Dead Against Consensus
Dead Against Consensus
The Thinking of Chantal Mouffe
It is no great wonder that interest in political philosophy is increasing amongst artists and curators. Art is currently in the post-historic age, as Francis Fukuyama announced in 1992, and more than ever before, artists are exploring the public domain, perhaps because it seems to have shed its conventional dichotomies of party politics and codes of behaviour. The public sphere is a location for artistic interventions where there is no obligation to acknowledge or conform to any given political bias. Artists collaborate with civil servants to plan new urban neighbourhoods, conduct social projects or organize encounters on a smaller scale. Their activities sometimes do touch the political domain, and it is here that people need concepts to define and further develop what they are doing. Mouffe’s ‘agonism’ seems exceptionally well suited to this task. In 2006, a young Korean curator, Hyunjin Kim, enthusiastically pointed to the ideas of the Belgian philosopher and political scientist, Chantal Mouffe, in her introduction to her presentation, Plugin #03 The Undeclared Crowd, at the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven. With Mouffe’s permission, she paraphrased a passage from the foreword of The Democratic Paradox (2000), in which Mouffe gives a general sketch of what she means by agonism. She distinguishes agonism from antagonism. By antagonism, opponents view one another as enemies. With agonism, opponents perceive one another as ‘friendly enemies’ or ‘antagonistic friends’. They are friends because they share a common, symbolic space, and they are enemies because each wants to organize that space differently. This ‘friendly enmity’ in Mouffe’s political philosophy was what Hyunjin Kim, as a curator, wanted to evoke with the museum’s images. To mark the end of her stay as curator in residence, she made a selection of works from the Van Abbe Museum collection. She hung 16 drawings, posters and a variety of prints by different artists on a single wall, and in the corner across from it, she put Dan Flavin’s Untitled (to a man, George McGovern), an installation of 55 circular neon lights. Placing the multitude of two-dimensional works across from Flavin’s light installation was meant to generate agonistic tension. In addition, the young curator saw her presentation as an allegory for our pluralistic society, explaining in an interview that she felt it her task as curator to fill the role of the ‘friendly enemy’.[1] One can debate whether Kim’s exhibition succeeded in evoking agonistic tension. What is more pertinent was her intention to avail herself of Mouffe’s concept of agonism. For Kim, agonism is more than a tool with which to organize works in a museum and give them a meaning that their audience can recognize. Agonism is a guideline for her profession as curator. Here, the concept takes on a personal import, and with that, a certain urgency. Other artists and curators have also recently adopted Mouffe’s vision, as evidenced in Mouffe’s popularity as a keynote speaker at international symposia that explore the relationship between contemporary art, philosophy and politics. In November of last year, she spoke at the Thinking Worlds conference at the second Moscow Biennial, and in early 2007, she was invited by the het design- and research collective Metahaven in Bucharest to help consider the future of the new museum for contemporary art in Bucharest’s former People’s Palace. Shortly thereafter, she was in Amsterdam for the Transformations of Public Space conference, organized by the Professorship of Art and Public Space of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Less than a month later, she was again speaking on agonistic pluralism at Platform Garanti in Istanbul. Mouffe’s popularity is remarkable, because she continues to teach traditional political theory courses at the University of Westminster, without being particularly preoccupied by how her ideas are being applied in other fields. Her presence at these symposia bears witness to a polite affability towards the interest from the art world, but she has expressed virtually no link to artistic practices, as was clear at the lecture she gave in Amsterdam this last spring.[2] Only at the very end did she suggest that when artists venture into the public sphere, they should do so in an agonistic fashion. Nothing was said about what that might entail: she leaves that to the artists. She did give her audience an elaborate explanation on the specifically political-philosophical context of the concept of agonism. It is clearly in Mouffe’s interest that she is well understood, for what is indeed the issue is whether her theory can come into its own in artistic practice without sacrificing political weight, which is for her what is all about.
Politics Outside Politics
For about 15 years, Chantal Mouffe has engaged herself in the debate about the crisis in democracy. The worldwide expansion of liberal democracy has gone hand in hand with ethnic conflicts, civil wars and fundamentalist terrorism. In those Western countries with long democratic traditions, people have to deal with dissatisfaction about their governments being too inaccessible, low election turnouts and populist movements trying to unravel democracy’s achievements. According to Mouffe, one of the most important causes of this crisis is the disregard of ‘the political’. By this, she is not referring to politics or involvement in politics. By the political, she means that dimension of antagonism that is present in all human relationships. One might think of religious, nationalist, or cultural passions – not so much individual as collective mechanisms that distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’. This antagonism need not lead to dividing friends into foes, but that chance is always present. Our current liberal democracy does not really know how to deal with the antagonistic dimension of ‘the political’. In liberalism, it is a blind spot, as Mouffe claims, following the ideas of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), the controversial German constitutional law scholar and political philosopher who joined the Nazis in 1933 and became known as Hitler’s ‘crown advocate’. Mouffe dismisses Schmitt’s nationalism, but does find an important lesson in his view that only in the final instance do politics revolve around the distinctions between friend and enemy. Schmitt held that in politics, you must to be alert to the Ernstfall, the moment of truth, the moment when it is all or nothing. This is still relevant in politics today, claims Mouffe, but liberalism is blind to that fact. The tradition set out by liberalism puts the emphasis on freedom and the interests of the individual, not on forming communities with which citizens can identify. Liberal tradition upholds an instrumental view of democracy. It is democracy as a neutral instrument to guarantee the interests of individual citizens, and politics in a series of rational procedures meant to achieve compromises amongst all those different interests. The result is a summing-up of all the compromises, not the result of an all-or-nothing struggle. According to Mouffe, the liberal model has the upper hand in our current democracy, certainly since the traditional contrast between left and right lost their meaning and since there no longer seems to be any alternative to the Western liberal world order. This is, however, at the expense of the democratic tradition, whose core is equality, community and sovereignty of the people. Mouffe does not mean to say that the liberal model has to be dispensed with, for it is precisely the tension between the liberal and democratic traditions that forms a fruitful ‘democratic paradox’. Our current liberal democracy is the result of an historic process. In the course of two centuries, liberalism has been democratized and democracy liberalized, and it has not happened without leaving behind its bruised and wounded. The two traditions are still ill at ease with one another. Democratic decisions can limit individual freedoms, while the struggle for freedom forces plurality and protects democracy from exclusion, from forcing people into collective behaviour and loss of individualism. It is this tension that drives the motor of our democracy, and according to Mouffe, we have to foster, even radicalize this dynamic. A first step, suggests Mouffe, is to abandon our objective of rational consensus. Rational consensus can, in her view, never offer a solution for all the conflicts that our pluralistic society inevitably brings with it. This is a sober conclusion, but it is in fact about something more fundamental. Any consensus is achieved by the exclusion of something that will not, rationally, agree to be excluded or forfeited. The greater the effort to achieve rational consensus, the greater the possibility that it will somewhere generate feelings of being wronged. With that comes the likelihood that populist politicians will take advantage of it by fuelling the antagonism in those emotions. Politics, emphasizes Mouffe, always revolve around the creation of collective identities, around identification with a common cause. This makes it all the more urgent that the passions that play a role here be taken seriously and preserved. Her proposal is that antagonism be reformed into agonism. The aim is to construct political communities in such a way that the differentiation between us and them, which we need in order to form any community at all, does not get carried so far that it divides friends into foes, but to achieve that without dismissing the passions that play such an important role in the formation of communities. This is possible if citizens behave agonistically. Agonistic pluralism means that democracy is always on the razor’s edge, in a permanent state of ‘friendly enmity’. Mouffe’s pluralism is not a noncommittal one. She does not propose that all the differences in our society be allowed to grow and flourish. She puts clear limits on pluralism. There is, for example, one consensus that must not be meddled with, the one that forms the symbolic space of democracy. It is freedom and equality for all. Those who challenge the institutions that guarantee this freedom and equality may no longer take part, having put themselves outside the liberal democracy. In an interview, she stated that someone who wants to establish a theocracy, for example, may not participate in democratic elections.[3] At the same time, in an agonistic democracy, that one ultimate consensus will always be up for debate, because no universal consensus ever exists, and that also applies here.
Conversion
Is Mouffe’s vision a utopia? In some ways, our current liberal democracy is already reminiscent of her agonistic model. In parliamentary debates, politicians engage one another as ‘friendly enemies’. Since the fall of the Netherlands’ ‘purple’ government, a coalition of social democrats and liberals, without the participation of the Christian Democrats, the rational consensus of the older model has no longer been upheld as the sole solution for social conflicts. Mouffe refers to existing initiatives, which in the long run can contribute to a more agonistic democracy. She has praised the proposal of the Italian philosopher and former mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari, for a new form of federalism, in which political decisions can be made at regional and municipal levels as well as nationally. One can no doubt also think of other political communities that break through existing structures of political decision-making. To promote heterogeneity, the division and multiplication of communities, so that collective passions will adhere themselves less quickly to a single people or a single culture or religious background: to Mouffe, this is the strategy that can bring us closer to agonistic pluralism. She sees no advantage to all varieties of cosmopolitan citizenships, which she analyzes in her collection of essays, entitled On the Political (2005). A citizenship that floats along, bouncing on the wave of globalization, obscures differences and conflicts, and makes it more difficult to mobilize people for political action. In order to achieve a truly agonistic democracy, Mouffe claims that we must find a more fundamental framework. In a passage from The Democratic Paradox which the reader is inclined not to notice, Mouffe writes, ‘To accept the view of the adversary is to undergo a radical change in political identity. It is more a sort of conversion than a process of rational persuasion (in the same way as Thomas Kuhn has argued that adherence to a new scientific paradigm is a conversion).’[4] This is a very pertinent statement. The shift to agonism is apparently something that is inexplicable and not subject to rationalism and planning. It simply happens. After the fact, you can only look back with surprise at a period of antagonism that is now past. In the meantime, all we can do is reach out towards such a condition. Seen in this light, Mouffe’s theory has a faintly messianic tone. It is here that Hyunjin Kim’s personal approach falls into place. As a nomadic curator, she feels called upon to bring agonistic pluralism into practice, not only by illustrating it with visual material, but also by adopting it as a personal attitude and putting it into practice that way. She is not alone. In Maastricht, on February 14, 2003, a hundred people practiced an agonistic approach to a project. For a day, they moved through the so-called Gender Democratic Labyrinth, designed by philosopher Marli Huijer and visual artist Irene Janze, to mark the former’s professorial appointment at the University of Maastricht. Huijer’s research concerned the means by which women can participate in decision-forming processes in the use of human embryos for medical purposes. There were always many parties involved in such decisions, but in every case, the decision-making involved far too few women. Huijer and Janze were not trying to achieve a consensus of all those concerned, but claim, entirely in keeping with Mouffe’s thinking, that the struggle to achieve a consensus inherently excludes all sorts of factors that cannot be given a rational common denominator. They decided to take the bull by the horns and create a situation in which the public would take part in an agonistic experiment. The Gender Democratic Labyrinth was a happening. Visitors moved along numerous, specially designed niches in the former library, where the Bonnefanten Museum had once been housed. In each niche, inside a five-minute period, someone explained his or her vision of the medical use of human embryos. Then the bell rang and the audience moved on to the next niche. The event responded to what the makers envisioned: a contemporary ‘agora’ in which opponents encountered one another and observed their differences of opinion. The labyrinth was set up such that you immediately lost your way, and consequently also lost the person with whom you had a bone to pick or whose opinion you shared. Differences of opinion persisted, could not be laid to rest. There was criticism as well. The Gender Democratic Labyrinth was an agreeable chaos. Perhaps too agreeable, for in this experiment, nestled in the domain of the visual arts, nothing needed to be definitively decided. The result was a faint sensation of non-commitment, of being able to do whatever you liked.
Symbolic Space
Probably unintentionally, Huijer and Janze’s experiment was a critique of Mouffe’s political theory. Agonism is only possible if the symbolic space is clearly defined to all opponents. They can be friendly enemies if each knows that the other will go to the utmost limits to stay within that symbolic space. But what happens if that space loses its integrity? How do you make the distinction between intimidation and healthy assertiveness? And in this case, who or what calls the opponents to order, and following what procedures? Seyla Benhabib, a well-known political scientist, accuses Mouffe of a lack of attention to arbitration, claiming that Mouffe’s agonism in fact comes down to arbitrariness and power struggles. Mouffe responds to Benhabib’s accusation by stating that in agonistic pluralism, arbitration is indeed a possibility, between right and wrong and between legitimate and illegitimate, but it can only take place within the specific consolation of a tradition, a culture, or whatever might define the group, by making use of the norms that apply within that group, and that such arbitration is always indeed contestable. According to Mouffe, every claim to universal procedures and norms is but an illusion: no one can remove themselves into a position from which they can make a universal judgment. This consistency in Mouffe’s thinking is admirable, but it fails to satisfy. Perhaps this guarded attitude is a result of the aversion that she has towards that other, competing vision of the radicalization of democracy, one which she has never been able to shake off. This is the viewpoint of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who also aims to deepen democracy, but by way of designing a universal, rational set of conditions for democratic deliberation and debate. Against the current fashion of all the postmodern criticism of rational reasoning, in his Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981), Habermas expressed his thoughts on the ‘ideal conditions for dialogue’, a public setting, devoid of power, for discussion and debate in which people could take part without pressure, and were free to speak out. That can lead to real agreement. Habermas does not quickly see this taking place in reality, but he does envision it as an idea towards which democratic debate should aspire. His critics, including both Chantal Mouffe and Seyla Benhabib, have torpedoed Habermas’ optimism, pointing out the mechanism of exclusion that is inherent to his focus on achieving rational consensus. It seems that Habermas has taken this criticism to heart. In a later work, The Inclusion of the Other (1998), he puts less emphasis on universal standardization and more on the design of procedures with which open dialogue can take place. In his model of democracy, the participants in the discourse themselves determine the procedures that their deliberations must satisfy within the given circumstances. The result, the consensus, can always be opened up again should the participants wish. With this, Habermas’s democracy begins to resemble Mouffe’s pluralism. Perhaps this is why the two are knocking heads so violently. For Jürgen Habermas, argument must prevail over power. To his way of thinking, Mouffe’s vision has to be suspect. Behind her informal and non-procedural manifestations of agonism can lie misuse of power and manipulation. And, who determines how just the symbolic space is within which the friendly enemies are obliged to remain? Voluntarism! This is the word thrown on Mouffe’s doormat, and in political philosophy, it is the worst possible term of abuse. Indeed, Chantal Mouffe correctly states that argument cannot be the final haven for democracy, because arguments are easily swept aside by antagonistic passions. Democracy must not turn away from the intangible, from the conflicting and antagonistic dimension of our existence, but must accept it and reshape it. Art is a domain that is paying heed to that summons. It is a safe domain, for in it, there is the freedom to determine one’s own rules. There is also the willingness of its audience to follow the procedures thus determined. It is, however, that willingness to go along with the artist that precludes the collision between antagonistic passions, the clash between groups for whom it is all or nothing, willing to risk everything. It also nullifies the need to reshape that clash into an agonistic field of tension. Of course, the people involved in the domain of art can be one another’s friends and enemies, but by participating in such works of art as Gender Democratic Labyrinth, they are walking a path of their own making. There is no possibility of Ernstfall. A ‘safe agonism’ is a contradiction in terms. Therefore, Mouffe’s thinking may well be an impetus for interesting experiments in the visual arts, but it will always remain removed from what, for Mouffe, it was all about in the first place.
Erik Hagoort
