Showing papers in "Constellations in 1998"

Memory, Identity and the (Im)possibility of Reconciliation: The Work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa

Abstract: APARTHEID – . . . May it thus remain, but may a day come when it will only be for the memory of man. A memory in advance. . . very close to silence, and the rear-view vision of a future for which apartheid will be the name of something abolished. Confined and abandoned to this silence of memory, the name will resonate all by itself. . . . The thing it names today will no longer be. Jacques Derrida Without the truth, there can be no reconciliation. G. Werle

Power Trouble: Performativity as Critical Theory

Abstract: Although Judith Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender has been highly influential in feminist theory, queer theory, cultural studies, and some areas of philosophy, it has yet to receive its due from critical social theorists. This oversight is especially problematic given the crucial insights into the study of power – a central concept for critical social theory – that can be gleaned from Butler’s work. Her analysis is somewhat unique among discussions of power in its attempt to theorize simultaneously both the features of cultural domination in contemporary societies and the possibilities of resistance to and subversion of such domination. Although I will maintain here that this attempt is not entirely successful, I nevertheless argue that Butler’s account makes crucial contributions to a feminist critical theory of power; as a result, it merits much more serious attention from critical theorists. I begin by claiming that feminist accounts of power have reached a critical impasse, the result of which is a demand for an analysis of power that can simultaneously theorize both the domination relations that create and sustain certain groups as subordinant and the possibilities for resistance to and subversion of those relations. In order to demonstrate that Butler’s account of power attempts to meet this demand, I go on to lay out the conception of power implicit in Gender Trouble, Butler’s early formulation of the theory of performativity. In that work, Butler adopts a Foucauldian framework and, hence, her account of power inherits a Foucauldian problem (all-to-familiar by now to this audience): the problem of agency. As a result of this inheritance, Gender Trouble founders on the traditional philosophical cleavage between determinism and voluntarism. After laying out this troubling implication of the early version of performativity, I examine Butler’s recent reformulations – in her books Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” and Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, and in her contributions to Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange – which attempt to overcome this problem by appealing to the Derridean notion of citationality or iterability. I maintain that this notion allows Butler to make the crucial link between sexed individuals and the culturally hegemonic norms that govern their production that was missing in her early formulation. Citationality thus solves one of the problems plaguing the theory of performativity and allows Butler to begin to move feminist discussions of power beyond their current impasse. Despite its solution of the Foucauldian problem of agency, however,

Culture and Democratic Theory: Toward a Theory of Symbolic Democracy

Abstract: Since the late 1970s, a highly productive strand of critical theory has emerged which has largely abandoned the Frankfurt School’s critique of cultural domination. Influenced by the work of Habermas, which replaces the problem of individual happiness with “a concentration on the problem of political democracy and on the analysis of institutions permitting individual autonomy and democratic interaction,” 1 this strand has turned to democratic theory and discourse ethics as a means to resuscitate the transformative potential of existing political institutions. Civil society, the public sphere, and the domain of law (as opposed to the culture industry and the critique of instrumental reason) figure centrally in reconstructive projects aimed at the articulation of institutional remedies for chronic forms of economic and political injustice. It is noteworthy, however, that in the search for post-Marxist foundations for the critique of “really existing democracy,” critical democratic theory has not adequately taken stock of the fact that the symbolic order of society, which shapes the meaning and status of social identities, is implicated in these forms of injustice. While this emergent strand of critical theory has remained distant from a critique of cultural domination, it does not stand alone in this failure to conceptualize all the significant features of modern relations of power. The constitutive force of the symbolic order of society, enacted at the macro-level through the institutions of the public sphere and at the micro-level in face-to-face interactions, is difficult to capture in the terms of existing political and social theory. Such theory, as Foucault emphasized, is capable of recognizing social injustice in only two registers: economic domination and the illegitimate exercise of sovereign authority. Consequently, the symbolic force that structures the formation and hierarchization of social identities fails to be understood as a type of political power. Because it is unequally distributed across the social order,this symbolic force is an undemocratic structural constraint on the social identity, social valuation, and symbolic practices of individuals and groups, a constraint which always already impacts the quantity and quality of individual and group participation in the political, economic, and cultural life of society. Moreover, the one-solution-fits-all approach to instances of social injustice that is favored by liberal and social democratic reform projects (legal equality and economic egalitarianism) inhibits the development of a theory which can articulate

Migration — A Challenge to Modern Citizenship

Abstract: I will treat the question of whether there is an inherent difficulty hindering the nation-state and its concept of citizenship from coping with the problem of migration.... I interpret democracy as a political form which bridges the gap between the premodern concept of republicanism which inspires the idea of citizenship and statehood (which tends to be hostile to the idea of citizenship).... I claim also that democracy is necessarily harmonious with citizenship...which then leads me to the consequences of this judgment for the problem of migration.... (EXCERPT)

Populist redemption and the unfinished democratization of latin america

Abstract: The re-elections of Carlos Menem in Argentina and Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and the unstable and corrupt presidencies of Fernando Collor in Brazil and Abdala Bucaram in Ecuador, have brought back the discussion on Latin American populism. Contrary to the dominant views of populism as a phase in the region’s history, understood either as a transitory stage towards modernization, or as a political phenomenon linked to import substitution industrialization, the re-emergence of populist leaders poses again fundamental political problems. Continuing the unresolved issues raised by debates on classical populism, the questions that need to be addressed from an empirical and normative standpoint are: What is the relationship between Latin American populism and democracy? What is the pattern of incorporation of the popular sectors into the national political community, and how do they differ from the Western experience? And what are the specificities of really existing Latin American democracies? Differently from the Western pattern of inclusion through the progressive extension and deepening of citizenship rights, the Latin American masses were incorporated by populist appeals to “el pueblo” and weak citizenship rights. Citizenship is not the only, or the main, relationship between individuals and the state. The poor and the excluded have been incorporated through charismatic political movements. These movements have used clientelism and corporatism to give resources to the poor, not as citizenship rights, but as personal favors of politicians, or as corporatist concessions to privileged groups. The institutionalization of these two mediations between state and society – weak and incomplete citizenship and strong appeals to el pueblo – have produced a specific version of democracy. Guillermo O’Donnell has characterized these electoral regimes, which transform electoral winners into the nation’s savior, and which do not respect democratic procedures and civil rights, as “delegative democracies.” This essay is divided into two sections. The first reviews existent theories of Latin American populism, and presents a new approach to its study. This research strategy analyzes the institutionalization of different mediations between the state and society at the time of the transition from “the politics of notables” to “mass politics.” The second section studies recently re-established democracies in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. These democracies do not respect civil rights, and/or liberal democratic procedures. Differently from the West,

Culture: Choice or Circumstance?

Abstract: In this paper, I would like to discuss two recent attempts to incorporate groupdifferentiated rights and entitlements into a broadly liberal conception of distributive justice. The first is John Roemer’s “pragmatic theory of responsibility,” and the second is Will Kymlicka’s defense of minority rights in “multinational” states. Both arguments try to show that egalitarianism, far from requiring a “color-blind” system of institutions and laws that is insensitive to ethnic, linguistic or subcultural differences, may in fact mandate special types of rights, entitlements, or compensatory arrangements for members of minority groups. These proposals are attractive because they attempt to ground these special rights without reference to controversial philosophical doctrines, but merely through appeal to the widely accepted political norm of equality. Furthermore, if either of these arguments were to succeed, it would allow liberals to avoid many of the difficulties that have often led proponents of “the politics of difference” or the “politics of recognition” to adopt an oppositional stance toward more traditional forms of liberalism. Both Roemer and Kymlicka take as their point of departure Ronald Dworkin’s resource egalitarianism (which does not recognize group-differentiated entitlements). They both attempt to extend Dworkin’s mechanism for compensating those disadvantaged through circumstances beyond their control, in such a way as to license special transfers and entitlements for minority cultures. They disagree, however, on how this should be done. Roemer argues that the preference pattern induced through membership in a minority culture may prove disadvantageous, and so form the basis of a legitimate claim for compensation. Kymlicka takes a slightly narrower view. He claims that agents should be held responsible for their own preference pattern, but they cannot be held responsible for how many others share the same pattern. In cases where having a certain culturally induced preference pattern results in disadvantage by virtue of the fact that it is not widely shared, agents have a legitimate claim to compensation. Both of these proposals have problems – cases where they appear to conflict with our intuitions about justice and desert. I would like to show, using some examples of this type, that when these systems of group-differentiated entitlements appear plausible, it is because we have some respect for the value system underlying the problematic preference pattern. This suggests that the attempt to avoid directly evaluating the preferences that leave members of minority cultures systematically disadvantaged in the larger society is unlikely to succeed. I will

The Narrative of Civil Society in Communism's Collapse and Post-communism's Alternative: Emancipation and the Challenge of Polish Protest and Baltic Nationalism

Abstract: Civil society has been understood as a set of social relations, but it should also be recognized as a narrative of social reproduction and transformation. .This narrative; however, is not so enduring-as its ideologues might have it. Its meaning is transformed as it comes to be embedded within various historical periods and cultural fields of identity and difference. In this paper, we identify patterns of exclusion and inclusion within the labilities of the East European civil society project in the decade preceding and the decade following communism's collapse in 1989. We then identify two particularly important challenges to the emancipatory potential of civil society that are grounded in East European lifeworlds. By linking this study of civil society's lability to its normative critique, we seek to demonstrate civil society's continued significance to critical social theory, and Eastern Europe's importance for making that case. The Narrative of Civil Society in Communism's Collapse and Postcommunism's Alternative: Emancipation and the Challenge of Polish Protest and Baltic Nationalism Civil society's significance in sociology and political science as a whole appears to have increased since communism's collapse.* Withn Eastern Europe, however, civil society is not only a social phenomenon, but a discourse both shaping and useful in strategic a c t i ~ n . ~ Through its strategic invocation, civil society was critical to the emancipation of Eastern Europe from Soviet-type society. Its critical function in postcommunist society is less apparent, h ~ w e v e r . ~ By considering the abiding potential of civil society as a discourse of emancipation, we hope to contribute to the restoration of civil society to the center of critical ~ocial.theory.~ We illustrate in this paper not only why ciwil society remains an important concept for those working within Eastern Europe, but also why working within ,Eastern Europe is important for espanding civil society's critical potential. To a considerable estent, one of the problems facing critical theory is its often implicit and untheorized grounding in particular historical ~on te s t s .~ In this paper, we want to highlight the significance of working within Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union for developing critical sociology, for it is here where the engagement with socialism as lived experience, and civil society as its most compelling alternative, are most palpable and consequential for imagining the significance of civil society as an emancipatoxy vision.' .. . Instead of civil society, identity and difference tend to assume center stage in cultural studies and much of cetical theory. Some of the most fruitful work in critical social theory has been in search of the engagement between the integrating visions of civil society and the emphases on difference in identity projects.8 In this paper, we seek to extend that engagement by identifjling under what conditions certain East European social practices and social actors are identified as commensurate with the civil society project, and under what conditions practices and actors are identified as antagonistic to it.' For that reason, William Connolly's recent work on the politics of becoming\" is especially useful. Instead of considering a political project like civil society to be defined by certain intrinsic principles like tolerance or pluralism, we can define it relationally.\" In Connolly's terms, we might ask what the politics of becoming is in civil society projects, and how the vision of civil society changes as it comes to be associated with different sets of power relations. In this sense, we approach civil society differently than many others who focus on solely its sociological limitations. Rather than emphasize civil society's organizational weakness or inadequacy before the challenges of the \"transition\" from communist rule to democratic capitalism,'' we focus here on the shift in civil society's framing and normative penumbraeI3 in the transformational politics of Eastern Europe. Clearly, civil society's normative power was much greater in the 1980s when it was viewed by the East Central European democratic opposition and their Western allies as a politics based not only on the condemnation of communist moral failing,I4 but also the legacy and distinction of East Centrol ~urope.\" Is there another way in which critical theorists might recover the politics of civil society for an emancipatory project that deepens, rather than limits, the democracy of postcommunist capitalism? Our approach to civil society also reflects a very differentakind of discursive,location for civil society within Eastern Europe. In and from the USA, civil society can be treated as a longstanding discourse in which one can identlfy a deep and durable structure opposing democratic and antidemocratic actors, relationships and institutions.I6 Eastern Europe, by contrast, has been racked by the labilities of its cultural formations.\" The elements of dominant and subordinate discourses have themselves been unstable and the criteria for recognizing . threats and promise within and across them have been altered radically over time. In this paper, we suggest broad patterns of and exclusion in the labilities of the East European civil society project, and how the substance and mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion have varied over historical periods and national spaces.'' Simply put, before communism's collapse, civil society tended to be an expansive discourse iwwhich its meaning was expanded as it included ever more types of action as consistent with its vision. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has tended to become a consolidating vision, in which its principal strategic function has been to identify who is part of the emancipatory future and who is part of the past to be transcended. .In its common rhetorical terms, who wants to become part of the West and Europe, and who must be leA behind in a socialist east? In Part I of this paper, we identify why civil society theory must be an intrinsic part of any critical theory of East European social transformations. We begin this paper by considering why civil society endures as a fundamentally important concept in the theory and practice of East European social transformations. We turn next to consider how it became so locally meaningful. We suggest that its power was not only conferred by its putative logical or political opposition to communism, but through a social process. This social process began as an intellectual praxis, in which intellectuals identified a wide range of autonomous activities as consistant with communism's alternative. In turn, these intellectuals were then inscribed as civil society's representatives when communist authorities and Western powers identified them as reasonable partners for negotiating communism's end. To conclude Part I, we consider how civil society alters its ideological function in postcommunism. We explain how civil society establishes its new hegemony by subtly including and excluding fonns of activity within a larger affirmation of certain kinds of power centered on political society and the state (civil society's guarantor and antithesis) and the market (civil society's Lockkan manifestation). In Part 11, we turn to civil society's challenge for critical theory. To be sure, civil society cannot simply function as a vehicle to 'clarify the struggles and wishes of the age'. It has lost its qualities as an expansive emancipatory vision and has been transformed into a defensive consolidating vision (perhaps explaining thereby its growing appeal for neofunctionalism and those who would celebrate or explain, rather than deepen and interrogate, democracy). Nevertheless, civil society remains necessary to critical theoretical work in Eastern Europe. As postcolonial studies seeks to recover a form of community denied by a nationalism that claims to embody that c~mmunity, '~ critical sociology out of Eastern Europe ought to elaborate that potentially emancipatory civil society now denied by the hegemonic contest behveen liberalism and fundamentalism, or individualism and collectivism. In this essay, wve offer a sociological method to elaborate that emancipatory potential. This method has three steps. In the first step, one should identify particular contradictory moments in the elaboration of the civil society project. Contradictory moments are those in which past expressions of civil society's potential are subsequently identified as their nemesis. Here we focus on two: labor movements and nationalist movements. In the second step, one should turn to particular manifestations of these contradictions, and explain how they have been constructed, by participants and by interpreters, as consistent or inconsistent with the civil society project. Here we focus on Polish Solidarity 1993-94 and post-Soviet Baltic nationalisms to illustrate the dilemmas of an \" u ~ e a l socialism\" and the \"small nation\" in the discourse of civil society. Finally, one returns to the critical civil society project itself, to consider what presumptions allow exclusions and what theoretical recasting might expand, rather than consolidate, the vision of civil society. PART I: THE NECESSITY OF CIVIL SOCIETY CIVIL SOCIETY AS POINT OF DEPARTURE In many East European countries, the gap in ideological commitment to civil society between formerly communist parties and newly liberal parties is not so great, and the fundamental importance of civil society might easily be forgotten. But the continuing contest within Russia between a vision of a great imperialist Russia and a more democratic Russia helps remind critical theorists that civil society is still a political accomplishment and not an evolutionary inevitability.\" Some authors even consider the return of another imperial type of Russia to be well within a realm of pos~ibility.~' Because what happens in Russia has terrif