Politics of Dialogue: Non-consensual Democracy and Critical Community 9780748644063

Citation preview

Politics of Dialogue

To Dorota

POLITICS OF DIALOGUE

NON-CONSENSUAL DEMOCRACY AND CRITICAL COMMUNITY

2 Leszek Koczanowicz

© Leszek Koczanowicz, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 0 7486 4405 6 (hardback) ISBN  978 0 7486 4406 3 (webready PDF) The right of Leszek Koczanowicz to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Introduction 1 1. Democracy and Everyday Life 6 1.1 Pragmatism as a Response to the Crisis of Democracy 6 1.2 George Herbert Mead’s Concept of Language as Dialogue8 1.3 George Herbert Mead: the Political, Democracy and Everyday Life 15 1.4 George Herbert Mead: the Self and Democracy – between Conflict and Integration 20 1.5 John Dewey: Individual, Community and Democracy 25 1.6 Conclusion: the Pragmatist Concept of Democracy and its Role in the Contemporary Debate on Democratic Society 32 2. Dialogue, Carnival, Democracy: Mikhail Bakhtin and Political Theory  2.1 Politics and Mikhail Bakhtin’s Notion of Language 2.2 The Utterance as a Unit of Language 2.3 Ideology and the Utterance 2.4 Understanding and the Utterance 2.5 Dialogue, Understanding and the Utterance 2.6 Dialogue and the Social 2.7 Carnival and Democracy 2.8 Conclusion: Dialogue, Carnival and Democracy 3.

Critical Community 3.1 Democracy and Community 3.2 Modernity and Community: a Genealogy 3.3 Are Liberalism and Community Eternal Enemies? 3.4 Communitarian Challenge: Community and Identity

42 42 45 46 48 51 63 78 85 91 91 93 104 108

politics of dialogue

3.5 Creation, Self-Creation and Community 3.6 Embodied Communities 3.7 Critical Community

112 118 130

4. Coda: Non-Consensual Democracy as a Political Form of Critical Community 146 4.1 Democratic Community between Consensus and Disagreement146 4.2 Non-Consensual Democracy: Dialogue, Solidarity and Democratic Politics 154 4.3 Non-Consensual Democracy: Dialogue and Understanding  160 4.4 Non-Consensual Democracy: Culture, Institutions and Understanding 164 Index of Persons171 Index of Subjects 173

vi

Introduction

The book you are going to read features no biographical details, and yet it is a deeply personal one. Many of its theses have been inspired by my own experience. Of course, a biography can never serve as an ultimate substantiation of an argument, but it always remains a powerful source of inspiration, especially for people who, like myself, have lived through a tectonic social transformation. Slightly hyperbolising perhaps, Fyodor Tyutchev, an outstanding Russian poet, envisaged such an experience as partaking of a feast of gods: He’s blessed who visited this world In moments of its destination – Like for the feast or celebration, He was invited there by gods1

In East and Central Europe, my generation’s significant experience was that of democracy. Born in the 1950s of the twentieth century, for a long time we had acutely felt its lack, and in the wake of systemic changes we started to feel keenly how taxing that political system might be. Democracy is a unique but still indeterminate project, which keeps being contested and challenged. The democratic project has millions of people invest their hopes and desires in it, and at the same time it is a source of disappointment for the millions, too. While many people still suffer and die for democracy, democratic societies are visibly growing disaffected with, and impatient about, democratic procedures, which increasingly appear tedious and barren. My own life has unfolded in such a way that I could, and still can, witness both stages and try to make sense of their dynamics. My biographical experience inclines me to think of political systems as forms or ways of life. Institutional changes triggered by democracy have gone hand in hand, inextricably intertwined and interdependent, with changes in lifestyles. This has reasserted my conviction that democracy, and politics in general, is something more than just a struggle for power or for one or other system of institutions. It is a form of 1

politics of dialogue life, a way in which people organise their experiences and activities across the spectrum of their existence. This experience has also made me realise a paradox inherent in the theory of democracy. For political theory, democracy is ‘an impossible object’, an aberration that eludes any clear categories or formulas. Which societies and political systems are indeed democratic – and which are not yet quite so – is an issue that continues to spark fervent disputes. Nonetheless, people themselves seem to be magically able to state whether they live in a democratic society or not. Propagandist efforts and indoctrination through a controlled education system fail to deliver expected results if they diverge from our everyday experience, which verifies the pronouncements of theorists, ideologues, and various regime mouthpieces. And still, it is not entirely clear what kind of everyday experience can be defined as democratic. We can surmise, however, that democratic experience is somehow linked to dialogue. Dialogue is another category whose gravity has deeply imprinted itself on my experience. Theories of totalitarianism, which depict it as a system wherein the state exercises absolute control over individuals, fail to capture the fact that any totalitarian power needs to have its opposite pole – a concealed society of bonds, dialogue, everyday communication, spontaneous solidarity and help. This hidden society evades the gaze because it is so thoroughly evident that it becomes transparent and eludes all attempts at conceptualisation and control. It pops into visibility very occasionally, when anger and rebellion erupt momentarily, only to withdraw promptly into the penumbra of abstract ideologies. The concealed society is first and foremost a society of dialogue. A perennial problem is how to make a transition from everyday dialogue, which permeates all human relationships, to political dialogue, which could institute rules of political struggle. Though fundamentally predicated upon introducing dialogue into the public space, democracy can hardly come to terms with the very notion of dialogue. The dialogical potential inherent in society is either constrained or downright squandered. For me, a theorist of society, it is a definitional problem, a problem of (and with) how we understand dialogue and its ends. Even though dialogue is one of the essential concepts in liberal democracy, neither its nature nor its social role has been studied in tolerably satisfying detail. My objective is thus to compensate for this negligence, partly at least, and highlight the manifestations of the dialogical social potential in politics. Both my experience and my theoretical intuition 2

introduction make me posit that dialogue itself – that is, a decision to engage in a dialogical situation – is more important that any outcomes dialogue may produce. This intuition will be explored and substantiated in my book. I will also seek to consider the implications such a thesis has for the concepts of community and democracy as its political form. Community is another central category of my argument. Born into a nation that had to fight for its independence, I have no doubt that communal thinking is vital to the development of social bonds. At the same time, I have seen communal notions, particularly those pertaining to nation and religion, abused and pushing a community into a xenophobic self-enclosure that precludes any free debate. Community is thus a prerequisite of democracy, but it is also its gravest hazard. Hence, I devote a lot of attention to this category and propose a concept of critical community. Characterised by a ceaseless, self-reflective interrogation of its own foundations, a critical community develops through critical inclusion of ever novel values and meanings, rather than by fortifying itself against external influences. Critical community finds its political form in non-consensual democracy. Non-consensual democracy is a politics of dialogue in social action. In the chapter on non-consensual democracy, I take on board two theoretical approaches to democracy. On the one hand, I polemicise with a vision of democracy as procedures that head primarily toward a consensus; on the other, I take issue with a concept of democracy as an ongoing conflict, which, in democratic society, is channelled into milder, civilised forms. Non-consensual democracy is an attempt at providing an alternative to both positions in this controversy. An ethical decision to engage in a dialogical situation refracts the trajectory of political struggle and allows a better understanding of our adversary’s intents and objectives. All these reflections and categories are underpinned by my arguably pre-eminent biographic experience – the experience of solidarity, both in the sense of a vast social movement from 1980 to 1981 and in the sense of the idea that kindled this movement. My theoretical discourse develops in reference to two ostensibly divergent traditions: American pragmatism and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories. Volumes could be filled with the similarities of, and differences between, the two conceptual tendencies, but I hope it will suffice here to reveal why they have become my sources of inspiration. The two concepts envision a social world with dialogue and communication as their centre and axis. For pragmatists – and in 3

politics of dialogue this book I draw mainly on John Dewey and George Herbert Mead – this vision can be translated into a theory of democracy as an universalisation of everyday life interactions. Democracy is thus a political form of communal life. Bakhtin, for obvious reasons, did not write about democracy, but his entire oeuvre is permeated with ‘a democratic imagination’. The enormous effort that he invested in analysing dialogical ways of language use, which emerge from social life and return to it, can be transposed onto social theory. It turns out, then, that varieties of dialogue that Bakhtin so meticulously discussed are fully enacted in a democratic society, and carnival – one of Bakhtin’s central notions – can be comprehended, as I argue, as a liminal case (utopia) of democracy. Consequently, the first two chapters explore pragmatism and Bakhtin’s ideas. The third chapter develops on my concept of critical community in dialogue with other notions of community. And the fourth chapter is devoted to non-consensual democracy as a political form of critical community. * * * This book would not have been possible without a grant that I received from Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej (Foundation for Polish Science), which enabled me to set up a research team with whom I could discuss my ideas and, consequently, refine them. In seminar discussions and informal conversations, my colleagues on the team – Katarzyna Liszka, Ewa Jupowiecka, Rafał Włodarczyk, Rafał Nahirny and Michał Paz´dziora – prompted me to hone and modify my original standpoints. And although the ultimate responsibility for the shape this book has taken rests with me, it also bears an indelible imprint of more than two years of those fruitful intercourses. The grant of Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej also funded a cycle of meetings with invited lecturers, including Carlin Romano, Stefan Jonsson, Tomasz Kitlin´ski, Paweł Leszkowicz, Avishai Margalit, Daniel Colleran, Danielle Carlo and Adam Czarnota and a conference co-financed by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Co-organised by Katarzyna Jezierska, the conference took place in Wrocław and focused on ‘Democracy in dialogue, dialogue in democracy’. The contributions were delivered by Jacek Koltan, Paweł Dybel, Ewa Jupowiecka, Torill Strand, Lovisa Bergdahl, Margarita Palacios and Mikael Carleheden. I was also able to present my ideas at seminars organised by the Department of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Buffalo, the 4

introduction Department of Political Sciences at the University of Gothenburg and the Critical Theory Group at the University of California in Berkeley, as well as at conferences held by the Society for Advancement of American Philosophy and the Central European Pragmatist Forum. In all these places, I discussed dialogue and non-consensual democracy with Rodolphe Gasché, Krzysztof Ziarek, Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Martin Jay, Hans Sluga, John Ryder and many other colleagues. Acknowledgement is also due to my faculty authorities at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities for their unfailing support and help. The book received its final shape in cooperation with Patrycja Poniatowska, who assisted me in rendering my ideas in English, and Katarzyna Liszka, who edited my manuscript. My son Tadeusz, a graduate student of sociology and cultural studies, offered me a lot of useful, soundly critical feedback. But my greatest thankyou goes to my wife Dorota, without whose help this book would never have come into being.

Notes 1. Fyodor Tyutchev, ‘Cicero’, trans. Yevgeny Bonver. Available online at: http://www.poetryloverspage.com/yevgeny/tyutchev/cicero.html (acc­es­ sed 16 May 2014).

5

1

Democracy and Everyday Life

1.1  Pragmatism as a Response to the Crisis of Democracy It is now an almost trivial observation that pragmatism has developed a theoretically rich concept of democracy, in which John Dewey’s reflection on society and its institutions has a major share. The historical context and significance of Dewey’s notion of democracy have already been comprehensively discussed in a number of studies, so I feel at least partly relieved from repeating these findings. What remains to be done is to focus on how these pragmatic insights can be employed to advance my ideas of non-consensual democracy and critical community. For contemporary readership, the crucial point in Dewey’s reasoning is his emphasis on the concept of democracy as an open-ended and never-ending endeavour. Dewey’s idea of democracy appears to be especially attractive as a response to the notion of democracy as a stabilised set of institutions that are given indefinitely and need only a few corrections in particular circumstances. Rather popular with some experts and politicians, such a concept of democracy is rightly criticised by Robert Mangabeira Unger as the ‘democratic perfectionism’ – that is, ‘the belief that a democratic society has a unique, indispensable institutional form. Once that form is secured, it creates a setting within which every individual who is not unlucky can raise himself to freedom, virtue, and happiness.’1 Unger, of course, rejects this concept and insists instead on examining individual people’s power to build up their social worlds. According to him, such a vision needs pragmatism as a requisite source of inspiration: The major source of the attraction of these ideas lies in their focus on the picture of the human agent. According to this picture, the human agent is irreducible to any set of causal influences that may weigh upon him. He is incapable of being fully contained and governed by the social and cultural orders he develops and joins. For such a view, prophecy speaks louder than memory, and one lives for the future the better to live more freely and fully in the present. Orientation to the future is just another way of 6

democracy and everyday life describing the structures, of organization and of consciousness, that can define a present that provides us with the instruments of its overcoming.2

Unger describes pragmatism as a philosophy of freedom and underlies its futuristic orientation. I fully endorse this portrayal. However, I would like to add two other characteristics of pragmatist social philosophy to it, which I consider paramount for a contemporary discussion on democracy. First, I would like to emphasise that pragmatism is also a philosophy of dialogue and of human interaction and, second, following on from this claim, that it is a philosophy that always seeks sources of human cooperation. Obviously, this does not mean that pragmatism ignores the fact that human societies have always been ridden with conflicts and contradiction. Pragmatic philosophers, especially the Chicago circle gathered around Jane Addams and her social initiative Hull House, were, however, optimistic about the possibility of overcoming these contradictions, not so much by finding a consensus, but by arriving at a better understanding among different groups of society through social dialogue. In discussing the place of dialogue in democratic society, I believe we should have recourse to George Herbert Mead’s thought, as it establishes a link between the self and social interactions and, consequently, between democracy and the self. The link surfaces from Mead’s general views on the self as an effect of interactions among individuals. This social and psychological rooting of democracy enables us to look at the democratic system as an extension and, in a sense, a culmination of elements, which, though not political in themselves, are a necessary condition for the emergence of the self. The self emerges from increasingly generalised exchanges between human individuals, and democracy is a political system that enables individuals to enter the space of universal human relations, where each individual can take the role of anyone else. From this point of view, democracy is a kind of ‘regulative ideal’, one not given in advance, but generated through the processes involved in the constitution of the democratic system. Democracy is, thus, an ongoing process, which facilitates ‘amelioration through understanding’, to use a catchy phrase coined by Thomas Vernon Smith.3 This phrase is, in my view, an expression of a normative dimension, which is indispensable in democracy. Democracy, in this sense, is not only a system of popular sovereignty, but also a constant struggle for continued understanding among people. The cornerstones of 7

politics of dialogue liberal democracy – popular sovereignty and individual rights – are an accumulation of the various forms of communication. Mead’s theory outlines the development of understanding from the elementary form of sociality to sophisticated institutions and Lebenswelt of modern societies. Understanding is a significant factor in building the self, because it is through the mechanism of ‘taking the role of the other’ that individuals can become social selves. Such a concept of the self paves the way to constituting a democratic society, and Mead is very aware of this possibility. Mead’s concept of creativity seems particularly pertinent to democracy. Creativity, as Hans Joas rightly points out, is inscribed in sociality itself: [Mead] is interested not simply in according the whole precedence over the parts, but in developing a different type of action theory in which social interrelations are not held to be mere aggregations of individual actions. Instead, Mead wishes to expose the irreducible sociality behind all individual acts; he then describes this sociality itself as a specific type of action and of action coordination.4

Individual creativity and social creativity supplement each other and provide the foundation for the contemporary political theory of democracy, which foregrounds democracy’s multifaceted nature. In this view, democracy is comprised of sociality and creation, agreement and resistance, universality and particularity. I think that pragmatism, especially its version developed by Dewey and Mead, perfectly captures this diversified versatility of democratic society. In my further investigations of Mead’s concept of democracy, I intend to concentrate on his idea of democracy as resulting from everyday life communications, as well as on his creative and futuristic concept of democracy. It will help me demonstrate that Mead’s concept of democracy contains potential, which may be effective in bridging the gap in contemporary political theory between antagonistic and consensual notions of democratic society. I will argue that Mead’s theory can explain how amelioration through understanding can find its path within contradiction- and conflict-fraught society.

1.2  George Herbert Mead’s Concept of Language as Dialogue Before I explore Mead’s notion of democracy, I would like to discuss briefly his concept of language. This is, I believe, a necessary prelude, 8

democracy and everyday life since, as mentioned above, his idea of democracy emerges from his overall theory of communication and the human self. Of course, there are already several excellent, thorough studies of Mead’s thought, so my presentation will only aim to show the fundamentals of democracy in the process of the constitution of the self.5 For Mead, meaning is the central category of communication. He proposes the following definition of meaning: A gesture by one organism, the resultant of the social act in which the gesture is an early phase, and the response of another organism to the gesture, are the relata in a triple or threefold relationship of gesture to first organism, of gesture to second organism, and of gesture to subsequent phases of the given social act; and this threefold relationship constitutes the matrix within which meaning arises or which develops into the field of meaning.6

In this way, meaning is constituted by gesture and a subsequent social action. Therefore, meaning is an elementary unit of communication: it always encompasses an exchange between at least two organisms. This definition of meaning shows that any act of communication already embraces an anticipated response. Meaning, according to Mead, is constituted in this dialogical mode at all levels of the communication process, from gestures to significant symbols. According to Mead, ‘gesture’ is a theoretically useful notion, in that it enables a transition from action to mind and therefore makes it possible to answer the challenge posed by behaviourism. Gesture is action that is rooted in the biological endowment. However, it is through gesture that social communication is achieved, which is a prerequisite of all social processes. In their simplest forms, gestures are biologically determined actions through which one organism influences another one’s behaviour. Mead’s favorite examples of communication – of conversation through gestures – are dogs barking at each other and fencers or boxers in combat. In all these examples, movements of one organism – the barking of a dog or a fencer’s attack – induce a complementary behaviour in another organism: the other dog responds by barking, and the partner assumes an appropriate counter posture. Mead shows that there are also instinctually underpinned social behaviours – for instance, sexual behaviour, some aspects of parental behaviour and differentiated actions in insects’ societies. The difference between such behaviours and communicative actions, even in the simplest gestures, is that in that in the former the other individual 9

politics of dialogue is treated merely as part of the environment, whereas communication aims to effect a change in another individual’s behaviour, which carries him out of his environment. On a specifically human level, communication is carried out by gestures that are meaningful – that is, through significant symbols. Gestures acquire meanings when an individual who performs them reacts in the same way as an individual to whom they are addressed. This enables both coordination of actions between individuals and the control of one’s behaviour.7 Mead proposes that gestures, significant symbols and meanings make up a crucial, interconnected scheme. In this scheme, particular elements are built on one another, in the sense that simpler elements become aspects of more complex forms. However, it is not clear whether these internal links are merely genetic or whether each act of communication is a synthesis of biological and cultural elements. To settle this, it may be useful to analyse Mead’s theory of action, as both gestures and significant symbols are certain forms of actions – that is, communicative actions. Any act can be described in purely biological categories as proceeding in four stages: impulse, perception, manipulation and consummation. In becoming social, the act changes in two respects. First, its internal structure undergoes a change: the stage of manipulation comes to dominate, which is related to using implements and also to hand and eye coordination for the construction of the world. Second, individual acts become elements of social acts, in which the need to relate the whole act to an individual disappears. The act is attributed to a social group in a twofold sense: patterns of acts are social, and they become objectified through the habits of a group. Social acts distributed among individuals are integrated by virtue of social objects, which are the same for all individuals involved, and by virtue of the mechanisms of communication that order the social act. Thus, when transferred to the social level, a biological act becomes a basis for the construction of reality. In this system, the biological mechanisms have meanings as a general pattern of an act, which undergoes far-reaching modifications, and whose elements can be built up of entirely different structures. Impulses, which are a basis for motivation, are also of biological character. Relating these interdependencies to sign creation, we could also state that patterns of reacting to objects are of biological character as well. On becoming elements of the social process, these patterns undergo remarkable changes. Objects one reacts to are created in the process of social interaction. Mead calls the world in which the act takes place ‘the world that is there’. It is the world composed of objects that achieve validity, because they 10

democracy and everyday life can become the basis for a successful act.8 It is tempting to interpret Mead’s concept of ‘the world that is there’ as a version of phenomenology. There are, for example, striking similarities between Husserl’s central category of Lebenswelt and Mead’s concept. Both posit a world that precedes all scientific reflection, although in itself it is not a subject of this reflection. However, in Mead, this world is very peculiar: it consists in part of those elements of scientific theories that have become elements of things. Therefore, the world can evolve and assume ever newer forms in the course of scientific progress. It is also, crucially, a world of action and not of consciousness. The aforementioned differences between Husserl’s and Mead’s concepts shed light on the role of nature in the latter’s philosophy. Only action as a biological fact is relevant to nature. It is only in this sense that Mead espouses naturalism. Gestures in themselves, not being a true language, provide a pattern for communication, which in a modified form can be detected in significant symbols and meanings. Meaning is conceived by Mead as a characteristic of action or interaction among people, rather than as a relation of words to things. In acting, a subject reacts first of all to senses and meanings, not to physical characteristics of objects. Entering the world of culture-determined meanings, a subject undergoes a change whose core lies in its becoming separated from things and capable of treating itself as an object. A subject, that is, becomes a self. This general scheme acquires texture and tangibility in the discussion of a relatively simple example: the significance of play to the formation of a child’s self. Play and games are central to Mead’s conception, for they comprise incipient forms of social interaction, methods of interpreting the world and the initial experience of the self. The child’s actions cease to be biological and acquire social meanings, with their internal structure and function undergoing a transformation. In analysing play and the game, Mead emphasises that both forms of activity enable the formation of the self as a result of taking on a role of the other. In play, one assumes roles of concrete individuals – real or imaginary persons. While being itself, a child at the same time becomes someone else. It is typical of play that its situation is relatively concrete, which encourages Mead to propose an analogy with the animal world. Such an analogy, however, is limited, since animals are not able to assume roles of the other in the way that a child does. In play, a child is able to provide such stimuli that are supposed to cause an expected reaction. The next stage – a game – is far more abstract. At this stage, a 11

politics of dialogue child has to assume the attitudes of all of the participants in the game. A concrete situation disappears, thus, and a certain abstract totality emerges in its place, which Mead calls the ‘generalized other’. The attitude of the generalised other is one of an entire community. Formation of such an attitude is made possible by the rules that organise the game. De-personalised, those rules enable – and, in a sense, compel – one to assume the attitudes of all persons engaged in a given social activity. Owing to this, it is possible to relate to oneself as a subject of activity and, thus, to attain a self, which entails achieving the level of mankind and participating in the universe of discourse. Summing up these insights, Mead concludes: Children take a great interest in rules. They make rules on the spot in order to help themselves out of difficulties. Part of the enjoyment of the game is to get these rules. Now, the rules are the set of responses which a particular attitude calls out. These responses are all in yourself as well. There you get an organized set of such responses as that to which I have referred, which is something more elaborate than the roles found in play. Here there is just set of responses that follow on each other indefinitely. At such a stage we speak of a child as not yet having a fully developed self. The child responds in a fairly intelligent fashion to the immediate stimuli that come to him, but they are not organized. He does not organize his life as we would like to have him do, namely, as a whole. There is just a set of responses of the type of play. The child reacts to a certain stimulus, and the reaction is in himself that is called out in other, but he is not a whole self. In his game he has to have an organization of these roles; otherwise he cannot play the game. The game represents the passage in the life of the child from taking the role of others in play to the organized part that is essential to self-consciousness in the full sense of the term.9

Mead outlines the advancement of the process of taking the role of the other in purely descriptive terms, but the process has been analysed in ethical categories, as well. This ethical dimension has been elaborated on in the psychoanalytic theory of play and game. In his essays on the role of play in psychotherapy, Donald Winnicott emphasises that play is a sphere of creativity, but that it is also paramount to the development of social relations, especially those of trust. As a sphere of creativity, play harbours a certain element of threat, which can be eliminated by establishing rules and converting play into game: ‘games and their organization must be looked at as part of an attempt to forestall the frightening aspect of playing’.10 From this perspective, participation in play presupposes the emergence of the self and its social 12

democracy and everyday life interactions. Therefore, an ability – or inability – to participate in play and games can be looked upon as intrinsically bound up with ethical decision-making, which involves a decision to engage in social interactions. This aspect of taking the role of the other seems to be overlooked in Mead. And it is especially important at those stages of the development of the self when we take on roles of the increasingly generalised other. Mead describes this process in rather objective terms as a consequence of increasingly advanced communication in the modern world. Mead’s inattention to the ethical dimension of taking the role of the other can be a result of his focus on the objectivity of the social process as an instance determining the emergence of the self. Inclusion of an ethical dimension would highlight that, at least at a certain level, the decision to take part in human interaction can also be of ethical character. We are social beings, so we have to interact with others in order to survive, but we can determine particular features of these interactions. They can be more or less ethical, they can be more or less aesthetic or we can be egoistically oriented or socially involved. Contemporary researchers of moral psychology contend that even if we do not know the sources of morality, whether natural or conventional, ‘the political implications were similar: morality is about treating individuals well. It’s about harm and fairness (not loyalty, respect, duty, piety, patriotism, or tradition).’11 Morality and its sources do not feature in Mead’s theory, which can be justified by the fact that they were not scientifically accounted for when he developed his concepts, and he patently sought to describe the progression of individuals’ social interactions in objective terms. Thus, according to Mead, a social process enables the creation of meanings: The social process in a sense constitutes the objects to which it [organism] responds, or to which it is an adjustment. That is to say, objects are constituted in terms of meanings within the social process of experience and behavior through the mutual adjustment to one another of the responses or actions of the various individual organisms involved in that process, an adjustment made possible by means of a communication which takes the form of a conversation of gestures in the earlier evolutionary stages of that process, and of language in its later stages.12

These processes, and the adaptation occurring in conversation, are primary in relation to objects to which an organism reacts. Objectively existing meanings will come into being in the experiences of an individual, thus creating a basis for the self. Transition 13

politics of dialogue from meaning to consciousness is made possible by the mechanism of ‘taking a role of the other’. An individual relates to its own activity in the same way as to other people’s activity or, in other words, an individual is able to provide stimuli to his or her own behaviour. This is the moment when a split between the subject and the object of behaviour disappears and an individual is both. However, for this unity to exist, a social process and mutual relations among people are necessary. Hence, we finally arrive at a tripartite scheme: meaning as objective relations among organisms; assuming the attitude of the other – for example, viewing oneself from an external vantage point (the self); and, eventually, incorporating the executed meanings (meaningful symbols) into action (mind). This scheme shows that in everyday rituals of the exchange of perspectives, we can ‘take the role of the other’ and transgress the limits of our selves, which in turn is a prerequisite for the emergence of the self and mind. This circular movement is a constitutive moment of society, and, at the same time, it is constituted in the social action. It assumes the division of an act into different phases ascribable to different individuals. The ultimate unity of action is secured by what Mead calls ‘social objects’. One of his commentators observes that: [A]s the object controls the act, so social object controls the social act. [. . .] By taking the attitude of an object I internalize its attitude towards me; in the case of society, by taking the attitude of the ‘generalized other’, I immediately become able to exert a certain amount of (social) control over my acts. Social control is thus but a form of self-criticism – social conventions control our action as a result of our ability to take the attitude of the ‘generalized other’ through the ‘me’.13

The predominance of the social over the individual leads Mead to claim that: Objective consciousness of selves must precede subjective consciousness, and must continually condition it, if consciousness of meaning itself presupposes the selves as there. Subjective self-consciousness must appear within experience, must have a function in the development of that experience, and must be studied from the point of view of that function, not as that in which self-consciousness arises and by which through analogical bridges and self-projections we slowly construct a hypothetically objective social world in which to live.14

The dialectics of the social and the individual, which is so characteristic of Mead’s and Dewey’s pragmatism, considerably affects their views on politics. Political activity, namely, is also included in the 14

democracy and everyday life circular interdependencies; in fact, it features as their significant part, since it establishes institutions that can either facilitate or hamper, taking the role of the more and more generalised other, which is crucial for making the social more conducive to the development of the self and vice versa. In his later works, and especially in The Philosophy of the Present, Mead found it requisite to endorse metaphysical assumptions, in order to legitimise his concept of the functioning of mind. As a basic unit of action, the act is a model of the structure and functioning of the world. Action is not only a model of the structure of reality, but, depending on the level at which it takes place, it also serves a specific function as a basic structure of every process. Mind and self emerge where a social process and action as such intersect and their respective characteristic overlap. Mead views basic psychological categories – for instance, mind, thinking or consciousness – as arising gradually from the mutual connections of individuals’ actions. Thereby, he claims that a single language – the language of action – suffices to describe the human mind.15 However, if analysed in detail, Mead’s conceptions imply rather clearly that the structure and functions of action, at least at the social level, are subject to cultural factors. A closer look at Mead’s cosmological ideas, according to which the principle of emergence is the basic one, reveals that Mead’s naturalism is only apparent. His concept could be viewed as extremely anthropocentric, in the sense that it considers the world from the perspective of the emergence of mind. Mead frequently refers to Kant’s conception as exposition of the mind, which imposes order upon the world. Mead’s own concept might be legitimately described as holding that the mind imposes rules of the world’s evolution. This metaphysical tenet reverberates throughout Mead’s social and political views. The social is, for Mead, what emerges in inter-human interactions, but the interactions are themselves determined by the order of nature. Democracy, which is, as I will show below, the highest form of the social process, emerges from the development of particular instances of these interactions, but it is already there, even in their simplest appearances.

1.3  George Herbert Mead: the Political, Democracy and Everyday Life Democracy was, for Mead, not only a question of theory. Apart from being a professor at Chicago University, he was also a devoted 15

politics of dialogue social activist. He was involved in several social initiatives, including Jane Addams’ Hull House and the University of Chicago Settlement House that was modelled upon it. In his social pursuits, Mead, as Gary A. Cook notes, insisted that social problems stood a chance of being solved, provided that people abandoned pulpit mentality. In the paper that summarises his social experience, Mead writes: The pulpit is called upon to inspire to right conduct, not to find out what is the right – unless the right is so plain that he who runs may read. While its dogma has been abstruse its morality has been uniformly simple. When, then, the new problems arise, such as the question of the right of the employer to use his property rights to control and exploit the labor of children and women, the justice of the union in its effort to advance the wage, and a hundred more such problems which have been crowding upon us, the pulpit is unable to solve them because it has not the apparatus, and the scientific technique which the solution of such problems demands. In the meantime it holds its peace, for it must give no uncertain sound to the battle. The only overt social issues with which the pulpit in recent time has identified itself have been temperance and chastity.16

Commenting on this pronouncement, Cook writes: Instead of attempting to bring an external set of standards to bear upon social problems, settlement workers saw that they must first take advantage of their residence in a settlement house to make themselves at home in the neighborhood they wished to serve. Having done this, their understanding of social problems, their moral judgments, and their attempts at amelioration would flow from a context of immediate human ­relationships – from what might be called ‘neighborhood consciousness.’17

Mead warns against deducing solutions to social problems from ethical principles, and, instead, he proposes relying on everyday life experience and, importantly, on scientific methods for answers to difficulties that a given situation presents. Moral consciousness should be, at the same time, ‘modern scientific consciousness’.18 The injunction to combine everyday life experiences and scientific inquiry, so characteristic of pragmatism, may sound awkward, but it logically ensues from Mead’s general position on epistemology and ontology. As analysed above, his main category is ‘the world that is there’ – namely, the world in which the act is going on within. It is a world composed of objects that achieve validity, because they can become the basis for a successful act. This world is, at the same time, a world of action and a world in which a scientific exploration can be engaged with, which in turn is ‘a search for what has disappeared 16

democracy and everyday life in the conflicts of conduct, that is, for objects which will remove the antagonism – it is a search for the solution of a problem’.19 Thus, there is no unbreakable wall between action, including social action, and science. Recently, this argument, also endorsed by John Dewey, has received special appreciation, as procedural democracy has to cope with the challenges that requirements of expert knowledge pose to it. Such knowledge, essential to solving many concrete problems that contemporary societies face, can hardly be controlled by democratic procedures. Pragmatists, as James Bohman suggests, ‘thought that the problems and prospects for democracy were both epistemic and political: nor just the Enlightenment problem of making democracy more like science, but also the political problem of making science more democratic’.20 Science is a democratic activity, insofar as it emerges from conscious reflection on problems in action and becomes a guideline for further intervention in the world that is there. Reflective consciousness is, for Mead, always a phase in action, and the scientific method, as the highest form of that consciousness, enables individuals to find a solution to social problems, which ensures a progressive evolution of society.21 Democracy can thus draw on both everyday life and scientific procedures. These general assumptions about democracy will be developed by Mead in his outline of the emergence of democratic society. The part of Mind, Self, and Society that addresses politics, and democracy in particular, is, as Mead himself insists, an application of his general theoretical framework of the self to this social formation. To understand his point, we have to remember that, for Mead, the self is an effect of social interactions among individuals. This provides a vantage point from which Mead considers the evolution of political systems. He regards them as an embedment of a greater number of inclusive relationships among individuals, with democracy emerging as a culmination of this process. The universal form of society – democracy, in Mead’s account – concludes two different processes of the universalisation of society: that of economy and that of religion. Mead carefully sketches this development, showing how scattered communications of different societies have taken progressively ordered and universal forms: There is in human society a universality that expresses itself very early in two different ways – one on the religious side and the other on the economic side. These processes as social processes are universal. They provide ends which any form that makes use of the same medium of communication can enter upon.22 17

politics of dialogue Mead depicts the progression of universality through subsequent stages, in which communication among individuals grows increasingly inclusive. In both cases, the final point of this universality is ‘a universal society that includes the whole of human race, and into which all can so far enter into relationship with others through the medium of communication. They can recognize others as members, and as brothers.’23 Though similar in terms of the general pattern of development, each of these two processes has, nonetheless, its own dynamics. Exchange, production and transportation relate ‘the individuals more closely to others involved in the economic process’.24 According to Mead’s concept of the self, this process promotes identification with the more and more generalised other, until eventually an individual is, of course, identifying himself with any possible customer, any possible producer; and if his mechanism is of this very abstract sort, then the web of commerce can go anywhere and the form of society may take in anybody who is willing to enter in this process of communication. Such an attitude in society does tend to build up the structure of a universal social organism.25

For the religious process, the most important attitude is that of neighbourliness. Again, as in the economic process, a passage from elementary forms of this attitude to the fully developed idea of a universal society takes place: The immediate effect of the attitude may be nothing but sharing one’s food with a person who is hungry, giving water to the thirsty, helping the person who is down and out. It may be nothing but surrendering to the impulse to give something to the man who touches you on the street. It may accomplish nothing more than that, just as exchange between two children may not go beyond the process of exchange. But, in fact, the attitude once assumed has proved to have enormous power of social reorganization. It is that attitude which has expressed itself in the universal religions, and which expresses itself in a large part of the social organization of modern society.26

These two processes of universalisation seem to be rooted in the general process of communication, which finds its fulfillment in the universe of discourse. ‘The universe of discourse which deals simply with the highest abstractions opens the door for the interrelationship of the different groups in their different characters.’27 As the two processes of the social development are conditions of possibility for the development of communication up to the stage of the universal 18

democracy and everyday life discourse, communication itself proves a premise for the universality of human communities: The very universality of the processes which belong to human society, whether looked at from the point of view of religion or trading or logical thinking, at least opens the door to a universal society; and, in fact, these tendencies all express themselves where the social development has gone far enough to make it possible.28

We deal, thus, with two concrete processes of interactions: that of economy and that of religion, each having its own dynamics, but both working together to create a universal condition for communication, which Mead calls the ‘universe of discourse’. The economic and the religious are supplemented by Mead with a third factor – the political – which makes up one more dimension of universality. In the phrase redolent of the Hegelian dialectics of master and slave, Mead writes: The political expression of this growth of universality in society is signalized in the dominance of one group over other groups. [. . .] It signalizes the expression of self-consciousness reached through a realization of one’s self in others. [. . .] The dominant expression in terms of the self has been, even on the part of a militaristic society, rather that of subjection, of a realization of the self in its superiority to and exploitation of the other. This attitude of mind is an entirely different attitude from that of the mere wiping-out of one’s enemies. There is, from this point of view at least, a definite achievement on the part of the individual of a higher self in his overcoming of the other and holding the other in subjection.29

For Mead, thus, even the relation of subjection is a way to the universality of society. Such construal is possible, because Mead looks at the social process thorough his concept of the self, as a result of increasingly universal communication. This moment encapsulates the key difference between Hegel’s and Mead’s visions of social progress. For Hegel, the social progress is an expression of pre-given rationality, which, finally, after passing through contradictory tendencies, finds its realisation in the idea of freedom. And while Mead shares Hegel’s idea of contradictions inherent in social progress, he departs from the Hegelian concept, in that he does not posit any pre-given ideas that could possibly control its ongoing movement. The universal moment is, rather, a possibility hidden in the very form of human interactions, yet it has to be revealed by the creation of suitable political conditions. For this reason, democracy is also a realisation of the idea of ­universality in politics: 19

politics of dialogue There are, in fact, various forms of democratic government; but democracy, in the sense here relevant, is an attitude which depends upon the type of self which goes with the universal relation of brotherhood, however that be reached. It received its expression in the French Revolution in the conception of fraternity and union. Every individual was to stand on the same level with every other. This conception is one, which received its first expression in the universal religions. If carried over into the field of politics, it can get its expression only in such a form as that of democracy; and the doctrine that lies behind it is very largely Rousseau’s conception, as found in Social Contract.30

While Mead puts forward democracy as the universal society that emerges from the economic exchange and the religious idea of neighbourhood, contemporary political theorists predominantly tend to single out the ‘political’ as a separate sphere of activity opposed to other spheres of social actions. The proponents of this standpoint draw on the work of Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt, who sought to show that the political is not reducible to any other form of sociality.31 Mead demonstrates, rather, that politics is closely interwoven in the complicated process of the development of communication embedded in economy and religion, with democracy as a culmination of the two. At this point, we could legitimately ask which social mechanism is chiefly conducive to the emergence of democracy? The answer lies, as I have already mentioned, in Mead’s social psychology and his concept of the social self. However, since Mead seems to foreground the centripetal force, which makes a society increase in coherency, we could also ask how this scheme can accommodate conflict and contradiction. To answer this question, I will turn again to Mead’s discussion of social progress.

1.4  George Herbert Mead: the Self and Democracy – between Conflict and Integration Mead’s reference to Rousseau is by no means accidental, as in his book he envisions the ideal of society as that in which all social relations become transparent. Every member of such a society is conscious of his or her position vis-à-vis its other members; and the relation of power, rather than involving subjugation or oppression, becomes an expression of general will. I would say that Mead took over this concept of society, but, in building on it, he articulates its tenets in his own categories of a self-conscious human individual capable of taking the attitude of the other: 20

democracy and everyday life Human society endows the human individual with a mind; and the very social nature of that mind requires him to put himself to some degree in the experiential places of, or to take the attitudes of, the other individuals belonging to that society and involved with him in the whole social process of experience and behavior which that society represents or carries on.32

Mead explicitly utilises this concept in his examination of economy and religion. In both cases, we encounter a mechanism that enables the individual to take the attitude of the other and to integrate, so to speak, his own self with the selves of others. This tendency is visible in existing societies, but if we extrapolate it to show how it can be completed, then we arrive at the ideal of the full democratic community. Analysing the economic process, Mead writes: The whole process depends on an identification of one’s self with the other. And this cannot take place among living forms in which there is not a capacity for putting one’s self in the place of the other through communicating in a system of gestures which constitute language. Here are then two phases in which universal societies, although highly abstract societies do actually exist, and what I have been presenting is the import from the psychological standpoint of these universal societies and their tendencies to complete themselves. One cannot complete the process of bringing goods into a market except by developing means of communication. The language in which that is expressed is the language of money. The economic process goes right on tending to bring people close together by setting up more and more economic techniques and the language mechanism necessary to these procedures.33

The same tendency can be observed in religion: The same is true in a somewhat different sense from the point of view of the universal religions. They tend to define themselves in terms of communities, because they identify themselves with the cult in the community, but break out beyond this in the missionary movement, in the form of propagandists. [. . .] They illustrate the tendency of religion to complete itself, to complete the community which previously existed in an abstract form.34

Having this tendency in mind, we realise that the ideal system, which emerges as a consequence of the development of elementary forms of exchange and elementary forms of sympathy, is the ideal of a transparent society, where everybody can exchange perspectives with everybody else. In terms of a political system, democracy would 21

politics of dialogue then be a kind of direct democracy, as postulated by Rousseau, because it would accommodate all human interactions. The division between the private and public spheres would be obliterated, as full communication would permeate all levels of social and private lives. A universal society may materialise if we attune our conduct properly.35 We may obviously wonder whether the concept of the development of human community outlined by Mead is not over-optimistic by any chance. Where can conflicts and contradictions be located in such evolving communities? It seems that, in Mead’s view, the forces of integration are stronger than those of disintegration. But, of course, the relations between conflict and integration are far more complicated than may be rendered in such a simple statement. Both forces work at the same time in all human communities: In the baseball game there are competing individuals who want to get into the limelight, but this can only be attained by playing the game. Those conditions do make a certain sort of action necessary, but inside of them there can be all sort of jealously competing individuals who may wreck the team. There seems to be abundant opportunity for disorganization in the organization essential to the team. This is so to a much larger degree in the economic process. There has to be distribution, markets, mediums of exchange; but within that field all kinds of competition and disorganizations are possible, since there is an ‘I’ as well a ‘me’ in every case.36

What is, then, the source of the conflictual tendencies in society? One reason for conflict is that our social self is a composite of various points of reference, which, of course, are susceptible to conflict. The self experiences an internal tension, which, at its pathological worst, produces a split personality. If conflict is inscribed in the individual self, it is all the more evident that conflict is unavoidable among various social selves, which represent all the different possibilities of the social at any given moment. Mead, however, instantly suggests a way out of this predicament: Thus within such a society, conflicts arise between different aspects or phases of the same individual self [. . .], as well as between different individual selves. And both types of individual conflicts are settled or terminated by reconstructions of the particular social situations, and modifications of the given framework of social relationships, wherein they arise or occur in the general human social life-process – these reconstructions and modifications being performed, as we have said, by the minds of the individuals in whose experience or between whose selves these conflicts take place.37 22

democracy and everyday life This way out of conflict is determined by the human capacity for such reconstruction. As we have already seen, Mead identifies scientific investigation with providing a solution to the problems that arise from the difficulties in action. Reconstruction is, thus, tantamount to using reflective consciousness for the invention of a new social condition that could accommodate conflictual perspectives. Hans Joas defines Mead’s concept of ethics as ‘the clarification and systematization of the attempts to proceed according to this experimental method which occur in individual reflection on problems encountered in action’.38 I would supplement this account by adding politics to it, a move justified by the close link that Mead establishes between ethics and politics, almost to the point of non-differentiation between these two spheres. Given this, politics is identified with solving social conflicts, and the procedure of reconstruction is directed at finding ‘a new social object’ that could secure a smooth course of action. Although the whole process of accepting the increasingly generalised perspective is painful and, as we have seen, may also entail subordination of one group to another, it finally leads to accomplishing the human ideal, characterised as the attainment of a universal human society in which all human individuals would possess a perfected social intelligence, such that all social meanings would each be similarly reflected in their respective individual consciousnesses – such that the meanings of any one individual’s acts or gestures (as realized by him and expressed in the structure of his self, through his ability to take the social attitudes of other individuals toward himself and toward their common social ends or purposes) would be the same for any other individual whatever who responded to them.39

The mechanism of taking the attitude of the other prevails in the construction of the social. It is so overriding that it includes even such conduct that may seem at odds with the social integration. It is important, according to Mead, to distinguish two varieties of social behaviour. Social behavior, namely, can be ethical, in the sense of conscious cooperation, or asocial, in the sense of being directed against other members of a society. In both cases, however, the most important thing is that an individual acts on the premises formulated by the society he or she inhabits. Thus, the potential of sociality intrinsic to the human self has to be activated through a complicated and often painful process of mutual adjustment: 23

politics of dialogue In social situations of the latter general type [. . .] each individual’s attitude toward the other individuals is essentially asocial or hostile (though these attitudes are of course social in the fundamental nonethical sense, and are socially derived); such situations are so complex that the various individuals involved in any one of them either cannot be brought into common social relations with one another at all or else can be brought into such relations only with great difficulty, after long and tortuous process of mutual social adjustment; for any such situation lacks a common group or social interest shared by all the individuals – it has no one common social end or purpose characterizing it and serving to unite and co-ordinate and harmoniously interrelate the actions of all those individuals; instead, those individuals are motivated, in that situation, by several different and more or less conflicting social interests or purposes.40

From this point of view, society is a kind of universal mutual exchange of communicative actions, in which political institutions are of secondary importance. Mead states emphatically that we must recognize that the most concrete and most fully realized society is not that which is presented in institutions as such, but that which is found in the interplay of social habits and customs, in the readjustment of personal interest that have come into conflict and which take place outside of court, in the change of social attitude that is not dependent upon an act of legislature.41

Social and political institutions can facilitate the process of integration, but they are not able to impose this process by themselves. Referring to human rights, Mead concludes: ‘Human rights are never in such danger as when their only defenders are political institutions and their officers.’42 With his claim that politics is more about the relationships among individuals than about political parties and institutions, Mead seems to treat the latter merely as a reflection of deeper changes in the development of communication and the enlargement of the social self. Of course, institutions are vehicles of this process, but their role is secondary and their real content is guaranteed by people’s willingness to accept others’ attitudes to them. Summing up Mead’s views on politics, we could say that, according to a broader pragmatist principle, politics resembles a helix, where the subsequent phases are realisations of increasingly universal relationships among individuals. Politics is embedded in everyday life with its two core processes – that of economy and that of religion. Both bring people ever closer to each other not 24

democracy and everyday life only in the sense of spatial proximity, but mainly in their ability to take the position of the other. Both processes, however, are concrete incarnations of the fundamental process of communication, which, in turn, fosters a progressively enlarged self. The social and political institutions – also including, I believe, religion – can facilitate the processes of achieving the ideal of human society, but they are not able to bring it forth. This assertion can be seen as a weakness in Mead’s political conception, since he seems to neglect the importance of democratic institutions, therein parties, for the development of democratic society. Hans Joas comments on this problem, concluding his discussion of Mead’s ethics: ‘Mead’s ethics [. . .] would be completed in a consistent manner only if it incorporated into itself its relationship to the problem of political action encountered by a movement to democratize society.’43 A weakness though it may be, this feature of the pragmatist social theory proves an asset for those who seek alternatives to party politics and institutionalised democracy. I have already mentioned Unger and Bohman as thinkers who refer to pragmatism in order to overcome the limits of historically established liberal democracy in their attempts at developing ‘radical democracy’ and ‘deliberative democracy’, respectively. Yet, to judge to what extent pragmatism can be a source for such alternative thinking, we need to consider, briefly at least, John Dewey’s concepts of community and democracy.

1.5  John Dewey: Individual, Community and Democracy As already signalled, there are a proliferation of commentaries on John Dewey’s concept of democracy, as it is intuitively felt that his insights can help understand democracy as something more than merely a system of institutions and accompanying procedures. Rorty is certainly right that Dewey regards democracy as a kind of inquiry directed at facilitating individuals’ social lives: ‘organization is never an end in itself. It is a means of promoting association, of multiplying effective points of contact between persons, directing their intercourse into the modes of greatest fruitfulness.’44 This anthropological approach to institutions also applies to democracy and, in broader terms, to politics. In this respect, Dewey shares George Herbert Mead’s position that democracy is a culmination of various human interaction processes. Dewey opens The Public and Its Problems, his seminal book on politics, with a kind of political credo: 25

politics of dialogue Modifiable and altering human habits sustain and generate political phenomena. These habits are not wholly informed by reasoned purpose and deliberative choice – far from it – but there are more or less amenable to them. Bodies of men are constantly engaged in attacking and trying to change some political habits, while other bodies are actively supporting and justifying them.45

The emphasis on habits and bodies attests that, for Dewey, politics has affinities with a general process, in which the human self attains its full capacity. In his anthropology, bodies and their habits are primary facts of human endowment. Dewey, of course, accepts Mead’s view that individuals become selves only in, and through, interactions with other individuals. He stresses repeatedly that humans are social beings with nothing like a separate individual ever existing in the first place. But he also underlines that the bare fact of the necessity of human integration by itself does not constitute a community: ‘We are born organic beings associated with others, but we are not born members of a community.’46 Thus, the potential of community construction has to be activated, and democracy, from this point of view, means increased universal communication, which, in turn, will affect action: ‘[. . .] the perfecting of the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action’.47 To grasp the implications of this notion fully, we need to refer to the general assumptions Mead and Dewey shared about the development of the social self. In their anthropology, the individual is, in fact, an artificial construct, because the human being is from the outset involved in the network of relations with other human beings. Mead, as already discussed, describes in detail how mind and self emerge through the process of communication in his work on social psychology. I believe that both Mead and Dewey adopt this concept of the social self as a fixed point of departure and keep referring to it as to tacit knowledge, which does not has to be repeatedly articulated. Therefore, if Dewey analyses the impact of technological developments on the shape of society, he has in mind the formative role of communication in changing the human self and, in turn, the political sphere. The development of communication in various forms brings about the creation of the Great Society, but not a Great Community: We have the physical tools of communication as never before. The thoughts and aspirations congruous with them are not communicated, 26

democracy and everyday life and hence are not common. Without such communication the public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance. Till the Great Society is converted into a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community.48

How can such a conversion be effected? To answer this question, we should again revisit the general assumptions shared by Mead and Dewey. Discussing Mead’s concept of the self, Dewey shows its political relevance by introducing a distinction between the private and the public as a differentiation in various consequences of individual interactions. The difference is not, as Dewey reminds us, between the individual and the social, because most of our acts have a social character. However, only some of those acts are of public significance: When A and B carry on a conversation together the action is a transaction: both are concerned in it; its results pass, as it were, across from one to the other. One or other or both may be helped or harmed thereby. But, presumably, the consequences of advantage and injury do not extend beyond A and B; the activity lies between them; it is private. Yet if it is found that consequences of conversation extend beyond the two directly concerned, that they affect the welfare of many others, the act acquires a public capacity, whether the conversation be carried on by a king and his prime minister or by Catiline and a fellow conspirator or by merchants planning to monopolize a market.49

Therefore, there are no clear boundaries between the public and the private, as well as between the individual and the social, and any political theory that upholds such a clear distinction is erroneous. This perspective allows Dewey to discuss government and governmental officers as always representing the public interests, while at the same time being immersed in the common affairs of their groups. Again, the extent to which government is representative is rather a matter of degree than of an absolute difference. Dewey thus states: We commonly speak of some governments as representative in contrast with other which are not. By our hypothesis all governments are representative in that they purport to stand for the interests which a public has in the behavior of individuals and groups [. . .]

And he continues to show the difference: The dual capacity of every officer of the public leads to conflict in individuals between their genuinely political aims and acts and those which they possess in their non-political roles. When the public adopts special 27

politics of dialogue measures to see to it that the conflict is minimized and that the representative function overrides the private one, political institutions are termed representative.50

Again, Dewey insists on a continuity of everyday life and politics, positing also a continuity of non-democratic and democratic political regimes. If we want to install democracy, we can and must work on developing mechanisms that will protect the institutions of our society from conflict and predominance of the particular interests of groups and cliques. No effort, however, can eliminate what Dewey calls ‘the dual capacity of officers’. Such removal cannot be effected, even if a system of institutions and procedures is set up to defend citizens against the officers’ misuse of power. Therefore, Dewey insists that democracy is an ideal that will never be fully attained. The only possible way to realise it is by reinforcing the tendencies promoting an increasingly universal society. Democracy is thus identified with community: ‘Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community itself.’51 But not every association is a community, according to Dewey. As Axel Honneth observes, Dewey intertwines the idea of cooperation with the concept of full self-realisation of the individual. This harmonisation lies at the core of his democratic theory.52 It does not come as a surprise, then, that the ultimate definition of democracy evokes the idea of consciousness: ‘The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy.’53 However, I think that in order to fully understand Dewey’s position, we would be well advised to delve into a book that Dewey advertises as the best formulation of the democratic ideal. The book is Thomas Vernon Smith’s The Democratic Way of Life.54 Smith opens his discussion of democracy, defining it as ‘a state of mind’. More specifically, he writes: Democracy itself is, in truth, ‘a state of mind.’ It is a state of mind, first, of and toward the majority. It is a state of mind, second, toward and of the minority. It is a state of mind, finally and fundamentally, by and for the individual.55

Among the various dimensions of the democratic state of mind that Smith enumerates, he finds ‘the emotional element of mentality’ the most important. People have to accept intuitively the rule of the majority and the legitimacy of the minority if democracy is to work. From this point of view, an emotional endorsement of democracy is more relevant than truth. Smith refers to the experience of Soviet 28

democracy and everyday life communism, in order to show that ‘no abstract truth is safe for citizens save that arrived at and by agreement freely consented to, on the basis of persuasion and proof alone’.56 The public sphere is thus not a place for imposing belief; rather, it is a space where people who believe in different things can meet and cooperate. Again, Smith stresses the value of the consciousness of this fact, which is the most important facet of the democratic way of life: The discovery that men do not have to agree on fundamental beliefs in order to cooperate in necessary measures is the final state of mind which ties all our previous states of mind together into the seamless whole known as the democratic way of life.57

The crucial question, for Smith as for Dewey and Mead, is how to account for the existence of both conflictual tendencies at the same time. What is it that people need to have in common in order to cooperate in spite of the incommensurability of their beliefs. Walking the pragmatist path, Smith makes the triad of fraternity, liberty and equality central to the democratic ideal. Fraternity, for Smith, is a natural outcome of the social character of human beings. The inclination for companionship demands a clear framework, which could be found in a universal religion. Smith insists, however, that religion is not a source of fraternity. ‘Brotherhood is not founded upon the fatherhood of God; it is not even founded upon religion at all. It is quite the other way around. Religion is founded upon the experience of brotherhood.’58 Hence, religion should reinforce the democratic spirit by constructing ‘out of friendship’s will-to-become-incarnate a constantly enlarging brotherhood, the guardian genius of which would be some dynamic conception of deity. Conceived in any other way religion can become the enemy of the democratic way of life.’59 Fraternity denotes two things. On the one hand, it is intrinsic to human life, as we are social beings from the very beginning; this aspect is defined by Smith as brotherhood. On the other hand, fraternity in a strict sense of the word is a democratic ideal that must be pursued in conscious way: ‘[. . .] we have seen fraternity as a natural and necessary ethical end for men. Religion has testified to this, in its failures as well as in its success; and democracy aims fundamentally at the progressive attainment of this objective.’60 Fraternity and liberty are closely interrelated, as liberty, like fraternity, is founded on emotions: ‘The fundamental insight achieved in this is that man’s emotional nature is primary. If we do not base 29

politics of dialogue liberty upon desire, then liberty rests upon a floating foundation that may be transported wherever presumptuous tyranny wills.’61 Therefore, liberty is not doomed to clash with fraternity, insofar as both are rooted in human nature. Human nature, for Smith as well for Dewey and Mead, is not an unchangeable entity; rather, it is a product of interactions. Hence, people can be educated and trained in such a way that they perceive and experience these two concepts – fraternity and liberty – as complementary and not conflictual. Therefore, education for democracy is not just a preparation for fulfilling fixed social roles. Education consists in shaping the process of communication, so as to facilitate the development of individual capacities. The task of education is even more momentous if liberty is regarded as an acceptance of personal experimentations. Here, Smith evokes the concept of experience, which lies at the core of pragmatism, and links it to liberty: Vicarious experience, whether in religion or in politics or in economics or in family life, belongs to an older ideal. The democratic ideal must insist upon fresh experience for every man, and the only way to achieve it is to encourage toward the limitations of every age; the critical attitude taken by our revolutionary forefathers toward the tyranny of their time.62

Having defined liberty in such terms, Smith can interlace liberty and equality and dismiss the claims that that these two values are incompatible. In direct opposition to them, he maintains that ‘the only freedom worth emphasizing is the ability actually to try out one’s desires and plans, and the ability to escape unforeseen consequences. The one ability exists only with economic independence, the other only with a liberal education.’63 Only if we create such conditions for liberty will we be able to pose the question of equality. As liberty means, from this perspective, a full development of the capacities of every individual, only when we have fulfilled or, rather, worked on achieving these conditions can we investigate the problem of inequalities: we must follow Aristotle in preferring to base our judgments concerning men on their highest potentiality, rather than upon any given actuality to attainment, though of course we require to go far beyond Aristotle by applying this dictum to all men rather than to a few. We are not as democrats disturbed by the probable fact that after such indulgence men will still unequal. What disturbs us is, rather, that without this treating of men as equal, we can never know what their deep and genuine inequalities are and so cannot turn them to constructive, rather than aggressive, account.64 30

democracy and everyday life Having described the key concepts of democracy, Smith delves into how to realise the ideals, without recourse to force or any other form of imposition. In other words, he tackles the central question troubling liberal democracy – for instance, how to achieve the unity of action without forfeiting the tolerance of different opinions and beliefs. Smith’s answer to this question ensues from his general approach to democracy as a state of mind. The ideal of democratic politics is sportsmanship. Democratic politics, as opposed to Nazi or communist politics, is a kind of game in which all participants respect the rules. This state of mind is predicated upon acknowledging that ‘all thought is on way to action’, to use Justice Holmes’s expression.65 Therefore, we should consider politics as a field of shared action, rather than an opportunity to clarify our beliefs on ethics, religion and aesthetics. This concept of democracy also demands a reconstruction of religion in such a way that ‘the God whom citizens worship shall be at least as good as citizens are themselves’.66 It also requires special capacities characterised by political activity. Formulating the ideal of sportsmanship, Smith enumerates its three distinctive parts: (1) an activity worthwhile for its own sake, (2) an opposition tolerated and even treasured as indispensable to this activity, and (3) a continuous exercise of the will-to-power in striving for victory and the will-for-­ perfection in acceptance of defeat as both honorable and necessary in human competition. These three elements of the ideal are present in every democratic institution. The final affirmation of sportsmanship is in the field of party politics, just as the final denial of its spirit in totalitarian lands is in disdain of ‘game of politics.’ Totalitarians cannot abide the mediocrity of politics; so they abide the obliquity of something ten thousand times worse.67

Smith notices that both Nazism and communism hate politics and fear politicians, as they reject the political way of resolving conflicts. In fact, the two reject politics as such, so they are not able, of course, to tolerate politics as a game in which one sometimes wins and sometimes loses. For Smith, being ‘a good loser’ and ‘a graceful winner’ defines the democratic way of life. Finally, what makes a person a good Democrat is his or her ability to exercise self-detachment to find enjoyment in political activity: The sportsman can smile at his own foibles, can suffer and even inflict a joke at his own expense; he is so at home with himself that he does not have always to be obtrusive with his seriousness or defensive of his honor; nor is he trigger-happy to make easy simplicity of other men’s actions or 31

politics of dialogue beliefs. This is indeed the democratic man, matching his outer opportunities of freedom with inner resource of enjoyment.68

Using the concept of sportsmanship, Smith shows which rules have to be respected by a community if it is to become a democratic community. He thus establishes a link between the community’s consciousness and its political form. Via the detour of Smith, we arrive at a lucid understanding why Dewey insists that the clear consciousness of communal life constitutes the idea of democracy. Axel Honneth, in his account of Deweyan democracy, underscores that it allows us to ‘grasp democratic ethical life as the outcome of the experience that all members of society could have if they related to one another cooperatively through a just organizing of the division of labor’.69 Though certainly valid, this interpretation, I believe, deserves – perhaps even needs – further commentary. The main problem with Dewey’s concept of democracy lies in his understanding of community, which diverges from those developed by the contemporary communitarians. For Dewey, community is not an entity demarcated and fixed by shared values or goals inherited from the past, but rather a living entity that presupposes ‘merely’ one condition – namely, undisturbed communication among its members. This condition of the real community, as opposed to an association, entails, however, serious duties to be met. They comprise a conscious commitment to the rules and norms, which would prevent any distortion of communication. This commitment gives a society its democratic contours. Apparently, democracy is entangled in a vicious circle of sorts: democracy cannot exist without a community, and it is at same time a precondition for a community to exist. Yet, this vicious circle would be real only if politics and communal life were two separate things. Dewey, however, as already noted, envisages no sharp distinction of this kind. He highlights the continuity between the everyday life of society and the political institutions that the society in question forms. Therefore, ‘the great society’ with elaborate, sophisticated technical means of communication cannot be ‘a great community’ if it lacks a proper ‘state of mind’, which, in turn, generates the set of proper democratic institutions.

1.6  Conclusion: the Pragmatist Concept of Democracy and its Role in the Contemporary Debate on Democratic Society As discussed earlier, the pragmatist concept of democracy proves attractive to many political theorists, as it allows them to discard the 32

democracy and everyday life tight corset of the procedural notion of democracy and look for alternative solutions. For instance, James Bohman, one of the prominent proponents of deliberative democracy, notes: According to a pragmatic account, democracy itself is a form of inquiry typical of problem solving in cooperative social activity. A mode of inquiry is democratic not only if it fulfills the basic conditions of freedom and equality; if it does so, it is eo ipso ‘multiperspectival’. In contrast to the single perspective of the social scientific observer, a mode of inquiry is multiperspectival to the extent that it seeks to take into account the positive and negative dimensions of current social conditions as well as to incorporate the various perspectives of relevant social actors in attempting to solve a problem.70

The multiperspectival approach enables us to pit the pragmatist concept of democracy against various other currents in contemporary social theory. As Richard Bernstein argues, this idea can lead us beyond the liberalism versus communitarianism controversy, which was so fervent in two last decades of the twentieth century.71 Although I fully agree with these insights, I think that to justify them it is necessary to bring to light the link that Mead and Dewey establish between their views on the nature of the human self and action and their concept of politics. Mead and Dewey look at democracy (and politics in general) as an extension of everyday human communication, with communication invested with a special and theoretically loaded meaning. Communication is a medium in, and through which, the human self and mind are constituted; in other words, communication endows biological organisms with consciousness and self-­ consciousness. Crucially, the origins of democracy – and all other human activities likewise – lie in the exchange between biological organisms. Democracy is, thus, initiated in bodies, and it is always embodied. Though never elaborated on in an unambiguous conjunction with politics, this thesis resonates in all pronouncements that Dewey and Mead advance on democracy. The embedment of communication in simple gestures, so important for Mead’s account of the self, gives to any human activity a touch of concreteness, preventing it from slipping into a futile abstraction or subordination to hypostatised categories. For this reason, politics is not only a realm of rational action, but contains emotions, sentiments and even prejudices as well. However, all of these non-rational elements are, in the last instance, incorporated into the system of human i­nteractions, which 33

politics of dialogue constitute the self and mind. Reciprocity of action is an axiom in Mead’s account of human conduct, and, as Blumer, points out: The significant thing about interaction on the symbolic level is that the action of the participants is formed by their having to take account of the action of the others. The responses of others thus enter into the formation of one’s own line of conduct. This simple fact means, first, that the conduct of the participant cannot be understood or explained except in terms of interaction and, second, that the joint action of the participants must be seen as a product of their interaction and not a creation of a social structure.72

Interactions, of course, go on in various spheres of social reality, but Mead finds religion and economy particularly relevant. Their development changes the trajectory of human interactions, making them more and more general, precisely in the sense of increased universal interactions between individuals. Political outcomes of this process of universalisation can be labelled ‘democracy’. In many of his works, and in The Public and Its Sphere in particular, Dewey demonstrates the role of politics in the whole process of the universalisation of human interactions, which means at the same time the universalisation of human communication, human self and human intelligence. The crucial problem of democracy is, for him, its close link with community. He sees community as created, rather than given; community, namely, emerges as a result of the intellectual efforts of theoreticians that penetrate ideologies of everyday life and even constitute them. The major challenge is to explain how an individual can contradict the community knowledge, and, patently, this challenge must yet be adequately tackled. An individual seems doomed to being subject to manipulation, and he or she can salvage autonomy only in a brief moment of revolt or revolution. In Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey concludes: Now it is true that social arrangements, laws, institutions are made for man, rather than that man is made for them; that they are means and agencies of human welfare and progress. But they are not means for obtaining something for individuals, not even happiness. They are means of creating individuals [. . .]. Individuality in a social and moral sense is something to be wrought out. It means initiative, inventiveness, varied resourcefulness, assumption of responsibility in choice of belief and conduct. They are not gifts, but achievements. As achievements, they are not absolute but relative to the use that is to be made of them. And this use varies with the environment.73 34

democracy and everyday life Thus, Dewey is much more optimistic: social and political institutions are not only the agents of oppressive power, but they can also promote human achievements. Dewey’s approach differs in this from the perspective that locates the source of all ills in modernity. The proponents of the latter view – and Michel Foucault’s work could be a paradigmatic case in point – regard social and political institutions, especially but not exclusively those constructed in modernity, as necessarily oppressive. Ostensibly an expression of rationality, the institutions deploy rationality as a veil for violence and coercion: [R]eason of state is not an art of government according to divine order, natural, or human laws. It doesn’t have to respect the general order of the world. It’s government in accordance with the state’s strength. It’s government whose aim is to increase this strength within an extensive and competitive framework.74

However, in his interventions into the concrete political and social situation, Foucault sees sources of resistance in everyday moral experience. For instance, in his reflections following the suppression of the Solidarity movement in Poland, he emphasises a moral awakening of society: In these regimes that function as much on the basis of reward as on the basis of punishment, the reward is even more humiliating than the punishment, because it makes one an accomplice. Now, after Solidarity, after the collective formulation of all these individual hatreds, I believe that a certain number of these obliging and weary behaviors will become much more difficult. People are going to be much stronger in resisting all these petty mechanisms by which they were made, if not to sanction, at least to accept the worst. This moralization seems to me to be, in fact, a process that has been incorporated into people’s behavior and will not be obliterated any time soon.75

These two utterances exemplify a certain contradiction in Foucault’s thought. He seems to believe in a spontaneous moral awakening of Polish society in opposition to the corrupted state apparatus. Of course, in this case, he refers to an antagonism between the totalitarian state and the moral society, but the same line of reasoning could be applied to liberal democracies of the Western world. Foucault’s whole oeuvre articulates a critique of the false rationality of the modern state, the rationality which permeates the regime of liberal democracy. I am not going to discuss Foucault’s views at length here; I evoke 35

politics of dialogue them only in order to highlight the specificity of the pragmatist concept of democracy. Like Foucault, the pragmatists believe that social and political institutions make individuals, but, unlike him, they do not think that this process inevitably leads to oppression. Pace Foucault, democracy for the pragmatists is, as John Ryder observes, a process in which social and individual human growth is secured: ‘Democracy has everything to do with human nature; in fact, it brings out the best in us, so to speak. It involves a faith in the possibilities of human nature, specifically the possibilities of individual and social development.’76 Above, I showed that, for the pragmatists, democracy is an expression of the process of universalisation unfolding through increasingly complicated communication. Obviously, this process cannot run smoothly all the time. In this process, individuals simultaneously enter into dialogue with each other and construct rules and norms of communication. Therefore, in communication, there are no pre-given goals. The goals must be set in the process itself. This approach has far-reaching consequences for pragmatist social philosophy. First, democracy from this point of view is not a way of achieving a consensus to which all parties involved in a controversy could subscribe. Instead, democracy involves a constant struggle for an ever better understanding, as understanding is neither guaranteed by a set of concepts common to all of humankind nor governed by a single regulative idea. Put another way, the measure of social progress is the achievement of more complex perspectives, including partial ones, without approximating any universal principles of rationality. Practically, it means that, for pragmatists, democracy is a system where all voices should be respected. Smith formulates this rule as a principle of ‘sportsmanship’, which actually resembles Chantal Mouffe’s category of ‘agonism’ versus ‘antagonism’. Both concepts – ‘sportsmanship’ and ‘agonism’ – rely on the metaphor of the game as an apt rendering of the democratic system. Respecting the rules of the game is the most important feature of democracy. However, for Chantal Mouffe, ‘agonism’ is a way of domesticating antagonism, while for the pragmatists ‘sportsmanship’ is a way of promoting democratic dialogue, which is instrumental in better social understanding. Second, democratic dialogue emerges from community and forms community at the same time. Community has to be sufficiently differentiated in order to be a space of dialogue, and it has to be ready to accept this diversity as a value in itself. Acceptance of diversity means 36

democracy and everyday life acceptance of dialogue as a form of community. Dialogue finds its embodiment in democratic politics; hence Dewey’s observation that democracy is a form of community. Third, dialogue plays a threefold function for community. At the most basic level, dialogue permeates all human relationships, as the mechanism of taking the role of the other is the foundation of the self and mind. For an established community, dialogue is an endorsement of its diversity, as opposed to the modes of thinking in which community is defined as an integrated whole founded on fixed values and traditions. At the political level, dialogue shapes community into a democratic community. The transition from one stage to another is what Mead calls universalisation. However, this process is by no means a one-way process. If certain institutions that foster democratic dialogue have been formed, they influence communal life, which in turn shapes the selves and minds of the community members. This concept of democracy resonates with Cornelius Castoriadis’s views, in which democracy is a project of autonomy, both individual and collective. For Castoriadis, democratic society is a society that promotes autonomy, which, in turn, enables people to interrogate and call into question all ostensibly evident customs and institutions: Almost all societies we know have instituted themselves in and through the closure of meaning. They are heteronomous; they cannot put into question their own institution and they produce conformal and heteronomous individuals for whom the putting into question of the existing law is not just forbidden but mentally inconceivable and psychically unbearable. These individuals are ‘conscious’, but not self-reflective subjectivities. This state of affairs was broken for the first time in ancient Greece, and this breaking was repeated fifteen centuries later, with much greater difficulty but also on an incomparably large scale, in Western Europe. In both cases the institutions and the ultimate beliefs of the tribe have been explicitly called into question, and, to a large extent, modified. The main carriers of this new historical creation were politics as collective emancipatory movement and philosophy as self-reflecting, uninhibitedly critical thought. Thus emerged what I call the project of collective and individual autonomy.77

For Castoriadis, this project of autonomy cannot ever be completed, but it does not entail that it is a failure: [I]t being understood that the project of autonomy does not aim at establishing Paradise on Earth or at bringing about the end of human history; 37

politics of dialogue nor does it purport to ensure universal happiness. The object of politics is not happiness but freedom; autonomy is freedom understood not in the inherited, metaphysical sense, but as effective, humanely feasible, lucid and reflective positing of the rules of individual and collective activity.78

If we compare Castoriadis’ project with that of the pragmatists’, it is clear that both are complementary and can supplement each other. Both are concerned with linking democracy to the development of individual autonomy, this autonomy being simultaneously democracy’s prerequisite and its final effect. The pragmatists would agree that, in the political realm, autonomy is freedom as experienced by politically involved individuals, but they would insist that social conditions for autonomy emerge from interactions among individuals, which are always reciprocal and dialogical. These interactions, which effectively condition the rise of society, have grown increasingly universal, with democracy appearing a consequence of this universalisation. Democracy, in turn, is the necessary condition for the full development of the self, since only this system can ensure free communication among individuals, which fosters the growth of the self. The progress of democracy and the development of the self are only moments in a wider process of the universalisation of human interactions.

Notes 1. Robert Mangabeira Unger, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 23. 2. Ibid. p. 28. 3. Helen Swick Perry, ‘Introduction’, in Harry Stack Sullivan (ed.), The Fusion of Psychiatry and Social Science (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971), pp. xxiii–xxxii. 4. Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 189. 5. I have discussed Mead’s idea at length in my paper ‘G. H. Mead and L. S. Vygotsky on meaning and the self’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 8: 4, 1994, pp. 262–76. 6. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society: From the Standpoint of Social Behaviorist, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1959), p. 76. 7. Ibid. p. 69. 8. George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Act, eds Charles W. Morris, John M. Brewster, Albert M. Dunhan and David Miller (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), pp. 240–7.

38

democracy and everyday life 9. Ibid. p. 152. 10. Donald Woods Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publication, 1971), p. 68. 11. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 10 [emphasis in original]. 12. Ibid. p. 77. 13. Filipe Carreira de Silva, G.H. Mead: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 68–9. 14. George Herbert Mead, ‘What social objects must psychology presuppose?’ Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 7, 1910, p. 179. 15. George Herbert Mead, ‘A behavioristic account of the significant symbol’, Selected Writings, ed. Andrew J. Reck (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), p. 247. 16. George Herbert Mead, ‘The social settlement: its basis and function’, University of Chicago Record, 12, 1908, p. 110, after Gary A. Cook, George Herbert Mead: The Making of Social Pragmatist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 100–1. 17. Cook, George Herbert Mead, p. 101. 18. Ibid. 19. Mead, The Philosophy of the Act, p. 45. 20. James Bohman, ‘Democracy as inquiry, inquiry as democratic: pragmatism, social science, and the cognitive division of labor’, America Journal of Political Science, 43: 2, April 1999, p. 591. 21. George Herbert Mead, ‘The working hypothesis in social reform’, Selected Writings, pp. 3–5. 22. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, p. 281. 23. Ibid. p. 282. 24. Ibid. p. 292. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. p. 293. 27. Ibid. p. 284. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. p. 286. 31. Martin Jay, The Virtue of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). 32. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, p. 300. 33. Ibid. p. 302. 34. Ibid. 35. Cook, George Herbert Mead, p. 136. 36. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, pp. 307–8. 37. Ibid. p. 307. 39

politics of dialogue 38. Hans Joas, G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought, trans. Raymond Meyer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), pp. 128–9. 39. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, p. 310. 40. Ibid. pp. 322–3. 41. George Herbert Mead, ‘Natural rights and the theory of the political institution’, Selected Writings, p. 167. 42. Ibid. p. 169. 43. Joas, G.H. Mead, p. 144. 44. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 12, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), p. 198. 45. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–27, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 240. 46. Ibid. p. 331. 47. Ibid. p. 332. 48. Ibid. p. 324. 49. Ibid. p. 244. 50. Ibid. p. 283. 51. Ibid. p. 328. 52. Axel Honneth, ‘Democracy as reflexive cooperation: John Dewey and the theory of democracy today’, Political Theory, 26: 6, 1998, pp. 771–2. 53. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, p. 328. 54. Ibid. p. 327n. 55. Thomas Vernon Smith and Eduard C. Lindeman, The Democratic Way Of Life: An American Interpretation (New York: The New American Library, 1951), p. 10. 56. Ibid. p. 22. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. p. 32. 59. Ibid. p. 34. 60. Ibid. p. 37. 61. Ibid. p. 55. 62. Ibid. p. 45. 63. Ibid. p. 64. 64. Ibid. p. 71 [emphasis in original]. 65. Ibid. p. 79. 66. Ibid. p. 81. 67. Ibid. p. 99. 68. Ibid. pp. 108–9. 69. Honneth, ‘Democracy as reflexive cooperation’, p. 780. 70. James Bohman, ‘Realizing deliberative democracy as a mode of inquiry: 40

democracy and everyday life pragmatism, social facts and normative theory’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 18: 1, 2004, p. 25. 71. Richard Bernstein, ‘Dewey’s vision of radical democracy’, The Cambridge Companion to Dewey, ed. Molly Cochran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 288–308. 72. Herbert Blumer, George Herbert Mead and Human Conduct, ed. Thomas J. Morrione (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2004), pp. 32–3 [emphasis in original]. 73. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 191 [emphasis in original]. 74. Michel Foucault, ‘“Omnes et singulatim”: toward a critique of political reason’, in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley at al. (London: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 317. 75. Michel Foucault, ‘The moral and social experience of the poles can no longer be obliterated’, in Power, p. 468. 76. John Ryder, The Things in Heaven and Earth: An Essay in Pragmatic Naturalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), p. 184. 77. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Radical imagination and the social instituting imaginary’, in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 336–7. 78. Ibid. p. 337.

41

Dialogue, Carnival, Democracy: Bakhtin

2

Dialogue, Carnival, Democracy: Mikhail Bakhtin and Political Theory

A WORD is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live That day.1 – Emily Dickinson

2.1  Politics and Mikhail Bakhtin’s Notion of Language In the previous chapter, I discussed the pragmatist concept of democracy as grounded in the idea of the community of communication. Mead and Dewey painstakingly demonstrated the connections between the self, communication (mainly, although not exclusively, through language) and democratic politics. Mead, especially, developed a concept of language, which posits language as a kind of action. Yet, he did not explore the inner structure of linguistic communication, which omission has been frequently cited as a serious flaw of his theory. For instance, Habermas made this failing into a focal point of his critique of Mead’s theory.2 Habermas proposes that Mead’s concept of language should be supplemented with Wittgenstein’s insights: Wittgenstein emphasized the internal connection that holds between the competence to follow rules and the ability to respond with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question whether a symbol has been used correctly, that is, according to rules. The two competencies are equally constitutive for rule consciousness; they are equiprimordial in regard to logical genesis. If we explicate Mead’s thesis in the way I have suggested, it can be understood as a genetic explanation of Wittgenstein’s concept of rules – in the first instance, of rules, governing the use of symbols that determine meanings conventionally and thereby secure the sameness of meaning.3 42

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin What is of greatest importance for Habermas is ‘the sameness of meaning’, which is supposed to secure the ultimate understanding between the parties involved in dialogue. As there is not the space to discuss Habermas’s concept of language in detail at this point, I would like only to note that his notion of language-in-action is, in fact, a disguised form of language-as-system. This scheme enables Habermas to reinterpret pragmatism as an undeveloped version of his idea of transcendental pragmatics. The gist of his interpretation lies in showing that what the pragmatists described as language communication, through subsequent operations of taking the role of the other, can be represented as universal principles, and that these principles can be deductively derived from the rules of transcendental pragmatics. Dialogue postulated by Habermas ultimately turns out to be a quasi-dialogue, as its outcomes are predetermined by these transcendental rules. However, were we to go beyond a mere criticism of the Habermasian notion of language and its consequences for social theory and to propose a positive solution to the problem of understanding, we would need to tackle the issue of the incommensurability of meaning. A group of thinkers loosely described as ‘postmodernists’ accept the idea that this incommensurability is inevitably inscribed in language, and we are not able to establish any definite meaning of a word. Many of them, and Richard Rorty is a perfect case in point, are inspired by the views of Heidegger and Wittgenstein (Rorty, as we know, adds John Dewey to this duo). They see Wittgenstein as a philosopher who liberated language from the tyranny of representation and, as a consequence, from the tyranny of truth: To drop the idea of languages as representations, and to be thoroughly Wittgensteinian in our approach to language, would be to de-divinize the world. Only if we do that can we fully accept the argument I offered earlier – the argument that since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.4

Rorty looks at language from the outer side, so to speak, from the way in which language represents the objective world. What he can tell us about how language really works is essentially that everything that constitutes language is made by human beings. In a similar vein, Jean-François Lyotard sees Wittgenstein as a philosopher who demonstrates the failure of the concept of language as a unity: The examination of language games, just like the critique of the faculties, identifies and reinforces the separation of language from itself. There is 43

politics of dialogue no unity to language; there are islands of language, each of them ruled by a different regime, untranslatable into the others. This dispersion is good in itself, and ought to be respected. It is deadly when one phrase regime prevails over the others.5

If we give up the unity of language – that is, the possibility of achieving a common meaning – then we have to make do with the multiplicity of concurrent voices, which do not need to have much in common. This proposal has far-reaching implications for the concepts of society and community, which I will consider later. Crucially, both of these concepts of language – as a set of actions governed by universal rules and as an ensemble of various voices that have a contingent character –almost entirely neglect the ‘inner’ side of language: the ways and methods of using language, which, in fact, form a body of language. As Craig Brandist notes, the concept of ‘the inner form of language’ was a technical term that the Bakhtin Circle borrowed from various strands of German philosophy. It denotes the property of a word that is not connected with the language system, but pertains to language-in-action: Inner form is thus trans-subjective, registering the pattern of distortion of a word’s ‘ideal’ meaning when the word is used in intentional patterns of mutual ‘triggering.’ The ‘inner form’ of language is no longer an element of a ‘stream of mental life’ but of a chain of discursive interaction.6

I believe that this approach, with its emphasis on the role of language in social interaction, is crucial for the construction of a social theory inclusive of the pragmatist concept of democracy as an universalisation of dialogue and its concept of understanding, which is not determined by universal rules, but emerges in a complicated process full of mistakes and failures. For this, we need a notion of language and dialogue that will explain how understanding is embedded in language. Bakhtin’s notion of language, which not only shows how language works in communication, but also indicates how formal characteristics of language can be analysed in communication, seems to be an ideal starting point for such an enterprise. Crucially, for Bakhtin, language is always language-in-action, which he underscores, delimiting his own position from that of the linguist repeatedly across the vast body of his work. This position was a cornerstone of his (and the whole Bakhtin Circle’s) methodology. I am going to reconstruct his concept of language and dialogue as the foundation of a social theory of democracy. In order to do that, I will skip the development of his theory, since we have some excellent examples of such efforts.7 My 44

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin interpretation aims to depict how Bakhtin’s main categories are relevant to social theory, so my analysis will be limited by this purpose.

2.2  The Utterance as a Unit of Language For Bakhtin, the fundamental unit of language is ‘utterance’. It is clear in the early work of the Bakhtin Circle:8 Only the utterance can be beautiful, just as only the utterance can be true or false, bold or timid, etc. All of these definitions only pertain to the organization of the utterance and work in connection with the functions they fulfill in the unity of social life and, in particular, in the concrete unity of the ideological horizon. Linguistics, while building the concepts of language and its syntactic, morphological, lexical, etc. elements, digresses from the organizational forms of concrete utterances and their socioideological functions. Therefore, the language of linguistics and linguistic elements are indifferent to cognitive truth, poetic beauty, political correctness, and so on.9

Therefore, what is really important is that the social function of language takes place at the level of the utterance. This crucial role of the utterance ensues from its double nature, which is simultaneously an expression of an individual’s state of mind and a socially constructed means of communication. Moreover, these two roles overlap and they become indistinguishable in a single verbal act of the utterance: Not a single instance of verbal utterance can be reckoned exclusively to its utterer’s account. Every utterance is the product of the interaction between speakers and the product of the broader context of the whole complex social situation in which the utterance emerges.10

This social embedment of the utterance, in conjunction with its role as an expression of inner states, leads to regarding individual consciousness as an effect of social interactions; therefore, ‘if we in psychological experiment put “verbal equivalent” (outer and inner speech or only inner) in the place of “inner sensation,” then we can save unity and continuity of material experience’.11 Consequently, we can conceive of the utterance as a ‘bridge’ between mental states, social institutions in the broadest sense of the term and the relation with the immediate or mediated other. However the ‘bridge’ metaphor is somewhat flawed, as it suggests that the factors of language activity (mental states, social institutions and the other) exist independently from each other. Moreover, it also suggests that the utterance exists independently, by itself. I do not think that it actually is 45

politics of dialogue Bakhtin’s idea. Bakhtin always maintains that language-in-action is a whole in which all parts determine each other and, in fact, even the division into various parts of language is merely functional, not ontological. Furthermore, this whole is established by an outer factor – that is, responsive understanding. This orientation toward the other, which is part and parcel of the utterance, constitutes its final form. In his last works, Bakhtin highlights the dialectics between this whole and the utterance: This finalized wholeness of the utterance, guaranteeing the possibility of a response (or of responsive understanding), is determined by three aspects (or factors) that are inseparably linked in the organic whole of the utterance: 1. semantic exhaustiveness of the theme; 2. the speaker’s plan or speech will; 3. typical compositional and generic forms of finalization.12

Thus, in order to extract the main characteristics of language communication that would be crucial for political theory, it is necessary to take a closer look at those aspects of the utterance.

2.3  Ideology and the Utterance The most obvious social reference is to ideology. The early works of the Bakhtin Circle posit that the utterance is located in social ideology, which can be accounted for by the exchange with Marxism. This interest in ideology permeates the whole oeuvre of Bakhtin, for whom, as Michael Gardiner states, ‘language, being inherently “dialogic”, is always the site of ideological contestation, which explains Bakhtin’s stress on the “struggle over the sign”. As such, Bakhtin’s conception of ideology does not lose its critical or radical edge.’13 The intimate connection between the sign and ideology is caused by the very nature of the sign. A sign is never a ‘neutral’ reflection of reality; it ‘may distort that reality or be true to it, or may perceive it from a special point of view, and so forth. The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs. They equate with one another.’14 Ideology is not only a clearly crystallised system of beliefs and values, but also a way in which we express our views in everyday activity. To capture this aspect of ideology, Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov, a Russian linguist and member of the Bakhtin Circle, coined the term ‘behavioural ideology’, proposing that it be used ‘for the whole aggregate of life experiences and the outward expressions directly connected with it’.15 Behavioural ideology is ‘that atmosphere of unsystematized and unfixed inner and outer speech which 46

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin endows our every instance of behavior and action and our every ‘conscious’ state with meaning’.16 Behavioural ideology is, then, a type of everyday ideology that becomes palpably crystallised as ideology only in a clash with a more coherent system of beliefs and values. In his depiction of behavioural ideology, Voloshinov distinguishes between its two levels: the lowest one consists of ‘experiences born of momentary and accidental state of affairs’ and encompasses ‘all those vague and undeveloped experiences, thoughts, and idle, accidental words that flash across our mind’;17 while the upper ones, in turn, the ones directly linked with ideological systems, are more vital, more serious and bear a creative character. Compared to an established ideology, they are a great deal more mobile and sensitive: they convey changes in the socioeconomic basis more quickly and more vividly.18

Language embedded in utterances is, thus, social by nature. While at the lower level of behavioural ideology, language can function as an individual’s expression, at the upper level ‘the objective sociological method takes full command’.19 Therefore, concluding his argument at this stage, Voloshinov states clearly: ‘The structure of the utterance is a purely sociological structure. The utterance, as such, obtains between speakers. The individual speech act (in the strict sense of the word ‘individual’) is contradiction in adjecto.’20 The utterance is social by nature, but its social character does not lie merely in the imparting of the social to individual minds. Sociality is always a material sociality: ‘meanings and values are embodied in material things and actions. They cannot be realized outside of some developed material.’21 This concreteness of meanings is always entangled in an interplay with an ideological background: ‘Life, the aggregate of defined actions, events, or experiences, only becomes plot, story, theme, or motif once it has been refracted through the prism of the ideological environment, only once it has taken on concrete ideological flesh.’22 The concepts of ideological environment and refraction are of particular interest here. Both refer to the Marxist conceptual apparatus, but they develop it in the direction of a language-oriented methodology of the social sciences, which perceive all human activity as a language activity: ‘Human consciousness does not come into contact with existence directly, but through the medium of the surrounding ideological world.’23 Therefore, reality is always refracted by the ideological environment. We live in a world of object-signs, and our reality is a reality of signs. This conception 47

politics of dialogue provides a framework in which Bakhtin can make a link between the ideologically loaded social consciousness and behavioural ideology of individual consciousness. The utterance, as mentioned earlier, is a way of realisation of consciousness and, as such, it focalises complicated relations between the individual and the social. The Bakhtin Circle explored the relationships of language and individuality when this very problem became central for Soviet psychology and, generally speaking, for the emerging Marxist social sciences. I am not writing a historical analysis of the period’s intellectual history; still, I think that it is illuminating to note some striking similarities between Bakhtin’s approach and the theories developed by Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, who was the then central figure of psychology. As David Bukhurst relates in his discussion of the consciousness issues in Soviet psychology, Vygotsky argued that the psychologist must be able to preserve the ‘reflexive,’ ‘internal,’ ‘private’ and distinctively mental domain of thought, and contrast this with the ‘external,’ ‘public,’ and communicative nature of the physical expression of speech. In a dialectical mood congenial to Vygotsky’s universe of discourse, we might say that the psychologist strives to give sense to a unity of opposition.24

This unity of opposition also lies at the core of Bakhtin’s concept of language. Bakhtin shares the idea of the dialogical character of consciousness with Vygotsky. For both, dialogue is not only a way to know the other, but also a way to know oneself.25

2.4  Understanding and the Utterance The dialogical character of consciousness transpires clearly at the lowest level of analysis – namely, that of the utterance. The utterance is, simultaneously, a way of constructing self-expression and – as a means of communication – a vehicle of understanding. Bakhtin keeps reminding us that the utterance is never complete unless it is directed toward the other. In fact, the utterance is the smallest cell of the dialogical language – that is, language-in-action. What differentiates language-as-system from language-as-action is the dialogical character of the utterance: [T]he sort of relations that exist among rejoinders of dialogue – ­relations between question and answer, assertion and objection, assertion and agreement, suggestion and acceptance, order and execution, and so forth – are impossible among units of language (words and sentences), 48

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin either in the system of language (in the vertical cross section) or within the utterance (on the horizontal plane). [. . .] These relations are possible only among utterances of different speech subjects; they presuppose other (with respect to the speaker) participants in speech communication. The relation among whole utterances cannot be treated grammatically since, we repeat, such relations are impossible among units of language, and not only in the system of language, but within the utterance as well.26

In the same essay, Bakhtin emphasises that we lack a developed theory of the utterance, which leads to the confusion between the utterance and the sentence. He proposes that such effective theory should address: (1) the subject turn-taking in dialogue; and (2) finalisation of the utterance. The first element marks the boundaries of the utterance, both from an external, as well as from an internal, perspective. The internal aspect secures that the author of the work ‘manifests his own individuality in his style, his worldview, and in all aspects of the design of his work’.27 The external aspect of changing subjects, in turn, shows that the utterance always has clear and absolute boundaries. As for the finalisation, Bakhtin describes it as taking place when ‘the speaker has said (or written) everything he wishes to say at a particular moment or under particular circumstances’.28 The finalisation of the utterance, nevertheless, is effectively conditioned by the possibility of responding to it. This feature differentiates the utterance from the sentence, which is comprehensible, but does not evoke a responsive reaction. In his later works, Bakhtin seems to revisit the early discussions engaged with by the Bakhtin Circle, whose pivotal point was how to reconcile the individual and the social in every speech act. The key to this reconciliation was found by Pavel Medvedev in the utterance’s double reference to social reality. On the one hand, the utterance ‘organizes communication oriented toward reciprocal action, and itself reacts; it is also inseparably enmeshed in the communicative event’.29 On the other hand, the utterance is always a social and historical phenomenon, not only in terms of its content, but also in ‘in the very fact of its performance’.30 The utterance is, then, a dialectical unity of general meaning and unique performance: The organic connection of meaning and sign cannot become lexical, grammatically stable, and fixed in identical and reproducible forms, i.e., it cannot in itself become a sign or a constant element of a sign, cannot become grammaticalized. This connection is created only to be destroyed, to be reformed again, but in new forms under the conditions of a new utterance.31 49

politics of dialogue As a unit of language-in-action, the utterance can be treated, to some extent, as analogous to Mead’s concept of taking the role of the other. Both cases envision the ideal speech activity oriented toward altering behavior of the other. In Mead, this goal is attained mainly through exchanging speech acts, but also through other mechanisms, such as sharing social meanings or constructing social objects. While he refers sometimes to the ‘social process’ as a framework of any interaction, he never offers a comprehensive account of connections between the social process, on the one hand, and the form and content of interaction, on the other. Bakhtin sees the essence of the utterance is its orientation toward the other, but, contrary to Mead, he does not presuppose that it has to elicit desirable behaviour in the other. The obvious role of the utterance is to serve as a vehicle of dialogue, in which Bakhtin, again, comes very close to Mead. Still, for Bakhtin, the primary object of dialogue is understanding, rather than, as in Mead, constructing shared action. Nowhere does Bakhtin articulate the idea of progress through the universalisation of economy or religion as Mead does; instead, he concentrates on showing how features of language can be used to achieve understanding. Many of these differences ensue from Bakhtin’s preoccupation with the text as a vehicle of action and not with action as such: A human act is a potential text and can be understood (as a human act and not a physical action) only in the dialogic context of its time (as a rejoinder, as a semantic position, as a system of motives).32

In spite of the differences, however, Mead’s and Bakhtin’s conceptions can be viewed as two sides of the same coin. Their complementariness is caused by the general attitude both thinkers seem to have shared in seeking the mechanisms of securing a possibility of shared human action. Mead is far more optimistic, though, believing that cooperation is intrinsic to human nature, which itself is a product of communicative cooperation. Bakhtin, who also emphasises the inevitability of communication, is aware that communication is always threatened by monologue, and this tension is part of the communication process. Therefore, he carefully investigates the conditions to be fulfilled in order for the sequence of utterance exchanges to legitimately qualify as ‘dialogue’. In brief, a double operation must be performed: identifying which apparently dialogic utterance is, in fact, a veiled monologue and demonstrating dialogic elements in what could be taken for a monologue. 50

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin

2.5  Dialogue, Understanding and the Utterance The main feature of the dialogic nature of the utterance is, as I have signalled above, its capacity to be an instrument of understanding. The concept of understanding is rather ambiguous, and its ambiguity results from the nature of the utterance. The utterance, as already mentioned, is always a fusion of the social and the individual. Therefore, understanding the utterance is predicated upon understanding the whole context, which generates its ‘social’ part. But, of course, Bakhtin insists that the utterance is always unique and individual and cannot be simply reduced to the social. So, in order to understand the individual part of the utterance, we need to know the complicated relationships between the text and its author. Therefore, any interpretation of the text is stretched between two possible poles. Interpreting a text, we can proceed toward the first pole, that is toward language – the language of the author, the language of the genre, the trend, the epoch: toward the national language (linguistics), and finally toward a potential language of languages (structuralism, glossematics). It is also possible to proceed toward the second pole – toward the unrepeatable event of the text.33

This unrepeatable event of the text means that: ‘any truly creative text is always to some extent a free revelation of the personality, not predetermined by empirical necessity’.34 This unique character of the text is reinforced by its dialogical reference: ‘The event of the life of the text, that is, its true essence, always develops on the boundary between two consciousnesses, two subjects.’35 Therefore, we have in Bakhtin three overlapping planes, on which the process of understanding unfolds: first, the social, cultural and historical contexts, which, although differently defined, is always a framework of reference from which the utterance can be understood; second, the intention of the author, which, in turn, presupposes his/ her personality, emotions and creativity; third, the utterance as an unrepeatable event, which has to be viewed in the context of a direct dialogic situation. In such a situation, a recipient – another person involved in dialogue – is part of the text. However, this rough division into three planes on which any text functions does not give justice to the complexity of Bakhtin’s work. As Bakhtin emphasises in ‘Discourse in the novel’, we need to tackle the unitary language, as opposed to heteroglossia. The pursuit of the unification is, of course, bound up with modernity’s tendency toward 51

politics of dialogue centralisation and integration of society. Nonetheless, this tendency is countered by heteroglossia, which represents the overabundance of language phenomena, as well as the richness of expressions of social and cultural life.36 Both tendencies surface in every utterance: ‘Every utterance participates in the “unitary language” (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces).’37 So not only is the utterance a fusion of the individual and the social, but also its social moment is split between the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies. Therefore, as Gardiner writes, referring to Voloshinov’s book: The word is always the site of a struggle between multiple and intersecting meanings which, in turn, reflects wider social conflicts. The attempt by the dominant class to fix meaning and neutralize semantic flux is a specifically political act – it represents the perennial authoritarian desire hegemonically to secure an inseparable fusion between signifier and signified, between form and meaning. Signification is itself inherently ideological.38

Generally speaking, Bakhtin maintains this perspective on language throughout his work. He repeatedly insists that language as a social phenomenon is always a site of struggle between various forms of expression and that in language-in-action no single word is unambiguous. The ambiguity is also inherent in the ‘individual’ moment of the utterance, as it is a locus of uniqueness and creativity. Of course, an individual can fully control the meaning of the word, provided it is a poetic word. Writing about the poetic language, Bakhtin stresses that here ‘the poet strips the word of others’ intentions, he uses only such words and forms (and only in such a way) that they lose their link with concrete intentional levels of language and their connections with specific contexts’.39 He continues: ‘Everything that enters the work must immerse itself in Lethe, and forget its previous life in any other contexts: language may remember only its life in poetic contexts (in such contexts, however, even concrete reminiscences are possible).’40 So, the poetic language may clearly express individual intentions, but it does so at the cost of being utterly subjective and, consequently, compromising its potency as a vehicle of dialogue. I would add that it is evidently the human community’s misfortune that the ‘unitary poetic language’ cannot serve as a means of social communication and it has to be reserved exclusively for rendering individual intimate feelings. The dialogue that occurs in our social lives is much closer to prose, within which 52

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin [t]he prose writer does not purge words of intentions and tones that are alien to him, he does not destroy the seeds of social heteroglossia embedded in words, he does not eliminate those language characterizations and speech mannerisms (potential narrator-personalities) glimmering behind the words and forms, each at a different distance from the ultimate semantic nucleus of his work, that is, the center of his own personal intention.41

But here, we encounter again the tension between the variety of meanings of the word in various social languages, for the pursuit of a unitary, hegemonic language and individual intention. If we adopt such a perspective, the obvious question arises whether an understanding other than the hegemonic imposition of certain fixed meaning is at all possible. And if the answer is negative, we need to inquire about the ends of dialogue. Or rather, we should pose a Kantian question – how is dialogue possible? – as closer to Bakhtin’s thought. Bakhtin, after all, does not doubt that dialogue is actually viable; he treats it, in fact, as a transcendental precondition of human existence, which goes beyond language. In his book on Dostoevsky, he introduces the concept of dialogic relationships, which ‘are extralinguistic. But at the same time they must not be separated from the realm of discourse, that is from language as a concrete integral phenomenon. Language lives only in dialogic interaction of those who make use of it.’42 Therefore, dialogic relationships are reducible neither to logical relationships, nor to relationships oriented semantically toward their referential object, relationships in and of themselves devoid of any dialogic element. They must clothe themselves in discourse, become utterances, become the positions of various subjects expressed in discourse, in order that dialogic relationships might arise among them.43

Bakhtin emphasises that semantically referential relationships, in order to become must be embodied, that is, they must enter another sphere of existence: they must become discourse, that is, an utterance, and receive an author, that is a creator of the given utterance whose position it expresses.44

The authorship can assume various forms, but ‘in all cases we hear in it a unified creative will, a definite position, to which it is possible to react dialogically. A dialogic reaction personifies every utterance to which it responds.’45 Two issues seem to be of paramount importance in Bakhtin’s analysis of dialogic relationships. First, they always carry a potential for the real dialogue embodied in language 53

politics of dialogue and, second, this embodiment entails the personification of utterances. The former points toward the role of language as a vehicle of dialogue, whereas the latter reveals the role of extra-linguistic elements in dialogical relationships. These extra-linguistic elements are, to some extent, comprised in the dialogic activity, as the author is a paradoxical figure in Bakhtin’s analysis: necessary for the existence of dialogue, the author seems to be a condition of dialogue, rather than a real person, since ‘of the real author, as he exists outside the utterance we know absolutely nothing at all’.46 This, and similar statements, suggest that the dialogic potential can be activated, even if the speaker tends to produce authoritative or monologic utterances. Dialogue is, thus, permanently present in dialogical relationships, but finds itself constantly threatened from both sides. On the one hand, there is the poetic language, which can be a sheer expression of an individual’s intentions, without any reference to an other’s intentions. On the other hand, there is the unitary, hegemonic and monologic language, which is an imposition of the dominant class’ ideology and suppressed dialogue. Therefore, we can reformulate the question posed earlier and enquire about the properties of a dialogic use of language as opposed to a non-dialogic one and about the possibility and conditions of the activation of dialogic potential inherent in dialogic relations and language-in-action. Addressing this issue, we have to start from Bakhtin’s concept of the word as a dialogical phenomenon: The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word; it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation in any living dialogue.47

Again, we encounter a permanent tendency to treat the meaning of the word as split between two persons, two participants in dialogue. Like Mead, Bakhtin firmly insists that the meaning is not a property of a particular word, but a complex phenomenon, which can be grasped only in the context of the social dialogical activity, and he claims with equal firmness that this activity constitutes, at the same time, an existential characteristic of human beings. Therefore, understanding is a process that not only engages language, but also penetrates into the deep strata of human existence. In his notes on the difference between dialogue in Plato and Dostoevsky, Bakhtin 54

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin shows that ‘the very juxtaposition of Dostoevsky’s dialogue with Plato’s dialogue seems to us in general superficial and unproductive, for Dostoevsky’s dialogue is not at all a purely cognitive, philosophical dialogue’.48 Therefore, understanding is, inevitably, a complex process that not only engages language, but also penetrates deeper, involving all human capacities. At the level of language only, understanding is a passive understanding of linguistic meanings, which ‘is no understanding at all, it is only the abstract aspect of meaning’.49 This kind of understanding does not affect the social situation of the speaker and the listener; it adds nothing new to their relation, except a clarification of an abstract meaning of the word through ‘negative demands’: Indeed the purely negative demands, such as could only emerge from a passive understanding (for instance, a need for greater clarity, more persuasiveness, more vividness and so forth) leave the speaker in his personal context, within his own boundaries; such negative demands are completely immanent in the speaker’s own discourse and do not go beyond his semantic or expressive self-sufficiency.50

Noticeably, what Bakhtin calls ‘negative demands’ have close affinities with Habermas’s validity basis of speech. Habermas’s wellknown postulate is that all those seeking understanding through the medium of language are entitled to put forward universal validity claims and to expect that they will be respected. The claims stipulate that: The speaker must choose an intelligible expression so that the speaker and hearer can comprehend one another. The speaker must have the intention of communicating a true proposition [. . .] so that the hearer can share the knowledge of the speaker. The speaker must want to express her intention truthfully so that the hearer can find the intention of the speaker credible (can trust her). Finally, the speaker must choose an utterance that is right with respect to prevailing norms and values so that the hearer can accept the utterance, and both speaker and hearer can, in the utterance, thereby agree with one another with respect to a recognized normative background.51

Elaborating on these premises, Habermas states further that: The aim of reaching understanding is to bring about an agreement that terminates in the intersubjective mutuality of reciprocal comprehension, shared knowledge, mutual trust, and accord with one another. Agreement is based on recognition of the four corresponding validity claims: comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness, and rightness. We can see that the word 55

politics of dialogue ‘Verständigung’ is ambiguous. In its narrowest meaning it indicates that two subjects understand a linguistic expression in the same way; in its broadest meaning it indicates that an accord exists between two subjects concerning the rightness of an utterance in relation to a mutually recognized normative background. In addition, the participants in communication can reach understanding about something in the word, and they can make their intentions understandable to one another.52

It seems that Bakhtin’s concept of active understanding, which is, for him, a genuine understanding, as opposed to formal, passive understanding, differs from Habermas’s Verständigung. The main difference lies in that Bakhtin does not presuppose a ‘mutually recognized normative background’. Conversely, his notion of an active understanding assumes inner tensions intrinsic to both perspectives and further reinforced in the process of understanding. However, despite the tensions, the real process of understanding inexorably leads to augmenting the conceptual endowment of all participants: In the actual life of speech, every concrete act of understanding is active: it assimilates the word to be understood into its own conceptual system filled with specific objects and emotional expressions, and is indissolubly merged with the response, with a motivated agreement or disagreement. To some extent, primacy belongs to the response, as the activating principle: it creates the ground for understanding, it prepares the ground for an active and engaged understanding. Understanding comes to fruition only in the response. Understanding and response are dialectically merged and mutually condition each other; one is impossible without the other.53

Dialogue is, thus, at the same time an outcome and a premise of understanding, as for an act of understanding to take place, an interaction between the word of the speaker and the conceptual horizon of the listener is necessary, and the outcome of such interaction is a significant change in the conceptual systems of both the speaker and the listener. Therefore, unlike in Habermas, the process of understanding depends not so much on finding a common normative background, as on the readiness to open up to an other’s conceptual horizon, which is conveyed in his/her utterance. This openness means that the speaker and the listener are disposed to change their own conceptual horizons, so as to adjust them to the utterance (the listener) and the response (the speaker): Thus an active understanding, one that assimilates the word under consideration into a new conceptual system, that of the one striving to understand, establishes a series of complex interrelationships, con56

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin sonances and dissonances with the word and enriches it with new elements. It is precisely such an understanding that the speaker counts on. Therefore his orientation toward the listener is an orientation toward a specific conceptual horizon, toward the specific world of the listener; it introduces totally new elements into his discourse, it is in this way, after all, that various different points of view, conceptual horizons, system for providing expressive accents, various social ‘languages’ come to interact with one another. The speaker strives to get a reading on his own, and his conceptual system that determines this word, within the alien conceptual system of the understanding receiver; he enters into dialogic relationships with certain aspects of this system. The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance on alien territory, against his, the listener’s, apperceptive background.54

This passage foregrounds the intimate relation between understanding and dialogue. To understand the meaning of the word does not entail finding a common normative background; rather, it entails capturing, as accurately as possible, the consequences which the word in question has for the conceptual systems of both the speaker and the listener. Of course, since nobody can remain outside of the dialogical exchange, understanding is always a partial understanding, in which one is involved in the chain of linguistic interactions: the utterance constructed in view of the expected-response-to-the utterance, the actual response, the meaning of the primary utterance modified in view of the actual response, the utterance response and so on. Each of these links in the construction of meaning is formed against the background of the conceptual systems (horizons) of the speaker and the listener. Far from merely looking to come to terms with the other, the process of understanding resembles, rather, a struggle for colonising an ‘alien conceptual horizon of the listener’. However, this colonising effort is always doomed to failure, as instead of colonisation we inevitably confront an exchange of meanings, which constantly provides multiple starting points for the construction of increasingly complicated relations between the two conceptual systems. In his late works, Bakhtin reasserts, again, that the word is not only a neutral word that – according to its dictionary definition – belongs to nobody. Instead, for the speaker, it also exists in two other forms: [A]s an other’s word, which belongs to another person and is filled with echoes of the other’s utterance; and finally, as my word, for since I am dealing with it in a particular situation, with a particular speech plan, it is already imbued with my expression.55 57

politics of dialogue Understanding in Bakhtin is, thus, differently construed than in Habermas and Mead. Habermas sees understanding as a process of finding a common background, whereas Mead perceives it as a process of reciprocal turn-taking in taking the role of the other, which leads to forming an increasingly universal attitude – that is, taking the role of the increasingly ‘generalised other’. Bakhtin approximates Mead in his insistence that the process of exchange is the most important factor in understanding. Yet he differs from Mead in proposing that the object of the exchange process is not another step toward universalisation, but rather constant construction and reconstruction of both conceptual horizons. As he states in his reflection on Dostoevsky’s novels: [T]he works (the novels) in their entirety, taken as utterances of their author, are the same never-ending, internally unresolved dialogues among characters (seen as embodied points of view) and between the author himself and his characters; the characters’ discourse is never entirely subsumed and remains free and open (as does the discourse of the author himself).56

This interminable dialogue is preconditioned by a figure of the speaking person. The speaking person, by virtue of Bakhtin’s characteristic shift from an examination of Dostoevsky’s stylistics to an analysis of the outer linguistic reality, becomes an iconic figure of social life: All fundamental categories of ethical and legal inquiry and evaluation refer to speaking persons precisely as such: conscience (the ‘voice of conscience,’ the ‘inner word’), repentance (a free admission, a statement of wrongdoing by the person himself), truth and falsehood, being liable and not liable, the right to vote [pravo golosa] and so on. An independent, responsible and active discourse is the fundamental indicator of an ethical, legal and political human being.57

Fundamentally, the speaking person is a condition of possibility of a discourse and, at the same time, a ‘product’ of this discourse. Having commented on the relationships between the speaking person and his/her discourses in different scientific and social contexts, Bakhtin resumes his central argument on the dialogical character of understanding. He reasserts the dialogical character of the meaning of the word, even more emphatically foregrounding the concept of understanding as knowledge of another’s world: The forms in which a dialogic understanding is transmitted and interpreted may, if the understanding is deep and vigorous, even come to have 58

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin significant parallels with the double-voiced representations of another’s discourse that we find in prose art. It should be noted that the novel always includes in itself the activity of coming to know another’s word, a coming to knowledge whose process is represented in the novel.58

Because the process of understanding deals with words and is embedded in words, its analysis covers also rhetoric, which is used for the representing someone’s discourse and its representation in other’s discourse. Bakhtin enumerates several varieties of discourses that render various spheres of social life. For politics, he writes that: [I]n political rhetoric, for example, discourse can support some candidacy, represent the personality of a candidate, present and defend his point of view, his verbal statements, or in other cases protest [. . .] against the specific verbal utterance toward which it is dialogically aimed.59

This rhetoric-centred point of view provokes the question about the relationship between the real world and the world of words, linguistic actions. Bakhtin registers this problem, but his answer, at least in ‘Discourse in the novel’, is rather ambiguous. In the context of publicist discourse, he writes: When it [publicist discourse – LK] analyzes an act it uncovers its verbal motifs, the point of view in which it is grounded, it formulates such acts in words, providing them the appropriate emphases – ironic, indignant and so on. This does not mean, of course, that the rhetoric behind the word forgets that there are deeds, acts, a reality outside words. But such rhetoric has always to do with social man, whose most fundamental gestures are made meaningful ideologically through the word, or directly embodied in words.60

For Bakhtin, rhetoric at its best conveys the complicated, socially loaded meaning of the word. At its worst, it degenerates into ‘a formalistic verbal play’. Again, two characteristics of language and approaches to it surface at this point. Language can be treated formally, in an abstract way, or it can be understood as a social reality per se: We must once again emphasize that what is meant here by social language is not the undifferentiated mass [sovokupnost’] of linguistic markers determining the way in which a dialectologically organized and individuated, but rather the concrete, living integral mass [celokupnost’] made up of all the markers that give that language its social profile, a profile that by defining itself through semantic shifts and lexical choices can be established even within the boundaries of a linguistically unitary language.61 59

politics of dialogue If language reality is, in fact, a social reality, what is said about the different genres of language use can be transposed almost directly onto social life. The same power of language that enables the author to create a complicated image of various social languages can be used in social life, in politics, to represent different perspectives and ideologies. Therefore, it is necessary for our purpose to scrutinise in more detail the way in which the author constructs a language reality in the novel. This construction is possible only because of the ability of a language to represent another language while still retaining the capacity to sound simultaneously both outside it and within it, to talk about it and at the same time to talk in and with it – and thanks to the ability of the language being represented simultaneously to serve as an object of representation while continuing to be able to speak to itself [. . .].62

As we have already seen, Bakhtin frames understanding as a complex phenomenon, which involves the movement back and forth between two conceptual horizons. It assumes, of course, the representation of one conceptual system in another conceptual system. Hence, a crucial issue is how to represent someone else’s utterances in my own conceptual system. Since, to some extent, it is a task of rhetoric, Bakhtin devoted considerable time to this vehicle of language. Moving beyond rhetoric, he enumerates three basic categories for creating the image of a language: ‘(1) hybridization, (2) the dialogized interrelation of languages, and (3) pure dialogues’.63 Hybridisation, which is the most important means for accomplishing this task, consists of a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factors.64

Hybridisation is an artistic device, but it is also an important feature of an evolution of any natural language. The main difference between these two types of hybridisation lies in degree, rather than in nature. As a historical phenomenon, hybridisation means mixing different social languages co-existing in one dialect or one national language. This phenomenon is of interest to me primarily as a means of creating a new social language; a language which fits a new social situation through the resolution of the conflicting tendencies already residing in the language. However, as Bakhtin writes, such nonintentional hybridisation has a very limited range, as it never fully 60

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin or accurately renders the intention of a language being represented. In spite of these shortcomings, such an organic hybrid is historically productive, generating new perspectives and viewpoints on social issues. Unlike the organic hybrid, the image of language conceived as an intentional hybrid is first of all a conscious hybrid [. . .]; an intentional hybrid is precisely the perception of one language by another language; its illumination by another linguistic consciousness. An image of language may be structured only from the point of view of another language, which is taken as the norm.65

This perception of one language by another language is inevitably dialogical: ‘in it, within the boundaries of a single utterance, two potential utterances are fused, two responses are, as it were, harnessed in a potential dialogue’.66 Bakhtin again focuses on an artistic strategy of language representation, but I would insist that the conscious process of hybridisation is one of the processes central to a dialogical, reflexive understanding. Therefore, when Bakhtin writes that: ‘the novelistic hybrid is an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another’,67 this proposition can be, albeit with reservations, transferred onto the sphere of political or, even broader, social dialogue. In this framework, the social is constructed in reciprocal exchanges, which consist of subsequent phases of representation of one language by another language. The juxtaposed layers of interpretations create a living tissue of the social as a never-ending dialogue between conflicting ideas. For this reason, hybridisation is a crucial phenomenon to be considered when addressing the problem of understanding in social and political life. Two other ways of creating the image of language are not so potent in this respect, as the dialogised interrelation of languages and pure dialogism do not assume the inner juxtaposition of two different languages. The intentional hybridisation as an artistic strategy evidently requires an author as a special instance of authority that determines the distribution of representation. In social reality, such a position can be rendered in various ways. Here, we touch upon an interesting question of the perimeters of dialogue. For one, dialogical involvement is limitable by authoritarian forms of utterance, which seems inescapable, since an author – and every utterance must have one – may seize the position of authority. This explains Bakhtin’s 61

politics of dialogue ­ articular interest in social forms of authorship, as mentioned above. p This interest persisted into his last works, where he writes: Various forms of speech authorship, from the simplest everyday utterances to large literary genres. It is customary to speak about the authorial mask, but in which utterances (speech acts) is there a face and not a mask, that is, no authorship?68

The point lies in rhetoric, as Bakhtin insists that we are always confronted with a kind of authority. The power of the author is rooted in his or her social position, though it is also affected by the type of addressee to whom the author can legitimately refer. A particularly interesting kind of authority is the reference to a superaddressee that links understanding and authority: Understanding itself enters as a dialogic element in the dialogic system and somehow changes its total sense. The person who understands inevitably becomes a third party in the dialogue [. . .], but the dialogic position of this third party is a quite special one [. . .]. But in addition to this addressee (the second party), the author of the utterance [. . .] presupposes a higher superaddressee (third), whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical distance or in distant historical time.69

Such a configuration of dialogue ensures that there is no privileged position in it which could be an ultimate instance of understanding. The reference to the superaddressee does not terminate the discussion; on the contrary, such a reference becomes a subsequent step in a never-ending dialogue: Being heard as such is a dialogic relation. The word wants to be heard, understood, responded to, and again to respond to the response, and so forth ad infinitum. It enters into a dialogue that does not have a semantic end [. . .].70

Comparing the idea of the superaddressee with Habermas’s concept of an ideal community of communication, we can discern significant differences between Bakhtin’s and Habermas’s positions. In the introductory parts of the second volume of his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas claims that the ideas of freedom and community, theorised in solely negative terms by Adorno, can be given a positive formulation on the basis of Mead’s concept of action. As its final outcome, such theory yields the project of an ideal community of communication – a ‘utopia’ that ‘serves to reconstruct an undamaged intersubjectivity that allows both for unconstrained 62

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin mutual understanding among individuals and for the identities of individuals who come to an unconstrained understanding with themselves’.71 It seems that Bakhtin does not propose a corresponding transcendental construct for his idea of dialogue. The superaddressee does not emerge as a transcendental or quasi-transcendental horizon of communication. On the contrary, it represents a horizon of dialogue from the point of view of a participant in the dialogue, without instituting an ‘objective’ point of reference for understanding. At the same time, however, an appeal to a superaddressee is tantamount to a hegemonic intervention in the political discourse. Such a manoeuvre changes the trajectory of discourse, as it potentially shifts the focus of political negotiation from seeking a compromise in the public sphere to negotiating political identities. It would seem that, at this point, dialogue ceases to work and is petrified into a soliloquy. But if we remember Bakhtin’s observation that even monologic utterances have their dialogical moment, then the authoritative potency of such utterances is depleted. By the same token, hegemony as a party in dialogue could be said to contradict itself and partake of the polyphonic, multi-voiced nature of the social.

2.6  Dialogue and the Social This multi-voiced nature of the social is realised in two forms of dialogue: a finished and an unfinished one, which exemplify its double temporal and structural nature. The double nature of the polyphonic discourse is rendered in two figures: the prose writer and the journalist. The journalist is above all a contemporary. He is obliged to be one. He lives in the sphere of questions that can be resolved in the present day (or in any case in the near future). He participates in a dialogue that can be ended and even finalized, can be translated into action and can become an empirical force. It is precisely in this sphere that ‘one’s own word’ is possible. Outside this sphere ‘one’s own word’ is not one’s own (the individual personality always transcends itself); ‘one’s own word’ cannot be the ultimate word.72

While the authorship of the journalist is focused on a concrete issue that has to be resolved here and now, the authorship of the prose writer is dispersed and transcends both the temporal and spatial dimensions of the social. It seems that only such a transcendent ­dialogue is genuinely polyphonic: 63

politics of dialogue The peculiarities of polyphony. The lack of finalization of the polyphonic dialogue (dialogue about ultimate questions). These dialogues are conducted by unfinalized individual personalities and not by psychological subjects. The somewhat unembodied quality of these personalities (disinterested surplus).73

The same questions can be limited by the temporal and cultural horizon of a particular epoch or they can transcend it and enter into a polyphonic sphere of perpetual discussion. As these two planes coexist vis-à-vis each other, it is possible traverse from one to the other. Bakhtin refers to Dostoevsky as an example that illustrates such a possibility: ‘Only a polyphonist like Dostoevsky can see in the struggle of opinions and ideologies (of various epochs) and incomplete on ultimate questions (in the framework of great time.).’74 Further, Bakhtin continues his explanation: When entering the area of Dostoevsky’s journalism, we observe a sharp narrowing of the horizon: the universality of his novel disappears, even though the problems of hero’s personal life are replaced by social and political problems. The heroes lived and acted (and thought) before the entire world (before heaven and earth). Ultimate questions that originated in their small lives broke away and attached themselves to ‘the divine universal life.’75

These remarks have far-reaching consequences for the understanding of the social. Bakhtin suggests that a historical temporal horizon can be transcended by the reference to universality, but universality itself is of dialogical character. The world of action has its permanent double in the universal life of never-ending questions. The query that offers itself here concerns the character of those questions. To settle that, I would like to refer to Osip Mandelstam’s poem ‘The Decembrist’, which I quote at length below: ‘Consider the pagan senate: causes never die!’ He pulled on his Turkish pipe, wound himself Into his robe; next to him they sat playing chess. He traded an ambitious dream For a hut in wild Siberia, And that chic pipe at his poisonous lips – lips that Told the sad truth. German oaks rattled – the first time; Europe wept in its traps. 64

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin Black chariots reared up, racing triumphant curves. Blue punch burned in glasses, once. The broad burble of a samovar Blended with the soft voice Of its Rhine sweetheart, the freedom-fond guitar. ‘Sweet liberty rouses citizens’ voices, living voices!’ But blind heaven wants no sacrifice: Work and good faith work better. It’s all confused. Who should be told That it’s all mixed up, it’s growing cold, And anyway it’s good to keep saying Russia . . . Lethe . . . Lorelei.76

In the opening appeal, the poet evokes the idea of democracy and civic virtue as an inevitable point of reference for the political activity of people involved in common struggle. To protect liberty against the snares of tyranny is one of the ‘divine questions’ that break upon the ‘small lives’ of the Decembrists. In Russia, the Decembrists – a group of revolutionary Democrats who attempted a desperate coup d’état in December 1825 – became a symbol of determined resistance to the Tsarist regime. Some of them were executed, and some (as the protagonist of the poem) were sent into exile to Siberia. Their lives were shattered, and the Tsarist tyranny persisted until the February Revolution in 1917. Achieving nothing in terms of palpable political outcomes, the enterprise misfired grievously, but, ideologically, it turned into a powerful symbol of a never-ending struggle for the realisation of the Republican virtues, with freedom as the most important among them. At the level of the finished dialogue, we deal with the Decembrists’ discussion on how to change the political situation they inhabited, the discussion which instigated their engagement in political action. As this action failed, the dialogue was abruptly severed. However, at the level of polyphony, the dialogue was not terminated. The event, the failed coup d’état, became a voice in an unfinished dialogue about freedom and the possibilities of having the intolerable political situation altered by a group of noble revolutionaries. In short, it is a voice in a dialogue about the responsibility of an individual for its political and social milieu. This encapsulates what Bakhtin sees as crucial – the tension between a unique and unrepeatable deed of an individual and the world of objectivised 65

politics of dialogue culture to which the political belongs. Bakhtin already emphasises this dichotomy in his early writings: Two worlds confront each other, two worlds that have absolutely no communication with each other and are mutually impervious: the world of culture and the world of life, the only world in which we create, cognize, contemplate, live our lives and die or – the world in which the acts of our activity are objectified and the world in which these acts actually proceed and are actually accomplished once and only once.77

This contradiction is a cornerstone of Bakhtin’s ethics. Since I develop this topic in more detail elsewhere, here I would like to note simply that the encounter with the Other, which is the core of an individual’s ethical responsibility, can take place only in the world of action. At the same time, this unique act finds its objectification in the world of culture. These two moments of an act create a whole, a single unity that participates in Being-as-event (sobytie bytiia).78 As one of his commentators writes, Bakhtin’s ethics is ‘co-existential ethics’: Bakhtin’s philosophy of the act radically departs from traditional notions of ethics, both material and formal. Insofar as it deals with the architectonics of co-existence, that is, that level of human sociality which underlies and informs the sphere of values and norms, the philosophy of the act can be described as co-existential ethics prior to ethics in any traditional sense. My concrete, active relatedness to acting others makes the creation and enactment of values and norms possible in the first place.79

There are moments, however, when this co-existential ethics is inevitably doomed to confront social ethics and politics. The knot between individual existence and objectivised culture is critical for the understanding of the place of the social in individual existence and the meaning of individual, or even group, activity in the social. The crucial question, again, is how the concreteness of human relations, including language relations, can be translated into social and political practices, aimed to create the objectivised instances, such as institutions, ideologies and values. To exist in the first place, these instances of culture need to be embodied in language-as-­system, which ensures the commonality of meanings. Yet, people who create and inhabit these institutions use language-as-action with all its ambiguity of meanings and complicated mechanism of reaching understanding. This split and duality have important implications for political practice. By way of example, I will consider here the double 66

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin character of democracy, which is at the same time a political ideal and a political practice. Democracy is a political ideal, because it is always a promise of a better social life. Under communist rule, fighters for democracy did not struggle for a specifically defined election model or institutional system; rather, they fought for a system that would offer a greater level of justice and increased freedom. And this seems to be a common preoccupation of all pro-democratic movements. Almost inevitably, then, the victory of democracy is accompanied by a sense of disappointment, since democracy turns out to be, in reality, a patchwork of contradictory interests that do not add up to a common ethical project. The debate on the concept of civil society engaged in Eastern Europe under the communist regime provides a vivid illustration of this mechanism. I examine this in detail elsewhere, so here I will present only an outline of my analysis.80 For Eastern European dissidents, the idea of civil society had a predominantly ethical character. Civil society was to be an organisation of people against the state and beyond the state. The communist state was regarded as incorrigibly corrupt, and the only possibility for revival lay in the ethical redemption. For this reason, the idea of civil society, as endorsed in the eighties, was an ethical rather than a social challenge. It was to serve as a criterion of society’s recovery from contamination by the totalitarian state. In Bakhtinian terms, the reference to civil society was tantamount to introducing the superaddressee into the ongoing discourse. The dissidents thus shifted the discussion from the political level – that of a concrete world of action – to the level of ethical responsibility as part of objectivised culture. However, such a conception could only work as a challenge to the totalitarian state and not as an alternative political orientation. Consequently, when the communist system collapsed, the majority of the dissidents were disappointed that the concept – deliberately utopian as it was – did not convert into a system of political and social institutions. In the West, the idea of civil society was developed in response to the decline of citizens’ participation in public life. As Michael Walzer observes: Citizenship [. . .] is today mostly a passive role: citizens are spectators who vote. Between elections they are served, well or badly, by the civil service [. . .]. But in the associational networks of civil society – in unions, parties, movements, interests groups, and so on – these same people make many smaller decisions and shape to some degree the more distant determinations of state and economy.81 67

politics of dialogue Civil society as a network of grassroots organisations was supposed to work together with the state, not against it, as it was postulated in the east. For the East European dissidents, their concept of civil society was a form of ‘anti-politics’, while for the Western political theorists, civil society was a resource strengthening democratic politics. Walzer makes that clear when, after referring to Hungarian dissident George Konrád, he writes: He [Konrád] urged his fellow dissidents to reject the very idea of seizing or sharing power and to devote their energies to religious, cultural, economic, and professional associations. Civil society appears in his book as an alternative to the state, which he assumes to be unchangeable and irredeemably hostile. His argument seemed right to me when I first read his book. Looking back [. . .] I can easily see how much it was a product of its time. [. . .] No state can survive for long if it is wholly alienated from civil society. It cannot outlast its own coercive machinery; it is lost, literally, without its firepower. The production and reproduction of loyalty, civility, political competence, and trust in authority are never the work of the state alone, and the effort to go it alone – one meaning of t­ otalitarianism – is doomed to failure.82

For both Walzer and the dissidents, civil society is a site of ethical reflection on the state, but they essentially differ as to the results of this reflection. Walzer underscores the ethical dimension of the state machinery and its functions, while the dissidents foreground the critical exploration of the relationship between the individual and the state. This difference could be easily ascribed to the distinct social experience, but such an explanation, though undeniably true, is not entirely satisfactory. Both concepts of civil society only partially render the complicated process of language-mediated human interactions as described by Bakhtin. The dissidents’ notion of civil society positions the ethical superaddressee as a point of reference for immediate human relations, while the Western notion of civil society introduces the discursive ethical moment into language-as-action, which creates state institutions. So, in the latter case, we encounter a reference to ethics inside the finished discourse, whereas in the former case the ethical moment is an outer point of reference of the ongoing discussion, outside the finished discourse, and is situated in the realm of unfinished discourse. This example sheds light on the nature of the political in general and on the nature democracy in particular. As I will discuss these issues in the following chapters, I will make just two observations here. First, I believe that the Bakhtinian approach accounts for the 68

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin double character of the political as a sphere in which the postulated social ideals can be realised and as a sphere of the concrete, often administrative, action. This fissure is felt particularly acutely in totalitarian regimes, where individual ethics are sharply incompatible with authoritative politics. Individual ethical choices become, then, points of resistance against the ubiquitous presence of the state apparatus. Zbigniew Herbert’s poem ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’ illustrates this discrepancy in the political. It is a monologue of Fortinbras, a Norwegian prince who appears in the closing scene of Hamlet. When published in 1961, the poem was interpreted as an obvious allusion to two possible responses to totalitarian politics, in which some – albeit, in fact, restricted – space for individual freedom seemed to open up at last (after the 1956 Thaw). People were allowed to be unenthusiastic about the state’s ideology, though at the price of isolation and institutional marginalisation. Contrasting two attitudes, that of Hamlet with that of Fortinbras, Herbert pictures two alternative ways of doing politics: Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life you believed in crystal notions not in human clay always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me you chose the easier part an elegant thrust but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dial Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project and a decree on prostitutes and beggars I must also elaborate a better system of prisons since as you justly said Denmark is a prison I go to my affairs This night is born a star named Hamlet We shall never meet what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince.83

As good poetry usually does, Herbert’s poem captures something crucial about the political. To some extent, this cleavage inherent in the political is conceptualised in Jacques Derrida’s idea of democratie à venir. From Derrida’s point of view, democracy is a 69

politics of dialogue Messianic moment in social life, as it gives promise that can be only fulfilled in the future. Democracy is a fulfillment of two ethical ideals: justice and responsibility (answerability), which Derrida emphatically formulates: The same duty dictates assuming the European, and uniquely European, heritage of an idea of democracy, while also recognizing that this idea, like that of international law, is never simply given, that its status is not even that of a regulative idea in the Kantian sense, but rather something that remains to be thought and to come [à venir]: not something that is certain to happen tomorrow, not the democracy (national or international, state or trans-state) of the future, but a democracy that must have the structure of a promise – and thus the memory of that which carries the future, the to-come, here and now.84

The idea of democracy as a duty emerges alongside, with a more universal, more general idea of the coincidence of universality and singularity: The value of universality here capitalizes all the antinomies, for it must be linked to the value of exemplarity that inscribes the universal in the proper body of a singularity, of an idiom or a culture, whether this singularity be individual, social, national, state, federal, confederal, or not. Whether it takes a national form or not, a refined, hospitable or aggressively xenophobic form or not, the self-affirmation of an identity always claims to be responding to the call or assignation of the universal. There are no exceptions to this law. No cultural identity presents itself as the opaque body of an untranslatable idiom, but always, on the contrary, as the irreplaceable inscription of the universal in the singular, the unique testimony to the human essence and to what is proper to man. Each time, it has to do with the discourse of responsibility: I have, the unique ‘I’ has, the responsibility of testifying for universality. Each time, the exemplarity of the example is unique.85

To illustrate his thesis, Derrida evokes ‘men of universality’ – Paul Valery’s coinage from his essay on Gallocentrism – and further extends the paradox involved in this idea. In Valery, this paradox pertains, first of all, to the exceptional role of French culture, which in its particularity is a bearer of universal values. Derrida, in turn, claims that universality is part and parcel of European culture. Consequently, the imperative of transcendence is inscribed in European culture, which – with its intrinsic duty of democracy or critical thinking – is compelled to cross the borders of Europe and become universal in its particularity. Derrida, like Bakhtin, is 70

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin interested in the tension between individuality and universality and sees this tension as the source in which the social is rooted. However, there is a fundamental difference between the Derridian and the Bakhtinian perspectives. Profoundly influenced by Levinas’s philosophy, Derrida assumes that universality is inscribed in individual, unique responsibility, which is at the same time the evidence and foundation of universality. The social, which arises from individual ethical decisions, has to take a universal form, and as such it has to permeate all individual choices. Bakhtin’s ethics is, as mentioned earlier, a co-existential ethics, in which the relationship with the other is the axis of moral choices. This ethics, however, leads us inexorably to the pivotal problem of Bakhtin’s work – that is, how to harmonise the uniqueness of the individual (I, I-for-myself) with the necessity of encounter with the other and the inescapable consequences of this encounter for our own self-formation (I-for-the-other). These two moments, though equally essential in, and for, human existence, seem mutually contradictory. And yet, both are also necessary in the construction of the social, as it emerges from individual decisions concerning the other, as well as from the complicated architectonics of the relationships between I-for-myself and I-for-the-other. The encounter with the other is, thus, an enigma. In his early works, Bakhtin spares no effort to resolve this mystery or, strictly speaking, to show many of its facets in an attempt to move closer to a resolution. Bakhtin stresses the validity of the objectified world of science and ethical norms, but he also insists that, actually, it is not the world in which we live. This is a world that can survive without any human intervention, so per se it is somehow irrelevant for the crucial decisions we make in our lives: Any kind of practical orientation of my life within the theoretical world is impossible: it is impossible to live in it, impossible to perform answerable deeds. In that world I am unnecessary; I am essentially and fundamentally non-existent in it.86

The world of objective culture exists for us only insofar as it is mediated through individual decisions. The most obvious, but also the most difficult, example of the relation between individual existence and the objective world is the problem of truth. Bakhtin insists that truth is eternally objective and independent from human cognition. But what matters for us is an encounter with such objectively understood truth: ‘The validity of truth is sufficient unto itself, absolute, 71

politics of dialogue and eternal, and an answerable act or deed of cognition takes into account this peculiarity of it; that is what constitutes its essence.’87 The relationship between truth and human activity involves a peculiar paradox. Truth as an objective, absolute phenomenon is unavailable for human cognition. Its existence, however, secures an objective moment of reference crucial for ethical responsibility. This responsibility, in turn, can only happen in the once-occurrent, unique world of Being: Newton’s laws were valid in themselves even before Newton discovered them, and it was not this discovery that made them valid for the first time. But these truths did not exist as cognized truths – as moments participating in once-occurrent Being-as-event, and this is of essential importance, for this is what constitutes the sense of the deed that cognizes them.88

These remarks also refer to all theorising, including psychological reasoning. This is why Bakhtin refuses to approach the self as a psychic being. Psychology erects a very abstract theoretical construction, which can be compared only with other theoretical constructions. It is not able to comprehend the complicated relationship between the world of deed and the world of objective culture. The self as a psychic being is a result of abstracting mental elements from once-occurrent Being. Bakhtin generalises his considerations as follows: The world as a content of scientific thinking is a distinctive world: it is an autonomous world, yet not a detached world, but rather a world that is incorporated into the unitary and once-occurrent event of Being through the mediation of an answerable consciousness in an actual deed. But that once-occurrent event of Being is no longer something that is thought of, but something that is, something that is being actually and inescapably accomplished through me and others (accomplished, inter alia, also in my deed of cognizing); it is actually experienced, affirmed in an emotionalvolitional manner, and cognition constitutes merely a moment in this experiencing-affirming. [. . .] All of theoretical reason in its entirety is only a moment of practical reason, i.e. the reason of the unique subiectum’s moral orientation within the event of once-occurrent Being.89

Clearly, any kind of abstraction can become part of the self, only insofar as it finds its expression in moral activity. The self cannot be constructed, then, as a theoretical entity, for it defies any universalisation. Even the universalisation of the self itself (Bakhtin cites psychology, but I think that it pertains to other – for instance, cultural or anthropological –concepts of the self, as well) is subject to the 72

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin same procedure. It is not part of the self until it becomes an element in moral activity. Another possibility of universalisation of the self is its aesthetisation. Aesthetisation has as a cognitive theoretisation – namely, to bring together two constructions – that of the self and that of the world: A characteristic feature of contemporary philosophy of life [. . .], which endeavors to include the theoretical world within the unity of life-inprocess-of-becoming, is a certain aesthetization of life, and this masks to some degree the obvious incongruity of pure theoreticism (the inclusion of the larger theoretical world within a small, also theoretical, world). As a rule, the theoretical and the aesthetic elements are fused in these conceptions of life.90

Bakhtin draws here primarily on Bergson’s philosophy, which he considers the best example of Lebensphilosophie. He perceives Bergson’s concept of intuition as a blend of intellectual and aesthetic elements. The subtraction of intellectuality leaves a ‘purely aesthetic contemplation’. However, contemplation of this kind generates the same problems in the construction of the self as theoretical abstraction does. It cannot penetrate into the real activity of the self: The world of aesthetic seeing, obtained in abstraction from the actual subiectum of seeing, is not the actual world in which I live, although its content-aspect is inserted into a living subiectum. But just as in theoretical cognition, there is the same essential and fundamental non-­ communication between the subiectum and his life as the object of aesthetic seeing, on the one hand, and the subiectum as the bearer as the act of aesthetic seeing, on the other.91

The aesthetic contemplation always assumes an intimate, empathising link between the subject and the object of seeing. The process of empathising is, for Bakhtin, a complex interaction of two consciousnesses. It presupposes the ability to place oneself in the consciousness of another, producing both a moment of objectification and a return to oneself. I think that, for Bakhtin’s concept of empathy, the moment of objectification is of distinctive significance. In this moment, an individual takes a position outside the object of empathising and distances him/herself from it. The last stage of the process is restoring this objectified consciousness to the individual. Bakhtin, of course, insists that all of these moments are not arranged in a chronological sequence, but that they form a ‘unitary act of ­aesthetic activity’. 73

politics of dialogue The main implication of empathy defined in these terms is the ascription of aesthetic reflection only to the other: ‘the aesthetic reflexion of living life is, in its very principle, not the self-reflexion of life in motion, of life in its actual aliveness: it presupposes another subiectum, a subiectum of empathizing, a subiectum situated outside the bonds of that life’.92 Aesthetic contemplation, though imbued with a great deal of intuition, ends up with a ‘product’, an ‘object’ brought forth by objectification. The aesthetic perspective on life could be thus labelled as a ‘frozen intuition’. Such an intuition is not part of any individual activity, so it can only convey a much depleted sense of real life deeds. Bakhtin exemplifies this thesis by referring to the world in which Christ lived and died. This world is ‘fundamentally and essentially indeterminable either in theoretical categories or in categories of historical cognition or through aesthetic intuition’.93 Applying theoretical categories, we are not able to access the uniqueness of the event; relying on historical cognition, we can recognise the uniqueness of the fact itself, but we cannot ascribe meaning to it. And in aesthetic intuition, ‘we have both the being of the fact and the sense in it as a moment of its individuation, but we lose our own position in relation to it, our ought-to-be participation in it’.94 This distance from ourselves is a crucial factor in understanding aesthetic existence. It can grasp the feeling of actual activity, but, similarly to theorisation, it fails to render its uniqueness. It seems that, for Bakhtin, aesthetic being is a border, a limit of the self understood as a locus of activity. We cannot fathom the self with objective, interpersonal tools. What we really approach is not an actual self; or, rather, it is a self of the other, not ours. That is why the subject can only enact aesthetic existence, putting on the mask of another person. For the subject, living aesthetically means being an observer of its own deeds and comparing them with aesthetic categories. In this, aesthetic reason shares with practical reason the ability to universalise activity. Like practical reason, aesthetic reason has to turn actual life into an abstract universalisation. That can be avoided only by bringing aesthetic categories into the deed, but then they lose their objective character and become a moment in activity. This reasoning is succinctly expressed in the following passage: Yet aesthetic being is closer to the actual unity of Being-as-life than the theoretical world is. That is why the temptation of aestheticism is so persuasive. One can live in aesthetic being, and there are those who do so, but they are other human beings and not I myself [. . .]. I shall not find myself in that life; I shall find only a double of myself, only someone pre74

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin tending to be me. All I can do in it is play a role, i.e., assume like a mask, the flesh of another – of someone deceased. But the aesthetic answerability of the actor and the whole human being for the appropriateness of the role played remains in actual life, for the playing of a role as a whole is an answerable deed performed by the one playing, and not the one represented, i.e., the hero.95

Creativity, thus, is a crucial point in Bakhtin’s approach to the self. Using the category I-for-myself for the most intimate, active part of the self, Bakhtin describes the function of the self as follows: I-for-myself constitute the centre from which my performed act and my self-activity of affirming and acknowledging any value come forth or issue, for that it is the only point where I participate answerably in once-occurrent Being; it is the centre of operations, the headquarters of the commander-in-chief directing my possibilities and my ought in the ongoing event of Being.96

The instances of objective culture are important for the actor, insofar as they are included into his or her deed. Yet the self, as such, has no content; it is an attitude toward objective reality, as well as toward objective culture. A participant in the act, as Bakhtin points out, sees clearly these individual, unique persons whom he loves, this sky and this earth and these trees [. . .], and the time; and what is given to him simultaneously is the value, the actually and concretely affirmed value of these persons and these objects. He intuits their inner lives as well as desires; he understands both the actual and the ought-to-be sense of the interrelationship between himself and these persons and objects – the truth [pravda] of the given state of affairs – and he understands the ought of his performed act, that is, not the abstract law of his act, but the actual, concrete ought conditioned by his unique place in the given context of the ongoing event. And all these moments, which make up the event in its totality, are present to him as something given and something-to-beachieved in a unitary light, in a unitary and unique answerable consciousness, and they are actualized in a unitary and unique answerable act.97

The self as activity exists as momentary phenomenon, taking the form of a moral decision embedded in moral activity. What organises these momentary selves is the ability to respond to the situation in an answerable manner. Framing the self in such categories, Bakhtin is sceptical about the possibility of establishing a general mechanism that would explain the self in its entirety. The self is created in the space delimited by the three elements: I-for-myself, the other (or, strictly speaking, the other-for-me) and I-for-the-other. The life of 75

politics of dialogue the self proceeds in the constant shifting of positions between these centres: The highest architectonic principle of the actual world of the performed act or deed is the concrete and architectonically valid or operative contraposition of I and the other. Life knows two value-centres that are fundamentally and essentially different, yet are correlated with each other: myself and the other; and it is around these centres that all of the concrete moments of Being are distributed and arranged.98

This ability (and necessity) to shift positions from the self to the other is the most important mechanism of the emergence of the social from language-in-action. The utterance – the most important category in Bakhtin’s concept of language – enables the individual to pass from his/her perspective to the other’s. With the complicated dynamics of this process outlined already, I will depict now its implications for the constitution of the social. Bakhtin, as has been stressed, is interested most of all in language-as-action – that is, in such use of language entities which presupposes the existence of the other. This approach involves a certain paradox: on the one hand, language actions are always personal and, on the other, they are inevitably directed toward the other. Therein, the nature of language replicates the existential structure of human existence. Although the egocentric perspective is essential, its ego-centrity via answerability requires the other as an opposite pole of existence. Language communication is thus doubly bound: it has to safeguard individual uniqueness and, at the same time, gives the individual a chance to be responsible for the other. At its foundations, the double-faceted human existence and its expression in language have an always-concrete character. However, the objective world of culture, which is rendered in language, imposes its own conditions on the concreteness of human existence. The concreteness has to face up to the objective material accumulated in language as it permeates all dimensions of individual utterances. The social is thus born from the ethical as a consequence of the individual’s ethical involvement, which, in turn, is an inalienable part of human existence. Although individual answerability lies at the core of the social, the social is not reducible to answerability. Rather, to exist, the social also needs a glue to bind all the scattered human actions. Dialogical relationships intrinsic to all human social efforts enable people to harmonise their actions. However, this bond is very weak, since dialogical relationships are always at risk of being colo76

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin nised by the objective world of culture. Given this, monologue, or monologic utterances, can be treated as evincing such colonisation. Hence, the social is a site of a constant struggle between the dialogical potential comprised in dialogical relationships and monologic utterances, which try to hinder this potential. Language is an obvious battlefield on which this struggle unfolds, and the efforts to impose a fixed meaning on the word are an essential part of the fight. This is a context in which to locate and analyse understanding. Understanding is an ongoing process in which conceptual systems of reference keep shifting incessantly. In the process of understanding, we accommodate an other’s concepts and make them part of our own conceptual system. Bakhtin is very far from believing that it would be possible to find a common ground, which could account for the diverging meanings in two conceptual systems. Instead, in the complicated process of subsequent shifts of perspectives, we can gradually approximate an other’s perspective, which, in turn, becomes increasingly closer to ours. However, nothing predetermines this process. As I have already indicated, dialogue is both a feature of human interactions (as dialogical relations) and an ethical challenge. As the social includes both elements, we always have to consider a concrete situation if we want to identify the role of dialogue in a particular society. The social never starts from scratch; a social relation never starts from a ‘dialogical robinsonade’ in which two separate individuals initiate and continue a dialogue, coming to terms with each other eventually. Instead, Bakhtin insists that in our social interactions we start from the accumulated language material, which is ideologically loaded, and we can proceed with our dialogue in certain social circumstances, which, to some extent, determines not only the content, but also the form of our language encounters. Bakhtin devotes a lot of energy to show how speech genres can instigate particular types of utterances. I think that it is a very important clue for the interpretation of social and political life. Engaging in such interpretations, we should identify the dominant types of speech genres and show their relevance for promoting dialogue as an ethical challenge and its extension into the sphere of the political. Although Bakhtin’s works can be understood as a dramatic plea for a liberated dialogue, he never explicitly discusses political questions. An obvious reason for this silence is the political conjuncture in which Bakhtin lived his mature life. This does not exclude, however, another equally or perhaps even more important motive behind 77

politics of dialogue Bakhtin’s reserve on this point. That is to be sought at the very heart of Bakhtin’s philosophical anthropology, to borrow the phrase from Tzvetan Todorov.99 The political emerges from ethicality, which, in turn, as a source of the political, must have a discursive, dialogical form. From this point of view, one can treat the political as a constant tension between the sayable and the unsayable in the context of ethical answerability.

2.7  Carnival and Democracy The complex relationship between an intimate, personal relation and the objectivised culture expressed in language is outlined in Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais: A new type of communication always creates new forms of speech or a new meaning given to the old form. For instance, when two persons establish friendly relations, the form of their verbal intercourse also changes abruptly; they address each other informally, abusive words are used affectionately, and mutual mockery is permitted [. . .]. The two friends may pat each other on the shoulder and even on the belly (a typical carnivalesque gesture). Verbal etiquette and discipline are relaxed and indecent words and expression may be used. But obviously such familiar intercourse in our days is far from the free familiar communication of the people in carnival time. It lacks the essentials: the all-human character, the festivity, utopian meaning, and philosophical depth. Let us point out that elements of the old rituals of fraternization were preserved in the carnival and were given a deeper meaning. Some of these elements have entered modern life but have entirely lost their primitive connotation.100

It could seem that, in his Rabelais book, Bakhtin proposes a new version of language-in-action, which is more culturally and socially charged. This impression is, to some extent, legitimate, as Bakhtin undoubtedly highlights this sphere of language functioning, articulating all the more emphatically the emancipatory character of language, which resists official ideology. For this reason, Bakhtin’s concept of carnival currently tends to be used as an interpretative tool in formulating accounts of revolution. However, a carnivalesque potential can be regarded as incorporated in human relations – i.e. in dialogical relations. Carnival is a perfect incarnation of one of the moments of human existence, with its capacity to build authentic bonds, despite the prevailing social and political obstacles. In the Middle Ages, carnival was, thus, a source of opposition to the official ideology: 78

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin Official medieval culture tried to inculcate the exactly opposite belief in a static unchanging world order and in the eternal nature of all existence. This teaching [. . .] was still powerful. It could not be overcome by individual thinking or scholarly perusal of antique source. [. . .] Popular culture alone could offer this support.101

This and similar remarks shed light on the political implications of carnival as a site of resistance to the official political culture. In order to discuss the specificity of this resistance in medieval culture and the possibilities to universalise the carnival model of resistance, I will make a short recourse to medieval political theology and its consequences for establishing the political order of modernity. In his celebrated book, Ernst Kantorowicz examines the medieval legal doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies. The role of the King as a validator of the legal order demanded that his body be granted a special status: This migration of the ‘Soul,’ that is, of the immortal part of kingship, from one incarnation to another as expressed by the concept of the king’s demise is certainly one of the essentials of the whole theory of the King’s Two Bodies. It has preserved its validity for practically all time to come. Interesting, however, is the fact that this ‘incarnation’ of the body politic in a king of flesh not only does away with the human imperfections of the body natural but conveys ‘immortality’ to the individual king as King, that is, with regard to his superbody.102

Consequently, the sovereign became an extraordinary figure, a hybrid of the universal and the particular (corporeality): [T]he Prince no longer was the christomimétés, the manifestation of Christ the eternal King; nor was he, as yet, the exponent of an immortal nation; he had his share in immortality because he was the hipostasis of an immortal Idea. A new pattern of persona mixta emerged from Law itself, with Iustitia as a model deity and the Prince as both her incarnation and her Pontifex maximus.103

The King and his body are also brought to the foreground of Bakhtin’s carnival book. In the carnival system, however, the concept of the King’s body and his role are almost entirely reversed, for: [i]n such a system the king is the clown. He is elected by all the people and is mocked by all the people. He is abused and beaten when the time of his reign is over, just as the carnival dummy of winter or of the dying year is mocked, beaten, torn to pieces, burned, or drowned even in our time. They are ‘gay monsters.’ The clown was first disguised as a king, but once his reign had come to an end his costume was changed, ‘­traverstied,’ to 79

politics of dialogue turn him once more into a clown. The abuse and thrashing are equivalent to a change of costume, to a metamorphosis. Abuse reveals the other, true face of the abused, it tears off his disguise and mask. It is the king’s uncrowning.104

Carnival thus appears as a nearly direct response to medieval political theology. The double of the King’s body is not his immortal politicotheological body, but the clown. Instead of gesturing toward eternity, carnival features trashing and uncrowning. The body of the King, which, according to Kantorowicz, was a centre of political power, becomes a symbol of the degradation of this power, as opposed to its perpetual intactness in the established hierarchy. This is the meaning Bakhtin’s book invests in the term ‘degradation’: Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better.105

Demolishing power, carnival brings it down to the ground – pulls it out of heaven not only metaphorically, but also literally, as the carnivalesque degradation is always wrought upon a living body, which is not tainted by universality: To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place.106

Thus, the King’s body eventually becomes an object of consummation, a communion that the crowd partakes of. Analysing the game of boeuf violles mentioned by Gargantua (i.e. a carnival parade of a fat ox through the streets), Bakhtin writes: The ox was to be slaughtered, it was to be a carnivalesque victim. It was a king, a procreator, symbolizing the city’s fertility; at the same time, it was the sacrificial meat, to be chopped up for sausages and patés.107

This moment most eloquently articulates the extreme hostility of carnival to any kind of authority embodied in the King’s Body. As the sacred body stands for an eternity of power and authority, the fate of the ox-king symbolises the elusiveness of any power and envisions a 80

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin new world in which a king is simultaneously a clown, and the coronation rituals are coupled with uncrowning and thrashing. As a force contravening the embodiment of power, carnival can be accounted for in the framework of the opposition between totalitarianism and democracy. I build here on Claude Lefort’s concept of democracy as a system organised around an ‘empty space’: I have for a long time concentrated upon this peculiarity of modern democracy: of all the regimes of which we know, it is the only one to have represented power in such a way as to show that power is an empty space and to have thereby maintained a gap between the symbolic and the real. It does so by virtue of a discourse which reveals that power belongs to no one; that those who exercise power do not possess it; that they do not, indeed, embody it; that the exercise of power requires a periodic and repeated contest; that the authority of those vested with power is created and re-created as a result of the manifestation of the will of the people.108

The uniqueness of the democratic system, according to Lefort, lies in that it does not produce a definite incarnation of power and, hence, democratic societies evade the temptation of subordination to the image of People-as-One. The democratic system is contrasted with a totalitarian system, which characteristically enforces a symbolic fulfilling of the democratic empty space. The totalitarian system tends to secure the oneness of people through producing such categories as the People, the Nation, the Fatherland and the Class. Lefort sees the beginnings of such a system in the medieval monarchy. He contends that the process of the ‘sacralisation’ of politics crucially contributed to the emergence of totalitarianism: With reference to Kantorowicz’s analyses, it would be no less instructive to examine the process inaugurated in the twelfth century whereby a public domain becomes detached from the person of the king and is defined as a domain of inalienable property; and whereby a further division is introduced between a reference to an objective order and a reference to a sacred order: the res publica becomes a res sacra modeled on the possessions of the Church, which are themselves the property of Christ.109

This symbolic order of pre-modern societies is vital for the understanding of contemporary totalitarianism, because, as Bernard Flynn observes, it assumes the phantasmatic suppression of the relationship to the Other.110 Therefore, he continues: on a political level, we see that if the certain foundations of premodern society were fixed in another world, and if the doubling of the body of the 81

politics of dialogue king acted as a mediator between the visible and invisible, then political modernity must be the discorporation of the political.111

Modernity emerges, thus, as a system characterised by a radical indetermination and, consequently, ‘the establishment of democratic power’ equals ‘the controlled challenge to the authority vested with its exercise [. . .], [which] requires an institutionalization of conflict and a quasi-dissolution of social relations at the very moment of the manifestation of the will of the people’.112 From this perspective, carnival takes on an unexpected significance as an independent social form alternative to the official political theology. Bakhtin underlines that carnival is not merely a parody of the official life: ‘We must stress, however, that the carnival is far distant from the negative and formal parody of modern times. Folk humor denies, but it revives and renews at the same time. Bare negation is completely alien to folk culture.’113 Carnival becomes an embodied utopia: literally embodied, as this utopia essentially ‘acquires [. . .] a sharply defined material bodily form’, in which ‘freedom and equality are expressed in familiar blows, a coarse bodily contact’.114 Contrary to the concept of the body in political theology, the carnival body is a real physical body with all its weaknesses, but also with all its capacities for renewal and regeneration. In a sense, this bodily character of the carnival utopia compromises all pretensions to eternity, which are so important for the medieval political theology. The destruction of the eternal social order is not imaginary, it is a palpable occurrence restricted only by time: ‘The absence of clearly established footlights is characteristic of all popular-festive forms. The utopian truth is enacted in life itself. For a short time this truth becomes to a certain extent a real existing force.’115 Carnival is thus a focus of Bakhtin’s political perspective, a nodal point from which various strands of his reflections on language and philosophical anthropology diverge and acquire new meanings. We cannot, of course, assume that Bakhtin conceived of his book on Rabelais as a kind of political treatise; conversely, it was a detailed study of a cultural phenomenon located very precisely in its historical time. But as many remarks scattered throughout the work indicate, Bakhtin views the carnival as a universal phenomenon somehow reflecting human nature and a potential of communication always harboured in human relations. Actual dialogue, as shown earlier, always hinges on activation of the potential of dialogical relations in certain social and political circumstances; consequently, carnival, 82

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin likewise, depends on possibilities for actualising the potential of fraternity present in human relations. Carnival and dialogue are phenomena of everyday life, but they extend into the realm of politics. Their embedment in everyday life is reinforced by the bodily character of carnival. As David McNally states, carnival ‘shamelessly celebrated the body as a counterforce to the anti-corporeal spiritualism of official ideology’.116 Though pertaining to the medieval carnival, this observation has a wider resonance, since, generally speaking, political theorists generally tend to view politics as an entirely bodiless entity. On this account, politics is an interplay of abstract ideas, signs and conceptions. The beheaded king, for example, is a sign of revolution, a sign of the rise of new ideas in society, whereas his decapitated body is meaningless. The same disembodied and disembodying reading is applied to other political events, whose corporeal manifestations are construed merely as an emblem of their underlying ideas. In his book The Royal Remains, Eric L. Santner suggests that, in fact, the idea of the political theology of the body survived in modernity, but at a price of changing its designate. Instead of being concentrated on the king’s body, it has shifted to the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. The concept of biopolitics, formulated by Foucault and developed by Agamben and Esposito, is for Santner an expression of this shift: Modern politics is always also biopolitics not simply because the wealth of nations – the commonwealth – is now seen to reside in the wellbeing of its population but rather because the procedures of Setzen and Entsetzen, of positing and deposing, that formerly focused on the figure of the sovereign now transpire within the life of every citizen. In a word, the privilege and horror, the sublimity and abjection, of the flesh now belong in some sense to the fate of every member of the polity.117

Bakhtin, as demonstrated above, is hostile to construals of social life that reduce it to bodiless ideas, and carnival is a supreme social expression of his perspective. This hostility is not only ideologically motivated. Bakhtin always appreciates the perspective of popular culture and the plebeian view on life as a biological and ever-­ regenerating force, but he is also equally committed to reflection on communication to dialogue. Since the utterance, as mentioned earlier, is always of concrete character, it must be embodied in flesh. Only a concrete individual can create the utterance, and only in the concrete world of bodies can we strive after mutual understanding. Thus, carnival is an ideal form for free and equal communication embodied 83

politics of dialogue in real gestures of real people. In Bakhtin’s perspective on society, it plays the same role as an ‘ideal speech situation’ does in Habermas’s; it is an ultimate yardstick for assessing to what extent a concrete situation expresses an ideal of freedom and equality. Carnival itself, of course, does not contain sophisticated communication, but is a quasi-transcendental condition of such communication. And because for both Bakhtin and Habermas the ideal situation emerges from the real circumstances of social life, an ideal is not merely a normative fiction, but also a kind of purified social reality. Such interpretation has been amply substantiated for Habermas.118 In the case of Bakhtin, it invites a few words of commentary. Carnival is, for Bakhtin, a historical, temporally located phenomenon: it culminated in the Renaissance, but it flourished in the Middle Ages, especially toward their end. However, the ideas that inform carnival are by no means restricted to a particular period. The qualities of carnival show the potential of human relations unshackled from the stiff ties of political theology. Therefore, the extent to which modern totalitarianism is an heir to medieval political theology and the project of democracy is its opposition indicates the significance of carnival as an important source of political thought. Carnival comprises all the features of free communication. Heteroglossia, hybridisation, mixing languages of different social origins – all phenomena so thoroughly explored by Bakhtin – find their embodiment in carnival. The decentring of the carnival discourse makes it into an ideal model of the Lefortian concept of democracy. The constant fluctuation of the carnival discourse from pathos to grotesque, from birth to death, from laughter to seriousness precludes the appropriation of the empty space of the carnival feast by any permanent symbol. Instead, the carnival ideology revolves around an axis of ‘frankness’, which is not a psychological faculty, but the most important social value: Frankness was understood, of course, not in a narrowly subjective sense as ‘sincerity,’ the ‘soul’s truth,’ or ‘intimacy’. [. . .] Thought and speech had to be placed under such conditions that the world could expose its other side: the side that was hidden, that nobody talked about, that did not fit the words and forms of prevailing philosophy. America was still to be discovered, the Antipodes reached, the Western hemisphere explored, and the question arose: ‘What is under our feet?’ Thought and word were searching for a new reality beyond the visible horizon of official philosophy. Often enough words and thoughts were turned around in order to discover what they were actually hiding, what was that other side. The 84

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin aim was to find a position permitting a look at the other side of established values, so that new bearings could be taken.119

‘A look at the other side of established values’; this phrase encapsulates the Bakhtinian programme of an ideal social life: a social life in which it is always possible to negate the established structures and purposes, in order to propose new projects and new ideas; a social life in which the work of imagination is the most important social asset. It is clear that in an ideal society, understanding differs from coming to terms with, or achieving a compromise among, various individuals and social groups. Understanding is a complicated process of attempting to harmonise diverse viewpoints through assimilation and accommodation to others’ perspectives. This harmonisation is never complete, as it is never possible to evade the concreteness of the utterance and the heteroglossia of language. However, the dialogical involvement enables all members of the community to seek a greater profoundness of understanding. Thus, carnival and communication are inextricably intertwined, as carnival demarcates the borders of a free and equal dialogue.

2.8  Conclusion: Dialogue, Carnival and Democracy Of course, it is a risky venture to transpose cultural and linguistic concepts into political ones. Politics is evidently a component of culture, but it is predominantly involved with institutions, procedures and violence. I do believe, nonetheless, that Bakhtin’s ideas of dialogue, language and carnival can be highly relevant to political theory. I will conclude by outlining the space where such interconnections can be made. First, Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue gives us the possibility to build a non-consensual model of democratic society. In such a model, democracy does not require a consensus, but rather a certain kind of understanding. According to Bakhtin, an ethical decision to engage in the process of understanding is a crucial point capable of redirecting the whole trajectory of political struggle. Second, his concept of dialogue assumes that there is a continuation between everyday life and politics. Dialogical relations are ubiquitous in society, existing even in the most oppressive ones, but their activation in politics takes struggle and conscious effort. Third, Bakhtin’s concept of carnival entails that democratic society is an activation of the potential embedded in all human relations.

85

politics of dialogue

Notes 1. Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 124. 2. I discuss Jürgen Habermas’s interpretation and critique of Mead at length in my paper ‘The choice of tradition and the tradition of choice: Habermas’ and Rorty’s interpretation of pragmatism’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 25: 1, 1999, pp. 55–70. 3. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume 2. Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p. 22. 4. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 21. 5. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Wittgenstein after’, in Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 20. 6. Craig Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2002), p. 83. 7. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 8. The Bakhtin experts are certainly familiar with an ongoing vivid dispute regarding the extent to which the work of Medvedev and Voloshinov was inspired or even written by Bakhtin himself. Instead of getting involved in this controversy, I prefer to treat the works of the Bakhtin Circle and Bakhtin himself as a continuity, in which the same motifs are reiterated and shared. 9. Mikhail M. Bakhtin/Pavel N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 84. 10. Valentin N. Voloshinov, Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, eds I. R. Titunik and N. H. Bruss, trans. I. R. Titunik (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 79 [emphasis in original]. 11. Ibid. p. 18. 12. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, eds Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 76–7. 13. Michael E. Gardiner, The Dialogics of Critique: M.M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 7. 14. Valentin N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 10. 86

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin 15. In fact, Voloshinov uses a term ‘zhizhnienaia ideologia’, which literally translates as ‘life ideology’, but throughout the rest of this book I will use the phrase ‘behavioral ideology’. 16. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, p. 91. 17. Ibid. p. 92. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. p. 93. 20. Ibid. p. 98 [emphasis in original]. 21. Bakhtin/Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, p. 7. 22. Ibid. p. 17. 23. Ibid. p. 14. 24. David Bakhurst, Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Psychology: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 70–1 [emphasis in original]. 25. Vera I. Samokhvalova, ‘Soznanie kak dialogichieskoye otnoschienije’ [Consciousness as a dialogical relation], in L. A. Gogotischvily and P. S. Gourievitch (eds), M.M. Bakhtin kak filosov [Bakhtin as a Philosopher] (Moscow: Nauka, 1992), pp. 190–2. 26. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, p. 72 [emphasis in original]. 27. Ibid. p. 75. 28. Ibid. p. 76 [emphasis in original]. 29. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, p. 120. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. p. 121. 32. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, p. 107. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. p. 106 [emphasis in original]. 36. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the novel’, in The Dialectical Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press: 1981), pp. 272–4. 37. Ibid. p. 272. 38. Gardiner, The Dialogics of Critique, p. 17. 39. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the novel’, p. 297. 40. Ibid [emphasis in original]. 41. Ibid. p. 298. 42. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 183 [emphasis in original]. 43. Ibid [emphasis in original]. 44. Ibid. p. 184 [emphasis in original]. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 87

politics of dialogue 47. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the novel’, p. 280. 48. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 280. 49. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the novel’, p. 281. 50. Ibid. 51. Jürgen Habermas, ‘What is transcendental pragmatics?’ in On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. Maeve Cooke (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 22–3 [emphasis in original]. 52. Ibid. p. 23. 53. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the novel’, p. 282. 54. Ibid. 55. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, p. 88 [emphasis in original]. 56. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the novel’, p. 349 [emphasis in original]. 57. Ibid. pp. 349–50. 58. Ibid. pp. 352–3. 59. Ibid. p. 353. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. p. 356. 62. Ibid. p. 358. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. p. 359 [emphasis in original]. 66. Ibid. p. 361. 67. Ibid [emphasis in original]. 68. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, p. 152 [emphasis in original]. 69. Ibid. p. 126. 70. Ibid. p. 127. 71. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume 2, p. 2. 72. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, p. 152. 73. Ibid. p. 151. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. p. 152. 76. Osip E. Mandelstam, ‘The Decembrist’, in Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, trans. Burton Raffel and Alla Burago (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972), pp. 95–6. 77. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Vadim Liapunov, eds Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), p. 2. 78. Leszek Koczanowicz, ‘Freedom and communication: the concept of human self in Mead and Bakhtin’, Dialogism, 4, 2000, pp. 54–66. 79. Michael Eskin, Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam, and Celan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 75 [emphasis in original]. 88

dialogue, carnival, democracy: bakhtin 80. Leszek Koczanowicz, Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in PostCommunist Poland (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), pp. 42–53. 81. Michael Walzer, ‘The concept of civil society’, in Michael Walzer (ed.), Toward a Global Civil Society (New York: Berghahn Books, 1995), p. 18. 82. Ibid. p. 21. 83. Zbigniew Herbert, ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’, in Czesław Miłosz (ed.) (trans.), Post-War Polish Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 141–2. 84. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections of Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 78 [emphasis in original]. 85. Ibid. pp. 72–3 [emphasis in original]. 86. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of Act, p. 9 [emphasis in original]. 87. Ibid. p. 10. 88. Ibid [emphasis in original]. 89. Ibid. pp. 12–13. 90. Ibid. p. 13. 91. Ibid. p. 14 [emphasis in original]. 92. Ibid. p. 15 [emphasis in original]. 93. Ibid. p. 16. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. p. 18 [emphasis in original]. 96. Ibid. p. 60. 97. Ibid. p. 30 [emphasis in original]. 98. Ibid. p. 74 [emphasis in original]. 99. Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 100. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 16. 101. Ibid. p. 275. 102. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 13. 103. Ibid. p. 143. 104. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 197. 105. Ibid. p. 21. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid. p. 202. 108. Claude Lefort, ‘The permanence of the theologico-political’, in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 225 [emphasis in original]. 109. Ibid. pp. 253–4. 89

politics of dialogue 110. Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), p. 125. 111. Ibid. p. 126. 112. Lefort, ‘The permanence of the theologico-political’, p. 226. 113. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 11. 114. Ibid. pp. 264–5. 115. Ibid. p. 265. 116. David McNelly, Bodies of Meaning: Studies of Language, Labor, and Liberalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 142. 117. Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgame of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 61. 118. Katarzyna Jezierska, Radical Democracy Redux: Politics and Subjectivity beyond Habermas and Mouffe (Örebro: Örebro University Press, 2011), p. 77. 119. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 271–2.

90

3

Critical Community

3.1  Democracy and Community Evidently, contemporary societies are fractured by two contradictory tendencies that organise their social life. While, on the one hand, society, by common consensus, cannot exist without the background of shared, generally endorsed values and norms, on the other hand, modern societies, and postmodern ones even more emphatically so, consist of a patchwork of diverse values, norms and regulations, which, as a rule, are mutually incompatible and very often contradictory. The liberal doctrine proposed to accommodate this dichotomy, offering a division into the public and private spheres. This seemed to promote harmonisation of the private differentiation of values and the public acceptance of a unified legal order. However, the political experience of modernity belies the viability of this simple division. It proves impossible for two reasons. First, democracy itself is not merely a system of procedures and institutions independent of the culture of the particular society in which it operates. Democracy is a form of life in Wittgenstein’s meaning of the term: ‘So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?’ – It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.1

From this point of view, democracy is a form of life enabling the existence of a shared language of politics, which, in turn, fosters the unification of contradictory beliefs by a community of individuals who can understand each other. This concept of democracy is very close to the one developed by the pragmatist philosophers John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. For them, democracy is a system of habits and way of doing things that express themselves in institutions and procedures, and not the other way around. Democracy, thus, has to be anchored in a community defined by a form of life. 91

politics of dialogue Second, if democracy is a form of life, it is also, inevitably, a form of identity. The division into the public and private spheres imposed by liberalism does not work if we address individual and collective identities. It does not seem plausible that all that which is vital to our innermost existence could be relegated outside our political involvement. Anthropologists show that our identities are, to a considerable degree, constructed through negating the Other’s identity, which makes the inner tensions an intrinsic part of pluralistic, democratic society. The crucial question is how these inevitable tensions can be harmonised, if we deny the restrictive division into the private and public spheres of social life. This question is central not only to theory, but also to the practices of democratic society. As Claude Lefort assumes, democracy is a political system that is organised around an ‘empty space’, and political conflict is essentially a struggle for the right to speak in the name of ‘the people’. Lefort’s tenet undeniably holds for the political sphere, insofar as it is deemed dissociated from other dimensions of social life. If, however, we allow for the arguments against the liberal concept of politics, we can revise this thesis. Democratic politics has to engage with the cultural and communal stratum of habits, prejudices, values and norms, which, to a great extent, predetermine everything that goes on in politics itself; hence, the frustrations of political scientists notoriously unable to formulate a plain definition of ‘democracy’ or ‘a democratic political system’. Their distress is likely to persist, since political solutions depend on the culture of a community and, whereas in totalitarian systems dreary uniformity is the norm, pluralism is inherent in democracy. Consequently, democracy is a continuous change, an ‘institutionalized revolution’, to use John Dewey’s formulation. How can this variability function when democracy is interwoven into a community? Each community is, by nature, conservative, at least in the sense that it seeks to hand down its values and norms and to protect its integrity. The tension between the requirements of a democratic system and the pursuits of the community underlying it is often overlooked, as it is channelled in the form of a purely political or legal debate. It does, however, inevitably lead to a change in social values – that is, a change in the community itself. The history of modern and postmodern societies shows that such changes do take place, though it remains unclear what their mechanisms are and what kinds of community facilitate them. 92

critical community

3.2  Modernity and Community: a Genealogy The concept of community is probably essential in the discussions of modern society. The less evident and transparent this concept is in the social practice, the more attention it attracts. If we concur with William E. Connolly that ‘the epoch in which the destruction of the world followed the collective attempt to master it’,2 we cannot but view the problem of community as the pivot of the discourse of modernity. It is commonly acknowledged that with the onset of modernity community disappeared or, at least, it underwent fundamental changes. It is also commonly acknowledged that this decline of community has instrumentally contributed to transforming the trajectory of social life. From the beginning, social life was organised around the notion of community; therefore, as community rapidly vanished, an entirely new form of social and personal interactions emerged. The social thought of the last 200 years could thus be summarised as a discourse on community as a precondition of society or, alternately, on implications of living without community. This discourse revolves around two important axes. The first query is whether or not we need a community to preserve our identity. This problem concerns, in fact, the validity of liberalism not only as a political theory, but also as a specific social philosophy probing into the relationship between an individual and society. In pre-modern times, a community was a natural locus of individual identity. Individual identity was an expression of the group identity, and individual biography was determined by the social structure. The process of individuation, which commenced probably with the Reformation, decisively remade the relation between an individual and the community. The once ‘natural’ arrangements of society were questioned and became the issue of heated disputes. And the disputes continue, largely due to the dominance of liberalism as a leading political theory of modernity. The second query concerns the liberal notion of an autonomous and free individual, who is driven by rational motives. This individual rationality can always be translated into the collective rationality, which leads to a compromise in the public sphere. However, the basic – and still unsolved – problem in all versions of liberalism is the transition from individual rationality to collective rationality. For a collective action to work, individuals have to coordinate their actions and harmonise their views. However, such coordination assumes a priori a check on the freedom and autonomy of i­ndividuals, which 93

politics of dialogue jeopardises the key principles of liberalism. This contradiction is demonstrated by Pierre Manent in the paradoxical position that modern man assumes vis-à-vis law, which should be the locus of political universality and shared action of citizens: ‘[. . .] modern man, as modern, both flees from and seeks out law. He flees the law that is given to him and seeks the law he gives himself.’3 This contradiction can be circumvented in two ways. First, we can hypostatise public reason and take individual rationality as an expression of such a ‘higher rationality’. Second, we can presuppose that there are values prior to individual actions. Both solutions have recurred in various incarnations, ranging from the social a priori of the Neo-Kantians, to the common good of communitarians, to John Rawls’s public reason. However, with all these efforts failing to purge liberal philosophy from its intrinsic flaw, it has actually become the starting point for criticism of the liberal political strategy. The criticism targets mainly liberalism’s inability to explain how collective identities are constructed and what role they play in the political. If phrased in the interrogative mode, the problem would be: is a community necessary for liberals? And if so, how is a liberal community possible? This problem of liberal theory has provoked two types of critique. One of them, which can be associated with the right wing of the political scene, argues that the source of collective identity can be located in the fixed values of nation and religion. The other one, which can be associated with left-wing politics, argues that the source of collective identity is to be found in the economic structure of society. The conservative critique of liberalism, which began in the aftermath of the French Revolution, locates the sources of collective identity in the culture of a nation. An individual is always constituted by the values of a group to which s/he belongs, and it is misconception to think that individual autonomy and freedom could originate from any other sources. The Romantic response to the Enlightenment consists of the idea that society or community is always prior to an individual and that an individual forms his or her identity upon the collective identity of the community s/he inhabits. This new community is perhaps a continuation of an old community, as in both cases one of the main ramifications of communal life is an assault on democracy. In his monumental book on the antiEnlightenment, Zeev Sternhell shows that this concept of community is indeed the foundation of another modernity, one different from that defined by the Enlightenment. As Sternhell encapsulates it: 94

critical community In Herder and among the Herderians, not only in Germany but also in France and Italy, there emerged cultural nationalism and its product, political nationalism, which, as one advanced into the twentieth century, became more and more radical and more and more violent. Cultural nationalism very soon gave birth to the idea of the nation state and its counterpart, the supremacy of the state and the idea that democracy is the enemy of the people.4

From this perspective, a national and religious community comes across as a grave peril to democracy. It is obvious that while democracy relies on discussions, disagreements and even strife for its sheer survival, community – especially a strong national community – champions the unity of the people. The twentieth century witnessed, nevertheless, a new kind of community, which, without discarding the traditional concept of community, changed it radically to align with the spirit of the time. This invention was accomplished in Carl Schmitt’s political theology, which developed somewhat later, in the 1920s and 1930s. Schmitt paradoxically exposes the limits of conservative theory by purging it of the aura of Romantic sentimentalism in a gesture directed against the traditional conservatives. As Charles E. Frye writes: Schmitt repudiated the very substance and form of tradition, of history, indeed, of life itself. There was nothing in the institutions, traditions, and customs of Germany he sought to preserve – except perhaps a strong executive state. And even there his interpretation was so radical (by making the ruler absolute, destroying any possible bases for a Rechtsstaat, and reducing parliament to a nonentity) as to constitute a break with that tradition.5

Schmitt depicts politics as a struggle of pure collective identities, which are, in fact, reduced to the friend/enemy dimension only. He argues that it is hardly possible to nourish the liberal illusion that a compromise is always possible. Instead, he views the unity of society as an effect of violence, the will of a sovereign. Reversing Clausewitz’s famous aphorism that ‘war is a mere continuation of politics by other means’, Schmitt conceptualises politics as a mere continuation of war. The unity of society ensues, thus, always from the outside, imposed by the will of a sovereign, who is not bound by any laws. Or, strictly speaking, his will itself is the source of law: ‘All law is “situational law.” The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision.’6 95

politics of dialogue Drawing on Hobbes and the French Revolution thinkers, Schmitt construes the state as a political entity, which makes him assert that the state is premised on an account of the political, [so] properly understood the two are coterminous, as the sphere of the political is where is delineated the precise authority that is able to take decisions about who or what constitutes a threat to the state, the political and public sphere.7

Politics and the state are indistinguishable in modernity: The decisive question [. . .] concerns the relationship of [. . .] state and politics. A doctrine which began to take shape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a doctrine inaugurated by Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, and Thomas Hobbes, endowed the state with an important monopoly: the European state became the sole subject of politics. Both state and politics were linked just as indivisibly as polis and politics in Aristotle.8

In this way, Schmitt constructs a community on a nearly voluntaristic basis. A community as an expression of the ‘we’-and-‘they’ dimension is erected around the sovereign-issued distinction between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. Therefore, a nation as constituted by cultural values mutates into a political nation constituted by a sovereign’s political decision. This concept of community is bound up with the notion of politics as an existential experience. Politics is a domain in which individuals reveal their ‘innermost nature’, their essence. Again, this concept of community is distinct from the one developed in the nineteenth century by Herder – or Burke, on the other side of the British Channel – although, ostensibly, it looks back to it. Rather than being founded upon cultural and social values, a community is more of an individual’s decision to open his/her Dasein to community. Nazi Germany, as Hans Sluga points out, was subsumed in a bitter struggle between the conservative Nazis, who intended to build their ideology upon tradition as embodied mainly in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, and the revolutionary Nazis, who drew extensively on Heidegger’s philosophy.9 The message of the right-wing critique of liberalism is that individuals need a community, in order to realise their existential essence. The shape of a community is, in fact, defined by the political powers – the Hobbesian and Schmittian sovereign with his prerogative to indicate who is a friend and who is an enemy. In a sense, the national and religious values so cherished by the Romantics are, in this concept of community, merely an empty form, a decorum, which disguises the true content of an existential community as a unified force in which individuals can find their true destiny. The leftist critique of liberalism originated in Karl Marx’s claims 96

critical community that in all existing societies collective identities were perpetuated by the division of labor, which, in turn, split society into opposing classes constituted by their economic interests. This is already put forward in The German Ideology: [T]he division of labor implies the contradiction between the interest of separate individuals or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who enter into relationships with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination as the ‘general interest’ but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labor is divided.10

The views and actions of individuals are determined mainly by their position in the economic structure of a society: ‘[. . .] as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape’.11 This location is obviously a source of collective identity, and it also produces the inevitability of the conflict between the opposed identities. People may seek a compromise, but their economic determination has sentenced them to struggle. As Marx and Engels insist in their perhaps most memorable statements: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.’12 And the history of Marxism, as we all know, has been largely defined by a debate on the extent of this determination and the margin of freedom left for individuals to enjoy in their endeavours. In his late letters, Engels tries to correct what he considers a misinterpretation of Marx’s thought, showing that not only the economic situation but also other factors, such as political forms, philosophical theories and religious views, can influence ‘the course of the historical struggles’.13 This short outline, which certainly does not adequately render the richness and complexity of Marx’s thought, serves only as a backdrop to a radical shift that took place in Marxist philosophy after the October Revolution. Put succinctly, the shift consisted in introducing the concept of hegemony into Marxist philosophy. This concept has ever since been a theoretical bone of contention among various interpreters and commentators. I am not going to enter into those discussions here, as my main point is to show that hegemony is a central concept, which forms a basis for understanding modern community. Hegemony stands in the same relation to Marxism’s economic determinism as Schmittian political nation to the Romantic concept of the nation. The principle of economic determination was not challenged until 97

politics of dialogue the work of Vladimir Lenin and Antonio Gramsci. Lenin approached this problem from the perspective of political practice, arguing that introducing a ‘true’ class consciousness into the mentality of the working class was a task of a group of determined revolutionaries organised into the Communist Party. He also developed the idea of an alliance between the working class and peasantry, which would enable the proletariat to mobilise the masses, in order to overturn the Czarist regime. The alliance was, of course, supposed to be organised and hegemonised by the proletariat, but incarnated in the Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The idea of hegemony was maintained and even reinforced after the October Revolution. In his paper ‘A great beginning’, Lenin outlined the proletariat’s two tasks in the revolutionary struggle. First, the proletariat must win over the entire mass of the working and exploited people; it must win them over, organize them and lead them in the struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie and utterly suppress their resistance. Secondly, it must lead the whole mass of the working and exploited people, as well as all the petty-bourgeois groups, on the road of new economic development, towards the creation of a new social bond, a new labor discipline, a new organization of labor, which will combine the last word in science and capitalist technology with the mass association of class conscious workers creating large-scale socialist industry.14

This is clearly an enterprise of building a new community with its own morality, its own model of social interactions and its own model of labour relationships. As I have argued elsewhere, the idea of remaking the economy was inevitably interconnected with the idea of the creation of a new moral community. That the project misfired exposes the limitations to the voluntaristic construction of community. Marxist ideology – at least in the form it took in the Soviet Union and the satellite states – patently failed to become a mode of subjectivisation, to use Michel Foucault’s term.15 For political theory, Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony is probably even more important, as it transfers the idea of determination and collective identity from the realm of economy to that of culture. In Gramsci, hegemony is, to some extent, independent of economic determination; it is, rather, a cultural construction, which has to be imposed on society by a group of ‘organic intellectuals’. The idea of cultural hegemony can account for the integrity of society, but it does so at the price of loosening the Marxian deterministic scheme. Class struggle becomes mainly a cultural struggle, and hegemony is constructed within a culture. Such hegemony 98

critical community is always fragile and prone to be replaced by another hegemony. Gramsci’s statement that what is certain is only the struggle, and not its outcome, actually undercuts the eschatological message of Marxism. Therefore, the state – the political organisation – has a decisive impact on how a community is organised: In my opinion, the most reasonable and concrete thing that can be said about the ethical State, the cultural State, is this: every State is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interest of the ruling classes.16

Although Gramsci does not articulate the idea of political nation as directly as Schmitt does, his postulates are somewhat similar, since his community is constructed rather than given and has an alwaystemporary character. However, the Gramscian community does not have this ecstatic overtone, which reverberates through some versions of German political existentialism, and it is rooted in the ideology of the ruling class, albeit not in an identity produced by the enemy/friend division. On the other hand, the Gramscian concepts of hegemony and civil society also diverge significantly from Lenin’s idea of socialist society as an ethical community of revolutionaries. The main difference lies in that Gramsci tries to trace carefully how common sense can be and is incorporated into a hegemonic community. In Gramsci’s writings, this dialectics is rendered by the relationship between ‘civil society’ and ‘political society’. In his Prison Notebooks, he demonstrates the link between these two social apparatuses in the context of the role of intellectuals: What we can do for the moment is fix two major superstructural ‘levels’: the one that can be called ‘civil society’ [. . .] and that of ‘political society’ or ‘the State.’ These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of ‘hegemony,’ which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of ‘direct domination’ or command exercised through the State and ‘juridical’ government. The intellectuals are the dominant group’s ‘deputies’ exercising the subaltern function of social hegemony and political government. These comprise: 1. The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production. 2. The apparatus of state coercive power, which ‘legally’ enforces 99

politics of dialogue ­ iscipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or pasd sively. This apparatus is, however, constituted for the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed.17

Roughly speaking, we encounter two different but closely interconnected mechanisms for creating civil society as a foundation of the state. On the one hand, we have what Gramsci describes as ‘spontaneous’ consent, which, of course, is spontaneous only conditionally, as part of it is rooted in the subordination to the ideology of the dominant class. On the other hand, we have bare political power, which can be used for disciplining society. To create a fixed model ultimately explaining how both levels work together is hardly possible, because their interaction depends on particular historical circumstances. However, what is really important is the cooperation of coercive political power and consensual social imaginaries in producing a unified sense of community. As Kate Crehan convincingly argues in her book on the Gramscian concept of culture: Culture for Gramsci is, in part, the ways in which class is lived in particular time and places. A crucial dimension of how class is lived is as specific power relations. The concept of hegemony helps us to grasp how power is lived in a given context, and how certain regimes of power – remembering that no regime is uncontested – are produced and reproduced in the dayto-day lives of individuals.18

From this perspective, the Gramscian concept of community must also include relations of power. These relations of power have to rework common sense viewpoints and everyday life activities, subordinating them to the dominant class’ perspective. In the Gramscian categories, these complicated interactions can be described in terms of a division into two concepts of the world: This contrast between thought and action, i.e. the co-existence of two conceptions of the world, on affirmed in words and the other displayed in effective action, is not simply a product of self-deception [malafede]. Self-deception can be an adequate explanation for a few individuals taken separately, or even for groups of a certain size, but it is not adequate when the contrast occurs in the life of great masses. In these cases the contrast between thought and action cannot but be the expression of profounder contrasts of a social historical order. It signifies that the social group in question may indeed have its own conception of the world, even if only embryonic; a conception which manifests itself in action, but occasionally and in flashes – when, that is, the group is acting as an organic totality. 100

critical community But this same group has, for reasons of submission and intellectual subordination, adopted a conception which is not its own but is borrowed from another group; and it affirms this conception verbally and believes itself to be following it, because this is the conception which it follows in ‘normal times’ – that is when its conduct is not independent and autonomous, but submissive and subordinate.19

This and similar remarks spread over Prison Notebooks show the complexity of Gramsci’s concept of community. Community (social group) has its own worldview, but it expresses itself only in rare moments of political action. Normally, it adopts the ideas that are alien to it, but are imposed by the ruling class, which has ‘organic intellectuals’ at its disposal – a group of outstanding competence for describing the social world. If this mechanism fails to work, the ruling class can always resort to coercive power. But this model is only a rough idealisation, as coercive power can also be used to normalise the concept of the social world through education, for example. For me, the most important lesson from reading Gramsci is his insistence that any community – any hegemonic community – is a complicated entity, in which various separate strata become constitutive moments of an interwoven whole. It is rather unconceivable that these two planes of sociality – the ‘normal’ and the ‘revolutionary’ – are independent of each other and that either is activated depending on circumstances. Both are rather out there, as Gramsci’s remark on common sense implies: Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. It is the ‘folklore’ of philosophy, and, like folklore, it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental characteristic is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential, in conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is. At those times in history when a homogeneous social group is brought into being, there comes into being also, in opposition to common sense, a homogeneous – in other words coherent and systematic – philosophy.20

Such an account suggests that, for Gramsci, no social group is unified by a homogenous pattern of convictions, beliefs and values expressed in linguistic forms. Really existing social groups live steeped in the contradictions that constitute them. They develop their own systems of beliefs and values (common sense), which are confronted with that of the dominant group and, eventually, find themselves under pressure exerted by the direct coercive power of the dominant group. 101

politics of dialogue All these elements remain in constant tension with each other. Their configurations depend not only on the objective strength of each of these elements, but also on a concrete historical, social and cultural conjuncture, which can effect a radical shift in their mutual relationships. This idea of diverse levels of language use is similar to that developed by Valentin Voloshinov. As the previous chapter shows, Voloshinov distinguishes various levels of ideology. In terms of his classification, Gramsci’s common sense could be easily treated as corresponding to behavioural ideology (Voloshinov actually uses the term life ideology), which is crystallised in the encounter with scientific ideology.21 It is clear that different levels of language reflect the various configurations in which particular social groups define their respective position in a broader community, such as the nation, for instance. Mikhail Bakhtin renders this complex character of community in his distinction between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies in language. Dominant social groups tend to impose their languages and suppress any kind of vernacularity. What Bakhtin considers a feature of the sociality of language, Gramsci approaches from a rather different angle. For him, particular languages are extensions of social forces, which are, to a great extent, extra-linguistic. Given this, the question arises how an inner dynamics of groups is confronted with the coercive power of the state. In the Marxist tradition, Gramsci’s remarks induced heated debates on the relationship between consent and coercion. Perry Anderson in his seminal paper ‘The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’ reconstructs the complex dynamics of Gramsci’s thought and shows how he gradually came to view consent as the state’s action, rather than as an inner activity of a particular group. Eventually, he identified the state with civil society. Anderson suggests that the Marxist solution to the consent-coercion dilemma has to take into account both categories, realising at the same time that consent itself is also a product of coercion: If we revert to Gramsci’s original problematic, the normal structure of capitalist political power in bourgeois-democratic states is in effect simultaneously and indivisibly dominated by culture and determined by coercion. To deny the ‘preponderant’ or dominant role of culture in the contemporary bourgeois power system is to liquidate the most salient immediate difference between Western parliamentarism and Russian absolutism, and to reduce the former to a myth. The fact is that this cultural domination is embodied in certain irrefutably concrete institutions: 102

critical community regular elections, civic freedoms, rights of assembly all of which exist in the West and none of which directly threaten the class power of capital. The day-to-day system of bourgeois rule is thus based on the consent of the masses, in the form of the ideological belief that they exercise selfgovernment in the representative State.22

Anderson is, of course, preoccupied with the role of community as a political entity. But when his interpretation of Gramsci is applied to the problem of community formation, community appears as an effect of a combination of forces – some created by the community and some by the power of the state as an agent of the dominant class. Although Schmitt’s and Gramsci’s concepts of community are poles apart in fundamental assumptions and social consequences, they are both predicated upon the shared idea that community is formed rather than given and that it is shaped by the political power of the state. If this is so, the borders between community and the state are blurred, and community becomes a modus operandi of the state. Community loses, thus, its original innocence as a source of an uncontaminated group or/and individual identity. However, in a version developed by the Weimar Republic’s revolutionary conservatives, it can become a vehicle of group and/or individual self-realisation – in fact, probably the only available mode of selfrealisation. This existential politics posits an intimate link between the state, the community and the individual, in which politics ceases to be a pursuit of purposes external to a community and turns into a ubiquitous activity that overrides all other forms of human action. The Gramscian vision of politics conveys a similar message, but for entirely different reasons. As I have argued earlier, the Gramscian community is, in fact, a political community, in which all phenomena of social life are subordinated to the logic of political struggle. The political struggle in Gramsci is not an expression of an individual’s existential decision, but rather a means of emancipation for subaltern groups. Their struggle for recognition proceeds along cultural lines, but, from this perspective, culture is not innocent: it represents a way in which the dominant classes impose their views on the whole society. However, a permanent clash between different ‘cultures’ – that of the dominant class and that of the subordinated one – makes community into a field of fight, which, in turn, enables incessant societal construction and reconstruction. Therefore, internal tensions intrinsically permeate all communities, making it impossible to construct a unified, universally valid and applicable concept of community. 103

politics of dialogue As John Hoffman suggests, we need to distinguish two kinds of consent: we can acknowledge that all forms of consent involve the active recognition of coercion, we can usefully distinguish the ‘willing slave’ from the rebellious subaltern. The consent of the willing slave must be deemed minor and relatively insignificant, since the extent to which he alters the coercive relationship he accepts, is itself minor and insignificant. The ‘rebellious subaltern,’ on the other hand, is also obliged to accept the social relationships, which coerce him, but his consent has a dramatic, emancipatory impact on society, since he recognizes the realities of his oppression, only to transform them radically! The ‘more’ people consent to the relationships, which compel them, the more they are able to change them into something else.23

Hoffman’s suggestion, which transcends Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, can be useful for the description of community as a field of contradictory forces. Both communities seem to function similarly, but a community of ‘willing slaves’ develops along a different line than that of rebellious subalterns. In fact, history shows that a community of willing slaves can transform itself into a rebellious community and, consequently, change the whole society-altering hegemony that resides in it.

3.3  Are Liberalism and Community Eternal Enemies? Thus far, I have discussed Carl Schmitt’s concept of politics and the state as well as Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony as examples of community formation in modernity. I know that this perspective is rather removed from the consensual idea of community, which is closer to the ‘classic’ notion as developed by Herder. The thrust of my argument is that if modernity envisioned community as produced rather than given, we have to look into the complicated mechanisms of community formation, where the political power of the state is as important as the inherited religious and national values. This argument is, of course, highly contentious. The first objection could be that such a perspective deals almost exclusively with the totalitarian state. Historically speaking, totalitarian ideologies were, in many cases, imposed on the living tissue of communitarian values. The communists in Russia and, gradually, throughout the socialist world and the fascists in Germany and other countries consciously sought to eradicate traditional values and replace them with values underpinned by their respective ideologies. To what extent such enter104

critical community prises will succeed is an empirical question that can never be settled in advance. The philosophical response to the historical evidence is that the coercion/consensus doublet is probably an overgeneralised concept. Instead of automatically falling back on it, we need to examine the complexity of actual circumstances and try to capture a complicated dialectics of coercion and consensus. Second, if liberalism is an apt answer to totalitarianism, the political concept of community is exposed as a mere cloak for totalitarian society. From the strictly liberal point of view, any concept of community assumes subordination of the individual to the state or, at best, an egoistic pursuit of one group’s particular interest. Political power in democratic society should thus be rigorously dissociated from community. Therefore, the proponents of liberalism, in fact, have to clearly draw and strictly sustain the division between community and political institutions. As the critics of liberalism point out, such division leads to stripping democracy of any positive content and reduces it to a sheer procedure. Consequently, the links between liberal democracy and the cultural context underlying it are almost completely severed. One can suggest, thus, that liberal ideology works upon the community approximately like totalitarianism does. Both neglect the inner values of the community and enforce political solutions on it. Of course, the liberals’ reiterated claim is that they do not seek to change community – they want to leave its values intact – and that their ideology is specific in that it pertains only to ‘the political and public sphere’, steering clear of ‘the private sphere’ with its concept of ‘good life’. However, these liberal protestations cannot be taken at face value. The liberal ideology alters the trajectory of social and cultural life, be it only through its concept of tolerance and recognition or empowerment of diverse minorities. Undeniably, ‘cultural wars’, which have become part and parcel of contemporary politics in democratic societies, are precipitated by a clash between liberal ideals and conservative values. This clash is not defined in terms of a struggle between two concepts of community, because the liberals are reluctant to use this notion in the first place. A ‘liberal community’ sounds rather oxymoronic not only to the liberals, but also to their adversaries, yet, as I will argue later, such a category can be implemented in political and theoretical debates. However, if we trace the genealogy of the concept of community in modern political thought, we have to acknowledge that the main thrust of this genealogy is a struggle between liberal and communitarian perspectives. 105

politics of dialogue This struggle is memorably depicted on the pages of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, when Naphta and Settembrini wage a fight over Hans Castorp’s soul. What is at stake in these disputes is the concept of human individualism. Naphta claims that an individualism that springs from the cosmic, the astrological importance of the individual soul, an individualism not social but religious, that conceives of humanity not as a conflict between the ego and society, but as a conflict between the ego and God, between the flesh and the spirit – a genuine individualism like that sorts very well with the most binding communism.24

After Hans Castorp’s applauding comments: ‘Anonymous and communal’, Settembrini strikes back; for him, the central matter is human freedom, which would be lost in Naphta’s ideal community: ‘In the course of our discussion you have let fall various allusions to the dignity of the human being. Yet you are defending the morality of an economic system which deprives the individual of liberty and self-respect.’25 Mann, as we know, reproduced in his book the intellectual atmosphere at the end of the ‘long nineteenth century’, pitting carefully selected opposing viewpoints in a dialectical relation. In this way, Mann accomplished the feat of portraying the complicated ideological tension that was to lead to the catastrophe of the First World War. As Johannes A. Gaertner writes: Symbolization is usually a dialectical process in The Magic Mountain. As such it implies an enlargement of the dialectical process: not only two persons confront each other, but, as it were, two philosophies, two nationalities, two ways of living, or whatever. The persons become transparent, and what we perceive through them are ideas. Beyond the personal accidents and often trifling happenings, we participate in the struggle of ideas, we become aware of ultimate questions, we get involved in existential decisions, which are so actual today as they were before 1914.26

Conversations between Naphta and Settembrini touch upon another aspect of the debate around the liberal concept of politics: its anthropological dimension. Naphta and Settembrini quarrel over the real meaning of human freedom. Is an individual free in the world of unfettered relations or does s/he need a community to realise his/ her freedom? Either answer has important implications for politics. If the communal answer is true, politics is an exercise in community building. Individuals find their way of life through pursuing communal goals, which makes their lives meaningful and, consequently, 106

critical community provides a foundation for their sense of freedom. But if the individualistic answer holds, we have to confront the challenge of investing our lives with meaning through our own activity. In the former case, politics promotes communal life; in the latter, politics aims to protect the freedom of individuals. The problem with the first answer is that it implies subordination of an individual to a community. Even if the extent, degree and intensity of this subordination can vary widely, a possibility of terror always looms on its horizon. Historically, fascism and Stalinism could, of course, be seen as an exercise in the forced communal life. The Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals, drafted in part by the philosopher Gianni Gentile, provides a good example of fascism’s communal involvement: Fascism was described as ‘a recent and ancient movement of the Italian spirit, intimately connected to the history of Italian nation’ whose nature was intrinsically religious – ‘this religious and therefore intransigent character explains the methods of struggle pursued by Fascism in the four years from 1919 to 1922.’ It looked to counter the materialism of ‘agnostic liberalism’ and enable individuals to find their ‘purpose in life’ and true ‘freedom’ through selfless subordination to the ideal of the ‘patria.’27

Similar examples can be found on the other side of the political spectrum, too. Stalinism made every effort possible to destroy the traditional fabric of communal life, first in Russia and, afterwards, in the subordinated countries of eastern Europe. Of course, there was also a clear difference between the two strategies. The fascists claimed to be restoring a vaguely defined national community, while the Stalinists believed that it was possible to create a ‘new man’ and a ‘new community’, both of which could live up to the demands of communist society. Both, however, considered the existing ‘empirical community’ to be necessarily liable to radical change or, even, eradication. The liberal response to that assertion was simple: what is actually at stake is human freedom, which demands that we impose as few constraints on the individual as possible. The liberals, therefore, recoiled from any discussion about community, as the very idea of community – embroiled with totalitarian ideologies – seemed suspicious to them. The discussions between Naphta and Settembrini were a paradigm case of this ideological struggle until the 1970s, when a loose coalition of different views emerged that came to be called communitarianism. 107

politics of dialogue

3.4  Communitarian Challenge: Community and Identity As often is the case in the history of ideas, it is hardly possible to identify the main assumptions of communitarianism and even to distinguish a ‘pure communitarian’ from a ‘communitarian liberal’. However, following Michael Sandel, we could say that what are at stake in the liberals-versus-communitarians debate are the concepts of the self and freedom. As he writes: The priority of the self over its ends means I am never defined by my aims and attachments but am always capable of standing back to survey and assess and possibly to revise them. This is what is means to be a free and independent self, capable of choice. And this is the vision of the self that finds expression in the ideal of the state as a neutral framework.28

This assumption is questioned by the communitarians, who assume that [w]e cannot conceive ourselves as independent in this way, as bearers of selves wholly detached from our aims and attachments. They say that certain of our roles are partly constitutive of the persons we are – as citizens of a country, or members of a movement, or partisans of a cause. But if we are partly defined by the communities we inhabit, then we must also be implicated in the purposes and ends characteristic of those communities.29

Sandel rightly identifies the question of the self as the pivot of the debate between the liberals and the communitarians. If the self is always an encumbered self beset by a community, the fear of being constrained by communal life evaporates. We are always dependent on fresh air, but we are not restricted by the lack of fresh air. To continue this analogy: we can survive without fresh air, as divers and astronauts do, by utilising technology-supplied equipment. By the same token, we can say that we are able to endure loneliness, but we need mentally produced equipment to survive in our lonely void. The liberals’ blunder consists in mistaking what is a sideshow of modernity for a social norm. If such reasoning is right, the communitarians can legitimately declare that an individual needs a community to exist. By advancing such claims, they need to restore the myth of an ‘innocent community’. This innocence is a consequence of the function that the community plays in the constitution of the self. As Alasdair MacIntyre writes: But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question 108

critical community ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters – roles into which we have been drafted – and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed.30

Speaking of the innocence of tradition, I do not mean, of course, that each community always endows its members with positive values or virtues. As MacIntyre insists, many of us have to face up to traditions that we would greatly prefer to forget, but which are, inevitably, part of our lives: For the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships. The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide. Notice that rebellion against my identity is always one possible mode of expressing it.31

Therefore, community is always a point of reference for the construction of our own identities, and whether we accept or reject it, we have to treat it as a framework within which our own stories unfold. Community is not only a framework of our own narratives; it also demarcates the borders of the moral space we inhabit. So, we are sentenced to ground our moral intuitions in the context of the community: [P]articularity can never be simply left behind or obliterated. The notion of escaping from it into a realm of entirely universal maxims which belong to man as such, whether in its eighteenth-century Kantian form or in the presentation of some modern analytical moral philosophies, is an illusion and an illusion with painful consequences. When men and women identify what are in fact their partial and particular causes too easily and too completely with the cause of some universal principle, they usually behave worse than they would otherwise do.32

I fully agree with MacIntyre’s account of tradition as a very complex, changeable and contradiction-fraught entity. However, I find it difficult to accept the idea of tradition being allegedly immune to any kind of political intervention, which is implicit in this account. It seems that, despite differences, the same standpoint is adopted by Charles Taylor. In his seminal book, Taylor formulates a strong thesis on identity: A language only exists and is maintained within a language community. And this indicates another crucial feature of a self. One is a self only 109

politics of dialogue among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to those who surround it.33

Thus, the human self is determined by its community. The implications of this statement are well-known: individual identity is built as a narrative based on a community narrative, and an individual is bound to endorse the values and norms of the community in which s/ he is immersed. The public and private spheres are brought together by the common narrative and, in a sense, they form a unified whole. Taylor offers a persuasive argument for the importance of a commonly shared moral intuition for social and political life, though the possibility of change in societal values – or, in other words, the ways in which members of a community can oppose its values that define their selves – still remains an open question. Such a critical attitude is counteracted by the mechanism of identity formation, which makes the encultured values transparent and unquestionable. One of Taylor’s crucial theses is that modernity is an age of choice, including the choice of identity. He insists, however, that this choice is not arbitrary; neither is it a matter of self-creation. It is executed within certain horizons of moral values, but individuals can move from one horizon to another. These horizons should converge at a certain point (resembling Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘fusion of horizons’), in order to secure at least the minimum framework accepted by all members of the community. While for Taylor, the crucial problem is how to find a unity in plurality, for me the most important question is how we can oppose the dominant system of values and sometimes venture to change it. Taylor’s concept of community contributes to the problem. Drawing on the German philosophy of J. G. Herder or G. W. F. Hegel, it initially emphasises the intellectual dimension of community and its conceptual integrity expressed in language. Such a community is rather constrained epistemologically and emerges through a long process of the crystallisation of values upheld by a social group – that is, mainly, though by no means exclusively, by a nation. Such genesis secures the community’s long-lasting stability. Nevertheless, such a notion of the conceptual community can hardly, if at all, accommodate those communities that many thinkers find specific to (post) modernity, since they are founded on the shared experience, rather than on values. They emerge and perish in a relatively short period of time, and they are prone to rapid changes. Generally speaking, for Taylor, community is a positively charged 110

critical community term; it is not only a point of reference for individual narrative identities, but also an ideal providing a yardstick for individual life decisions. Taylor does not discuss a community that threatens people’s identities or imposes certain modes of behaviour on them. Of course, he is sensible of such hazards, but sees their source in the degeneration of a ‘true’ community, which may dwindle into an oppressive, degenerated kind of communal life. An opposite, or complementary, model of community is that of a community that can circumscribe our freedom by imposing beliefs and norms on us. The sociological and philosophical literature on modernity abounds in such examples, starting from Michel Foucault, who in Discipline and Punish demonstrates the productive aspects of power in its capacity to form selves. This tradition is continued in a very interesting way by Judith Butler, who shows that every subordination to power has elements of emotional affirmation inscribed in it. Power that moulds our identities is simultaneously oppressive and adored, as it is the very source of our existence. Paradoxically, the self is a stigma of subordination to the community and, at the same time, the innermost core of our being. It is relatively easy to raise serious objections to these conceptions. It is not clear whether they concern community or the power that disintegrates community. I do not think, however, that separating power from community is feasible, because, as Michel Foucault insists, power, in fact, constitutes society and an individual self. Similar conceptions propose that society is produced by an imposition of certain values or languages on it. Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, emphasises symbolic power: The different classes and class fractions are engaged in symbolic struggle properly speaking, one aimed at imposing the definition of the social world that is best suited to their interests. The field of ideological stances thus reproduces in transfigured form the field of social positions. These classes can engage in this struggle either directly, in the symbolic conflicts of everyday life, or else by proxy, via the struggle between the different specialists in symbolic production (full-time producers), a struggle over the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence (cf. Weber), that is, of the power to impose (or even to inculcate) the arbitrary instruments of knowledge and expression (taxonomies) of social reality – but instruments whose arbitrary nature is not realized as such.34

The discursive-hegemonic concept of power developed by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau can be situated in the same theoretical framework. 111

politics of dialogue In my opinion, we can legitimately posit that, in these concepts, power is constitutive of community, and values, language and norms of conduct imposed by it come to be regarded as ‘natural’. In other words, the idea of community as an innocent territory colonised by alien forces of politics or anti-communitarian ideologies vanishes. Community is created, rather than given: it is produced as a result of theoreticians’ intellectual effort, which penetrates ideologies of everyday life and even constitutes them. The central problem for these concepts is to explicate how an individual can resist community knowledge. And, quite clearly, it remains unresolved. An individual seems doomed to be subject to manipulation and capable of salvaging autonomy only in a fleeting moment of revolt or revolution. These brief incidents do not alter the general theoretical pronouncement in which the self is an outcome of the workings of power. In his later writings, Michel Foucault tried to overcome this contradiction by introducing the idea of ‘technologies of the self’. He proposed that an individual could reverse the societal pressures, in order to form his/her self consciously. Charles Taylor in his commentaries to Michel Foucault stresses that his work is ethically engaged and that such engagement can be treated as one of the moral horizons. However, he views Foucault as a proponent of the self, as an outcome of individual auto-creation and as a representative of the tendency identified as a grave danger of modernity.

3.5  Creation, Self-Creation and Community The tension between communitarian involvement and liberal individualism seems both inevitable and impossible. One way to bypass it is to ignore it and build the concept of community on different assumptions than those of language, values or shared memory. George Bataille’s ‘ecstatic community’ and Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘inoperative community’ are examples of endeavours to devise such a concept. The scope of this chapter is too limited to do justice to these sophisticated ideas, and thus I will only indicate here that they show how the problem of community can be philosophically framed as the issue of singularity and plurality or the question of the possibility of an absolute immanence. Jean-Luc Nancy opens his The Inoperative Community with the following conceptualisation: I would like to introduce a qualification, to which I will return later: behind the theme of the individual, but beyond it, lurks the question 112

critical community of singularity. What is a body, a face, a voice, a death, a writing – not indivisible, but singular? What is their singular necessity in the sharing that divides and that puts in communication bodies, voices, and writings in general and in totality? In sum, this question would be exactly the reverse of the question of the absolute. In this respect, it is constitutive of the question of community, and it is in this context that it will have to be taken into account later on. But singularity never has the nature or the structure of individuality. Singularity never takes place at the level of atoms, those identifiable if not identical identities; rather it takes place at the level of the clinamen, which is unidentifiable. It is linked to ecstasy: one could not properly say that the singular being is the subject of ecstasy, for ecstasy has no ‘subject’ – but one must say that ecstasy (community) happens to the singular being.35

This concept of community changes the whole trajectory of thinking about community: community ceases to be a fulfillment of the self or the foundation of a self-narrative. Instead, it becomes a moment of undecidability of the self. One of the commentators on Bataille’s thought writes in this context: But just like the ‘subject’ is set aflow in inner experience – its stable identity lost in communication – so is ‘community’ not to be understood as a fixed, stable or transcendent referent. [. . .] When reflecting on Bataille’s ethics of community, it is imperative that we take care to distinguish the (inner) experience of community from a community: a point of reference outside the experience itself; something to which the experience can be subordinated. [. . .] It is difficult to maintain the distinction between the two senses of community precisely because of the difficulty of thinking community as a pure opening where one experiences the loss of self, rather than as some form of closed set or entity that is enriched by the subject’s loss.36

This perspective helps to solve the problem of the relationship between the individual and its community. The self confronts a community, and its existence in a community is rather a momentary appearance than a permanent fixedness. The relation between the self and a community is rendered as an example of a broader relation between singularity and plurality. The question is to what extent, if at all, the singular self can become part of a plural community, and if so, how the self and the community will be affected by it. This general, ontological or structural question entails a whole series of detailed issues concerning social and political philosophy. In his seminal work Being Singular Plural, Jean-Luc Nancy takes issue with both sides of the liberal-communitarian controversy. He 113

politics of dialogue starts with the idea that our lives are fully invested with meanings, and, in fact, ‘we are meanings’. But meanings are always shared meanings: There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being. Meaning begins where presence is not pure presence but where presence comes apart [se disjoint] in order to be itself as such. This ‘as’ pre­supposes the distancing, spacing, and division of presence. Only the concept of ‘presence’ contains the necessity of this division. Pure unshared presence – presence to nothing, of nothing, for nothing – is neither present nor absent. It is the simple implosion of a being that could never have been – an implosion without any trace.37

Drawing on Aristotle’s concept of the political animal, Nancy shows that the concept of community, the concept of ‘being together’, precedes any natural world, and, in fact, the thinking about community expressed as philosophy constitutes philosophia prima. But an approach to the significance of the community need not be informed by Aristotelian categories. Heidegger’s concepts can also provide suitable theoretical underpinnings. As Dasein is necessarily communal, Nancy anchors his vision of community in the category of ‘being-with’: Being singular plural means the essence of Being is only as co­essence. In turn, coessence, or being-with (being-with-many), designates the essence of the co-, or even more so, the co- (the cum) itself in the position or guise of an essence. In fact, coessentiality cannot consist in an assemblage of essences, where the essence of this assemblage as such remains to be determined. In relation to such an assemblage, the assembled essences would become [mere] accidents. Coessentiality signifies the essential sharing of essentiality, sharing in the guise of assembling, as it were. This could also be put in the following way: if Being is being-with, then it is, in its beingwith, the ‘with’ that constitutes Being; the with is not simply an addition. This operates in the same way as a collective [collégial] power: power is neither exterior to the members of the collective [collège] nor interior to each one of them, but rather consists in the collectivity [collégialité] as such.38

If being-with is a fundamental category of social ontology, then both sides of the liberal-communitarian controversy err. The self cannot be autonomous and sovereign in its relation to society, but neither can it be just inscribed in the narrative of society, which endows it with a broader social meaning: 114

critical community The ‘meaning of Being’: not only as the ‘meaning of with,’ but also, and above all, as the ‘with’ of meaning. Because none of these three terms precedes or grounds the other, each designates the coessence of the others. This coessence puts essence itself in the hyphenation – ‘being-singularplural’ – which is a mark of union and also a mark of division, a mark of sharing that effaces itself, leaving each term to its isolation and its being-with-the-others.39

For this reason, Nancy claims that such a perspective entails a retreat from the political, understood as a retreat from the ontological presupposition of society. Of course, he assumes that it is possible to build a new social ontology, which would be based on the specificity of ‘with’: ‘With’ is neither mediate nor immediate. The meaning that we understand, insofar as we understand it, is not the product of a negation of Being, a negation destined to represent itself to us as meaning, nor is it the pure and simple ecstatic affirmation of its presence. ‘With’ neither goes from the same to the other, nor from the same to the same, nor from the other to the other. In a certain sense, the ‘with’ does not ‘go’ anywhere; it does not constitute a process. But it is the closeness, the brushing up against or the coming across, the almost-there [la-peu-pres] of distanced proximity.40

The problem that arises from this conglomerate of oxymoronic descriptions of ‘with’ is how to translate an ontology of ‘with’ into political or social categories. In its negativity, such an ontology can be a response to the liberal and communitarian claims to the total control of the political field. I think that Nancy is right in his critique of oversimplified understandings of the relation between the self and society. But if we ventured to use Nancy’s ontology to construct a positive political program, then, I suppose, we would have to plunge into utopian thinking as an actualisation of the deep structure of being-with. Nancy stops short of developing an ideal of the community of beingwith, but we can trace similar motifs in the works of other thinkers who have arrived at parallel insights. A good example is Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community, pre-dating Nancy’s Being Singular Plural and theorising a community that could accommodate universality and individuality. Agamben’s point of departure is the concept of a single planetary petty bourgeoisie, which draws on Walter Benjamin’s portrayal of the petty bourgeoisie, with their inescapable inner contradictions. Stefan Jonsson shows close affinities between the concept of the petty bourgeoisie class and that of the mass: 115

politics of dialogue The social relations within the mass are constituted by the participants’ position in the circulation of exchange values. As commodity circulation assumes fetishistic qualities, however, it is perceived as a source of historical, cultural and aesthetic values, through which the members of the collective construe a sense of authenticity and individuality. Such is phantasmagoric quality of the mass, preventing the members of the collective from apprehending the impersonal, economic powers governing their world while at same time convincing them that they are themselves independent individuals living and acting in accord with their own free will.41

Agamben plays off these contradictions and claims that the dominance of a single planetary petty bourgeoisie is ubiquitous in the contemporary world; therefore, what once was a local peculiarity has become a global phenomenon. This class builds the world ‘without class’: They represent, however, a national petty bourgeoisie still attached to a false popular identity in which dreams of bourgeoisie grandeur were an active force. The planetary petty bourgeoisie has instead freed themselves from these dreams and has taken over the aptitude of the proletariat to refuse any recognizable social identity.42

On the one hand, this decay of identity can have disastrous ramifications, but on the other hand, it can prepare the ground for the formation of a new identity, free of any particularism: This means that the planetary petty bourgeoisie is probably the form in which humanity is moving toward its own destruction. But this also means that the petty bourgeoisie represents an opportunity unheard of in the history of humanity that it must at all costs not let slip away. Because if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity – if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then, they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable.43

This utopian promise, according to Agamben, is even being fulfilled in the current, dramatic political circumstances. He sees the Tiananmen demonstrations brutally suppressed by the state as a harbinger of a new community, ‘community [. . .] mediated not by any condition of belonging [. . .] nor by the simple absence of conditions 116

critical community [. . .] but by belonging itself’.44 In political terms, this utopian community is the principal enemy of the state: In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity – even that of a State identity within the State (the recent history of relations between the State and terrorism is an eloquent confirmation of this fact). What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition).45

Agamben, as well as Nancy, continues, to some extent, the communitarian idea of the community’s primacy over the state. At the same time, like many others, they both refuse to acknowledge that the self is always an encumbered self that acquires its strength from the narrative of its community. In this sense, they side with the liberals, but they are compelled to reject the implications of the liberal concept of the self as an autonomous and free entity. Consequently, they construct the concept of community that explores the most rudimentary elements of human existence. If, following Nancy and Agamben, we wanted to resort to the Heideggerian terms, it would be a community of Dasein rather than of Mitsein, as the communal impulse is inscribed in the most fundamental layers of being. Beingwith, being-thus precedes any other form of human existence. The potentiality of such a community is guaranteed by the existence of humans, but its actualisation requires particular political conditions. The liberalism of the petty bourgeoisie, or the triumphant liberalism of the post-Cold War era, has become a caricature of the liberal cult of freedom. In its narcissism and egoism, it has carried the worst feature of bourgeoisie society to the extreme, obliterating the concept of a unified identity. Such developments open up a space for the true community of being-thus to emerge. The community of experience is, hence, a utopian reversal of a tendency embodied in Gramsci’s and Schmitt’s works. If they insisted that the modern community needs to be politicised to the utmost, Nancy, Agamben and other proponents of this utopian approach show that this trend can be inverted and that contemporary social reality contains assumptions that validate such reasoning. In this way, the thinking about community comes full circle and resumes the idea of an innocent community disentangled from any political conditions.

117

politics of dialogue

3.6  Embodied Communities ‘We commune with bodies only to encounter specters’, as someone intimated, trying to define the ends of philosophy. The maxim undeniably conveys a certain truth. Social and political philosophy, and also political sciences, tend to look into politics as if they were analysing a game of chess, in which the shape of the pieces were entirely irrelevant, both to the course and to the final outcome of the game. Instead, what really matters to them is a sequence of disembodied moves, which might as well be unfolding in the observer’s mind. In this way, politics is reduced to an intricate game of shadows, to a reflection in ‘a wilderness of mirrors’, to use T. S. Eliot’s phrasing, in which all references to the actual, physical realities of the social are slowly, but surely, vanishing. Whatever it is that the actually existing society creates disappears, and, together with it, the bodily investment that has its part both in the construction and in the destruction of social life is dissolved. To explore the various reasons behind this disembodied thinking about society is unfeasible here, largely because their genealogy reaches far back into a very distant past. Yet we should at least point out some factors that have contributed to such a purely spiritual account of the social. Prominent among them is Western culture’s pervasive dualism, which has dominated reflection on man and society for the last 2,000 years. As the bodily became subordinated to the ideal, political discourses focused on the idea, ousting the tangibilities of the body from their field of inquiry. If they feature the body at all, they usually relegate it to the symbolic or mythical realm. When in his seminal doctrine of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’ Ernst Kantorowicz describes the complicated network of relationships between the monarch’s real, live body and his immortal, legal body, it is clear that the symbolic, immortal body prevails over the physical, mortal one. Evidently, even if the idea of sovereignty is embodied, as was the case in the political doctrine of feudalism, embodiment as such mutates into doctrinal symbolism: The individual king may die; but the King who represents sovereign Justice and was represented by the supreme judges, was not dead; he continued his jurisdiction ceaselessly through the agency of his officers even though his natural body had passed away.46

After the theological justifications of sovereignty were discarded or at least undercut, bodiliness still lingered at the backstage of politics. 118

critical community In Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan – undoubtedly one of the founding texts of modern political thought – the realities of human existence are largely consigned to an artificial construct of ‘the state of nature’. In famous passages depicting the nature of man and a resultant war of all against all, Hobbes sketches a very palpable image of human behaviours: Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind, as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.47

From this perspective, the social contract, which leads to the creation of the state, seems to be another victory of the soul over the body. While not entirely amenable to reason, human nature can certainly be harnessed by it, and the reasoned power of the state makes people feel secure, even though it breaches their freedom. The body submits thus to the soul, and the social contract produces ‘a community of fear’. Blaise Pascal seems to have been Hobbes’s only near contemporary to realise how powerful the bodily habits are and how deeply they affect the formation of society: How few things are demonstrated! [. . .] Custom provides our strongest and most firmly believed proofs. It inclines the automaton, which drags the mind unconsciously with it. Who has demonstrated that tomorrow dawn and that we shall die? And what is more believed? It is, then, custom that persuades us, that makes so many Christians; it is custom that makes them Turks, heathens, professions, soldiers, etc.48

Pascal grasps what so many political theorists have failed to recognise – that is, that our attitudes and pronouncements are ­ shaped beyond our reason, and that our decisions are made before we become aware of them. He can demonstrate both how we are fashioned, but also how we can fashion ourselves. On the one hand, society influences us by regulating our bodies-automata through customs, while on the other, our will enables us to perform the same operations on ourselves that custom performs on us. Our bodies and the ways in which we act upon them – that is, practices and ‘technologies of the self’, to use Michel Foucault’s coinage – are loci of 119

politics of dialogue the forces that affect the mind. The Pascalian vision of politics, and social life as such, envisages these domains as a site of whimsical and contingent choices, which are dictated by a habit and external coincidental conjunctures, as, for example: ‘My friend, you were born on this side of the mountain, it is therefore just that your older brother should have everything.’49 If so, it is highly doubtful whether ‘practicing politics’ as a conscious engagement is at all viable. With the contingent nature of politics impossible to resist or oppose, man can only pursue spiritual self-development and seek liberation from randomness in other realms. Also, attainment of truth is precluded in social life; it can be found only through an inner search for certainty. Mystical though it may sound, Pascal differs from the mystics, in that he appreciates, as mentioned above, the impact of habit on the perpetuation of certainty arrived at by reasoning or by heart. What is it, then, that can possibly remain in the social, except the chaos of habits? A kind of ‘habit management’, perhaps, making sure that politics opens up a space in which an individual transformation can take place. Nevertheless, ‘the community of customs’, implied by Pascal’s considerations, seems to be an idea capable of redirecting thinking about politics and its identitary dimension. The community’s identity, namely, is here posited as rooted in bodily habits and not in abstract ideas. Unfortunately, we can see in retrospect that Pascal’s voice has not resonated effectively in social philosophy. On the contrary, together with the onset of the dominant Enlightenment thought, when community became both a theoretical and a practical issue, the theme immediately turned into a battlefield of the Enlightenment’s slogans of equality, freedom and fraternity, on the one hand, vying against the counter-Enlightenment reflection, with its idea of collective and group identities being anchored in a nation’s culture, on the other. The counter-Enlightenment thought posits community as constituted by cultural values shared by all its members and translated into the sense of identity by means of language. The national language is ascribed a special role as an expression of cultural instances. Originating in Hamann and Herder, the idea was elaborated on by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Charles Taylor, who clearly builds on this tradition, encapsulates the concept of ­language developed by Hamann, Herder and Humboldt as the locus of different kinds of disclosure. It makes us aware of the expressive dimension and its importance. And it allows us to identify a consti120

critical community tutive dimension, a way in which language does not only represent, but enters into some of the realities it is ‘about.’50

Obviously, identification with the nation has its bodily manifestations, customs and rituals, which, ever since Herder, have been meticulously studied by ethnographers. Yet, these bodily dimensions of communality are supposed to gesture toward its originary conditions to be found in language as a vehicle of, and for, values. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the community of values expressed in language was gradually being supplanted by the community of ‘blood and soil’ (Blut und Boden). The gruesome effects of the ideology of a nation as a biological community have effectively undone thinking in terms of an embodied community. As if naturally, an embodied community was pitted against a cultural community, and the very concept of community was seen as an opposite of society in a liberal democracy founded upon the primacy of free, autonomous individuals over any kind of collective identity forms. Of course, when we examine these issues historically, we are bound to come across multiple cases in which the two community types intersect or overlap. The adherents of the biological notion have discerned analogies between liberal politics and a decomposition of hereditary traits in individuals. For example, Francis Galton, in one of his programmatic texts, explained a dispersal of hereditary traits in siblings in the following way: The great dissimilarity frequently observed between brothers or sisters is to be accounted for and easily illustrated by a political metaphor. We have to recognise, on the one hand, that the stirps of the brothers and sisters must have been nearly alike, because the germs are simple organisms, and all such organisms breed true to their kind, and on the other hand, that very different structures have been developed out of those stirps. A strict analogy and explanation of all this is afforded by the well-known conditions and uncertainties of political elections. We have abundant experience that when a constituency is very varied, trifling circumstances are sufficient to change the balance of parties, and therefore, although there may be little real variation in the electoral body, the change in the character of its political choice at successive elections may be abrupt. A uniform constituency will always elect representatives of a uniform type; and this result precisely corresponds to what is found to occur in animals of pure breed, whose stirp contains only one or a very few varieties of each species of germ, and whose offspring always resemble their parents and one another. The more mongrel the breed, the greater is the variety of the offspring.51 121

politics of dialogue Although such remarks, scattered across Galton’s writings, shed light on his specific engagement with social issues, they do not determine to what extent the concept of eugenics, which he pioneered and promoted, is to be blamed for all the crimes subsequently perpetrated in his name. Similar motifs also emerged in entirely different ideological contexts.52 Undoubtedly, however, the ideologies of national or racial purity, which ensued from interpretations of findings in the biological sciences, underpinned the extreme exclusion from the national community of individuals, who, by the standards of these ideologies, did not deserve to belong to the community on the grounds, precisely, of their biological attributes. In her poem about the Holocaust in Poland titled ‘Still’, Wisława Szymborska captures this conjunction in a dramatically condensed form: Let your son have a Slavic name, for here they count hairs on the head, for here they tell good from evil by names and by eyelids’ shape.53

In this light, it is hardly surprising that the body as a vehicle of community has long been shunned by social theorists. Dread of an embodied idea converged with, and was reinforced by, the prevalence of structuralist frameworks in the humanities and social sciences. Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic concepts, in which language is perceived as a structure of binary opposites, have been triumphantly transplanted onto the thinking about society. The political sphere, in turn, is suffused with injunctions to champion liberalism with its concept of an autonomous, free individual as the groundwork of society’s political organisation. The body as a theoretically developed category is not a piece that would fit into this jigsaw puzzle. This, of course, does not mean that the issues of bodiliness are absent from the discourse on society. Bodiliness appears at the heart of Marcel Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and in cultural psychoanalysis, features prominently in Herbert Marcuse’s thought and is central to Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology. Each of these concepts deserves a thorough discussion; however, this is beyond the scope of this chapter. All these very different theories seem to share a focus on the concrete and an attempt to expose the bodily core of all ideologies and, thus, to reveal their true content. A contemporary social theorist would, in all probability, be highly inspired by Helmuth Plessner’s concepts. In his early study The Limits of Community, Plessner emphasises that 122

critical community one can love only something individual that stands before one in concrete form and, reaching through it, then grasp hold of something general. What does it mean when I love my people, land, humanity, the world? It means to have an intention to love that does not need to be cooler than a sincere erotic impulse.54

However, his commentators show that community understood in this way is inevitably doomed to a perpetual inner conflict between the concrete and real, on the one hand, and the general and, in a way, illusory, on the other.55 Plessner notes that ‘a limit of community becomes clear: The chance of its actualization decreases with the probability of love – with growing distance to individual reality.’56 Plessner contrasts this kind of community with another type of communal life: the ideal-based community. The person-embodied center is replaced with the impersonal character center of the ideal. Perhaps the rays of spiritual life are still directed towards it, but now no longer do they emanate from the essential core of each individual person, but rather from only a part of them, namely, the reason that they share in common with all others.57

However, both types of community are doomed to failure, as they are bound to encounter two powerful limits: ‘the irrevocability of the public sphere and the incomparability of life and spirit’.58 Both ­communities – of blood and of ideal – inevitably come into confrontation with the public sphere and the chaotic character of human existence. The public sphere, with its multiplicity of voices and noncentred organisation, is evidently hostile to community. And the sheer existence of both community types is contingent upon a clear centre and a clear and strong emotion of love. The public sphere would harmonise more with the community of ideals, but even so it has to confront the impossibility of pursuing ideals only. The biological endowment of human beings produces community, but, at the same time, imposes sharp constraints on it. Society’s communal involvement is embroiled in inner conflictual tendencies, which have been reinforced ever since modernity, when the public sphere became a dominant form of s­ ocietal organisation. The potential of conflict inherent in society is also highlighted by Herbert Marcuse. In his reading, Freud’s analysis is intrinsically political, since the psychoanalytic categories do not have to be ‘related’ to social and political conditions – they are themselves social and political categories. Psychoanalysis could become an effective social and political instrument, 123

politics of dialogue positive as well as negative, in an administrative as well as critical function, because Freud had discovered the mechanisms of social and political control in the depth dimension of instinctual drives and satisfactions.59

Of course, psychoanalysis conceives of bodiliness in a very particular way, which does not offer much opportunity of developing an embodied community. Psychoanalysis posits, rather, a highly intricate relationship, in which an individual is a ‘site’ onto which society inscribes its rules. In his analysis of the Freudian concepts of mass and crowd, Stefan Jonsson stresses that ‘in psychoanalytic theory, society is present within the subject from the outset, and it is society that enables the subject to become a conscious individual’.60 Given the complicated history of psychoanalysis, we should conclude that the body becomes in it a sign, or a symbol, rather than a real object that affects the physical and social world. A psychoanalytical community is founded upon repression mechanisms, which control and curb the primal bodily drives. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Herbert Marcuse formulated his concept of libidinal revolution, which strives to create a utopian community free from repression. Contemporary social theory has nonetheless been far more affected by Jacques Lacan, who locates the body in the imaginary represented by the mirror stage and insists on its utter symbolisation in the successive stages. Many of the doubts and queries that haunt the concepts of the body referred to above are inspiringly responded to by pragmatism. Always foregrounding the body and its habits, the pragmatist tradition offers a fertile ground for theorising bodiliness. There are several reasons for this. First, pragmatism has consistently been part of the anti-dualist, anti-Cartesian movement. William James, for example, attempted to overcome the Cartesian dualism in his work. He put the sentient body at the centre of his thought, although he was not able to show, convincingly enough, the ways in which the body influences mental activity. This residual dualism, which plagued his psychology, can be accounted for partly by flaws in neuroscience, which was not yet developed in his day, and partly by the dominance of introspectionism, which held him in its thrall, even though he mutinied against it. Second, the next generation of pragmatists, including John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, argued that the self emerges from interactions among cooperating individuals. Hence, they stressed that our ethical obligations arise from bodily cooperation, and that we are able to take ever broader groups into our selves. George Herbert 124

critical community Mead’s concept of taking on the role of the other and embracing the standpoint of the increasingly generalised other is the most impressive elaboration on bodily cooperation as a cornerstone of the social bond to be found in contemporary philosophy. Third, the pragmatists (especially John Dewey) developed the concept of the experiential body as the core notion of their philosophy. This concept has two dimensions. On the one hand, Mead and Dewey showed the impact of our biological endowment on the development of mental faculties. In his famous lectures published as Mind, Self, and Society, Mead argues that our human selves have evolved from a biologically grounded exchange of gestures. On a specifically human level, communication is carried out by means of meaningful gestures – that is, through significant symbols. Gestures acquire meanings when an individual who performs them reacts in the same way as an individual to whom they are addressed. This allows both the coordination of actions among individuals and behavioural selfcontrol.61 The pragmatists’ appreciation of the body, however, is hardly limited to the genetic aspects of the human self and mind. Dewey devotes a lot of attention to the body as a vehicle of experience. Since experience is, for him, the most important factor in the construction of knowledge, Dewey, by the same token, assumes that the body is of paramount importance in acquiring knowledge of the external world. In the pragmatist tradition, it is Richard Shusterman who has developed a consistent concept of the body as a vehicle of human emancipation. He draws on classical pragmatism and, in particular, on Dewey’s work. In his essay on Dewey’s concept of the body, ‘Redeeming somatic reflection: John Dewey’s philosophy of bodymind’, Shusterman traces the roots and defines the contemporary significance of Dewey’s thought. He emphasises that Dewey developed his theory of the body not only through philosophical speculation, but also through a close scrutiny of scientific findings and personal engagement with Alexander’s technique for improving the functioning of the body.62 Shusterman recognises the flaws inherent in Dewey’s concept of the body and, consequently, the expediency of correction. I am not going to examine Shusterman’s account of Dewey’s philosophy of the body in detail here, noting only that he discerns a troubling dilemma in Dewey’s thought: Here then is the core practical dilemma of body consciousness: We must rely on unreflective feelings and habits – because we can’t reflect 125

politics of dialogue on ­everything and because such unreflective feelings and habits always ground our very efforts of reflection. But we also cannot entirely rely on them and the judgments they generate, because some of them are considerably flawed and inaccurate. Moreover, how can we discern their flaws and inadequacy when they are concealed by their unreflective, immediate, habitual status; and how can we correct them when our conscious, reflective efforts of correction spontaneously rely on the same inaccurate, habitual mechanisms of perception and action that we are trying to correct?63

Although Shusterman does not provide here a definitive answer to this query, he hints that despite technological inventions we are still heavily dependent on our bodies, which are, in turn, enmeshed in our social and cultural practices: Despite our evolutionary progress of rational transcendence (including the technological advancements that some regard as rendering us posthuman cyborgs), we still essentially and dependently belong to a much wider natural and social world that continues to shape the individuals we are (including our reasoning consciousness) in ways beyond the control of our will and consciousness. As oxygen is necessary for the functioning of consciousness in the brain, so the practices, norms, and language of society are necessary materials for our processes of reasoning and evaluation. It is not moral perfectionism but blind arrogance to think otherwise.64

Seeking inspiration for his research, Shusterman resorts to the Eastern philosophies of Confucius and Mencius, showing that they vividly depict the close interdependence between the progress of our mental faculties and the state of our bodies. All these diverse sources share one important conviction – namely, that the more we focus on the body, the more we realise that the body cannot be considered in separation from our environmental contexts, both natural and social, within which it develops and progresses. Therefore, the training aimed to perfect our bodies can both improve our relationship with the outer world and enhance our self-understanding. Shusterman concludes that [b]y enabling us to feel more of our universe with greater acuity, awareness, and appreciation, such a vision of somaesthetic cultivation promises the richest and deepest palate of experiential fulfillments because it can draw on the profusion of cosmic resources, including an uplifting sense of cosmic unity. Enchanting intensities of experience can thus be achieved in everyday living without requiring violent measures of sensory intensification that threaten ourselves and others. And if we still prefer more danger126

critical community ous psychosomatic experiments of extreme intensity, our somaesthetically cultivated sensory awareness should render us more alert to the imminent risks and also more skilled in avoiding or diminishing the damage.65

In his subsequent books and articles, Shusterman repeatedly shows how various practices of the body can contribute to the amelioration of our lives. In recent years, he has developed the concept of a new discipline, which he calls ‘somaesthetics’. In the ‘Introduction’ to his latest book Thinking through the Body, Shusterman writes: Beyond reorienting aesthetic inquiry, somaesthetics seeks to transform philosophy in a more general way. By integrating theory and practice through disciplined somatic training, it takes philosophy in a pragmatic meliorist direction, reviving the ancient idea of philosophy as an embodied way of life rather than a mere discursive field of abstract theory.66

Therein, he shows that throughout the history of Western philosophy, starting from antiquity through Christianity to most contemporary philosophies, the body has been neglected and denied validity as a subject of philosophical reflection. It has served primarily as a contrasting backdrop against which the mind – the real locus of specifically human personhood, consciousness, creativity and the like – is considered. Shusterman acknowledges the iconic status of the body in contemporary culture, but admonishes at the same time that, in this context, it is pervasively treated as an object to be displayed to others. He counteracts such an approach to the body, advocating the idea of the body as a vehicle of melioristic human emancipation: Somatic self-consciousness in our culture is excessively directed toward a consciousness of how one’s body appears to others in terms of entrenched societal norms of attractive appearance and how one’s appearance can be rendered more attractive in terms of these conventional models. (And these same conformist standards likewise impoverish our appreciation of the richly aesthetic diversity of other bodies than our own.) Virtually no attention is directed toward examining and sharpening the consciousness of one’s actual bodily feelings and actions so that we can deploy such somatic reflection to know ourselves better and achieve a more perceptive somatic self-consciousness to guide us toward better self-use.67

Developing Shusterman’s concept will allow us to sketch, at least in broad lines, a framework of embodied communities: of what they are and how they function. Their most salient feature is, perhaps, their concreteness. The body abhors abstraction; it is always immersed in the physical reality and, therefore, it always refers to the material. Hence, as Plessner notices, embodied communities are rather small, 127

politics of dialogue medium-sized at best. They bind us to those closely familiar to us – both the loved and the loathed ones – with the emotions they evoke ensuing from immediate experiences, rather than from abstract, ideological speculations. Such a model of an immediate embodied community definitely needs a supplement. That could be provided by anthropologically, sociologically or even neurophysiologically grounded accounts, which indicate that the body is a site onto which society inscribes its norms and rules. In his habitus theory, Pierre Bourdieu underscores that the habitus is necessity internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions; it is a general, transposable disposition which carries out a systematic, universal application – beyond the limits of what has been directly learnt – of the necessity inherent in the learning conditions. That is why an agent’s whole set of practices (or those of a whole set of agents produced by similar conditions) are both systematic, inasmuch as they are the product of the application of identical (or interchangeable) schemes, and systematically distinct from the practices constituting another life-style.68

We could imagine a community of habitus or a community of somatic styles, to use Shusterman’s category, as a community whose members are more unified by particular ways in which they use their bodies than by the values and norms which their language expresses. And we could still argue that such a community would be based on values; values which are engraved in, and enacted by, bodies. I believe, nonetheless, that specific bodily practices are something more than a simple reflection of acknowledged values expressed in language. There are good reasons to think so. As bodily experiences often cannot be conveyed in language, embodied communities do not necessarily overlap with linguistically constituted communities. Feminist thinkers have employed this argument to undercut the communitarian concept of community, pointing out that differences in women’s experiences depending on their distinct cultural contexts do not preclude the formation of women’s community. A similarly conspicuous example is provided by sexual minorities. However, these are by no means the only instances of the solidarity of bodily experiences we could refer to. Suggestive examples of embodied communities produced by mechanisms of oppression are analysed by Michel Foucault in his Discipline and Punish, which focuses on how repression and subjugation shape bodies and make them docile. It is by no means coincidental that such groups develop their own cul128

critical community tures, which rely on bodily practices rather than on the language of values for articulation of their fundamental mechanisms. The gamut of these practices tends to be very comprehensive, starting from particular modes of using the body and ending with unique ways of modifying it, by, for example, self-mutilation and/or tattooing. Foucault distinguished a special group of body-focused practices that permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.69

He dubbed these practices ‘technologies of the self’. Technologies of the self enable individuals to resist and oppose the pressures exerted by power by reversing the forces that affect them and deploying them in, and for, self-creation. The emancipatory dimension inherent in technologies of the self is curbed, however, because the body still remains a site of fixture between the subject and power. While not entirely vulnerable to pressures from outside, individuals and their actions are still constrained by external conditions. In his polemic with Foucault, Shusterman insists that bodily practices can, indeed, have an emancipatory potential: engaging in them, people improve their lives and acquire skills that allow them to expand their perception and knowledge. If we build on Shusterman’s conception, we can speak of emancipatory embodied communities in which shared bodily practices serve such meliorist ends. But in saying this, we must at the same time inquire if it is legitimate to call a group of people who share bodily practices a community. The bonds among the members of embodied communities may, indeed, be fleeting and linguistically ungraspable. Consequently, embodied communities of experience are not necessarily enduring or long-lasting. They arise by a confluence of particular emotions or sensations. The crowd is a classical figure of such a community. In his pioneering work, Gustave Le Bon describes the crowd as a collection of individuals, such that under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless ­transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics.70 129

politics of dialogue Much of what has traditionally been described in the categories of crowd or mass could effectively be rendered in terms of the body. A helpful framework for such an enterprise is to be found in the JamesLange theory of the origin of emotions, which explains them in terms of the realisation that certain processes have taken place in our bodies. Interpreted in such terms, the crowd becomes a temporary community of emotion. Such a community, admittedly, can rapidly disperse into individuals, but it may also initiate a more permanent social movement, in which a community aware of its values and norms comes into being.

3.7  Critical Community How much community does democracy need? The question posed by Charles Taylor is crucial for contemporary societies. Indisputably, both a surplus as well as a deficit of communitarian values can be lethal for democratic society. In the former case, the idea of the unity of community precludes disagreement and dialogue, and in the latter, a lack of communitarian commitment makes liberal democracy into an empty shell, where ‘habits of the heart’ do not work. Irrefutably, if democracy is to work in everyday communication, it cannot be merely a system of procedures that bring together autonomous individuals with various concepts of loyalty to the democratic system. At the same time, democratic involvement cannot be merely a form of loyalty to the values of the nation-state, since such loyalty does not leave room for genuine discussion and conflictual disagreement. If we juxtapose these two conditions, we are faced with a nearly irresolvable dilemma: how to secure loyalty to the democratic system with its all paradoxes, without clinging to the local loyalties of the nationstate. This question is notoriously difficult to answer, because, historically speaking, the nation-state was a way to universalise locality. As Terry Eagleton writes: What are ideally united in the nation-state, then, are ethos and abstract rights, ethnic uniqueness and political universality, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, the common folk and the cosmopolitan intelligentsia. Ideally, local pieties, customs and affinities – culture, in a word – are preserved, but a political unity supervenes upon them.71

Eagleton seems to accept the Gramscian concept of community as a hybrid of consent and coercion, but in his formulation it is the nation-state community that combines cultural consensus with the 130

critical community dominant political form. If we scrutinise the two sides of this equation, we are, in fact, bound to face the same dilemma, albeit from different angle. Consensual culture is never really consensual; it is, actually, the imposition of external values, which are to be internalised. Since Romanticism, as Harold Bloom shows, the development of personality has been identified with an opposition to such acculturation.72 From the perspective of political philosophy, the Romantic riot of the individual against its culture is, in fact, a declaration of the liberal autonomy of an individual against any constraint, political or cultural. Therefore, an ideal liberal must be loyal to the political organisation of the state, but s/he has to be wary of the cultural imposition of national values. The most lucid account of the consequences of this fissure is to be found in Richard Rorty. In his famous essay ‘Private irony and liberal hope’, Rorty develops the concept of the ironist, who, from his perspective, seems to be an ideal liberal: I call people of this sort ‘ironists’ because their realization that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed, and their renunciation of the attempt to formulate criteria of choice between final vocabularies, puts them in the position which Sartre called ‘metastable’: never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies, and thus of their selves.73

The ironist’s perspective can, indeed, serve as a remedy for the temptations of totalitarianism, but it also excludes any kind of partisan involvement. Why should we engage in any meliorist activity whatsoever if we know that everything is a matter of re-description? Irony is, of course, important, in order to avoid a complete immersion in common sense, but its efficacy as a weapon used to protect liberties is highly dubious. This dialectics of irony is best summarised in Zbigniew Herbert’s poem ‘From mythology’: First there was a god of night and tempest, a black idol without eyes, before whom they leaped, naked and smeared with blood. Later on, in the times of the republic, there were many gods with wives, children, creaking beds, and harmlessly exploding thunderbolts. At the end only superstitious neurotics carried in their pockets little statues of salt, representing the god of irony. There was no greater god at that time. Then came the barbarians. They too valued highly the little god of irony. They would crush it under their heels and add it to their dishes.74 131

politics of dialogue Rorty fully realises, of course, that private irony has a very limited range in fighting for a more equitable society. In his later works, he emphasises the role of the trade union movement in promoting a better world. Struggling for better working conditions, for higher wages and for a fixed time of work can hardly be deemed an ironic activity. To truly engage in fight, we need a clear conviction and the sense of being right in pursuing social purposes, but also recognition that people need at least a rudimentary ‘final vocabulary’ to act in the public sphere. Rorty bewails the breaking down of the coalition of the academic left and the union movement as the main reason behind the weakness of the left in the 1990s: The Vietnam War saw the end of the traditional alliance between the academics and the unions – an alliance that had nudged the Democratic Party steadily to the left during the previous 20 years. We are still living with the consequences of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and in particular with those of the rage of the increasingly manic student protesters of the late 1960s. These protesters were absolutely right that Vietnam was an unjust war, a massacre of which our country should always be ashamed. But when the students began to burn flags, they did deeper and more long-lasting damage to the American left than they could ever have imagined. When they began to spell ‘America’ with a ‘k’, they lost the respect and the sympathy of the union members.75

Therefore, Rorty postulates a reconstruction of this alliance as a way of restoring the traditional American left. He may have a point here, but to accomplish the feat, the academic left needs to abandon the ironist’s attitude and at least accept a rudimental final vocabulary of American patriots. Doing this is not impossible, but involves the risk of experiencing a sharp, nearly schizophrenic split in attitudes and actions. Such a split can be prevented by the opposite strategy of showing the public sphere as a critical extension of certain rules binding in the private sphere. I think that Habermas’s project of communicative action lends itself to such a reading. In his works, Habermas seeks to fuse various spheres of social activity, producing a coherent image of individual engagement in social life. This view ensues from the concept of democracy that the German philosopher adopts. For Habermas, democracy is ‘a generic means of resolving conflict and negotiating collective actions rather than a process with a specific institutional locus’.76 That is why the democratic social framework directly implies the emergence of a particular personality type and, the other way around, democratic society is hardly imaginable 132

critical community without genuine moral engagement of the citizens. Habermas, as we know, developed a theory of moral development in which in the course of ontogenesis morality takes increasingly abstract forms. Based on three principles supposed to generate concrete solutions, his cognitivist, universalist and formal ethics overrides the cultural relativism of ethical positions. Following Lawrence Kohlberg (who, in turn, drew on George H. Mead), Habermas also added the principle of discourse ethics, postulating that ‘[e]very valid norm would meet with the approval of all concerned if they could take part in a practical discourse’.77 In Habermas, this principle is supposed to institute a procedure serving to ensure the impartiality of moral judgements. The procedure entails the creation of forms that enable many people to participate in the setting of moral norms. While prior to modernity such forms arose immediately from the ways in which an individual experienced the world in life, in post-conventional societies, such forms must be produced and reproduced by the individuals themselves. This demands that an individual develop cognitive mechanisms enabling him or her to construct principles of action independently. Habermas describes this process in the following terms: As the social world is dissociated from the context of a form of life that used to be its ever present background of certitude and habituation and is put at a distance by participants in discourse who take a hypothetical attitude, the uprooted and now free-floating systems of norms require a different basis. This new basis has to be achieved through a reorganization of the fundamental sociocognitive concepts available at the preceding stage of interaction. The means to the solution of this problem is the very same perspective structure of a fully de-centered understanding of the world that created the problem in the first place. Norms of action are now conceived as subject to other norms in turn. They are subordinated to principles, or higher-level norms. The notion of the legitimacy of norms of action is now divided into the components of mere de facto recognition and worthiness to be recognized. The social currency of existing norms is no longer equivalent to the validity of justified norms. To these differentiations within the concepts of norm and normative validity corresponds a parallel differentiation in the concept of duty. Respect for the law is no longer considered an ethical motive per se.78

In the, as Habermas calls it, post-conventional stage of morality and action, the subject achieves such autonomy that he or she becomes a legislator of his/her own action. Hence, refusing to endorse the existing social norms as fixed and given in advance, the subject delves into 133

politics of dialogue the procedures of grounding them. Such an attitude leads to identifying the principles that may serve to test and select the norms already in place. It seems, thus, evident that Habermas, unlike Rorty, does not distinguish between the private and the public spheres, in this respect at least. The same individual skills are at work in both spheres, and, similarly, the same motivational mechanisms operate in both. The model propounded by the German philosopher is not fully immune to criticism, however. One objection that could be raised, for example, is that its integrity is attained at the cost of excessive emphasis on the cognitive sphere as the only source of human motivation for action. The fundamental problem to be tackled in transposing theoretical categories onto practical relations between the self and discursive democracy is establishing how far individual personality can be modelled by participation in social and political life. Based on an interpretation of Mead’s conceptions, the model outlined above fails to explicate such interdependencies. It seems that Habermas approaches the issue from another angle, focusing on individual capacity to bring communicative rationality into particular social relations. This explains why the German philosopher concentrates on individual competencies, rather than on the individual’s dependence on the social situations in which he or she participates. It is evident, nonetheless, that an ideal communication community is available to the individual only through its historical and social incarnations. Humans are engaged in the life of social institutions as particular individuals who bring their own biographies, anxieties and hopes into them. Individual minds not only affect social life, but are also, in turn, affected by it, insofar as particular people’s collaboration makes these institutions capable of functioning in the first place. It seems that Habermas purposefully ignores the possibility of political theory interfering with individual existence. He assumes that political projects are always formulated in universal categories and aim to solve universal problems. They are collectivist, and not individualist, by nature. As William E. Connolly writes: Habermas is tempted by the wish to exclude existential issues from political theory, but, again, they seep back in. He appears to think that because no organization of public life can resolve or eliminate existential suffering, these issues can be excluded from public discourse.79

Thus, Habermas ultimately replicates a clear distinction into the private sphere and the public one by separating private ways of life 134

critical community from the universal political discourse. His stance may be defended, nevertheless, by referring to the minimalism presupposed in any political theory. A political theory of the self and its functions does not have to be identical to a theory of the self as such. In this context, Mark Warren claims that not all that we value can be achieved politically, and different descriptions of the self will illuminate differently situated values. If we understand this, we will also be suspicious of any theory that is not bounded explicitly by a problematic it seeks to illuminate. Habermas’s theory, I think, provides promising new approaches to democratic theory because it problematizes commonalities implicit in discourse, the only means we know of conducting political life in a way consistent with respect for individuals. But his theory does not problematize intimacy, irony, or silence, and will appear clumsy and tyrannical when we understand it as doing so.80

Even if we accept these observations, we are still faced with a division into the public and private spheres in Habermas’s theory. The former is a domain of language discourse and involves procedures of attaining consensus and moral self autonomy. The latter is a realm of the linguistically inexpressible, a space in which individuality eludes universal principles and emotions dictate action, which does not even pretend to lead to a consensus. We could agree that this is the general direction that Habermas’s thought follows, but we could not fail to notice that he sees this sharp distinction as both a theoretical and a practical problem. Rorty’s and Habermas’s conceptions exemplify the problems inherent in theorising community in contemporary social philosophy. It is, namely, rather difficult to acknowledge a radical split into the public and private spheres. Of course, such a distinction served a historically important function in ushering the tolerance and diversity principles into politics, but modern societies display clear leanings to construct or reconstruct community. They are expressed in the communitarian concepts discussed above and in the conclusions that sociologists infer from empirical research on what communal forms best serve their memebers. Paradoxically, the research implies that, in many cases, weak bonds may better promote realisation of the community’s interests than strong ones. These findings seem surprising, since the sociological definition of strong bonds comprises all features that – from the early counter-Enlightenment to contemporary communitarianim – have traditionally been regarged as constitutive community features: ‘the strengh of a tie is a [. . .] ­combination 135

politics of dialogue of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocical services which characterize the tie’.81 Strong bonds have also been viewed as intrinsic traits of a genuine community, immunising it against external influences and enabling it to survive even in the most unfavourable conditions of external oppression. Granovetter points out that, at least in some cases, this intuitively endorsed view is actually wrong. Simplifying his position slightly, we could state that weak bonds are bridging ties, through which communities or sub-communities can connect and unite. The rules established at the micro-level are also operative at the macro-level: Linkage of micro and macro levels is thus no luxury but of central importance to the devlopment of sociological theory. Such linkage generates paradoxes: weak ties, often denounced as generative of alienation, are here seen as indispensable to individuals’ opportunitities and to their intergration into communities; strong ties, breeding local cohesion, lead to overall fragmentation.82

Granovetter’s theses stirred a heated debate within sociology. Though the debate still continues, it seems that he aptly captured the essence of modern community. Human bonds have not vanished in modernity, but they have transformed at least in that the strong ties rooted in commonly shared values and emotional commitments have lost their central importance. Crucial, now, are the ties that facilitate functioning in various groups, which makes for the interconnectedness of these groups. Harmonising philosophical concepts and theories grounded in sociological and psychological empirical research is fraught with difficulties. Nonetheless, it seems to suggest certain options for community emerging in response to the challenges posed by liberal democracy in the era of globalisation. Referring to the concepts of community discussed above, I would like to sketch briefly community-related postulates that this survey implies. Such community should meet the following criteria: (1) bringing together the public and the private spheres; (2) promoting critical identification with tradition and, at the same time, fostering openness to other traditions so that particularist identities can always be negated; (3) providing a basis for democracy and reacting flexibly to democratic transformations; and (4) combining universal regulatory principles with specific ways of realising them through reliance on emotions and bodiliness. Given those criteria, I propose the concept of critical community, 136

critical community which, inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue, is an extension of the pragmatist vision of community as developed by John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. The pragmatists show that a community is built in the process of communication, which is also a crucial factor in the emergence of the self. As only a democratic system can guarantee the development and freedom of communication, democracy is a political form of community. The political form is one feature in which a community differs from an association – for example, mere communication without a proper political form. The pragmatists also insist that political institutions are shaped by interactions among the community members, but if they materialise, they mould individuals. Thus, as Dewey says, individuals are products of institutions, but their interactions change both the forms and the content of these institutions. Institutions, from the pragmatist point of view, are at the same time communities of shared action and experience. The mechanism of taking the role of an other (Mead), which is vital to the existence of society and the emergence of the self, compels individuals to accept various points of view. As individuals take on the role of an increasingly generalised other, their perspectives become more and more universalised. This universalisation process is, however, not determined by any a priori mechanisms; it is, on the contrary, always an outcome of a complicated interplay of various social interactions. It is in dialogue that a community’s shared values are produced, together with the very rules that make intra-communal dialogue possible in the first place. Mead insightfully described the mechanisms of interaction, yet did not delve into the ways in which dialogue functions. Developing the concept of critical community, I thus supplement the pragmatist ideas with Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue. The reason is that although Dewey and Mead demonstrate that communicative activity is the foundation of community, they have never been interested in the internal structure of language. Bakhtin, in his turn, has done titanic work to show how language acts become the glue for social relations. It would hardly be possible to describe Bakhtin’s ideas thoroughly here (and I have done this elsewhere), but I would like to signal those of his concepts that seem to be paramount to the constitution of a critical community. First, from Bakhtin’s perspective, language is understood as a language-in-action – that is, he is interested in language as a means of communication. Therefore, his analyses of stylistics serve to reveal in what particular ways language interactions proceed. Second, dialogue is comprehended as 137

politics of dialogue an ongoing and never finished activity aimed at achieving a better reflexive understanding, rather than at striking a consensus. Third, the meaning of the world is always contested; it is fiercely fought over, which makes the world a battlefield of ideological struggle. Fourth, language and tradition crystallised in language are open to continuous revisions, in which process new forms of social life come into being and are articulated in new language forms. I put forward the concept of critical community as emerging from the aforementioned notions, in order to show that collective identities can be constructed in a critical dialogue with the community’s tradition and values. A critical community is a community of doublenatured dialogue: a critical dialogue with the tradition and values (vertical dialogue) and an internal dialogue within the community (horizontal dialogue). Therefore, the selves of the critical community members are constituted against the background of a broader narrative of the community, but this narrative is inscribed in their shared actions and experiences. In other words, they know and appreciate the values of their tradition, yet they can also maintain a critical distance to them. This critical distance is anchored in the horizontal dialogue, the dialogue within the community. The community members develop their attitudes to the tradition as an effect of their dialogue in the present and through their orientation toward the future. The self of the critical community is, consequently, a dialogical self. Bakhtin’s work has laid foundations for the psychological theory of dialogical self put forward by Hermans. In his formulation, a dialogical self can only exist on the assumption that the other person is not purely outside, but simultaneously part of the self and even constitutive of it. If the other would be seen as something that ‘influences’ or ‘determines’ an otherwise socially isolated self, such a self would be reduced to a monadic existence. It should be noted that the ‘social’ or ‘intersubjective’ is not something that is ‘added’ to a self that, in its intrinsic status, has an existence separate from the other. The self can be properly understood only when social interchange and intersubjectivity are considered as intrinsic to its nature. An adequate way to clarify the dialogical disposition of the self is to consider the role of imagination and imaginary figures.83

The theory of dialogical self has inspired plentiful research in many branches of psychology, but I believe that it can also be of paramount importance to social theory. Since identity narratives are always dialogical, there is no simple inscription in a communal meta-narrative. 138

critical community Also, an autonomous self, a self largely resistant to external influences, put forward in liberalism does not exist, either. The self as a central element of a critical community is (being) constituted in an ongoing dialogue with this community, its traditions, its institutions and its values. The dialogical self is, of course, modelled in immediate contact with other people. What we face, then, is a complex, multilayered process, which, from the viewpoint of an individual, seen by Bakhtin as always constituting the centre of its world, is an adaptation and assimilation to the surrounding social world. I use the terms ‘assimilation’ and ‘accommodation’ here as defined by Jean Piaget, with the former referring to inclusion of new elements into the existing structures and the latter concerning transformation of cognitive structures, so as to make room for new, emergent elements of the social world.84 In his theory of dialogue, as discussed in the previous chapter, Bakhtin described the same processes as integration of an alien utterance into one’s cognitive structures. This comes to pass in direct dialogue that unfolds in face-to-face interactions of the community members. Such immediate interactions are, in turn, shaped by the pre-existing traditions of the community and by its institutions. Of course, from this perspective, liberal democracy is one of the institutions that enable specific forms of direct dialogue. Still, liberal democracy itself emerges from the very experience of diversity in everyday life. Critical community members constantly find themselves in a dialogical tension, which makes them subject to the pressures of tradition and institutions and, at the same time, capable of shaping them. Moreover, we know that a critical community is, to some extent, shaped by its political institutions, which are increasingly affected by internationalisation. Because of this process, a critical community is open-ended and capable of accommodating a more and more generalised other, to use Mead’s phrase. It is, of course, a matter of discussion, but I believe that such a community can be constructed above and beyond national borders. The Internet is, evidently, a cradle of such a community, but they can evolve in various cultural and social contexts. The new circumstances reveal both the urgency of creating a critical community and the problems inherent in constituting it. A critical community comes into being when traditional communal values encounter new social institutions, which stimulate, but also enforce, the self-reflection of individuals and social groups alike.85 When the ‘universe of discourse’, to use another of Mead’s categories, is expanded, the relations among the elements of traditional communities, which 139

politics of dialogue have been preserved within nation-states, and political and administrative institutions grow increasingly complicated in effect of multidirectional shifts. National communities are confronted with other communities, which is hardly a novelty in itself, but the scale of such confrontation is, indeed, unprecedented. What is a new development is that national communities are confronted with a possible global or planetary community. This conjuncture may help realise Mead’s idea of adopting the point of view of mankind, but at the same time it affects considerably the possibility of dialogue, which depends on the confluence of three factors. One of them is the already mentioned size of the community. The second is the form of political institutions that directly shape dialogue and, indirectly, the community in which dialogue takes place. Political institutions are becoming increasingly supra-national, which does not always entail an emergence of transnational communities. The European Union is a perfect case in point, with its extended institutional network not grounded in an equally extended community and a permanent crisis in ‘European identity’ concomitant upon this disparity. The third condition is immediacy, since dialogue is always a direct dialogue, in which particular individuals communicate with other individuals and themselves. The three dimensions, or limitations, of dialogue add up to a challenge that critical community must face. The global community, which critical community looks toward, can only materialise when local identities, irrespective of their provenance, are abolished or at least bracketed off. In this way, obstacles that thwart self-reflection will be removed. Paradoxically, however, it is in overcoming the obstacles of local identity that the dialogical self, which lies at the centre of critical community, may recognise itself for what it is in dialogue with the Other. The moment of universality engages, then, in a dialogue of bodily tangibilities as the Bakhtinian superaddressee – that is, as one more partner in dialogue and not as its ultimate hegemonic reference. Critical community, thus, is not ‘a coming utopia’, but a movement toward a democratic society of the age of globalisation and dialogical cosmopolitanism.86

Notes 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), §241 [emphasis in original]. 140

critical community 2. William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 1. 3. Pierre Manent, The City of Man, trans. Mark A. LePain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 204. 4. Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, trans. David Maisel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 101. 5. Charles E. Frye, ‘Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political’, The Journal of Politics, 28: 4, 1966, p. 829. 6. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 13. 7. Duncan Kelly, ‘Carl Schmitt’s political theory of representation’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 65: 1, 2004, p. 127. 8. Carl Schmitt, Le categorie del ‘politico’, eds Gianfranco Miglio and Pierangelo Schiera (Bologna: Societa editrice il Mulino, 1972), quoted in George Schwab, ‘Introduction’, in Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 6. 9. Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 10. Karl Marx, ‘The German ideology’, in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978), p. 160. 11. Ibid. p. 160. 12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 473. 13. Friedrich Engels, ‘To Joseph Bloch’, in The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 760. 14. Vladymir Ilich Lenin, ‘A great beginnings’, in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Lenin Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975), p. 480. 15. Leszek Koczanowicz, Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in PostCommunist Poland (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). 16. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from The Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. and eds Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 258. 17. Ibid. p. 12. 18. Kate Crehan, Gramsci, Culture, and Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 199–200. 19. Gramsci, Selections from The Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, pp. 326–7. 20. Ibid. p. 419. 21. Similarities between Gramsci’s and Bakhtin’s concepts of language have already been noted. See, for example, Peter Ives, Gramsci’s 141

politics of dialogue Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 71–2. 22. Perry Anderson, ‘The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, 100, November 1976/January 1977, p. 42. 23. John Hoffman, The Gramscian Challenge: Coercion and Consent in Marxist Political Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 127. 24. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1953), pp. 623–4. 25. Ibid. 26. Johannes A. Gaertner, ‘Dialectic thought in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain’, The German Quarterly, 38: 4, 1965, p. 607. 27. Christopher Duggan, Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 115. 28. Michael Sandel, ‘Introduction’, Liberalism and its Critics, ed. Michael Sandel (New York: New York University Press, 1984), p. 5. 29. Ibid. pp. 5–6. 30. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Tradition’, in Liberalism and its Critics, p. 138. 31. Ibid. p. 143. 32. Ibid. 33. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 35. 34. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 167–8. 35. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 6–7 [emphasis in original]. 36. Chris Gemerchak, ‘Of goods and things: reflections on an ethics of community’, in Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree (eds), The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), pp. 68–9 [emphasis in original]. 37. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert B. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 2 [emphasis in original]. 38. Ibid. p. 30 [emphasis in original]. 39. Ibid. p. 37 [emphasis in original]. 40. Ibid. p. 98. 41. Stefan Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 200. 42. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 63. 142

critical community 43. Ibid. p. 64 [emphasis in original]. 44. Ibid. p. 85. 45. Ibid. p. 86. 46. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 418. 47. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Parts I and II. Revised Edition, eds Aloysius P. Martinich and Brian Battiste (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2010), p. 121. 48. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2005), p. 202. 49. Ibid. p. 8. 50. Charles Taylor, ‘Theories of meaning’, in Philosophical Papers: Human Agency and Language, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 273. 51. Francis Galton, ‘A theory of heredity’, The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 5, 1876, pp. 329–48. 52. Patrick Parrinder, ‘Eugenics and utopia: sexual selection from Galton to Morris’, Utopian Studies, 8: 2, 1997, pp. 1–12. 53. Wisława Szymborska, ‘Still’, in Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts, trans. and eds Magnus J. Krynsky and Robert A. Maguire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 23. 54. Helmuth Plessner, The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism, trans. Andrew Wallace (New York: Humanity, 1999), p. 88. 55. Andreas Hess, ‘Against unspoilt authenticity: a re-appraisal of Helmuth Plessner’s The Limits of Community’, Irish Journal of Sociology, 16: 2, 2007, pp. 11–26. 56. Ibid. p. 90. 57. Ibid. pp. 94–5. 58. Ibid. p. 99 [emphasis in original]. 59. Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 44. 60. Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy, p. 123. 61. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: Chicago University Press 1959), p. 69. 62. Cf. Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 180–216. 63. Ibid. p. 212. 64. Ibid. p. 214. 65. Ibid. p. 216. 143

politics of dialogue 66. Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 3. 67. Shusterman, Body Consciousness, p. 6. 68. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 186. 69. Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’, in Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 17. 70. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Portland: The Floating Press, 2009), p. 26. 71. Terry Eagleton, The Idea Culture (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 59–60 [emphasis in original]. 72. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 73. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 73–4. 74. Zbigniew Herbert, ‘From mythology’, in Czesław Miłosz (ed.) (trans.), Post-war Polish Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 145. 75. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 260. 76. Mark E. Warren, ‘The self in discursive democracy’, in Stephen K. White (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 169. 77. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 121. 78. Ibid. pp. 161–2 [emphasis in original]. 79. William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 162 [emphasis in original]. 80. Warren, ‘The self in discursive democracy’, p. 195. 81. Mark S. Granovetter, ‘The strength of weak ties’, American Journal of Sociology, 78: 6, 1973, p. 1361. 82. Ibid. p. 1378. 83. Hubert J. M. Hermans, ‘How to perform research on the basis of dialogical self theory? Introduction to the special issue’, Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 21, 2008, pp. 186–7. 84. Jean Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child, trans. Margaret Cook (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 350–1. 85. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: 144

critical community Politics, Tradition, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 86. I developed the category of dialogical cosmopolitism in my paper ‘Cosmopolitanism and its predicaments’, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29: 2, 2010, pp. 141–9.

145

4

Coda: Non-Consensual Democracy as a Political Form of Critical Community

4.1  Democratic Community between Consensus and Disagreement As I demonstrated in the previous chapters, pragmatists have insisted that there is a continuity between everyday life, community and democracy. Everyday interactions make up the texture of social life, which achieves its fullest expression in the form of community with shared values, goals and rituals. Communities, in turn, become petrified in particular political forms, which buttress them by, for example, immunising them against internal fracas. In this model, democracy is a system that most effectively facilitates social interactions, since only democracy ensures uninterrupted communication, endorsed by Habermas as an ultimate point of reference, a utopia of a fully realised democratic system. The model is, however, tenable provided that there is a high degree of idealisation. The greater number of factors of social development we take into account, the more acutely aware we become of what can be called democracy’s Janus-like face. Existence of a democratic society is predicated upon internal concord, be it voluntary or enforced. At the same time, conflict is an equally important condition of democracy, since it is a driving force behind its development and prevents society from slipping into a tyranny of one group or one person. This problem did not escape the notice of Ancient Greek thinkers, who were the first to theorise democracy. Since the beginning of reflection on democracy and politics, it has been clear that social and political life entails conflict as well as harmony. The Ancient Greeks’ preoccupation with the issue of conflict and harmony in the polis led them to acknowledge that conflict was both inevitable and, at the same time, illegitimate, while the central challenge was to devise ways for community to avoid it. Given this, they distinguished two concepts of conflict: conflict 146

coda: non-consensual democracy understood as stasis is distinct from conflict understood as polemos; the former is conflict between friends, whereas the latter is between enemies.1 The former is much more dramatic and can have farreaching consequences. Bernard Yack, whose account of Aristotelian thought I follow here, notes that it is primarily political friends who become class enemies in Aristotle’s account. In other words, it is primarily those who have the mutual expectations characteristic of members of political communities who turn the division between rich and poor into the main source of their social conflict.2

Yack argues convincingly that the citizens who engage in stasis in Aristotelian political communities act within the expectations created by political justice and political friendship. The ways in which they engage in social conflict will reflect something of the bonds that shape their shared life.3

Crucially, the same forces that hold the members of a political community together also set in motion an argument about the concept of justice. This argument is thus the main source of conflict. Sharing in a political community prompts citizens to put forward for public approval their understanding of justice as the basis for the community’s standards of mutual accountability. The variety of interests and characters among the citizens, coupled with an understandable tendency to amplify their own interests, ensures that they will champion competing conceptions of justice. Political decisions concerning which understanding of justice to enshrine in laws and other public standards are, as a result, bound to inspire the perceptions of injustice and the kinds of resentment that lead to stasis.4 In other words, conflict-as-stasis could be said to appear only among people who already accept reciprocity of obligations and who seek to universalise their idea of justice as mandatory for the whole community. They are simultaneously political friends and class enemies. I will not discuss Aristotle’s views on conflict at length here, but I would like to stress some of his points that correspond to contemporary discussions on this topic. First, as Yack states, the problem of conflict and social harmony can be meaningfully acknowledged only in a political community, as distinct from other kinds of community. Political community, as I have mentioned, is a community of mutual obligations, of which its members are conscious. Second, although Aristotle insists on moral education, he is aware that it does 147

politics of dialogue not secure elimination of conflict in the polis. If the primary task of the state is to facilitate the possibility of a ‘good life’ for its citizens, then we arrive at a circular relation between moral education, the state and the ‘good life’. These elements are inevitably interlinked, and each of them requires the other ones. Third, and probably most importantly, Aristotle’s position against Socrates’ claim ‘that the greater the unity of the state the better’ can be exemplified as follows: Is it not obvious that a state may at length attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state? Since the nature of a state is to be a plurality, and in tending to greater unity, from being a state, it becomes a family, and from being a family, an individual; for the family may be said to be more than the state, and the individual than the family. So that we ought not to attain this greatest unity even if we could, for it would be the destruction of the state. Again, a state is not made up only of so many men, but of different kinds of men.5

Hence, Aristotle once again asserts that differentiation within the state is inexorable and argues that unification within the state leads to its destruction as the state; at the same time, the state cannot exist as a political community without the recognition of mutual obligations and a shared concept of justice. Therefore, as Yack comments, [i]n books 4-6 of the Politics Aristotle offers much advice on how to limit and moderate the consequences of this persistent tension between rich and poor citizens. But he offers little hope of simply eliminating the sources of factional conflict from political life, for the source of stasis lie in the very nature of political community, in the combination of expectations about participation in framing public standards of justice with the social heterogeneity that Aristotle thinks is essential to political life.6

I think that the dilemma so aptly captured in Ancient Greece is inscribed in every form of democracy. Contemporary social philosophy and democratic theory suggest a few ways of circumventing or solving the dilemma. As I have already mentioned some of them, I will now simply sum them up briefly in the context of a dispute about constitutive features of democratic community. Generally speaking, we can distinguish in it two intersecting divisions. One of them focuses on whether it is at all feasible to speak of a democratic community. It seems rather objectionable to those who define democracy essentially in systemic terms as an ensemble of institutions and procedures. Both institutions and procedures can be considered in relative disjunction from the community’s values. Of course, there is no denying that such values may play an impor148

coda: non-consensual democracy tant role, but they do not determine the democratic – or, for that matter, undemocratic – nature of a given society. Such an account of democracy, however, breeds a number of questions and reservations. If democracy can be succinctly defined, in terms proposed by Adam Przeworski, as ‘but a framework within which somewhat equal, somewhat effective, and somewhat free people can struggle peacefully to improve the world according to their different visions, values, and interests’,7 we still face the problem of relations between this very framework and a community that supports it. Obviously, such a question may not be deemed entirely relevant by the political sciences, which could view it as basically secondary, prioritising a precise depiction of how democracy functions as a political system. Przeworski’s book serves as a perfect case in point here. Social philosophy, nevertheless, would be first and foremost interested in the extent to which a democratic political system depends on the trilateral relation between an individual, his/her community and the political organisation of this community. Again, we could refer to Aristotle, who – as Yack emphasises – differentiated between a community and a political community. A community is not a form of collective identity or communion, and, consequently, membership in a community does not entail full subordination to the community’s sentiments and even less a complete self-identification with the collective ‘self’ of the community. Once we distinguish community from communion and collective identity, it becomes clear that for Aristotle community is a structural feature of everyday social interactions rather than an ideal of solidarity and harmonious living. Sentiments of love, sympathy, and solidarity will often develop in Aristotelian communities. But they will grow out of the same sources as much of the conflict and competition in communal life: the sharing of goods, activities, and identities by different kinds of individuals.8

What still needs elucidating is the fact that communities are created beyond direct blood ties or close neighbourly bonds. According to Yack, perennial in Aristotle is the fact that human beings are political animals primarily because they are also rational animals. They possess a capacity for logos, which, as is wellknown, refers in Greek to speech and argument as well as to reasoning itself. Human beings are unique not only in their reasoning capacities but in their ability to communicate their reasoning to each other. [. . .] Animal possessing logos can calculate the advantages to be gained by interaction 149

politics of dialogue with a greater variety of individuals that can be found in the family and the village. They can, moreover, communicate and argue about the best ways of pursuing these advantages, including the formation of communities beyond kinship ties, forms of community not found among other animals. One of these forms of community, according to Aristotle, is the political community. The political community comes into being for the sake of the greater security, comfort, and self-sufficiency to be gained by bringing a relatively heterogeneous group of unrelated individuals, with their different goods and skills, into one community. And it is natural, according to Aristotle, for human beings to form such a community because it is natural for them to reason about and communicate the advantages and disadvantages of various forms of communal living.9

The two levels of social life – community and political ­community – are, of course, interwoven, but language, the ability to communicate one’s states and the capacity to reason are the constitutive factors of the political community. Hence, we could approach the political community from the angle of a particular language use prevalent within it. In this, we step, of course, beyond the Aristotelian perspective, because language becomes something more than simply a medium of reasoning: it largely shapes the reasoning and, thereby, moulds the political community. This, in turn, as indicated in the previous chapters, affects the form of community underlying the political community. Adopting this position, I locate myself among those who believe that a democratic community exists as a system of habits or forms of life that make up a structure superimposed over a critical community. At this point, we come across the other type of division. If in the former one, the point of dispute lies in questions about the legitimacy of the very coinage democratic community, here the bone of contention is the nature of a mechanism that ensures the smooth operation of democratic society. As already implied, there are two fundamental concepts of, or rather theoretical approaches to, this issue. One of them underscores conflict as inherent in the very notion of politics. The other, in turn, insists that in social life, as well as in politics, a compromise is always possible and striving for a compromise is a distinctive feature of democratic societies, as opposed to totalitarian or authoritarian ones. The two division lines sketched above intersect, producing a whole range of possible positions and stances. At one pole of the continuum, there are strongly communitarian concepts, which revolve around community clearly demarcated by values endorsed in it. 150

coda: non-consensual democracy While the values are basically not negotiable, what can be disputed are the ways of realising them. In such communities, the political sphere is a vehicle for actualising internal values and serves to safeguard them against destructive schemes from outside and inside. An ethnically defined nation-state may provide a vivid example of such a community. The ethnicity as such is, of course, a fiction, but it serves as the major ‘invented tradition’10 or as an imaginative basis for creating ‘an imagined community’.11 Given this, we could legitimately wonder whether such a community could even be called a democratic community, if communal values are excluded from democratic debate. They cannot be deliberatively examined not only because they are commonly and indisputably upheld, but also because their extreme ‘transparency’ prevents them from being perceived as values in the first place. Nevertheless, we can classify communities organised in this way, based on the form of power and viability of free deliberation on the issues that appear eligible for discussion. The classical division into tyranny, oligarchy and democracy is one way to categorise such communities. Still, democratic community, to some degree at least, goes beyond the strong communality paradigm. This aspect was underscored by Cornelius Castoriadis, who observed that what is really democratic in Athens over and above all the rest, and what is of paramount importance for us, is not any particular institution established at a certain point in time [. . .] but the continuous process of democratic self-institution, going on for almost three centuries: there is the creativity; there is the self-reflectiveness, there is democracy, and there is the lesson.12

If Athenian democracy heralded something more than a communitarian state, the vision fully materialised on a larger scale only with the onset of the Enlightenment. Strong community was undermined, paradoxically, the very moment that it was noticed at all. It occurred when, faced with the expansion of Enlightenment thinking, Herder formulated the concept of community as a cornerstone of collective and individual identity. Consequently, community turned into a problem to be solved in one way or another. Community was proclaimed an opposite pole of ideal liberal society, its reversed mirror image. If community was organised by values it took for granted, liberal society was envisaged as a society in which communitarian values belonged to the private sphere, while the values of the political sphere were consensually agreed upon by autonomous and free 151

politics of dialogue individuals. In his famous essay on the Enlightenment, Kant outlined this principle most emphatically: ‘For enlightenment of this kind, all that is needed is freedom. And the freedom in question is the most innocuous of all – freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.’13 Kant’s assertions were powerfully countered by Edmund Burke, who in his well-known critique of the French Revolution offers a passionate vindication of prejudice: In this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings: that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. [. . .] Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved.14

Importantly, although the Enlightenment cult of reason is an evident target of Burke’s harangue, prejudice does not emerge in it as unquestionable and unchallenged. The defense of prejudice is pragmatically informed, with Burke showing that it can actually enhance action by tying knowledge in with social or political activity. Burke’s approach to prejudice approximates Pascal’s differentiation between the order of the heart and the order of reason. Community is, for Burke, a community of tradition, yet tradition itself has an intrinsic capacity for evolution and adjustment to circumstances. In other words, the community’s prejudices are indisputable for its individual members, but they can be and are discussed by the community as a whole. Interpreted in this way, community becomes a task, rather than a given. Is such a self-reflective community capable of serving the same functions as those served by the community in the pre-modern era? Juxtaposed with each other, the two prominent thinkers’ views imply that social and political problems that emerged at the onset of modernity anticipated a debate on society to develop later. Of course, they have surfaced in a variety of forms, but the core of the debate has persisted unchanged, with the central query being whether reason alone suffices as a foundation of society or whether shared values are indispensable to stabilise it. I do not want to delve into the complexities of the debate here, having already touched upon these 152

coda: non-consensual democracy issues in the previous chapters of this book, but I believe that one of its peculiarities deserves special attention. Namely, throughout, the debate has adopted the definitions of reason and community, in which one is pitched against the other. Reason has been seen as an exclusive property of societies, which have relinquished communal values, while communality has been framed as an emotional bond, with rationality receding to make place for sentiment and resentment. In such an account – which is, in a sense, also endorsed by the communitarians – individuals’ freedom and autonomy and, consequently, their critical reflection on the community they inhabit seem possible only in liberal societies at the price of forfeiting or loosening communal bonds. A dramatic dilemma arises as a result: should community be consolidated, which poses a risk of radical nationalism, or should liberal society be built at the expense of communal bonding, which, in turn, generates a risk of legal norms remaining the sole regulators of social relations, with courtrooms serving as the only space for civic debates settled by ‘impartial’ judges? In the previous chapter, I proposed that such a notion of community was inadequate. Drawing on the pragmatist intuitions of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead and on the concept of language developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, I postulated a critical community as a community in which respect for, and commitment to, tradition intertwined with critical reflection upon it. It is only in such a community that what Aletta Norval calls democratic identification can actually emerge: [T]he key to differentiating between a democratic, and other forms of identification, is in the manner in which such identification is held. Cavell draws out some of the implications for democratic subjectivity. Aversive identity is based precisely upon a problematization of the given, of prevailing opinion, and it is closely tied with self-definition, which [. . .] is essentially communal in character. This the moment of the political within already constituted democratic regimes.15

In my view, this capacity for problematising the given is the essence and core of critical community. It must be enacted in everyday interactions, whereof a democratic critical community stands a chance of emerging. Accepting the notion of continuity between a community’s everyday life and its political dimension, we must establish which political dimension corresponds to critical community – i.e. what it is that constitutes its political community. I posit that the political form of critical community is provided by non-consensual democracy. 153

politics of dialogue

4.2  Non-Consensual Democracy: Dialogue, Solidarity and Democratic Politics To state that democracy is a system in which dialogue and compromise play the most prominent role is a drearily trite observation. Reiterated ad infinitum, the two words feature both in theoretical studies and in politicians’ declarations. We could safely propose it as a rule that the more ruthless and atrocious politics becomes, the more persistently those involved in it speak of dialogue and compromise. This may be caused by the fact that both dialogue and compromise are typical empty signifiers, to use Jacques Lacan’s terminology, adapted for political theory by Ernesto Laclau.16 The spellbinding power of these two words is ensured by their locatedness at the very heart of liberal theory, as well as by their stubborn evasion of any theoretical processing. Political theories, including even those which, like Habermas’s framework, foreground dialogue, do not actually fathom dialogue itself. Similarly, the notion of compromise is treated as an obvious, universally comprehensible idea, which it would be pointless to elucidate. If the theory of dialogue as such has sprouted in various incarnations – primarily in the so-called philosophy of dialogue – no comparable developments have pertained to compromise. One of very few notable exceptions is Avishai Margalit’s study On Compromise and Rotten Compromises,17 which puts forward a fully-fledged conception of compromise and its limits. Margalit’s consideration of two competing approaches to politics is the most relevant to my argument: The idea of political compromise is caught between two pictures of politics: politics as economics and politics as religion. Roughly speaking, in the economic picture of politics everything is subject to compromise. Compromise is not always desirable or prudent, but it is always possible. In the religious picture, there are things over which we must never compromise. The religious picture is in the grip of the idea of the holy. The holy is not negotiable, let alone subject to compromise. Crudely put, one cannot compromise over the holy without compromising the holy.18

Margalit reflects on the implications the two concepts have for political practice and concludes that [t]he religious picture fills politics with the idea that politics is a domain of human activity meant to protect a way of life and give meaning to human life. It is the antithesis of the economic picture, concerned with satisfying desires and interests, not with meanings.19 154

coda: non-consensual democracy Obviously, the vision of politics as religion does not promote compromise, while perceiving politics as activity akin to economy naturally fosters compromise, because contradictory interests may always be negotiated and settled or at least framed so as to considerably reduce the tensions between the adversaries. Apparently, compromise can be consensual – for instance, accepted by all parties to the dispute – or non-consensual – when none of the parties approves of the solution, yet all agree to adhere to it, albeit unwillingly or with reservations. Margalit does not propose to distinguish between kinds of compromise in this way, but the differentiation seems essential to me. Namely, it supplements political philosophy with a dimension I consider very important – that is, understanding other parties involved in conflict. This factor binds politics with the ethics of everyday living. As I pointed out in the chapter on democracy and the Bakhtinian concept of dialogue, dialogue inevitably pervades all human relationships throughout all political systems, but actualisation of dialogue in the political sphere is an entirely different matter. It ushers in a political moment, a conscious and self-reflective acceptance of social differentiation as a political fact. That is why if we focus on understanding as an important category of social theory, we can develop a different approach to the fundamental dispute going on in contemporary political thought. The dispute spans between the assertions that democratic society is founded upon inevitable conflict and affirmation that the system has in-built mechanisms, which always potentially lead to consensus. In his book on deliberative democracy, James Bohman encapsulates the most frequently cited conditions of consensus in the following way: [T]he inclusion of everyone affected by a decision, substantial political equality including equal opportunities to participate in deliberation, equality in methods of decision making and in determining the agenda, the free and open exchange of information and reasons sufficient to acquire an understanding of both the issue in question and the opinions of others, and so on.20

Of course, in particular historical conjunctures, consensus may not come to pass, but that means that a chance has been lost – abolished by the circumstances or squandered because of a subjective perception of the situation. Despite all the reservations about the realities of deliberation and its course, the concept of deliberative democracy seems to be irresistibly located among the democratic visions that see this political 155

politics of dialogue system as inherently interconnected with consensus. At the opposite pole, there are theories of democracy – or of society in general – which highlight its inevitably conflictual nature. They date back to Ancient Greece, where, as already mentioned, conflict was deemed both unavoidable and illegitimate. In modern and contemporary philosophies, this line of thought commences with Machiavelli and continues through Marx, reaching, finally, into various forms of the sociology of conflict.21 Still, I would like to focus on contemporary theories of antagonism, which directly polemicise with the deliberative democracy concepts. A perfect case in point is the concept of politics developed by Chantal Mouffe. She draws clear lines demarcating her vision of agonistic democracy from dialogical democracy: Contrary to the dialogic approach, the democratic debate is conceived as a real confrontation. Adversaries do fight – even fiercely – but according to a shared set of rules, and their positions, despite being ultimately irreconcilable, are accepted as legitimate perspectives. The fundamental difference between the ‘dialogical’ and the ‘agonistic’ perspectives is that the aim of the latter is a profound transformation of the existing power relations and the establishment of a new hegemony. This is why it can properly be called ‘radical’. To be sure, it is not the revolutionary politics of the jacobin type, but neither is it the liberal one of competing interests within a neutral terrain or the discursive formation of a democratic consensus.22

I believe Mouffe is right in her claim that there is no neutral space in which conflicting interests could be settled. But fully respecting the valuable insights she offers, I also believe that her concept necessarily entails rejection of dialogic democracy and the very idea of dialogue as a cornerstone of the democratic system. Moreover, I believe, and I shall further argue the point, that non-consensual democracy can be considered in a ‘third way’, circumventing both the antagonistic and dialogic-consensual models. The tenet that democratic dialogue can lead to understanding, but not necessarily to agreement, provides the starting point for my reasoning. If this reasoning holds, there is no need to seek ‘a neutral terrain’, which Mouffe speaks about. She is right in that such a territory is an artificial construct that presumes suspension of the conflict in order for it to be solved behind the wings, so to speak. Such a neutral terrain is, thus, either a sheer impossibility, because democracy should not have ‘wings’, or, provided it exists in the first place, a site where people’s sovereignty is suspended, abolishing, for some time at least, democracy or, at least, democracy in its dimension of popular sovereignty. Mouffe infers 156

coda: non-consensual democracy thereof that the only possibility for democracy is the domestication of antagonism, in which antagonism is transformed into agonism and enemies into adversaries. Such a change is feasible, because all the parties involved in the conflict respect the formal requirements of democratic procedure. It seems, nevertheless, that the proposal to limit democracy’s operations merely to meeting the formal conditions invites criticism for three reasons at least. First, it presumes a strict division between the political sphere and other spheres of social life – that is, the bracketing off of the political from politics. Such a differentiation has already been championed by thinkers of widely divergent views – Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt and Claude Lefort – but, all the same, its legitimacy has always been highly dubious. I addressed these doubts in my chapter on pragmatism, pointing out that the political sphere could be considered as an universalisation of everyday interactions or, at least, some aspects thereof. Second, the formal conditions of democracy’s functioning do not seem to be a sufficiently ‘strong’ to transform antagonism into agonism. Something else is needed, as well: ‘something’ that would pervade a given society so thoroughly as to make its symbolic sphere forestall the transgressing of agonism’s borders. In contemporary society, the ‘something’ is provided by solidarity. Solidarity, as Hauke Brunkhorst writes, constitutes the foundation of the democratic system through politicisation and universalisation of the lovethy-neighbour-based Christian ethics: [I]n the Western revolutions of 1776, 1789, and 1848, the Christian ethic of brotherliness was politicized, and republican civic solidarity was egalitarianized. The politicization superceded [aufheben] the ideologicalaffirmative character of love of neighbor. The dualism of civitas dei and civitas terrana was overcome, and along with it the hierarchical form of organic solidarity that was represented by the church-state and the feudal state [Ständestaat]. Conversely, by connecting with the compassionate ethic of brotherliness, the meaning of equal civic freedom shifted away from elitist particularism toward egalitarian universalism.23

Brunkhorst’s views seem analogous to Mead’s concept of the universalisation of Christian rules and the relevance of this universalisation to the development of democratic society. Although Mead did not resort to the notion of solidarity as a theoretical category, he claimed, like Brunkhorst, that the universalisation of love of thy neighbour, being extended over the increasingly generalised other, produced a necessary basis for the rise and sustaining of democracy. 157

politics of dialogue Third, the transformation of antagonism into agonism and an enemy into an adversary also poses an ethical challenge. Mouffe’s framework is certainly meant to be a descriptive concept of politics, fully conscious of how mechanisms of power come into being in a democratic society, but it inescapably involves evaluative judgements. The ethical engagement necessary for a democratic society to exist exemplifies here a reliance on ethics. Democracy is a system that faces a persistent threat of decomposition or conversion into totalitarianism or anarchism. The irremovable trait of democracy was emphatically diagnosed by Claude Lefort, which I highlighted in the chapter on Bakhtin. The existence of a democratic society is thus predicated upon citizens’ activity and their readiness to engage in its operations. Acknowledging the importance of structural, institutional and linguistic theories of democracy, we should not overlook the impact of motivational factors. Their relevance is highlighted in the communitarians’ concepts, which foreground community’s values and democracy’s rootedness in these very values. Nevertheless, as pointed out above, the line beyond which community’s values turn against democratic society is notoriously difficult, if not entirely impossible, to establish. The line is crossed when a community becomes selfenclosed, upon which its values serve to unify society and eradicate conflicts, which are crucial to democracy’s development. In the previous chapter, I postulated a critical community as an ideal community of modernity. Such a community adopts a critical and reflexive attitude to its own tradition, whereby a self emerging within the community is a dialogic self and not an individual reflection of the community’s narrative envisaged by the communitarians. These features of a critical community, however, render only its aversive facet. I think that this negative side has been aptly captured by Chantal Mouffe in her notion of the constitutive outside, borrowed from Henry Staten.24 Mouffe contends that the category is introduced to highlight the fact that the creation of an identity implies the establishment of a difference, difference which is often constructed on the basis of a hierarchy, for example between form and matter, black and white, man and woman, etc. Once we have understood that every identity is relational and that the affirmation of a difference is a precondition for the existence of any identity, i.e. the perception of something ‘other’ which constitutes its ‘exterior,’ we are, I think, in a better position to understand Schmitt’s point about the ever present possibility of antagonism and to see how a social relation can become the breeding ground for antagonism.25 158

coda: non-consensual democracy An identity constituted through difference is, nonetheless, only a moment in the dialectical linking of unity and multiplicity, identity and difference. It seems to me that, in the context of social philosophy, it makes sense to use a category of similarity, which is less encumbered than the category of identity. Difference constitutes identity, and differentiation constitutes similarity. Similarity is, of course, always relative and perceived depending on some conditioning external to it. For example, social action, according to Mead, is organised by the social objects toward which it is oriented. Social objects impose internal connections on the agents of action; hence, we can speak of a shared self. If we define identity as a piling up of similarities, we obviously must, as was the case with difference, identify the forces that enable the differentiated social groups to engage in shared action or at least to proceed from antagonism to agonism, to use Mouffe’s formulations. In order to examine democracy from this point of view, we must do more than simply refer to the formal conditions that guarantee its existence. Democracy requires a certain personality type, which comes into being within it. Above, I mentioned the notion of democracy as a state of mind (Smith), the links between democracy and the project of autonomy (Castoriadis), and my own concept of a dialogic self, drawing on some insights provided by Bakhtin, Mead and contemporary psychology. Each of these concepts attaches a great weight to critical and reflexive attitudes to social realities, which, in turn, generate a belief in the viability of altering these realities. Critical community, being a community of such personalities, is a community of solidarity. Solidarity, here, is a critical solidarity, which involves the perception of similarities, coupled with an acceptance of differentiation. Yet solidarity entails more than a mere critical acceptance. At the core of solidarity, there is a conviction that social bonds are created not only by shared interest, but also through consciousness of shared participation in universal humanity. Of course, solidarity cannot be formed merely at the rational level; it must inevitably be bound up with passion and emotional engagement in a relationship with the Other. Difficult to explicate, this property of solidarity is inscribed in the celebrated revolutionary triad of Liberté-Égalité-Fraternité, whose third component has always occasioned the most trouble. Revolution summons us not only to fight for certain social ideals, but also to cultivate some human bonds – a relationship that completes these ideals in the existential dimension. If we view brotherhood as a 159

politics of dialogue social utopia, its fullest realisation could be found in the Bakhtinian carnival, which I addressed in Chapter 2. In carnival, the social bond becomes an ultimately unfettered play, with inter-human relationships shuffling off formality and rituals vanishing or turning into objects of ridicule and derision. If carnival is a limit of democracy conceived as brotherhood, solidarity turns into an ethical obligation to develop such immediate social bonds. At this point, Bakhtin’s, Dewey’s and Shusterman’s concepts intersect. Unfettered communication and carnival as its liminal manifestation, which is at the same time an expression of bodiliness and a vehicle of emancipation, add up to a utopian vision of a democratic community free of totalitarian temptations. Yet, as far as a political form of such a community – that is, non-consensual democracy – is concerned, its crucial constitutive moment is dialogue conceived as a medium, in which understanding can be enhanced, rather than consensus arrived at. Dialogue does not serve to arbitrate conflicts or find one solution acceptable to all parties to the conflict. Dialogue that we have in mind here is a cornerstone of solidarity, because it does not enforce identity formation, but contributes to the constitution and fortification of similarity. Non-consensual dialogue is a political actualisation of features of language-as-action, which I portrayed in the Bakhtin chapter.

4.3  Non-Consensual Democracy: Dialogue and Understanding Non-consensual democracy’s fundamental premise is that the primary function of political dialogue is understanding and not agreement. In the previous chapters, I argued for this assertion, referring to pragmatist ideas and, first of all, to Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue. Taking the role of the other, Mead’s central category, does not mean that we are able to look at the world through the other’s eyes. And relational meaning of a word entails ambiguity of meanings and their being instruments in the coordination of action, rather than fixed notions that demarcate the space of agreement and consensus. This feature of language, called incommensurability, implies that the difficulty of arriving at an agreement is encoded in the very structure of language. In his book on Wittgenstein, Hans Sluga vividly presents the consequences that such a vision of language functioning has for social theory.26 Sluga’s starting point is the Wittgensteinian assertion that ‘our grammar lacks surveyability’.27 Sluga states that 160

coda: non-consensual democracy in order to appreciate the nature of this difficulty we must understand that ‘grammar’ is meant to be here not a system of abstract grammatical rules but more generally the organized pattern of our linguistic practices. It is this actual structure or order of our language game that proves to be unsurveyable. In fact, we should not be thinking only about language and language games. The human form of life – our society, our culture, our history – each has its grammar and each such grammar we must say that it lacks surveyability.28

Sluga demonstrates that the lack of surveyability has serious implications for the way we understand politics and life as such. He states that in analysing the political system of the United States, we need to consider not only its economic, social or institutional factors, but also the Republicans’ perceptions of the Democrats’ views and vice versa. The complexity of this system practically precludes any complete account of it. Any representation of the system we could possibly produce will be fragmentary or approximate only. Ultimately, Sluga declares: It follows a fortriori that the totality of political viewpoints within the American political system will also be unsurveyable. We have thus, a cascade of levels of unsurveyability. And the same holds for totalities such as a human society, a human culture or civilization, and, of course, the human form of life as a whole. They all exemplify a type of complexity that goes far beyond that of grammar and language. In order to distinguish them I will call them hyper-complex.29

Sluga writes that Wittgenstein realised, of course, that all endeavours to create a synoptic representation of our grammars, languages and forms of life were inevitably doomed to failure. He believed that in such circumstances we should ‘abandon the attempt to construct a synoptic representation of unsurveyable totalities and look, instead, for surveyable representations of those specific aspects of such totalities that initially generated our confusion’.30 Sluga thinks, nevertheless, that even if the solution Wittgenstein proposed is satisfying at the level of language, it may be inadequate in the case of hypercomplex totalities: The reason is that the agents within such a hyper-complex totality require a comprehensive view of that totality. In order to act politically, for instance, agents require a comprehensive view of the political system. In order to engage in a culture, agents need to have an overall view of that culture. In order to participate in a historical course of actions, agents need to have a historical perspective. These views will, of course, be 161

politics of dialogue g­ enerally schematic but they will, nonetheless, be synoptic in character. This is not the case in language. In order to speak a language I do not need an overall view of that language. The question that remains at this point then is what it is for us to be agents within hyper-complex totalities.31

In my view, at the political level, democracy is such a recognition of the impossibility to formulate one, universal viewpoint that extends over our entire society. From this perspective, democracy is an admission of a failure of reason, and it is certainly for that reason that philosophers, starting with Plato, tend to dismiss it. Democratic society is a society of sanctioned, even consecrated, chaos, and hence it eludes any attempts at ordering. As I tried to show above, the Bakhtinian carnival is a liminal situation, in which we can discern the utopian features of an ideal democratic society. The only principles that such a society of democratic carnival upholds are equality and scorn of hierarchical rules, which seek to impose anything on the participants of carnivalesque revelry. If any unified vision of the world emerges amidst the fervor of carnival, it serves only as an immediate object of ridicule and is discarded as a relic of the world from beyond the carnival. Carnival, however, renders only one facet of democracy – namely, its capacity for infinite mutation and constant negotiation of the fundamental notions underpinning it. Carnival is, thus, an utopian expression of what I call a critical community – that is, a community capable of ongoing questioning of its essential identity categories. Resorting to Lefort’s terms, we could say that carnival is a response to the temptation of totalitarianism, but not to the seductions of anarchy, a regular threat to democracy. Overcoming anarchy requires, as Sluga puts it, a comprehensive view of the political system. We know, nevertheless, that because of the impossibility of surveyability, none of the agents within the system is able to produce such a representation. At this point, we touch upon a problem of democracy as a political community that must define the rules of internal discourse enabling political decision-making. Political decisions, namely, must be made for the political system to survive and develop. Democratic decision-making is distinctive in its display of the mechanisms wherewith the decisions arise from the will of the people or at least of the majority that represent the people. If we cannot rely on a universal, commonly endorsed or at least majority endorsed representation of the system, we need to resort to other mechanisms of decision-making. Generally speaking, as already mentioned a few times, modern 162

coda: non-consensual democracy political philosophy has two sets of answers to the question how a political democratic community is at all possible. On the one hand, there are concepts that emphasise consensus, which is achieved through compromise, while on the other, there are concepts which view democracy as an ongoing conflict, which, of course, must take on such forms that forestall democracy transforming into totalitarianism. Resorting to Sluga’s terms, we could say that in the former case we deal with a conviction that agreeing on some common shape of the fragmentary representations is viable, while in the latter we have to do with a claim that one party to the conflict will impose its partial vision on the whole society. The dispute between the two theoretical frameworks revolves, basically speaking, around the question of whether agreement is possible in the first place or whether it is merely a delusion of classical liberalism, while democracy’s only chance is to accept conflict, as Lefort would have it, or to domesticate it, as Mouffe postulates. In response to this controversy, I propose the idea of non-­ consensual democracy grounded in the notion of dialogue inspired by Bakhtin’s concepts. As I argued in more detail in Chapter 2, dialogue is understood here as a vehicle of understanding, rather than of agreement. Dialogue is, of course, a feature of all human interactions, permeating them even under extreme forms of totalitarian regimes. Still, social theory is obliged to identify the conditions in which the ubiquitous dialogue, or – to apply Bakhtin’s formulations – ­dialogical relations, transform/s into a consciously endorsed dialogue with traditions within a critical community and into a consciously endorsed dialogue with political adversaries within nonconsensual democracy. Such dialogue does not lead to agreement, but rather to reflective understanding. In Bakhtin’s conception, dialogue is an extraordinarily complicated, multilayered phenomenon. In the foregoing, I analysed the causes of this complexity in detail. I believe it will suffice here to recall the heteronomy of language, in which the meanings of words span various languages, which, in turn, represent divergent social practices in their ideological incarnations. Moreover, it is not languages that engage in dialogue, but specific people who seek to achieve their goals or at least to convince others. Dialogue among people is always a unique event (sobytie bytia), but its results augment the objectivised culture – that is, they contribute to increasing the dialogical potential of language. Bakhtin studied the dynamics of relationships between the two 163

politics of dialogue levels in-depth and invested considerable effort in finding ways of overcoming their incommensurability. Contemporary scholarly reflection seeks, rather, to separate the two levels meticulously. Living inter-human dialogue is explored by social psychology, in which many interesting laws have been formulated. Numerous empirical studies suggest primarily that upon engaging in dialogue, we start to treat others as our close ones and not as strangers: ‘the involvement in a dialogue about unimportant or conventional matters predisposes people to switch mindlessly to the script of the interaction with an acquaintance, repeatedly rehearsed throughout their past life experience’.32 Dialogue thus ‘enforces’ a certain type of interaction, which results in understanding the other better, but, interestingly, social psychologists also demonstrate that creating such an interaction may be a prelude to manipulating other people’s behaviours. Dialogue, as they pointedly show us, has its darker purposes, too. A decision to engage in dialogue may actually be a decision to submit to manipulation. The mechanisms that psychologists suggest here involve enhancing sensitivity to others’ needs and requests. Still, the fact that a peculiar bond that is formed when we enter dialogue may be used for vile purposes does not eliminate the potential import of that bond for political life. The pragmatist slogan of ‘amelioration through understanding’ sounds particularly up-to-date in the face of an increasingly often diagnosed crisis of democracy. To put it into practice, though, requires a thorough rethinking of democracy not only on the level of a theoretical model of democratic communication, but also on the Bakhtin-postulated level of objectivised culture and institutions accountable for it.

4.4  Non-Consensual Democracy: Culture, Institutions and Understanding My objective in this book was to show how democracy emerges from everyday dialogical interactions among people. Consequently, I have analysed – based on pragmatism – a transition between the everyday and democratic politics, and – based on Bakhtin – dialogue and carnival as inalienable features of society, which underpin the creation of democratic structures. The model I postulate of a critical community as an ideal, utopian democratic community demonstrates how the everyday and dialogue may serve to construct a post-conventional community that could be a cornerstone of democratic society. The institutional facet of the political form of critical ­community – that is, 164

coda: non-consensual democracy non-consensual democracy – has been omitted from consideration, without ever disappearing from my sphere of interest. It is evident that community and its political form are inextricably intertwined – to prove which, I devoted much of my argument in the chapter on critical community – while critical community and non-consensual democracy are by no means an exception to the rule. However, to believe that institutions could be pre-designed to serve as ideal institutions of a given form of democracy is to slide into delusion. Democracy is one vast experiment, and proper institutions can be erected only in the course of political debate and civic negotiation of meanings. Hence, in the concluding part of my argument, I will not prophesy such or other specific solutions. Rather, I would like to articulate some postulates for institutions to satisfy, if they are to be a match to a critical community and facilitate its development. In the face of a ubiquitously identified crisis in the traditional forms of democracy, it is crucial to formulate such postulates. Observing that the crisis is there has come to serve as an obvious starting point for reflection on the possible directions of democracy’s impending transformations and speculations as to whether a new type of democratic society will emerge thereof. A poignant example of such a comprehensive assessment of contemporary democracy is provided by Colin Crouch’s concept of post-democracy, which is informed by a realisation that the growing corporate power, citizenship transformations and emergence of new identity forms spark questions about the tenets of Western democracies and the inevitability of revising them.33 Of course, believing that changing the rules is feasible, we embrace the most optimistic scenario. At the same time, more and more voices are being heard, claiming that the logic of global development may jeopardise the very ideals of democracy. The global challenges, both natural and economic ones (e.g. climatic changes and dismantling of the competences of the nation-state and the substrate of modern liberal democracy, respectively), unsettle one of the two pillars that democracy rests on: sovereignty of the people. The other pillar – inalienable rights of the individual – is vanishing as we speak in the wake of ‘a global war on terror’, which legitimises and prompts common acceptance of surveillance mechanisms, which have been intensified throughout modernity. It seems that the last word in the grand dispute about the sources and shape of liberal society belongs to Hobbes, rather than to Locke. Individuals exchange their freedom for security, and the people cede their power to the sovereign. 165

politics of dialogue There is a surprisingly universal acceptance of this diagnosis, though its assessment is by no means equally univocal. On the one hand, we have a group of ‘the prophets of the Apocalypse’, who should be historically associated with Michel Foucault and are, perhaps, most impressively represented now by Giorgio Agamben. On the other hand, we have optimistic advocates of transforming politics into post-politics, led by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck. Whether we opt for a gloomy vision of escalating surveillance culminating in biopower or for an optimistic vision of a monitored and rational globalisation, its excesses corrected by an equally global civil society, we are asked to interrogate the functionality of traditional dimensions of liberal democracy. The decisions that lie within the competence of ‘the will of the people’ are made by an expertsupported administration and may pertain, if deemed necessary, also to a person’s individual rights. Furthermore, both contradictory perspectives are informed by the same conviction that uniform, totalising forces are currently at work, ‘imposing’ their solutions on us. The forces may be viewed as hostile, enslaving and turning Western societies into a concentration camp or, contrariwise, as friendly and offering rational solutions. In the former case, the state administration is seen as governing ‘the state of exception’, if it can be said to be governed by anything or anybody in the first place. In the latter case, the state administration features as a site where rational decisions emerge in a consultation process involving citizens and experts. All these tendencies make it desirable, if not simply imperative, to rethink democracy, starting from its weak points. Avishai Margalit observes that it is not justice that brings us into normative politics, but injustice. Not equality, but inequality; not happiness, but suffering; not dignity, but humiliation. And so it should be. Negative politics, the politics that counters evil, should come before positive politics, which promotes good. There is more urgency, if not importance, in fighting evil than in furthering good. Moreover, there is greater clarity and agreement in identifying evil than in recognizing and agreeing on the good. Thus urgency and epistemic priority are good reasons to adopt negative politics over positive politics.34

Looked at from this perspective, contemporary democracy reveals its most acute failing in a deficiency of dialogue. Basically, all of the approaches to democracy outlined above see either an exclusion of, or severe constraints to, dialogue. Generally speaking, the most inter166

coda: non-consensual democracy esting developments in modern theories of democracy focus on the ways to reactivate dialogue. New social movements, famously epitomised by the ‘Occupy movement’, expose a dramatic inadequacy of the forms of dialogue practiced so far and call for the replacement and/or complementation of them with new modes of dialogical communication. In recent years, we have seen such new modes of dialogical communication germinate across the world, from Tunisia to Ukraine. These events enable us to read the dynamic behaviours of the social masses anew. Ever since Gustave Le Bone published his seminal study, the crowd has been presumed to be guided primarily by emotions and eschew any dialogue or rational thinking. Given the concept of non-consensual dialogue, it seems that the problem ensues rather from the fact that the crowd theorists have adopted a specific definition of dialogue as invariably leading to consensus. This has removed a number of phenomena that are essential to the constitution of democracy from the researchers’ conceptual horizon. Pierre Rosanvallon stresses that in his book on counter-democracy: ‘The history of real democracies has always involved tension and conflict.’35 He also emphasises that [i]f we wish to comprehend the variety of democratic experiences, we must therefore consider two aspects of the phenomenon: the functions and dysfunctions of electoral representative institutions on the one hand and the organization of distrust on the other. Until now, historians and political theorists have been primarily concerned with the first aspect.36

Of course, it is a formidable challenge to imagine democratic institutions that would be able to absorb the potential inherent in dissatisfaction and remake it into positive energy feeding better understanding. Before such a project is embarked upon, thinking about democratic society must be incisively revised. And changes would have to commence at the level of educational theory, in which concepts of education for resistance and understanding would have to be developed.37 Changes would also have to affect the theory of democracy; democracy redefined as a form of life in which people seek mutual understanding, while institutions are obliged to promote actions that are oriented towards such understanding. A project of non-consensual democracy does not magically materialise in or from a void. In the previous chapters, I highlighted its links with many contemporary concepts of democracy. What seems to me crucial and deserving of particular attention, in this concluding part of my argument, is combining concepts that foreground 167

politics of dialogue the spontaneous activity of the masses in defense of freedom and democracy with those that, like various types of deliberative democracy, seek to improve the existing modes of democratic debate. Without the popular activity, without the emotional engagement of the people, no democratic society stands a chance of surviving. It is evident, however, that those spontaneous outbursts of anger meant to safeguard democracy are an exception, rather than a rule. Hence, many thinkers who, like Michel Foucault, saw such outbursts as the essence of liberal democracy were sternly disillusioned with its ‘regular’ forms, with the bureaucratic machinery of representative democracy. Its defects have not escaped the notice of deliberative democracy advocates, who insist that arriving at a democratic consensus is a far more complicated issue than voting, in which the majority eliminates the minority’s voice. Although in its general attitude deliberative democracy seeks consensus, some of its proponents also underline the role of discord. James Bohman, inspired largely by pragmatism, may serve as a perfect case in point here. He writes that many philosophical approaches to public reason still have very little to say about reasonable disagreement; they suggest that contentious issues simply be excluded. The reconstructive approach that I have taken here argues that deliberation guided by public reason can answer such questions in ways that promote cooperation.38

From my perspective, public reason and rationality are not particularly important for seeking mutual understanding, but the very capturing of them through ‘analyzing existing practices for their potential for rationality rather than constructing new ones on the basis of a practice-independent standard’39 seems to promise to bring us closer to non-consensual and deliberative democracy. And yet, what I find crucial seems to evade deliberation and, at the same time, to surface in spontaneous movements of fighters for, and defenders of, democracy. I mean new forms and possibilities of dialogue. Frequently, they diverge from any standards of rationality, but they also prompt new, often astonishing social forms into materialisation. Both the forms of dialogue alone, as well as forms of social life that emerge from them, are an actualisation and universalisation of dialogical relations that permeate everyday life. Social theory must live up to the challenge of clarifying and augmenting the potential of understanding, which is persistently threatened by abstract formulas forwarded by sundry ideologies. 168

coda: non-consensual democracy

Notes 1. Kostas Vlassopoulos, Politics: Antiquity and its Legacy (London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 2010), pp. 80–1. 2. Bernard Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice, and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 210 [emphasis in original]. 3. Ibid. p. 219. 4. Ibid. p. 220. 5. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowitt (London: Forgotten Books, 2007), pp. 20–1. 6. Yack, The Problem of a Political Animal, p. 231. 7. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 16. 8. Yack, The Problem of a Political Animal, p. 33. 9. Ibid. p. 65. 10. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 11. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 12. Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. David Ames Curtis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 21–2. 13. Immanuel Kant, ‘An answer to the question: “what is Enlightenment?”’ in Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 55 [emphasis in original]. 14. Edmund Burke, ‘Reflections on the revolution in France’, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 3 (New York: Cosimo Inc., 2008), p. 346. 15. Aletta J. Norval, Aversive Democracy: Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 185 [emphasis in original]. 16. Ernesto Laclau, ‘Why do empty signifiers matter to politics?’ in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 36–46. 17. Avishai Margalit, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 18. Ibid. p. 24. 19. Ibid. p. 25. 20. James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 16. 21. Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959). 22. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 52. 23. Hauke Brunkhorst, Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal 169

politics of dialogue Community, trans. Jeffrey Flynn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 64. 24. Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). 25. Mouffe, On the Political, p. 15. 26. Hans Sluga, Wittgenstein (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), §122. 28. Sluga, Wittgenstein, p. 98. 29. Ibid. p. 110. 30. Ibid. p. 111. 31. Ibid. 32. Dariusz Dolinski, Magdalena Nawrat and Izabela Rudak, ‘Dialogue involvement as a social influence technique’, Pers Soc Psychol Bull, 27, 2001, p. 1404. 33. Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). 34. Avishai Margalit, ‘Privacy in the decent society’, Social Research, 68: 1, Spring 2001, p. 255. 35. Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy: Politics in the Age of Distrust, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 3. 36. Ibid. p. 5. 37. Leszek Koczanowicz, ‘Education for resistance, education for consensus? Non consensual democracy and education’, in Tomasz Szkudlarek (ed.), Education and the Political (Rotterdam, Boston and Taipei: Sense Publisher, 2013), pp. 25–40. 38. Bohman, Public Deliberation, p. 241. 39. Ibid.

170

Index of Persons

Eagleton, Terry, 130 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 118 Engels, Friedrich, 97 Esposito, Roberto, 83

Addams, Jane, 7, 16 Agamben, Giorgio, 83, 115–17, 166 Anderson, Perry, 102–3 Arendt, Hannah, 20, 157 Aristotle, 30, 96, 114, 147–50 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 42, 44–6, 48–66, 68, 70–80, 82–5, 102, 137–9, 153, 158–60, 163–4 Bakhurst, David, 48 Bataille, George, 112–13 Beck, Urlich, 166 Benjamin, Walter, 111, 128 Bergson, Henri, 73 Bernstein, Richard, 33 Bloom, Harold, 131 Blumer, Herbert, 34 Bodin, Jean, 96 Bohman, James, 17, 25, 33, 155, 168 Bourdieu, Pierre, 111, 128 Brandist, Craig, 44 Brunkhorst, Hauke, 157 Burke, Edmund, 96, 152 Butler, Judith, 111 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 37–8, 151, 159 Cavell, Stanley, 153 Clausewitz, Carl von, 95 Confucius, 126 Connolly, William E., 93, 134 Cook, Gary A., 16 Crehan, Kate, 100 Crouch, Colin, 165 Derrida, Jacques, 69–71 Dewey, John, 6, 8, 14, 17, 25–30, 32–5, 37, 91–2, 124–5, 137, 153, 160 Dickinson, Emily, 42 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 54–5, 58, 64

Flynn, Bernard, 81 Foucault, Michel, 35, 83, 98, 111–12, 119, 128–9, 166, 168 Freud, Sigmund, 123 Frye, Charles E., 95 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 110 Gaertner, Johannes A., 106 Galton, Francis, 121–2 Gardiner, Michael, 46, 52 Gentile, Gianni, 106 Giddens, Anthony, 166 Gramsci, Antonio, 98–104, 117 Granovetter, Mark S., 136 Habermas, Jürgen, 42–3, 55–6, 58, 62, 84, 132–5, 146, 154 Haidt, Jonathan, 39 Hamann, Johann Georg, 120 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 19, 110 Heidegger, Martin, 43, 96, 114 Herbert, Zbigniew, 69, 131 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 95–6, 104, 110, 120–1, 151 Hermans, Hubert J. M., 138 Hobbes, Thomas, 96, 119 Hoffman, John, 104 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr, 31 Honneth, Axel, 28, 32 Humbolt, Wilhelm von, 120 Husserl, Edmund, 11 James, William, 124 Joas, Hans, 8, 23, 25

171

politics of dialogue Jonsson, Stefan, 115, 124 Kant, Immanuel, 15, 152 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 79–81, 118 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 133 Konrád, George, 68 Lacan, Jacques, 124, 154 Laclau, Ernesto, 111, 154 Lange, James, 130 Le Bon, Gustave, 129, 167 Lefort, Claude, 81, 92, 157–8, 162–3 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, 98–9 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 71 Locke, John, 165 Lyotard, Jean-François, 43 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 96, 156 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 108–9 McNally, David, 83 Mandelstam, Osip, 64 Manent, Pierre, 94 Mann, Thomas, 104 Margalit, Avishai, 154, 166 Marx, Karl, 97, 156 Mead, George Herbert, 7–19, 21–30, 33–4, 37, 42, 50, 54, 58, 62, 86, 91, 124–5, 133–4, 139, 153, 157, 159 Medvdev, Pavel Nikolaevich, 49 Mencius, 126 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 122 Mouffe, Chantal, 36, 111, 156–9, 163 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 112–15, 117 Norval, Aletta J., 153 Pascal, Blaise, 119–20, 152 Perry, Hellen Swick, 38 Piaget, Jean, 139 Plato, 54–5, 162

Plessner, Helmuth, 122–3, 127 Przeworski, Adam, 169 Rabelais, François, 78, 82 Rawls, John, 94 Rorty, Richard, 43, 131–2, 134–5 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 167 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 20, 22 Ryder, John, 36 Sandel, Michael, 108 Santner, Eric L., 83 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 122 Schmitt, Carl, 20, 95, 96, 99, 103, 117, 157–8 Shusterman, Richard, 125–9, 160 Silva, Filipe Carreira de, 39 Sluga, Hans, 96, 160–3 Smith, Thomas Vernon, 7, 28–32, 36, 159 Staten, Henry, 158 Sternhell, Zeev, 94 Szymborska, Wisława, 122 Taylor, Charles, 109–12, 120, 130 Todorov, Tzvetan, 78 Unger, Robert Mangabeira, 6, 25, 38 Voloshinov, Valentin Nikolaevich, 46–7, 52, 102 Vygotsky, Lev Semyonovich, 48 Walzer, Michael, 67–8 Warren, Mark, 135 Weber, Max, 111 Winnicott, Donald, 12 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 42–3, 91, 160–1 Yack, Bernard, 147–9

172

Index of Subjects

action, 10–11, 14–15 agonism, 36, 157–8 answerability, 76 antagonism, 36, 157–8 author, 53–4, 58, 62 authorship, 62–3 autonomy, 37–8, 159 being-as-event, 66, 72 biopolitics, 83 bodiliness, 118, 122, 124 body, 26, 33, 118–19, 122, 124–30 King’s Two Bodies, 79, 80, 118 carnival, 78–80, 82–5, 160, 162 civil society, 67–8, 99 communication, 9–10, 18–19, 24–5, 27, 33, 36, 45, 50, 76 communism, 31 communitarianism, 107–8 community, 26, 28, 32, 34, 36–7, 92–4, 98, 100–6, 108–9, 111–13, 116–17, 122–3, 135–6, 140, 149–50 critical, 137–40, 153, 158–9, 162, 164–5 democratic, 150–1, 165 embodied 118, 121, 124, 127, 129 inoperative, 112 political 149–50, 162 of communication, 62 compromise, 154–55 conceptual horizons, 56–8, 60 conflict, 22–3, 147–8, 156 consensus, 36, 135, 138, 155–6, 168 crowd, 15, 124, 129–30 culture, 65, 71, 75–6, 78 democracy, 7, 15–17, 19–20, 25–6, 28, 32–3, 36, 70, 81, 91–2, 94, 130,

137, 149, 153, 158–9, 162, 164, 167 deliberative, 33, 155 liberal, 31 non-consensual, 146, 153–4, 160, 163, 165, 167 dialogic relationships, 53–4, 76–7 dialogue, 36–7, 50–1, 55–8, 61–3, 82–3, 85, 137–8, 140, 153, 155, 163–4, 167 transcendent 63 difference, 158–9 economy, 17–18, 21, 24, 34, 50 embodiment, 83, 84 empty space, 81, 84, 93 Enlightenment, 94, 120, 151–2 equality, 29–30 ethics, 23, 25, 68, 71, 133 co-existential, 66, 71 everyday life, 16, 24, 153 fascism, 107 finalisation, 49 fraternity, 29–30 gesture, 9–11, 125 habit, 26, 119–20, 128 hegemony, 97–9, 104 heteroglossia, 51–2 hybridisation, 60–1 identity, 110–11, 116, 158–9 ideology, 46, 102 behavioural, 46–7, 102 individual, 28, 34, 36, 71, 93–4, 104, 106, 113 ironist, 131

173

politics of dialogue language, 8, 42–5, 47, 52–3, 55, 59–61, 76–7 -as-system, 43, 48 -in-action, 43–4, 46, 48, 50, 52, 76, 78, 137 poetic, 52, 54 unitary 51–2, 59 liberalism, 93–4, 104–5 liberty, 29, 30 mass, 15, 124, 129–30 meaning, 42–3, 54–5, 58 modernity, 35, 82, 93–4, 96, 104 monologue, 50 Nazism, 31 other, 66, 71, 74, 76, 81 generalised, 12, 14–15, 18, 58, 139 taking the role of, 13–14, 58, 125, 137, 160 play and game, 11–13 political theology, 79, 82, 84 politics, 20, 23–6, 92, 96, 104 polyphony, 64 post-politics, 166

religion, 17–18, 20–1, 24–5, 29, 31, 34, 50 responsibility, 70–2 self, 7, 13, 15, 18, 22, 25, 26, 37, 71–6, 110, 113, 138–9 dialogical 138, 139–40, 159 significant symbol, 10, 125 solidarity, 157, 159 sovereign, 79, 95–6 sportsmanship, 31–2, 36 Stalinism, 107 superaddressee, 62–3 text, 50–1 totalitarianism, 81, 84, 104–5, 158, 162 tradition, 109–10 truth, 71–2 understanding, 48, 51, 53, 55–7, 59–60, 77, 85, 160, 163–4, 168 universalisation, 18, 34, 36–7, 50, 58, 72–3, 136, 157 universality, 17, 19, 70–1 utterance, 45–51, 76, 83

174