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I was just reading about the anti-emo riots that have taken place in Mexico recently. As well as being simultaneously sad, depressing and funny (maybe it’s just the phrase “anti-emo riot”?), it’s an interesting example of what Chantal Mouffe is talking about with the idea of agonistic pluralism. An agonistic understanding of politics takes issue with attempts to find a final closure to conflict: within much liberal though, this manifests itself as an attempt to work out principles of justice which will reconcile competing interests and allow everyone to live happily ever after. As Bonnie Honnig puts it, this valorisation of consensus as the final end of politics in actuality displaces politics. Politics is intrinsically conflictual. To try and turn into a framework for reconciling competing interests is to try and replace politics with economics. On this account, the task of political philosophy should not be how to overcome competition and achieve consensus but rather to consider how we should deal with the irreducibility of conflict.
All identities are defined by what they are not: to be a Christian, is to not be a Muslim, a Jew, an atheist (etc). Consequently all relationships between identities are potentially conflictual. Unlike liberal politics which leaves identities ‘off-stage’ and deals only with interests, an agonistic politics tries to bring all relationships within the sphere of political contestation. Excluding them doesn’t make conflict go away, it merely precludes it being played on in an agonistic (i.e. adversarial) form, as a contest between people who agree on the rule of the game. This is the realm of politics: a space of agonistic contestation. When conflict is forced to play itself out beyond the political sphere, it may take on an antagonistic form: a struggle between enemies rather than legitimate adversaries.
The far more questionable, yet still very interesting, part of Mouffe’s thesis is the way these dynamics play themselves out in real-life liberal politics. She argues that the capitalist liberal democracies, profoundly shaped by a neo-liberal hegemony, effectively exclude all conflict from the politic sphere; in the process reducing the political into the economic. Politics increasingly becomes a technical exercise in administration, as all parties agree on the rules of the game, they simply disagree on the way the game should be administered. As the obvious case in point: witness the convergence of New Labour and the Tory party under David Cameron.
However this displacement of politics doesn’t eliminate politics but rather sublimates it: the conflict that would play itself out between adversaries in the political sphere instead plays itself out antagonistically outside it. More so, a properly adversarial politics provides a vehicle for other, more psychologically rooted, tendencies towards aggressive conflict to play themselves out in a less destructive agonistic form. When politics is displaced, these aggressive and conflictual tendencies find expression through (often violent) identity conflicts. In short: a confrontational but agonistic politics allows all sorts of conflictual and aggressive tendencies to play themselves out in a less destructive form. When such an agonistic politics is eroded, this same tendency towards conflict finds expression through all sorts of agressive identity conflicts: religious fundamentalism, racism and, getting back to the start of the discussion, conflicts between sub-cultures. In this case: anti-emo riots?
Mercy is spontaneous because the least interruption, the least calculation, the least dilution of it in order to serve something else destroys it entirely, indeed turns it into the opposite of what it is, unmercifulness.
I’d largely agree with Knud Logstrup on this point. When instrumental concerns occur in the moral context, the situation is irredeemably distorted: if we start to think about what we have to gain from acting morally we cease to act morally. This doesn’t preclude us acting in ways that could be deemed moral by others but the character of the act is now of a different kind. I guess this entails that there’s a deep tension between moral action and strategic action. Perhaps even a fundamental incompatability. If we’re thinking stategically, considering the options available to us in a situation we’re attempting to negotiate and how these variously impact on our prior concerns, we can’t help but consider courses of action instrumental terms i.e. how effective is option x as a means to my achieving my end y.
What’s worrying is the extent to which strategic thinking is of ever increasing importance in the modern world. In fairly stable social settings, tending towards continuity over time, strategic thinking may be a requirement of specific situations but it’s not a necessarily skill to orientate ourselves in a social world. Yet with economic and cultural globalisation come the rise of flexibile capitalism, the decline of the job for life, frequently changing working conditions and demands, more consumer choice than ever before, an ever growing awareness of different cultures and different ways, the commingling of countless different options about how to dress, how to act and who to be.
The sheer volume of choice available necessitates that we think strategically simply because things that were previously given (identity, tradition, relationships) become open questions which the individual has to answer themselves using the resources they can muster. So, as per the earlier argument, does the increasing necessity of strategic thinking come with a corresponding erosion of the capacity for genuinely moral action? I hope not.
“The owners of a new restaurant named “Hitler’s Cross” in the Indian city of Mumbai have changed its name after protests from the Jewish community.
The restaurant opened last week in the city’s outskirts, initially displaying a giant poster of Hitler.
But now one of the restaurant’s owners has acknowledged that naming the restaurant after Hitler was “most inappropriate” and has apologised.
The small Jewish community said they were insulted over the choice of name.
How surreal. Not least of all because there’s no mention of what justification (if any) they gave for the choice of name.
The columnist Cynthia Heimel argues that because celebrity figures are known by so many people, they serve as forms of social glue, allowing people from different points of society to converse with each other, to share feelings, and essentially to carry on informal relations. “Celebrities,” she proposes, “are our common frames of reference, celebrity loathing and revilement crosses all cultural boundaries. Celebrities are not our community elders, they are our community.”
Obviously the claim about crossing all cultural boundaries is false. How true is the rest though? Off the top of my head, I’m not really sure.
We burn with desire to find solid ground and ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the infinite. But our groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to the abysses.
So wrote Blaise Pascal. It’s wonderfully indicative of the original sin of the foundationalist project that threatens to corrupt our endeavours even when we believe we’ve moved beyond it. It’s the aspiration to reach the infinite that necessitates the ultimate sure foundation. If we give up on directing our tower towards the infinite, the ultimately sure foundations aren’t necessary. I’m not sure he’d assent to it but Otto Neurath’s boat analogy nicely describes the (practical) success we can have in the absense of “ultimate sure” foundations:
We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
The principal hero of this book is human relationship. This book’s central characters are men and women, our contemporaries, despairing at being abandoned to their own fits and feeling easily disposable, yearning for the security of togetherness and for a helping hand to count on in a moment of trouble, and so desperate to ‘relate’; yet wary of the state of ‘being related’ and particularly of being related ‘for good’, not to mention forever – since they fear that such a state may bring burdens and cause strains they neither feel able nor are willing to bear, and so may severely limit the freedom they need – yes, your guess is right – to relate…No wonder that ‘relationships’ are one of the main engines of the present-day ‘counselling boom’. The complexity is too dense, too stubborn and too difficult to unpack or unravel for individuals to do the job unassisted […] what they hope to hear from the counsellors is how to square the circle: to eat the cake and have it, to cream off the sweet delights of relationships while omitting its bitter and tougher bits; how to force relationship to empower without disempowering, enable without disabling, fulfilling with burdening…
While I think Zygmunt Bauman is spot on about the paradoxical demands people make of relationships that are manifested socially through the ‘counselling boom’, I think the dynamic at play predates the rise of therapeutic culture. There’s an irreconcilable tension between the individual and community. To be an individual we must be recognised as such by a group of people not ourselves. Yet that group carries within it the ever present threat of the negation of our individuality. If we get too close to it, we risk losing our individuality as we’re subsumed into the group. Yet if we get too far from it, our sense of ourselves as an individual begins to break down in the absence of the group’s recognition. It’s a tension that can never be finally resolved. It demands perpetual negotiation. Perhaps why “hell is other people”?
I think what’s new is the instrumentalisation of social relations: more than ever, our relationships are built rather than given and, naturally enough, we build them to criteria. There’s always the spectre of cost/benefit. Even if we don’t think in these terms, or admit to thinking in these terms, the possibility of making the judgement hangs over the relationships we choose to form. As a result they will (sometimes) feel irrevocably fragile. It’s a fragility which seems most pronounced when held up against the solidity and security of the given relationships we’ve been ‘liberated’ from and that, as a result of our newfound freedom, we can never (innocently) go back to.
Saved here for next time I’m on something:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Fraser_spiral.svg
This is probably my all time favourite photo. Just look at the passion as London burns in the background, sounding the death knoll for Thatcher’s rule.
Lesley Stahl: We have heard that half a million children have died in Iraq. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price? We think the price is worth it.
Earlier today I came across this exhange for the first time in ages. It’s been said before but it needs saying again. What an evil bitch. Who according to Wiki later claimed that she didn’t mean it:
I must have been crazy; I should have answered the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaws in the premise behind it. … As soon as I had spoken, I wished for the power to freeze time and take back those words. My reply had been a terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy, and wrong. … I had fallen into a trap and said something that I simply did not mean. That is no one’s fault but my own.
I just came across this utterly surreal blog started by a man who claims he had sex and did crack in the back of a limo with Obama in 1999. It’s littered with comments clearly posted by himself under pseudonyms and he’s apparantly attempting to sue three internet usernames (he doesn’t have their real names) for $3 million people for defamation. This is quite possibly the weirdest blog I’ve ever come across.
