which valorize existing group identities, avoids essentializing current configurations, foreclosing change
By emphasizing participation parity
- avoids authoritarian monologism of politics of authenticity - submits claims for recognition to democratic processes of public justification
Kalyvas - Politics of Autonoy and the Challenge of Deliberation
< Habermas <
- Against relativism of disenchanted world
- Discourse principle - extracts inescapable presuppostions of speech -> rational and universal principles to est. norm. superiority of del.dem.
- Principle of Democratic Legitimacy -> Political translation / sublimated form of ideal speech situation
< Castoriadis >
- quasi-transcendental biological formation
- Reduces 'ought' to 'is'
- Deterministic / reductionist grip of ensemblistic-identiary ontology
- Turn to natural ground - secure extrasocial basis
< Habermas
- Pol. Aut. - rational testing of validity of norms, not their creation
- Focus on opinion-formation -> conception of democracy is decisionless
- H' DD - heteronomous rep. lib. oligarchy
- Reason rules over will, pol. system over public sphere
Decisionism
< Schmitt <
- Sovereign decision cannot be juridically explained
- Grounds both norm and order
- An absolute beginning out of normative nothingness
< Weber <
- Decision as the experience of the impossible - the striving to achieve the impossible
* Dem. should be seen as the collective experience of a struggle to reach the impossible fullness of autonomy.
Castoriadis
<< Incompleteness of dem., arbitrariness, contingency
- tragic regime
- Regime of historical risk
< No use of decisionism -> Kairos
- Part of a theory of political freedom and collective autonomy
<< Power of multitude to shatter the inst. structures of heteronomy and dom IN effective will of the actual political subjects
<< If radical rupture is possible - > because we will it
<< No rigid foundation of anything
- NOT arbitrary
- ' Will to autonomy' - aspiration that surpasses peculiarities of personal const.
- will - the possibility for a human being to make the results of reflective processes enter into the relays that condition acts
- will - the reflexive dimension of what we as imaging beings are
- will - a reflective capacity to intervene in one's own self-constitution
- will - sensitive intentional redirection, thought gester of ordering and shaping
- dem. will - explicit self-inst. of society - moment of rational will-formaiton
- Occurs after process of confrontation of views, clarification, elaboration
- without such preparation, mystification and negation of dem.
- dem. will - associated with original imagination, creative capacities for radical ruptures and ontological genesis
- will of the human being is also imagination - positing as an entity that which is not
- ontological creation
- instituting will - cannot be conditioned or constrained by existing legal system
- Source of instituted society - maintains itself out of const.power
< Dem. decisionism - sovereign collectivity as a whole has power to inst. society
- not thru command and domination
- creative instituting associative power of positing new laws, rules, values
Politics
Castoriadis
<< the explicit and reflecitve struggle among competing collecitve entities over the appropriation of greater amounts of the creative form-giving power to intervene in areas of social life open to modification and the inst. of their particular values
Habermas
< theory of continuity, incremental change
Castoriadis
< focus on discontinuities, ruptures, radical transfomations
< dem. as the regime in which individuals participate in creation of insts. and significations that best facilitate individual autonomy, effective particiatpion
<< Liberal states - procedures designed/deployed to protect strutures of domination
<< propose a different set of procedural arrangements which allow for consolidation of dem. identity thru effective particiation
- Against relativism of disenchanted world
- Discourse principle - extracts inescapable presuppostions of speech -> rational and universal principles to est. norm. superiority of del.dem.
- Principle of Democratic Legitimacy -> Political translation / sublimated form of ideal speech situation
< Castoriadis >
- quasi-transcendental biological formation
- Reduces 'ought' to 'is'
- Deterministic / reductionist grip of ensemblistic-identiary ontology
- Turn to natural ground - secure extrasocial basis
< Habermas
- Pol. Aut. - rational testing of validity of norms, not their creation
- Focus on opinion-formation -> conception of democracy is decisionless
- H' DD - heteronomous rep. lib. oligarchy
- Reason rules over will, pol. system over public sphere
Decisionism
< Schmitt <
- Sovereign decision cannot be juridically explained
- Grounds both norm and order
- An absolute beginning out of normative nothingness
< Weber <
- Decision as the experience of the impossible - the striving to achieve the impossible
* Dem. should be seen as the collective experience of a struggle to reach the impossible fullness of autonomy.
Castoriadis
<< Incompleteness of dem., arbitrariness, contingency
- tragic regime
- Regime of historical risk
< No use of decisionism -> Kairos
- Part of a theory of political freedom and collective autonomy
<< Power of multitude to shatter the inst. structures of heteronomy and dom IN effective will of the actual political subjects
<< If radical rupture is possible - > because we will it
<< No rigid foundation of anything
- NOT arbitrary
- ' Will to autonomy' - aspiration that surpasses peculiarities of personal const.
- will - the possibility for a human being to make the results of reflective processes enter into the relays that condition acts
- will - the reflexive dimension of what we as imaging beings are
- will - a reflective capacity to intervene in one's own self-constitution
- will - sensitive intentional redirection, thought gester of ordering and shaping
- dem. will - explicit self-inst. of society - moment of rational will-formaiton
- Occurs after process of confrontation of views, clarification, elaboration
- without such preparation, mystification and negation of dem.
- dem. will - associated with original imagination, creative capacities for radical ruptures and ontological genesis
- will of the human being is also imagination - positing as an entity that which is not
- ontological creation
- instituting will - cannot be conditioned or constrained by existing legal system
- Source of instituted society - maintains itself out of const.power
< Dem. decisionism - sovereign collectivity as a whole has power to inst. society
- not thru command and domination
- creative instituting associative power of positing new laws, rules, values
Politics
Castoriadis
<< the explicit and reflecitve struggle among competing collecitve entities over the appropriation of greater amounts of the creative form-giving power to intervene in areas of social life open to modification and the inst. of their particular values
Habermas
< theory of continuity, incremental change
Castoriadis
< focus on discontinuities, ruptures, radical transfomations
< dem. as the regime in which individuals participate in creation of insts. and significations that best facilitate individual autonomy, effective particiatpion
<< Liberal states - procedures designed/deployed to protect strutures of domination
<< propose a different set of procedural arrangements which allow for consolidation of dem. identity thru effective particiation
Review - BFN - Regh, Bohman
The counterintuitive concept of ‘subjectless communication’ is central to
Habermas’ attempt to preserve an account of ideal democratic deliberation
without recourse to a unitary popular will. Our aim in this essay is both to
explicate and to develop further this concept of deliberation as a way of
preserving the core ideas of radical democracy. First, we situate the problem by
elaborating the theory of discourse that provides Habermas with a more complex
account of deliberation than found in civic republicanism (section I). One can then
understand the concept of ‘subjectless communication’ as introducing further
dimensions of social complexity within the process of democratic deliberation and
decision-making (section II). We then argue that Habermas’ strongly epistemic
interpretation of this model engenders difficulties in dealing with contemporary
value pluralism (section III). These difficulties motivate a weaker epistemic
conception of deliberative democracy that allows more room for ongoing
disagreement and compromise (section IV). Revising the democratic epistemic
ideals themselves makes them more plausible than Habermas’ own strategy of
accommodating strong ideals of consensus to the ‘unavoidable complexity’ of
modern society. In conclusion, we formulate a weaker version of the democratic
principle and suggest its benefits for the empirical analysis of current institutions
(section V). We argue that such a weaker version of the democratic ideal of
agreement remains consistently cognitivist and at the same time provides a better
tool for criticizing the failures of actual democratic arrangements to promote
public deliberation
Habermas’ attempt to preserve an account of ideal democratic deliberation
without recourse to a unitary popular will. Our aim in this essay is both to
explicate and to develop further this concept of deliberation as a way of
preserving the core ideas of radical democracy. First, we situate the problem by
elaborating the theory of discourse that provides Habermas with a more complex
account of deliberation than found in civic republicanism (section I). One can then
understand the concept of ‘subjectless communication’ as introducing further
dimensions of social complexity within the process of democratic deliberation and
decision-making (section II). We then argue that Habermas’ strongly epistemic
interpretation of this model engenders difficulties in dealing with contemporary
value pluralism (section III). These difficulties motivate a weaker epistemic
conception of deliberative democracy that allows more room for ongoing
disagreement and compromise (section IV). Revising the democratic epistemic
ideals themselves makes them more plausible than Habermas’ own strategy of
accommodating strong ideals of consensus to the ‘unavoidable complexity’ of
modern society. In conclusion, we formulate a weaker version of the democratic
principle and suggest its benefits for the empirical analysis of current institutions
(section V). We argue that such a weaker version of the democratic ideal of
agreement remains consistently cognitivist and at the same time provides a better
tool for criticizing the failures of actual democratic arrangements to promote
public deliberation
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