“Tell me who your enemies are, and I will tell you who you are”: A Response to Critics of the SJSA Guidelines on Communal Action
In the guise of being more politically expedient and effective, critics of the SJSA Guidelines for Communal Action have increasingly been relying on the demonization of differences that animate sources of political organizing and community-building in response to the present political crisis. Their vicious Manichean portrayal of the crisis – whether you’re against Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo or for her – closely resembles the foundational illusion of modernity’s “escape from immaturity” and perpetuates the violent destruction of particularly shared life-worlds in favor of transcendental and instrumental rationality: get Arroyo ousted now, no matter what it takes! Such basis for alliance fails to realize how much it drains politics out of the picture in the same way that Arroyo has been trying to sap the political out of the lives of Filipinos today. If politics, according to Hannah Arendt, is based on the fact of human plurality, then clearly, it is not what the SJSA critics are engendering, at least in the way they demand from the SJSA agreement with the position to call for Arroyo’s resignation, otherwise the Guidelines will lend more credibility to the Arroyo administration.
What is more obscene with their imperative is that it reduces the call for communal action to the atrophy of consensus instead of accenting and multiplying the rhizomatic depth of action and politics proper. It treats the political struggle as a mere rational calculation of interests than as a space where constitutive identities are disclosed and as such fails to engage in an encounter with the multiplicity of voices striving to be heard that precisely allow politics to exist.
In what follows, I would like to argue that the focus of much political rhetoric today on the need for consensus (including the SJSA Guidelines itself) must instead be organized around the differences of various political and social actors involved. It is in this regard that I defend the SJSA Guidelines: as an attempt to analyze the present positioning of social forces (highlighting their differences and disagreements) and to articulate principles with which its constituents can draw from. By treating the Guidelines in this manner and not as an attempt to provide a hegemonic leadership in the political crisis, I claim that it allows the emergence of what Friedrich Nietzsche calls a pathos of distance:
an attachment to that which differs from you growing out of glimmers of difference in you, an attachment that takes the form of forbearance in strife and generosity in interdependence rather than a quest to close up the distance between you through formation of a higher unity. … This ethos of agonistic respect amidst a world of dissonant interdependencies is crucial to the fabric of democratic politics: … it folds a pathos of distance into democratic relations of contestation, collaboration and hegemony.
Empty Consensus
First, I think that the reduction of social antagonisms into multiple interest groups engaging in peaceful contestation or building overlapping consensus is a dangerous myth that has to be dispelled in any attempt towards generating political activity: each political association necessarily establishes its own “truth regime”. This is why Thomas Kuhn was critical of the positivist view of scientific revolutions as the simple accumulation of data or theory and instead posited that interparadigmatic conversation between epistemic communities is naturally difficult. The insight, I believe, in Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, is its striking rejection of the atomist, self-pursuing model of individuals that positivism and modernity is hinged. Kuhnian scientific revolutions result instead out of the constitutive challenges that contest the validity of the truths upheld by scientific/epistemic communities. Thus, paradigm change is a result not of private and rational calculations of self-interest but from crisis situations that shake the problem solving world of scientific discovery. This theory of scientific change find resonance with Chantal Mouffe’s argument that: “The prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions, nor to relegate them to the private sphere in order to render rational consensus possible, but to mobilize these passions, and give them a democratic outlet” (1994, 109).
The illusion which SJSA critics would like us to believe is that the collective identities of social actors involved in addressing the present political crisis must be abandoned is strikingly similar to the Hobbesian defense of government and Arendt’s metaphorization of human necessity as anti-political. According to Arendt, the moment issues turn into questions of necessity, the political space ceases and the realm of freedom is colonized by the consuming realm of the social. Extending this assertion to a critique of the foundational moment of modern liberal politics, it may also be argued that the discursive characterization of ousting Arroyo as a necessity to which political actors must surrender their differences brings into mind the establishment of the leviathan monster Hobbes sought to justify as the panacea to the difficulty of self-governance and self-constitution. This is a chilling movement, not only because it leads to the totalization of the political project, but more importantly because it advances the suspension of particularly held subject positions in favor a rationally calculated maximization of a mythical universal goal. It is only acceptable under a theoretical abstraction that collective identities are constituted a priori and in private – that human plurality is a fixed reality that can be plotted in advance.
This leads me to a second point: political identities can only be political in the context of a horizon which simultaneously enacts a visible space of articulation and a limited terrain against which any radicalization or transgression can be possible. Even Marx, if I’m not wrong, never dismissed the lived-worlds of the proletariat or the bourgeoisie in his analysis of social transformation. But a retrieval of political interventionism must not proceed from the fantasies of a Lenninist vanguard army (which I am increasingly sensing SJSA critics are implicitly styling themselves) but in a Gramscian “politics of meaning” (Smith 1998, 63-65) – that is the identification of the “thinkable boundaries” of political mobilization. Here, I would like to think of the SJSA Guidelines as an exercise and at the same time a concrete material of conjectural politics: the “analysis of prevailing networks of power relations and political horizons” (1998, 65).
On the question of reflexivity
Let me anticipate a possible objection: might not the delineation of principles and the enumeration of action points produce an authoritarian structure in which other options are already inhibited from being considered? A quote from William Connolly may perhaps set the stage for a response to this objection:
A powerful identity will strive to constitute a range of differences as intrinsically evil, irrational, abnormal, mad, sick, primitive, monstrous, dangerous, or anarchical – as other. It does so in order to secure itself a intrinsically good, coherent, complete or rational and in order to protect itself from the other that would unravel its self-certainty and capacity for collective mobilization if it established it legitimacy. This constellation of constructed others now becomes both essential to the truth of powerful identity and a threat to it. The threat is posed not merely by actions the other might take to injure or defeat the true identity but by the very visibility of its mode of being as other. (Connolly 1991, 66 emphasis mine)
Connolly here, I believe points to the contradiction “closed” systems of self-signification and othering take upon itself once performed within a public space of visible appearances. Here, Connolly seems to resonate with Arendt’s concept of political activity as enacted within a world of appearances and identity as a public character. “Othering” and the construal of other options as evil or steps that a particular political group would be unwilling to take cannot therefore be taken as automatically foreclosing: othering is paradoxically essential and a threat to the process of self-disclosure. Othering then generates ambiguous results in the same way that action in Arendtian sense is always anarchic and disruptive. The implication for social movements and political mobilization therefore takes a normative slant: it will always almost be impossible for social movements and purveyors of political identities to take full charge of their actions. Thus, the process of self/political identity formation is always incomplete. But this does not mean that reflexivity is an automatic feature. On the contrary, as long as a political world is assured – that is the process of identity formation is played out in public through the faculty of speech/action – that is received by its constituted others in a spirit of adversarial struggle and not in a desire to consume it or deny the existence of political differences.
I think therefore that the responsibility in precluding the possibility of identity formation and political difference lies with those identified and constituted as others who are challenged to provide a space where adversarial positions can be taken and performed in agonistic dialogue. The moment adversaries refuse to acknowledge each other reciprocally, the world in-between them vanishes, politics is disavowed and the much feared dogmatism settles in. This is the danger which I think critics of the SJSA Guidelines are increasingly realizing in the way they have been responding to the Guidelines: refusing to acknowledge deep political differences, refusing to take the role of a visible other and adversary through which democratic solidarity can be built on.
