Off

Jon M
, Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements
, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1.
An agent doing the acting ---“The
United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy
of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value,
the agent is the subject of the sentence
. 2.
The verb should
—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action
. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action through governmental means
. 4.
A specification of directions
or a limitation of the action desired
. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred.
The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur
. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.
, "legalize", www.businessdictionary.com/definition/legalize.html legalize
¶
Definition
¶
To make enforceable, justifiable, or lawful by judicial or legislative sanction.
, *David, Lecturer in Communication studies and rhetoric.
Advisor to Miami Urban Debate League. Director of Debate at U Miami, Former President of
CEDA, and **Austin, attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, JD,
Suffolk University, Argumentation and Debate, Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision
Making, 121-4
Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a controversy
, a difference of opinion or a conflict of interest
before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a
feet or value
or policy, there is no need or opportunity for debate
; the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four,” because there is simply no controversy about this statement.
Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals
, interests, or expressed positions
of issues, there is no debate.
Controversy invites decisive choice between competing positions. Debate cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question
or questions to be answered.
For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration
. How many illegal immigrants live in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity to gain citizenship? Does illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? How are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification card, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many
more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration
.
Participation in this “debate” is likely to be emotional and intense.
However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy.
To be discussed and

resolved effectively, controversies are best understood when seated clearly such that all parties to the debate share an understanding about the objective of the debate.
This enables focus on substantive and objectively identifiable issues facilitating comparison of competing argumentation leading to effective decisions.
Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions
, general
feelings of tension without opportunity for resolution, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the U.S. Congress to make substantial progress on the immigration debate
.
Of course, arguments may be presented without disagreement.
For example, claims are presented and supported within speeches, editorials, and advertisements even without opposing or refutational response.
Argumentation occurs in a range of settings from informal to formal, and may not call upon an audience or judge to make a forced choice among competing claims.
Informal discourse occurs
as conversation or panel discussion without demanding a decision about a dichotomous or yes/no question. However, by definition, debate requires
"reasoned
judgment on a proposition
.
The proposition is a statement about which competing advocates will offer alternative (pro or con) argumentation calling upon their
audience or adjudicator to decide.
The proposition provides focus for the discourse and guides the decision process.
Even when a decision will be made through a process of compromise, it is important to identify the beginning positions of competing advocates to begin negotiation and movement toward a center
, or consensus position.
It is frustrating and usually unproductive to attempt to make a decision when deciders are unclear as to what the decision is about.
The proposition may be implicit in some applied debates (“Vote for me!”); however, when a vote or consequential decision is called for (as in the courtroom or in applied parliamentary debate) it is essential that the proposition be explicitly expressed
(“the defendant is guilty!”). In academic debate, the proposition provides essential
guidance for the preparation of the debaters prior to the debate, the case building and discourse presented during the debate, and the decision to be made by the
debate judge
after the debate.
Someone disturbed by the problem of a growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, “Public schools are doing a terrible job!
They' are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms."
That
same concerned
citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this” or, worse, “It’s too complicated a problem to deal with."
Groups
of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations
, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions
, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow.
But if a precise question is posed—such as “What can be done to improve public education?”—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up
simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution
step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions
, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies, The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in atrisk communities” and “Resolved; That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with
educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate.
They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference
.
This focus contributes to better and more informed decision making with the potential for better results
. In academic debate, it provides better depth of argumentation and enhanced
opportunity for reaping the educational benefits
of participation. In the next section, we will consider the challenge of framing the proposition for debate, and its role in the debate.
To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision
making by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly defined
.
If we merely talk about a topic, such as ‘"homelessness,” or “abortion,” Or “crime,” or “global warming,” we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish a profitable basis for argument.
For example, the statement
“Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword” is debatable
, yet
by itself fails to provide much basis for dear argumentation
. If we take this statement to mean Iliad the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose, perhaps promoting positive social change. (Note that “loose” propositions, such as the example above, may be defined by their advocates in such a way as to facilitate a clear contrast of competing sides; through definitions and debate they “become” clearly understood statements even though they may not begin as such. There are formats for debate that often begin with this sort of proposition. However, in any debate, at some point, effective and meaningful discussion

relies on identification of a clearly stated or understood proposition
.) Back to the example of the written word versus physical force.
Although we now have a general subject
, we have not yet stated a problem.
It is still too broad
, too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, cyber-warfare, disinformation, or what? What does it mean to be “mightier" in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be, “Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Laurania of our support in a certain crisis?” The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as “Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania.” Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution.
This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy
by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference
, which will be outlined in the following discussion.
John
, Professor of Social and Political Theory, The Australian National University,
Reconciling Pluralism and Consensus as Political Ideals, American Journal of Political
Science,Vol. 50, No. 3, July 2006, Pp. 634–649
2.
A more radical contemporary pluralism is suspicious of liberal and communitarian devices for reconciling difference. Such a critical pluralism is associated with agonists such as Connolly
(1991), Honig (1993), and Mouffe
(2000), and difference democrats such as Young
(2000). As Honig puts it, “Difference is just another word for what used to be called pluralism” (1996, 60). Critical pluralists
resemble liberals in that they begin from the variety of ways it is possible to experience the world, but stress that the experiences and perspectives of marginalized
and oppressed groups are likely to be very different from dominant groups
.
They
also have a strong suspicion ofliberal theory that looks neutral but in
practice supports and serves the powerful.
Difference democrats are hostile to consensus
, partly because consensus
decisionmaking (of the sort popular in 1970s radical groups) conceals informal oppression
under the guise of concern for all by disallowing dissent
(Zablocki 1980). But the real target is political theory that deploys consensus, especially deliberative and liberal theory. Young (1996,
125–26) argues that the appeals to unity and the common good that deliberative theorists under sway of the consensus ideal stress as the proper forms of political communication can often be oppressive. For deliberation
so oriented all too easily equates the common good with the interests of the more powerful
, thus sidelining legitimate concerns of the marginalized. Asking the underprivileged to set aside their particularistic concerns also means marginalizing their favored forms of expression, especially the telling of personal stories
(Young 1996, 126).3 Speaking for an agonistic conception of democracy (to which Young also subscribes; 2000, 49–51),
Mouffe states:
To
negate the ineradicable character of antagonism and aim at a universal rational consensus
— that is the real threat to democracy
. Indeed, this can lead to violence
being unrecognized and hidden behind appeals to
“rationality
,” as is often the case in liberal thinking. (1996, 248)
Mouffe is a radical pluralist: “By pluralism I mean the end of a substantive idea of the good life” (1996, 246).
But neither
Mouffe nor Young want to abolish communication in the name of pluralism and difference
; much of their work advocates sustained attention to communication.
Mouffe also cautions against uncritical celebration of difference
, for some differences imply “subordination and should therefore be challenged by a radical democratic politics” (1996, 247).
Mouffe raises the question of the terms in which engagement

across difference might proceed
. Participants should ideally accept that the positions of others are legitimate, though not as a result of being persuaded in argument. Instead, it is a matter of being open to conversion due to adoption of a particular kind of democratic attitude that converts antagonism into agonism, fighting into critical engagement
, enemies into adversaries who are treated with respect
. Respect here is notjust (liberal) toleration, but positive validation of the position of others.
For Young, a communicative democracy would be composed of people showing “equal respect,” under “procedural rules of fair discussion and decisionmaking
” (
1996,
126). Schlosberg speaks of “agonistic respect” as “a critical pluralist ethos” (1999, 70).
Mouffe and Young
both want pluralism to be regulated by a particular kind of attitude, be it respectful, agonistic, or even in
Young’s (2000, 16–51) case reasonable.Thus neither proposes unregulated pluralism as an alternative to (deliberative) consensus
.
This regulation cannot be just procedural, for that would imply “anything goes” in terms of the substance of positions
. Recall thatMouffe rejects differences that imply subordination.
Agonistic ideals demand judgments about what is worthy of respect and what is not
. Connolly (1991, 211) worriesabout dogmatic assertions
and denials of identity that fuel existential resentments that would have to be changed to make
agonism possible. Young seeks “transformation of private
, self-regarding desires into public appeals to justice
” (2000, 51). Thus for Mouffe, Connolly, and Young alike, regulative principles for democratic communication are not just attitudinal or procedural; they also refer to the substance of the kinds of claims that are worthy of respect
.
These authors would not want to legislate substance and are suspicious of
the content of any alleged consensus
.
But in retreating from “anything goes” relativism, they need principles to regulate the substance of what rightfully belongs in democratic debate.
Dana
, prof of political science, Amherst, Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action, Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1992), pp. 274-
308
The representative thinking made possible by disinterested judgment is Arendt‘s Kantian version of Nietzsche's perspectival objectivity, the objectivity born of using “more" and “differ-em" eyes to judge/interpret a thing.”
There is
, however, a n obvious and crucial difference between perspectives represented through the free play of imagination and the “perspective seeing" that Nietzsche describes. For Nietzsche, the ability to view the world aesthetically presupposes liberation from any residual sense that the link between signifier and signified is in any way nonarbitrary. Having “more” and “different
” eyes
simply means the ability to relativize all accepted meanings, to dissolve their
apparent
solidity in the free play of signifiers
.135
In
Kant and
Arendt
, on the other hand, the free play of the imagination, the capacity for representative thought
, has the effect of focusing the judging agent's attention on the publicly available aspects of the representation
.'‘‘‘’
The representative nature of judgment enables the transcendence of "individual limitations" and “subjective private conditions,” thereby
freeing us for the purely public aspect of the phenomenon
.
The difference
between genealogical "objectivity" and representative judgment, between the kind of aesthetic distance endorsed by Nietzsche and [hat endorsed by Kant and Arcndt, is summed up by the contrast between Nietzsche’s trope of
“seeing things from another planet" and the
Kantian]
Arendtian appeal to “common sense,” t he sensus communis.m
Nietzschean aestheticism, in the form of perspectivism
, has the effect of either placing one beyond any community of interpretation
(the genealogical standpoint) or denying that a viable “background consensus" exists, thereby robbing the public realm of its fundamental epistemological precondition
.
There can be no arena of common
discourse, no genuinely public space
, whcn the “death of God” leads to the advent of Weber's “waning gods."Us
Lyotard
expresses a similar thought when he links the discovery of an irreducible plurality of incommensurable language games to the decline of the legitimizing metanarratives of modernity

. in such a situation, judgment and interpretation are inevitably aestheticized
: we are left
, in Nietzsche's phrase, with the "yay and nay of the palate.
""°
For Kant, the significance and implications of aesthetic distance are quite opposite. As noted previously, he is struck by the public character of the beautiful, despite the nonobjective quality of aesthetic t’ntpel'ience.“I
The impartiality of detached aesthetic judgment, while not pretending to truth, guarantees that the object or ground of aesthetic satisfaction will be communicable.
This
in turn reveals a quality of taste as judgment
, which is obscured by Nietzsche, and our own subjectivist notion of taste.
Taste judgments of the disinterested sort are characterized by a peculiar claim: the pure judgment of taste "requires the agreement of everyone, and he who describes anything as beautiful claims that everyone ought to give approval to the object in question and describe it as beautiful?”
The communicability of taste judgments
leads Kant to posit the existence of a common sense
, a common “feeling for the world." Indeed, Kant describes taste itself as “a kind of sensus communism“
The aesthetic distance achieved by representative thought thus points to the “grounding” of judging insight in common sense
, a point that Arendt emphasizes. "
Common sense
,” she writes, “ discloses to us the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world; we owe to it the fact that our strictly private and " subjective
" five senses and their sensory data can adjust themselves to a nonsubjective and “objective” world which we have in common and share with others
.“'“ The significance of Kanl’s theory oftaslejudgmcm for politics is that it shows how a nonfoundationalist theory of judgment can in fact serve to strengthen rather than undermine our sense of a shared world of appearances.
Kant's analysis of taste judgment reveals how, in Arendt's words,
“judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass?"5 It does so by highlighting the public-directed claim implicit in all pure judgments of taste, by showing how the expression of approval or disapproval, satisfaction or dissatisfaction appeals to the common sense of one‘s judging peers. In matters of taste, one “expects agreement from everybody else.”"" Oriented toward agreement, relying on common sense, taste judgment emerges, contra Nietmhe, as the activity through which the public world presences itself as appearance, as the activity through which a community “decides how this world, independently of its utility and all our vital interests in it, is to look and sound, what we will see and what men will hear in
Kant‘s theory of judgment thus opens a space between the false objectivism of Plato
(political judgment as a kind of episteme, as determinative judgment) and the subjectivism that accompanies Nietzsche’s endorsement of perspectival valuation
.
Taste judgments
are valid, but their “specific validity“ is to be understood precisely in opposition to the "objective universal validity" that marks cognitive or practical judgments in the Kantian sense. As Arendt says, “its claims to validity can never extend further than the others in whose place the judging person has put himself
for his considerations?“ Taste judgments are crucially dependent on perspective, the "it appears to me," on “the simple fact that each person occupies a place of his own from which he looks upon and judges the world.”"°
Nevertheless, they constantly return us to a world of appearances “common to all its inhabitants. “Kant’s notion of taste judgment provides the perfect model for political judgment
, in Arendt’s opinion, because it preserves appearance and perspective without abolishing
the world.
We can sum up the achievement of Kant’s theory of judgment by saying that it removes
the spectre of the subjectivism of perspectivism
of taste, yet without recourse to objective
or cognitive grounds of validation
. Lacking an objective principle, taste judgments are
necessarily difficult
, and
where their validity is questioned, it can be redeemed only by persuasive means
. As Arendt says in “The Crisis in Culture”: taste judgments (unlike demonstrable facts or truths demonstrated by argument) “share with political opinions that they are persuasive; the judging person — as Kant says quite beautifully -can only ‘woo the consent of everyone else’ in the hope of coming to an agreement with him eventually.”"°
Taste judgments are,
in a word,
redeemed deliberatively. Kant's conception of aesthetic judgment—departing from the exchange of viewpoints necessary for representative thinking and culminating in the persuasive exchange that accompanies the rendering of each judgment
— is thus, for Arendt, political through and through
.‘51
It requires an ongoing process of exchange and deliberation
, one "without criteria," as Lyotard would say)“
This is yet another reason why Kantian taste judgment is the appropriate model for
Arendt’s account
of political judgment, the
“receptive side” of virtuoso action. It reasserts the intersubjective nature of
both appearances and
judgment while severing the links between the common or public and the universal
.
Our capacity for judgment rests on our feeling for the world
, and this requires neither a transcendental ground
for appearances nor universally valid criteria of argumentative rationality
.
Practical questions
emphatically do not admit of truth
.‘”
Yet political judgment
seen as a kind of

taste judgment
nevertheless helps to tame the agon by reintroducing the connection between plurality and deliberation, by showing how the activity of judgment can
, potentially, reveal to an audience what they have in common in the process of articulating their differences
.
And what they have in common
, contra Aristotle and contemporary oommunitarians, are not purposes per se but the world. Debate, not consensus, constitutes the essence of political life
, according to Arcndtf" The conception of taste judgment
proposed by Kant reopens the space of deliberation threatened by an overly agonistic aestheticization of action but in such a way that consensus and agreement are not the Isles of action
and judgment but, at best. a kind of regulative ideal.
The turn to
Kant
thus enables Arendt to avoid the antipolitical tendencies encountered in the actorcentered version of agonistic action
.
The meaning creative capacity of nonsovereign action becomes importantly dependent on the audience
, conceived as a group of deliberating agents exercising their capacity for judgment
. The judgment of appearances or the meaning of action is seen by Arcndt as predicated on a twofold “death of the author”: the actor does not create meaning as the artist does a work1 nor can the audience redeem the meaning of action through judgment unless the individuals who constitute it are able to forget themselves. This is not to say that Arendt’s conception of political action and judgment extinguishes the self; rather, it is to say that self-coherence is achieved through a process of self-disclosure that is importantly decentered for both actor and judge, for the judging spectator is also engaged in the "sharing of words and deeds” in his capacity as a deliberating agent. As Arendt reminds us, “By his manner of judging, the person discloses to an extent also himself, what kind of person he is, and this disclosure, which is involuntary, gains in validity to the degree that it has liberated itself from merely individual idiosyncrasiesm’
The agon is tamed, then, not by retreating from the aestheticization of action but by following its anti-Platonic impulse through to the end.
The
"completion" of the theory
of action by a Kant-inspired theory of judgment retains the focus on action as something heroic
or extraordinary, as beyond good and evil. It does so, however, by shifting the emphasis from world- and self-creation to the world-illuminating power of “great" words
and deeds, to [he beauty of such action. As a public phenomenon, the beautiful can only be confirmed in its being by an audience animated by a care for the world. The difference between Arendt’s aesthcticization of politics and Nietzsche's aestheticizatjon of life is nowhere clearer than in the connection that
Arendt draws between greatness and beauty in "The Crisis in Culture":
Generally speaking, culture indicates that the public realm, which is rendered politically secure by men ofaction, offers its space of display to those things whose essence it is to appear and to be beautiful. In other words. culture indicates that an and politics. their conflicts and tensions notwithstanding. are interrelated and even mutually dependent. Seen against the blckground of political experiences and of activities which, if left to themselves, come and go without leaving any trace in the world, beauty is the manifestation ofimpcrishability. The fleeting greatness of word and deed can endure to the extent that beauty is bestowed upon it
Mthout the beauty, that is, the radiant glory in which potential immortality is made manifest in the human world, all human life would be futile and no greatness could endure.
Arendtian aestheticism, an aestheticism predicated on a love of the world and which admires great action because it possesses a beauty that illuminates the world, is critically different from
Nietzschean aestheticism, the aestheticism of the artist
. A persistent theme in Arendt's writing, one parallel to her emphasis on the tension between philosophy and politics, concerns the conflict between art and politics.157
This conflict does not emerge out of the phenomenology of art versus
that of political action
; as we have seen, Arendt thinks both are importantly similar
.
Rather, the conflict centers on the mentality of the artist
versus that of the political actor. The artist
is, according to Arendt, a species of homo faber, who characteristically views the world in terms of means and ends
.
He is unable to conceive praxis independently
of poiesis: the work always retains priority over the activity itself
.
The result is that performance is denigrated, action misconceived
.
Nietzsche, of course, has even less use for homo faber than Arendt, who takes pains to voice her criticism not against making as such but against the universalization ol'a particular attitude. Nevertheless, if we take an Arendtian perspective, it is clear that N ictzsche, the artist-philosopher, must be counted among those who “fall into the common error of regarding the state or govemmenl as a work of art,” as an expression of a form-giving will to power)” The Republic stands as the initiator of the state as “collective masterpiece," as artwork, trope. The fact that Plato launched this metaphor in terms of what Lacoue-Labarthe calls a “mimetology,” while
Nietzsche repudiates again and again all metaphors of correspondence or adequation, does not alter their fundamental agreement: both regard action not as essentially performance but as making.I59 Poiesis has a radically different connounion for Nietzsche, to be sure, but the activity of self-fashioning and self-overcoming does not overturn the Platonic paradigm so much as bring it to closure. Nietzsche may explode the notion of telos in its classical sense, but the model of the work retains its significance. Thus despite the importance of his anti-Platonism to the project of dcconstructing the tradition’s model of action, his contribution to the thinking of plurality and difference in apolitical way is subject to a crucial limitation.
Thought
essentially in terms of an “aesthetics of existence,"
in terms of a project of self-fashioning freed from any telos, the positively valorized notion of difference
proposed by Nietzsche remains poetic
. Like the activity of the artist
, it “must be isolated from

the public
, must be sheltered and concealed from it“ if it is to achieve adequate expression
.“J
The poetic, ultimately anti theatrical framework
assumed by Nietzsche prohibits the Arendtian thought that under
certain very specific conditions, it is precisely the public realm which is constituted by plurality and which enables the fullest, most articulated expression of difference.
CONCLUSION
Arendt resists the Habermasian temptation to seek quasi-transcendental standards of agreement
in a “polytheistic" disillusioned age However, it is important to realize that her appeal to a Kantian notion of taste and the sensus communis is not tantamount to an endorsement of the Aristotelian view of political community and judgment (her comments linking tastejudgments to phroncsis notwithstanding).'°‘ Arendt’s Kantian, aeslheticizing turn has, unsurprisingly, confused commentators, who note the highly attenuated character of community and the depoliticizcd notion of judgment in
Kant.‘M Arendt chooses Kantian formalism over Aristotelian concretencss because, while she wants to focus on the shared world of appearance that is the public realm, she has no desire whatever to frame “what we have in common” in terms of purposes or ends. In this regard, the problem with the Aristotelian notion of koinoru'a, as defined in book 3 of the Politics, is that it creates not a stage fot action but a vehicle for teleological fulfillment."u Arendt’s appeal to the sensus oommunis self-consciously avoids the overly substantive, local character of koinonia or Sittlichlteit. At the same time, it denies the false universalism of moralitat.
Arendt‘s theory of judgment points not to the determinancy of phronesis, with its emphasis on context
and local practices, but to "the free reflexive discovery of rules in light of indeterminate,
transcendent ideas of community”
The critique of Aristotelian/oommunitarian thinking is also applicable to the kind of postmodern relativism that we find in a thinker like Lyotard. Like Arendt, Lyotard's conception of judgment is a curious mixture of Nietzschean, Aristotelian, and Kantian elements)” However, the postmodern " incredulity towards metanarratives
” serves not only to deny the possibility of any overarching metadiscourse that might render diverse language
games commensurable but to deny the possibility of a public space of discourse
, at least insofar as this space claims, implicitly, to synthesize perspectives and distance interests
.
For Lyotard, discourse is essentially
fragmented
: “All we can do is gaze in wonderment at the diversity of discursive species, just as we do at the diversity of plant or animal speities."166 It is also incducibly interested: “to speak is to fight, in the general sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistic:s."'67 Given these assumptions, it is not surprising that Lyotard feels that Kant has left our ability to judge "hanging,” as it were, and turns to the will to power as an explanation of this faculty.“8
What we find in Lyotard is the false
Nietzschean
dichotomy between a universal
, metaphysically grounded metadiscourse and a fragmented, postmetaphysical discursive realm in which “public” discourse
/ judgment reflects either local habit or the agonistic ability to create new moves, impose new interpretations, generate new criteria
— all in the name of the will to power
.“ Arendt's appeal to taste judgment and a shared feeling
for the world may be immensely problematic, but it does serve to underline the falseness of this dichotomy
.
One may grant that Arendl's aesthcticism avoids the trope of the fiction du polin'que, universalism, and postmodern pluralism. yet still feel that her “solution" is of dubious relevance to our situation. True, there is a distance and alienation built into the Kantian idea of a community of taste that may make the Arendtian response to Enlightenment universalism more palatable to a postmodern sensibility than the oven Aristotelianism of a Maclntyre or a Gadamer. Nevertheless, the “withering away of
common sense" in
the modern and postmodern ages
would appear to relegate Arendt's modification of
Nietzschean aestheticism t0 the status of a rearguard action. The fragmentation of contemporary life renders the idea of a “common fooling for the world" more paradoxical
, and possibly less viable, than a recovery of ethos or the legislation of a proceduralist rationality.
"Hie simple answer to this objection is mat Arendt completely agrees. Her work stands not only as a comprehensive rethinking of the nature and meaning of political action but as an extended mediation on how the energies of modernity have worked to dissipate our feeling for the world, to alienate us from the worlti The last part of The Human Condition equates modernity with world alienation: the reduction of Being to process, the subjeclification of the real, and finally, the triumph of a laboring mentality all work to alienate man not from himself but from the world."’° “Worldliness,” presupposed by the sensus communis, is not a distinguishing characteristic of the animal laboranst Similarly,
Arendt would
entirely agree with the postmodernist who questions the possibility of circumscribing a particular realm of phenomena in a world where boundaries are increasingly blurred
. in her analysis of "the rise of the social” in the modern age,
Arcndt identifies this blurring as the central movement of modernity."l
Her work departs from the
strongest possible conviction that our reality is one in which stable boundaries
and distinctions have been dissolved and rendered
virtually impossible
.
The postmodernist will object that Arendtian aestheticism
. unlike Nietzsche's, mourns the loss of the world as
an articulated, bounded whole
.
Nietzschean aestheticism is an affirmation of the Dionysian

capacity to destroy fixed identities
, to dissolve
Apollonian slampings into flux
.
Postmodern theory affirms this aestheticism, exaggerating the immanent tendencies of
postmodern
reality in the pursuit of an active
(i.e., creative) nihilism
: it has no time for guilty nostalgia.
Arendtian aestheticism, in contrast, stakes its hopes entirely on the rethematization of certain ontological dimensions of human experience (action, the public world, and self
), which this blurring obscures,
denatures, and makes increasingly difficult to articulate. The fetishistic quality of her distinction making
, her
Kantian finickincss in delimiting the political
: these attest to a deeply rooted desire to preserve the possibility of meaning created by political action and redeemed by political judgment.
Christian O.
Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311
The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech
—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking
, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid
scientific and technological change
outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and moneydriven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate
. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy
such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education
(Dewey 1988,63, 154).
Debate
provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them
, to sort through and evaluate
the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them.
The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy
. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of
modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment
.
This is a problem for
the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make
evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information environment
(ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources:
To
analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned
. . . students in the Instnictional [debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases.
There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144)
Larkin's study substantiates
Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn
Pack's
(1992, 3) claim that debate in the
college classroom
plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity
. Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the

primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials.
There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice
in the classroom as
a technology for
enhancing democratic deliberative capacities
.
The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life
. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life.
Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including
: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice
; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change
; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and
new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization
including an increasingly volatile global economic structure.
More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges
to democracy [in an] increasingly complex world.
Amanda
, prof of English at Johns Hopkins The Way We Argue Now, 33-6
In some ways, this is understandable as utopian writing, with recognizable antecedents throughout the history of leftist thought. But what is distinctive in Butler’s writing is the way temporal rhetoric emerges precisely at the site of uneasy normative commitment
. In the case of performative subversion, a futural rhetoric displaces the problems surrounding agency, symbolic constraint, and poststructuralist ethics.
Since symbolic constraint is constitutive of who we can become
and what we can enact, ¶
34 ¶ there is clearly no way to truly envision a reworked symbolic
.
And since embracing an alternative symbolic would necessarily involve the imposition of newly exclusionary and normalizing norms, to do more than gesture would mean lapsing into the very practices that need to be superseded.
Indeed, despite Butler’s insistence
in Feminist Contentions that we must
always risk new foundations, she evinces a fastidious reluctance to do so herself.
¶
The forward-looking articulation of performative politics
increasingly gives way
, in Bodies That Matter, to a
more reflective, and now strangely belated, antiexclusionary politics
. Less sanguine about the efficacy of outright subversion, Butler more soberly attends to ways we might respond to the politically and ontologically necessary error of identity categories. We cannot choose not to put such categories into play, but once they are in play, we can begin to interrogate them for the exclusions they harbor and generate. Butler here is closely following
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s position on essentialism, a position Butler earlier sought to sublate through the more exclusive emphasis on the unremitting subversion of identity.18 If performative subversion aimed to denaturalize identity and thus derail its pernicious effects, here, by contrast, one realizes the processes of identity formation will perforce proceed, and one simply attempts to register and redress those processes in a necessarily incomplete way. The production of exclusion, or a constitutive outside, is [butler quote starts] “the necessary and founding violence of any truthregime,” but we should not simply accept that fact passively: ¶ The task is to refigure this necessary “outside” as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome. But of equal importance is the preservation of the outside, the site where discourse meets its limits, where the opacity of what is not included in a given regime of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and unrepresentability, illuminating the violent and contingent boundaries of that normative regime precisely through the inability of that regime to represent that which might pose a fundamental threat to its continuity. . . . If there is a violence necessary to the language of politics, then the risk of that violation might well be followed by another in which we begin, without ending, without mastering, to own—and yet never fully to own—the exclusions by which we proceed. (BTM, 53) ¶ [butler quote ends]
Because the exclusionary process is productive of who and what we are, even in our oppositional politics, our attempts to acknowledge and redress it are always post hoc
. Here the future horizon is ever-receding
¶ 35 ¶ precisely because our own belated making of amends will never
, and should never,
tame the contingency that also begets violence
. But the question arises: does Butler ever propose that we might use the evaluative criteria governing that belated critical recognition to guard against such processes of
exclusion in the first

place?
Well, in rare moments she does project
the possibility of cultivating practices that would actually disarm exclusion
(and I will be discussing one such moment presently). But
she invariably returns to the bleak insistence on the impossibility of ever achieving this. This retreat is necessitated
, fundamentally, by
Butler’s failure to distinguish evaluative criteria from the power-laden mechanisms of normalization
.
Yet the distinction does reappear, unacknowledged, in the rhetoric of belatedness, which
, like performative thresholdism, serves to underwrite her political purism
.
As belated,
the incomplete acts of “owning” one’s exclusions are more seemingly reactive and can appear not to be themselves normatively implicated.
¶ We can see a similar maneuver in Butler’s discussion of universalist traditions in Feminist Contentions. Here she insists that
Benhabib’s universalism is
perniciously grounded in a transcendental account of language
( communicative reason
), and is hence not able to examine its own exclusion ary effect s
or situated quality (FC, 128–32).
This is
, to begin with,
a mischaracterization.
Benhabib’s account of communicative reason is historically situated
( if somewhat loosely within
the horizon of modernity
) and aims to justify an ongoing and self-critical process of interactive universalism
— not merely through the philosophical project of articulating a theory of universal pragmatic s but more significantly through the identification and cultivation of practices that enable democratic will formation
.19 Butler then introduces, in contrast to Benhabib, an exemplary practice of what she calls
“misappropriating” universals (Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic is cited here). Now, it is hard not to see this as a species of dogmatism. Bad people reinscribe or reinforce universals, good people “misappropriate” them.
Benhabib calls for the reconstruction of
Enlightenment universals, but presumably even reconstruction is tainted
.
The key point,
however, is that misappropriation is a
specifically protected derivative process
, one whose
own belatedness and honorific disobedience are guaranteed to displace the violence of its predecessor discourse.
¶ Let me pursue here for a moment why
I find this approach unsatisfactory
.
Simply because the activity of acknowledging exclusion or misappropriating universals is belated or derivative does not mean that such
¶ 36 ¶ an activity is not itself as powerfully normative as the “normative political philosophy
” to which Butler refers with such disdain.
There is a sleight of hand occurring here
:
Butler attempts to imply that because such activities exist at
a temporal and critical remove from
“founding regimes of truth,” they
more successfully avoid the insidious ruse
of critical theory.
But who’s rusing who here? Because Butler finds it impossible to conceive of normativity outside of normalization, she evades the challenging task of directly confronting her own normative assumptions
.
Yet Butler in fact advocates ethical practices that are animated by the
for its own newly generated exclusions
, and the reconfiguration of debilitating identity terms such as “women” as sites “of permanent openness and resignifiability” (FC, 50).
Both
these central practices rely fundamentally on democratic principles of inclusion and open contestation
.
Communicative ethics does no more than to clarify where among our primary social practices we might locate the preconditions for such activities of critique and transformation
.
By justifying its own evaluative assumptions and resources it aims not to posit
a realm free of power but rather to clarify our own ongoing critiques of power
.
This does not mean that such critiques will not themselves require
rigorous scrutiny
for harboring blindnesses and further exclusions, but neither does it mean that such critiques will necessarily be driven by exclusionary logic
. And communicative ethics is by no means
a “ merely theoretical
” or “philosophical” project inasmuch as it can identify
particular social and institutional practices that foster democratic ends
.
By casting all attempts to characterize such practices as pernicious normalizing, Butler effectively disables her own project and leaves herself no recourse but to issue dogmatic condemnations and approvals.

Jean-Michel
, Professor of French, American Catholic U, THE SACRED:
MYSTICISM AND PRAGMATISM, THE MAJOR TRENDS IN CONTEMPORARY THEORY, http://www.crvp.org/book/Series07/VII-6/chapter-6.htm
Beginning with Foucault these were concerned with
carrying out an archeology of knowledge with a view to deciphering the potential for restrictions native to, andreproduced by, Western culture
since the classical age.
Following
the same movement, through the concept of différence, Derrida
(and at the same time Lacan) pointed out the internal division of the subject
between two contrary existential tendencies: the one, centrifugal and directed towards loss and death; the other, centripetal and directed towards conservation and power. Then, in introducing his Leçon at the Collège de France,
Barthes proclaimed
the explosive slogan: "
All language is fascist
." By this he meant that syntactical and grammatical conventions constitute a constricting structure from which the writer could escape only by "cheating the language" in order to go beyond orthodox usage. What is essential in the text is no longer the content or manifest sense, but the structure of musical and psychological associations which, like a slip of the tongue, manifest the deepest orientations of the writer — generally referred to as a Freudian or pleasure slip. This literary kamasutra or "science of the pleasures of language" — which Barthes already had developed in Le plaisir du texte — complements on the level of rhetoric the work of Deleuze and Guatari on the psychoanalytic level.
Strongly influenced by the Nietzschean idea of "culture," the authors of L’Anti-Oedipe call "writing" that "terrible alphabet" or "cruel system of signs" engraved in the flesh of man who, by that very fact, loses his privileges as the ego scriptor and become a "Desiring machine."1 In this context Jean
Baudrillard’s prediction of the subjection of man to the position of a thing gains in force. In Les strategies fatales
Baudrillard writes: the subject was beautiful only in its pride and arbitrariness
, its limitless willful power, its transcendence as subject of power and of history, or in the drama of its alienation
. Without this one is pitiably deficient, the pawn of his own desires or image, incapable of forming a clear representation of the universe and sacrificing himself in an attempt to revive the dead body of history.2 In sum, would give birth to the revolt of May 1968 the insight
which destroyed
in one stroke the
related ideas of conscience, will and autonomy which
had constituted
the contribution of the
Enlightenment
; that is, the ability of a subject, besieged by the irrational forces of myth and religion, to give focus to a world in terms of his understanding and will. It is this heritage of the Enlightenment which today is being reaffirmed.
The urgency of this return to enlightened reason
under the auspices of the Kantian philosophy of the subject provides the principal themes for the last books of Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut.
In La pensée 68: essai sur l’anti-humanisme contemporain3 and Heidegger et les modernes,4 the intention is to warn against the
dangerously metaphysical process by which
the thinkers
of the last decade have practiced
— often without being aware of it
— a systematic anti-humanism. Ironically, under the pretext of eliminating
once and for all the metaphysics of reason centered upon the subject, Foucault andDerrida
have found themselves caught in the spiral of metaphysical hyperbole
. For the a
priori identity they suppose between knowledge and power leads them to place the human ideal beyond all kinds of meaning and
in so doing to make it inaccessible, in relation to which the individual can only renounce his or her autonomy
. In other words, in the end the excess of thought fascinated by the absolute becomes a form of regression
.
Dispossessed of his attributes as a subject
(that is, of knowledge and will) on both the speculative and the practical
levels, and thus incapable of acting upon "the world,"
the modern man is subjected to the transcendentalism of a nother lay,
non theological religion, which leads him to search his salvation no longer in the truth or efficacity of a satisfying answer
, but in the effort and tension of an endless questioning
. It is as reaction
to (in the chemical sense) and against
(in the political sense) this metaphysical hyperbole
that one should
interpret the desire of Ferry and Renaut to search for
the conditions of a " nonmetaphysical humanism
" capable of
" conferring coherent
philosophical status upon the promise of freedom contained in the requirements
( of
the term humanism
)."5 In a parallel manner Jürgen Habermas wishes to restore to philosophy its true place and function as the "guardian of rationality."
Rejecting the erroneous association between reason and power
, the author of Morale et communication6 attempts to show that the normative rules of linguistic communication, inasmuch as they provide a universal basis for intersubjective exchanges
,
constitute the best defense against an abuse of power. Although Barthes deduces a fascist character for language from its normative function
, Habermas tries to show that this same function is, on the contrary, presupposed intuitively by every subject who takes part in a process of communication
.
This permits
him to state the ethical principle of dialogue
: "only those norms can claim validity which are accepted . . . by all the persons participating in a practical

discussion
."7
Nonmetaphysical humanism and the ethics of communicative action agree that human activities
and relationships must be perceived no longer in terms of an ideal of inaccessible purity, but from the pragmatic point of view where conditions of efficacity and utility are understood on the basis of results in daily life.

Case

Martha
, Professor of Law and William J. Magavern Faculty Scholar @ SUNY
Buffalo Law, How Queer Theory Makes Neoliberalism Sexy, Buffalo Legal Studies Research
Paper No. 2008-15
Queer theory's anti-moralism works together with its anti-statism to advance
not simply "politics," but a specific vision of good "politics" seemingly defined in opposition to progressive law and morality
. This anti-statist focus distinguishes queer theory from other critical legal theories that bring questions of power to bear on moral ideals of justice. Kendall Thomas (2002), for example, articulates a critical political model that sees justice as a problem of "power, antagonism, and interest,"
(p. 86) involving questions of how to constitute and support individuals as citizens with interests and actions that count as alternative visions of the public. Thomas contrasts this political model of justice with a moral justice aimed at discovering principles of fairness or institutional processes based in rational consensus and on personal feelings of respect and dignity. Rather than evaluating the moral costs and benefits of a particular policy by analyzing its impact in terms of harm or pleasure, Thomas suggests that a political vision of justice would focus on analyzing how policies produce and enhance the collective power of particular "publics" and "counterpublics" (pp. 91—5).
From this political perspective of justice, neoliberal economic ideology is distinctly moral,
even though it appears to be anti-moralist and to reduce moral principles to competition between self-interested power.
Free-market economics rejects a political vision of justice
, in this sense, in part because of its expressed anti-statism
: it turns contested normative questions of public power into objective rational calculations of private individual sensibilities.
Queer theory's
similar tendency to romanticize power as the pursuit of individualistic pleasure free from public control risks disengaging from and disdaining the collective efforts to build and advance normative visions of the state that arguably define effective politics.
Brown
and Halley (2002), for instance, cite the Montgomery bus boycott as a
classic example of the left's problematic march into
legalistic and moralistic identity politics
. In contrast, Thomas (2002) analyzes the Montgomery bus boycott as a positive example of a political effort to constitute a black civic public, even though the boycott campaign relied on moral language to advance its cause, because it also emphasized and challenged normative ideas of citizenship (p. 100, note 14).
By glorifying rather than deconstructing the neoliberal dichotomy between public and private, between individual interest and group identity, and between demands for power and demands for protection, queer theory's antistatism and anti-moralism plays into a right-wing double bind
.
In the current conservative political context, the left appears weak
both because its efforts to use state power get constructed as excessively moralistic
(the feminist thought police, or the naively paternalistic welfare state) and also because its efforts to resist state power get constructed as excessively relativist
( promoting elitism and materialism instead of family values and community well-being
).
The right
, on the other hand, has it both ways, asserting its moralism as inherent private authority transcending human subjectivity
(as efficient market forces, the sacred family, or divine will) and defending its cultivation of selfinterested power as the ideally virtuous state and market (bringing
freedom, democracy, equality
to the world by exercising economic
and military authoritarianism
). From Egalitarian Politics to Renewed Conservative
Identity
Queer theory's anti-statism and anti-moralism risks not only reinforcing right-wing ideology
, but also infusing that ideology with energy from renewed identity politics
.
Susan Fraiman (2003) analyzes how queer theory
(along with other prominent developments in left academics and culture) tends to construct left resistance as a radical individualism modeled on the male "teen rebel, defined above all by his strenuous alienation from the maternal" (p. xii). Fraiman observes that this left vision relies on "a posture of
flamboyant unconventionality [that] coexists with highly conventional views of gender [and] is
, indeed, articulated through them
" (p. xiii).
Fraiman links recent left contempt for feminism to a romantic vision of "coolness
... epitomized by the modem adolescent boy
in his anxious, self-conscious and theatricalized will to separate from the mother" who is by definition uncool— controlling, moralistic, sentimental and not sexy
. (p. xii).
Even though queer theory distinguishes itself from feminism by repudiating dualistic ideas of gender, its anti-foundationalism covertly promotes an essentialist "binary that puts femininity, reproduction, and

normativity on the one hand, and masculinity, sexuality, and queer resistance on the other"
(p. 147).
This binary permeates queer theory's condemnation of "governance feminism."
(Brown and Halley, 2002; Wiegman, 2004) a vague category mobilizing images of the
frumpy, overbearing, unexciting, unfunny, and not-so-smart "schoolmarm"
(Halley, 2002) whose authority will naturally be undermined when real "men" appear on the scene.
Suggesting the importance of gender conventions to the term's power, similar phrases do not seem to have gained comparable academic currency as a way to deride the complex regulatory impact of other specific uses of state authority -for instance postmodernists do not seem to widely denounce
"governance anti-racism," "governance socialism," "governance populism," "governance environmentalism" or "governance masculinism" (though Brown and Halley do criticize progressive law reform more generally with the term "governance legalism" (p.
11)).
Queer attraction to an adolescent masculinist idea of the "cool' dovetails smoothly with the identity politics of the right
.
Right-wing politics and culture similarly condemn progressive and feminist policies with the term "nanny state"
(McCluskey, 2000; 2005a). The "nanny state" epithet enlists femaleness or femininity
as shorthand to make some government authority feel bad to those comfortable with or excited by a masculinist moral order, it adds to this sentimental power by coding the maternal authority to be resisted as a "nanny" (rather than simply a "mommy"), enlisting identities of class, age—and perhaps race and nationality—to enhance uncritical suspicions of disorder and illegitimacy. Th e "nanny state" slur tells us that a rougher and tougher neoliberal state, market, and family will bring the grown-up pleasures, freedom, and power that are the mark and privilege of ideal manhood
. The "nanny state" is not an
isolated example of the use of gender identity to disparage progressive or even centrist policies that are not explicitly identified as feminist or gender-related
. For example, "girlie-man" gained currency in the 2004 presidential election to disparage opposition to George
W. Bush's right-wing economic and national security policies (Grossman and McClain, 2004), and and in 2008 critics of presidential candidate Barack Obama similarly linked him to disparaging images of femininity (Campanile 2008; Faludi 2008).
These terms open a window into the connections between economic libertarianism and moral fundamentalism.
Libertarianism's anti-statism and anti-moralism requires sharp distinctions between public and private, morality and power, individual freedom and social coercion. The problem, if we assume these distinctions are not self-evident facts, is that libertarianism must refer covertly to some external value system to draw its lines.
Identity conventions have long helped to do this work
, albeit in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. Power appears weak, deceptive, illegitimate, manipulative, controlling, undisciplined, oppressive, exceptional, or naive if it is feminized; but strong, self-satisfying, publicserving, protective, orderly, rational, and a normal exercise of individual freedom if it is masculinized.
Conventional political theory and culture identifies legitimate authority with an idea of a masculine power aimed at policing
supposedly weaker or subordinate others. A state that
publicly depends on and promotes such power enhances
rather than usurps private freedom and security in citizenship, market,
and family, according to the traditional theory of the patriarchal household as model for the state
(see Dubber, 2005).
Queer theory updates this pre-modern political ideology into smart postmodernism and transgressive politics by re-casting its idealized masculine power in the image of a youthful and sexy disdain for feminized concerns about social, bodily, or material limits and support
. In her challenge to this queer romanticization of "coolness," Fraiman (2003) instead urges a feminism that will
"question a masculinity overinvested in youth, fearful of the mutable flesh, and on the run from intimacy ... [to] claim, in its place, the jouissance of a body that is aging, pulpy, no longer intact... a subject who is tender-hearted ... who is neither too hard nor too fluid for attachment; who does the banal, scarcely narratable, but helpful things that moms' do" (p. 158). Feminist legal theory concerned with economic politics adds to this alternative vision an ideal that advances and rewards the pleasure, power, and public value of the things done by some of those moms' nannies (McCluskey, 2005a)—or by the many others engaged in the work (both paid and unpaid) that sustains and enhances others' pleasure and power in and out of the home (McCluskey, 2003a; Young, 2001).
One means toward that end would be to make the domestic work (and its play and pleasure) conventionally treated as both banal or spiritual (see Roberts, 1997b) deserving of a greater share of state and market material rewards and resources on a more egalitarian basis, as Fineman's (2004) vision would do.

Joseph
, Professor of Political Science at Temple University, The Future of
Democratic Equality, 56-61
Butler, Brown, and Connolly reject the essentialism of “narrow” identity politics as an inverted
“ressentiment” of the Enlightenment desire for a universal, homogenized identity. They judge identity politics to be a politics of “wounding, resentment, and victimization” that only can yield bad-faith moralization Wendy Brown takes to task identity politics for “essentializing” conceptions of group identity. For example, she critiques the work of Catherine MacKinnon as epitomizing “identity” political theory, accusing MacKinnon of denying women agency by depicting them purely as victims.38 Brown also remains wary of the patriarchal, conformist nature of traditional left conceptions of solidarity and citizenship. Brown’s implicit concept of radical democratic citizenship rests upon the recognition that political identity is continually in flux and is socially constituted through “agonal” political struggle. Brown celebrates an
Arendtian conception of a polity in which both shared and particular identities are continually open to reconstruction. In this “left Nietzschean” view of an “everyperson’s” will to power, there can be no cultural certainties or political givens, as such “givens” would repress difference and fluidity.39 But, if the human condition is a world of permanent flux, then we must postulate a human capability of living with constant insecurity, for in this world there can be no stable political institutions or political identities.40 An ability to calculate the probabilities of political actions or public policies would disappear in this world of infinite liminality. By assuming that the pre-eminent democratic value is that of leaving all issues as permanently open to question, post-structuralist “democratic theory” eschews the theoretical and political struggle
over what established institutions and consensual values are needed to underpin a
democratic society.
Post-structuralist analysis has contributed to a healthy suspicion of narrow and “essentializing” identity politics. But a self-identified feminist, African- American, or lesbian activist is likely to value the shared historical narratives that partly constitute such group identities. Of course, if one is a democrat and a pluralist, one would reject the oppressive homogenization and potentially authoritarian aspects of ethnic or racial chauvinism and of “essentializing” types of identity politics. The democratic political home should be open, fluid, and self-reflective; but if participation is to be open to all, then such a society also needs to reproduce a shared democratic culture and the institutional guarantee of democratic rights. That is, contrary to post-structuralist analysis, not all issues can be open to “agonal struggle” in a democratic society. The traditional radical democratic critique of democratic capitalism remains valid; the equal worth of the individual is devalued by rampant social inequality within and between groups. Thus, a radical democrat, whether post-structuralist or not, must not only be committed to institutional protections of political and civil rights, but also to social rights—the equal access to the basic goods of citizenship (education, health care, housing, child care). Of course, the precise nature and extent of these rights will be politically contested and constructed. But a democratic society cannot leave as totally “open” the minimal institutional basis of democracy— a democratic society cannot be agnostic as to the value of freedom of speech, association, and universal suffrage.
Social movements fighting for an expansion of civil, political, and social rights, rarely, if ever, rest their arguments on appeals to epistemological truths— whether “foundational” or “antifoundational.” To remain democratic, their policy goals cannot be so specific that they preclude political argument about both their worth and how best to institutionalize them. If social

movements in a 58 democratic society deemed that every policy defeat meant a betrayal of basic democratic principles, there would be no give-and-take or winners and losers within democratic politics. But if a government were to abolish freedom of speech and competitive elections, or deny a social group basic rights, it would be reasonable for an observer to judge that democratic principles had been violated. Democratic political movements and coalitions struggle to construct shared meanings about those political, civil, and social rights that should be guaranteed to all citizens—and they often work to expand the types of persons to be recognized as citizens (such as excluded immigrants). Such arguments are inevitably grounded in normative arguments that go beyond merely asserting the import of “flux,”
“difference,” and “anti-essentialism.” The civil rights movement did not demand equal rights for all solely as an “agonal” assertion of the will of the excluded; they desired to gain for persons of color an established set of civil and political rights that had been granted to some citizens and denied to others. The movement correctly assumed that the exclusion of citizens from full political and civil rights violated the basic norms of a democratic society. Thus, postmodern epistemological commitments to “flux” and “openness” cannot in-and-of-themselves sustain the
“fixed” moral positions needed to sustain a radical democracy.
Post-structuralist theorists openly proclaim their hostility to all philosophical “meta-narratives.”
They reject comprehensive conceptions of how society operates and the type of society that would best instantiate human freedom. But post-structuralists go beyond rejecting “metanarratives”; they insist that only an “anti-foundational” epistemology can ground a politics of emancipation. For Butler, Brown, and Connolly, not only do “meta-discourses” invariably fail in their efforts to ground moral positions in a theory of human nature or human reason. They also assert that an agonal politics of democratic “we” formation can alone sustain democratic society.
This agonal politics, they claim, can only be sustained by a recognition of the inconstant signification of discourse and the ineluctable flux of personal and group identity.41 Rejecting the authoritarian, celebration of the “ubermensch” by Nietzsche, they offer a post-Nietzschean,
“amoral” conception of democracy as an open-ended project of defining a self and community that is constantly open to the desires of “others.” These theorists constantly reiterate the definitiveness (dare we say “foundational truth”) of this grounding of democracy, despite the historical reality that social movements often contest dominant narratives in the name of a stable alternative narrative of a democratic and pluralist community.
One might well contend that the post-structuralist political stance is guilty of a new metanarrative of “bad faith,” that of “anti-foundationalism.” According to this anti-foundational politics, a true democrat must reject any and all a priori truths allegedly grounded upon the nature of human reason or human nature. A committed democrat may well be skeptical of such neo-Kantian or neo-Hegelian conceptions of freedom; but, many committed democrats justify their moral commitments using these philosophical methods. A democrat might also reject (or accept) the arguments of a Jurgen Habermas or Hans Georg Gadamer that the structure of human linguistic communication contains within it the potential for a society based on reasoned argument rather than manipulation and domination. But there are numerous other philosophically “pragmatic” ways to justify democracy, even utilitarian ones. Political democrats may well disagree about the best philosophical defense of democracy. But, invariably,
“practicing democrats” will defend the belief (however philosophically “proved” or “justified”) that democratic regimes best fulfill the moral commitment to the equal worth of persons and to the equal potential of human beings to freely develop and pursue their life plans.
To contend that only an anti-foundationalist, anti-realist epistemology can sustain democracy is to argue precisely for a foundational metaphysical grounding for the democratic project. It is to contend that one’s epistemology determines one’s politics. Hence, Brown and Butler both spoke at a spring 1998 academic conference at the University of California at Santa Cruz where some attributed “reactionary” and “left cultural conservatism” to belief in “reactionary”
“foundationalist humanism.”42 Post-structuralism cannot escape its own essentialist

conception of identity. For example, Butler contends in Feminist Contentions that democratic feminists must embrace the post-structuralist “nondefinability of woman” as best suited to open democratic constitution of what it is to be a “woman.”43 But this is itself a
“closed” position and runs counter to the practices of many democratic feminist activists who have tried to develop a pluralist, yet collective identity around the shared experiences of being a woman in a patriarchal society (of course, realizing that working-class women and women of color experience patriarchy in some ways that are distinct from the patriarchy experienced by middle-class white women).
One query that post-structuralist theorists might ask themselves: has there ever existed a mass social movement that defined its primary “ethical” values as being those of
“instability and flux”? Certainly many sexual politics activists are cognizant of the fluid nature of sexuality and sexual and gender identity. But only a small (disproportionately university educated) segment of the women’s and gay and lesbian movement would subscribe to
(or even be aware of) the core principles of post-structuralist “anti-essentialist epistemology.”
Nor would they be agnostic as to whether the state should protect their rights to express their sexuality. Post-structuralist theorists cannot avoid justificatory arguments for why some identities should be considered open and democratic and others exclusionary and antidemocratic. That is, how could post-structuralist political theorists argue that Nazi or Klan
“ethics” are antithetical to a democratic society—and that a democratic society can rightfully ban certain forms of “agonal” (e.g. harassing forms of behavior against minorities) struggle on the part of such anti-democratic groups.
Joseph
, Professor of Political Science at Temple University, The Future of
Democratic Equality, 56-62
A politics of radical democratic pluralism cannot be securely grounded by a whole-hearted epistemological critique of “enlightenment rationality.” For implicit to any radical democratic project is a belief in the equal moral worth of persons; to embrace such a position renders one at least a “critical defender” of enlightenment values of equality and justice, even if one rejects
“enlightenment metaphysics” and believes that such values are often embraced by non-Western cultures. Of course, democratic norms are developed by political practice and 60
struggle rather than by abstract philosophical argument. But this is a sociological and historical reality rather than a trumping philosophical proof. Liberal democratic publics rarely ground their politics in coherent ontologies and epistemologies; and even among trained philosophers there is no necessary connection between one’s metaphysics and one’s politics.
There have, are, and will be Kantian conservatives (Nozick), liberals (Rawls), and radicals
(Joshua Cohen; Susan Okin); teleologists, left, center, and right (Michael Sandel, Alasdair
McIntyre, or Leo Strauss); anti-universalist feminists (Judith Butler, Wendy Brown) and quasiuniversalist, Habermasian feminists (Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser).
Post-structuralists try to read off from an epistemology or ontology a politics; such attempts simply replace enlightenment meta-narratives with postmodern (allegedly anti) metanarratives. Such efforts represent an idealist version of the materialist effort—which poststructuralists explicitly condemn—to read social consciousness off of the structural position of
“the agent.” A democratic political theory must offer both a theory of social structure and of the social agents capable of building such a society. In exchanging the gods of Weber and Marx for
Nietzsche and Heidegger (or their epigones Foucault and Derrida), poststructuralist theory has abandoned the institutional analysis of social theory for the idealism of abstract philosophy.

Connolly, Brown, and Butler reject explicit moral deliberation as a bad faith Nietzschean attempt at “ressentiment.” Instead, they celebrate the amoral, yet ethical strivings of a
Machiavellian or Gramscian realist “war of position.”44 Sheldon Wolin, however, has written convincingly of how Machiavelli can be read as an ethical realist, a theorist of moral utilitarianism.45 Even a Machiavellian or Gramscian political “realist” must depend upon moral argument to justify the social utility of hard political choices. That is, if one reads both as ethical utilitarians who believe that, at times, one must “dirty” one’s hands in order to act ethically in politics, then they embrace a utilitarian, “just war” theory of ethical choice. According to this consequentialist moral logic, “bad means” are only justifiable if they are the only, unavoidable way to achieve a greater ethical good—and if the use of such “bad means” are absolutely minimized. Such “hard” political choices yield social policies and political outcomes
that fix identities as well as transform them.
Not only in regard to epistemological questions has post-structuralist theory created a new political “metaphysics” which misconstrues the nature of democratic political practice; the poststructuralist analysis of “the death of man” and “the death of the subject” also radically
preclude meaningful political agency. As with Michel Foucault, Butler conceives of
“subjects” as “produced” by powerknowledge discourses. In Butler’s view, the modernist concept of an autonomous subject is a “fictive construct”; and the very act of adhering to a belief in autonomous human choice is to engage in “exclusion and differentiations, perhaps a repression, that is subsequently concealed, covered over, by the effect of autonomy.”46 That is, the power of discourse, of language and the unconscious, “produces subjects.” If those “subjects” conceive of themselves as having the capacity for conscious choice, they are guilty of “repressing” the manner in which their own “subjectivity” is itself produced by discursive 61 exclusion: “if we agree that politics and a power exist already at the level at which the subject and its agency are articulated and made possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire into its construction.”47 Susan Bickford pithily summarizes the post-structuralist rejection of the modernist subject: “power is not wielded by autonomous subjects; rather through power, subjectivity is crafted.”48 Bickford grants that post-structuralism provides some insight into how group and individual identity is “culturally constructed.” But Bickford goes on to contend that after post-structuralism exposes the “lie of the natural” (that there are no natural human identities), “socially constructed” modern individuals still wish to act in consort with others and to use human communication to influence others: “people generally understand themselves as culturally constituted and capable of
agency.”49
For if there is no “doer behind the deed,” but only “performative” acts that constitute the subject, how can the theorist (or activist) assign agency or moral responsibility to actors who are
“constituted by discursive practices.” (“Discursive practices” engaged in by whom, the observer may ask?) Butler insists that not only is the subject “socially constituted” by power/knowledge discourses, but so too is the “ontologically reflexive self” of the enlightenment. Now if this claim is simply that all social critics are socially-situated, then this view of agency is no more radical a claim than that made by Michael Walzer in his conception of the social critic (or agent). Walzer argues that even the most radical dissident must rely upon the critical resources embedded within his own culture (often in the almost-hidden interstices of that culture). Effective critical agency cannot depend on some abstract universal, external logic.50 Asserting that critical capacities are themselves socially constructed provides the reader with no means by which to judge whether forms of “resistance” are democratic and which are not. That is, no matter how hard one tries to substitute an aesthetic, “ironic,” “amoral ethical sensibility” for morality, the social critic and political activist cannot escape engaging in moral argument and justification with fellow citizens.
Butler astutely notes that “resistance” often mirrors the very powerknowledge discourses it rejects—resisting hegemonic norms without offering alternative conceptions of a common

political life. But Butler seems to affirm the possibility (by whom?) of effective rejection of such
“norming” by “performative resignification.” But the “resignification” of “performative” discursive constructions provides no criteria by which to judge whether a given “resignification” is emancipatory or repressive.51 And just who (if not a relatively coherent, choosing human subject) is “performing” the resignification. Furthermore, if all forms of identity and social meaning are predicated upon “exclusion,” then the democratic theorist needs to distinguish among those identities which “exclude” in a democratic way and those which exclude in an antihumanist, racist, and sexist manner. Some social “identities” are democratic and pluralist, such as those created by voluntary affiliations. But other “identities,” such as structural, involuntary class differences and racial and sexual hierarchies, must be transformed, even eliminated, if democracy is to be furthered. And how we behave—or “perform”—can subvert (or reinforce) such undemocratic social structures. But if these social structures are immutably inscribed by62
“performative practices,” then there can be no democratic resistance. In her call for an ironic politics of “performative resistance,” Butler seems to imply that human beings have the capacity to choose which “performative practices” to engage in—and from which to abstain. If this is the case, then a modernist conception of agency and moral responsibility has covertly snuck its way back into Butler’s political strategy.52

Ella
, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies at the University of
Utah, 2013, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World, p. 44-45
Unfortunately,
Connolly
is inconsistent in this regard, for he also positions
Foucauldian self- artistry as an
“essential preliminary to,” and even the necessary “condition of,” change at the macropolitical level
.104 That is, although Connolly claims that micropolitics and political movements work “in tandem
,” each producing effects on the other,105 he
sometimes privileges “action by the self on itself
” as a starting point and necessary prelude to macropolitical change. This approach not only avoids the question of the genesis of such reflexive action and its possible harmful effects but also indicates that collective efforts to alter social conditions actually await proper techniques of the self
. For example, in a rich discussion of criminal punishment in the United States,
Connolly contends that “today the micropolitics of desire in the domain of criminal violence has become a condition for a macropolitics that reconfigures existing relations between class, race, crime and punishment
.”106
Here and elsewhere in Connolly’s writing the sequencing renders these activities primary and secondary rather than mutually inspiring and reinforcing
.107
¶
, however.
How
, after all, is such intervention, credited with producing salient effects at the macropolitical level
,
, so to speak, or assuredly move in the direction of democratic engagement
( rather than
, for example) if it is not
How and why would an individual take up reflexive work on the desire to punish if she were not already attuned
, at least partially, to problems afflicting current criminal punishment practices?
And that attunement is
who define a public matter of concern and elicit the attention of other citizens.108
¶
For reflexive self- care to be democratically significant
, it must be
.
Connolly sometimes acknowledges that the arts of the self he celebrates are not themselves the starting point of collaborative action but instead exist in a dynamic, reciprocal relation with cooperative and antagonistic efforts to shape collective arrangements. Yet the self’s relation with itself is also treated as a privileged site
, the very source of democratic spirit and action.
¶
This tendency to
over other modes of relation defines
the therapeutic ethics
that ultimately emerges out of Foucault’s and, to a lesser degree, Connolly’s work.
This ethics not only elides differences between caring for oneself and caring for conditions but also
or
, as Foucault says, “ ontologically prior
.”
An ethics centered on the self’s engagement with itself
may have value, but it
.
Chamsy
, Senior Lecturer School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of
Wellington, Post-modernism, the Return to Ethics, and the Crisis of Socialist Values, www.democracynature.org/vol8/ojeili_ethics.htm#_edn9
Notably, anarchists have often been charged with this failing by Marxian thinkers.[157] Anarchism does include those suspicious of the demands of association, those who fear the tyranny of the majority and who emphasise instead the uniqueness and liberty of the individual. Here, the freedom of the creative individual, unhindered by the limitations of sociality, is essential. This second strand shows clearly the influence of liberal ideas. It is also, in its bohemian and nihilistic incarnation, a child to the malevolent trio of De
Sade, Stirner, Nietzsche, that is, those who reject coercive community mores and who recoil from herdish, conformist pressures. The free individual must create his or her own

guiding set of values, exploring the hitherto untapped and perhaps darker aspects of him or herself through an art which chaffs against the standards of beauty and taste of the ordinary mortal. Given that freedom cannot endure limitations and that all idols have been driven from the world and the mind, for these revolutionaries, “all is permitted”.[158]
This emphasis on individual sovereignty is clear in Godwin and Stirner,[159] but also in Goldman’s suspicion of collective life, in her elevation of the role of heroic individuals in history, and in the work of situationist Raoul Vaneigem.[160]¶ This accent within non-orthodox socialism has been much criticised. For instance, Murray Bookchin has contrasted “social” with “lifestyle” anarchism, rejecting the elevation the self-rule of the individual in the latter to the highest goal of anarchist thinking.[161] One might consider
, here, the consequences
, in the case of Emma Goldman, of the substitution of collective revolutionary change for boheme and for an intellectualist contempt for the masses
.
Goldman turned
more and more to purely self-expressive activity
and increasingly appealed to intellectuals and middle class audiences, who felt amused and flattered by her individualism and exotic iconoclasm.[162]
This egoistic and personalistic turn ignores the essential
social anarchist aspiration to freedom, the commitment to an end to domination in society
, the comprehension of the social premises of the individualist urge itself, and the necessity of moving beyond a purely negative conception of liberty to a thicker, positive conception of freedom.[163]
Perhaps, as Bookchin has rather trenchantly asserted, the recent individualist and neo-situationist concern with subjectivity
, expression, and desire is all too much like middle class narcissism and the selfcentred therapeutics of New Age culture.
Perhaps also, as Barrot has said, the kind of revolutionary life advocated by Vaneigem cannot be lived.[164] Further, total freedom for any one individual necessarily means diminished freedom for others. As La Banquise argue, “Repression and sublimation prevent people from sliding into a refusal of otherness”.[165] For socialists, freedom must be an ineradicably social as well as an individual matter.
The
whole thrust of libertarian politics is towards a collective project that reconstructs
those freedom-limiting structures of economy, power, and ideology
.[166] It seems unlikely that such ambitions could be achieved by those motivated solely by a
Sadean ambition to seek satisfaction of their own improperly understood desires. ¶ On this question, Castoriadis is again useful – accenting autonomy as a property of the collective and of each individual within society, and rejecting the opposition between community and humanity
, between the “inner man [sic] and the public man [sic]”.[167]
Castoriadis ridiculed abstract individualism
: “
We are not ‘individuals’
, freely floating above society
and history, who are capable of deciding sovereignly
and in the absolute about what we shall do, about how we shall do it, and about the meaning our doing will have once it is done … Above all, qua individuals, we choose neither the questions to which we will have to respond nor the terms in which they will be posed, nor, especially, the ultimate meaning of our response, once given”.[168]
Rejecting the
contemporary tendency to posit others as limitations on our freedom
, Castoriadis argued that others were in fact premises of liberty, “possibilities of action
”, and
“sources of facilitation
”.[169]
Freedom is the most vital object of politics
, and this freedom
– always a process and never an achieved state
– is equated with the “effective
, humanly feasible, lucid and reflective positing of the rules of individual and collective activity
”.[170] An autonomous society – one without alienation – explicitly and democratically creates and recreates the institutions of its own world, formulating and reformulating its own rules, rather than simply accepting them as given from above and outside. The resulting institutions, Castoriadis hoped, would facilitate high levels of responsibility and activity among all people in respect of all questions about society.[171]¶ Castoriadis’ notion of social transformation holds to the goals of integrated human communities, the unification of people’s lives and culture, and the collective domination of people over their own lives.[172] He was also committed to the free deployment of the person’s creative forces.
Just as Castoriadis enthused over the capacity of human collectivities for immense works of creativity and responsibility,[173] so he insisted on the radical creativity of the individual and the importance of individual freedom. Congruent with the notion of social autonomy, Castoriadis posited the autonomous individual as, most essentially, one who legislates for and thus regulates him or herself.[174] Turning to psychoanalysis, he designated this autonomy as the emergence of a more balanced and productive relationship between the ego and the unconscious. For Castoriadis, these goals were not guaranteed by anything outside of the collective activity of people towards such goals
, and he insisted that individual autonomy could only arise “under heavily instituted conditions … through the instauration of a regime that is
genuinely … democratic”
.[175]
Such an outcome could not be solved in theory but only by a re-awakening of politics.
Only in the clash of opinions – dependent on a restructured social formation – not determined in advance
by naturalistic or religious postulates, could a true ethics emerge
.[176]
This, I believe, is the highpoint of libertarian thinking about ethics and politics.
Conclusion ¶ I have argued that socialist orthodoxy has been eclipsed as a programme for the good life. On the one hand, it devolves into a project of pragmatic expediency bereft of a political and ethical dimension, where statist administration submerges both individual freedom and democratic decision-making. On the other hand, as social democracy the orthodox tradition coalesces into a variety of more or less straightforward liberalism. Liberalism tends to overstate the conception of humans as choosers, under-theorising and under-valuing the necessity of political community and the social dimension of individuality and the necessity of a positive conception of freedom. The communitarian critique, however, too readily diminishes the freedoms of the individual, subordinating people entirely to the horizons of community life and reducing politics to something like a “general will”. ¶ Possessed of both liberal and communitarian features, post-modernism has been skeptical about the idea of a unitary human essence. It has jettisoned the notion of humans as unencumbered choosers, and it has underscored the constructedness of all our values. In so doing, post-modernism signals
a renewed interest in ethics
, in questions of responsibility, evaluation, and difference
, within contemporary social thinking. Post-modernism offers a valuable critique of the tendency of socialist orthodoxy to bury the socialist insight as to the sociality and historicity of values.
Nevertheless
, advancing as it does on orthodox socialism, post-modernism’s
radical constructivism and its horror at the disasters of confident and unreflective modernity can issue in an ironic hesitancy
, indicated
in particular by an uncritical emphasis on pluralism and incommensurability that threatens to forever suspend evaluation
.[177]
One signal of this is the
cautious and depoliticised obsession with Otherness and the subject as victim of the return to ethics
.[178] Further, post-

modernism
all too often withdraws from universals and emancipation towards particularist – either individualist
or community-based – answers to questions of justice
and the content of the valuable life. In contrast, those seeking a radical, inclusive democracy must remain engaged and universalist in orientation
. ¶ A number of libertarians have not hesitated in committing themselves, most importantly, to
the emancipation of humanity
without exception.[179] In fact, politics and ethics seem unthinkable without such universalistic aspirations
.
Post-modernists themselves
have often had to submit to this truth
,
smuggling into their analyses universally-binding ethicopolitical principles and attempting to theorise the potential linkages between progressive political struggles.
However, such linkages do not amount to a coherent anti-systemic movement that addresses the power of state and capital
. In contrast, the universalist commitments of the ethics of emancipation
held to by many libertarians accents both freedom and equality, and the establishment of a true political community
, against the dominations and distortions of state and capital
.
Against the contemporary obsession with ethics
, which is so often sloganistic, depoliticised
, defensive, privatised, and trivial
, we should
, with Castoriadis, accent politics as primary and as the condition of proper ethical engagement
. I have argued that, in line with Castoriadis’ strictures, such a political community and the aspiration to truly ethical and political deliberation, can only be attained when socialists free themselves from belief in the possibility of extra social guarantees “other than the free play of passions and needs”,[180] and from the expectation of an end to tensions and dilemmas around questions of social ordering. On these terms, libertarian goals are not – contra liberal strictures – the negation of aspirations for freedom and democracy but are rather a collective pressing of these aspirations to the very far limits of popular sovereignty. It is for this reason that the stubborn durability of these goals may, against all expectations, be an auspicious sign for libertarian utopianism.

Benjamin
, Reader in English at the University of Chichester, Through a Glass Darkly:
Alain Badiou’s critique of anarchism, https://www.academia.edu/216175/Through_a_glass_darkly_Alain_Badiou_s_critique_of_an archism
Badiou’s critique of anarchism operates indirectly; it attacks what Daniel Bensaïd describes as
‘[a] neo-libertarian current, more diffuse but more influential than the direct heirs of anarchism …[which] constitutes a state of mind, a ‘mood’, rather than a well-defined orientation
.’ (Bensaïd 2005: 170). One of Badiou’s examples of this tendency, targeted while he was still a Maoist, is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s book Anti-Oedipus (1972).
This
book, with its vision of a flux of desire that can escape
the constraints
of both capitalism and the ‘prison’ of the Freudian Oedipus complex, not only had a significant influence on
the libertarians of the movements after May 68 but also on later anarchists and postanarchists
. Where anarchists have tended to celebrate their theories of the uncontrollable fluxes of desire
Badiou sarcastically comments:
‘Unforeseeable, desiring, irrational: follow your drift, my son, and you will make the Revolution
.’
(2004: 76). This point summarises Badiou’s general scepticism towards what he regards as the anarchist faith in the ‘pure’ movement of resistance
, a movement that seems to operate without the need for aim or direction but will somehow still result in revolution.
¶ Badiou refines this general scepticism in making a series of more precise criticisms of the
‘libertarian current’. He argues that the central problem of this
current is that it sets up a simple-minded opposition between power and resistance (or revolt, or rebellion). The result is a sterile set of ‘static dualisms’, from which is derived ‘the catechism of the System and the Flux, the Despot and the
Nomad, the Paranoiac, and the Schizo’
(Badiou 2004: 80). In this case Badiou is explicitly referring to a number of oppositions that structure the text of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus , in which the second term is valorised at the expense of the first
. The problem with such dualisms is that they fail to grasp the actual way politics operates: ‘power’ is not one monolithic whole, and neither is ‘resistance’.
Instead the task of ‘doing politics’
involves a closer analysis of different forces and contradictions as well as
, for Badiou, the formation of the party as a form to handle and organise these contradictions
. Whatever we might think of the second point we can, I think, accept the first is well made. While there may be a polemically or motivational gain in presenting politics in terms of a grand opposition, and there may well be times where struggle operates in this form, more often matters are considerably more complex.
¶ For Badiou these kind of oppositions are reflective of the limits of the French political scene of the 1970s: namely the opposition between the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser, which finds its model in the French Communist Party, and the philosophy of desire of Deleuze and Guattari that gave voice to, and which finds its model in the dispersion of the little groups of libertarians (‘groupuscules’). In the first we find the relentless and paralysing insistence on the power of structure and, in the second, the celebration of ‘pure’ revolt. We can see here the origin of Badiou’s later contention that the anarchist model mirrors the communist party model.
Anarchists oppose their small groups to the supposedly ‘monolithic’ style of the communist party. What they fail to recognise are the fissures and contradictions that run through both power and resistance
. In this period
Badiou, and the UCFML, are groping towards a new party-form that would be able to negotiate a dialectical reading of politics that could engage with force and place, disruption and structure, without reifying one of the terms against the other.
¶
The irony is that defenders of Deleuze and Guattari, or
Michel
Foucault, whom Badiou also attacks, will argue that they present a model of power and resistance as multiple, fluid, and unstable – precisely not a binary. Badiou, however, is correct to note a tendency to re-constitute new binaries in these modes of thinking: ‘Schizo vs. Paranoid’
(Deleuze and Guattari), ‘
Pleb vs. Power’
(Foucault), or ‘Multitude vs. Empire’
(Negri and Hardt). In each case the attempts at anti-dialectical thinking risk becoming merely un-dialectical.
Badiou himself certainly changes the terms of his own thinking, but he retains the mistrust of what he regards as this fundamental libertarian or anarchist schema. So, in the later Being and Event (2005) Badiou will critique what he calls ‘speculative leftism’, which believes in the ‘pure’ event of revolt – the miracle of revolt appearing out of nothing.2 Again his point here is there is a faith in the emergence of a force of revolt posed against a static sense of power, without any real attempt to analyse the possibilities and limits the forces that would compose this ‘revolt’
. This faith in the miracle of the event of revolt is coupled, Badiou argues, with a sense of the inevitable defeat of such revolts by power. The result is that we are left in the situation of fighting an endless (losing) war – alternating between the eruption of revolt out of nothing and then its inevitable return to nothing.
¶ More recently Badiou has focused his criticisms on the thinking of Antonio
Negri (author, with Michael Hardt, of Empire (2000)), and his influence on the ‘movement of movements’. Badiou tends to conflate Negri with the
‘movement of movements’, and while it is true that the language and thinking of Negri has had considerable influence it has by no means passed uncontested. Badiou modulates his earlier general criticisms of anarchism / libertarian positions but stays within the same general frame: Negri is not truly opposed to capitalist ‘Empire’ but instead romanticises the power of capitalism: ¶ As is well known, for Negri, the Spinozist, there is only one

historic substance, so that the capitalist empire is also the scene of an unprecedented communist deployment. This surely has the advantage of authorizing the belief that the worse it gets, the better it gets; or of getting you to (mis)take those demonstrations – fruitlessly convened to meet wherever the powerful re-unite – for the ‘creation’ and the ‘multiform invention’ of new petit-bourgeois proletarians. (Badiou 2006: 45) ¶ Therefore
Negri cuts the ground from under any truly anti-capitalist politics by being overly fascinated with the mobile power of capital
. At the same time he is overly hopeful about the powers of resistance on this ground, offering only a ‘dreamy hallucination’
(Badiou 2003: 126) of the power of the
‘multitude’, which lacks the discipline to properly detach itself from the state.
¶ Badiou’s critique of anarchism
ranges across a number of repeated and modulated criticisms. At the fundamental level it involves a constrained sense of the possibilities of politics that remains in a dualism of resistance versus power. This monolithic conception prevents a properly political assessment of the complex arrangements of political power and the means by which capitalist and state power might not only be resisted but also overthrown. This static dualism often leaves the origin of revolt unexplained or undetermined
. It seems to come from nowhere and also to go nowhere; the ‘miracle’ of revolt is always doomed to defeat or recuperation. Also, this dualism leads to a structure of mirroring between anarchism and state
or capitalist power
.
The invocations of drift and liberation found in the libertarian current are dangerously close to the ideological forms of capitalism itself
. For Badiou, this means that anarchism lacks the ability to
‘construct new forms of discipline to replace the discipline of political parties’
(Badiou 2003: 126). Of course anyone knowledgeable of the history of anarchism will recognise these kinds of criticism, particularly as it has often been advanced by Marxists.
But it is the vehemence with which Badiou poses these questions in the present context, and his choice of theoretical targets that make them worth considering as critical questions – especially since, as we will see, some voices within the movement have arrived at similar conclusions.

t

Paul
, Professor of English and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Winter 2000, “The Politics of Play: The Social
Implications of Iser's Aesthetic Theory,” New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, p. 211-223
Such a play-space also opposes the notion that the only alternative to the coerciveness of consensus must be to advocate the sublime powers of rulebreaking. 8 Iser shares Lyotard's concern that to privilege harmony and agreement in a world of heterogeneous language games is to limit their play and to inhibit semantic innovation and the creation of new games. Lyotard's endorsement of the "sublime"-the pursuit of
the "unpresentable" by rebelling against restrictions
, defying norms, and smashing the limits of existing paradigms
-is undermined by contradictions
, however, which Iser's explication of play recognizes and addresses.
The paradox of the unpresentable
, as Lyotard acknowledges, is that it can only be manifested through a game of representation
. The sublime is, consequently, in Iser's sense, an instance of doubling.
If violating norms creates new games
, this crossing of boundaries depends on and carries in its wake the conventions and structures it oversteps
.
The sublime may be
uncompromising, asocial, and unwilling to
be bound by limits, but its pursuit of what is not contained in any order or system makes it dependent on the forms it opposes
. [End Page 220]
The radical presumption of the sublime is not only terroristic in refusing to recognize the claims of other games whose rules it declines to limit itself by
.
It is
also naive and self-destructive in its impossible imagining that it can do without the others it opposes
. As a structure of doubling, the
sublime pursuit of the unpresentable requires a play-space that includes other, less radical games with which it can interact
. Such
conditions of exchange would be provided by the nonconsensual reciprocity of
Iserian play
.
Iser's notion of play offers a way of conceptualizing power which acknowledges the necessity and force of disciplinary constraints without seeing them as unequivocally coercive and determining
.
The contradictory combination of restriction and openness in how play deploys power
is evident in Iser's analysis of "regulatory" and "aleatory" rules. Even the regulatory rules, which set down the conditions participants submit to in order to play a game, " permit a certain range of combinations while also establishing a code of possible play
. . . .
Since these rules limit the text game without producing it
, they are regulatory but not prescriptive
.
They do no more than set the aleatory in motion
, and the aleatory rule differs from the regulatory in that it has no code of its own" (FI 273).
Submitting to
the discipline of regulatory restrictions is both constraining and enabling because it makes possible certain kinds of interaction that the rules cannot completely predict or prescribe in advance
. Hence the existence of aleatory rules that are not codified as part of the game itself but are the variable customs, procedures, and practices for playing it.
Expert facility with
aleatory rules marks the difference
, for example, between someone who just knows the rules of a game and another who really knows how to play it
. Aleatory rules are
more flexible and openended and more susceptible to variation than regulatory rules, but they too are characterized by a contradictory combination of constraint and possibility, limitation and unpredictability, discipline and spontaneity.

Sarah
, Director of the School of Communication and Professor at USC
Annenberg, 2012, Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, p. 224-225
18. Examining the contemporary moment, in other words, means that we need to, as James
Scott has eloquently pointed out, understand how neoliberalism authorizes not just corporate institutions and governments but also individuals to "see like a state." James Scott, Seeing Like a
State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999). As Judith Halberstam has pointed out, "For Scott, to ‘see like a state’ means to accept the order of things and to internalize them; it means that we begin to deploy and think with the logic of the superiority of orderliness and it means we erase and indeed sacrifice other more local practices of knowledge, practices, moreover, that may be less efficient, may yield less marketable results, but may also, long term, be more sustaining." See Judith
Halberstam, "Beyond Broadway and Main: A Response to the Presidential Address" American
Quarterly 61, no. i (2009): 35. But, importantly, the neoliberal context is also a broader set of ideologies that allows for what Jacques Ranciere calls a "distribution of the sensible," where
"
, where what is considered "sensible" is understanding the state as the enemy of the people and privileging the individual as the central interlocutor in all areas of life, and where those practices that "may be less efficient, may yield less marketable results" are positioned as the opposite of the sensible, indeed, as pure nonsense. Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: The
Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Lockhill (London: Continuum, 2004).
[Italics in original]

Brandon
, U Wisconsin-Madison Dept of Pol Sci, The Thrill of Victory, the Agony of
Defeat: The Nietzschean Vision of Contest, www.lsu.edu/artsci/groups/voegelin/society/2006%20Papers/Brandon%20Turner.pdf
Agonistic democrats emphasize the role of the construction of identity/difference both external and internal to the democratic citizen and suggest that
—since identity should be understood as fluid, other-positing, and constantly reshaping itself— politics must be understood as inescapably and inherently pluralistic
. As a result, consensus—however it might be procured—is necessarily incomplete, exclusionary, and potentially coercive. As consensus is reached, politics will always produce what Bonnie Honig calls “remainders,” which proceduralists can account for “only as independent, prepolitical, or apolitical artifacts.”7 Consensus pushes dissenting identities and means of expression to the margins of the political sphere without providing avenues of reentry consistent with the demands of authenticity.
To counter the tendency of democratic theorists, and political theorists generally, to minimize, marginalize, or attempt to cancel the possibility of ineradicable difference and conflict, the agonists find new possibilities in the politics of the agon (αγον – literally, “competition” or “struggle” – also, the root of “agony”).
Agonistic politics is premised on conflict,
dissonance, resistance, unceasing competition
– all of which constitute what agonistic theorists believe to be the natural state of politics. Wolin defines “politics” (as opposed to the “political”) in precisely this way: “legitimized and public contestation, primarily by organized and unequal social powers, over access to the resources available to the public authorities of the collectivity…politics is continuous, ceaseless, and endless.”8 These thinkers recall Hannah Arendt’s worries over the interplay between truth and politics. For Arendt, the introduction of universal or objective truth (such as a procedurally-legitimated consensus) must bring about the temporary suspension of the political sphere and likewise the suspension of freedom itself. Action and speech can only exist when their outcome remains in question. The kind of truth sought after by philosophers since Plato only serves to cut off the possibility of action by cutting off the uncertainty attached to it. Truth, in Arendt’s terms, is patently coercive and “despotic”: it necessarily eliminates the choices and possibilities that comprise politics.9 Previously the connection between struggle and absolutes emerged in Nietzsche’s early essay “Homer’s Contest,” in which he describes the original meaning of “ostracism.” Greek society, he points out, removed the greatest genius from the city because the undefeatable genius represented the most dangerous threat to the continuation of the agon.10 The genius functions in the pre-Socratic Greek world as absolute truth functions in Arendt’s thinking about politics: both deny the possibility of dissent and the continuing space for creation.
Agonists aim, therefore, to complicate the underlying binaries that work to preclude marginalized perspectives from reentering the political sphere: us/them, identity/difference, home/foreign all must be problematized and destabilized if their contingent and artificially coercive nature is to be revealed. To challenge these problematic consensuses, agonists emphasize the need for
new political spaces and for conflict and struggle in the political sphere
. For Mouffe, “ a well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions
,” clashes which should
normalize political strife and familiarize citizens with a more democratic and less dangerous construction of
Carl
Schmitt’s friend/enemy binary
.11 Friends and enemies, like other us/them constructions, must be made fluid and temporary, since “ the aim of democratic politics is to construct the ‘them’ in such a way that it is no longer perceived as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an ‘adversary
,’ that is, somebody whose ideas we combat
but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question…this is the real meaning of liberal-democratic tolerance.”12
Another way of describing the agonist project is through its particular vision of the “paradox of politics.”13 Writes Connolly of this paradox: The human animal is essentially incomplete without social form; and a common language, institutional setting, set of traditions, and political forum for enunciating public purposes are indispensable to the acquisition of an identity and the commonalities essential to life. But every form of social completion and enablement also contains subjugations and cruelties within it. Politics, then, is the medium through which these ambiguities can be engaged and confronted, shifted and stretched. It is simultaneously a medium through which common purposes are crystallized and the consummate means by which their transcription into musical harmonies is exposed, contested, disturbed, and unsettled. A society that enables politics as this ambiguous medium is a good society because it enables the paradox of difference to find expression in public life.14
The agonists’ key concern, then, is that the polity be aware of the incomplete nature of any “social completion” through an increased sensitivity to the construction of identity/difference and the often invisible violence caused by (admittedly necessary) political consensus of any kind. The introduction of the agon, then, implies that all social constructions are fair game: we must cultivate contestation (politics) everywhere in order to ensure the fluidity required by the fact of pluralism. Though Honig, Mouffe, and Connolly take different routes to agonistic democracy (Honig through Arendt, Mouffe through Wittgenstein, Connolly through Foucault and Nietzsche), they all three give similar recommendations on what an agonistic democracy should look like: namely, more space. For Honig and Mouffe, this means multiplying the spaces in which politics is carried out, meaning both a proliferation of physical spaces and mediums for political negotiation and a reconceptualization of the public/private distinction with an eye toward a more fluid understanding of what counts and does not count as political. For Connolly, this means providing the individual the space necessary for free negotiation of identity, a coercion-free zone in which one might arrive more autonomously at one’s own notions of identity/difference.
Why involve Nietzsche at this point? First, because the agonists involve Nietzsche prominently at this point. For Connolly, Nietzsche’s pathos of distance provides the basis for a fuller understanding of the fluidity of identity/difference construction, and for Honig Nietzsche urges the reclaiming of a responsible subjectivity and the institutionalization of agonistic ostracism. “Homer’s Contest” figures heavily in both. Second, understanding
Nietzsche—the father of post-modernism—is instrumental in understanding the philosophical tradition of a politics of difference or différance, the fountainhead of the agonistic wave.
Lastly, and most importantly, a proper conception of Nietzsche’s agon is essential in understanding just how far agonism has strayed from its vibrant and terrible Greek origins. Contemporary democratic theory misuses and misunderstands the power and purpose of the agon, supposing it an institution through which difference is rectified through its expression. In their formulation, the agon is the institution through which the ontological

claim for pluralism becomes a normative claim for tolerance. The answer to the question, “Why tolerance?” is simply: “Because we are agonists.” A look at Nietzsche corrects this view in two ways: first, it suggests that from the fact of difference the claim for respect does not follow; and second, it reveals that the agon is not an institution of respect.
The agon
, in Nietzsche’s view, is the arena in which difference is felt, experienced, lived
. One comes to the agon, not out of respect, but out of a desire for disrespect: a desire to test oneself against another, to order oneself vertically, hierarchically. This is the purview of the following essay. If Connolly believes that Foucault tames the problem of Nietzsche’s heroic individualism, then my aim here is to expose the absurdity of an agon without heroes and the agon without Nietzsche.15
Homer’s Aesthetic Contest
In his early essay “Homer’s Contest,” Nietzsche gives his most sustained discussion of the Greek agon.
The Homeric desire for contest arises
, in
Nietzsche’s vision, out of the prospect of the “uninterrupted spectacle of a world of struggle and cruelty
.”16
He praises the Greeks for their embrace of the inhumane aspects of humanity, an embrace that acknowledges that “‘natural’ qualities and those called truly ‘human’ are inseparably grown together.”17 To be human, to act in this world as a human being, requires benevolence and cruelty, love and hate, the will to create and to destroy.
The
Greeks here serve as a corrective to “the flabby concept of modern ‘humanity’”
because they sanction the
“earnest necessity to let their hatred flow forth fully.”18
The Greeks are terrifyingly human
.
Yet
these Greeks shuddered at their own possibilities.
Cruelty needed boundaries; efforts were needed to control the proliferation of strife and death. If life was ruled only by “the children of the Night: strife, lust, deceit, old age, and death,” then the realization of man’s greatest danger might come about: “disgust with existence
… the conception of this existence as a punishment
and a penance…the belief in the identity of existence and guilt.”19 The Greeks’ reply to this quandary—worthy of Silenus—was to divide discord into good and evil forms.20 The evil Eris was that form which pitted combatants against each other in battles of annihilation – this in contrast to the good Eris, “the one that, as jealousy, hatred, and envy, spurs men to activity; not to the activity of fights of annihilation but to the activity of fights which are contests.”21 Achilles and Hector exchanged for Aeschylus and Euripides; Pericles for Socrates. From the beginning, then, Nietzsche interprets the agon as a channel for our destructive capacities
.
Nietzsche’s agon exhibits a profoundly aesthetic dimension. His combatants are artists all of them: the poets Xenophanes, Homer, and Plato, the musicians Pindar and Simonides, and the politicians Themistocles and Aristides.22 Artistic contests enter as viable alternatives to armed combat
, and artists replace the warriors of old. Now the artist employs his craft against his fellow artists and “the Greek knows the artist only as engaged in a personal fight.”23 The irresistible force of war is redirected into the artists’ object as it was previously routed from the warrior to his enemy. In this way virtues are strengthened and greatness attained, because from war “man emerges…stronger for good and evil.”24
The aesthetic dimension of Nietzsche’s agon warrants further examination. The Greek contest, as described in “Homer’s Contest,” shares potentially instructive characteristics with Greek tragedy as described by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. In Nietzsche’s understanding of tragedy, an opposition is drawn between the Apollonian and Dionysian elements that coexist in the tragedian artist. The Apollonian is the element of boundaries, illusions, and the “principium individuationis” – it is the element of “dreams” through which the artist recreates the world in her own image.25 The Apollonian artist is the sculptor who molds the raw materials of existence into a “middle world” between consciousness and the horror of the meaningless life as the Greek Apollonians did in creating the Olympian god-world.26 To dream is to create a buffer against existence itself by forming lines and boundaries between the dreamer and the shapeless chaos of the universe. Opposite this is the Dionysian element, the bringer of fervor and ‘intoxication.’ Named for the Greek god Dionysus – god of wine and theatre – the artist therein channels the primal, the primordial, the unified character of nature, for:
Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man…the slave is a free man; now all the rigid, hostile barriers that necessity, caprice, or “impudent convention” have fixed between man and man are broken. Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him, as if the veil of maya had been torn aside and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious primordial unity.27
The Apollonian and the Dionysian exist
, then, as the two necessary aesthetic elements: as one individuates, the other reunites; as one creates boundaries, the other transcends them; as one orders, the other plays
.
Through a sublime unity of the two, the artist transcends existence if but for a moment in an act of channeling what can only be described as primal humanity.
Nietzsche writes: Insofar as the subject is the artist, however, he has already been released from his individual will, and has become, as it were, the medium through which the one truly existent subject celebrates his release in appearance. For to our humiliation and exaltation, one thing above all must be clear to us. The entire comedy of art is neither performed for our betterment or education nor are we the true authors of the art world. On the contrary, we may assume that we are merely images and artistic projections for the true author, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art – for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified…Only insofar as the genius in the act of artistic creation coalesces with this primordial artist of the world, does he know anything of the eternal essence of art; for in this state he is, in a marvelous manner, like the weird image of the fairy tale which can turn its eyes at will and behold itself; he is at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and spectator.28
The artist, at the moment of creation, transcends temporality and can behold herself as spectator (literally an “out-of-body” experience). To view oneself as artistic phenomenon – this is the purpose of the aesthetic and the only justification of existence. It is conceptually helpful to conceive of the agon as aesthetic experience.
Imagine a wrestling match: it requires contestants, boundaries, and fervor.
Before the match can begin, boundaries must be drawn and the previously chaotic
landscape of the arena must be ordered and made concrete, an act of Apollonian dreaming
.
The contestants pronounce this temporary suspension of reality – this molding and drawing of an unordered space into an ordered arena of contest – through a set of rules and boundaries
.
Once the illusion has been created, the contestants proceed to wrestle
.
They come together in an act of primal physicality, struggling against each other with every ounce of their will. Both contestants wrestle from the same instincts: the instinct to dominate and to exert power over an opponent, the instinct to philotimia (love of honor) and philonikia (love of victory).
Soon the boundaries drop away – the technicalities that bound the fervor are forgotten in a frenzy of contest as the combatants
, the wrestling circle, and the arena and spectators are all caught in a moment

of exhilaration
. The match is over – winners and losers are declared, the contestants re-separate themselves and exit the arena. Existence returns where an aesthetic thrill had appeared only moments before. If one can conceive of the agon in this way
, it becomes clear that it shares with the aesthetic experience the character of bounded fervor
. If the combatant is the artist and the aesthete is the warrior, then one might make further instructive correlations between Nietzsche’s conceptions of the aesthetic and agonistic. One might come to understand how the Greeks “poetized in order to conquer.”29

Amanda
, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown
University, Spring 2006, “Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 2, p. 281-290
Lets first examine the claim that my book is "unwittingly" inviting a resurrection of the "Enlightenment-equals-totalitarianism position."
How
, one wonders, could
a book promoting argument and debate, and promoting reasongiving practices as a
kind of common ground that should prevail over assertions of cultural authenticity
, somehow come to be seen as a dangerous resurgence of bad Enlightenment?
Robbins tells us
why:
I want "argument on my own terms"that is,
I want to impose reason on people
, which is a form of power and oppression
. But what can this possibly mean?
Arguments stand or fall based on whether they are successful and persuasive
, even an argument in favor of argument
.
It simply is not the case that an argument in favor of the importance of reasoned debate to liberal democracy is tantamount to oppressive power
. To assume so is to assume, in the manner of
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that reason is itself violent, inherently, and that it will always mask power and enforce exclusions. But to assume this is to assume the very view of Enlightenment reason that Robbins claims we are "thankfully" well rid of. (I leave to the side the idea that any individual can proclaim that a debate is over, thankfully or not.) But perhaps Robbins will say, "I am not imagining that your argument is directly oppressive, but that what you argue for would be, if it were enforced
."
Yet my book doesn't imagine
or suggest it is enforceable; I simply argue in favor of, I promote
, an ethos of argument within a liberal democratic
and proceduralist framework
. As much as Robbins would like to think so, neither I nor the books I write can be cast as an arm of the police
.
Robbins wants to imagine a far more direct line of influence from criticism to political reality, however, and this is why it can be such a bad thing to suggest norms of argument
. Watch as the gloves come off:
Faced with the prospect of submitting to her version of argument roughly, Habermass version-and of being thus authorized to disagree only about other, smaller things, some may feel that there will have been an end to argument, or an end to the arguments they find most interesting. With current events in mind, I would be surprised if there were no recourse to the metaphor of a regular army facing a guerilla insurrection, hinting that Anderson wants to force her opponents to dress in uniform, reside in welldemarcated camps and capitals that can be bombed, fight by the rules of states (whether the states themselves abide by these rules or not), and so on-in short, that she wants to get the battle onto a terrain where her side will be assured of having the upper hand.
Lets leave to the side the fact that this is a disowned hypothetical criticism. (As in, "Well, okay, yes, those are my gloves, but those are somebody elses hands they will have come off of.") Because far more interesting, actually, is the sudden elevation of stakes
. It is a symptom of the sorry state of affairs in our profession that it plays out repeatedly this tragicomic tendency to give a grandiose political meaning to every object it analyzes or confronts
. We have evidence of how desperate the situation is when we see it in a critic as thoughtful as Bruce Robbins, where it emerges as the need to allegorize a point about an argument
in such a way that it gets cast as the equivalent of war atrocities. It is especially ironic in light of the fact that to the extent that I do give examples of the importance of liberal democratic proceduralism
,
I invoke the disregard of the protocols of international adjudication in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq
; I also speak about concerns with voting transparency.
It is hard
for me to see how my argument about proceduralism can be associated with the policies of the Bush administration when that administration
has exhibited a flagrant disregard of democratic procedure and the rule of law
. I happen to think that a renewed focus on proceduralism is a timely venture
, which is why I spend so much time discussing it in my final chapter.
But
I hasten to add that
I am not
interested in imagining that proceduralism is the sole political response to the needs of cultural criticism in our time: my goal
in the book is to argue for a liberal democratic culture of

argument
, and to suggest ways in which argument is not served by trumping appeals to identity and charismatic authority. I fully admit that my examples are less political events than academic debates; for those uninterested in the shape of intellectual arguments, and eager for more direct and sustained discussion of contemporary politics, the approach will disappoint. Moreover, there will always be a tendency for a proceduralist to under-specify substance, and that is partly a principled decision, since the point is that agreements, compromises, and policies get worked out through the communicative and political process. My book is mainly concentrated on evaluating forms of arguments and appeals to ethos, both those that count as a form of trump card or distortion, and those that flesh out an understanding of argument as a universalist practice. There is an intermittent appeal to larger concerns in the political democratic culture, and that is because I see connections between the ideal of argument and the ideal of deliberative democracy. But there is clearly, and indeed necessarily, significant room for further elaboration here.
There is a way to make Robbins’s point more narrowly which would run
something like this:
Anderson has a very restricted notion of how argument should play out
, or appear, within academic culture, given the heavy emphasis on logical consistency and normative coherence and explicitness. This conception of argument is too narrow (and hence authoritarian
).
To this I would reply
simply that logical consistency and normative coherence and explicitness do not exhaust the possible forms, modes, and strategies of argumentation
.
There is a distinction to be made between
the identification of moves that stultify or disarm argument
, and an insistence on some sort of single manner of reasoned argument
.
The former I am entirely committed to; the latter not at all
, despite the fact that I obviously favor a certain style of argument
, and even despite the fact that I am philosophically committed to the claims of the theory of communicative reason. I do address the issue of diverse forms and modes of argument in the first and last chapters of the book (as I discuss above), but it seems that a more direct reflection on the books own mode of argumentation might have provided the occasion for a fuller treatment of the issues that trouble Robbins.
Different genres within academe have different conventions
, of course, and we can and do make decisions all the time about what rises to the level of cogency within specific venues, and what doesn't
.
Some of those judgments have to do with protocols of argument
. The book review, for example, is judged according to whether the reviewer responsibly represents the scholarship
under discussion, seems to have a good grasp of the body of scholarship it belongs to, and convincingly and fairly points out strengths and weaknesses
. The book forum is a bit looser-one expects responsible representation of the scholarship under discussion, but it can be more selectively focused on a key set of issues. And one expects a bit of provocation, in order to make the exchange readable and dramatic. But of course in a forum exchange there is an implicit norm of argument, a tendency to judge whether a particular participant is making a strong or a weak case in light of the competing claims at play
.
Much of our time
in the profession is taken with judging the quality of all manner of academic performance, and much of it has to do with norms of argument, however much Robbins may worry about their potentially coercive nature
.
From time to time I myself have wondered whether my book is too influenced by the modes of academe. But when I read a piece of writing like the one that Elspeth Probyn produced, I find myself feeling a renewed commitment to the evaluative norms of responsible scholarship, and to the idea that clearly agreed-upon genres and protocols of fair scholarship
benefit from explicit affirmation at times. Probyn's piece does not conform at all to the conventions of the forum response. She may herself be quite delighted that it does not. Robbins may find himself delighted that she represents a viewpoint that does not agree on my
(totalitarian) fundamentals of forum responses. But I would simply say that here we do not have fair or reasoned argument, which is one of the enabling procedures of forum exchanges. Indeed,
I hear a different genre altogether: the venting phone call to a friend or intimate. In this genre, which I think we are all familiar with, one is not expected or required to give reasons or evidence, as one is in academic argument. Here's how the phone call might go: "Ugh. I have to write a response to this awful book. I agreed to this because I thought the book had an interesting title; it's called The Way We Argue Now. But I can't get through it; it isn't at all what I expected. I find myself alternately bored and irritated. It's so from the center—totally American parochial, and I just hate the style: polemical in a slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am way—really quite mean-spirited. She's so arrogant. And you wouldn't believe the so-called critique of Foucault. I don't know, I think I'm just sick of abstract theory—I mean, aren't we past this? It's so stultifying. I wish there were some way to get out of the commitment. I don't know how I'm ever going to get to it anyway, with all my journalism deadlines." The friend: "That sounds awful. But just use the occasion to write about something else, something you think is important. Write

about yourself. Direct attention to a book that you do like. Whatever you do, don't spend too much time on it. And definitely call her out on the American centrism."

case

Adolph
, prof of pol sci at U Penn, Race and the New Deal Coalitionk www.thenation.com/article/race-and-new-deal-coalition#axzz2ZcPH3kri
But the fact is, most New Deal programs were anything but race-neutral--or, for that matter, gender-neutral--in their impact. Some, like the initial Social Security old-age pension program, were established on a racially invidious, albeit officially race-neutral, basis by excluding from coverage agricultural and domestic workers, the categories that included nearly 90 percent of black workers at the time. Others, like the CCC, operated on Jim Crow principles. Roosevelt's housing policy put the weight of federal support behind creating and reproducing an overtly racially exclusive residential housing industry.
That so much of recent liberal and left discussion of the New Deal has been charged by the imperatives of current political debates has given it an unfortunate either/or quality. In reality, the New Deal was both racially discriminatory and a boon to many black Americans.
Blacks benefited relatively less than whites from many social policy initiatives. Worse, postwar urban renewal--one of the main conduits of federal resources to the local level--actively intensified racial disadvantage as blacks and Puerto Ricans were displaced for federally supported redevelopment at a rate more than 500 percent greater than their share of the national population. But benefiting relatively less does not mean not benefiting. The Social
Security exclusions were overturned, and black people did participate in the WPA, Federal
Writers' Project, CCC and other classic New Deal initiatives, as well as federal income relief.
Moreover, the National Labor Relations Act facilitated the Congress of Industrial Organizations' efforts, from which blacks also benefited substantially. Black Americans' emergence as a significant constituency in the Democratic electoral coalition helped to alter the party's center of gravity and was one of the factors--as was black presence in the union movement--contributing to the success of the postwar civil rights insurgency.
One lesson to take from reflecting on the New Deal is that political institutions and the
politics rooted in them can have significant and far-reaching consequences. The
right understands this well. When Newt Gingrich and his protofascist comrades took over
Congress in 1994, they sneeringly boasted that they intended to take the federal government back to the 1920s. This was not only because they were bent on eliminating redistributive social programs. They also wanted to extirpate from the culture the idea that government can
be an active force for making most people's lives better. By crippling [wrecking] public institutions, they leave us without any rudder or focus for an effective politics.
We need to remember that in the lived experience of younger Americans today, public power and government capacity have been only dismissed and disparaged. Both Democratic presidential candidates qualify their embrace of federal activism and temporize with fealty to market forces and calls to personal responsibility. Therefore, the nostalgic identification that those of us who are older or who grew up in left, union or Democratic activist households feel for the New Deal era will not transfer well to others. I've seen this with my own students. To those young people who encounter the era, unions may have been necessary then; federal intervention and regulation may have been appropriate then. We can use the New Deal as part of a discussion about what government can do and how its actions can change the playing field in
progressive ways. What we need most of all, though, is to articulate a politics steeped
in a vision like that of the industrial democracy that fed the social movements that pushed the
New Deal to be as much as it was.

Arrigo 8 [“Revolution in Penology Rethinking the Society of Captives,” Rowman & Littlefield:
New York, Bruce A. Arrigo is professor of crime, law, and society in the Department of Criminal
Justice at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, Dragan Milovanovic is professor in the
Justice Studies Department at Northeastern Illinois University, 2008]
We have not attempted to provide a blueprint or to offer concrete proposals
for a socius yet to come. As Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999, 190) proposes, the danger is that any preconceived socius may result in authoritarian outcomes
. In other words, deviation
from the conceptualization may be resisted
and be regarded as counterrevolutionary
. Hence, consistent with Deleuze and Guattari
, we have suggested how certain lines of flight might emerg e that undermine (deterritorialize) closure and capture so that a more liberating socius
1 could develop
(reterritorialize). To remain true to our position, we must accept the potentials that inhere within each of us and
, as such, cannot in advance limit these becomings
. Indeed, following Dyer-Witheford (1999, 191), "the aim should be to create a space where a diversity of social, cultural, and economic ways of being can coexist/'2
However, we still need to think through possible alternatives, weighing with appropriate ethical consideration the competing options to which we are drawn and for which the struggle, the revolution
, in penology is sustained
(Dyer-Witheford 1999,
191). In this direction, we are particularly mindful of some key suggestions,
Witheford (1999, 192-218). some "battlefield maps
," offered bv Dyer-
We have seen that the war machine must engage
various molar levels. At the
more " micro
" level, personal strategies for daily survival and challenge are needed. At the
more " meso
" level, alternative networks and
organizations are desirable. At the more " macro" level
, either a reformist remedial
or radical reformist strategy is recommended
(see Henry and Milovanovic 1996).
We return to the constitutive elements of
COREL sets/ assemblages
for guidance at these various "levels." We recall that each comprises
(1) a material component
("machinic processes" that produce cuts and breaks or flows of matter/energy providing the raw material on which expressive forms work),3 (2) an expressive component (the manifest forms— discursive and nondiscursive), (3) terri totalization (tendency toward molar structurations and capture in the form of axioms), and
(4) deterritotalization (tendency to differentiate, dissipate, break apart). We also recall that iteration and nonlinearitv prevail in terms of linkages and effects.
Let us briefly provide some possible directions in producing change that may privilege active molecular forces and becoming
.
Suggestive at the more "micro" level is Massumi (1992, 103-106), who offers five recommendations. We provide some additional thoughts that augment and amplify his observations.

—Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University (Diane, Beyond Derrida: The
Autoimmunity of Deconstruction, Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 10:1)
There are alternative ways to articulate politics, ethics and justice
—or forgiveness, hospitality and democracy
— without appealing to a notion of alterity in
matters of justice and politics that it seems we can only articulate as a regulative ideal or ineffable beyond
. This does not negate the effectiveness of Derrida’s attention to theantinomies of politics, nor does it suggest that undecidability is paralyzing and that theonly solution is a normative, calculative approach. I am suggesting that we have not even begun to assess the role of the unconditional in political actualities (as opposed to political thought)—whether we speak of an incommensurable alterity or anundeconstructible justice—and this is where Derrida has not helped us much. This reading of actualities, of events, is something that political practitioners and actors have long practiced and acknowledged, constantly in confrontation as they are with their others—not their incommensurable others but the others they must sometimes struggle to understand or die at the hands of. Merleau-Ponty put it wisely in a 1960 interview: in actuality political life is not fixed into either/or dilemmas, and politicians are not as
Manichean as is commonly thought.
There are moments for affirmation and moments for
negation: these are moments of crisis.
Beyond these moments, ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are the politics of an amateur
. Let me emphasize this point: by refusing to abide by the yes and the no the philosopher does not stand outside politics, but is confined to doing what everyone,
and especially the professional politician, does
.29 Here is a very rare testament by a philosopher to the insight of the political practitioner, perhaps the very coming philosopher Derrida has invoked, but political philosophers are not strangers to this refusal either;30 my complaint is not
merely another allusion to the seemingly insurmountable gap between thought and practice, but about a kind of philosophy that hails itself as politically important, yet clings to a justification or ethical ground that means very little in the event, in the moment of crisis, action and decision
.
There may be obstacles
for the theorist in thinking the event and in acting
—the constant and often tediously slow work of “translating” ideas— but the gap will not be closed by creating a beautiful and complicated logic that never leaves the pages we write or
read
. When asked whether he is in despair over the situation in Israel and Palestine, Shuli Dichter tells
Simone Bitton, director of Mur: “Were I [in despair] I wouldn’t be here. Were I [in despair] I wouldn’t talk. Silence frightens me most. Desperate people keep silent. I’m not [in despair] I’m fighting.”31
Is it a pure idea of freedom or justice that motivates this man to act; is it an injunction “from on high”
?
On the contrary, it appears to be his confrontation with suffering and inequality—not an unconditional injunction so much as an inability to tolerate the pain of others
, which anyone may or may not feel in this encounter, may or may not act upon
. Like countless other political actors
, Dichter already knows, is forced to acknowledge
on a daily basis, the exigencies of political crises, and therefore the risk that any political program will miss its mark.
If we are to engage in philosophy that does not break with politics, we have to look there, where the moment of crisis demands a thinking that has no alibi, that is not seduced by a regulative ideal or pure á-venir
. Gasché’s statement about the impossibility of closure in Derrida could be a demonstration of the very
autoimmunity of deconstruction
.
What was once a startling insight, even a shocking intervention
, has come to immunize itself against its own other or others
. Thinking about the “good” autoimmunity, this is as it should be. We could turn Derrida’s words concerning community back to him: deconstruction needs to cultivate its own autoimmunity in order to stay “alive,” in order to remain “open to something other and more than itself.”
This other might be the very practitioner
Derrida believes the coming philosopher should be, and a justice focused on commensurability rather than incommensurability, commonality rather than difference, and the conditional rather than the unconditional.

Eric
, Contemporary anarchism, http://isreview.org/issue/72/contemporaryanarchism
By the end of the decade, anarchism had established itself as a provocative, radical opposition to
the hegemony of pop culture and the suburban conservatism of Reagan and Thatcher
’s worldview. At the same time, anarchist ideas were reduced to a tiny cultural milieu, stripped of virtually all class politics. In this context, anarchism emphasized the politics of the personal; veganism, interpersonal relations, and lifestyle choices, rather than revolutionary class politics.
¶
The failure of anarchism to convincingly offer a coherent strategy for fighting
oppression meant that many turned to variants of identity politics
. R ather than a unified movement, this resulted in an increasingly disjointed residue of identity-based anarchisms; green anarchism, anarcha-feminism, anarchist people of color, queer anarchism
, etc.
Just as the new global justice movement was chalking up some early victories, anarchist organizations were disappearing.
¶
A new global struggle—a new anarchism?
¶
In 1994, the Zapatista uprising marked the beginning of a worldwide fight against the excesses of global capitalism. The growth of neoliberalism and global resistance had a profound effect on anarchism internationally. In the United States, where the few workplace fightbacks were largely isolated and beaten, the 1999
Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization offered a militant, dynamic way of fighting and immediately became a touchstone for a revived anarchist movement. In this new context, the central discussion within anarchism was no longer about the nature of oppression. Instead, protest tactics became the immediate focus—how to recreate the success of Seattle during other meetings of world capitalist elites.
¶ ¶
This new emphasis on street tactics marked a significant turn from debates on the roots of oppression
. In fact, much of the global justice movement fostered an atmosphere hostile to political debate
. Under the guise of building consensus, minority perspectives were systematically buried.
While much of the movement was preoccupied with a “diversity of
tactics,” little room was left to discuss the very real diversity of politics and ideas that existed in the movement.
“The new movement did arrive, first in the pentecostal appearance of the Zapatistas in 1994, then in 1999 and after at Seattle, Quebec, Genoa, and Cancún,” explains Staughton Lynd in Wobblies and Zapatistas.
¶ ¶
Moreover, mirabile dictu, it arrived not exactly with a theory, but at least with a rhetoric: the vocabulary of anarchism. Far be it from me...to tell these splendid and heroic young people that they need more and better theory. I will just say that I am worried that in the absence of theory, many of those who protest in the streets today may turn out to be sprinters rather than long-distance runners
.9
¶
I will just say that I am worried that in the absence of theory, many of those who protest in the streets today may turn out to be sprinters rather than long-distance runners
.
9
¶
¶
This evolving emphasis on practice over theory—and in some cases the elevation of tactics to the level of principle—exposes two problems for contemporary anarchism
. First, the anarchist method was transformed into its raison d’être. The tactic itself became the goal.
¶ ¶
Second, this represented a retreat from any goals-based, long-term strategy.
As a result, anarchism was chiefly expressed in the concept of prefigurative politics, where anarchism’s method sought to prefigure an anarchist ideal of social relations.
¶ ¶
In this scenario, the classic anarchist goal of destroying the state receded into the background.
Instead, as Lynd describes the approach, the anarchist project “should be to nurture a horizontal network of selfgoverning institutions down below, to which whoever holds state power will learn they have to be obedient and accountable.”10 ¶ ¶
Prefigurative politics, of course, have always been part of the anarchist creed. “No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the means used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the purposes to be achieved,” wrote Emma
Goldman.11
What is different about the new anarchism is that it ignores rather than challenges state power
; instead of the means prefiguring the ends, the means have become the ends
.