CHAPTER 1
POSTMODERNITY AND REVISIONING THE POLITICAL
Anna Yeatman
Yeatman, A. (1994) Postmodern Revisionings of the Political (New York: Routledge), pp. 106ā22
I
There is no reason, only reasons.
(Jean-Francois Lyotard in Van Riejen
and Veerman, An Interview with
Jean-Francois Lyotard 1988)
Postmodernity is the condition we are in now, a condition under which there is no operative consensus concerning the ultimate or transcendental grounds of truth and justice. This is why Lyotard (1984) identifies the postmodern condition with a crisis of narratives, or more specifically, of meta-narratives, stories which ground truth and justice in some kind of metaphysical presence such as Reason, Nature or God.
Where there can be no consensus derived from a shared culture of orientation to such transcendental grounds, the consequence for truth and justice is simple. Some other approach than that of basing them in shared transcendental grounds has to be found. If this approach is consensualist in the sense of requiring agreement on how to approach decisions concerning truth and justice, there is no guarantee that this agreement is anything more than a highly provisional and pragmatic adaptation to the conditions of contestation over these values, and how they are to be interpreted.
Here I want to discuss the kind of politics that such provisional and pragmatic adaptation involves. Because it is politics rather than knowledge that is of concern, truth enters the picture only as it is one of the criteria in relation to which the legitimacy of claims on political process are assessed and judged. For example, in the politics of needs formation in an area such as home and community care for people who are disabled seriously enough to need help in the tasks of everyday living, there are patterned disagreements between how these individuals judge their needs, and how their needs are judged by the professionals involved (gerontologists, specialists in palliative care, physiotherapists and so on).
The professionals deal in the business of what they like to think are real or objective needs, that is, needs as assessed in accordance with the knowledge base of the profession concerned. The disabled individuals think of these needs as their own, as taking on shape and existence through the way that they give voice to them: they are their expressed needs. Moreover, they accord themselves a special kind of expertise with regard to these needs: who can know them better than the person experiencing the needs? Then there are the informal carers, that is, spouses, close kin and sometimes friends who provide personally-oriented, regular assistance to the disabled individuals with whom they are connected. They have a carerās construction of the disabled individualās needs: a construction which is that of a close, personally involved observer, whose own needs are implicated in how the burden of meeting this individualās needs is distributed. The perspectives of the professional service deliverer, the carer and the needy person on the latterās needs and how they might best be met are irreducibly multiple, and often conflict.
One can make a policy decision, as the Commonwealth Government of Australia has done, to make the principle of determining how an individualās need is to be provided for one of responding to the expressed needs of the individual. This principle operates as a guideline in respect of determining how to weight these various judgments as to what the need is, and, correlatively, how it might be best met. Such a principle does not, however, resolve the ongoing tensions between the different perspectives on need. All it does and can do is to provide a principle of regulation of what I call the politics of needs formation. This example is a good one for other reasons as well. The Commonwealth Governmentās policy of guiding services to work with the expressed needs of individuals in the home and community care area is in line with the general emphasis of the relevant bureaucratic department (the Department of Health, Housing and Community Services) on user rights. This, in turn, is in line with contemporaneous expectations of democratic service delivery: there have been a number of social movements contesting professional domination in needs formation, not least of these being the disabled peopleās movements of the 1970s and 1980s. These expectations have destabilized the welfare state culture of needs definition in which expert professional opinion guided the way that policy-makers framed needs and the services responding to those needs. This was a centric culture of scientifically informed needs formation which preempted an open politics of needs formation in favor of professional expertise. It is a political culture which favors the rhetoric of rational consensus. Once there is an open and legitimate difference of perspectives on needs formation the rhetoric of rational consensus is no longer operable. It is supplanted by a rhetoric of negotiated needs settlement where the principle of user rights provides guidance toward achievement of an effective and practical compromise between these perspectives. Each perspective is necessary because it provides a basic piece of information about the context which informs the needs concerned . . .
The value of this example is also to underline how ātheā polity has lost a clearly bounded centricity. It has become a more or less (dis)continuous series of politics. These polities are not given but struggled for: they arise out of what Alberto Melucci (1988, 258ā60) calls the opening of āpublic spacesā. This particular example of a polity involves the interpenetration of the state and everyday life in respect of areas of individual need usually reserved for what we would term personal privacy (e.g. the activities of an individual being washed, fed, toiletted, and so on). It is an example which is outside the scope of the classical liberal and republican democratic polity of modernity. In this polity, needs of the kind to which I am referring were left to the private and natural business of the internal life of households. They were ministered to by those whose life was contained within the private world of the household (wives, mothers, daughters and servants). These non-citizens permitted the citizens, the heads ofā households, to represent the business of the polity as both quite separate from these private needs, and as much more important than them. Theirs was a unieity [sic] of rationalist hubris and public prestige, stable as long as their own status as masters of their own culture and independent property owners remained unthreatened.
A number of left, masculinist commentators (Larch, Leach, and Donzelot) have pointed out that it was the professionals who laid the foundations of the welfare state and who undermined the integrity of this classical picture of a neat division between things public and things private. Male doctors who were licensed by the state toward the end of the nineteenth century, and who began to legitimize the intervention of the state into private lives in the areas of public and maternal/infant health, embarked on a treacherous alliance with, especially, middle-class mothers to undermine the patriarchal privilege of heads of households. The development of a universal, compulsory public school system worked in the same direction. However, the compromise between property rights and social rights which the welfare state represented maintained a principle of patriarchal determination of needs. This time it was expressed on behalf of a corporate representation of households-the state-and, in due measure, involved a transfer of rights from individual heads of households to the state in respect of the members of households. Corporate patriarchalism functioned thus to emancipate those who had been subject to the individual patriarchal householderās will. This is why interventionist doctors found ready allies amongst many, though largely amongst middle-class, women. It is also why such fin-de-siecle social scientists as Emile Durkheim, committed to the path of rational social reform, argued for a positive theory of right against the doctrine of natural right . . . Durkheim-in his lectures published as Professional Ethics and Civic Morals argued that these clear instances of the state bestowing rights on individuals showed that right is always a matter of positive law. Natural right, which seems to indicate that law merely reflects rather than creates the rights of individuals, is a doctrine that does not accord with the facts. Durkheim offers a benign view of the modern interventionist state, one uncomplicated by late-twentieth-century awareness that the positive constitution of rights by the state comes at the expense of the bureaucratization of the spheres in which they operate.
At the same time, this construction of the polity in the form of the welfare state is considerably more relevant than the older liberal/republican democratic construction of the polity. Where the latter offers a very simple picture of the business of governance as essentially no more than the making and enforcement of law, the former shows how the interventionist state makes the executive and administrative aspects of governance just as central to the life of the polity as the legislative aspects. This begins to complicate the principle of representative government: the legislature may be representative, but to what extent is this true of the executive, let alone of the large and complex organizations that the administration of the state has come to involveā? Moreover, an interventionist state politicizes by naming hitherto nonpolitical areas of social life and drawing them within the ambit of policy (see Yeatman 1990, chapter 8). The increasing reach of policy both deprivatizes and denatures aspects of social life hitherto regulated within the local patriarchal and customary communities of families, firms and service provision. In so doing, policy constitutes all who come within its reach as potential political actors who can open this area to a politics of voice and representation.
As we have seen with the example of the area of home and community care, a politics of voice and representation introduces the principle of irresolvable difference into the way that political process and decisions operate. This principle destabilizes and delegitimizes the paternalism of the state which it had borrowed from the patriarchal, paternalist authority of private households. This means that paternalism is no longer adequate to the vertical integration functions of social and political control at a time when the state is subject to an historically unparalleled politics of voice and representation. For paternalism, the state substitutes performativity as the principle which legitimizes both its control functions, and the way in which those functions operate to contain the influence of the horizontally integrated, democratic politics of social movements and their claims on the state. The state is thereby subject to the contradictory dynamics of performativity and democratization. Performativity has the singular virtue of supplying a meta-discourse for public policy. Thus it can subsume and transform substantive democratizing claims within a managerialist-functionalist rhetoric. Performativity is a systems-orientation: instead of the state appearing as the enlightened and paternal command of shared community, the state is equated with the requirements of a system for ongoing integrity and viability. This is a cybernetic model: āThe true goal of the system, the reason it programs itself like a computer, is the optimization of the global relationship between input and output-in other words, performativityā (Lyotard 1984, 11).
II
The decision makers . . . allocate our lives for the growth of power.
(Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern
Condition 1984)
Performativity as a principle of governance depends on the existence of jurisdictional boundaries of the state which permit it to be thought of as a discrete system. However, the very nature of the cybernetic metaphor makes these boundaries open to input and output flows of information, capital and population within which the regulative presence of the boundaries operates like a program in relation to these flows, and where the limits of the program are set, reviewed and revised in state policy decisions. Performativity is a principle of governance which establishes strictly functional relations between a state and its inside and outside environments. Democracy and social welfare are operationalized in terms of these functional relations. The rhetoric of the state addressed to its own internal population takes on the features of an instrumentally rational orientation to the terms of economic competition between states and/or states allied together in trading blocks: Cerny (1990, chapter 8) refers to this development as a shift from the welfare to the competition state: Cerny (1990, 230) argues that: āAs the world economy is characterized by increasing interpenetration and the crystallization of transnational markets and structures, the state itself is having to act more and more like a market player, that shapes its policies to promote, control, and maximize returns from market forces in an international setting.ā
Clear criteria (immigration policy) of who are/are not legitimate citizens of the state are maintained primarily as a strong regulative control over who is permitted access to this community of goods and services. Policy concerning such access is defined almost completely in terms of the performativity requirements of a competition state. For those who are legitimate members of the state, their shared identity is not that of the social citizens of the welfare state, but that of actual or potential contributors to the performativity of the competition state. The trend is thus to turn all nationals into contributors (an active labor market policy), and to define out of existence non-contributors. As Lyotard (1984, xxiv) correctly discerns, the application of the criterion of optimizing the systemās performance āto all of our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is commensurable) or disappear.ā
A state which is oriented in terms of the culture of performativity is a secretive state, oriented to making discreet deals with corporate players who can significantly affect the performativity of this state-centric system. Information is openly shared by the state with its internal environment only to the extent that it furthers strategies of political and social management of the actors within this environment. The consequence of this is that a great deal of the business of the state is private rather than public. Or, to put it more accurately, this business becomes public only as social movements and their minority party representatives within the legislature contest state decisions, and, by so doing, drag them into the visibility of openly contested political representations.
In this context democratic politics is centered in the evanescent openings of public spaces which the new social movements achieve in their contestation of the stateās definition of the situation. By turning the techno(econo)cratic representations of state policy into openly contested political issues, they convert performative decisions into rhetorical praxis. Democratic struggle is centered on attempting and effecting this conversion. A politics of representation depends on making issues visible by opening up public spaces. This is why the state has encouraged a high degree of concentration and centralization of print and electronic media capital. However, even within the controlling ambience of a partnership between the state and media corporate players, representational...
