&RQWHPSRUDU\3UDJPDWLVP Vol. 11, No. 1 (June 2014), 103–113 Editions Rodopi ©2014 Contributions and Limits of Rortian Pragmatism for Political Agonism Federico Penelas This paper is concerned with outlining how the ethnocentric pragmatism of Richard Rorty may serve, from an epistemological standpoint, to consolidate the practical advantages that agonism possesses over deliberationism in the field of political philosophy. However, some problems are noted in the specific way that Rorty develops his particular agonist liberalism with regard to a potentially contradictory conception of the ethical-political place granted to victims of cruelty. Bad news leads me to return to the .XOWXUNDPSI with redoubled vigor. – Richard Rorty Two ways of understanding politics coexist within the tradition of democratic thought. One of them emphasizes the irreconcilable plurality of interests and the inescapability of conflict as constitutive of political phenomena; the other one emphasizes the idea of common good in the search for consensus. For the first of these ways, the legitimacy of the democratic system lies in the institutionalization of mechanisms to ensure the expression and representation of competing interests. For the second one, the idea of legitimacy derives from the deliberation of citizens and the public use of reason. During recent decades the labels of “agonism” and “deliberationism” have been imposed in order to express both positions, with Chantal Mouffe and Jürgen Habermas, respectively, as paradigmatic representatives of these political conceptions. My intention throughout this article will be to show, first, how Rorty’s work (SDFH Mouffe and perhaps Rorty himself) can offer an account of the advantages of agonism; and, second, how a weakness exists in the way that Rorty thinks the hegemonic struggle must be developed. The importance of the metaphilosophical pragmatist creed that I endorse, the Jamesian slogan “what makes no difference in practice makes no difference in philosophy,” was strongly impressed upon me because of the various reconstructions that can be found in the literature about the debate between deliberationism and agonism. It is not easy to discern what kind of political 104 FEDERICO PENELAS institutions would be differentially promoted by one or another proposal. Mouffe herself indicates that: What an agonist approach certainly disavows is the possibility of an act of political refoundation that would institute a new social order from scratch. But a number of very important socioeconomic and political transformations, with radical implications, are possible within the context of liberal democratic institutions. ... We should not fall again back into the trap of believing that their transformation requires a total rejection of the liberal-democratic framework.1 It seems to me that no practical differences are evidenced at the level of political institutions; rather, they reside in the way that various political actors are inserted into these institutions. I shall return to this later; however, I want to emphasize that it is actually possible to trace at least one difference at the level of the institutional consequences. It is a practical difference that has been widely discussed in the literature on deliberationism and that can be reduced to the question: “Is it important to vote in a deliberative democracy?” The problem is well known: the deliberationist’s emphasis on validity understood as a result of discursive consensus regards the act of decision through voting as an interruption of rational discussion, which is presented as the only source of democratic legitimacy. Voting is usually justified by deliberationists as merely an effective means for achieving political goals when it is not possible to reach a rational consensus. In any case, the emphasis in these theoretical debates is designed to be able to justify how, even when voting (by people or by parliamentary representatives) is inevitable, deliberation is essential for legitimacy and for political stability, in the sense that losers at the moment of voting at least may feel that they have been heard. But by itself, voting is not what guarantees the legitimacy of decisions, nor is it what indicates that the decision has been taken. When within a collective decision there is total consensus, voting is redundant. At the height of contempt for voting, we can consider the Global Justice Movement deployed in the late 1990s and early new century, which employed a decision-making procedure whereby there was no decision until all assembly members had agreed and ensured, through various protocols, that the overall agreement had been reached by setting the decision through an act of collective silence. The rejection of voting, including the unanimous vote, is a consequence of the deliberationist creed that should not be surprising. Conversely, agonism cannot but appreciate the vote as, on the one hand, the moment when the political nature of politics is expressed; and, on the other, the device that disrupts the forms of antagonism that may be conducive to a drop in the friend/enemy dichotomy. Mouffe uses Elias Canetti’s &URZGVDQG3RZHU to mark the point: &RQWULEXWLRQVDQG/LPLWVRI5RUWLDQ3UDJPDWLVPIRU3ROLWLFDO$JRQLVP 105 A parliamentary vote does nothing but ascertain the relative strengths of two groups at a given time and place. Knowing them beforehand is not enough... The actual vote is decisive, as the moment in which the one is really measured against the other.2 The solemnity of these activities derives from the renunciation of death as an instrument of decision. Every single vote puts death, as it were, on one side. But the effect that killing would have had on the strength of the enemy is scrupulously put down in figures; and anyone who tampers with this figures, who destroys or falsifies them, lets death in again without knowing it.3 Thus, the instrument of the vote is considered in radically different ways by deliberationists and agonists. For deliberationists, it is an optional element that emerges from the mere misfortune that the urgency of political decisions entails discussions that are bounded by time, with time being the only impediment to the imposition of the force of the better argument. For agonists, however, voting is irreplaceable as an instrument of decision and consolidation of political stability. However, given the recognition of the inevitability of this misfortune imposed by the peremptory nature of political decisions, deliberationists are forced to accept the procedure of voting by one or another formulation of majority rule. So the acceptance of voting, though it assumes the character of a concession to facticity, restores the pragmatist suspicion that there are no conceptual differences between deliberationism and agonism. However, both are determined to draw the difference. Let us see how far the assimilation traced as a result of the application of the Jamesian slogan can be overcome. A first point of agreement/differentiation appears at the hour of the proper consideration of several basic global agreements that both agonists and deliberationists assume as allowing democratic politics. Briefly stated, I assume that both groups of theorists accept the first Rawlsian principle of justice as the unshakable foundation of politics in a pluralistic democratic society. Thus, agonists finally assume, in a deliberationist mode, that basic consensus as essential to the democratic political game. Consensus, the great WHORV of deliberationism, is also taken as a base by agonists, beyond their perennial claim of conflict as the main political engine. That base is not accepted by them in a contingent way (as with voting for deliberationists), but rather it is practically and conceptually assumed as necessary to the development of subsequent struggle for hegemony. However, this common point involves radically different assumptions for the two groups in dispute. For agonists, the agreement is, in turn, the result of a hegemonic struggle and cannot be viewed, in the manner of the deliberationists, as the result of the deployment of substantive commitments implicit in the rationality of communicative action itself. Thus, for the agonist conception, the condition of the settlement of that basic democratic consensus is 106 FEDERICO PENELAS a serious disagreement with undemocratic political forces; the consensus always involves exclusion, which cannot be watered down in terms of eradication of irrationality, as Habermas’s deliberationist heirs argue in their treatment of intolerance. This philosophical difference between agonists and deliberationists in their respective conceptions of consensus – the first in terms of an intrinsic unavoidable exclusion present in any agreement, the latter in terms of a regulative ideal contingently violated by the distortions present in historical discursive practices – rests on substantively divergent approaches to the epistemological phenomenon. To understand this difference Rorty’s ideas become in my view more than relevant. According to Rorty, those who cling to the idea of convergence assume that there is something like an ethics of justification that is not contextual and that involves a universal commitment, such that the practice of justification leads to a rational agreement among all participants of linguistic communication. This makes it possible to say that there are some communities who carry justification practices that deviate markedly from pragmatic presuppositions that all communicative exchanges ideally assume. Convergence is possible as long as all users of language can eventually assume such presuppositions and then engage in domination-free communicative exchanges. Intersubjective agreement and, therefore, truth guide the practice of justification and are ideally secured to the extent that action please do not engage in practices that could rest in performative self-contradiction. “They,” Rorty says in reference to the sustainers of convergence, “see the desire for truth, construed as the desire to claim universal validity, as the desire for universal justification.”4 Besides these kinds of suggestions, Rorty’s response is immediate. For him it is not clear what is meant by universal presuppositions of our practices of justification and it is false that our practice of justification is based on a desire for universal agreement. “Davidson and I,” Rorty explains, “have no use for the claim that any communicative action contains a claim to universal validity, because this so-called ‘presumption’ seems to us to have no role to play in the explanation of linguistic behavior.”5 In turn, the practice of justification requires that we achieve agreement within our community, but in no way requires that the agreement be universal, integrating all potential partners: there is no language-use without justification, no ability to believe without an ability to argue about what beliefs to have. But this is not to say that the ability to use language, to have beliefs and desires, entails a desire to justify one’s belief to HYHU\ language using organism one encounters. Not any language-user who comes down the road will be treated as a member of a competent audience. On the contrary, human beings usually divide up into mutually suspicious QRW mutually unintelligible) communities of justification – mutually exclusive groups – &RQWULEXWLRQVDQG/LPLWVRI5RUWLDQ3UDJPDWLVPIRU3ROLWLFDO$JRQLVP 107 depending upon the presence or absence of sufficient overlap in belief and desire.6 The use of language requires the practice of justification but does not require a particular type of linguistic community. Our democratic community of justification assumes the goal of convergence, of maximizing intercommunal agreement, but this is an ethnocentric ideal that should not lead us to look to other communities, such as exclusionary communities, as wanting to play the justification game without playing it. The real question is, what is the difference in practice between these two epistemological concepts and their respective positions on the phenomenon of consensus? What should democratic forces do in the face of anti-democratic forces present in their same public space with the will to dissolve the basic consensus that makes politics possible? Surely the options assumed in practice by both deliberationists and agonists would be the same: education first, combat (prison or war) later. The point is that these options seem to be taken without major contradictions by the agonist, while the deliberationist would have serious difficulties justifying them. The assumption of educational output requires giving space in the constitution of consensus for sentimental and passionate resources. Once communicative distance is detected, it seems absurd to emphasize the argumentative level when divergence occurs in the justificatory one. However, here is one of the points in dispute between agonists and deliberationists: the former have made the appeal to passions crucial to understanding the political, an unavoidable device that shapes collective political identities; while the latter have permanently refused that appeal, considering it part of the strategic game rather than part of the communicative one. Meanwhile, combat, assumed by agonists as the restoration of antagonistic politics as a result of the failure of (first) argument and (second) education, is thought by deliberationists to be an interruption of our own rationality by the irrationality of others, and therefore as unable to support more than an instrumental justification, oblivious to political life. Thus, the adoption of education and combat as mechanisms to deal with anti-democrats cannot be seen by deliberationists other than as two forms, differing only in degree, of falling into mere facticity. Perhaps the deliberationist could indicate that the agonist has no way to distinguish, on the one hand, practices conducive to excluding antidemocratic forces, and, on the other, the same political practices in the context of democratic forces. The agonist’s emphasis on conflict, on the expression of divergent political identities, on the deployment of passion as sustaining argumentative practice itself, leads the search for consensus through argumentation to be quickly abandoned for other resources perhaps more effective but also surely more harmful to validity. I think that this observation would not be appropriate. First, it assumes that there is a natural order of reasons that can be revealed to the extent that we 108 FEDERICO PENELAS do not distort discursive practice, and that momentary nondisclosure is caused by our contingent argumentative disabilities or by the exercise of our distortionary will. This assumption does not pay attention to the fact that we usually participate in strictly argumentative discussions even under the certainty that the disagreement will be perennial, that convergence is not even a regulative ideal (think of debates among philosophers). This fact shows that there is a crucial role played by argument that precedes and exceeds the purposes of convincing others or of arriving at mutually acceptable agreements. That role is to fulfill our need for self-knowledge, for having a fuller, more articulated and more conscious grasp of our beliefs exposed to debate.7 A theoretical view, developed in terms of an implicit appeal to a natural order of reasons that we constantly sneak under the opacity of our mere opinions, is not able to account for that Socratic aspect of argumentation, nor for the phenomenon of progress in the articulation of belief networks that occurs by subjecting them to argumentative exchange with the tenacity required to avoid succumbing to the first dialectical attack. Nothing other than what I would call a “doxastic passion” may explain the phenomenon of our convictions, the hard core of unshakable beliefs that we need to enter argumentative practice. Over a century ago William James denounced excessive intellectualism as the origin of a simplistic view of epistemological practice. Emotions are, from the start, setting the exercise of our rationality. Agonists do not do anything more than to restore that Jamesian insight. Their appeal to passion does not imply a call to an early abandonment of argument in order to move to a quick adoption of one of the various forms of sentimental persuasion. The point of the agonist is, rather, that the call for the removal of the passionate element leads to political subjects – individual or collective – to move themselves from their center, losing the doxastic identity which is imperative for all discursive exchange. Thus, because of the recognition that makes (or should make) the agonist aware not only of the contribution of argumentation to self-knowledge but also of the need for convictions as anchors for not wandering in discourse, we could adopt this antiintellectual (and therefore invisible for deliberationists) slogan: passion without argumentation is blind, argumentation without passion is empty. Moreover, the point of agonists, especially Mouffe, is that the political game is given in the framework of a basic consensus that is the result of the victory of democratic hegemony. Thus, the risk of passage to violence is dismissed to the extent that such hegemony remains valid. According to Rorty, to assume the democratic game is to assume that political exchange is governed by two ideas: 1) using words instead of physical pressure; and 2) not using words to threaten to use physical pressure, that is, not committing the DG EDFXOXP fallacy. Assuming the democratic game thus implies replacing force by persuasion, with persuasion defined by those two criteria. In this way, combat is excluded as an alternative within democratic dominance. What could be a problem for agonists is how to distinguish argumentation from mere persuasion &RQWULEXWLRQVDQG/LPLWVRI5RUWLDQ3UDJPDWLVPIRU3ROLWLFDO$JRQLVP 109 (formerly termed, with Rorty, “education”). But the point that this difference can be traced in universal, ahistorical, terms, outside regulations and complaints made by subjects themselves involved in concrete political practice, seems a profession of faith that intellectualist deliberationist need, and whose articulation requires a series of highly controversial epistemological commitments. This is the way I think some Rortian ideas come done in support of agonism. In what follows I will draw attention to some risks that accompany the particular way in which Rorty understands hegemonic struggle when articulated under the model of education. For Rorty, the process of political change in the context of “the inescapable obligation to reduce cruelty”8 must be preceded by an act of imagination through which we perceive acts of cruelty about which we were previously blind or simply for which our normal speech didn’t have words. The assumption of this act of imagination as a condition for political change leads to Rorty to disbelieve of the utility of philosophical theory for politics, in favor of the important role he assumes other discursive practices have in that arena. So how will we be made sensitive to previously unseen cruelty? How will we be brought to think of the pain of the other as morally relevant? It is at this point that Rorty abjures appealing to a rationality common to all human beings as an instance of interethnic fellowship. What we must not do is to appeal to what we human beings have in common in the name of which we can repudiate cruel practices. The task is more fundamental; the point is to see the other as a genuine human being. How could appealing to the common help if such commonality is usually what was in doubt in order for the cruelty to develop in the first place? The Rortian approach is to abandon the appeal to a large commonality. He defends the idea that “moral progress could be accelerated if we focused instead on our ability to make the particular little things that divide us seem unimportant – not by comparing them with the one big thing that unites us but by comparing them with other little things.”9 It is therefore about appealing to little things, such as being a father, being a mother, being a child, compared with another little things, such as being white, being black, being straight, being gay, being rich, being poor. Such appeals must be channeled through the appeal to feeling rather than rationality, more the spread of mutual trust than obligation to the moral law.10 The dissemination of a culture linked to respect for human rights should be thought of as a progress of sentiments, as “a matter of increasing VHQVLWLYLW\, increasing responsiveness to the needs of a larger and larger variety of people and things.”11 Manipulating feelings, through novels, newspapers, television, history, of those who do not notice certain cruel practices is much more efficient for avoiding such cruelty than reminders about the obligation to respect dignity that rational beings possess by virtue of the mere act of participating in this great field called rationality. The possibility of the appeal to little things being successful depends on fostering this Humean moral perspective. 110 FEDERICO PENELAS But Rorty recognizes a failure in this schematized moral perspective. The flaw is that it contrasts with the traditional view that thinks of sentiments as a much weaker force than reason for the transformation of human life. The Rortian defense of sentimentality is based in his Promethean humanism, which abjures theological authoritarian ballasts that still remain in secular modernity. The distrust of sentimentality as a way of generating moral progress is a product, Rorty thinks, of the need to appeal to something greater that is above those who hold in their hands the possibility of ending the practices we abhor – an instance (Moral Law, Reason, Human Nature) powerful enough to twist the arm of those in power. These appeals leave us feeling confident that something greater than ourselves and our opponents is on our side to accompany us in our efforts to change the course of history. As Rorty puts it, “the residual popularity of Kantian ideas of ‘unconditional moral obligation’ deep – obligation imposed by deep ahistorical noncontingent forces – seems to me something entirely due to our abhorrence of the idea that the people on top hold the future in their hands, that everything depends on them, that there is nothing more powerful to which we can appeal against them.”12 The appeal to sentiment leaves us with the unpleasant idea that the end of cruelty will come because of those who exercised or tolerated past cruelty suddenly have become sympathetic people, with no more commitment than suddenly becoming generous, without sacrifice, without punishment involved in obedience to the moral law, without suffering, paraphrasing Nietzsche, the sadism that is behind the categorical imperative. The lack of confidence in sentimentality as a transformative tool is designed for Rorty, also in Nietzschean terms, as arising from resentment: “We UHVHQW the idea that we shall have to wait for the strong to turn their piggy little eyes to the suffering of the weak, slowly open their dried-up little hearts.”13 Here we encounter a thorny aspect of the Rortian view. Indeed, thinking of social transformation, the advent of utopia, as forcing awareness upon those in power, is a conclusion that Rorty argues, although in a reluctant way, when he declares, “I too would prefer a bottom-up way of achieving utopia.”14 But I would like to stress the fact that the shame expressed by Rorty in accepting what emerges from his defense of sentimentality is based on the existence of a tension between this defense and his call to understand this approach under the mandate of reducing cruelty. For if, as he says, we are offended by the thought that we depend on the feelings of those who dominate us, then the appeal to the feelings of perpetrators is cruel to victims, to the extent that is a source of humiliation. A decrease in cruelty is achieved on the basis of the self-humiliation of victims. Victims must victimize themselves in order to abandon their status as victims. Liberal policy is developed well at the expense of the humiliation of those who claim that development. The final result of Rortian sentimentality could lead us to a weakening of the weak. &RQWULEXWLRQVDQG/LPLWVRI5RUWLDQ3UDJPDWLVPIRU3ROLWLFDO$JRQLVP 111 The results of this line of Rortian argument could be absolutely cruel. The victims are presented as ineffectual – they never act; they only suffer cruelty or enjoy the gifts of those who have the power of action. It is not that victims don’t have a voice; it seems that they cannot have one. As Judith Shklar said, referring to Montaigne’s question: “Is it better to plead for pity or to display defiance in the face of cruelty? There are no certain answers, he concluded. Victims have no certainties.”15 Redescriptions originate in certain intellectual circles and are incorporated into normal speech, generating corrective practices once the persuaded perpetrators accept them. Victims don’t act; they do not persuade, nor are they persuaded. Nancy Fraser has said that it was the approach to the feminist movement which allowed Rorty to understand metaphorical innovation as no longer restricted to the private grounds of self-creation but as a basic process of development in the public arena. However, Fraser warns that Rorty’s reading of feminism and all innovative social movements is merely prophetic rather than political – that is, the metaphorical devices are reserved for a few prophets whose goals are reached when society (and especially those in power) finally literalizes the new words. For Fraser, Rorty is unaware that the most profound transformations usually occur when the new vocabulary constitutes a counterpublic that by means of political conflict threatens the existing hegemonies.16 For Rorty, by contrast, public discussion seems to be restricted to the dialogue between utopians who interpret the needs of suffering victims and the dominant social groups that produce such suffering. This leads to the next question. Rorty invites us to expand the “one of us” to which we belong fusing it with a wider “one of us”: the one formed by those capable of feeling pain and being humiliated. Now, can social ties be built on pain? Isn’t seeing the other as a victim, as a mere patient, a way to reify her, to see her as a mere HQ VRL incapable of choice? If you do not accept the other’s efforts to transcend her status as a victim, and we incorporate her inside our moral spectrum only to the extent that she is a victim, we are abstracting the descriptions of self-identification that she entertains in order to be defined as a concrete historical and social being. Seeing the other only as a victim is a form of reification, dehistorization, and depersonalization. There is something inherently cruel about this. Thinking of the other as a victim was in principle to be able to think of her as someone whose pain was morally relevant for us. It was humanizing. But we now see that this humanization leads to dehumanization to the extent that the characteristic that defines the other as a possible partner is simply her character as a victim. This is a characteristic that takes away human depth from people because victims have no other attitude than that of being subject to the cruelty of others. We humanize in a dehumanizing way, and all dehumanization is always a form of cruelty. 112 FEDERICO PENELAS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This paper is sponsored by the research programs “Contemporary Debates in Epistemology Of Testimony” (CONICET/Argentina, PIP 0413) and “The Reconstruction of Experience: Pragmatism and the Contemporary Criticism of Knowledge” (MINECO/Spain, FFI2012-38009-C02-02). NOTES 1. Chantal Mouffe, 2QWKH3ROLWLFDO (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 33. 2. Elias Canetti, &URZGVDQG3RZHU (London: Penguin, 1960), p. 188. 3. ,ELG p. 190. 4. Richard Rorty, “Universality and Truth”, in 5RUW\DQG+LV&ULWLFV, ed. Robert Brandom (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000),p. 17. 5. ,ELG, pp. 16–17. 6. ,ELG, p. 15 7. See Federico Penelas, “¿Es posible la filosofía analítica postrortiana?” in 3UHVHQWH\IXWXURGHODILORVRItD, ed. Alejandro Cassini and Laura Skerk (Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras-UBA, 2010), pp. 61–79. The main argument of that paper is an extension of the one developed in Bjørn Ramberg, “Rorty and the Instruments of Philosophy,” in 5LFKDUG 5RUW\ (GXFDWLRQ 3KLORVRSK\ DQG 3ROLWLFV, ed. Michael Peters and Paulo Ghiraldelli, Jr. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), pp. 15–45. 8. Richard Rorty, &RQWLQJHQF\,URQ\DQG6ROLGDULW\(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 88. The quote makes sense based on Rorty’s definition of a liberal, following Judith Shklar, as one for whom “cruelty is the worst thing we do,” p. xv. 9. Richard Rorty, “Ethics Without Principles,” in Rorty, 3KLORVRSK\ DQG 6RFLDO +RSH (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 86. 10. Rorty is supported at this point by the work of Annette Baier, who, drawing on Hume, defends the centrality of sentimentality for moral conscience. See Annette Baier, 3RVWXUHV RI WKH 0LQG (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) and Annette Baier, 0RUDO3UHMXGLFHV (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 11. Rorty, “Ethics Without Principles”, p. 81. 12. Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality,” in Rorty, 7UXWK DQG 3URJUHVV 3KLORVRSKLFDO 3DSHUV 9ROXPH 7KUHH (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 182. 13. ,ELG 14. ,ELG 15. Judith Shklar, 2UGLQDU\9LFHV(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 10. 16. See Nancy Fraser, “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics: A Response to Richard Rorty,” in 3UDJPDWLVP, ed. Russell Goodman (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 153–159. &RQWULEXWLRQVDQG/LPLWVRI5RUWLDQ3UDJPDWLVPIRU3ROLWLFDO$JRQLVP 113 Federico Penelas Philosophy Department University of Buenos Aires National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) Puan 480 4° (1406) Buenos Aires Argentina
