Trouble at Mill, not duty or reason but a paradox called Liberal Demcracy

Essay by Chantal Mouffe, 2000

Us against them is populism. It clarifies passions, encourages clear collective identities, and such a shame those clear collective identities by themselves alone and unaided usually fail to manifest a clear and civilized discourse which results in productive compromise. A pretty story with color pictures and happier endings isn't the answer, nor a bland monotony of color, faith, height and diet. Never has been.

Why? The last rational person who gave serious consideration to time for us people being a linear concept was August Comte, the father of Sociology and he died in 1857 when he was 59 years old, lucky chap. Instead of a line, wiggly or otherwise, what we have to maintain a vibrant, open and free democracy is an enduring, tragic, conflicting, messy pluralism of competing hegemonic interests in conflict with each other and those interests occasionally changing places without ever achieving a solution. There is no closure, there is no straight line, there is no boldly going where no man has been before. Society is a series of institutions one of which contains the process for determining leadership.

One argument suggests you can't institutionalize conflict unless the adversaries, however many there may be, are deemed legitimate. Should one party invest forty years in de-legitimizing the other party, then, as the old saying goes: "there's trouble at mill." 

Chantal Mouffe's position on the central role of passion and conflict in the democratic process is clear. She does not see a working liberal democracy as a committee of the ruling class, but suspects that's what democracy may have been replaced with. Her Agonistic Pluralism which provides the theoretical framework for an understanding of a liberal democracy that works more effectively to represent us people accepts conflict between groups, not reason, as both a cohesive and clarifying driving force that produces constructive expressions and welcomes "trouble at Mill." Agonism, Mouffe's position, as opposed to Antagonism, describes the enemy as a legitimate adversary against whom to mobilize. Passion is the driving force of mobilization, a passion to vote, not a duty to vote.

The Mill in question is a settling power structure attempting to return to a "work or starve" mindset that encourages the uncertainty of fear in a society, not hope. This produces a degree of obedience, but also it results in increasingly short term, ill-considered, yet given the circumstances apparently reasonable if temporary solutions to enduring problems. 

The Skeptic Cicero, looked for Virtue, Justice and Wisdom in a Statesman. He liked to see dignity, temperance, generosity and a magnanimous heart in a political leader. Mark Antony, a would be emperor, had him killed, which just about sums up the power hungry

 

 

Them and Us

Fungi on Old Apple Tree

Let's dive in, thrash around in the dawn of Post Irony before it disappears, and see how the New Modern might affect and ultimately effect the regimes of truth, language and the structures of power in a society of people. But before we do anything we have to enter the world of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. Why? Because they are a point of focus with enviable names.

Mouffe is a Belgian Political Theorist, a world traveler, a critic of Deliberative Democracy, a contributor to the Essex School of Discourse Analysis which is a field where the post structuralist Symbolic Order figures bountiful.

Ernesto Laclau, an Argentinian Political Theorist, he was a Philosopher, one of the many brave 'inventors' of Post Marxism, a field amongst many fields that attempts to recall the real through a materialist dialectic in the search for the concrete and in the process pisses a lot of hardcore Marxists off. Laclau died eleven years ago, he was 78, he was buried in Seville Spain. Mouffe is still with us, she's 82.

Mouffe's critique of Deliberative Democracy is where we start. And here there's a confusion to be mastered. An idea is an idea until it's not. Carl Schmidt might have been a nasty little man, it didn't mean that in 1933, as a well respected constitutional scholar he didn't have a point to make about the Weimer Republic having become a new constitutional creature when the leader of a minority party in a recent election was appointed Chancellor by the duly elected President of the Weimer Republic. And very true, much of Schmidt's scholarship into the constitutional use of Emergency Powers and the engineering of the Enabling Act that legitimized the Nazi takeover of the Weimer Republic has been adopted by the current US Republican Administration, but that's still not the point. The point, whether right or wrong, that Carl Schmidt wanted to make and the point that Chantal Mouffe still wants to make was that Deliberative Democracy was badly flawed, it didn't work and the question was why didn't it work. 

Both Schmidt, Mouffe and possible Laclau had concluded that the Ideal of a Rational Consensus is Utopian, it's dangerous, it totally fails to account for the actual nature of politics which is Conflict and Passion. Go ahead try to suppress these two central features of politics in favor of neutral, rational, cleanly structured, beautifully comprehensible Symbolic Orders that produce constructive dialogues and see what happens to stability. Neighbors start throwing stones and stealing signs.

And you're going to love this, Mouffe would have some mean, and possibly very ironic things to say about Post Irony and the whole post-political regime of the sweet little well educated Metamodernist cottage in the country. Mouffe has an Agonistic Perspective. For those who care, and despite other possible associations on the Symbolic Order, Agonistic is at minimum an acknowledgement of a "Them" and an "Us." In the middle it's a "take it outside." At the maximum it's a "bomb the bastards."

So yes we're dealing with a rare and an unusual person, a thinker who brushes her teeth when she feels like it and to hell with the Symbolic Pecking Orders of Academia and to hell with under forty-something pundits trying to pick up pullets by writing for the New Statesman, The Atlantic and/or The Guardian.

The two Jacques and the trade winds of French Poststructuralism

Giant Moon

 The Decentered Subject. Yes indeed, if you don't count beatniks, short skirts, bell bottoms and boots, a Decentered Subject is one of the causes of people putting things like the word Post in-front of a word like Modernism or Structuralism. Within the Lacanian view it's not that hard, we are the fickle subjects of forces beyond our control. For a supporter of the prefixing of the word post to structural, those forces include language, social structure, discourse as well as heated argument.  We, each one of us, are internally divided, there is definitely an enemy within, we are fractured, more contradictory than we are coherent. In short our well packed prelinguistic suitcase flew open years ago when we were running to catch the train.

Source of Meaning. We, as a you and an I, might make the odd word up like cuddlebunny, but you or I, neither of us are the origin of meaning. We are closer to a repository of crossword clues. The meaning that flows through us is more like an effect, as in the "effect of the weather is a change in my mood" and safe to say this effect is a consequence of using language in a society that talks. An English speaking pig goes Oink, a Polish pig offers a full blown Chrum and that's just the way it is.

Jacques Derrida, made a word up so that he could encompass the idea of differ and defer. Differ as: not the same as each other. And Defer as: putting off so that further consideration might occur. Derrida's word, différance, is kind of like the phrase "Give it time, let it come by freight." And why, because when the subject is decentered there is no transcendental center, or confident and obnoxious decision maker, which leads to an instability baked into the structure of language that according to poststructuralist thinkers you and I should take for granted and relish, rather than put on uniforms, arm ourselves and march around with sticks pointing at people.  

In 1966, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, both ambitious, career orientated young males with great hair and Napoleonic eyes had charged themselves with the immense task of introducing French Poststructuralist Thought to Baltimore's John Hopkins University at a conference called "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man." In Baltimore, Derrida and Lacan, spent much of their time addressing what happened to your writing when you died, which for the pragmatic children of William James might have been a little on the psychedelic side. But Derrida had a point to make. When you are alive you're present, you're there, ready with questions, ready with answers, ready to maintain a presence. When you're dead you're not there. Which means that metaphysically, you being alive are connected to the symbolic order, you are part of meaning now, but when you're dead you yourself are not part of meaning, which is why the title of your book or play, along with any memory of you, is a tombstone. Dream on Shelley, go ahead weep for Adonais, send thousands more to detention, it still doesn't mean you're not a couple of bones and a few teeth under a stone slab in Rome, Italy. 

Lacan and Derrida's most wonderful debate, some might say clash, had to do with how the Symbolic Order treated the word Signifier. The debate has been referenced as "The Purloined Letter Debate of 1975." The Purloined Letter is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, it's in the detective story from Paris genre. The famous detective August Dupin had got himself involved in a whole series of tricky situations that involved searching for clues about a suggestive and possibly gossipy letter that had been removed from the Queen's private quarters and replaced with an innocent how you feeling time of day letter that had nothing salacious or remotely interesting to say about anything.

For our two heroes, Lacan and Derrida, Poe's short story was about what the letter represented in the wider scheme of a decentered subject in an unstable symbolic order. Lacan chose to argue that the letter as a signifier - a piece of paper with words written on it that signified something -  always arrived at a destination. Derrida rolled his sparkling eyes and pointed out that his fellow poststructuralist had failed to take notice of the folly of forcing the metaphysics of presence - that the thing, whatever it is, has a center - on a decentered symbolic order. Lacan had apparently leapt to the comfortably centering of presence held dear by some psychoanalytic structures, such as a sensible Ego, and as a result Lacan had not only failed to see the obvious instabilities in the structure of language, he's also failed to embrace the tentative nature inherent in the signifier/signified relationship where there is no metaphysical presence because there is no center to be signified.

In other words for Derrida, the letter, as a vessel of meaning, didn't have to arrive at its destination and indeed the fact that it might not have done, raised a whole new can of meanings which got itself muddled up even more when the great detective August Dupin forged a letter to trap the evil minister of state, save the queen from disgrace and cause maidens throughout the 1840's to break out in hives at the prospect of having to wait 90 years for the vote.

Lacan's source of Desire

Spider Web Catches and Gives Meaning

Identification is Creation. Stay strong and let's know what Jacques Lacan might have meant when he talked about the structure of language being tied to an understanding that permitted him to interpret the Psyche, a pit where the unconscious and primal writhed around in unholy complaint.

It always seems as though the business of being a human being starts off messy in its unutterred silence. It's not messy. Until it comes into the world it's a like a well packed suitcase, all neat and tidy in a small orderly space, and as an entropy expressing itself it sounds like an opportunity looking to escape, it needs a hole in the fence, it embraces disorder and it becomes one of us. Over the years, stuff get's lost, bad habits like the metaphysical absolute of irony get acquired, along with disease, wrinkles, rat poison instead of collagen, impossible fantasies, figments of the imagination, heart conditions and aneurysms. So no wonder people have yearned for a structure with which to interpret the language of the creature that lurks within, or the unconscious, sometimes called the Psyche, the Ego, it's a long list, each attempt at definition an inspiration behind a wonderful disparagement.

We all remember being called puerile and cretinous by shell-shocked teachers of Latin and Greek, but very few of us, I think, even as infants, have been called unmediated and prelinguistic and yet that's how the illiterate within, the raw unconscious, has been described by those fluent in the Symbolic Order, which is another way of signifying the mental range of ideas associated with the structure or the language of the unconscious. This mental range isn't simply did the cat sit on the mat or didn't it? No, this mental range of ideas includes language, law, culture, tradition, social structure, the weather and everything else. It's all there rolling around in the unconscious doing devious things, upsetting a lifestyle and confusing the emotions.

Let's call up a coherent self and give out the name Ego. This is the chap or chappess who does what he or she can to run the unconscious. The Ego is the one to open a dialogue with. In our coffee clutch, or whatever, we identify our feelings within the context of a Symbolic Order, which is still a mental range of ideas that includes language, law, culture, tradition, social structure, the weather and everything else. In the process of identifying a feeling we give it a signifier or a word that creates it in our minds and we start adding meaning to this signified feeling we've identified with a word. This stream of meanings includes where that word lies within the entire Symbolic order. 

And soon enough, as dialogue continues, an unfillable void is observed, it's a great big hole Lacan called "lack," something missing, that needs to be filled. One of the titles that's been given to "lack" is the Source of Desire. Other things too, many of them the Ego might be reluctant to discuss because the "I" as manager of the unconscious, inventor of words and head communicator with the outside world isn't much of anything. The point is "lack" is structural, it's been there since first breath, if "Lack" were history Arendt's understanding of history would suit it. And there again, a lot of lack-pot-holes, have been filled by an immodest creator of words with buckets of make believe.