the liberating potential of conflict
My last post what is political? led not only to Shades of Purple deleting their post, but their entire blog which is such a shame. I always archive people’s posts before replying for the off-chance that they delete them so that if someone finds my post, they can check the archive to read the full conversation. This time it was prescient thinking on my end, even though I had genuinely not expected the outcome, having intentionally made myself nicer than what I was feeling writing that post. But clearly these types of people that present themselves as the “voice of reason” don’t stand the scrutiny their reasoning may receive.
This interaction reminded me of a text that I shouldn’t have forgotten about (considering that I cited it in a post two weeks ago) which is French political philosopher Chantal Mouffe’s own theory of the political. Mouffe uses Schmitt’s theory as a building block to go against his understanding of the political: Instead of seeing conflict as a weakness that needs to be solved through “harmonizing” public discourse, it must be seen as the strength of a democracy. She criticizes liberal democratic systems and “democratizing democracy” theories by the likes of Jürgen Habermas for putting such a big emphasis on consensus because it positions conflict as something to be overcome and not the catalyst for deliberation.
I find this best understood against the backdrop of their time. Jürgen Habermas’ democracy theory as well as Chantal Mouffe’s (and her husband’s) were written around and after the ’68 student protest movement that sparked a public debate on how to make democracy more democratic. Thinkers like Jürgen Habermas proposed a hypothetical system that he named “deliberative democracy” in which conflict would be a necessary evil that needs to be overcome through public deliberation. Mouffe counters that conflict is, evidently, an omnipresent element in a democracy that produces necessary change to satisfy the conflict participants. So why view it as a necessary evil and not the accelerator it is?
Moreover, the “how” in Habermas’ model for instance is very murky because somehow “reason” would ultimately always persevere. However, Mouffe disagrees that political deliberation must necessarily be rational either. Political beings (us) are emotional, so when we build political systems that assume we won’t be, we are shooting ourselves in the foot by betting on the best-case scenario. She asks: Why not harness political momentum, spurred by emotional attachment to a cause, to pull more people into politics rather than keeping politics the affair of some elite? Remember, this all happens in the backdrop of the ’68 movement’s dissatisfaction with what is officially called democracy in the Western world.
In turn, what this reminded me of is the conflict in one of my favorite novels The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin in which Shevek, a physicist, lives in a utopian anarchist society on the moon of a capitalist planet. The anarchists have abandoned their planet Urras to live out their martyr-philosopher Odo’s teachings because they can’t do so at home despite their best efforts. Within a set time frame, people can choose to go to Anarres, the moon, but after that contact with Urras is to be kept at the barest minimum (for exchanging raw metals for complex industrial items). Two hundred years later, the way people on Anarres live is taken for granted and there is no conflict to speak of. Any spark for a conflict is shrugged off so as not to disturb the stability they’ve come to know.
He sees the way his society is becoming culturally stagnant and its values of constant revolution and freedom abandoned in favor of stability and conflict aversion. When he proposes to exercise his right to live his life as he chooses by going after his curiosity, Urras—where he expects to meet the physicists he’d been exchanging letters with—, everybody reacts with revulsion and calls him a traitor for wanting to intermingle with the capitalists. By intentionally challenging the taboos around Urras, Shevek and his group show that even an anarchist society that comes to view conflict and change as an inconvenience at best and avoidable evil at worst would inevitably become authoritarian. Stirring up conflict turns out to be a good idea to remind his kin what they abandoned everything they had known for and reignite the spirit of their revolution.
So what people like the “voice of reason” I mentioned in the beginning really want is to live in ignorance and stasis, and they want us all to live the way they want because anything else would infringe on their freedom, but—paradoxically—not ours. Wanting to live or speak without outside input is a valid wish, although it remains a wish nonetheless. Being free doesn’t mean choosing what to become aware of, but rather that one can ignore it once one becomes aware of it. And live with the consequences. Part of living among other individuals necessitates criticism and pushback with whom you can disagree with as you please, but what you cannot disagree with is the mechanism through which our society exists as something beyond a mere agglomeration of individuals.
I hope Shades of Purple can grow out of this reactionary mindset for their own good. But one can only hope.
bibliography
Mouffe, C. (2007). Die Politik und das Politische (N. Neumeier, Trans.) [PDF]. In Über das Politische: Wider die kosmopolitische Illusion (1. Auflage, pp. 15–47). Suhrkamp. (Original work published 2005)
Schmitt, C. (1932). Der Begriff des Politischen (pp. 20–45).