62 Turning Operations identitarian grip of the maternal (without mirWniinitm real, lg real, existing mothers) and restore to itself a political project that values citizen action and struggles for democracy.20 When and if this happens, perhaps feminism's reconciliation of theory and praxis can begin.- Chapter 3 Merely Combating the Phrases of _This World_ Liberalism, Communitarianism, and Recent Democratic Theory Some books are important not because they resolve a puzzle or pose a problem in a new way but because they are symptomatic of certain deeply rooted and collectively shared patterns of thinking or conceptualizing within a particular moment in time. Such books are potentially illuminating insofar as they point to issues, even crises, in thinking or theorizing that far outweigh the subject matter that is immediately to hand. The books in political theory at issue in this chapter address the subject matter ofWestern democracy and citizenship. I am pleased to report that none of them exhibit the alleged "strange silence" (Isaac 1995) toward the European revolutions of 1989,the dissolution of communism, or the end of the cold war that, a few years ago, provoked a spirited group symposium about the political relevance of political theorizing (including William Connolly, Kirstie McClure, Elizabeth Kiss, Michael Gillespie, and Seyla Benhabib) in the pages of the international journal Political Theory. yuite explicitly, these books locate themselves within the historical and Political context of the "collapse of Communism" (Mouffe 1993, 3; Zolo *992, vii);"the dissolution of the Soviet Union" (Phillips 1993, 2); and "the end of the Cold War" (Bridges 1994, 14). Each recognizes the perils for eniocracy that accompany the subsequent rise of "destructive nationalisms M Central Europe" (Phillips 1993, 2); or the "recrudescence of nationalism" twinick 1993, 3); and the fragmentation of "previously united multina- 63 64 Turning Operations Merely Combating the Phrases of This World 65 tional political communities" (Beiner 1995, 3). If these introductory remarks , rrmrents of the democratic "market," and paradigms of "elites and do not exactly secure their authors' intentions to heed the symposium's call to open political theory "to the dramatic political experiences of our time," at least they encourage the reader to anticipate some sort of confluence between ps" governed the field. The theorizing of citizenship, as Beiner s collection masses g reveals, has come a long way since then. Yet at the same time, and despite the lively expansion and diversification of contemporary democratic theory on the one hand and what C. B Macpherson once called "the real world of democracy" on the other, in the turbulent context of the third millenium (Isaac 1995, 650). the problem of citizenship that they exhibit at the level of subject matter, I find in Bridges, Botwinick, Mouffe, Phillips, and Beiner s introduction (to his other-■ ,n,-ied collection) a srart.linp uniformity at the level of political theorizing. In the face of the post-cold war era, each of these authors also identifies particular political crises that face liberal democratic societies in the West and constitute what Ronald Beiner (1995, 3) terms "the problem of citizenship." Chantal Mouffe (1993, 4) and Anne Phillips (1993, 5), in their respective col- ■wise vdiieu n^j-j^-^*-iv-"-1-/? o j f Upon close inspection, the uniformity appears to be built upon a shared conviction that is itself linked to a binary conceptual picture, which all of these theorists appropriate. The conviction and the conceptual binary so thoroughly pervade these texts that they constantly threaten to resolve the manifold prob- lections of previously published essays, link the defeat ol communism to a "deep crisis of political identity" that confuses our understandings of friend and enemy and confounds our "yearnings for an undifferentiated unity" as the lem of democratic citizenship into a shared formula that bears a single solution. To paraphrase Aristotle's shrewd criticism of Plato's kallipolis, it is as if you were to turn harmony into mere unison, or reduce a theme to a single beat. In this basis tor democratic politics. Beiner (1995, 3) introduces his edited volume (of previously published articles by J. G. A. Pocock, Michael Ignatieff, George Armstrong Kelly, Richard Flathman, Michael Walzer, Iris Marion Young, chapter, I want to examine more closely this shared pattern of thinking because I think it is symptomatic of a problem in theorizing democracy, and perhaps also indicative of certain political confusions of our time. Alasdair Maclntyre, Joseph Carens, Jiirgen Habermas, and Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman) by noting a series of "political dilemmas"—ethnic and sectarian conflicts, mass migration and unemployment, economic globalization— Polemics that exacerbate already "jeopardized identities" and raise "anew deep questions about what binds citizens together into a shared community." Thomas Bridges (1994, 16) addresses what he calls "the most significant cultural task facing Has anyone ever seen a new idea come out of a polemic? —Michel Foucault North Atlantic liberal democracies"—the precise formulation of "civic moral _, o*>lf A *-i rat-* 1 * hiti«ii-1. /1 Oll^t A 1 O CO *l a\-----.'J.----^ .------ . 1 ... 1 - -1" — i-l ^ ~*_ The conviction that unites Beiner, Bridges, Botwinick, Mouffe, Phillips, and iucai^. /\ryen DoiwimcK {ljjj, iz, Dy, m) considers tne tiue gloDalization of democracy" and the possibilities of "participatory praxis" in terms of the reality of limited economic growth, "homogenizing technology," and the erosion of modernist culture. Zolo (who is otherwise the exception in this group) holds fast to the idea that we must dismantle a modern Western juggernaut that is allegedly on its way to wreckage, but under whose wheels too many devotees continue to throw them- As Beiner s excellent and wide-ranging collection of essays makes clear, the crisis of identity/difference (in national and international, as well as group selves. Zolo (19yz, vn) calls this juggernaut "liberal-democratic theory tout court las] established in the political culture of Europe." Mouffe (1993, 1) refers to it as "liberal thought" and "Western universalism." Phillips (1993,15,62) conceives and cultural terms), the cieation of shared yel diverse communities, the articulation of civic moral ideals, the meaning of civil society, the challenges of multiculturalism, the problems facing participatory social movements, the pro- of it as "liberal democracy" linked to the "abstract universal of the Enlightenment tradition." Beiner (1995,16) calls it "liberalism" in contrast to an equally objectionable "nationalism." Botwinick (1993, 59) identifies the danger cedures of deliberative democratic practices, and, above all, the phenomenon of citizenship—whether as an "ideal" (Pocock), a "myth" (Ignatieff), or a "theoretical problem" (Beiner)—are the themes that animate much democratic as the historical era of liberalism," and Bridges (1994, x, ix, 8, xii) variously denounces it as "the world view of the Enlightenment," "modernist Western rationalism," "modernist liberal doctrine," and "a universalist world view that political theory today. Kymlicka and Normans "Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory" (in Beiner) also provides a very useful overview of the state of the current literature. Insofar as the other books here under review also take up these themes in various ways, they offer a composite sketch of just how diversified the subject matter of democratic theory has become since the era rejects the cognitive and moral validity of culturally particularistic beliefs and moral ideals. In short, whatever its various guises and manifestations, something c ed 'liberalism" is the threat that must be controlled and contained. c^ ^°w' analyzing contemporary historical and political crises (such as the enges of democratization^ in l-prm** nf nnlitinl ideolofiml nr rhenretirnl when, in Flathman s words, "notionally scientific theories of citizenship" predominated (in Beiner 1995,106), and economic models of party competition, derrdeCtiVCS ^SUC^ as "liberalism") is the reliable stock-in-trade of much aca-tmc political theorizing and not, in and of itself, a deformation prcfessionelle. 66 Turning Operations Merely Combating the Phrases of This World 67 Botwinick's (1993,2) observation that "history in the 1990s seems to be keep rical analysis, positions the abstraction "liberalism" against an equally ing pace with and embodying the latest insights of theory" captures at its surface the deeper assumption among political theorists that one not only can organize the processes of theory formation into a historical pattern hut also bstract adversary, namely, "communitarianism."2 Over the past ten years the liberalism: communitarianism binary has come to reign supreme in the the party identification of Anglo American academic theory as polemics "Deniocrat:Republican" and its "bipartisan" attendant "liberalxonservative" do in American politics (and with an equivalent and increasing amount of understand history as variations in a theoretical pattern. Under this assurnp tion, for example, the historical field of Western citizenship might be grasped as a kind of "unfinished dialogue" between "a duality of values" embodied the Aristotelian politikon zbon and the Roman legalis homo, as Pocock does (in Beiner 1995, 34,49), or as "two mutually contradictory interpretations" of the citizen s role that pit the Aristotelian communitarian against the Lockean individualist, with each vying for "pride of place," as Habermas does (in Beiner 1995, 261). The persuasiveness of such arguments depends, however, upon whether the theorist avoids polemics, or a polemical attitude, by conceptualizing and clarifying the perspectives or patterns at issue, putting them to the blurring within each of its two entities). Within academia at least, the repre sentation of interests that operates under the respective "liberal" and "communitarian" banners still proceeds in a fashion that is somewhat more elevated than its ideological counterpart in American politics, but it is no less polemical for all that. At the level of the binary opposition, the opposing sides present them- selves as follows: liberalism generally marks "the Enlightenment" which, in turn, encompasses the "universal" values of reason, impartiality, and objectivity, the ideal of universal citizenship, "rights," the "disembodied" or "unitary" or test, modifying them when necessary, and bringing them to bear exactingly upon the historical subject matter at hand. This sort of enterprise within "the order of theory," as Foucault (1984c, 374) puts it, requires "a demanding, prudent,'experimental' attitude ... at every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing." The problem with much democratic political theory nowadays—to "autonomous" subject, and "abstract" individualism; communitarianism generally marks group identity and membership, the "embodied" or "encumbered" subject, the family, tradition, locale, virtue ethics, and situatedness in "commu-nity" The communitarian side of the binary often (but not always) gets the better of the liberalism side in this adversarial contest, if only as the friendly dupe that is exploited to expose all of the grand suspect's alleged crimes and which Beiner, Bridges, Botwinick, MoufFe, and Phillips all succumb in varying degrees—is that polemics have taken over the task of determining the subject matter of citizenship, particularly in the confrontation with liberalism. misdemeanors. Theorizing by Phraseology "Polemics," Foucault (1984b, 382 f.) observes, "defines alliances, recruits par-lisans, unites inteiesLs oi opinions, represents a paity; it establishes the other as an enemy, an upholder of opposed interests, against which one must fight until the moment this enemy is defeated and either surrenders or disappears." Polemics "isn't dealing with an interlocutor, it is processing a suspect" (382). The polemics that afflicts so many current studies of democracy and citizenship is most evident at the level of discourse on liberalism, where this complex Only because and insofar as man actually and essentially has become subject is it necessary for him, as a consequence, to confront the explicit question: Is it. as an "I" confined to its own preferences and and multifaceted historical phe lenomenon has become little more tlian an ideational enemy, or a suspect to be processed and called forth for "rebuke (Beiner 1995,19). Given the power of polemical thinking, it is not surprising freed into its own arbitrary choosing or as the "we" of society; is it as an individual or as a community . . . that man will and ought to be the subject, that in his modern essence he already is? to find even a theorist as astute as Beiner (1995,16) declaring that"theoiy typ ically involves radical simplification, in the interests of sharpening our sense of fundamental alternatives in the midst of complexity." Under the press of —Martin Heidegger curing the 1970s and 1980s, the Cartesian mode of thinking generated by the inary construct liberalismrcommunitarianism was more or less contained within the arena of Anglo-American analytical liberalism and specifically mobilized in philosophical responses to and critiques of the political philoso- polemics, it is apparently more tempting to simplify the task of theory than to theorize the dangers of oversimplification. The temptation to polemics in these works is aggravated by their shared recourse to a common conceptual binary that defines alliances, recruits parti-sans, and thereby undermines political theory's capacity to deal adequately 1% of John Rawls (1971). After the world-transformative events of 1989, ^wever, as the tendency to theorize democracy in terms of liberal democracy 1990ne m°re Urgent ancl Pronounced (perhaps in this case, theory in the toryj^ W^ keePing Pace with anc* embodying the latest developments in his- trans£- conceptual apparatus of liberalismrcommunitarianism was simply enin °rred °nt° terrain °f democratic theory.There it resides today, threat-g to subsume the latter into just one more subdivision of the by-now-vast with what MoufFe (1993, 35) terms "the legitimation crisis which affects the democratic system."The binary, which functions as a kind of principle of cat- 68 Turning Operations Merely Combating the Phrases of This World 69 and monotonously repetitive literature on liberalism, communitarianisna \ «r Mirv CÍ18451 1978,149) once observed in the somewhat parallel case antiliberalism, and anticommunitarianism. As democratic theorists, Phillips, Mouffe, Botwinick, Bridges, and Beiner (and some of Beiner's contributors) ^11 ;illow the liheralismromtnnnitarianisin jflcr). AS IVldlA r f the Young Hegelians, "They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way com-■ tUr, rri\ existins world when thev are merely combating the phrases of binary to frame their approaches to democratic theory and set off their discussions of alternative modes of approaching the politics of citizenship. Phillips (1993 59) for example pcic the dilemma of democracy as a choice between bating the real existing wi.nu w.,r <-y ..,™™y »i'„mu„s i""""" this world."5 But we have yet to see an even more dubious consequence of this sort of , - l «U^.rň^lí\mr Tfi hne fpvřc nelvtre n« tnp tirnnlpm is not met tnat "the kind of abstract theorizing that deduces principles of rights or justice from metaphysical assumptions" (that is, "liberalism"), on the one hand, and "a perspective that grounds our moral and political beliefs in the experience of specific communities" (that is, "communitarianism"), on the other. Beiner l, .a1 /111 v—[jv—Pill aoCvJX^Jj^ y.—xxl——t\^iJ—u^^mv—Mo,—miv—uim.mii—1.>—uu ^—i m^—umi- the idea of democracy is resolved into the adversarial phraseology of liberalism" communitarianism. At least here the problem is still posed politically, insofar as the two categories mark, however elusively, the identity of the subject-as-citizen. The more dubious consequence involves a parasitical bina- (1995, 13) introduces his book by noting the "competing perspectives" between the liberal, "emphasizing the individual, and the individual's capacity to transcend group or collective identity," and the communitarian, "emphasiz- ry that feeds off the original but at the same time reduces the political entity "citizen" to the philosophical entity "subject" (Heidegger's suhiectum) and leaches out the content of some basically political concepts (liberal, commu- ing the cultural or ethnic group, solidarity among those sharing a history or tradition"—against which he offers a third "republican" alternative. MoufFe, Bridges, and Botwinick each devote a chapter to the liberalxom- nitarian) so that they become, we might say, vacuously philosophical. The offending parasitical binary is universalism:particularism. The introduction of the vacuous phraseology of universalism and partic- munitarian "debate" and presuppose the challenge to democracy in terms of the same tension that Phillips and Beiner respectively identify between the (atomized or deracinated) liberal individual and the constituted or culture- ularism (which rarely rises to the level of any truly philosophical discourse) further depoliticizes democratic theory by beckoning a philosophical entity— the subject and its "identity"—to come hither. As such, it asserts a claim that bound member of a (habituated) community. Thus, the "radical-liberal-democratic political philosophy" that MoufFe (1993, 112) ultimately defends is set offby the dominating opposition of "Kantian liberals and their communitari- Beiner (1995, 9) terms "post-modern": "the philosophical universalisms that we know from the canonical tradition of the West all involve what we might call a 'hegemonic function,' which is to suppress various particularistic identi- an critics," while Bridges (1994, 56 f.) situates his discussion of civic culture in ties.' Botwinick (1993, 6) supports the same linkage between postmodernism ----1 1 / l • .1 it/"* f - ii ur i i- ii terms of the "Lockean and Kantian varieties of modernist liberal political theory," on one side, and a "communitarian identity" that he links to Charles Taylor's ethics of authenticity, on the other. Although Botwinick (1993, 34) and paitiLularism (and against the fixity of meaning, foundationalism, or "ultimate positions"), and adds "in a certain sense, we might say that with postmodernism we are back in the world of tradition." Bridges (1994, 62 f.), too, allows that certain features of the "worldwide postindustrial socioeconomic context" introduce an "element of artificiality" into the distinction, he also situates his discussion of democracy as a response to liberalism and communitar- appropriates Hie term postmodern in his call for a postmodern civic culture ' that "turn[s] away from the universalism of the modernist rhetoric of pure theory." In this arena, where democratic theorizing has now transmogri- ianism, the "two salient types ot political theory of the 1990s, except chat now Rawls (team L) and Sandel and Maclntyre (team C) substitute for Locke and Kant (teamL) and Taylor (team C).3 uea into the subject matter of so-called postmodernist critiques of Western foundationals metaphysics (or philosophy), the subject's identity is what is at stake: caught by the hegemon of Western (abstract) universalism, but open to In all of these works the formulaic binary liberalism: communitariaiusni has somehow managed to invade and structure the subject of citizen in democratic theory. The two amorphous posits of "the atomized liberal individual »ic possibilities of a postmodern (concrete) particularism. What are these suppressive Western philosophical, abstract" universalisms" | at threaten the particular citizen-as-subject? The answer is not very clear, for and the "situated communitarian self" serve as categories into which diveisc thinkers or texts, often from vastly different historical periods, can be pigeonholed or made ready stand-ins for one another (as in the mixing and matching within team L and team C, above). Through the use of this formulaic binary then the democratic theorists before us secure organise flnd articulate foC °n^ilaly blnal7>tne umversahsm:particulansm doublet serves in these ormulations as a kind of portmanteau category into whose two compartments some very sweeping claims are thrown and then hurriedly transported rr°m place to Piace. Bridges's book (1994, x), for example, is framed as a "civic" sponse to the "wreck" of the Fnlip-hretiment and contends that universalisms "democracy" by way of little more than a war of phrases (occasional bouts of hesitation and expressions of theoretical or conceptual concern notwithstand- e an entire ominous "cultural vocabulary" whose claim "was to provide 6 y Umversal language for a universal humanity, a language purged of all 70 Turning Operations Merely Combating the Phrases of This World 71 perspectives grounded in particularistic religions belief and the arrjdcin,:; &r-local history." Exactly which thinkers formulated this Enlightenment Esperanto, in what theories or context(s), and with what implications, Bridges neither specifies nor grounds in any particularistic rrifiqiie Mouffe (1993, 5£— 71) refers to a "universalistic, individualistic and natural-right type of discourse" that she associates with the (early) Rawls (1971); and she also men-_tions a "universal point of view, made equivalent to Reason and reserved to men" that is affiliated with "the liberal conception of citizenship"—but neither the philosophizing creators of the universal view nor the particular characteristics of the universal "R" are systematically studied or addressed. A chapter in Phillips's book is entitled "Universal Pretensions in Poliriral Thought." Phillips (1993, 55, 56, 71) links its topic to "Enlightenment thinking" and the "transcendent" and "abstract" universals of morality, justice, and rationality, as well as to "pretensions towards a universal truth or universal Tiumanity." "The tendency toward universality," she reports (58), "sometimes crops up as unthinking assumption, sometimes as grand aspiration, but in either case it should be firmly resisted." Exactly whose pretensions the Has in mind (not to mention whose justice or which rationality), and how any particular theorist or theory in the tradition ofWestern thought articulates these pretensions as all-encompassing, is not further articulated, specified nr partir-ularized. Given the impassioned claims in these pages that the "false abstractions of citizenship must indeed be challenged" on other fronts (14), this lack of specificity concerning "universals" is puzzling. (And is the phrase "ronrrete specificity" never itself an abstraction?) -The negative posit of "the Enlightenment," insofar as it is linked to the (equally negative) posit of "universalism" and opposed to particularism, is common to all of these works. In contemporary political theory, as Phillips (1993, 56) remarks in a phrase that reflects the level to which the matter hasT sunk, "the Enlightenment has been getting itself a pretty bad name." In Bridges s book (1994, 109, 147, 15, 116, 213), the Enlightenment (now a "wreck" in "demise") is repeatedly polenncized in phrases like "the detunctf cultural vocabulary and world view of the Enlightenment," "the totalizing character of modernist Enlightenment culture in general," and "the rationalist TVorld view of the Enlightenment." The "cultural vehicle" ofWestern globaT hegemony, Bridges (ix) writes, "was the universalist and secularist world view of the Enlightenment," wherein "the concepts of reason and knowledge spoke with the same authority as Western bombs and machines." Given the excess and hyperbole of such remarks, I fear it may be too late to reissue Foucault s (1984a, 45, 43) warning that "we must free ourselves from the intellectual blackmail of'being for or against the Enlightenment,'" and remember that "we do tint hreaV free of this hlarlrm-iil by introducing 'HiaWtiral' nipurra whlfc- seeking to determine what good and bad elements there may have been in the Enlightenment." Whatever the term ''Western universalism" and its accomplice "the Enlightenment" have come to mean, the verdict on them is more or less unanimous across these works: "Universalism is merely the cover for an imperialis- tic particularism" (Beiner 1995, 9), and itself "a form of Western cultural particularism" (Bridges 1994, xi), as well as "an obstacle in the path of understanding those newf forms of politics" (Mouffe 1993,11) that compel us to rec-ognize that "multiple differences have become the focus of the day" (Phillips 1993, 145). Thus, a problem emerges that Beiner (1995, 12) identifies as follows: "So we are left with two competing visions—-liberal universalism and antiliberal particularism—both of which tend to subvert, from opposing directions, the idea of a civic community.. .. Lying at die heart of this dilemma is what I would call the 'universalism/particularism conundrum.'" Mouffe (1993, 13) dons the same suit and calls for "a new kind of articulation between the universal and the particular"; Phillips (1993, 58, 51) seeks "a more middle route" between "abstract impartiality" and "concrete specificity"; and Bridges (1994, 6, 159, 34) wants to shift away from "the universalism and essentialism - characteristic of die doctrinal claims of modernist liberalism" and toward a "rhetorical concept" that recognizes "particularistic cultural communities." Botwinick's (1993,55) defense of a "postmodernist liberal communitarianism" -is framed in terms of a skeptical, "generalized-agnostic'" epistemological model that is itself an alternative to objectivist universals on the one hand, and relativist particulars on the other. -What is going on? If I understand them correctly, all of these theorists have resolved the contemporary crises of democracy and the problem of riri- zenship into two things: (1) a matter concerning the identity of the subject (as framed by the philosophical binary of umversalism:particularism), and (2) a task requiring the mediation, reconciliation, synthesis or transrendenre of the tension between individualism, equality, and liberty, on the one hand, and collectivity, community, and group membership, on the other (as framed by the political binary of liberalismxommunitarianisrn) The role of theory in this enterprise is to settle or renegotiate the (artificially created) tension between the two (conceptually constructed) "traditions," by way of an alternative epis- temology (Botwinick), language (Monffe), vision (Reiner), rnntr (Phillip), »r- "vocabulary (Bridges). Thus, the task, as Mouffe (1993, 62) puts it, "is not that ° replacing one tradition with the other but rather of drawing on both and "Ting to combine their insights in a new conception nf riri?r™hir adrqiuiir-^ a project of radical and plural democracy." Botwi^1 t0 CO"sider the five Particular positions (in Phillips, Mouffe, ' of'h ndges'and Beiner) that emanate out of the generic-collective exerts "i" 1theorlzlrlg democracy as the transformative reconciliati. -10nal Varies libeialis tion of the opposi- ism:communitarianism and universalism: particularism. 72 Turning Operations Merely Combating the Phrases of Tins World 73 Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of religion, disability, sexuality, language and so on' (Beiner 1995, 144). Phillips j compliments feminism for "redefining the political" in ways that "warn against the fruitless pursuit of a genuinely degendered universal" and the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process ide us toward "a greater emphasis on sexual and other kinds of difference." Mouffe (1993, 13, 12) also acknowledges feminisms "unmasking of the particularism hiding behind ... universal ideals" and dismisses the modern "ratio- of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners. —-John Stuart Mill Iris Marion Young was one of the first theorists to underscore the complexi- nalist concept of the unitary subject" as a "homogeneous and unified" entity, in favor of a theory that demands 'that we acknowledge difference—the particular, the multiple, the heterogeneous—in effect, everything that had been excluded by the concept of Man in the abstract." _t r_._| > | \ 11 j. i-—„a—A Am iftp—ulcn—nAin^ to ifTiHrninru'c in v*onnn g—f/,f n,i ,1 1 mi i- ties that identity, expressions or identity, and group differentiation pose for what she calls the "ideal of universal citizenship" (her influential essay "Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship" Yet r rlllUpS alio Iviounc also point 10 ni*iuequacics in i.vjuii^:> luiinuiduou of group differentiation that ultimately liberalize their respectively pluralistic concepts of democracy and thereby distance them from Youngs. Hence, [1989] is reprinted in Beiner). "Young (in Beiner 1995, 184) is interested in specifying a citizen politics that moves beyond the abstraction of "citizenship" as a universal ideal and toward certain principles that call for "a group differ- Phillips (1993, 117) notes that\oungs concept of diflciciitiatcd citizenship tends to dislodge if not obliterate "the older language of civic republicanism" and the idea of a broader polity that encompasses without erasing individual entiated citizenship and a heterogeneous public, within which the multiple differences and diverse perspectives of previously excluded others might be recognized, affirmed, and represented. She is, therefore, one of the first thinkers groups.8 MoufTe (1993, 86, 12, 87) pcisuasively charges that despite its apparent radicalism, Young s view of politics is static and immobile, insofar as it begins "with already constituted interests and identities," and thereby precludes to contribute the concepts ot "heterogeneity, diversity, and group difference"—in Walzer s terms, "a new sensitivity for what is local, specific, contingent" (Beiner 1995, 174)—to contemporary democratic theory. These ideas the uue aim of a radical democratic citizenship: the construction of a common political identity" at the intersection of a "multiplicity of subject positions" and "various struggles against oppression."9 _T^TTJll-l_frW_j- L. ■--■■ -J—-—. — — J.-J-1 '--, 1-J-. 1-1 - 1~ ■-—5-/ "-—■-1--- have now taken shape as part of a complex of elements that might be called the democratic theorists working answer to the question "what does it iriffp Lven as tliey advocate pluralism, then, and the proliferation of particularities, heterogeneity, and difference. Phillips and MoufFe are concerned to bring to be on the left today?" (MoufFe 1993, 9). The working answer is: the new pluralism.6 In brief, the new pluralism issues from combining, reconciling, or i/^dinrr tv-\rw=»t-Vif»t- t" M f liV^i-ilV /^e^fe>11w /"\f pninllhr inn 1iV»*>t-t-\.' itnn fnP rnmnill- to democracy some political principle that will, as MoufFe (1993, 57) writes, combine the defence of pluralism and the priority of right characteristic of modern democracy with a revalorization of the political understood as col- ---ALIVilllti—HJfcJC LI —L11C HUCLdJ. a UClCliaC Ul—CLJ Ua-LLL y—AliKX 1 y—A.' IK.1—LI 11,—iv.-'iiiiii - nitarians respect for particularities, cultures, and histories in a way that simultaneously circumvents both the laissez-faire detachment of the "atomized lechve participation in a public sphere." The problem, as Phillips (1993, 160) es it, is "how to generate that more comprehensive understanding that validates the worth of each group" (emphasis added). Universal is out comprehensive -■-11 lUlvlUUdl-elllLl—LllC—lUSLOU.ia.1—attcU-lllllCllL—fcHt—111C-lllUldi—LU1J lAlHAiiiLy 11' name of "individual difference" and "cultural heterogeneity." Phillips (1993, 5) and Mouffe (1993,131) appeal to (the new) pluralism in is in. The comprehensive political principles that Phillips and MoufFe recommend are derived from the very doctrine whose universal "philosophy of man" (MoufFe 1993, 150» they otherwise seek so c.trer,„o„sly to suppress- the -the wake of the disarray of European socialism, and as something that active-ly celebrates heterogeneity and difference" and is (now) nothing less than' the whole question of modern democracy." Their works are animated by a set of Principle of political equality (Phillips 1993, 160) and the principles of 1 50/tt, ^ demoCratic regime" namely, liberty and equality (MoufFe 1993, )■ Ihus, the reconciliatory project that ic "the new pluralism" issues for sociological values captured in the term difference . the multiplicity of indi viduals as social agents, the diversity of social relations, and the heterogeneity of society. Both Phillips and MoufFe contend that the assertion of these values is central to the project of escaping liberalisms universalizing tendencies. Indeed, Phillips's various essays (on socialism, liberalism, consociationalism, and en a MmifFe'in something like a defense of heterogeneity, difFer-ai° Und d!VCrSity 'n the name of a liberaHsm that is political, not metaphysi-bein Cr Pluralisin"in academia, it appears that the liberal convict pl«an-8 rehabilltated- By contrast, in the aftermath of Clintonite "new pro-Fiessivism " thr • feminism) ultimately circulate around the same theme and the same phenomenon: "the recuperation of pluralism" as "the growing emphasis on the political significance of sub-groups that are defined through gender, ethnicity, ctuall Vlct was not just apparently condemned to death but was Anld WOHn (1"6b' 23) observes'"volunteering its own epitaph."10 mj all of this combining and reconciling of opposites, one may well 74 Turning Operations Merely Combating the Phrases of This World 75 ask-'What has happened to democracy as a polities'? Phillips's essays provide ■ ii->r*-r"iH thp n of ion of *i "mn Ifinlinfv of™ ^oi"ni rplifion*; in instructive example of how the exercise of balancing binary oppositions, no matter how skillfully undertaken, can persistently impede the enterprise of tVioori^ino- riolitir** pinpciillv if trie ormn^ltions are ("iKPn as mi^pm For rli-«-i '. — r ^yy pOSin^ 11 1SLC«1.»Llicuuuuii ks l a ±±±k±±t±^±±^±tryf± awtMi i^idiivjiis n i hich sexual difference is always constructed in very diverse ways and where the struggle against subordination has to be visualized in specific and differen- her repeated assertion that "the questions of democracy and difference are ones that lie at the heart of contemporary dilemmas in democracy," Phillips (IQOt 11/ /1\ ivm^"" i-it-liiii- *- l-i -i .j\r^\ lir/ir t-V\fx d-i t +4-i i 1 t-t or ----J;._ . it tial forms " Her pluialism thereby begins with the reality of activity and stiug le or what she calls "the constitutive role of antagonism" (2) in political life. Social activity and political struggle construct identity (or "differentiated posi- ^J77jf 11/, / ly icgiSLCis latiici Liiaii IC3U1VCS liic Liuiii-Liiiics oi ucieilQinp 2i politics of greater generality and alliance" on one hand, and a politics of difference on the other. The reason for this, I think, has to do with her appreciation of some of the real dilemmas that face contemporary social movements rooted in the common yet divisive identifications of race, class, and gender that tions")" identity-as-sucli does not construct social activity. The advantage of this "agonistic pluralism" (4) is that it allows Mouffe to frame modern democ-ucy as a context of antagonism, conflict, and struggle, and to ask a decisively political question about the sorts of institutions, practices, and structures that an channel democracy's "agonistic dynamic" (6), without evading, repressing, today preoccupy theorists of cultural pluralism. But Phillips's difficulties with resolution also involve her ambivalence about feminism (and feminist theory), which she positions in organized opposition to liberalism (and liberal theory) submerging, or obliterating "the ineluctability of antagonism" (7). Mouffe's attunement to conflict, struggle, and politics as a world of combatants fighting under hostile banners thus appears to give her a way to theo- and about which she is equally ambivalent. In her account (66, 114), feminist particularism opposes liberal universalism, feminist difference opposes liberal equality, "female specificity" opposes "male abstraction," a feminist politics of rize democracy and citizenship without constructing or presupposing the ;tematic support of the constant notational principle of liberalism: commu-nirarianism. Yet, in political theorizing, as in political life, one should not participation opposes liberal democracy, and all of these oppositions presuppose a philosophy of subjectivity rooted in the terms of the by now familiar binary of womenrmen. underestimate the need for constants and the desire for reconciliation, even among thinkers who are otherwise not afraid to acknowledge the contingency .if human affairs and the flux of politics. The desire for reconciliation in the As we have seen, Phillips (1993, 71, 52) clearly wants to counter liberal universalism and abstraction with a politics of difference, but she wants to defend universality, abstraction, and liberal democracy, too. She also raises cau- fai,e of flux might explain the tendency at the level of Mouffe's theorizing to filiate between a (radical) account of democracy grounded in the rough process of struggle and antagonism and a (reformist) account of democracy tionary flags about the potential excesses of celebrating "femininity or female attuned to the reassuring constant liberahsmxommunitarianism. The second values" (160, 138) and radical forms of particularism. As a result, the chapters in her book keep getting caught between the very oppositions that they identify in contemporary political and feminist theory, and trapped in rhetorical point is where Mouffe (drawing upon both Quentin Skinner and Michael < >akeshott) seeks "a way of conceiving liberty which ... includes political participation and civic virtue" (63), and therefore rejects the "false dichotomy cul-de-sacs that empty out in the form of mere exhortations to move beyond "either/or" (64) and search for a "middle ground" (67). It is not surprising, then, that Phillips's most decisive theoretical expressions are framed in the face between individual liberty and political community" (65). But it is at precise-1 this second point—where the binary conceptual picture reasserts itself— that Mouffe offers the illusion of a reconciled liberal communitarianism" as of dual alternatives and alternate, ambivalently, between claims like "We need both the one and the other" (51) and we must "[recognize] difficult choices between what may be equally desirable but perhaps incompatible ends" (129). though it could be the real basis for the very politics that (at the other end of the oscillation) her agnostic pluralism declares resistant "to a final resolution of ^anflicts (8) and the comforting presence of some underlying norm of reali- Mouffe's new pluralism is more conceptually innovative and politically satisfying than Phillips's, partly because it refuses to begin where Phillips's feminism does—with fixed identities like "female specificity" and "male abstrac- ty The theorist's need to reconcile oppositional givens thereby overcomes the t. eorists recognition of the intractability of politics to any permanent solutions or final "adjustments." tion" that in turn give rise to "false dilemma[s]" (1993,78) like "equality versus difference," that are difficult to escape. Whatever Mouffe's regard for "difference" as an aspect of collective identities, she wisely does not subscribe to the "difference" or "standpoint" feminism that appears to guide Phillips's thinking hi short, Mouffe's new pluralism is as vulnerable to the presence of presupposed opposites demanding reconciliation as is Phillips's, although in a dif-jent and more interesting way. For Mouffe's reconciliatory impulses are in ™gg e with her agonistic impulses; they constantly dilute her politics of gonism (a volatile brew of MarVii-n'rlli ^/-Vimii-A ,mtli t-1-.n ^ ;r„ ated binary opposition: male and female. Mouffe (78) challenges the prior posit of "sexual difference" (and similar kinds of presupposed bifurcated sign1' 'ne AA' ljicw oi iviaLmaveiii ana ^>ari ocniruttj witn tne pacity— ^'public ^ "f EquaUy diluted) Rawlsian liberalism and Aristotelian canism.12 To be sure, Mouffe's combinative theorizing goes somewhere; 76 Turning Operations Merely Combating the Phrases of This World 77 there is a resolution to these efforts that is entirely larking in Phillips "Yet thci f h ihcr postmodernism ran live up to this promise notwithstanding is also a difference between a theory that is "sufficiently capacious" to absorb antipodes and one that is so accommodating that it loses its substance. The wnfery mixture that Mouffe (190.^ 11?) ultimately recommends conies clo |J0^ gotwinick's and Bridgess rhetorical appropriation of it—as a unitary jus-t'ficatory term and a solid legitimating category—is a sign of how even the 1 and disparate theoretical positions are susceptible to homoge- er to the latter and betrays itself by the very name that she is honest enough to give it: "a radical-liberal-democratic political philosophy." niost unruly y ^ ...... . zation-by-phraseology. Nowhere is postmodernism s incipient demotion ^naled more decisively, however, than in the name of the general project both *~ -i 1 O i ■ rArrpi' i^ri tit i lriHfrfri Iff 1 hf1 rrpnpi—»1 nrniprt rpintrnHi 1 Democracy as Solution Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of g ^VVllllCK SnO | >T 1 (ll^tJaWdlilLvJ U11UC1 IdfiC 1 1 lvJ gCllCldi ^JlV^JCv-l. 1C111L1UUULLS that by-now-familiar binary to which both Botwinick and Bridges grant lex-n_al authority and into whose service they commend "postmodernism." For Botwinick (1993,170, 57,55), the project is directed toward "a coalescence (or mprp-inrf between liberalism and at least some forms of communitarianism," -j--j-1-- \'- gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water . . . This hnrwt. fellow indeed toward a "postmodernist liberal communitarianism." For Bridges (1W4, 57, 35), the project requires "layfing] the basis for a postmodern liberal democratic civic culture" that effects a "balancing act" between "two oppos- was the type of the new revolutionary philosopher. —Karl Marx ing standpoints," namely, the citizens communitarian identity (shaped by "particularistic values") and his or her civic identity (as a free and equal individual). The notion that Bridges (1994,112,103,29) wants us to knock out of our "What I am searching for under the title of citizenship," writes Ronald Beiner heads, in the name of his postmodern liberal democratic civic culture—or simply a "postmodern civic culture"—is something he calls "modernist liberal political theorv" and "modernist liberal doctrines." Following doggedly along the (1995, b) "is an elusive middle term between opposing alternatives that I find unacceptable." Beiner's search ends with the promissory note of a mediatory republicanism of "civic bonds" (14) and "robust civic involvement" (19), but it path already marked by Sandel (whom he never mentions),14 Bridges (27, 101) argues that modernist liberal doctrine issued out of Lockean and Kantian liberal "types," "varieties," or "versions." It was shored up philosophically by (the begins with a visit to "post-modernism," which he summarizes as the theory tnif /Iff Cf\/~1 '1 1 tv*o 11 <"\,r ir llnrrnrir/'ftrirl'ik it nlnril Iroittia<\»ir-\r pi*\irnnir ITln early) Rawls (63) and relentlessly reinforced by "modernist liberal civic culture" -Cllclt,—Hit o\J\~*-cLi lCdi-lLy la LlllLldllaL-Cllliri.L>ly HJL-dJ., IJlLJldl, 11 at^iilCHLal y» CIJlaUUi.l-T U-llU. infinitely rearrangeable" (9). Although Beiner's visit to postmodernism elicits the by-now-predictable, quasi-philosophical condemnation of universalism •^>b). MoOermst liberalism perpetuates an essentiahst interpretation of citizenship that promulgates a myth of the free individual who is "unencumbered" by "membership in particularistic ethnic, class, or religious communities" (37). It -aim wcsicni lanoiiaiisiii l~J, it is unprouuenvc politically, since lie iiianiitiiii» a healthy suspicion that "the more citizens become fixated on cultural differences within the political community, the more difficult it becomes to sustain mistakenly and modernistically grants priority to the right over the good and the universal over the particular (62, 51). Bridges (1994,141, 62) proposes to free us from the totalizing worldview an experience of common citizenship (10). I doubt that it is coincidental that the Canadian Beiner, as well as the Canadians Ignatieff, Kymlicka, and Norman, all problemize rather than celebrate the prospects of "difference" and • modciniii hberal doctrine by summoning a "postmodern liberalism" that, m its "teleological" and "de-totalizing" modes, affirms "the ideal of citizenship i particularistic moral ideal capable of giving life particularistic content and multicultural rights in a way that leaves them self-conscious about the diffi culty of conceptualizing the experience of citizenship" (Beiner 1995, 15) and uncertain about "what we can expect from a 'theory of citizenship'" (Kymlicka action, i postmodern ideal is something that is augured, although not whe6^' °n ""eW coSnitive ground" of Rawls's Political Liberalism (1993), a "f, 3 concePt °f liberal morality [is] validated by a constructivist proce- and Norman in Beiner 1995, 309) even if they have one to recommend. No equivalent hesitations trouble the respective theoretical projects of the Americans Bridges and Botwinick. Unlike Beiner, both Bridges and Botwinick find in postmodernism a new; even revolutionary, philosophy that promises to help us assess the transformation of "modernist political society ^ ^ fridges 1994, 141j. it Kawls is now "recommending his liberal theory the",? h" COmmunltarian grounds," as Botwinick (1993, 48) succinctly puts it, iclw "IS a mOVC that BridSes wishes to endorse. Rawls's unfinished "rhetor-P^tmod 18 What Bndges (52> 125' 148) seeks to augment in the name of "a ern version of liberal doctrine" whose rhetoriril lim is to "p-r-ihli<-h -- i into "postmodernist political society" (Botwinick 1993, 14) and the development of a "postmodernist civic culture" (Bridges 1994, 59, 114)." The ques- No CUltUral Uniits of the Public sphere." w» postmodernism may be a cat with nine lives, but when it is sum- 78 Turning Operations moned in the name of Rawls (even a constructivist, rhetorical Rawls), one ran Merely Combating the Phrases of This World 79 of citizenship" that "will be shaped by concepts of liberal vocabulary be pretty sure that this dog won't hunt. Bridges s postmodern prospects are doomed to defeat on conceptual and methodological grounds. "The project of inventing a postmodern civic culture," he declares (114), "is the project pf ideals that emphasize their cultural particularism and their partial " But what lurks behind this supposedly "new vocabulary" is nothing "^""niuch less anything "postmodern" at all. Here we find the same old dual- neW'vocabulary recirculating and reasserting itself, assuaging the theorist s urge forCniastery-by-synthesis and producing yet another rendition of the persistent itarianism theme: A + B = C.Thus, even as Bridges (210) inventing [a] new vocabulary [of citizenship]." Bridges undertakes this project against a background that he identifies in terms of the oppositional dualism between a (nearly dead) "modernist liberal civic culture." on the one hand, and bberalismxommun advises diat"to attain full cultural citizenship, persons must learn to break open closed cultural worlds," his theorizing remains so utterly closed to breaking open the prison of his binary conceptual world that it seems indeed "sublimely proof," as Marx had it, against the danger of thinking politics at all. a (nascent) "postmodern civic culture," on the other. His search for "rhetorical resources" (99) then proceeds at the level of conceptualization by way of multiplying many more dualisms, including modernist metaphysical liberalism versus political or rhetorical liberalism (115); the civic ethics of authenticity versus the civic ethics of autonomy (88); civic moral ideals as "secondary" moral language versus communitarian moral ideals as "primary" moral language (89,122); the rhetorical turn versus the teleological turn (88,160); civic Like Bridges, Botwimck is interested in plotting the transition between modern and postmodern society. But Postmodernism and Democratic Theory offers a far more copiously developed version of the new revolutionary phi- freedom versus civic good; and civic friendship versus communitarian solidar-ity (241). Full cultural citizenship in liberal democratic civic culture, Bridges (1994, losophy under the claim of an "epistemological model" that reflects a "consis-tent pragmatism" or a "generalized agnosticism" (23). Construed "postmodernistically," as opposed to modernistically, Botwinick (1993, 32) 94, 124 t.) argues, requires a person "to develop the capacity to make a dis-tinction between communitarian identity and civic identity!' between the "accidental" and the "humanly essential," while at the same time aiming to achieve "a ;erts, "postmodernism in the sense of a generalized agnosticism enables us to withdraw instantaneously from our skeptical and relativist affirmations ... and thus to be consistently skeptical and relativist." An attitude of generalized balance of forces" between the "totalizing" drives of communitarian culture and the "detotalizing resources" of civic culture. Citizens must learn "to desire civic freedom ... as a component of the civic good" (175), but the communitarian good is "comprehensive" while the civic good is merely "partial" (238). The citizen's civic duty "to cultivate equally both civility and communitarian solidar- gnosticism "affirms everything it denies and denies everything it affirms" (31). Combining philosophical insights from Quine, Davidson, and Nagel, Botwinick appears to construct generalized agnosticism into the following Lumplex of epistemological elements: (1) a preoccupation with "the middle" that continually defers the fixity of meaning and therefore "recoils before any ity can thus seem to be self-defeating," Bridges (250 f.) admits, and "to require the development and reconciliation of hopelessly contradictory and mutually undermining normative standpoints." Nevertheless, such reconciliation amounts to nothing less than a "civic obligation" (264). Bridges recommends "a Christian community" as a model for all other cultural communities who strive to cultivate "civic freedom and civic justice" through "lifc-narrattonal equalization" (264). My purpose in recounting the veritable Noah's Ark of twosomes that particular version of reality"; (2) an acceptance of circularity (our conclusions hav ■ no alternative but to replicate our premises); (3) an attitude of "consistent kepncism" that is itself skeptical of skepticism as a consistent scheme; and (1) ----_----p - - •------ —- .—j- ... ^ ...-------- — •----------. ~ .----—, -------- \ ■ / a rejection of the explanadum-explanans distinction that is linked to a view that gns "philosophical centrality" to language rather than to "reality in the large or to causal factors in the world (6, 33). populate Biidges's reconciliatory project and relenllessly organize his argu-ment is to underscore an obvious but nonetheless telling characteristic of the mode of theorizing that completely defeats the so-called postmodern purpose Botwinick does not want to knock a notion out of our heads so much as ormulate the sort of notion we should take toward what is in our heads. His in ntive construction and defense of generalized agnosticism delivers a kind of purpose "unitary epistemological model" (117) that is simultaneously anced as a comprehensive worldview (characterized by openness and the all of his book. To put the matter bluntly, Bridges's theorizing is fixated upon dualisms that proliferate out of the Ur-binary of liberalism (in the form of the concept of "civic identity") and communitarianism (in the form of the concept of "communitarian identity"). It is also seized, as the liberal: communitar-ian mentality almost always is, by the possibility of mastering these dualisms ptance of uncertainty); a political theory (linked to the practice of partici-thk7 C'emocracy)' and a critical hermeneutics deployed on a range of theo-Tha R°Usseau' Habermas, and Strauss to Freud, Wittgenstein, and Lyotard rious'V'-^ ^ 3 Cr^Ca' hermeneutics, generalized agnosticism queries how r„ri . . eorlsts grapple with skepticism and relativism, assesses the nature of r«lCXivitv -:---:-r2--:—--— •"side"^ ^°r"t'le requirement to be utterly consistent") in their writings, and 1 rs the implications these matters have for their politics (90-91). through the achievement of a harmonious synthesis of them. In the (oxy-moronic) name of a "teleological postmodernism," Bridges (114) calls forth a 80 Turning Operations Although Botwinick offers aim insightful, if debatable, secondary intci_ Merely Combating the Phrases of This World 81 prctations of the theorists he addresses (including an attempt to read Leo Strauss as a liberal democrat), these chapters do not do much to shore up his initial and expressly political assertion in the name of democratic theory, that a generalized-agnostic approach provides "an epistemological backdrop in which the naturalness and inevitableness of [political] participation . . . seem especially persuasive and compelling" (54). It is to this claim that 1 wish to return, for here Botwinick moves generalized agnosticism to the field of action and appears to be prepared at least to gesture toward the conditions and limitations of a "participatory and procedural" democratic politics in the real existing (that is, democratizing) world, without succumbing to the constraints of vacant conceptual distinctions and the deflections of philosophical binaries (5). Despite these good intentions, however, Botwinick does not get there. Tellingly, his consistent skeptical (generalized-agnostic) approach, which is so cannot address here, and Botwinick is well aware of them. He acknowledges that "there is an inescapable move from 'pragmatism' to 'theory' and 'logic,'" if nlv for purposes of exposing their limitations and underscoring the virtues of pragmatism. "It is a question," he writes (31), "simply of what we want to L ve hanging—whether pragmatism without foundations or theorizing that opens a gap between thinking and reality." Botwinick quite consciously choos-to go the latter route. Nevertheless, I think it highly improbable that a "logic" (31), even a sophisticated "multivalued logic" (69), can be fashioned for politics from Botwinick's call for "the suspension of the law of the excluded middle" and the "legitimizing of circularity" (69, 33). "The final term of a political log'c" as Sheldon Wolin (1960, 65) observes in reference to Plato, "is assiduously constructed at the levels of epistemological formulation and hermeneutical deployment, deserts him when he shifts to theorizing actual (democratic) politics T think this is because Rotwinick s concept of participa- not q.e.d-, because finality is the most elusive quality of a political solution." I submit that this insight holds for any attempt formally to "epistemologize': politics, no matter how open to fluidity the epistemology may be. tory democracy is framed by what he calls the meeting of "two salient types of political theory in the 1990s" (34)—and there is no need, by now, to bela-bor the obvious. "The convergence of the epistemological limitations of lib Second, I find Botwinick's generalized-agnostic approach to participatory ^mocracy problematic because its political significance is nullified by a mundane but devastating facf in the name of participatory praxis, the substantial epis- temological apparatus of generalized agnosticism is placed in the service of the ^ductive formulation "liberalism and communitarianism" that bears about as much connection to political reality as refusing to believe in gravity bears to eralism and communitarianism," Botwinick (34) writes, "leads to primacy being assigned to participatory democracy as overcoming these limitations" (34). Generalized agnosticism is thus deemed to "be suggestive uf a coalescence (or merging) between liberalism and at least some forms of communi- i.v.ver drowning in water. At least Plato's Forms, built on an even more substantial epistemological apparatus and born of an even more resolute determination —' order politics through epistemology, were mobilized in response to the teal is of disintegrating concepts in everyday Athenian political discourse. The only "crisis" to which Botwinick's generalized agnosticism responds (and from vbch his participatory democracy issues) is that of a manufactured struggle bet-een phrases that have precious little connection to anything except a nar- tarianisni. ... It might suggest a participatory democratic society" (170). The epistemological model thus arrives on the scene at an opportune "liistorical' moment of a "convergence," "coalescence," or "merging" between liberalism and communitarianism (57). What generalized agnosticism offers is a way for us to think ourselves through this convergence, into the new revolutionary mentality of a "postmodernist liberal communitarianism" (55) that carries with it a "real-world analogue" of "political participation" (89, 59).15 The idea that a participatory democratic society might emerge out of a and Thee of the world of academic political theory discourse. Oddly enough, Botwinick presents his epistemological model as an alternative to the very "false dichotomizations and distortions of.. . diverse argu-ni nt-,—ibat ki-------zzz—r-t^--—-;-:-m— approach to the theoretical cualescence of liberalism generalized-agnostic approach to the theoretical cr communitarianism seems to me extremely problematic for at least two reasons. First, its underlying premise holds that once we get our epistemology und ^ h J-** concePt of participatory democracy ends up presupposing theo" t0my hberalism and communitarianism (xii). When even a .n™1** self~reflexive, agnostic, and suspicious of dualisms as Botwinick llr>< nticallv arv-^.*. ..i________-r^r.-^—-;-:- in ically ; right (even if it is an epistemology that harbors no illusions about getting any-thing right), we will get our praxis and our politics right. Botwinick registers this intellectualist assumption when he anticipates the "real-world analogue of participatory democracy that will be forwarded by "epistemological inves-tigations" that unearth the "deep continuities" between liberalism and com- _ 7 p----TLu^iLivfu^ ui uudiisiii^ as uuiwiniLK . - ^epte the construct "liberalism and communitarianism" as a start-d -hoton"1 ^heorizing democracy, we can be sure that this "false 11 " this duTT"" 1S hegem°nlC 111 our field-The consequences of recapitulat- munitarianism (57). We arc now on the ground of complex questions concerning the relations among philosophy, political theory, and politics that th- r -1'utomy are not trivial for theorizing democracy. At the very least, ' -nd of freely00311011 °f ^ Categ°ry effe«ively blocks access to the plorations7/1^11^' lnteUectually adventurous, and conceptually versatile theory of th P S that mark both fast-order contributions to democrat-'Pcrfa critica] SOTt ^ find' fol" CAaiUljlt:' ^Tocqueville or Mill, as well as in " cample , rCappralsals of historical and contemporary thought. Compare, ■ ne historical richness of John Dunn's interpretation of Locke, or 82 Turning Operations Merely Combating the Phrases of This World 83 the interpretive astuteness of Patrick Riley's studies of Kant, or the careful pre- k cY to the "essential lesson" of the first generation of democratic pluralists in cision ofThomas McCarthy's recent commentaries on Rawls, to the polemics on Locke, Kant, and Rawls that so often masquerade today under the title of "liberal and communitarian theory." olitical science, as well as to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Weber, and the Italian elitists namely, "that the salient characteristic of all political decision-making is its lack of impartiality, and the randomness of its morality" (ix). Zolo (1992, ix) Moreover, the fixation upon liberal: communitarian threatens to turn "democracy" into little more than the third factor of an already reductive conceptual binary that already suppresses the real problems involved in theorizing thus eschews the entire train of contemporary theorizing that he finds represented in Habermas and Rawls, who are themselves the heirs of "the ;™ nnliriral nrescription of classical democracy in the old European tradi- contemporary democratic social and political life rather than posing and specifying them. Making "democracy" the final term in a (now) trinary relationship requires the "combination" of dualisms at the level of concepts, the "convergence" of oppositions at the level of action, the "reconciliation" of tion" He is as unmoved by the ontology of rationality, the moral autonomy of the individual, and the concept of the sovereign subject as are the critics of liberalism. But he is also seemingly unswayed by the promises and possibilities of postmodernism or the new pluralism, or any "academic exercises incapable contrary impulses at the level of psychology, and the coalescence of partisan standpoints at the level of politics. This triangularizing operation, insofar as it culminates in the resolution of previously supposed contraries, seduces us into ever of making the transition from paper to reality' (73). The latter category appears to include a vast array of doctrines (including radical democracy and all forms of socialism), and thinkers (for example, Arendt,Macpherson, Barber, believing that "having it all" is what democracy (and equality) are about—a belief that Tocqueville brilliantly assessed as one of the essential elements of, and the chief dangers in thinking among, democratic peoples. Conceptual tri- Pateman, and Poulantzas), whose "alternative models" are judged in light of "the increase of differentiation and social complexity in modern democracy" and found wanting (62). angularization also invites us into viewing democracy as some sort of "solution": the answer to our political ills, the achievement of the "center," the apex of bipartisan interaction, perhaps even the triumph of a progressive sort of Instead, Zolo proposes to rethink democracy by relocating it in the "neo-classical doctrine" of political science and reexamining its fortunes, particularly as they were defined in the theories of Schumpeter, Lipset, Dahl, "localism," if not the political moment that finally approximates in a politics of meaning as perfectly deliberative discourse. But this notion of democracy as bipartisan solution is nothing but a mysti- Plamenatz, Aron, and Sartori. Presumably, this is a route to reality.17 With this task in mind, he offers an effective crash course in the "descriptive" theory of democratic government for theorists who want to brush up on the so-called fication. Its promise of combination and reconciliation represents the fantasy of i nrvnirlf^r^lom^n 1 rrinf~F» from lVnirn nolirior nn nnrinp ron'iPnm4! rw IT) fans of empirical theory of democracy that continues to play a leading role in politi-science rrllt f ,olo I*; nor out 1~o Pno"irfp in in pvprrKP in no*r1"ilm*i or *i mprp "conversation."16 Its promise of convergence invites the illusion of politics as a condition of finality and a state of being wherein, at long last,"we can all just get ~ 1 , ^ . -» A ,\ ->*-#- ,nr~. r~4- />n/ilor/~cn/~/> HnPr mmra i-»i/~irir inn n l nnilP 1~nF* fit— ^ ex 111CLC reaffirmation of neoclassical doctrine. His realistic approach appreciates certain basic premises of (Schumpeterian) political pluralism, including a "minimalist" definition OT flPmomn7 trill" ri1lf~FT itr frtrnr nn rtarnmriPrifiTP trirnrp o-ftrif1 aiOIlH. /iIlU 1LS prOIIilSC UJL LOaicsCclJJLc mJcs lllUIC LU UM^LLy tXLlKA suuuut li±*- v,**. izen than it does to specify democracy as a problem to be posed, and thereby engaged, by citizens themselves. Ultimately, of course, the fantasy states that v/*- uvJ-inj^Ailuy LllclL UltlLCs lis 1AJL.L13 Uli LllC COIIlUcLlllVC IldLLlIC \JL LilC procedure for access to political power, and an emphasis upon the function of leadership (or "elites"), while at the same time decisively rejecting the"episte-rilOlOPiral fl("tlOTl" of SrhnmnPt-prV nor-»t-»riri*-ii 'irt" m r+\-tn r\ m ' accompany tlie trianguiai political tncorizmg oi uemocracy aiso uu uiuui secure the position of the powerful, especially, perhaps, those who are in positions powerful enough to make triangularization itself a practice of politics. cj ai u^uuii ui ol-llUIIipcLCI S IlcOpOSlLlVlSL rnCinOQOlOgy Iot-). Yet in the end, the neoclassicists really fare no better in Zolo s estimation than the defenders of direct or classical democracy. Despite the staying power of the Democracy as Security . •j^uuiii|jcLcr ana nis icnow rcvisiomsts, tney aie plagued by an msut-cient realism" that is aggravated by a defunct model of the polyarchic political market (113).The upholders of democratic pluralism, Zolo (150) argues, "can seen tooa^r , * *. "l ~..— ~ _ _ — j ~ _ -... 1 i-.* r. From a disputation. A:My friend, you have talked yourself hoarse. B: Then I stand refuted. Let us not discuss the matter any further. —Friedrich Nietzsche T pt iK Hknense then with A and B Wbiat would an analvsis of democracy that <-iay lo ue just as amuiguous, luaimeiitary ana unrealistic as, Litly years ago, the classical liberal-democratic doctrine appeared to Schumpeter." e reason for this gets to the heart of Zolo s critique: in general terms, umpeter's weak realistic analysis does not take "clear note" of the "eclipse ^citizenship" in modern technological societies, especially in the context of did not theorize by binary look like? Zolo s work, which he characterizes as a "realistic approach," is one such example. Democracy and Complexity hearkens ParticubS1Ve lnCreaSe °f the means of mass communication" (152-153). Zolo's cu r call, then, is neither for a new pluralism nor an adventurous post- 84 Turning Operations Merely Combating the Phrases of This World 85 modernism but rather for political philosophy to "turn its most central atten- realistic, but it is hardly very edifying. Under its spell, we miglu anticipate, as Zolo does (181), the "dissolution" of Aristotelian political philosophy, as well as the end of the "organicistic and consensualistic model" of political commu- tion to the political effects of mass-media communication," and the problems raised by communication research (153). Under the Machiavellian title "the principality of communication," Zolo (156) begins the task of assessing the uity, which, he adds, "today is reduced to being the object of the futile aca-demic nostalgia of the North American 'communitarians.'" But what do we get in return? A conception that ties democracy's crucial "promise" to "the protection of social complexity against the functional predominance of any particular subsystem" (182), and its "laical functions" to the "organization of particular interests, the mediation of conflicts, the guarantee of security and the protection of civil rights" (180). In this vision of gravity without grace (including the grace that marks the civic virtu of that other Machiavellian, the long-term political effects of the means of mass communication that are the agencies "not simply of political socialization, but also ... of the production and social distribution of knowledge."- Unlike Marx's valiant fellow, Zolo believes in gravity.The "democratic system" is pervaded by the relentless processes by which media communication is produced, the subterranean operation of procedures that govern the forces of communication, and the heavy, distorting effects of the "functional code" that is the medium of electronic communication (159).These threats to citizenship are far beyond what Kelly calls "the expansion of the empirical state" (in Beiner 1995, 93). Instead of leading to new modes of participatory democ- racy—a kind of electronic agora—the new techniques of interactive communication (teleconferencing, automated feedback programs, two-way cable television, and so on) have served a "narcotizing dysfunction" whereby the republican citizen), Zolo has produced a democracy effectively devoid of an action context of citizen politics and subordinated to the demands of securi-ty, administration, and organization. Perhaps, looking squarely into the face of the future, this is the price that a realistic approach to democracy must pay. But that is neither an excuse to return to the false blandishments of comforting phrases nor an invitation to deceive ourselves about realism's costs.- "cognitive differential" between transmitting agents and receiving subjects multiplies rather than diminishes (166—167). In Zolos world, the subject is as decentered and as detotalized as it is in Mouffe's, but with this significant dif- ference: it is constructed not at an intersection of "new identities" but rather at an intersection of telematic forms, media forces, and symbolized stimuli that are generating something akin to an "anthropological mutation" in human affairs (170). In this world, democracy is not a question of the recognition of differ-ences, the celebration of heterogeneity, or the proliferation of "life-narratives"—we should be so lucky. The gravitational pull that long-term exposure to the media exerts upon the average citizen has induced, Zolo effec-tively argues (170), "narcosis, cognitive dependence, dissociation and 'political silence."'The question is: What is to be done? Can a democratic polity, where narcotized, dissociated individuals learn to act as citizens, be extracted from a complex democratic "system" of the sort Zolo describes? Given the ubiquity of the power frameworks and media effects that constitute the internal dynam- ics of complex modern social systems and subsystems, it seems unlikely. Given the "external risks" of demographic explosion; mass movements of populations and the racist reactions they provoke; disparities among rich "democratic" and poor nondemocratic countries; the diffusion of nuclear, chemical, and biolog-ical weapons; terrorism; ecological disequilibrium; and the persistence of a myriad of military threats, it seems almost impossible (178). In the wake of such global circumstances, the only "fresh perspective Zolo (181) can offer to theory is a model of the political system as "a social structure which fulfils the essential function of reducing fear through the selective regulation of social risks." This Parsonian spin on Hobbes may be