Democracy and Pluralism

The Political Thought of William E. Connolly

Alan Finlayson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415473507
• eBook ISBN: 9781135256074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

William E. Connolly's political theory forms a distinct and influential contribution to contemporary debates about the nature and prospects of democratic life in the twenty-first century. His original conceptualisations of pluralism, naturalism, the politics of the body, religion, secularism and his daring incorporation of contemporary neurobiology into political theory and analysis, have opened new paths for intellectual enquiry. Connolly has brought an American tradition of pragmatist political thinking into fruitful conversation with the best of contemporary continental European philosophy and given to both a new energy and focus.

In this edited collection, a distinguished panel of political theorists from both Europe and the US provide a critical and nuanced assessment of his contribution to the discipline, especially in the field of democratic theory. They identify the sources of Connolly's work, its connections to other ways of thinking about the political and they evaluate his continuing contribution to our understanding of the problems and promises of the present and to our appreciation of what it might mean to fulfil the promise of the democratic way of life.

The final chapter provides space for Connolly himself to reflect on his interlocutors and further develop his conception of a 'world of becoming' considering the links between political theory and the science of complexity while focusing on the immediate challenges facing both American and world politics.

Democracy and Pluralism provides a critical introduction to the work of William E. Connolly and to contemporary debates in political theory encompassing topics such as radical democracy, the body, religion, time and contingency.

1
Pluralizing methods

Contingency, ethics, and critical explanation

David R. Howarth

Introduction

In a typically generous and illuminating essay on Critical Theory, William Connolly acknowledges that ‘every contemporary social theorist must eventually confront the thought of Jürgen Habermas’ (Connolly, 1987:52). Surely the same must now be said about Connolly’s thought, as his work not only problematizes the leading currents of contemporary theory, but also tackles issues that are actively forgotten or deferred by mainstream perspectives. Not only do his writings persistently engage with the new challenges that punctuate the discourse of political theory, rather than pretending or hoping that these marginal murmurings were simply not there, but he refuses to be confined to any one available idiom or style of reasoning. Instead, he joyously relays between different camps, straddling the so-called analytical and continental divide, or the division between scientists, normativists and intepretivists, where he is happy to converse with thinkers in contiguous fields of thought, even those that are seemingly uncongenial for critical political theory.

At first glance, the sheer vitality and scope of Connolly’s work seem to defy meaningful engagement within the space of a single essay. But this worry is not fatal, as there are numerous arcs and trajectories in his writings and these lines of affinity are brimming with ‘surplus energies’ (Connolly, 2004a: 342). One such line of flight is his ongoing encounter with the philosophy of natural and social science, especially with respect to questions of explanation and critique. Stretching back to his initial engagement with the ‘problem of ideology’ in mainstream American political science in the mid-1960s, right up to the publication of Pluralism in 2005, Connolly has consistently grappled with the scientific ideals embedded in political theorizing, where he has sought to carve out a legitimate alternative to lawlike, teleological, and ideographic forms of explanation.¹

This chapter builds upon Connolly’s project of harnessing theoretical reflection on ethics and normative evaluation to a particular way of doing political theory. This is pursued by articulating key aspects of his work into a general strategy of critical explanation that foregrounds the particular role of logics. Two immediate theoretical problems present themselves. How is it possible to have explanations that employ general theoretical logics and concepts, yet respect the specificity and singularity of particular cases? How is something like critical explanation possible and how can it be conceptualized and practiced? The deeper question is whether or not it is possible to develop an approach to critical explanation that respects, without fully endorsing, certain intuitions in both naturalism and contextualism, while establishing a workable connection between explanation and critique.

Connolly’s history of the present: strategies of detachment and attachment

Consonant with the approach proposed here, and with Connolly’s method, the starting point for any adventure in political theorizing is the problematization of pressing issues in the present, where the key tasks are characterization, critique, and evaluation (see Connolly, 2004a). For example, in Identity/Difference, Connolly frames his account of the present by sketching out ‘a phenomenology of life and death in late modernity’ (Connolly, 1991:16). He begins by endorsing the unavoidable analytic of finitude, which for thinkers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault haunts each human existence. In Being and Time, for instance, Heidegger ties human finitude explicitly to Dasein’s knowledge of its own death, thus conceding to finitude an intrinsically temporal dimension (see Heidegger, 1962:329). But Dasein’s foreknowledge of its own death can be lived out inauthentically or authentically, as a human being can choose to live a meaningful life by ‘finding itself’ among the myriad of possibilities it encounters (ibid.: 42). Here, in Connolly’s words, the ‘foreknowledge of death can encourage a human being to establish priorities in life, to consolidate the loose array of possibilities floating around and within one into the density of a particular personality with specific propensities, purposes, and principles’ (Connolly, 1991:17).

But while the analytic of finitude in late modernity gives rise to a series of incipient dangers – the intensification of ‘dependent uncertainty’ as the self is ensnared in new networks of disciplinary power, the trend for citizens to divest from the common life in the name of privatization and individualism, and the appearance of numerous anxieties associated with what Connolly calls the ‘globalization of contingency’ (ibid.: 20–5) – it is not without its promises. For though the alienation and fragmentation of the late modern condition may intimate the demand for ‘a more harmonious collective identity’, an alternative problematization may home in on the nexus between normalizing pressures and their pathological outcomes, and yet glimpse new possibilities – new types, traits and dispositions – which resist the drives to conformism and bio-power. What is needed, then, is a loosening up of the bonds that squeeze difference and contingency out of identities (ibid.: 172–173).

Here Connolly invites us to ‘broaden’ our ‘reflective experience of contingency and relationality in identity’ (ibid.: 180), and to resist temptations to naturalize or normalize our conceptions of identity. This process can be fostered by writing ‘genealogical histories of the social construction of normality and abnormality’ (ibid.: 191), which ‘expose the falsification necessarily lodged inside articulations’ (Connolly, 1987:154). The genealogical model seeks not to ground identity in a transcendental or foundational way, or to attune it with a ‘higher unity’; instead, it seeks

attunement to discordance within the self, discordance between the self and identities officially established for it, between personal identity and the dictates of social identity, between the vocabulary which encourages the pursuit of self-realization, identification, knowledge, and virtue and that which must be subdued to enable those formations.

(ibid.: 155)

In short, then, ‘critical genealogies are indispensable to cultivation of the experience of contingency in identity/difference’ (Connolly, 1991:181).

However, the indispensable resources of genealogy and deconstruction are insufficient to pose effective challenges to dominant modes of analysis, because they ‘refuse to pursue the trail of affirmative possibility very far’ (Connolly, 1995:36). Instead, he counters the nihilism of a purely negative critique by articulating the ontopolitical dimension of political analysis.² He thus supplements Derrida’s and Foucault’s ‘strategies of detachment’ with a ‘strategy of attachment’ that necessarily ‘invokes a set of fundamentals about necessities and possibilities of human beings’, including what they are composed of, how they relate to nature, to each other, and so on (ibid.: 1):

To practice this mode of interpretation, you project ontopolitical presumptions explicitly into detailed interpretations of actuality, acknowledging that your implicit projections surely exceed your explicit formulation of them and that your formulations exceed your capacity to demonstrate their truth. You challenge closure in the matrix by affirming the contestable character of your own projections, by offering readings of contemporary life that compete with alternative accounts, and by moving back and forth between these two levels.

(ibid.: 36)³

The ontopolitical presumptions that are projected into the objects of Connolly’s ‘detailed interpretations’ draw on Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, James, and others. Its ethical component is premised on what Nietzsche calls an ‘abundance of being’ (Nietzsche, 1999:4) – an ontology of ‘existential gratitude’, as Connolly sometimes calls it, which ‘is an experience of overflowing’ or ‘vitality’ (Connolly, 2005:244).

Now it is evident that Nietzsche did not really approve of ‘the prejudices of democratic taste’ (Nietzsche, 1999:7–8). Yet Connolly most certainly does, for he frames his commitment to abundance and radical immanence by endorsing a particular democratic sensibility. Indeed, it is because of the ‘ambiguity of democracy’, especially those forms that are ‘infused with a spirit of agonism’, where ‘the culture of genealogy has also gained a strong foothold’, that democratic forms of articulation and mediation enable ‘anyone to engage fundamental riddles of existence through participation in a public politics that periodically disturbs and denaturalizes elements governing the cultural unconscious’ (Connolly, 1991:191, 211).

Connolly does, however, set important prerequisites for the proper functioning of democratic politics. Hence in more recent texts like Why I Am Not a Secularist, Neuropolitics and Pluralism, he favours a regime of deep and multidimensional pluralism, where ‘the cultural centre is pluralized along multiple dimensions and the procedures of governance are set in this dense plurality’ (Connolly, 1999:92). Connolly’s regulative ideal involves the creation of a ‘majority assemblage’ of disparate minorities based on a programme that could narrow income inequalities, widen educational opportunity, and improve job security, medical care, retirement prospects and housing for the many, by instituting a new settlement in which all citizens can participate equally and with dignity in a shared political economy (Connolly, 2005a: 7–8). Finally, this reworked ‘overlapping consensus’ also acknowledges ‘numerous lines of affinity and interdependence between human beings and nonhuman nature’, so that ‘the pursuit of pluralism and equality is infused with the drive to reconstitute historically dominant relations between the human animal and the rest of nature’ (Connolly, 2005b: 251).

Immanent naturalism

In Neuropolitics, these ontopolitical projections are informed by a further methodological twist, which supplements the strategy of detachment and attachment with a ‘double-entry model’ of political analysis (Connolly, 2002a: 215). This new sensibility challenges the lawlike model of explanation, which is assumed by most empiricists and rational choice theorists to be the only rational form of explanation; contests the search for ‘deep, authoritative’ interpretation by hermeneuticists and social constructionists; and problematizes the positing of a transcendental reason put forward by proponents of the Kantian/neo-Kantian tradition (Connolly, 2004a: 344). Connolly’s ‘double-entry orientation to the paradox of political interpretation’ intervenes in the gap between a first orientation, in which the social critic launches her investigation by acting ‘as if complete explanation is possible’, and a second gesture whereby the interpreter contests the hubris that informs the initial ‘regulative ideal’: critical explanation thus oscillates in the space between the two registers (ibid.: 344).

This relaying movement is rooted in a new ontopolitical compound that Connolly names ‘immanent naturalism’. Set against a philosophy of transcendence, and transcendental thinking more generally, his naturalism captures ‘the idea that all human activities function without the aid of a divine or supernatural force’ (Connolly, 2002a: 85–86).⁴ Immanent naturalism is contrasted with eliminative and mechanical naturalism, where the eliminative variant is ‘a metaphysical faith that reduces the experience of consciousness to non-conscious processes’ (Connolly, 2004a: 341), and the mechanical view ‘denies any role to a supersensible field while finding both the world of nonhuman nature and the structure of the human brain to be amenable “in principle” to precise representation and complete explanation’ (Connolly, 2002a: 85). Instead, immanent naturalists (such as Spinoza, Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, and so on) emphasize the differential intermixing of culture and nature, ‘depending upon the capacity for complexity of the mode of being in question’, yet query the possibility of necessary and sufficient laws of nature as propounded by ‘classical natural science’ (ibid.: 85–86).

Drawing inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari, Connolly argues that one of the most basic assumptions of immanent naturalism...

Table of contents

• Routledge Innovations in Political Theory
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Pluralizing methods
• 2 Ethos and late-modern democracy
• 3 Connolly, embodiment, conversion, and mysticism
• 4 Bill Connolly’s others
• 5 Interpretation, political theory, and the hegemony of normative theorizing
• 6 Hate, loathing and political theory
• 7 A post-secular faith
• 8 Beyond secularism
• 9 Connolly’s embodied politics
• 10 Must we persist to continue?
• 11 Time, politics and contingency
• 12 A world of becoming
• Index