Chapter Three

Public Realm Theory: From State to State ofBeing/Becoming

What is important is the work of reflection and it is perhaps mostly this that an author can make us see, if he (sic) can make us see anything at all. Presenting the result as a systematic and polished totality, which in truth it never is; or even presenting the construction process – as is often the case, pedagogically but erroneously, in so many philosophical works – in the form of a well-ordered and wholly mastered logical process, can only serve to reinforce in the reader thedisastrous illusion toward which he, like allof us, is already naturally inclined, that the edifice was constructed for him (sic) andthat he has only, if he so desires, to move in and live there. Thinking is not building cathedrals or composing symphonies. If the symphony exists, it is the reader who must create it in his (sic) own ears. (Castoriadis1987: 2)

Public realm theorists have been debating the purpose,

procedures and activities of democratic public space for

many years. In this chapter, using feral citizenship as an

interrogating methodology, I argue that as individually

important as each theory is, what is most important is the

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continued collective presence of the debates among

supporters of these theories. The task of this chapter is

therefore to use feral citizenship as a way to reinvigorate

a discursive political public sphere oriented toward

discussing the political promise of a group of scholars who

could broadly be described as radically democratic theorists

of the public sphere.1 The best way to describe the

approach to public realm theory that I practice in this

chapter is to call it synagonistic,2 because public realm

theorists are both comrades in relation to the broad loss of

the political and respectful antagonists struggling for

excellence – for victory – with respect to whose theory will

revitalize the public sphere within pluralist times.

1 While political theory is not necessarily equivalent to politics neither is the development of political public realm theory non-political. Feral citizenship creates new political moments through bothword and deed by disrupting and disturbing the assumptions of both spheres of activity. 2 Synagonism is a Greek word more about struggle among those who are together than about opposition and antagonism against enemies. The key difference between synagonism and antagonism is that synagonism begins with the need for commonality rather than opposition. In other words itrequires and creates common space or a public sphere in a way that antagonism does not (Karagiannis and Wagner 2005: 237).

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As a political concept synagonism serves the dual

purpose of creating common space and keeping those within

that common space active and engaged in struggle against

collective common enemies – and each other. Furthermore, as

a tool of social observation, the concept views the field of

power between cooperation and agonistic struggle as dynamic,

never complete, and democratically healthy. There are

several other advantages to the term. First, a theory of

synagonism has yet to become a common part of democratic

discourse; this marginal status helps shield the approach

from the assumptions and related limitations that tend to

accompany theories that are often assumed to belong to

particular theorists (e.g. “antagonism” as the property of

Laclau and Mouffe). Second, the replacement of the

oppositional or conflict focussed “ant” with the more

communally oriented or co-operative suffix “syn” offers a

way to include creation of a non-conflictually stimulated

common space as part of a political strategy, something

particularly significant to feral citizenship. Finally,

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synagonism is more useful for acting in the present than it

is in creating some utopian future. According to its most

recent advocates Karagiannis and Wagner (2005), synagonism

offers a way of engaging the present by moving between,

enriching and encouraging ongoing tension-filled co-

operation between “key conceptual elements of the major

‘modern’ approaches to political philosophy” (Karagiannis

and Wagner 2005: 238).3 In synagonistic mode then, I argue

that public realm theorists Habermas, Arendt, Mouffe and

Castoriadis should each be recognized for certain merits,

and together represent an interesting and vibrant

theoretical public sphere that has much to offer democratic

culture.

Some Preliminary Observations

3 Karagiannis and Wagner (2005) believe a theory of synagonism can help resituate the Greek ideals of friendship, ritual and autonomy through utilizing a political strategy that loosens restrictive assumptions concerning relations between the social and the political. They argue that it could be particularly germane in modern pluralist neo-liberal times that seem to have forgotten that “society” as a conceptual innovation “was invented precisely in the search for bonds between humanbeings” as a response to “individualist reasoning in political thought from Hobbes to Locke to Kant” (Karagiannis and Wagner 2005: 239).

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What is called for, it might be argued is an enlightened suspicion of enlightenment, a reasoned critique of Western rationalism, a careful reckoning of the profits and losses entailed by “progress.” Today, once again, reason can be defended only by way of a critique of reason. (McCarthy in Habermas 1984: viii)

One of the first things to note about contemporary

discussions around liberatory politics is the success4

radical democratic scholars have had in convincing a leftist

audience that liberal democracy, as the normatively least

demanding political strategy, is something worth struggling

for. The aim of these liberal radical democrats is to

radicalize, pluralize, and/or rationalize liberal democracy

in a time more definable by fragmentation than unity, more

by privately based individualism than collective political

beliefs, and more by passive acceptance of institutionalized

authority than active resistance to corrupt relations of

power.

4 The success can be measured by the lack of genuine or revolutionary alternatives to “radicalizing” liberal democracy even among those who state they are interested in revitalizing socialism and the leftist tradition.

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Yet radical democrats are not a homogenous group of

scholars. While they appear to share an optimistic belief

in the potential of liberal theory, the democratic political

system, and current social conditions, they differ in how

they wish to harness this potential. There are those who,

in spite of the absence of a coercion-free space, a

consensus based public realm, and a common space of

appearance (Villa 1992), continue to search for

rationalistic conceptions of the public sphere. With the

ideal of indicating the minimal conditions necessary for a

public realm free from internal and external coercion, these

theorists search for ways of legitimizing present-day

democratic institutions through public participation and

collective adherence to accepted norms.

The most notable theorist behind this deliberative

democratic approach is

Jürgen Habermas, who has struggled throughout his career to

reclaim both the epistemological and political aspects of a

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modernist project.5 His particular political concern is

with finding appropriate procedures that will allow

pluralist society to reach rational and legitimate consensus

on issues of public import. While aware that the ideal

speech situation required for such a result is not

realizable, he and other deliberative democrats nevertheless

continue to believe the attempt necessary enough.6 As

Habermas (1990: 323) explains

once participants enter into argumentation, they cannot avoid supposing, in a reciprocal way, that the conditions for an ideal speech situation have been sufficiently met. And yet they realize that their discourse is never definitively “purified” of the motives and compulsions that have been filtered out. As little as we can do without the

5 The key to understanding and exploring the political import of Jürgen Habermas’s public realm theory is in recognizing his particular reformist focus on rationalisation, decision making and political legitimacy. These three foci are grounded respectively in: universalization (rules of argumentation that act as bridging principlesto make agreement possible); discourse ethics (a moral theory justified through its relation to universalization and rational lifeworlds); and the ideal speech situation (required for making the outcome of discourseethics valid).6 An ideal speech situation requires the establishment of “a network of pragmatic considerations, compromises, and discourses of self understanding and of justice, [that] grounds the presumption that reasonable or fair results are obtained in so far as the flow of relevant information and its proper handling have not been obstructed” (Habermas 1996: 296).

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supposition of a purified discourse, we have equally to make do with “unpurified” discourse.7

There are also those within this radical democratic

tradition, such as Chantal Mouffe, who in light of the

current conditions of fragmentation, diversity, and

complexity within liberal democracies believe the unfinished

project of the democratic revolution has created a

liberatory opportunity distinctly different from any

previously experienced. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe

have famously argued that the task of the left, once it has

accepted that liberal democracy is something worth

struggling for, is not to “renounce liberal democratic

ideology but on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the

direction of a radical and plural democracy” (1985: 176).

Unlike Habermas, however, the agonistic pluralists do not

strive for consensus among diverse individuals. Nor do they

believe it necessary to hold onto the rationalist and

7 Slavoj Žižek (1989: 126) calls this disembodied/power free space an ideological fantasy which he defines as “a means for an ideology to takeits own failure into account in advance.”

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universalist epistemological elements of liberalism in order

to be capable of thinking about politics in complex times.

Rather, they argue that recent philosophical insights have

made it apparent that it is only the political aspect of the

enlightenment tradition that should be resituated in a

pluralist society. Therefore, they contend that

[….] it is only by drawing on all the implications of the critique of essentialism – which constitutes the point of convergence of all so-called posties – that it is possible to grasp the nature of the politicaland to reformulate and radicalize the democratic project of the enlightenment….The universalistic and rationalistic framework inwhich that project was formulated has today become an obstacle to an adequate understanding of the present stage of democratic politics. Such a framework shouldbe discarded and this can be done without having to abandon the political aspects of the enlightenment, which is represented by the democratic revolution. (Mouffe 1995: 259)8

8 In Mouffe’s (2005) most recent book On The Political she focuses her criticism on Third Way and cosmopolitan approaches to politics. While the opponent or antagonist has changed, her key criticism remains the same: to understand politics in contemporary times one must understand the irreducibility of antagonism and accept that, far from being a problem for democracy, it is the foundation of democracy. Mouffe is critical of all approaches that look to eliminate conflict in order to achieve some sort of consensus.

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Premised on the belief that traditional democracy

cannot deliver on its promises of collective equality,

individual freedom and inclusive civic participation, the

real issue facing these democratic theorists is whether or

not any form of democracy is capable of dealing with the

conditions of late capitalist society. More specifically,

the question is how to situate democracy and reclaim (the)

public sphere(s) in spaces radically different from those in

which democracy was born.

The deliberative and the agonistic approaches represent

two distinct and original attempts to answer this question.

Each endeavours to transgress the typical

communitarian/liberal dualism in order to come up with a

radically democratic revitalization of the public sphere in

a time that they agree is defined by a nearly universal

allegiance to democracy, an unprecedented proliferation of

social movements, and an absence of any universally accepted

meta-narrative or authority.9 Each offers ways of 9 There is a clear Western bias to the assumption of pluralism and the assumed allegiance to (liberal) democracy. I address this issue in

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rekindling debates around political concerns, primarily

related to how to reclaim the political public sphere.

Their common struggle is not with saving liberal democracy

as it is. Rather, the guiding desire is to allow liberal

democratic societies to develop into what they ought to be if

they wish to stay true to the ethico-political ideals of

individual freedom and collective equality.

So while their theories and positions are not

homogenous, radical democrats do take for granted certain

allegiances to liberal democracy. The result of the assumed

finality of liberal democracy has been that more radical

and/or republican attempts at the revitalization of the

public sphere have been excluded from the discussion because

they do not share the reformist desire to improve liberal

democracy. In this chapter, Hannah Arendt and Cornelius

Castoriadis, the two most notable western (republican)

political theorists excluded from this not-so-consensual

chapter two by arguing for active listening and the need for continuous re-visiting of assumptions such as the assumed allegiance and superiority of liberal democracy.

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conversation, are reintroduced as essential contributors to

public realm theory. As well as helping to expand the

boundary of what counts as acceptable political questioning

and discourse, the inclusion of Arendt and Castoriadis helps

to bring back a more radical and liberatory tradition of

democratic theory difficult to find within “radical”

democratic theory.10 It also reintroduces the notion of

politics as a space of freedom and public debate rather than

merely, as Mouffe (2005: 9) would have it, “a space of

power, conflict and antagonism,” or as Habermas would have

it, a place to temporarily bracket out power, conflict and

antagonism.

As Arendt and Castoriadis are both far more critical of

liberal democracy than Habermas or Mouffe, the initial

effect of their inclusion into radical democratic discourse

involves instigating a challenge to the current common

allegiance to liberalism. But this reinvigorated challenge

10 The irony lies in the fact that radical democracy may not be very radical at all as it continues to work within the confines of liberal democratic theory and practice.

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to the liberalism/democracy partnership is only the start of

an engaging interaction that constitutes and disrupts the

discursive public sphere. Claims that liberal democracy is

the best we can do (Habermas 1996a: 382) or that the task of

the left can no longer involve renouncing liberal democratic

ideology (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 176), become subject to

discussion, as does the effect of leaving more radical

arguments outside the parameters of the discourse as it

defines itself.

For Arendt and Castoriadis, politics is about natality,

imagination,11 and “the capacity to bring about the

emergence of what is not given – not derivable, by means of

a combinatory or in some other way – starting from the

given” (Castoriadis 1997b: 104). For them, everything is

11 There are two connotations of the word “imagination” when used by Castoriadis. The first connects the word to images in the general sense; the second is in relation to creation and invention (1997a: 321).Castoriadis asks his readers to consciously register the imaginary we are in while illuminating imaginaries that better serve democratic ends.The imaginary is never merely a reflection of a given reality; it is a situated and social-historical genesis of specific symbols, images, forms and institutions. Every society has unique imaginaries that distinguishes it from other societies and is locatable in history as a “creation and ontological genesis in and through individuals’ doing and responding/saying” (Castoriadis 1995: 3).

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incomplete. It is to-be, so any political theory that relies

on the assumption that what we currently have is good

enough, is in their view anti-political and in clear need of

the imagination of autonomous actors.12

Castoriadis explains that for him the radical

imaginary13 that allows for creative and innovative actions

to emerge operates on both an individual and a social level.

Individually, it acts as a source of irritation, creativity

and disturbance to the instituted world. Socially, the

imaginary creates “social imaginary significations” that

(un)consciously organize the meaning-world of a certain

12 “Every symbolism,” Castoriadis (1995: 121) explains, “is built on theruins of earlier symbolic edifices and uses their materials…By its virtually unlimited natural and historical connections, the signifier always goes beyond a strict attachment to a precise signified and can lead to completely unexpected realms.” I believe this unexpected potential has a great deal in common with Arendt’s notion of natality which she describes as the uniquely human “capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting” (1958: 11). 13 Castoriadis’s (1997a: 321) use of the term “radical” has two key purposes. First, it distinguishes the imagination from “the ‘secondary’imagination which is either reproductive or simply combinatory (and usually both).” The secondary imagination is adaptive more than creative. Second, radical is used in order “to emphasize the idea thatthis imagination is before the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fictitious’.”

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society.14 The social imaginary is what helps individuals

make sense of the world they are embedded in, but as stable

as this imaginary appears to be, its apparent stability is

always challenged by the creative, imaginative and

disruptive “instituting society” that houses a radical

imaginary never entirely absent from any society. The

imaginary informs, relies on, but also transgresses,

instituted society.15

Autonomous societies encourage the unknown and creative

aspect of each human being and also interrogate institutions14 As every individual has a slightly different way of embodying the social imaginary there is a genuine need to actively listen. Active listening occurs when, as Young (1997b: 354) explains, “we meet and communicate. We mutually recognize one another, and aim to understand one another. Each is open to such understanding by recognizing our asymmetry. A condition of our communication is that we acknowledge difference, interval, that others drag behind them shadows and histories, scars and traces, that do not become present in our communication.” 15 It is only as a part of a community that one can engage in any type of critical activity. Thus to speak from an historical situation other than one’s own is, for Castoriadis, dishonest and illogical. I thus do not agree with Kurasawa (2000: 150) that it is ironic that while deploring the modern West’s “relative ignorance and provincialism in relation to the vast multitude of current and past human modes of life” Castoriadis rarely ventures “outside the bounds of a European frame of reference himself.” His reason for not venturing outside is rather simple. Instituting and instituted society are always linked by a particular history that grounds the imaginary within that historical tradition. While instituted society is never complete in its normalizing of its citizenry, it is present and cannot be ignored.

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that exist and create social-imaginaries. Thus, “democratic

creation” becomes “the creation of unlimited interrogation

in all domains: what is the true what is the false, what is

the just and the unjust, what is the good and what is the

evil, what is the beautiful and the ugly” (1997a: 343).

Such questions are genuine questions16 that demand all

institutions and norms are at least potentially subject to

critical interrogation. For Castoriadis,

democratic/autonomous society must create its own specific

magma of social imaginary institutions17 that encourage and

enable autonomy both collectively and individually. He

therefore has very little interest in the procedural

16 “Genuine questions,” for Castoriadis, are questions that do not lead to end points but rather to questions of justice and freedom, questions that have no “legitimate” answers. “If a full and certain knowledge (episteme) of the human domain were possible,” he argues (1997a: 274), “politics would immediately come to an end, and democracy would be both impossible and absurd: democracy implies that all citizens have the possibility of attaining a correct doxa and that nobody possesses an episteme of things political.” Posing genuine questions would require a radical rethinking of democracy and its promise.17 Castoriadis (1987: 343) explains that “a magma is that from which onecan extract (or in which one can construct) an indefinite number of ensemblistic organizations but which can never be reconstituted (ideally) by a (finite or infinite) ensemblist composition of these organizations.” He argues that all societies have their own magma of social imaginary institutions that establish collective representations,rules and procedures, substantive meanings, and values.

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politics of Habermas, or even the antagonistic

particularities of Mouffe.

Arendt’s similarly anti-liberal politics is embedded in

her explanation of the differences between the three

activities of the vita activa: labour, work and action. While

she considers all three activities essential to humanity and

“intimately connected with the most general condition of

human existence: birth and death, natality and mortality”

(1958: 10), it is only action that, she believes, is

distinctly human and distinctly political. Very briefly,

she explains that labour involves the business of keeping

oneself and others alive, while work consists of the

construction of artefacts that will transcend the limits of

human mortality and provide permanence. These two

activities, while important for securing the survival of the

species, do little to promote the life or potential of the

individual and for Arendt, should be kept out of political

space. Rather, the individuality and distinctness of

humanity depends on action as it has “the closest connection

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to the human condition of natality…the capacity of beginning

something anew” (Arendt 1958: 11).

It is through articulating action with freedom and

plurality that Arendt is able to offer a participatory

approach to democracy that emphasizes process over form and

directly challenges the hierarchies and bureaucratic

organizations of current mass democracies. As Arendt (1958:

209) argues:

while the strength of the production process is entirely absorbed in and exhausted by the end product, the strength of the action process is never exhausted in a single deed but, on the contrary, can grow while its consequences multiply…the reason why we are never able to foretell with certainty the outcome and end of any action is simply that action has no end. The process of a single deed can quite literally endure throughout time until mankind (sic) itself has come to an end.

It is the action process that I hope to reinvigorate by re-

introducing Arendt and Castoriadis into radical democratic

discourse, but in order to do so I begin by describing the

democratic promise and limitation of Habermas’s public realm

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theory. As reformist and liberal as Habermas may be, I

argue that there is nevertheless considerable liberatory

potential in his procedural-deliberative focus; enough to

offer numerous useful entrance points for the kind of

radically democratic action and discussion that I believe

necessary for the revitalization of the public sphere.

The Roots of the Habermasian Public Sphere

A norm is to be justified prima facie by the principle of universalizability (U) pursued in a practical discourse (D) under specified normative conditions (Ideal Speech Situation/ISS). (Blaug 1999: 87)Habermas felt, existentially, the meaning of democracy and its significance as a historical achievement. He has translated this, at the philosophical level, into a commitment to defend the benefits of modernity against those who focus exclusivelyon the losses, or on a still-to-be-conquered future. (Leet, 1998: 78)

I have chosen Habermas as a point of entry into public realm

theory for three main reasons. First, his book The Structural

Transformation of the Public Sphere (STPS) helps to clarify the

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specificity of the liberal public sphere that he and Mouffe

are, in their different ways, attempting to radicalize and

reclaim. Second, Habermas’s elaboration of the distinction

between weak and strong public spheres creates an

opportunity for respectful debate between public realm

theorists who have genuinely different purposes for the

public sphere. Third, and perhaps most pragmatically, given

the prolific nature of Habermas’s contribution to public

realm theory one cannot possibly wander through the trails

of radical democratic theory without travelling along many

of Habermas’s paths, and one would be wise to know these

paths well.18

The Early Bourgeois Public Sphere

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas’s radical

and controversial study of the bourgeois/liberal public

sphere offers perhaps the first, and certainly the most

18 It is generally acknowledged that Habermas is the theorist most responsible for reinvigorating the discourse around public realm theory (Coles 2000, Mouffe 2000, Villa 1992, Benhabib 1992, Calhoun 1992, etc.).

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influential, argument directed at a leftist audience in

support of many of the social and political changes that

took place during the rise of liberalism, capitalism and the

bourgeoisie.19 But the book’s political relevance goes much

further than celebrating liberal democracy’s rise in the

west.20 It is from this study that Habermas continues to

substantiate his present political position. It is also

from conversations and gatherings concerning this study that

many of Habermas’s friendly critics have been able to

challenge and influence him. Indeed, it is in relation to

the effect of this study and the subsequent deliberative

domination of public realm discourse that Chantal Mouffe has

19 The book began as a thesis for post-doctoral qualifications required by German professors, the work was rejected by both Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno who believed it to be insufficiently critical of the “illusions and dangerous tendencies” of the Enlightenment conception of democratic public life, especially in mass society, and too radical in its call for an attempt to go beyond liberal constitutional protections in pursuit of truer democracy. The thesis was later successfully submitted to Wolfgang Adendroth at Marburg (Calhoun 1992: 4). While available in Germany in 1962 the book was not translated into English, and was therefore not a topic of discussion in the English speaking world, until 1989. It is a book Habermas had intended re-writing for many years but never did. 20The book also consisted of an “attempt to revive the progressive potential in ‘formal’ democracy and law and thus to counterbalance theirneglect in the Marxist tradition” (Calhoun 1992: 5).

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felt the need to directly challenge its hegemonic forces in

political circles. And finally, the ongoing influence of

STPS, along with Habermas’s subsequent prolific

participation in public realm discourse, has meant

Castoriadis and Arendt have consistently been squeezed out

of the conversation concerning the revitalization of the

public sphere.

Habermas’s study shows that throughout the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries, coffee houses in England, salons

in France and table societies in Germany were beginning to

house conversations that were rendering rationality

linguistic and intersubjective.21 The bourgeois citizens

who frequented these newly developing spaces of public

discourse and interaction began to see themselves as

responsible for two functions. The first was to create

21 It was within these spaces that there began to develop an understanding of differences between readers and critics whereby readerswere much less relevant than were those engaged in rational-critical discourse. What this new distinction led to, according to Habermas (1989: 51), was the formation in “the public sphere of a rational-critical debate in the world of letters within which the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself.”

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public opinion; the second was to guide the actions of the

state from which the bourgeoisie felt themselves unjustly

excluded.22 Both of these functions required strict

obedience to procedural rules that could allow strategic

action in which “one actor seeks to influence the behaviour

of another by means of threat or sanctions or the prospect

of gratification in order to cause the interaction to

continue as the first actor desires,” to be distinguished

from the desired communicative action in which “one actor

seeks rationally to motivate another relying on the

illocutionary binding/bonding effect of the offer contained

in the speech act” (Habermas 1995: 58).23

The accepted rules of engagement facilitated the

transformation of the public sphere from a realm of freedom

and action to a realm of “organized discussion among private

22 Craig Calhoun (1992: 7) describes Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere as a “public of private individuals who join in debate of issues bearingon state authority.” 23For Habermas (1992: 449) what is needed and what the rise of the bourgeois public sphere offers is “the institutionalization of legal procedures that guarantee an approximate fulfilment of the demanding preconditions of communication required for fair negotiations and free debates.”

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people that tended to be ongoing,” critical and publicly

engaging (Habermas 1989: 36). Freedom became the

precondition to, rather than the point of, political action,

and while there were many famous salons run by women,

politics nevertheless became a serious “gentlemanly”

activity practiced by rational, publicly minded men who

wished to influence the state. What was particularly

helpful for the creation of a new public was the change in

the role and make-up of the private sphere among members of

a new bourgeois class and the subsequent emergence of a

social realm that “is neither private nor public” for Arendt

(1958: 27),24 and both private and public for Habermas.25

24In the last chapter I explained that Arendt’s (1958: 40) well known and perhaps overstated concern with the rise of the social is a powerfuldefence of keeping the political sphere distinct from the private and social spheres. She argues “it is decisive that society, on all its levels, excludes the possibility of action, which formerly was excluded from the household. Instead, society expects from each of its members akind of behaviour, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.” While I have reservations as far as the inevitability of this claim I do believe there is a real threat in not recognizing the differences between political and social activities. 25 Habermas (1989: 175-76) explains that “the model of the bourgeois public sphere presupposed strict separation of the public from the private realm in such a way that the public sphere, made up of private people gathered together as a public articulating the needs of society

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Whereas the private sphere was mainly viewed as a realm

of necessity and rulership in republican theory, it took on

additional responsibility as a realm of freedom for the

practice of identity building and culture forming with the

rise of bourgeois society (Habermas 1989: 51).26 Freed

from the burdens of need, bourgeois private and semi-private

spheres gradually transformed into politically relevant

spaces made up of an intimate familial realm responsible for

socialization, and a slightly more formal world of letters

and critical debate that provided the means to engage in

rational discourse.27 Fed by the talents nurtured in the

more publicly-oriented private realm, bourgeois society,

riding on the back of the industrial revolution and

capitalist accumulation, transformed public space into

spheres where rational, consensus-oriented discourse could

with the state, was itself considered part of the private realm.” 26 According to Habermas (1989: 38) “more than half the population livedon the margins of subsistence” so it was less that the public sphere wasdominated by the bourgeois than it was that society was itself bourgeois. 27 These two processes, while distinct, were intertwined and dependent on each other as “the public’s understanding of the public use of reasonwas guided specifically by such private experiences as grew out of the conjugal family’s intimate domain” (Habermas 1989: 28).

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create public opinion and “privatized individuals who were

psychologically interested in what was ‘human,’ in self-

knowledge, and in empathy” (Habermas 1989: 50), could

publicize their concerns in open arenas.

Four criteria were considered necessary for the

bourgeois/deliberative public sphere to achieve its newly

defined purposes.28 The first was that speech, far from

presupposing equality of status, disregarded status

altogether. This disregard for status allowed for one’s

arguments to be validated only by its rational and public

content, which was the second criterion (Habermas 1989:

36).29 These two criteria, directly linked to the desire

for virtuous communication among equals, were required in

28 There are some interesting arguments in Calhoun’s book Habermas and the Public Sphere that suggest that, rather than downplay the classist make-upof the public sphere, these conditions institutionalised precisely thoseprocedures that ensured the public sphere would always be dominated by an elite group of well educated white males from the bourgeois class. See in particular Michael Warner’s fabulous article “The Mass Public andthe Mass Subject,” (1992: 377-401).29 Habermas (1984: 19) describes rational actors as those “who can justify their actions with reference to existing normative contexts. This is particularly true of those who, in cases of normative conflict, act judiciously, that is, neither give in to their affects nor pursue their immediate interests but are concerned to judge the dispute from a moral point of view and to settle it in a consensual manner.”

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order to eliminate all force other than the “unforced force”

of the better argument. As only this unforced force could

ensure the emergence of rational consensus from

communicative action within the “representative” public

sphere, these criteria were essential. Not surprisingly,

they strongly resembled the characteristics already nurtured

and developed within the intimate spheres of bourgeois

society, and were relatively easy to accept as the spheres

of intersubjectivity and public opinion were occupied by

people of the same class and with access to the same

privileges.30

Participants, when they entered the public sphere –

which quickly began to transcend the coffee houses, salons

and table societies and open up to a broader sphere of

appearance – were intent on acting as representatives of the

30 Habermas (1989: 29) explains that the familial sphere, free from economic needs, created its own type of public before the public sphere assumed the political function it had as the societal side of the state-society tension. And according to Calhoun (1992: 11) the literary sphere, through the world of letters, offered a space for critical debate “which paved the way for that oriented to politics.” Together the familial and the literary spheres worked together to develop the skills necessary for audience-oriented communication and the idea of “publicity against the established authorities” (Habermas 1989: 56).

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public. Their pre-political status was, in theory,

immaterial. More accurately, perhaps, the individual was

altogether irrelevant beyond his role as rational

representative of public opinion, as the goal was rational

consensus reached through intersubjective communication

detached from the fixed individual.31 Rational argument

became the trump card that would overrule all other power as

it was the only perceived way of achieving public opinion.

The third criterion was that “discussion within such a

public presupposed the problematization of areas that until

then had not been questioned” (Habermas 1989: 36). Habermas

refers to this interesting – and essentially democratic –

criterion as the “linguistification of the sacred” and

represents an important advance in politics that was

unfortunately, yet inevitably, short-lived due to the

structural limits imposed on a public sphere oriented 31 Reason, according to Habermas (1990: 341), “has to protect itself on both flanks from getting caught in the traps of the kind of subject-centred thinking that failed to keep the unforced force or reason free both from the totalitarian characteristics of an instrumental reason that objectifies everything around it, itself included, and from totalising characteristics of an inclusive reason that incorporates everything and, as a unity, ultimately triumphs over every distinction.”

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towards reaching consensus and guiding the actions of the

state.32 However, in the early stages, when the public was

beginning to ask questions and bring privileged places of

truth out of obscurity, the focus on state actions and

rational consensus was essential.33 Previously fixed

rationality came to be subjected to the scrutiny of a

discursive public sphere that questioned the authority of

much that was previously accepted as the domain of the state

or church. Power and legitimacy, as a part of this third

criterion, were taken out of the state or subject and placed

squarely within the discursive space of the public sphere.

Institutions of power and authority became responsible to an

active citizenry.32 Johannes Berger (1991: 167) explains that for Habermas the linguistification of the sacred within the lifeworld made up of the family and public sphere is only one side of the rationalisation process. The other and equally important side is “the delinguistification among forms of material reproduction – and this includes the economy and the state administration.” These delinguistified systems become the spaces where purposive and non-discursive actions take place. The private and public spheres of the lifeworld guide and critically interpret the actions of these non-linguistic spaces but never, according to Habermas do they themselves act.33 John Dryzek (2000: 95) reminds us that “it is easy to forget that thebourgeoisie was once an opposition force in Western societies, constituting a democratic civil society hostile to the state.”

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Geoff Eley (1992: 290) writes that the bourgeois public

sphere was “aimed at transforming arbitrary authority into

rational authority subject to the scrutiny of a citizenry

organized into a public body under the law.” “It was

identified most obviously,” he continues, “with the demand

for representative government and a liberal constitution and

more broadly with the basic civic freedom before the law

(speech, press, assembly, association, no arrest without

trial, and so on).” 34 Sacred and apolitical spaces of pre-

enlightenment society came to be subject to a well-read and

interested public that thought itself capable of taking on

the role of legitimate representative of the public and

rational critic of the state. Bourgeois citizens were

becoming capable of emancipating themselves from the

shackles of myth and ignorance; this led to the belief that

public participation and political involvement were rights

of all humanity. Rationality, no longer acclaimed from

34The phrase “rule of law” is the translation of the word rechtsstaat whichliterally means “constitutional state.”

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above, was now the product of discursive engagement among

concerned citizens.

The final criterion was that the public sphere had to

be inclusive “in principle.” The “in principle” was added

as Habermas, and presumably members of the early bourgeois

public sphere themselves, were well aware that such an ideal

was never achievable. Habermas has nevertheless always

defended the importance of attempts to achieve this ideal.

As he explains:

however exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique; for it always found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all privatepeople, persons who – insofar as they were propertied and educated – as readers, listeners and spectators could avail themselves via the market of the objects thatwere subject to discussion. The issues discussed became “general” not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate. (Habermas 1989: 37)

Unfortunately (or fortunately), the last two criteria made

it impossible for the bourgeoisie to keep all the so-called

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private issues of the non-bourgeois class out of the

expanding public domain. The late nineteenth and early

twentieth century inclusion of proletarian actors and needs

within an expanded public sphere created what Habermas

called the depoliticization of the public sphere. Brought

on by what he describes as the development of a new public

fashioned by the mass media,35 a loss of the general

coherence of all that made the bourgeois public sphere

unique, and a broad replacement of critical discourse with a

commodified relation of entitlement,36 this stage represents

the point at which the ideal public sphere became colonized

by needs and individualist demands.

35 Habermas’s arguments around the mass media are taken directly from his predecessors of the Frankfurt School (especially Adorno) who saw in the mass media the commodification of information and the replacement ofa liberatory realm with a consumptive realm. 36Lamenting these losses that occurred throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Habermas explains that those pleasures and virtues that accompanied public discourse in the eighteenth century havebeen lost: “the bourgeois forms of sociability have found substitutes that have one tendency in common despite their regional and national diversity: abstinence from literary and political debate. On the new model the convivial discussion among individuals gave way to more or less noncommittal group activities” (1989: 163).

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As much as Habermas laments the fall of the bourgeois

public sphere, he is aware that even without historical

depolitization it is unlikely that any of the four criteria

had ever been fully met even in earlier stages. But the

impossibility of achieving these features has never mattered

much to Habermas. What he is still interested in is the

normative or regulative validity claim that such procedural

norms can produce.37 Habermas is correct that with the rise

of the bourgeois pubic sphere there was a structural

transformation and change in the purpose of politics. The

degree to which the regulative/procedural intent of the

public sphere differentiates reformist liberal public

spheres from revolutionary republican ones is best

illuminated by briefly seeing how the revolutionary goals of

Castoriadis differ from the reformist goals of Habermas.

37 During the rise of the bourgeois public sphere a particular way and purpose of interacting led to the development of procedural norms that could create the conditions to allow public Man not private men to be present in the public sphere. The actor was to be less imaginative and free than rational and representative of “the public.” Abstract Man was, of course, not abstract at all; at the same time as the bourgeoisiewere demanding that “the public” be heard they were symbolically creating what “the public” was going to become.

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For Castoriadis, who looks to the Greek polis as an

influential democratic germ,38 procedures such as those

utilized by the bourgeois public sphere to help reach

rational consensus are only ever “pieces of a political

educational process, of an active paideia, which [in the

Greek context] aimed at exercising – and therefore, at

developing in all – the corresponding abilities and,

thereby, at rendering the postulate of political equality as

close to the effective reality of that society as possible”

(1997c: 11).39 For the citizen of ancient Athens, learning

how to act as a decision-maker was a necessary skill to

38 In the concluding paragraph of “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy” Castoriadis describes the two key ways in which the Greeks are “for us” a germ. First, they never stopped thinking about the explicitly humanistic and political question: “What is it that the institution of society ought to achieve?” And second, in Athens, the answer to the question was “the creation of human beings living with beauty, living with wisdom, and loving the common good” (1997a: 288). These guiding ideals made Greece in general, and Athens in particular, the birthplace of democracy and philosophy. It is, of course, only a germ as there were many well known limitations to the Greek public sphere that cannot be ignored (even if Athens did go well beyond all other political bodies in allowing public participation in political activities). 39It is interesting to note that amid contemporary struggles to re-energize “praxis philosophy,” Habermas views Castoriadis’s “linguistic turn” in this field as “the most original, ambitious, and reflective attempt to think through the liberating mediation of history, society, external and internal nature once again as praxis”(Habermas, 1992: 327).

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attain, but it was always part of much deeper political

activity. Thus, Castoriadis would not necessarily deny the

political significance of the linguistification of the

sacred, but he would see the fall of the bourgeois public

sphere as a necessary stage in the continued social drive

for autonomy.

For Castoriadis, politics is necessarily related to

autonomy, revolution and the radical imaginary. He thus

cannot

see how an autonomous society, a free society, could be established [s’instituer] without a genuine becoming-public of the public/public sphere, a reappropriation of power by the collectivity, the abolition of the division of political labour, the abolition of bureaucracy, the most extreme decentralization of decision-making, the principle ‘No execution of decisions without participation in the making of decision’, consumer sovereignty, the self-government of producers – accompanied by universal participation in decisions that commit the whole and by self-limitation… .(1997a: 415)

So with personal autonomy as a goal, the revitalization of

the public sphere has little to do with the recreation of a

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place for rational decision-making and the creation of

public opinion. Whereas Habermas is interested in

bracketing out passion and emotion, Castoriadis is

interested in bringing them back into politics (Elliott

2002: 163) in order to allow the more republican political

aim of collective and individual autonomy to erupt. By

relying on the history of the rise of the bourgeois public

sphere Habermas runs the risk of narrowing the concept of

politics too much as well as bracketing out the danger,

unpredictability and pleasure of politics – precisely what

makes democracy and the public sphere worth fighting for and

protecting.

For Castoriadis democracy is “the regime in which the

public sphere becomes truly and effectively public – belongs

to everyone, is effectively open to the participation of

all” (1997c: 7).40 It is thus inherently risky, for unlike

40 This becoming public of the public sphere, was the fourth criterion of the bourgeois public sphere but Castoriadis’s response to it is quitedifferent from Habermas’s. For Castoriadis, open participation is essential and is constitutive of a radically democratic condition that should never be seen as a nuisance. Indeed democracy represents the only regime where autonomy is a real option.

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tyrannies and totalitarian regimes that create or offer all

that can exist as risk, true democracy “renounces all

ultimate ‘guarantees’ and knows no limitations other than

its self-limitation….This amounts to saying that democracy

is the only tragic political regime – it is the sole regime

that takes risks, that faces openly the possibility of its

self-destruction” (1997a: 316). It is also the only regime

that can result from an autonomous society that has managed

to thrust aside the sacred and strive for democratic ideals

of freedom, equality and social justice (1997a: 316). This

relation among risk, wonder and publicity is why, for

Castoriadis, discussing democracy and discussing politics

are necessarily linked;41 it is also why Castoriadis argues

that “true politics” is “the result of a rare and fragile

social-historical creation” (1997c: 1) that has occurred

41Democracy represents a particular type of political magma whereby “allcitizens participate in the creation of those institutions and norms that best facilitate their individual autonomy and their effective participation in all forms of explicit power” (Kalyvas 2001: 13). So while politics and democracy are linked, they are not necessarily identical as politics could be linked to a different magma.

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only twice in history: in ancient Greece and in Western

Europe.

Castoriadis explains that in societies that refuse

closure and challenge pre-determined givens, politics and

philosophy emerge to put the established institutions into

question. “The rupture – and all the incessant activity of

questioning that goes along with it – implies,” he explains,

“the rejection of any source of meaning other than the

living activity of human beings.” He follows this humanist

argument by explaining that newfound autonomy “implies the

rejection of all ‘authority’ that would fail to render an

account and provide reasons” (1997c: 4). Politics then,

along with being a labour “aimed at transforming

institutions in a democratic direction,” is “a labour that

concerns all members of the collectivity under

consideration” (4). It is also necessarily active as it is

a specific type of praxis, and as “in praxis, there is

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something to be done” (4, emphasis in original), it belongs in

the domain of doing.42

What is required, he writes, is “the development of the

autonomy of the other or of others” (1987: 75), and a

related transformation of instituted society by instituting

society. True politics is about creation and “the

reorganization and reorientation of society by means of the

autonomous action of individuals” (Castoriadis 1987: 77).

Politics begins with “the explicit acknowledgement of the

open character of its object and exists only to the extent

that it acknowledges this” (1987: 89) and accepts that an

autonomous individual’s freedom is directly related to the

freedom of others. Thus, politics is a never-ending

movement striving to make society “as free and just as

possible.” It resists authority on all fronts and

42 Castoriadis (1987: 87) argues that “to do something, to do a book, tomake a child, a revolution, or just doing as such, is projecting oneselfinto a future situation which is opened up on all sides to the unknown, which, therefore, one cannot possess beforehand in thought, but which one must necessarily assume to be defined in its aspects relevant to present decisions.” To do something is to take a risk and introduce theunpredictable to the sphere of prediction, or in Castoriadis’s language,to imagine outside the social imaginary.

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constantly disrupts instituted society but it is not merely

or even primarily negative. The positive activities of an

autonomous actor resist and challenge instituted society by

their simple existence.

Castoriadis’s pessimistic view of contemporary Western

society is well known,43 as is his commitment to uncovering

its contradictions and dominating nature.44 This is one

reason why he sees the reduction of politics to

proceduralism as a genuine threat to his autonomy project.

Proceduralism, or seeing politics as a deliberative task or

decision-making tool, assumes the legitimacy of, and

operates within the confines of, existing society and thus

43 Referring to the conditions of modern society, Castoriadis (1997a: 346) explains that “on the level of the real functioning of society, the‘power of the people’ serves as a screen for the power of money, techno-science, party and State bureaucracies, and the media. On the level of individuals, a new closure is in the process of being established, whichtakes the form of a generalized conformism. It is my claim that we are living the most conformist phase in modern history.”44 Castoriadis argues that in present society although individuals and groups are permitted to struggle for justice within particular parameters they are also kept separate and “repressed by the entire contemporary social structure, by the reigning ideology, by the tirelesseffort of the traditional organizations to suppress it [the germinal critique of the status quo], and, of course, by individuals’ psychical internalization of this structure: the self-repression of new significations they create without completely knowing it” (1997a: 9).

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prevents the “plurality of potentially and effectively

revolutionary activities” (1997a: 27) from being realized

and set free.

Modern liberal society may be a repressive society, but

that does not mean there are no particular struggles and

movements that could become revolutionary. A repressive

society has a need for autonomously oriented groups as much

if not more than any other society, and these groups can and

do remain oriented toward revolutionary change. Therefore,

in modern liberal societies, the political activity of

democratic groups ought to be oriented toward

elucidating the problematic of revolution, ofdenouncing false-hoods and mystifications, ofspreading just and justifiable ideas, as wellas relevant, significant, and precise information; it can also promulgate a new attitude toward ideas and theory, for the type of relation people at present entertain with ideas and theory, an essentially religious type, must be shattered, and it must be shown at the same time that one cannot for all that authorize oneself to say just anything whatsoever. (Castoriadis 1997a:33)

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So for Castoriadis, committed democrats have a great deal of

work to do that goes well beyond uncovering conditions for

rational/legitimate decision-making procedures. Such a call

to action may seem curious in relation to his grim view of

western democracy with its skew in the direction of the

project of rational mastery over autonomy. But upon closer

examination such activity is what members of an instituting

society must do when they are situated within instituted

society. It is precisely what a democratic regime offers

its citizens.45

This section has shown that Habermas’s procedural-

deliberative focus on politics stems from particular

historical events. It has also shown that there are

distinct differences between a liberal procedural ideal and

a republican revolutionary ideal when it comes to the reason

behind revitalizing the public sphere. In what follows I

45 Castoriadis would accept Mouffe’s (2005: 33) claim that there is no “possibility of an act of radical refoundation that would institute a new social order from scratch.” However, he would not accept that a radical refoundation is not possible; he would argue it need not start from scratch.

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look at some of the remaining similarities between the

liberal and republican approaches to the revitalization of

the public sphere and point to some further consequences of

committing too much to a solely Habermasian version of the

public sphere.

Some Remaining Similarities and Their Misappropriation

While the four procedural criteria developed within the

bourgeois public sphere remain important to Habermas, and

while there are obvious differences between his and more

republican approaches to public realm theory, Habermas does

not go as far as to write off the relevance of

republicanism.46 He actually wishes to bring together

aspects of both the republican and liberal tradition to

inform his politics. From the liberals, he borrows an

emphasis on the separation of state and society, a

recognition of the need to compromise,47 and a focus on the

46 Indeed Habermas (19996b: 22) readily admits that he borrows from the republican tradition when developing his theory of the public sphere.47 This recognition of the need to compromise is emphasised by Thomas McCarthy (in Calhoun 1992: 104), who critiques Habermas’s early work for

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institutionalization of “sensible and effective

administrative accomplishments” (1996b: 27).48 What he does

not wish to take from the liberals is their focus on

economics, as it threatens to reduce the political sphere to

a tool for compromises between competing interests. He also

believes liberalism tends to be too focused on the

constitutional framework that protects the non-political

common good bound up in capitalism (Habermas 1996a: 298).49

From the republicans, who he believes have “the advantage of

preserving the original meaning of democracy in terms of the

institutionalization of a public use of reason jointly

exercised by autonomous citizens” (1996b: 22), he wants to

borrow a focus on constitutive discourse, a social emphasis

on opinion and will formation, and the ideal of consensus.50

being too idealistic: rational/inclusive consensus can never be achievedin the public sphere. 48 For a more thorough discussion of Habermas’s links to liberalism, seehis friendly debate with John Rawls in section two of The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (1998).49 Included in the list of liberalisms’ inadequacies are: their scepticism about reason; their desire to bracket politics within the state; and their inability to distinguish civil society as a distinct place separate from the steering media of money and administration. 50 He believes the great advantage of the republican tradition lies in its ability to preserve

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What he dislikes about the republican model is its offensive

relationship to the state (1996a: 297), its erroneous belief

in a common will, and the overly idealistic and ethically

overloaded aspects of its communitarian reading of public

communication (Habermas 1996b: 23).

A proposed partnership between liberal and republican

approaches is not as free of conflict as Habermas presumes,

however. His belief that “no one would enter into moral

argumentation if he (sic) did not start from the strong

presupposition that grounded consensus could in principle be

achieved” (Habermas 1984: 19), along with his argument that

“a public sphere of rational debate [is] the only possible

foundation for democratic politics in the contemporary

world” (Kulynych 1997: 320), brackets out much of the

disruptive potential of the republican tradition. It also

shows that while Habermas is open to the republican

tradition it is only as an inferior add-on to the liberal

the radical democratic meaning of a society that organises itself through communicatively united citizens and does not trace collective goals back to “deals” made between competing private interests (Habermas, 1998: 244).

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one. Yet there is nothing in any of Habermas’s procedural

politics to force others to agree to his conditions of

engagement, except for that of the unforced force of the

better argument. Ironically, this unforced force could

allow for an argument that challenges the primacy of

procedural democracy, and could thus reintroduce precisely

those aspects of the republican tradition bracketed out by

the liberal emphasis of Habermas’s politics. In other words

following procedural norms could lead to these very norms

being found wanting and in need of reinvigoration by more

ethical and substantial interpretations of democracy such as

those defended by Castoriadis and Arendt.

The difficult relation between Habermas’s rationalist

filter and his continued interest in certain republican

traits becomes even more evident in his contribution to a

special issue of Social Research dedicated to Hannah Arendt’s

work. Here, he explains that Arendt and he share an

emphasis on intersubjectivity,51 the importance of plurality51 Intersubjectivity is something Habermas (1990) also believes he shares with Castoriadis.

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to modern individuality, and a consensus-based co-operative

discursive action that keeps “the multiple perspectives of

participants who occupy different standpoints” together. In

addition, we are told by Habermas that he and Arendt

similarly emphasize the political sphere as the space where

humans engage in unanticipated or undisciplined actions. He

does, however, believe in the end that “an antiquated

concept of theoretical knowledge that is based on ultimate

insights and certainties keeps Arendt from comprehending the

process of reaching agreement about practical questions as

rational discourse” (1977: 22). This apparent failure, as I

will show, is actually a result of Habermas misreading and

overemphasizing one aspect of Arendt’s public realm theory;

a more careful reading embraces a continuous tension between

collective equality and individual or active freedom that

never leads to agreeable end points.

Arendt (1963: 229) was, to be sure, concerned with the

“exchange of opinion between equals” but this concern was to

act against “a mass that moves as one body and acts as

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though possessed by one will,” so the ideal of achieving

rational consensus was never her intent. In fact, Arendt

rejects notions of public sovereignty and finds a liberatory

potential among early American settlers who when writing the

Declaration of Independence retained the word people as “the

meaning of manyness, of the endless variety of a multitude

whose majesty resided in its very plurality” (229).52

Arendt’s more formal politics is about ensuring the

protection of unstructured and undisciplined public space

for its own purpose, as it is while acting that men are free

rather than possessing the gift of freedom (1968: 153).

For Arendt political life is to include:

the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of asserting ourselves into the world by wordand deed, thus acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new. (1968: 263)

52 Of course as the term people was not inclusive many of the exclusionary problems with early Athenian democracy were not overcome.

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So the Arendtian public sphere is a performative space which

must be free from procedural norms, as it is the sphere or

stage where humans act and action is

the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men,not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world…, this plurality is specifically the condition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam – of all political life. (1958: 9-10)

As Jessica Kulynych (1997: 345) has explained, “performative

actions,” those that Arendt believes ought to constitute the

activities of the political public sphere, “are not

alternative ways of deliberating, rather they are agonistic

expressions of what cannot be captured by deliberative

rationality.” In other words, they are the activities

forced out by the deliberative filter that Habermas’s

procedural politics imposes on political discourse in order

to achieve legitimate decisions.

While Habermas is right to recognize his debt to

Arendt, a reflection on how he judges success in liberal

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society along with a closer reading of Arendt’s politics

makes it apparent that substantive differences between the

two theorists get obscured by Habermas’s particular use of

Arendt’s work. Furthermore, Habermas’s conclusion that

Arendt fails to recognize the potential of her own arguments

is fair only if Arendt’s politics are assumed to be the same

as Habermas’s, which is simply not the case. The most

important point, as Canovan (1983: 107) explains, is that

Habermas’s particular misreading of Arendt “is a textbook

case of a form of distorted communication that does not

figure in Habermas’s theory.” Canovan (1983: 107) goes on

to explain that “in the course of taking up her ideas, he

transformed them very considerably, with the result that

what he learned from Arendt was not quite what she would

have liked to teach him.” Perhaps more importantly, “what

Habermas does is to translate Arendt’s concepts into his own

terminology, read his own theory into them, and then, when

forced to recognize that her conclusions are different from

his, accuse her of failing to realize the implications of

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her own theory.” Habermas’s substantial emphasis on

discussion over deed, Canovan argues, leads him in his

excessively “intellectualist” reading of Arendt to miss her

equally substantial focus on plurality and action (1983:

111). So while they may have certain concerns around

consensus in common, there is an equally important aspect of

Arendt’s work that a Habermasian reading obscures. The

aspect missing from Habermas’s reading of Arendt is active

freedom that can be realized only through a pluralist space

of appearance where numerous and diverse men, not Man (sic),

appear before, and distinguish themselves from, each other.

For Arendt, publicity is maintained only as long as the

plurality of perspectives that constitute it is preserved.

Dana Villa, who “seeks to show how Arendt’s defence of

the public sphere – interpreted as the locus of a politics

that stresses plurality, difference, spontaneity, and

initiation against the regularising apparatus of consensus”

(Johnson 1994: 427) is suited to contemporary times, claims

that the public sphere for Arendt is a “space for agonistic

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action denatured by the normalizing power of the social”

(Villa 1992: 718). He thus adds to Canovan’s critique the

argument that “Habermas is wrong to treat Arendt’s

definition of power (the ability to act together, to act in

concert) as implying a consensus-centred conception of the

public realm.” Moving perhaps too far in the direction of

agonism, Villa nevertheless convincingly argues that

Arendtian public realm theory cannot be reduced to a

problematic of legitimation as its purpose is “agonistic

subjectivity” (1992: 718). As Arendt (1958: 197) herself

argues, “the calamities of action all arise from the human

condition of plurality, which is the condition sine qua non

for the space of appearance which is the public realm.

Hence the attempt to do away with plurality is always

tantamount to the abolition of the public realm itself.” So

Arendt’s “inability” to comprehend “the process of reaching

agreement about practical questions as rational discourse”

is not her oversight, but rather a fundamental difference of

opinion over the nature of politics and the public sphere.

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Habermas, and those who accept the deliberative approach to

politics, seem to be blind to the particularity of their

deliberatively inspired filter. It is acceptable for

Habermas to read Arendt as he does, but it is not acceptable

to accuse her of failing because her conclusions do not

match his own.

Without venturing any further into Arendtian public

realm theory, we can see from Habermas’s reading that if his

interrogation is representative of the deliberative filter

in action, as I believe it is, such a filter does much more

than simply lead to consensus. It also obscures,

objectifies and/or misinterprets the insights of those who

have a purpose for politics different from the deliberative

one. If Habermas’s public realm theory is to remain useful

for more radical and revolutionary political activity, it

must not read difference as failure but as essential

democratic antagonism that needs space that is not filtered

by desires for consensus or limited by rationalist rules of

engagement.

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John Brady (2004) has made a nearly identical critique

of Chantal Mouffe’s and Jodi Dean’s similarly misguided

readings of Habermas.53 He argues that agonistic pluralists

fail to recognize that along with the fact that “Habermas’s

theory of the public sphere read in conjunction with other

aspects of his social theory allows us to question the sharp

distinction democratic theorists are prone to draw between

consensus and political contestation” (2004: 349); they

themselves also depend on a public sphere like the one

Habermas proposes. He also correctly argues that Habermas

promotes “debate, discussion, and contestation” around many

of the same questions and tensions that contextualists like

Mouffe believe constitute political activity.54 His most

interesting point, however, is that not only can a

Habermasian theory of the public realm accommodate the ideas

53 Brady (2004: 340) believes the shortcoming of their readings of Habermas’s work lead Mouffe and other agonistic pluralists to “overstatethe significance of the issues they identify and to overlook the significant strengths of Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, strengths that ultimately recommend it as a powerful and desirable modelfor theorizing the contemporary public sphere.”54 Others like Ilan Kapoor (2002) and Takis Fotopoulos (1997) similarly argue that the differences between agonistic pluralists and deliberativedemocrats are much less severe than they are made out to be.

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and arguments of agonistic pluralists, but it requires them

for legitimacy’s sake. The accuracy of this disruptive

argument will become more evident when I discuss Habermas’s

distinction between weak and strong public spheres. What is

important here is to acknowledge the broad lesson that is

beginning to be teased out of the conversations taking

place: most thinkers struggling to revitalize the public

sphere are misreading each others’ potential due to their

own limited readings of each others’ contributions.

I believe what is necessary is a more disruptive

presence that is not fixed to any particular public realm

theory and thus may be better suited to help ensure that

translation does not come before active listening and

understanding. As suggested earlier, I plan to engage this

disruption by performing a synagonistic method of engagement

as a democratically committed feral citizen. However, while

I do agree that differences have been overstated, I am wary

of turning too far towards the consensus side of the

consensus/contestation dualism. There remains merit, for

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example, in Mouffe’s continued struggle to differentiate

agonistic pluralism from deliberative democracy,

particularly in light of Habermas’s present domination of

the discourse. And while there are also recognizable

similarities between Mouffe and Castoriadis and Mouffe and

Arendt – particularly around pluralism, celebrations of the

loss of markers of certainty, and the possibilities that

open up once the tribunals of history no longer judge all

activity – Mouffe (2005: 120) remains committed to the anti-

Castoriadian argument that “a democratic society cannot

treat those who put its basic institutions into question as

legitimate adversaries.” She is also clear that while

Arendtian politics are concerned with freedom and public

deliberation, her own politics are about power, conflict and

antagonism (2005: 6).55 Those committed to a project of

autonomy could, for Mouffe, very easily be construed as

55 Given Mouffe’s focus on conflict and Habermas’s focus on consensus itis not at all surprising that Mouffe emphasizes differences while Habermas emphasizes similarities. The seeming inevitability of the respective blurring of similarities and differences by Mouffe and Habermas is another reason why I support a synagonistic approach to political engagement.

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enemies to destroy rather than adversaries to debate. The

possibility of opposition lies in the fact that, for

Castoriadis, an autonomous society must create its own laws

and must be free from any pre-constituted normative intent

that defines what counts as rational.56 For Mouffe, in

contrast, rules of the game must be agreed upon before

meaningful political conversation can take place.

Returning for a moment to the differences between

Mouffe and Habermas, Mouffe argues that these are

fundamental and foundational since agonistic pluralism,

unlike deliberative democracy,

asserts that the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions nor to relegate them to the private sphere in order to render rational consensus possible, but tomobilize those passions towards the promotionof democratic designs. Far from jeopardizingdemocracy, agonistic confrontation is in fact

56 “I want the Law not to be simply given,” argues Castoriadis (1987: 93), “but for me to give it to myself at the same time. The person who remains constantly in the infantile situation is the conformist and the apolitical person, for they accept the Law without any discussion and donot want to participate in shaping it.” In autonomous societies an autonomous individual has her/his own ‘law’ or guide based in the commitment to the autonomy imperative and this commitment always puts basic institutions into question.

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the very condition of its existence. (1999: 755-756)

Agonistic pluralists believe that by abandoning the

imperative toward rabid rationality they can provide “the

left with a new imaginary, an imaginary that [not only]

speaks to the tradition of the great emancipatory struggles,

but that also takes into account recent theoretical

contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy” (Mouffe

1993: 10). So, according to Mouffe, it is not that Habermas

is limited or not inclusive enough, but that he is

misguided.

“For radical and plural democracy,” explains Mouffe

(1993: 8), “the belief that a final resolution of conflicts

is eventually possible, even if envisaged as an asymptotic

approach to the regulative ideal of a free and unconstrained

communication, as in Habermas, far from providing the

necessary horizon of the democratic project, is something

that puts it at risk.” Habermas’s attempted reclaiming of

the promise of rationality she considers a leftover from

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pre-modern times and thus one of the many dominating aspects

of modernity that radical democrats must overcome. Mouffe

(1995: 260) argues that by realizing

that rationalism and abstract universalism, far from being constitutive of modern reason,were in fact reoccupations of premodern positions, it becomes clear that to put them into question does not imply a rejection of modernity but a coming to terms with the potentialities that were inscribed in it since the beginning.

In fact, only by eliminating this epistemological baggage

does Mouffe believe she can take full advantage of the

emancipatory possibilities for advancement toward the

ethico-political democratic ideals of freedom and equality

latent within current conditions of fragmentation, pluralism

and philosophical exploration.

Mouffe believes that the way to take advantage of

modern pluralist conditions is first to accept the dimension

of undecidability that infiltrates every decision-making

moment. This undecidability is brought about by the

irreducibility and contextual nature of all antagonisms,

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what Mouffe (2005: 17) calls “the hegemonic nature of every

kind of social order and the fact that every society is the

product of a series of practices attempting to establish

order in a context of contingency.”57 Second, the political

sphere is to become a means for temporarily translating

antagonistic relations into agonistic relations. “While

antagonism is a we/they relation in which the two sides are

enemies who do not share any common ground,” Mouffe (2005:

20) writes, “agonism is a we/they relation where the

conflicting parties, although acknowledging that there is no

rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless recognize

the legitimacy of their opponents.” Part of her broader

political intent is to allow particular issues or nodal

points to gather many different democratic struggles

together temporarily to form a chain of equivalence that can

become a new collective will/conflictual consensus. It is

this tension-filled collective will that can constitute a

57As a result of this belief Mouffe can make the anti-Arendtian argumentthat “it is impossible to determine a priori what is social and what is political independently of any contextual reference” (2005: 17).

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new temporary “we” space (or perhaps many of them) made up

of numerous unique radical democratic forces.

The temporality of the equivalences is important

because individual actors also have numerous subject

positions constructed by equivalences and political

engagement. The agonistic-pluralist citizen is a never-

complete political agent constituted by multiple

subjectivities, each of which may at certain times become

politicized and only then given greater significance as a

temporarily fixed, yet always partial, political identity.58

Slavoj Žižek gives a great example of how unfixed subject

positions can be constituted and organized for political

purposes. Despite its length it deserves to be quoted in

full:

It [political agency] changes according to the way they [a series of particular subject-positions] are articulated in a series of equivalences through the metaphoric surplus which defines the identity of every one of

58 Young (1997b: 358) similarly defends the irreducibility of political activity when she argues that “since the other person is a subject-in-process, I cannot assume that because last week I understood her standpoint, I can do so today.”

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them. Let us take, for example, the series feminism – democracy – peace movement – ecologism; insofar as the participant in the struggle for democracy “finds out by experience” that there is no real democracy without the emancipation of women, insofar asthe participant in the ecological struggle “finds out by experience” that there is no real reconciliation with nature without abandoning the aggressive-masculinist attitude towards nature, insofar as the participant in the peace-movement “finds out by experience” that there is no real peace without radical democratisation, etc., that is to say, insofar as the identity of each ofthe four above mentioned positions is marked with the metaphoric surplus of the other three positions, we can say that something like a unified subject-position is being constructed: to be a democrat means at the same time to be a feminist etc. What we mustnot overlook is, of course, that such a unityis always radically contingent, the result ofa symbolic condensation, and not an expression of some kind of internal necessityaccording to which the interests of all the above-mentioned positions would in the long run “objectively convene.” (Žižek 1990: 250)

What Žižek is explaining here is a need to recognize a

multiplicity of subject positions all in never-ending and

constitutive tension with each other, yet all with the

potential to become temporarily dominant and/or politicized.

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Individually, the political agents acting on these

activities are consistently developing new subject positions

as a result of their activities, and each of these new

subject positions can, in turn, take on the role of

politicizing or transforming oppositional relations into

agonistic relations. Young (1997b: 353) believes that by

seeing subject positions in this manner, “the specificity

and irreversibility of each location is more obvious,” and

thus active listening becomes more recognizable as an

essential component of political communication. Each

interaction not only clarifies and assists in creating

conditions of plurality, but also changes the identity of

the political agent, making the actor more than s/he was

prior to the political encounter. When it is related to

deliberation this more creative vision of political

engagement makes the actor aware of the fallibility of the

outcome of the political encounter as not even s/he herself

was “fully present.” Listening in relation to creation thus

makes the actor aware of the need to keep all decisions

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temporary and subject to political interrogation. A

political subject, like a democratic community, is never

complete: s/he is forever developing into something more,

and if she or he is situated in a pluralist public sphere of

antagonistic relations, perhaps something grander. The

citizen and the community co-develop in a tension-filled

relation that helps create political moments and micro

public spheres of tension.

Mouffe is aware of the particularity of her vision of

politics, and as a result is careful to take the time to

explain to her readers what distinguishes agonistic

pluralism from other liberal democratic approaches to the

condition of plurality. She is most clear when she

differentiates between “politics” and “the political.” She

explains:

By “the political,” I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive ofhuman societies, while by ‘politics’ I mean the set of practices and institutions throughwhich order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political. (2005: 8)

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Further clarifying the importance of the separation, she

explains that “it is only when we acknowledge this dimension

of ‘the political’ and understand that ‘politics’ consists

in domesticating hostility, only in trying to defuse the

potential antagonism that exists in human relations, that we

can pose the fundamental question for democratic politics”

(1999: 754). The question, she argues, is not one of how to

arrive at an inclusive rational consensus. Such an ideal is

impossible and can only lead to exclusions that are

practically evident yet theoretically obscured within the

abstract idealism of any such theory. The question is,

rather, how to create “unity in a [never reducible] context

of conflict and diversity” (1999: 754).59

The realm of politics for an agonistic model of

democracy is thus oriented not toward consensus but toward

creating new political frontiers60 that allow for conflict 59 Presently it will become apparent, at least on this point, that thereare similarities to this distinction that Mouffe makes and the distinction Habermas makes between weak and strong public spheres. 60 Mouffe (1993: 3) argues that the disappearance of the opposition between democracy and totalitarianism opens up the potential for the “establishment of new political frontiers” that could lead to numerous

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between adversaries who, due to their acceptance of the

ethico-political principles of democracy, accept the “other”

as a legitimate or worthy opponent rather than an enemy to

destroy. It is this transformation (actually not so

different from Habermas’s deliberative filter) from

competitive antagonism between enemies, to a respectful

agonism between worthy adversaries that politics is to

strive for in a fragmented, pluralistic and particularized

society. In this agonistic view, politics only ever

temporarily slows down the political. It accepts the

undecidability of all issues and celebrates the real and

symbolic consequence of this new condition of plurality.

The relevance of the many differences between public

realm theorists, alongside the truth behind the argument

that the differences may not be as clear and rigid as Mouffe

asserts, is what makes me believe there would be a real

benefit to public realm theorists operating in a

new friend/enemy relations that could either be taken up politically as ways of extending the democratic project, or devolve into a revitalisation of essentialist and fixed oppositional positions.

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synagonistic manner, wherein they recognize a common need to

resist the threat to the public sphere (rational or

liberatory) without burying the significance of the

differences that help justify the continued presence of many

theories of the public sphere. Castoriadis, Arendt,

Habermas and Mouffe each has a particularly important

contribution to make to public realm theory, and like

Habermas and Mouffe who take from republican and liberal

traditions to develop their own theories, I have taken from

all four of these theorists to come up with feral

citizenship as a synagonistic political methodology that

will help (I hope) reinvigorate the debates and uncover the

similarities between these public realm theorists. I do

not, however, believe that by reinvigorating these debates

an inclusive sphere of public debate will immediately be

created. Rather, more humbly, I believe that recognizing

the promise of each theorist will make it less likely that

any democratic ideal or activity will be justifiably kept

out of political debate. The revitalization of the public

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sphere is a necessary activity only within a larger never-

ending democratic movement that will never achieve the

sufficient conditions for attaining democracy.

Thankfully, even Habermas, the most admittedly

reformist61 of the public realm theorists discussed in this

chapter, has come to recognize the need for genuine

opposition and antagonism within the public sphere. Because

Habermas is both the most reformist and the most recognized

and discussed theorist of the public sphere I enter into

this final discussion beginning with his distinction between

weak and strong public spheres.

Weak and Strong Public Spheres62

61 This reformism is so extreme that Romand Coles (2000: 553), in his review of Habermas’s most recent work, argues that it is not difficult to find examples where much of Habermas’s institutional ideal has been followed and there remains, in Coles view, “very little democracy and enormous injustice.” 62 In response to the loss of social cohesiveness in one public sphere Habermas (1992: 424) now accepts that “it is wrong to speak of one single public even if we assume that a certain homogeneity of the bourgeois public enabled the conflicting parties to consider their classinterests, which underneath all differentiation was nevertheless ultimately the same, as the basis for a consensus attainable at least inprinciple.”

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We can distinguish between communicatively generated power and administratively employedpower. In the political public sphere, then,two contrary processes encounter and cut across each other: The communicative generation of legitimate power, for which Arendt sketched a normative model, and the political-systemic acquisition of legitimacy,a process by which administrative power becomes reflexive. (Habermas 1999: 55)

Habermas, likely listening to some of his critics and

observing the direction of the discourse around the

revitalization of the public sphere, has recently better

explained an aspect of procedural-deliberative democracy not

fully acknowledged and understood by most of his critics.

That aspect is the need to differentiate between and keep

distinct the creative and the deliberative moments within

all political procedures. He clarifies the unique features

of each stage by distinguishing between the constitutionally

protected informal creative opinion-formation that occurs

among those uncoupled from the need to decide (mainly a

republican influence), and the formal public sphere oriented

toward translating the communicative action of the weak

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public sphere into communicative power in the strong

parliamentary public sphere (mainly a liberal influence).

It is both the originality and the sameness of the

arguments that justify the need for structureless and

structured interaction in this sphere that are, I believe,

most relevant for present day theorists. First, the

originality is relevant to all those deliberative democrats

(e.g. Dryzek, Benhabib, Young, Fraser) who consistently

struggle for – and criticize Habermas for not achieving –

universality/inclusivity in the formal public sphere.

Second, the sameness is relevant because it indicates that

Habermas, while offering a democratic theory that is perhaps

partially responsible for a reduction in what politics

means, nevertheless shares the concern of contemporary

republican and agonistic thinkers who condemn the reduction

of politics to structured decisionism. In addition, it also

uncovers a potential allegiance with the agonistic pluralist

approach which, while accepting of liberal institutions,

nevertheless shares with the republicans a surprisingly

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unnoticed strong interest in the informal interactions of

the so-called weak public sphere.

While Habermas sets up the strong and weak public

spheres as co-operative partners in the process of

democratic legitimation, I see no reason why those not

accepting of his particular deliberative emphasis cannot re-

articulate the liberatory potential of the weak public

sphere63 with more radical purposes. I maintain that

Habermas’s weak public sphere can be both a legitimizing and

a de-legitimizing tool for present-day democracies. This

dual possibility gives it an unpredictable potential to

achieve all sorts of unimaginable results including, but not

limited to, rational opinion formation and legitimation.

The Informal Public Sphere64

The people from whom all governmental authority is supposed to derive does not

63 “Weak,” “wild” and “informal” are terms used interchangeably by Habermas when defining the non-parliamentary public sphere, as the weak public sphere is the sphere free from domestication and imposed need. 64 Margaret Canovan (1998: 40) actually uses the term “informal politics” to describe the sort of politics that Arendt has always been interested in.

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comprise a subject with will and consciousness. It only appears in the plural, and a people is capable of neither decision nor action as a whole. (Habermas 1999: 41)

Habermas’s (1996a) recognition of the need for a creative

aspect of the public sphere is more a change in focus than a

change in position. The weak public sphere is still

intended as a tool for legitimate decision-making, but now

it has the specific characteristic of being free from the

structural constraints of the formal sphere required for

institutionalizing rational decision-making. This “weak”

sphere is much more in line with the non-liberal Arendtian

(1963: 23) concept of public life where “the polis was

supposed to be an isonomy, not a democracy.” The need is

for space free from the burdens of survival where, for

Arendt, individuals could act and practice that distinctly

human ability to distinguish themselves from each other at

the same time as affirming their solidarity in commonality.

Achieved through performing in public spaces of appearance,

these acts were life-affirming, often had no lasting purpose

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beyond the act itself, and allowed people to distinguish

themselves from what they were by performing who they were

as unique individuals. Once again, performative and

intrinsically valuable politics is not the purpose of the

Habermasian weak public sphere but it is an unintended

potential implicit in the articulation of a political theory

with a wild and always wonderful public space.

The weak public sphere is, for Habermas, a space free

from all types of rule, even the rules of rational decision-

making and the unforced force of the better argument. It is

the source of “legitimacy and innovation” that can prompt

the creation of public opinion, which can then be filtered

into the problem-solving and decision-oriented spheres of

the formal public sphere. While Arendt (1963: 228) frowned

upon public opinion because “by virtue of its unanimity,

[it] provokes a unanimous opposition and thus kills true

opinions everywhere,” it is for Habermas the necessary task

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of “the people,”65 oriented as they are towards making

liberal democracy legitimate.

For the weak public sphere to achieve anything like

public opinion it has to be open to a largely spontaneous

development of “open and inclusive network[s] of

overlapping, subcultural publics having fluid temporal,

social, and substantive boundaries” (Habermas 1996a: 307).

Along with keeping the sphere free from obvious purpose,

this openness and universality also renders the weak public

sphere “a ‘wild’ complex that resists organisation as a

whole” as it is situated in a plural, antagonistic and

fragmented society. Indeed it is

on account of its anarchic structure [that] the general public sphere is, on the one hand, more vulnerable to the repressive and exclusionary effects of unequally distributedsocial power, structural violence, and systematically distorted communication than

65Yet Arendt does agree that “opinions will rise whenever men communicate freely with one another and have the right to make their views public,” and that “these views in their endless variety seem to stand also in need of purification and representation” (1963: 229). So in the end the two theorists seem to be making quite similar points. The main difference is that in the Habermasian case, the wildness of this sphere is to be harnessed and used for another purpose, and in the Arendtian case such wildness is considered valuable in and of itself.

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are the institutionalised public spheres of parliamentary bodies. On the other hand it has the advantage of the medium of unrestricted communication. (Habermas 1996a: 308)

These informal spheres are intended to open up opportunities

for the inclusion of those types of discourse not

appropriate for decision-oriented deliberation. It is the

sphere that has the greatest potential to achieve anything

like ideal speech acts because of the lack of fixed rules

and institutional norms to follow or within which to act.

However, due to its necessary lack of structure, this sphere

is also thought to have the greatest potential for

domination, oppression and unequal participation. For “on

account of its anarchic structure,” there is a grave danger

that the unforced force of reason will never be realized due

to the vulnerability caused by the “repressive and

exclusionary effects of unequally distributed social power,

structural violence, and systematically distorted

communication” (1996a: 307-308). This is, of course,

Habermas’s way of dealing with the demise of the normative

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content of the bourgeois public sphere. He recognizes a

paradoxical need to include all the new voices but also

knows that such inclusion will not be appropriate or

possible when decisions must be made.

In this distinction between wild and formal public

spheres, Habermas faces and comes to terms with the

contradictions latent in his desire for plurality and

rational decision-making. That is, he appears to realize

that actualization of one aspect requires elimination of the

other, which is why in his theory the two realms can and do

co-exist, and more importantly must remain distinct. Part

of the particular relevance of Habermas’s position lies in

the fact that he sees all spheres as existing not in an

antagonistic relationship but in a relationship of mutual

reliance and co-operation. In fact, he does not even

consider the fact that there could be radical tensions

between the spheres of activity, for tensions cannot help

lead to rational and legitimate decision- making.66 The 66 He does acknowledge the colonizing tendencies of the state and economy, which is why the public sphere must remain pure and free from

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lack of interest in potential tensions between the spheres

of activity leads to one of the most notable limitations to

the Habermasian split: concerns raised in public, if they

are to be politically relevant, must fit within, accept, and

be oriented to the purpose of the larger political system.

They must be translatable into a form of public opinion that

can get the administration to act on the deliberations of

the public sphere. Stated slightly differently, particular

issues must be translated into universally relevant moral

issues that can be rationally deliberated. So while the

freedom offered in this space is recognized as a necessary

part of a legitimate political system, it is limited in its

capacity as a politically relevant sphere of action by a

need to achieve rational moral consensus.

By arguing that a wild informal public sphere is

necessary for a legitimate liberal democracy, Habermas is

protecting the only remaining sphere capable of harnessing

the sort of creative radicalism that, he argues, is all but

the steering media of money and power.

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lost in contemporary liberal democracy. Furthermore, he is

making the strong argument that decision-making, while

important, does not encompass non state-based political

activity. His arguments are directed toward liberal and

deliberative democrats, but he has much to offer even those

who do not endorse his desire for responsible state

government, as the wild informal public sphere, regardless

of its intended Habermasian purpose, holds great potential

for radical politics. It also has the promise of expanding

the range of politics, potentially creating space that will

allow genuine questions to be debated and discussed for no

purpose beyond the discussion itself. The simple inclusion

of even a potentially isonomic aspect of political

procedures actually expands Habermasian politics beyond

Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism, in that the latter still

presumes that “properly political questions always involve

decisions which require us to make a choice between

conflicting alternatives” (2005: 10). Mouffe sees politics

only as an activity occurring between conflicting

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alternatives; Habermas’s weak public sphere at least allows

for the possibility of politics by other means taking place.

There are at least two ways of participating in the

Habermasian weak public sphere. The first is through the

signal function, which “acts as a warning system with

sensors that, though unspecialized, are sensitive throughout

society” (Habermas 1996a: 359). The role of the participant

here is to communicate or uncover problems that can then be

“processed by the political system.” The other prescribed

role of the informal public sphere is the job of “effective

problematization” of the signalled issues. Effective

problematization is the most interesting of the

opportunities as the participant is to “convincingly and

influentially thematize” the issues of public import. The

way to thematize is to furnish publicly relevant issues

“with possible solutions, and dramatize them in such a way

that they are taken up and dealt with by parliamentary

complexes” (Habermas 1996a: 359). Both of these tasks

remain oriented toward influencing the state but, once

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again, have consequences that reach well beyond the liberal

democratic cage. Habermas’s resistance to articulating a

post-bourgeois public sphere67 haunts him here and leads him

(at least in his political writing) to undertheorize

everything that is useful for the decision-making formal

public sphere.

It seems to me that the weak public sphere, as a space

open to wild discourse and performative action, if

disarticulated from Habermas’s overly disciplinary theory,

can become more than a useful legitimation tool. It could

offer a way to think about public discourse for those who

question Habermas’s reluctance to challenge the role of the

state or liberal democracy as a just system of distribution

and authority, as much as it offers insight for those who

accept liberal democracy as the “best we can do.” Feral

citizens, for example, do not intend to leave the wild

public sphere. Not interested in creating ideal speech

67 Nancy Fraser (1997: 71), outlining Habermas’s history of the bourgeois public sphere, believes it is odd that “Habermas stops short of developing a new, post-bourgeois model of the public sphere.”

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situations or legitimate decisions, nor in creating public

opinion, feral citizens want to unleash the wild public

sphere and disarticulate it from actually existing

liberalism and Habermasian rationality. Similarly, the

feral citizen, while borrowing elements from all public

realm theorists, is uninterested in representing a new

hegemonic force, which Mouffe argues is the intent of

political engagement, or pushing for instituting a new

social imaginary, as Castoriadis would like. The weak

public sphere is where the feral citizen can symbolically or

imaginatively wander along the trails with Castoriadis and

his autonomy imperative, Arendt and her independent active

and engaged citizen, Mouffe and her conflictual agent, and

even Habermas and his disembodied rational agent looking to

translate all the unruly discourse into consensus.

So the complexity exploding within informal public

spheres most certainly needs to be protected, but for

reasons that extend well beyond legitimation. With a not-

necessarily cooperative weak public sphere, radically

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democratic questions can be asked, such as: “does liberal

democracy embody the ‘just society’ or does it merely

represent one form of political order among other possibly

more just ones?” Or, similarly, the weak public sphere can

focus on becoming that domain responsible for debating the

never ending question regarding what a just political order

looks like.

Clearly, one can disarticulate Habermas’s conception of

a weak public sphere from its limited role as a tool used to

make decision-making more legitimate and universalizable.

At the same time, however, I believe something like the

structureless weak public sphere (and many features of the

strong parliamentary public sphere) remain necessary for

making even minimally legitimate or universalizable

decisions. My point is that uncovering the unnecessarily

constraining nature of Habermas’s politics does not require

denying the important role each distinct sphere has to play

within Habermasian decision-making.

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On this front my allegiance is with the second

generation of deliberative democrats. Nancy Fraser, Seyla

Benhabib and Iris Marion Young all recognize the need for a

politics similar to Habermas’s, yet each also believes

either clarification or radicalization of the Habermasian

public sphere is necessary. I believe that Habermas’s

distinction between the weak and strong public sphere, if

itself discursively structured and not pre-constituted, can

accommodate these non-fatal critiques.

Thus, I agree with Nancy Fraser (1997: 86) that “only

participants themselves can decide what is and what is not

of common interest to them... What will count as a matter of

common concern will be decided precisely through discursive

contestation. It follows that no topics should be ruled

off-limits in advance of such contestation.”68 I also

accept Fraser’s extended critique of the abstractness of

Habermas’s deliberative approach which, she believes,

includes his blindness to the political impact of social 68 Habermas (1995: 81) now accepts that no topic should be necessarily off-limits in advance.

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inequality, his belief in the superiority of one public

sphere rather than many competing public spheres, and his

belief that civil society and the state are necessarily in a

co-operative relationship. Fraser argues that there are

always subaltern counterpublics that create “parallel discursive

arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent

and circulate counter-discourses, which in turn permit them

to formulate oppositional interpretations of their

identities, interests and needs” (1997: 81).69 Her

arguments suggest that Habermasian politics should not be

denied, only freed from their falsely universal, bourgeois

and rigidly rationalist overtones through a recognition of

the physical and deliberative diversity of numerous public

spheres.

69 Geoff Eley (1992: 306, emphasis in original) similarly argues that Habermas, by subsuming all possibilities into the bourgeois model of thepublic sphere, “idealises its bourgeois character (by neglecting the ways in which its elitism blocked and consciously repressed possibilities of broader participation/emanicipation) and ignores alternative sources of an emancipatory impulse in popular radical traditions.”

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Seyla Benhabib (1992: 109), while not always as

critical as Fraser, adds to these points with her challenges

to Habermas’s use of fixed binary oppositions. She explains

that:

as with any modern liberation movement, the contemporary women’s movement is making what were hitherto considered private matters of the good life into “public” issues of justiceby thematizing the asymmetrical power relations on which the sexual division of labour between the genders has rested.70

Benhabib’s point is that distinctions between “justice and

the good life, norms and values, interests and needs are

‘subsequent’ not prior to the process of discursive will

formation” (110). These comments offered by Fraser and

Benhabib suggest that a constant blurring and redrawing –

but not elimination – of the boundaries between private and

70 There is an interesting debate between Young (1997b), who supports asymmetrical reciprocity, and Benhabib, who believes symmetrical reciprocity is a necessary accompaniment to communicative action. While there is not space to go into this debate here, I believe Young’s idea of asymmetrical reciprocity is more suited to the condition of plurality and the respect for difference that the rise of the public sphere is intended to encourage. For Young asymmetrical reciprocity leads to moral humility rather than the attainment of truth or even truthfulness. For Benhabib the moral respect required for communicativeaction means putting oneself in the place of others.

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public is a necessary component of contemporary deliberative

politics. The distinction remains, but its fixing can only

ever be temporary and situational. What is considered

private for one group, they show, may not be for another.

Furthermore, what is private today may be political tomorrow

and what is political today may, at another time or for

another person or group, be private (I would add to these

critiques the claim that each public sphere has the

potential to become weak and strong if by strong we mean

oriented towards making decisions).

Habermas has acknowledged the pertinence of these

critiques,71 and by instituting a distinction between a weak

and strong public sphere has created a way for these issues

to add legitimacy and substance to a procedural-deliberative

approach to democracy. There is, however, in this critical

reinterpretation of Habermasian discourse ethics, an implied

questioning of the need to institutionalize the results of 71 See, for example, Habermas’s (1992: 428) realization that the exclusion of women from the bourgeois public sphere had “structuring significance” and his acknowledgement that numerous public spheres are better than one.

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deliberation that Habermas does not consider.

Institutionalizing the consensus requires permanently taking

the results of legitimate deliberation out of the plural and

agonistic public sphere and placing it within the non-

linguistic administrative sphere. Once administered, the

deliberation is fixed and becomes a part of the accepted

norms that help determine what is relevant or acceptable for

public deliberation, itself oriented toward consensus. As

this predetermined distinction was the problem in the first

place, there needs to be a better way of dealing with the

undecidability latent within all decisions, including the

decision to accept the structures of present day society as

the best we can do. Even Habermas (1984) recognizes that

decisions can always be improved upon.

The contentions put forth by Benhabib and Fraser, while

perhaps not intended to do so, contribute to a reasoned

argument against a consistent prioritizing of

intersubjective rational deliberation for, as they point

out, defining ideal speech also entails defining

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unacceptable speech. Their arguments can be taken to

suggest that a specific type of discourse should not

permanently embody the public sphere; certain individuals,

language games, traditions, and identities will always be

excluded. The state structure that Habermas accepts as a

given requires that argumentative speech be permanently

prioritized as it is the only type of discourse legitimate

to the administrative sphere. On this point Jessica

Kulynych (1997: 319) correctly points out

the very practices of administration, distribution and decisionmaking on which Habermas focuses his attention can and must be analysed as productive disciplinary practices. Although these practices can clearly be repressive, their most insidious effects are productive. Rather than simply holding people back, bureaucratisation breaksup, categorises, and systematises projects and people.

Once the emphasis is taken off achieving rational consensus,

one can see more clearly that the state is a system that,

even in its ideal form, imposes an always partial (and

usually elitist) decision on a public never capable of

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actually achieving what the entire “representative” system

is grounded on. When one accepts a multiplicity of ways to

deliberate along with a multiplicity of ways to act in the

public sphere, one has to question the permanent

prioritizing of argumentative and state oriented speech.

State-oriented speech is, here, subject to its own

essentially parasitic logic; a good argument, as I have

mentioned, could show that argument oriented toward

consensus is not necessarily the best approach to political

activity.

The most important point these critiques offer affects

the foundation of deliberative democracy. The arguments

show that even when binaries are broken down, decision-

making requires exclusionary, prohibitive procedures. This

decisionist limit is an inevitability no matter how

inclusive one tries to make a decision-making body.

Habermas tries to achieve the best possible results out of

what I might call a necessary evil. That is, he tries to

articulate ways of making representative democracy actually

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representative. So the promise of Habermas’s deliberative

approach to politics does not lie in the

institutionalization of his theory. Rather, it lies in his

much more simple distinction between decision-oriented and

creative discourse. When decisions must be made, a

structure (institutionalized or not) is always imposed on

the conversation. This basic distinction challenges the

institutional reduction of politics to administration and

passive decision-making while also giving credence to

different ways to interact in order to reach consensus. It

offers even those concerned with autonomy and freedom a

reasonable way of dealing with the need to make decisions,

and also makes it explicit that decision-making is not in

and of itself a space of freedom.

So while Fraser and Benhabib do help bring to light

these limitations, they do not offer a way of “improving”

the decision-making task of deliberation. It is certainly

true that most deliberation is exclusionary of gender issues

and obscures the patriarchal make-up of the public sphere,

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but their arguments to that effect fail to offer any way of

overcoming the exclusionary nature of deliberation or, for

that matter, the need to do the best we can. This is not to

say that continued sexism is acceptable or the struggle to

improve deliberative procedures not a necessary struggle.

Rather it is to point to the fact that the broader ideal of

equality and universality will never be met within a

deliberative body. Deliberation always and inevitably

excludes, and this is what is most important to concede:

exclusion is what leads to envisioning democratic politics

as more than deliberation.

In related critiques, Iris Marion Young (1996) and Lynn

Sanders (1997) offer interesting examples of how

argumentative speech can be used to make rational arguments,

even against the dominance of rationality itself. They take

Habermas to task for prioritizing argument and reasoned

discourse at the expense of, for Young, greeting, rhetoric

and storytelling,72 and for Sanders, testimony involved in 72Young (1996: 133) offers communicative democracy which includes “a broad and plural conception of communication that includes both the

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telling one’s own story.73 While both thinkers endorse the

discussion-based ideal of democracy, they suggest that to

make it more inclusive and just, discourse-oriented

democracy must no longer prioritize argumentation. They are

of course right. Prioritizing argument excludes other types

of discourse and also, as Young argues, minimizes the

relevance of active listening which could lead to more

substantial and pluralist critiques. A minimal reliance on

rational argument remains, however, necessary, indeed

inevitable, when decisions must be made or when the point is

to convince others of a position, particularly when the

medium is the spoken or written word. Indeed both Young and

Sanders use a type of rational argument to make their point

that Habermas should include these other types of discourse,

so the point is not to replace argument with other kinds of

expression and the extension of shared understandings, where they exist,and the offering and acknowledgement of unshared meanings,” as an alternative to deliberative democracy. For her, deliberative democracy is too exclusive and the conditions of involvement exclude far too many kinds of communication. 73 The specific example Sanders (1997: 372) uses is rap music which, as Dryzek (2000: 66) rightly explains, is quite similar to Young’s storytelling as far as alternative ways of communicating that are excluded from deliberative bodies.

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discourse but to value and learn how to listen to kinds of

discourse that are not only argumentative.

Dryzek (2000: 71) is right that when the question of

“what is to be done?” about communicative failures is

raised, “argument always plays a central role.”

Furthermore, “when it comes to ‘what is to be done?’ […] in

response to a social problem, argument also must enter,” and

by the nature of its force, not by its institutionalization,

it becomes dominant. A type of translation and fixing of

discourse occurs when conversation becomes subject to time

constraints and decision-making needs. When consensus must

be reached, the joy and pleasures of discursive engagement

must be bracketed out or de-prioritized in order to initiate

the task of efficient decision-making. So there is a limit

to the critique of Habermas’s deliberative democracy. While

it is true that argumentative speech is exclusionary, it is

equally true that it is at times necessary and is, in fact,

the best we can do. The problem with Habermas is with his

desire to prioritize argumentative speech permanently in

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order to legitimize a hierarchical political system that

operates for the sole purpose of translating public

deliberations into law.

This line of argument does not eliminate the need for

rational argumentation and decision oriented bodies in

spaces with temporal and situational limitations. Rather,

it places argumentative speech on an equal plane with other

types of discourse that Habermas, for reasons I have

explained, accepts only at a less politically relevant

level. Yet it must be noted that exclusionary and silencing

rule following and obedience should not be thought of as a

characteristic only of rational decision-making. As John

Dryzek (2000: 68-69) states, there are coercive elements to

all the other types of discourse discussed by Young and

Sanders, and we could add all public spheres have variations

of all these (and more) types of inclusionary/exlusionary

discourses.

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Most of the rules assumed and followed in these other

types of discussion cannot be practised under the

constraints of consensus-oriented disembodied/rationalist

discourse, just as the rules for argumentation would not be

welcome in most greeting or storytelling. So not only

should argument not always be prioritized, but nor should

any type of discourse be permanently prioritized. Most

types of discourse have distinct rhetorical qualities, none

of which can be considered superior to the others and none

of which can legitimately include the language games of

other types of communication. Public spheres that rely on

and prioritize non-argumentative or persuasive types of

communication should not be designated as apolitical, yet we

should recognize the need for some sort of translation or

translatability (from particular to universal) if their

topics are even temporarily to become part of a larger

public sphere that at least attempts universality. Just as

accepting multiple types of discourse does not deny the

relevance of argument, suggesting translatability does not

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deny the relevance of untranslatable interaction,

communication and performance. The point is that discursive

plurality is just as relevant to democracy and citizenship

as the plurality of public spheres, subject positions,

political theorists and performances is to politics.

Lynn Sanders (1997: 364) adds more to the critique of

prioritized deliberation by citing a study on jury duty74

that shows that “when Americans assemble in juries, they do

not leave behind the status, power, and privileges that they

hold in the outside world.” In fact, no matter what the

make-up of the jury, more often than not the person selected

as foreperson is a white man with a college degree. The

study indicates that there are numerous “enhancers” that

increase the chances of being selected as the foreperson,

including speaking first and sitting at the head of the

table, both practised disproportionately by high-status

74 Many political theorists claim that if American politics is ever actually democratic it is in the institution of the jury. Members of the jury are to consider issues before them from a social perspective; they are to look beyond personal concerns; they are chosen from the general public; and they are to reach a decision collectively.

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white men. While acknowledging this tendency beforehand may

help to improve the selection process, it will not eliminate

the fact that certain individuals will inevitably occupy

positions with greater power than others, that privilege is

never fully bracketed out of deliberative moments, and that

decisions are never simply subject to the unforced force of

the better argument. Further, the study points out that

will formation, as Habermas recognized, is itself unequally

constructed, as s/he who speaks first assumes a position of

authority whether s/he desires it or not. Michael Warner

(1992: 382) adds that “the rhetorical strategy of personal

abstraction is both the utopian moment of the [deliberative]

public sphere and a major source of domination.” His point

is that an emphasis on the ability to abstract oneself from

any relation to body image (something assumed and required

for rational deliberation) is a way to prioritize

“implicitly, even explicitly, white, male, literate, and

propertied individuals,” as these characteristic have always

allowed body image to be irrelevant. What Warner is

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arguing is that by abstracting the whiteness and maleness of

the public person, the public sphere is not opened up but

rather subtly made ever more exclusive by naturalizing a

particular subjectivity. That which white men already are

(or have the privilege to be), is what all others must

strive to become.

Thus, deliberation brackets out discourse not easily

translatable from private or social to public; it does not

ensure active listening; it cannot offer any way of enticing

those who have traditionally been excluded from public

discourse into participating; it assumes abstracing the body

image is equally simple; and it cannot deal with issues that

are not “common.” In other words, deliberation both

attempts to achieve, and is based on, impossibilities made

theoretically possible by its overtly abstract approach

devoid of any relationship to real politics. This

abstraction obscures many issues of real subordination that

continue to haunt the public sphere. As Young explains, “the

conscious actions of many individuals daily contribute to

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maintaining and reproducing oppressions, but those people

are simply doing their jobs or living their lives, and do

not understand themselves as agents of oppression” (quoted

in Kulynych 1997: 319). Prejudices, patterns of exclusion,

and pre-political inequalities are often subtle, hidden and

pernicious, making them hard to challenge through the

deliberative process.

As deliberation and rational argument are prioritized

in Habermas’s theory, they have also been the focus of

critique in this section. The main point I have tried to

make, however, is that all types of discourse are

exclusionary, including those that seem to be inclusive and

self-critical, and thus what is required is diversity. This

pluralist conclusion shows why the best argument in

resistance to a Habermasian dominance of public realm

discourse is not one that tries to improve the inclusivity

of deliberation, nor one that denies space to deliberate

rationally. Rather, I support a position that recognizes

the limitation of rationality without denying a need for

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periodically attempting to achieve reasonable consensus.

Accepting this premise shows that the weak public sphere

becomes much more dangerous, pluralist and potentially

revolutionary than Habermas ever imagined.

While I have been focussing on what I believe to be the

democratic potential of the weak public sphere, I have also

been careful to explain that caging the potential of

wildness, while unfortunate, may be necessary if it is to

fit with any idea of deliberative authority. Habermas’s

approach to a discursively rational political system

requires a diversity of procedures that allow for

participation in some part of the decision-making process.

By outlining or uncovering a plurality of spaces for

participation, Habermas indicates the extent to which the

voices of the people can be heard. By opening up political

participation to numerous types of discourse, he succeeds in

extending what political participation means, but each type

of participation remains, in typical Habermasian fashion,

limited to its role within the liberal democratic system.

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That is, the purpose of participation is translated into a

legitimizing tool for the political function situated above

it in the hierarchical political system. Nothing in

Habermas’s political theory, not even the wild public sphere

free from authority and domination, has a political purpose

in and of itself.

I actually do not think expanding the purpose of the

public sphere represents a direct challenge to Habermas’s

deliberative ethics. On the contrary, I think it shows that

politically relevant acts have the potential to occur in

many different places and through many different types of

speech and action. As a result, no particular approach or

language game ought to be permanently prioritized. However,

regardless of the numerous possibilities of the weak public

sphere, it must not be forgotten that these kinds of

radically democratic opportunities are not Habermasian. The

weak public sphere is, for Habermas, always related to the

formal public sphere which is, as we will see, far less

encouraging and exciting than the weak public sphere.

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The Formal Public Sphere: Rational Not Free

Ideally a majority decision must be reached under discursive conditions that lend their results the presumption of rationality: the content of a decision reached in accordance with due procedure must be such as can count as the rationally motivated but fallible result of a discussion provisionally brought to a close under pressure of time. (Habermas 1993: 159)

At first, Habermas’s celebration of radical autonomy,

followed by a caging of the communicative power of this wild

public sphere, seems confused. When read closely in the

context of his larger political goals, however, it makes

“rational” sense to have informal opinion formation

regulated by democratic procedures. Perhaps here it is

useful to recall that Habermas is less interested in freedom

and equality for the individual than he is in rational

deliberation that can lead to reasonable decisions. With

this focus, the need for distinct (informal/formal) bodies

that work with one another becomes clearer. Strong public

spheres with regulated democratic procedures are intended to

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take rational and universalizable conclusions and translate

them into laws or policies. Yet even if Habermas is

primarily interested in the legislative end point, his focus

on procedures requires questioning how the consensus came

about and how it is performed or presented; these questions

always lead back to the weak public sphere. So while there

is danger in reducing the weak public sphere to a tool for

public opinion, it is equally imperative not to misinterpret

the consequence of Habermas’s focus on procedures. He may

be a reformer, but he is not oblivious to the claims of

those who demand radical changes.

Habermas finds in the structured parliamentary public

sphere opportunity to institutionalize procedures that can

ensure the decisions made are as legitimate and

representative as possible. Reliance on parliamentary

structures is where Habermas’s reformism becomes most

evident. It is also where he makes one of his most relevant

points: There is a distinct difference between making

decisions and reaching understanding. Decision-making is a

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need. It stops the wild explorations of the weak public

sphere and requires numerous limitations on individual

freedom if it is to lead to decisions that can be considered

legitimate and rational. What is important here is the fact

that this change in the way people communicate is

inevitable. As the previous section indicates, Habermas’s

real reformism relates to an acceptance of permanent

structures as the necessary embodiment of rationality and

justice. The fact that decision-making disciplines actors

is difficult to doubt; the necessity of fixed structures

that institutionalize these disciplinary norms is not.

Minimally, as Habermas’s own arguments attest, and as

Castoriadis has convincingly argued, all permanent

structures need to be subject to constant challenge, and as

these structures will necessarily be found wanting they must

accept that the flow of power is not one-directional. The

weak public sphere will, at times, challenge the strong

public sphere, but the confrontation ought not to be viewed

as a threat as much as a democratic challenge already

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embedded in Habermas’s reformist theory (though the

institutional challenge is more Castoriadis’s focus).

The task of making decisions is an administrative or

necessary duty. It is a type of management necessary for

dealing with the wild aspects of a complex society when

politics is seen as responsible for achieving consensus. It

requires behaving accordingly, not acting unpredictably, and

while it may support laws that develop equality it also

ought to be recognized as a hindrance to the democratic

freedom of an active and pluralist citizenry.75 Strong

public spheres, more centralized and much less diverse than

more exclusionary weak public spheres, are “arranged” prior

to the need to decide and have particular rules that are to

75Challenges to reductions of democratic citizenship to voting, or in the so-called participatory democratic approaches that call for increasing plebiscites and referendums, are obvious. But the challengesto those promoting direct forms of democracy are also significant. Participation in the decision-making stage does not make for a direct democracy. On the contrary: it allows for a more inclusive management decision that imposes responsibility on a populace that is considered responsible for making a choice, which is their democratic duty. As Habermas shows, democracy occurs long before the decision making process, and the imposition of having to attain democratic agency by answering a yes/no question considered appropriate by the un-representative state should never be accepted.

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be followed for “justifying the selection of a problem and

the choice among competing proposals for solving it.” The

structures are organized around the “cooperative solution of

practical questions, including the negotiation of fair

compromises.” Their role is not to become “sensitive to

new ways of looking at problems” but to respond to, justify

and evaluate the selection of the particular problem

(Habermas 1996a: 307).

The parliamentary/strong public sphere has to react to

public opinion developed out of the weak public sphere by

convincing the administrative sphere to institutionalize or

legislate the final decision. The assumption here is that

the goal of political action is law. Indeed, Habermas’s

deliberative process is concerned with the question “what is

valid law? Or, more precisely, how is a legitimate law, which

necessarily involves a claim to transcendent validity,

possible in a post-metaphysical context?” (Palti 1998: 118,

emphases in original). The way to do this, Habermas

answers, is to ensure the “normative expectation of rational

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outcome is grounded ultimately in the interplay between

institutionally structured political will-formation and

spontaneous, unsubverted circuits of communication in a

public sphere that is not programmed to reach decisions and

thus is not organized” (1999: 57).

It is clear that the hierarchical procedures set up by

Habermas are not one-directional, for if the desire is law,

then the means must be organized so that law can be the

final product of rational consensus.76 Politics is

envisioned as a means to an end: rational decision-making

that can be acted upon by the administrative body.

Furthermore, it is assumed that these formal procedures

will, at least temporarily, resolve the issue uncovered

within the weak public sphere by making it part of the

formal political system. The strong public sphere thus fits

in between the administrative sphere that it relies on for

76 Kulynych (1997: 319), discussing the power relations underlying Habermas’s theory, rightly explains that “bureaucratic power is not a power that is possessed by any individual or agency, but exists in the exercise of decision making.” The power relation implies that when politics is reduced to decision making, politics as a creative act is essentially halted.

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“preparatory work and further processing” and the weak

public sphere with its quality of discovery.

The strong parliamentary public sphere is intended to

ensure universality. It is also intended to

institutionalize rational decision-making, to be inclusive,

and to be democratic. The need for a creative and just

public sphere is also, without question, shown to be

essential for a democratic society. The weak public sphere

will, however, remain necessary until all irrationalities

are eliminated, and as such a notion is itself irrational

and highly utopian (dystopian?), it can be assumed that the

weak public sphere will always be necessary and desirable.

So even without more fatal critiques, Habermas’s own

rationality paradox means politics and undisciplined

interaction remain essential parts of deliberative

democracy.

Politics, Feral Citizenship and Synagonism

Any approach to theorizing democracy must “make room for

dissent and for the institutions through which it can be

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manifested” (Mouffe 1999: 756), but so too does it need to

make room for cooperation. Along with being feral, this

dual need to appreciate difference and acknowledge

similarity is embedded in the Greek term synagonism, and is

why I have chosen to use that term to inform my political

methodology. Synagonism offers a way of embracing

conflictual and cooperative aspects of public realm theory

without predetermining which aspect will stimulate the

democratic moment. Habermas and Mouffe acknowledge the need

for both agonism and cooperation, but each is too focused on

his/her particular understanding of politics to consider

seriously the consequence of actively listening to other

views of politics. Neither, as I have also shown, really

takes the republican/revolutionary arguments of Arendt and

Castoriadis seriously which is a problem because it is

Arendt and Castoriadis who best challenge the neo-liberal

consensus that limits most contemporary public realm theory.

I do believe radical and revolutionary approaches to the

revitalization of the public sphere can exist in a

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conflictual relationship that is respectful and agonistic.

I also believe, at times, these different theories can come

together and resist grander threats to any and all types of

democracy. I have argued that one way to do this is to

disrupt (by asking it to do something Habermas would not),

and occupy Habermas’s weak public sphere.

In much the same way as Mouffe and Habermas want to

take from both the liberal and the communitarian traditions,

I want to use certain insights from both the deliberative

and the agonistic approaches to the revitalization of the

public sphere. But I am not suggesting that an amalgam of

Mouffe and Habermas is enough. As I have shown, it is also

necessary to add Castoriadis and Arendt. Additionally, what

I am performing in this chapter is one more contributing

political strategy oriented toward revitalizing the public

sphere. Lastly, I have at no time proposed bringing all

these theorists together under one cooperative political

umbrella. Each theorist has particular interests and

desires that have both hindered and assisted their political

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theories and none should be sacrificed to a new superior

hybrid theory. This is not the same as saying they ought to

remain fixed in their positions and not listen to the

arguments of others. On the contrary, it is to say active

listening to others must always be a part of any approach to

revitalizing the public sphere. Any notion of “getting it

right” should be resisted, and any opportunity to create

spaces where differences can be performed, shared with

others and developed should be expanded. This is of course,

what feral citizenship is concerned with. The idea, as I

have asserted throughout the dissertation, is not to replace

what is already present but to create moments where other

political promises can be understood, explained, disrupted

and expanded.

Briefly summing up these different approaches to

politics, we see that for Arendt politics is primarily a

joyful act that allows active and independent agents to

gather together and perform the unimaginable and also to

realize their unique human capacities to act and be free.

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Politics, action and freedom not only rely on each other but

are indistinguishable, as it is only when free from the

sphere of necessity that the human capacity to act is

unleashed, and it is only human action that can introduce

the unexpected. Or, as Castoriadis might similarly argue,

it is only the autonomous individual who can imagine an

autonomous society. For Castoriadis, politics is about the

activity of creating and the attempt to create autonomous

individuals and societies. Mouffe, on the other hand, sees

politics as directly linked to antagonism. She believes

undecidability and antagonism are irreducible aspects of the

social symbolic makeup of modern pluralist society and that

the purpose of politics is to create conditions where

antagonistic relations where the other is viewed as an enemy

can be replaced by agonistic relations where the other is

viewed as a respectful adversary to debate with and learn

from. Last, Habermas sees politics as a procedural

movement from the creation of public opinion to its

institutionalization and legislation. Each definition has

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its place and time. Each ought to be understood as a

necessary though not sufficient part of a continued attempt

to revitalize the democratic public sphere.

In this chapter, by arguing with, for and against the

political promise of Habermas, Mouffe, Arendt and

Castoriadis, I have attempted to return a favour granted me

by each of these theorists. At one time or another all four

disturbed particular beliefs that I held prior to engaging

with their work and as I am sure is clear by this point,

each has influenced the development of feral citizenship as

a joyful adventure through the wilds of political theory.

So rather than simply describe how each theorist has been

helpful to the development of the concept of feral

citizenship, I have used feral citizenship and synagonism to

return the disruptive favour by stimulating, further

politicizing and reinvigorating discourse between attempts

to revitalize the public sphere.

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