Toward a critique of neo-republican reason: the subject, discursive control, and power in Pettit’s political theory

ABSTRACT

This article examines the concept of ‘discursive control’ as a feature of the personality of the subject of non-domination as it appears within Pettit’s theory of politics and practical reasoning. It explores how the subject of non-domination, in possession of ‘discursive control’, is enveloped within neo-republican proprietary order and thus constituted through, and constrained by, relations of power and violence. Such relations of power take the form of structures of raciality and gender that haunt the politics of recognition upon which Pettit’s subject of discursive control stands. The article examines the political consequences of this figuring of the subject of non-domination within Pettit’s text, I argue that Pettit’s politics of practical reasoning forecloses upon forms of political agency that are at variance with the norms of neo-republican political community. In developing this critique, I draw out its implications for our understanding of the problems of race and gender within neo-republican thought. Reading the idea of discursive control as synonymous with the question of logos in the history of political philosophy, I offer a post-republican critique of the politics of speech and recognition presupposed by Pettit’s account of the subject. The article concludes by asking what is the political price we pay for the theoretical satisfaction of a general theory of the subject?

KEYWORDS:

• Neo-republicanism
• discursive control
• freedom as non-domination
• logocentrism
• race
• Philip Pettit

Guide Quotes

In every generation there are sceptics who see discussion as war by another means but the very notoriety that such views procure for their defenders [sic] – say, the notoriety enjoyed by today’s postmodernists – testifies to the fact that few give the views serious credence. They may serve well as these for idle dialectic, but they are not assumptions by which people are willing to conduct their lives. (Philip Pettit, A Theory of Freedom)

Against this postmodernism, there is an effort to shore up the primary premises, to establish in advance that any theory of politics requires a subject, needs from the start to presume its subject, the referentiality of language, the integrity of the institutional descriptions it provides. For politics is unthinkable without a foundation, without these premises. […] To require the subject means to foreclose the domain of the political, and that foreclosure, installed analytically as an essential feature of the political, enforces the boundaries of the domain of the political in such a way that that enforcement is protected from political scrutiny. The act which unilaterally establishes the domain of the political functions, then, is an authoritarian ruse by which political contest over the status of the subject is summarily dismissed. (Judith Butler, Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism)

[…] political activity is always a mode of expression that undoes the perceptible divisions of the police order by implementing a basically heterogeneous assumption, that of a part of those who have no part, an assumption that, at the end of the day, itself demonstrates the sheer contingency of the order, the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being. (Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy)

Introduction

This article critically examines the constitutive relationship between the Subject and reason within the political ontology of neo-republicanism. The dual questions of the Subject and reason speak to the problem of who can participate in political discourse and upon/through what terms. At stake in raising these issues as objects of further political and theoretical reflection is nothing short of an inquiry into the conditions of (im)possibility for political speech. Historically this problem has been resolved politically through forms of exclusion based upon racial and sexual difference (cf. Pateman and Mills 2007). Contemporary normative political philosophies of justice invariably, pay lip-service to universal suffrage and equality – assuming (through their silence) such forms of exclusion are no longer constitutive features of the basic structure of ‘modern’ polities (Rawls 1971; cf. Mills 2017a, 16) – or they treat such inequalities of gender and race as contingent injustices that can be accommodated within the prevailing ‘orders of recognition’ (Honneth 2012, 78–79). In so doing, they fail to account for the ways in which raciality and sexual difference are constitutive features of the hegemonic grammar of political theorizing and the political orders into which we are all thrown (da Silva 2007). In this article, I develop this analysis more specifically in relation to the work of Philip Pettit and his theory of freedom and democracy.

Whilst most of contemporary analytical political philosophy has not theorized the (modern) Subject (of politics), Pettit has engaged this question in a robust manner. He has done so in order to provide an ontological, or perhaps even political anthropological, grounding to his ideal of freedom as non-domination. Through this philosophical labour Pettit has brought the project of neo-republicanism into closer conversation with the work of leading figures of the third and fourth generations of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (cf. Forst 2013; Honneth 2014), as well as a longer history of theorizing the conditions of political speech within a genealogy of political philosophy that draws in figures such as Kant, Hobbes, and Aristotle.¹

The concepts of the Subject and reason are joined at the foundation of Pettit’s contributions to normative political philosophy through the idea of ‘discursive control’ (see Pettit 2001, ch. 4). As a constitutive dimension of freedom as non-domination, such a ‘status’ of possessing discursive control refers to a form of social and political standing that grants agents the capacity to do things within a given discursive space (as a space of speech and action). In the context of Pettit’s broader theory of democracy, we might describe this discursive space as formally ‘noumenal’ in nature – i.e. it is a space of reason giving and testing (cf. Forst 2015). This form of ‘discursive power’ (Pettit 2001, 70) is not straightforwardly an ontological feature of the ‘free person’ or subject of non-domination, but it is the effect of an a priori form of recognition that is endowed upon agents or ‘free persons’ anterior to the constitution of non-dominating law and thus anterior to their ‘enjoyment’ of republican freedom. Such a ‘Hegelian’ structure of recognition grants (would-be) subjects of non-domination access to the political space of democratic deliberation, and to the exercise of discursive control, on simultaneously an individuated and corporate basis (Pettit 2012, ch. 5).²

In this article, I examine the concept of ‘discursive control’, or ‘discursive status’, as a feature of the personality of the subject of non-domination as it appears within Pettit’s theory of politics. I explore how the subject of non-domination, in possession of ‘discursive control’, is enveloped within neo-republican proprietary order(s),³ and thus constituted through, and constrained by, relations of power and violence. Such relations of power have been under-theorized within Pettit’s ideal-theory of politics and the extant literature on non-domination and power.

I argue that such relations of power – constitutive of how Pettit normatively conceives of the subject of non-domination as an agent of discursive control – as well as the very positing of a theory of the subject in the first instance, serve to philosophically regulate political speech/agency and foreclose upon the possibility of a future modality of politics that is antagonistic to the proprietary orders in which we all live. As such, Pettit’s theory of the subject reproduces relations of domination that are un-thinkable within his understanding of arbitrary power, and which arise from the very methodology of theorizing (racial and gender) domination as a contingent problem of recognition and the sovereign Subject in possession of discursive control. Drawing upon insights from postcolonial, deconstructive and black feminist theorizing, this article demonstrates how Pettit’s theory of discursive control replays a number of racist and gendered tropes from the history of political philosophy that were integral to the justification and reproduction of de-humanizing relations of subordination and domination.

By ‘proprietary order’ I refer to the historical, sedimented, and naturalized orders of domination and inequality that are distributive of bodies, their proper roles, dispositions, and capacities across society. The relations of power, that I have in mind (and which Pettit’s method is incapable of theorizing as a potential source of domination) take the form of broader (aesthetic) structures of consensus proper to both orders of inequality in a general sense, and to Pettit’s neo-republican normative vision.⁴ Such structures, or ‘distributions of the sensible’ (Rancière 2004, 12), act upon the subject of non-domination anterior to their appearance within the ‘republic of reasons’ (Pettit 1997, 188). In this way they serve to police ways of being, doing, and saying – according to the norms proper to neo-republican deliberative politics and the normative or ethical community that it performatively (re)produces. Such orders, simultaneously symbolic and material, police what is sensible and thereby intelligible, as well as the (gendered and racialised) bodies that can appear, or not, within that consensual space of the deliberative democratic republic. At stake is not just the limits of the sensible, but also the onto-epistemological limits of ‘being and meaning’ (da Silva 2007, 26). Proprietary orders, through each act of inclusion, presuppose and reproduce forms of exclusion (Laclau and Mouffe 1985), producing ‘remainders’ (Honig 1993, 127) or supplementary parts(-that-have-no-part) within a given distribution of the sensible and its logic of (mis)counting who counts (Rancière 2010, 33). Such acts of in\exclusion constitute a form of domination that is currently un-thinkable within Pettit’s neo-republican theory of politics. This is due, in large part, to Pettit’s account of the Subject and reason and the articulation of this relation in terms of the necessary possession of discursive control in order to be (potentially) free from domination.

To fully grasp the significance of Pettit’s account of discursive control, it is necessary to begin, not with Pettit’s theory of the Subject per se, but with an understanding of its location and role within his broader theory of democratic deliberation. Pettit’s theory of the ‘free person’ in possession of ‘discursive status’ is predicated upon the agent’s capacity to engage in ‘discourse friendly relationships’ with others (Pettit 2001, 69). In this sense, the neo-republican theory of freedom and democracy is, at its root, a relational theory of recognition. According to Pettit (2001), admission to the deliberative or discursive space is dependent upon the common recognition of the agent’s reasoning abilities. Such a ‘pre-political’ moment of (re)cognition is necessarily dependent upon certain norms of reason-giving and what is reason(able) that are, materially speaking, naturalized structures of power and violence within neo-republican proprietary order.⁵ Through a reconstruction of the pragmatics of the scenes of neo-republican democratic deliberation – scenes that Pettit theorizes in On the People’s Terms (hereafter OPT) in terms of points, or acts, of contestation and consensus-making – this article critically redescribes the way in which Pettit (2012, ch. 4 and ch. 5) figures the presence of norms in the formation of the political will of the people. I thereby demonstrate how such norms are entangled with forms of power that turn back against the formation of the subject of non-domination. Those structures of normative power, I argue, delimit access to the exercise of discursive control or logos – as both reason (itself) and reasoned speech – and thus shape the location, nature, and scope of what counts as an object of political deliberation and contestation within neo-republican orders. As such, they foreclose upon a political future different to the one that is currently before us.

This argument is developed across five movements. It begins with a problematization of the concept of discursive control and the subject of non-domination – reframing this question in terms of the post-Aristotelian ‘political anthropological’ problem of Man as the proper agent of logos. I thereby connect this politics of logos to the biopolitical struggles that have haunted the category of the human. This first section situates Pettit’s theory of the subject in relation to debates within Frankfurt School critical theory around the politics of justification and recognition, and the political project of ‘critical republicanism’ more specifically. In its second and third movements, the article maps the political significance of Pettit’s account of the subject of discursive control through a reconstructive reading of his broader theory of democratic politics. Section two redescribes Pettit’s neo-republican polity in terms of a ‘republic of reasons’, before honing in more specifically on the pragmatics of neo-republican political deliberation in section three. I demonstrate in these sections how the neo-republican politics of deliberation serve to screen out, and thereby foreclose upon, forms of political agency and claim-making that (potentially) seek to address the injustices and oppression arising from the racist and gendered structures of power that are constitutive of the political ontology of recognition. In its fourth movement, the article develops a critique of the politics of discursive control, through a deconstructive reading of the politics of logos – as both reason and reasoned speech. By politicizing the distinction between ‘speech’ and ‘noise’, I draw the reader’s attention to the role and power of ‘distributions of the sensible’ in drawing the line between the subject of discursive control and its other. The article concludes by reflecting upon the role and cost of a general theory of the subject for political theorizing. I argue that the price is too high, risking the reproduction of relations of domination for the sake of theoretical satisfaction. In making the argument, this article offers a critical philosophical and political critique of neo-republican reason and its treatment of the problem of racial domination. At its most fundamental this critique turns on the fact that the abstractions of ideal-theory only serve to reproduce hegemonic ‘White normativity’ (cf. Mills 2017a, 61).

Problematizing the subject of non-domination

At stake in returning to think about the concept of discursive control and the role it plays, is to grasp more centrally the forms of power that delimit what counts as meaningful ‘speech’ as opposed to simply ‘noise’ in political discourse. As such, I treat the problem of discursive power, and the exercise of discursive control, as synonymous with the Aristotelian political anthropological problem of logos and its possession (cf. Aristotle 1988, 1253a9). Whilst the metaphysical and humanist traditions of political philosophy have understood the problem of logos in ontological terms, there nonetheless exists a long history of the political agency of the subaltern, gendered, and racialised Others of discursive control. Such a history is one in which those Others of logos have demonstrated and put into question their exclusion from political space by ‘troubling’ the terms upon which the distinction between ‘speech’ and ‘noise’ is made (Gilroy 2014; Hartmann 2008; Spivak 1988). Such acts of ‘troubling’ constitute improper political practices of dissensus that suspend the logics of consensus and recognition (both of which are determinate of what is visible and sayable within neo-republican distributions of the sensible). They do so through the polemical staging of the equality of all ‘speaking beings’ – an equality that constitutes the anarchic basis of any form of community – to the effect of putting into question the philosophical and historical bases upon which some forms of speech are taken to be ‘discourse’, whilst others are dismissed as simply ‘noise’ (Rancière 1999, 29).

Through a politicization of this theoretical and historical partitioning of logos this line of critique in turn brings us to examine Pettit’s understanding of reason, recognition, and the human. It also raises the question of the attendant politics of race that haunts and structures these core categories of contemporary normative thought and political practices of reason and deliberation. As Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007) has demonstrated, the subject proper to the exercise of discursive control is the fabricated product of the emergence of an ‘analytics of raciality’ (and gender) – a term she uses to describe the convergence of philosophical and scientific discourses in post-Enlightenment Europe in creating a representation of the ‘human’ (the White, male, bourgeois human) as a ‘Transparent I’ (da Silva 2007, 29–30). Such a representation of the human – as sovereign, capable of reason, in control of their affect, and fit to be held responsible – constituted an integral instrument in the politics of coloniality and the construction of an image of both a universal humanity and reason (Wynter 2003). It further constituted the ontoepistemological basis upon which any ethical responsivity to the ‘others of Europe’ is rendered unthinkable and unnecessary (da Silva 2007, 2–4). Such a ‘political anthropological’ problem is, in contemporary political theory speak, and from the vantage point of late-modern proprietary order, a biopolitical matter (Agamben 1998, 7–8; Foucault 1978, 143; Mbembe 2019). As such, in this article I seek to offer a critical reading which attends to the potentiality of alterity and the political need in maintaining an openness to the Other, as the arrivant: ‘the one yet to arrive’ (cf. Derrida 1997, 29). This, to my mind, is to be attentive to the ways in which proprietary orders represent that which is other to them and thus foreclose upon their own inherent contingency. The consequence of such a figuring of the subject of non-domination (which best comes into view within the scene of neo-republican politics) is a radical critique of the ways in which Pettit’s theorization of politics forecloses upon the possibility of a democratic politics in and for the future.

The argument I present here with regards to Pettit’s text is not without precedent. The problem this article explores has been raised before in various forms – both in relation to the project of neo-republicanism, and in relation to at least two other contemporary theorists of politics: Rainer Forst and Axel Honneth. First, critical republican theorists have highlighted the need for neo-republicanism to have a more robust and structural account of power and domination, particularly in relation to the role of social norms in shaping what constitutes ‘arbitrariness’ and ‘reason’. Alan Coffee (2020) has drawn our attention to how, for example, cultural norms of racial hierarchy and inequality in post-Emancipation USA have shaped historically the possibility of freedom as non-domination. Dorothea Gädeke (2020) has also highlighted how Pettit’s neo-republicanism lacks a structural account of power that can do justice to the normative potential embedded in the idea of non-domination, when read from a discourse-theoretical perspective. Gädeke argues that the ideal of non-domination derives its normative power from the fact that relations of domination deprive agents of the ‘normative authority’ to taken seriously as participants in the conversation of justice (2020, 29). Gädeke (2020, 39–40) in turn, has argued for a stronger intersubjectivist and procedural approach to the problem of arbitrariness, in which, following the work of Forst (2011, 2013, 155), she understands the critique of arbitrary forms of power (domination) to be rooted in the failure of (potentially) dominating agents to justify the forms of power they exercise over others.⁶ This article extends Coffee and Gädeke’s important analyses. In doing so, it offers a political and philosophical interrogation of the problem of racial difference in Pettit’s neo-republican political ontology, and thereby takes critical distance from Gädeke’s neo-Kantian proceduralism as well as the ontological assumptions that underpin the Forst inspired understanding of discourse theory. At stake in attending to the forms of domination that deprive agents of normative authority is a methodological and political philosophical problem that runs deeper than any proceduralism or politics of recognition can address.

Second, critics such as Amy Allen and Patchen Markell have questioned the role of the Subject, power, and the understanding of reason found in the work of Honneth and Forst, respectively. These criticisms, I argue, bear down upon Pettit’s work too, and resonate with, important parts of the argument made in this paper. Allen (2010) has raised critical questions about the role of power in Honneth’s theory of the struggle for recognition. She has argued that Honneth’s (1995) account of power – understood simply in terms of resistance and the struggle for recognition – blinds him to the ways in which recognition is entangled, always and already, in relations of subordination to norms that are constitutive of the self in the first instance. Similarly, maintains that whilst Forstian critical theory provides powerful new avenues for thinking politics, it nonetheless posits an overly sanguine ideal of practical reason, that overlooks the ways in which reason itself has been instrumentalized as a tool of, and justification in and of itself for, relations of domination.⁷ As such, Forst’s account of a politics of justification, beginning with the ontological claim that humans are ‘justifying beings’ (Forst 2017, 21), is unable to account for the ways in which the ‘space of justifications’ is equally a space of power. Markell (2020) goes beyond Allen’s argument, and, in this regard, is equally as instructive in reading the politics of non-domination. Markell, as a creative reader of Hannah Arendt, draws our attention to how the space of reasons is always preceded by a world of things (‘artifices’) or ‘appearance’ which are phenomenologically constitutive of the stuff of deliberative politics as well as the objects of justification. This requires, importantly, reflection upon the social location and conditions of possibility for critical/political theory itself, as well as the ‘material, institutional and ideational conditions if its own practice, and on the blind spots and forms of non-thought that these enabling conditions also produce as they enable’ (Markell 2020, 146). Within this theoretical space opened-up by Allen and Markell, I turn now to offer a reading of Pettit’s account of democracy and reason.

The republic of reasons

In order to grasp the political significance of Pettit’s theorization of the subject of non-domination as in possession of ‘discursive control’, it is necessary to offer an analysis of Pettit’s politics and the theorization of neo-republican democracy in terms of a republic of reasons. As it is set out in OPT the neo-republican theory of democracy seeks to establish an account of how political freedom as non-domination can be achieved through a discourse-theoretical rethinking of the politics of will-formation (Pettit 2012). OPT develops a normatively preferable account for determining how the law, which constitutes freedom from public forms of domination, can be rendered non-arbitrary in terms of the power it holds over citizens within the republic. Law becomes non-arbitrary when citizens have equal ‘control’ over the process of law-making. The equal ability to affect ‘popular control’ is made possible to citizens through a ‘dual-aspect’ model of democracy, where the two elements necessary for meeting the threshold of ‘control’ – ‘influence’ and ‘direction’ – coincide as a result of the more or less concerted actions of citizens in their engagement in political discourse, broadly conceived.

Pettit’s ‘dual aspect’ model of democracy locates the possibility of popular influence and popular direction over law and decision-making upon two complimentary and mutually reinforcing temporalities of political activity. On the short-term and fast temporality, citizen-subjects engage in the cut and thrust of electoral politics, issue-specific campaigns, and practices of post-hoc contestation of legislation and political decisions, drawing together both the authorial and editorial dimensions of political influence over the law and its generation – in an institutionally mediated way. On the longer-term and slow temporality of popular control, the exercise of ‘direction’ over legislative processes is made possible through informal points of deliberation located in the public sphere. Such disaggregated and informal points of deliberation contribute to the generation of norms and ideals of policy-formation and are expressive of public opinion in the broadest sense. Taken in conjunction with each other, both aspects and temporalities of neo-republican democracy serve to complement the other, giving expression to the ‘corporate will’ (Pettit 2012, 291) of the people. On this basis, this model of democracy claims to establish ‘popular control’ over decision making and policy formation, in which this control is exercised by the ‘constituted people’ (Pettit 2012, 287). As such, ideal law, generated in accordance with these provisions can be said to represent a non-dominating source of interference in the lives of ‘the people’ (understood severally, as individuals), tracking their (common) interests and thus (re)producing their standing as free citizens in a free republic. At the centre of this process of will-formation, are a multitude of points and practices of contestation and reason giving/testing through which the subject of non-domination demonstrates its freedom from public domination through the possibility to contest the law – through the exercise of editorial power. This is a theory of democracy in which rhetorical practices of contestation over reasons given are at the centre of both the experience of freedom and the procedures of legitimation.

It is ultimately through such points and practices of contestation that legitimacy is secured for those citizens who hold interests and values at variance with the will of the majority (Farrell 2020). Fearful of majoritarian tyranny, Pettit’s emphasis on contestation, is not only oriented towards the generation of public norms that are expressive of a popular will, but also provide the opportunity for members of ‘sticky minority’ group (those with an ‘identity’ fixed by ‘creed’, ‘colour’, ‘race’, or ‘sexual orientation’) who may find themselves lacking in equality of influence over public decision making, to individually contest such decisions (Pettit 2012, 212).⁸ Having the opportunity to contest and perhaps even argue against majority decision making on some issues, grants those who may find themselves regularly in a minority position, an adequate degree of influence to find them not-dominated, and maintains a degree of openness, reflexivity and (limited) contingency to the bounds of the system itself (Pettit 2012, 215). Read in critical race theoretical terms, at stake here is a certain instrumentalization of difference in the service of systemic augmentation and reform. All the while this is premised upon the very real possibility that the interests of those members of a so-called sticky minority may never be aligned with the ‘corporate will’ of the republican demos. These ‘sticky minorities’, that Pettit identifies as potential victims of domination under a populist form of democratic politics (cf. Farrell 2020, 861–882), do not have, as Pettit assumes through his schematics, the same history or access to discursive control (logos) or recognition as the ‘White’ majority, taken as read here, by Pettit, as a universal experience. In his tendency towards the ideal-theoretical (a move this paper denies for Pettit), the theorist of neo-republicanism never theorizes this historical injustice and is thus doomed to reproduce its logic.

Pettit’s account of political action, sketched above, is firmly situated within the deliberative, and discourse-theoretical paradigm of thinking politics. What this entails more explicitly is a rendering of the practices of deliberation, consensus-making, and contestation, as discursive practices of claim-presenting and reason-giving within a ‘noumenal’ space (cf. Forst 2015) by reasoning (citizen-)subjects. Such (citizen-)subjects are presumed to be ‘responsible’ and therefore ‘free persons’ in the ontological sense (cf. Pettit 2001). At stake in this shift to the deliberative paradigm, however partial, is the beginning of a set of gestures which ensnare the activity of contestation within institutionally and normatively mediated (and therefore policed) spaces, temporalities, and rhythms of consensus. As a result, theoretical and (potentially) material limits are placed on forms of dissensual and improper political agency that are at variance with the terms of neo-republican reason, and which arise from locations and subjects not recognized as proper to the ideal of discursive standing.

Part of how Pettit forecloses upon the possibility of (in)felicitous politics is through the curtailing of open deliberation over decision-making and policy formation to the members of elected representative assemblies who are responsive to the ‘interests’ of their electors. Concerned with maintaining consistency and coherency in decision-making over time, Pettit’s curtailing of deliberative democratic instruments for will-formation is the outcome of a supposedly careful balancing of the need to ‘democratize deliberation’ and to ‘collectivize reason’ whilst securing and maintaining freedom as non-domination (Pettit 2003, 147). Deliberation proper is posited as the task of elected representatives who act as the ‘deputies’ of their constituents, ‘causally responsive’ to the latter’s dispositions and interests (Pettit 2012, 197–199).

Beyond the politics of electoral campaigns, the role of ‘the people’ in exercising popular influence, and (individuated) control over the legislative and decision-making process of the republic, is in the form of the editorial work of contestation after the fact. Contestation is institutionally mediated through official and semi-official channels and forms, such as the courts, writing to your member of parliament, various ombudsman procedures, social movements (as ‘clearing houses’ for complaints, cf. Pettit 1997, 193), and tribunals (Pettit 2012, 216). Presented in this way, neo-republicanism as a form of contestatory democracy attempts to remove contestation from the field of power and into a depoliticized space of ‘influence’ and ‘control’. As such, it proceeds in terms of reasoned (and thus reasonable) discourse, free from ‘noise’ and at the mercy of the judgments of elected officials, members of the judiciary and other elites (Pettit 1997, 188, 193; see McCormick 2019). To this problem of ‘noise’ I shall return.

Having contained the practices of deliberation proper to those bodies charged with the representation of ‘the people’ along the fast, short, and cyclical temporality of the dual-aspect model, deliberation reappears in a broader and less mediated sense within the long-haul and slow time of democracy in order to establish a particular ‘direction’ to the more general influence exercised on the previous aspect. ‘Direction’ will only be an ‘institutional possibility’ insofar as two conditions are met. The first of these conditions is that ‘people come to support certain norms of public policy-making, whether or not this is something they intend, in virtue of pursuing popular influence over government’ (Pettit 2012, 252). Second, Pettit suggests that these norms will ‘come to direct public decision-making, whether or not this is something that people intend, thereby establishing a popular purpose that government serves’ (Pettit 2012, 252). Placing ‘direction’ firmly within the noumenal realm of reason and reason-giving, Pettit attempts to secure the telos of popular control from forms of purposive action driven by self-interest and the exercise of ‘brute force’ and ‘naked preference’ (Pettit 2003, 153) relegating this form of action to the short-haul aspect of neo-republican democracy. What emerges, in terms of the picture I have sought to reconstruct of neo-republican democracy, is ‘a republic of reasons’ (Sunstein 1993, ch. 1; cited in Pettit 1997, 188), or as I wish to rename it: a republic of logos.

The pragmatics of neo-republican deliberation

Having sketched the broad contours of the republic of logos and began to problematize Pettit’s figuring of a contestation-based politics of deliberation, I turn now to consider the pragmatics of such scenes of deliberation and reason testing. By paying close attention to the normative structures that shape political discourse in the neo-republican polity, the ways in which Pettit theoretically regulates political agency are rendered explicit.

At its core, Pettit’s conceptualization of deliberation along the long and slow temporality of democracy is dependent upon a performative conception of political discourse. Political claim-making is constitutive not only of the meaning and value of the claims made, but also of the liberty of the subject. The expressive force of claims made during everyday political communication, is not simply generative of norms, but presupposes a particular mode of subjectivity and a particular location of enunciation within the terrain of neo-republican proprietary order. At stake with each moment of political speech is the reproduction and reinforcement of the neo-republican distribution of the sensible in the name of non-domination – as well as the dematerialization of popular sovereignty and ‘the people’ as an embodied constituent power.⁹

In his penultimate set of lectures at the Collège de France during 1982–1983, Michel Foucault offers us the broad co-ordinates of ‘the pragmatics of political discourse’. Foucault (2011, 67) draws our attention to three formal or structural elements of the pragmatics of political discourse, and their dynamic relations (of power) to one another. In any scene of political discourse, we can identify: (i) a speech situation; (ii) the status of the subject engaged in political speech; and (iii) a performative statement made by that subject. At stake in ‘the analysis of the pragmatics of discourse is the analysis of the elements and mechanism by which the situation of the enunciator modifies the value of meaning of the discourse’ (Foucault 2011, 68). The point on which the affect, meaning and value (currency) of such a statement ultimately turns on in the scene of political speech, is not simply the context and conventions of speaking within that scene (cf. Austin 1976). More precisely, it turns on the ‘situation’ or ‘status’ of the speaking-subject (Foucault 2011, 68) and their relation to the mode of being and norms proper to their location within the hegemonic order of bodies and allocated ways of speaking.

What emerges from this return to the formal features of the scene of political discourse, is the focus on the status of the subject which engages in political speech within the deliberative process. This aspectival approach to the question of the Subject, as positioned within a field of power in which the free person of ‘discursive control’ is figured, first, as the ‘presumptive “ground” of normative debate’ (Butler 2016, 138); and second, as subject to recognition as a political and thus ‘speaking being’ (cf. Rancière 1999, ch. 2).

Returning to the text of Pettit’s account of neo-republican democracy, this time reading for the traces of the performative, as well as the status of the subject, it is worth examining in greater detail how Pettit strives to regulate politics. This requires us to attend to the locations in Pettit’s text where he discusses the norms which ought to govern deliberation, namely through an appeal to ‘acceptability-games’. As Pettit summarizes: ‘if a regime is designed to facilitate an individualized, unconditioned and efficacious form of popular influence, as our model requires, then it is bound to give a prominent role to games of acceptability and is bound therefore to generate a range of commonly accepted norms of policy-making’ (Pettit 2012, 260, emphasis added).

In processes of everyday deliberation over policy, reasons and considerations given by ‘the people’ ought to ‘count as relevant by the lights of all’, such that any ‘considerations adduced should help to make the policy acceptable to everyone, given shared assumptions about the dispositions of each’ (Pettit 2012, 253, emphasis added). The relevance of considerations should accord with everyone’s view as they are ‘or can be brought to be’ through deliberation and judgment formation that arises from the same dialogue (Pettit 2012, 253). Deliberating partners in such an ‘acceptability game’ are required to ‘treat others as equals’ and to be moved by the force of the better argument (Pettit 2012, 253). Here non-domination as it pertains to private domination (as opposed to public forms of unfreedom), re-emerges in the guise of the ‘acceptability game’, as a regulative ideal for the practice of deliberation.

Drawing further upon the insights gleaned from his philosophical work on discursive groups, recognition, and the possession of discursive control Pettit argues:

Under the pressures of the acceptability game, it is inevitable that participants will generally comply with the regularity of seeking out considerations that all others, no matter what their interests or opinions, can treat as relevant in collective decision-making; else they will have little impact. And it is equally inevitable that participants will register this fact in common awareness as well as registering at the same time that any failure of compliance will attract the inhibiting derision or disapproval of others. Those who present considerations that can only carry weight with a particular subgroup will be laughed out of court. (Pettit 2012, 254)

Here we can see the constraining effects of the discourse-theoretical figuring of ‘contestation’ at first hand, as matters of complaint or demands made against the state, will struggle for hearing should they not resonate with the considerations of the normative qua established or hegemonic norms. This regulation of political contestation and agency is likely to disproportionately affect members of those ‘sticky minorities’ who are relegated to the domain of experiencing ‘tough luck’ (cf. Pettit 2012, 177).

Pettit (2012, 255) admits that participants ‘may or may not be successful in gaining such acceptance for the relevance of the’ given particular ‘considerations in the domain addressed, certainly not on the first round’. Nonetheless, he assures the reader that with repetition and patience on the part of the dissenting subject, ‘if the consideration really does cohere well with the existing commitments of participants, then sooner or later it is very likely to win acceptance as a relevant coin in the currency of acceptability debates’ (Pettit 2012, 255, emphasis added). There is little solace for those finding themselves on the margins, remaindered by the normative force of the norm in the so-called republic of reasons. What is increasingly apparent is how the prioritizing of a politics of ‘contestation’ by Pettit, nonetheless, relies very strongly upon a broader sedimented or naturalized consensus which is formative of the subject of ‘discursive control’ and thereby distributive of reason, sense, or logos.

Whilst, as we have seen Pettit leaves open some scope for lower order dissensus through moments of contestation, we nonetheless feel the force of neo-republican consensus qua the normative and its disciplinary power in the sculpting of the subject and the shaping of their interests, desires, and potential political demands. This is not to stray beyond the obvious at this point, but to make the case, reading Pettit against the grain, that the norms which he projects forth as regulative of the activities of political representatives in the legislative process, are equally disciplinary norms which move in the opposite direction too. Turned back toward the subject of non-domination as a ‘citizen’, the regulatory force of the norm, constitutes a policing power which limits the scope and character as well as the subject of democratic political demands as they emerge from life itself in all of its abundance.

‘Consensus’ is not necessary at an everyday deliberative level for this norm-based order, but rather ‘dissensus’/contestation of this lower order status is accepted, if not promoted, not least in the cut and thrust of debate and deliberation over particular policy issues liable to divide discussants. Pettit’s claim, in such circumstances, is that, so long as any given difference of position in relation to a given issue does not throw into question, or rather, ‘offend’ against ‘any of the norms they hold in common’, not only will the participants be directed by such norms, but (re)productive of the order of norms specific to the community (Pettit 2012, 266). Viewed in terms of disciplinary forms of power (Foucault 1991) this corralling of dissensus, through the discourses of ‘offence’, ‘common norms’, and ‘deliberative community’, proves to be far more effective in suppressing political antagonism than any communitarian ring-fencing of permissible argumentation and claim-making, by making negative sanction by deliberative or discoursing partners seem ‘reasonable’.

The subject and the political problem of logos

The free person in possession of ‘discursive control’, and thus ‘fully fit to be held responsible for what they decide and do’ (Pettit 2001, 70), partially constitutes the subterranean theoretical presupposition of this scene of deliberation. The subject of discursive control, on Pettit’s account, must possess both the ‘ratiocinative’¹⁰ capacity to engage in discourse through reason and the ‘relational capacity’ to access the space of discourse in which they can practice such a capacity under ‘discourse friendly’ conditions. This, Pettit calls ‘discursive power’ or ‘discursive status’ and through the language of status and the articulation of the conditions for ‘enjoying’ discursive control, Pettit creates an inside/outside dynamic of distinction between the free-person and the infra-person, who is not yet, or may never be said to be free. With these two elements of discursive control, Pettit (2001, 79, 103) argues that the capacity to reason is not sufficient for freedom, but further that the subject with such a ratiocinative capacity must exercise this reason in a context of social relationships in which the other practitioners of reason recognize the subject as a person who is fit to participate in practical discourse, who counts as a speaking being.

Admission to the constituency of speaking beings counted by the proprietary order of ‘discourse friendly relations’, however, has historically depended upon the coincidence of the subject with a myriad of cultural, racial, and gendered extra-legal and non-state-centric powers. Such powers are determinate of the very same subject’s ‘intelligibility’ to its discourse partners (Butler 2016, 140–149), and therefore precede the arbitrary forms of power over inclusion and exclusion to the realm of republican citizenship. As Allen writes (of Forst’s critical theory), the space of reasons is a ‘space of power in the sense that it constituted through a certain kind of power relation that can only be justified to the participants after they have entered it and accepted its demands and constitutive norms’. That is access to moral and political discourse for agents is thinkable only after they have been subjected to a particular ‘form of life’ (way of being and meaning) in the first instance.

In this respect, I am critically concerned about the appearance of a trace of a particular theoretical possibility within Pettit’s text. Namely, that of positing the presence of an infra-person or more accurately the ‘infra-human’ (cf. Gilroy 2014) within the temporality of becoming the subject of discursive control. This theoretical presence can be traced by paying attention to the language Pettit uses to describe those who do not conform to the idealizations he ascribes to a ‘free-self’ and the ways in which this discourse of ‘discursive control’ is tied to an individuating responsibilization of the human. Within such an account, the failure to meet such idealizations is tantamount to the continued exclusion of a subset of human beings from not only politics, but the space of appearance in which they would be treated as equal and free persons by virtue of their assumed common humanity. Take for example the following passage in which Pettit describes the potential reaction to a person within the neo-republican space of reasons who does not meet the threshold of a ‘free self’: ‘Such a person, we must suppose, will be bedevilled by obsession, or compulsion, or chronic weakness of will, […] And with anyone subject to such pathologies we will naturally say that, […] they are not fully fit to be held responsible’, that is to be free, in either a philosophical or political sense (Pettit 2001, 87, emphasis mine).

This kind of dehumanizing language has a long imperial and colonial history in justifying and extending relations of domination and oppression against colonial subjects within the ‘historico-racial schema’ of the human (Fanon 1967). How far are we here, in Pettit’s text, from the ‘scientific racism’ of Kant and the figure of the Untermenschen (cf. Mills 2017a, ch. 6), or John Stuart Mill’s description of the ‘barbarian’ in their ‘nonage’ (Mill 2004, 14)? At stake is an onto-epistemological politics of anti-blackness, that is coeval with Western Enlightenment philosophy and scientific discourse that suggests that non-White people are ‘most representative of the abject animalistic dimensions of humanity, or the beast’ (Jackson 2020, 3; cf. da Silva 2007, 1–4)

Pettit is concerned with the need to further entrench the procedures through which non-domination can be secured communicatively. Through the appeal to ‘the norm of norms’ he both presupposes an ethical and disciplined subject and shores up the institutional expression of neo-republican proprietary order. It does so through its arrest and confinement of the performative dimension of language. The performative constitutes the condition of (im)possibility of political speech, both within and beyond the texts and political forms of Pettit’s neo-republicanism. As something of a ‘Messianic promise’, the performative or illocutionary speech act, introduces into language the play of a ‘believe me’ gesture which is both radically open and potentially self-arresting (Derrida 1996, 82). Pettit’s turn towards the political-cum-regulatory logic of (political) norms, reasonableness, and the need for intersubjective acceptability foreclose upon the openness of the performative. Further, Pettit now institutionalizes the policing of the performative and its relation to the fundamental category of logos, a policing which extends beyond the implicit veridicity of speech acts. As Jacques Derrida (2000, 467) reminds us,

Wherever there is the performative, whatever the form of communication, there is a context of legitimate, legitimizing, or legitimized convention that permits it to neutralize what happens, that is, the brute eventness of the arrivant (l’événementialité brute de l’arrivant). Put another way, […] performativity […] neutralizes the eventness of the event.

The effect of Pettit’s text is the double neutralization of such an event, that is the very neutralization of a future politics.

What emerges quite violently from Pettit’s text is the restaging, of the fundamental political fracture in Book I of Aristotle’s Politics between (political) speech, logos, and voice as phōnē (Aristotle 1988, 1253a9–18). Allocating the possession of logos and reason to the human, Aristotle takes voice, that capacity to express nothing more than pleasure and pain, to be a capacity proper to other animals. Re-reading this distinction between speech and voice in Aristotle through the work of Jacques Rancière (1995, 1999, 2010), we can identify the politically constituted differential, and thereby unequal, allocation of logos across the proprietary order. Re-citing Aristotle, Rancière stages the logic of dissensus within the distinction between speech and voice, deconstructing and reconfiguring the Aristotelian fracture, establishing the terms for his argument for democratic politics:

Alone of all the animals, man possesses speech [parole]. Without a doubt the voice [voix] is the method for indicating [indiquer] pain and pleasure. It is also given to other animals. Their nature proceeds only up to a point: they possess the feeling of pain and pleasure and they can indicate [indiquer] that among themselves. But speech [parole] is there for demonstrating [manifester] the useful and harmful and, as a result, the just and the unjust. It’s this that is man’s own, compared to the other animals: man alone possesses the feeling of good and bad, just and unjust. And it’s the community of these things that makes the family and the city. (Rancière 1995, 19, translated by and quoted in Chambers 2013, 94)

Rancière doubles the concept of indiquer/indique as indicating and that which is indicated: a sign. Rancière thus, displaces the ontology of language which underpins Aristotle’s narrative. Pointing to how both the human and animal are in possession of a shared sign, Rancière notes the role of logos or parole – as opposed to phōnē or voix – in the determination between the human and the animal, insofar as the speaking being will manage, or not, to demonstrate through the exercise of reason, their possession of such political speech, of logos – of discursive control. As Samuel Chambers (2013, 97, emphasis added) puts it, ‘rather than starting with a given subject who would then come to possess language, Rancière has placed the question of language (of interpretation, of signs) at the beginning’. Blurring and displacing that otherwise clear line in Aristotle between the human and animal, between reasoned political speech and the ‘noise’ which expresses mere pleasure or pain, what Rancière opens-up to us is a way of thinking the relationship between logos and its other (phōnē) in political terms and in relation to power. That is, in terms of the policing of who speaks and from what location within the given proprietary order can logos be enunciated or enacted. By appealing to the vocabulary of ‘noise’, ‘reasonableness’ and ‘discursive control’, Pettit introduces into the politics of deliberation a bifurcation of political claim-making that differentially and unequally allocates the capacity and right to speak politically – to engage in neo-republican politics.

I emphasize this question of interpretation and intelligibility, as the distinction between the human and the (racialized human-)animal, is founded upon a consensus of norms and reason that are unequally distributive of responsivity, attunement, and ethical openness to that which is experienced as Other to the ‘proper’ human (Derrida 2002). What this analysis of the pragmatics of neo-republican politics problematizes, in an immediate sense, is those forms of consensus that haunt the moments of apprehension and recognition that precede ascension to the status of ‘discursive control’ (cf. Butler 2016, 2–12). Such norms, and their attendant conceptions of reason, have a deep, old, and all-encompassing relation to white power, the imperialist category of the West, and to white supremacy (Mills 2017b, 242).

After Rancière we are left, not with a radicalized politics of recognition and visibility aimed at extending the category of logos per se, but a dissensual politics that refuses such a logic. Attending to the fact that there is an irreducible equality of ‘speaking beings’, of those beings (both human and non-human) that can address us in some way (cf. Derrida 2002), Rancière allows us to think a politics of non-domination that can break with the primacy of logocentrism in both normative political philosophy and republican political practice. In reproducing a politics that maintains a binary between logos/phōnē, discursive control/social death, discourse/noise, the human/the animal, political theory reaffirms logocentrism and risks reproducing racialized and gendered reason and structures of bio-political power and domination. Following Rancière’s improper politics of equality, we can begin to theorize a politics of non-domination that is rooted in forms of political action that do not demand recognition within the existing norms and hegemonic forms of reason and reasoning. Such a politics is one that puts into question and demonstrates from the outset the dominating nature of hegemonic distributions of the sensible and the reasonable, thereby affirming their equality to others and refusing the struggle for recognition within epistemological terms always already hostile to them. I read this to be the possibility Rancière (2010, 30) opens-up for us in his third thesis on politics, when he writes:

Politics [based upon equality] is a specific break with the logic of the arkhê. It does not simply presuppose a break with the ‘normal’ distribution of positions [order of recognition] that defines who exercises power and who is subject to it. It also requires a break with the idea that there exist dispositions ‘specific’ to these positions.

The politics of political theorising

In light of the critical reading of neo-republican reason developed here, it remains to ask where do we stand as critical political theorists with regards to the politics of non-domination, the role of reason, and the theory of the subject? What are the forms of political action and contestation that are available to us now, that we might not have grasped before reading Pettit’s theory of democratic politics? Otherwise put, what does a careful and critical reading of Pettit’s theory of the subject teach us? At our most critical, we might propose that Pettit’s normative political philosophy of freedom as non-domination is a ‘realistically utopian’ (Rawls 1999, 6) redescription of the political institutions of liberal democracy. This redescription we might suggest offers an account of how a depoliticized and passive citizenry may still be theoretically capable of exercising control over their governments. Pettit’s account of the subject and their acquisition of discursive control however resonates too strongly with the logics of coloniality, raciality, and patriarchy that pervade modern European political philosophy and its fundamental role in justifying relations of domination and oppression in the historical formation and legitimation of colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism. It is a normative political philosophy with critical pretence that does not offer a vision of the future l’avenir (to-come), but simply a repetition of the colonial present and its attendant structures of domination.

More generously put, the novelty and power of Pettit’s theory of politics of non-domination and its identification of the evil of ‘social death’ as the paradigmatic feature of slavery and unfreedom (cf. Haugaard 2020), is its emphasis upon a contestatory mode of politics that challenges the arbitrariness of power relations. This exciting and promising figuring of contestation at the centre of the politics of non-domination becomes blunted, however, first through its discourse theoretical rendering, and second through its dependence upon an account of subject formation. Echoing Rancière’s (2016, 87) critique of Honneth’s political philosophy, my wager is that any philosophical conception of personality, as an ‘anthropological construct’ of sorts, puts into jeopardy the very idea of a political community of equals it seeks to ground. Do we pay too high a political cost for the philosophical satisfaction that comes with a general theory of the subject? Instead of pursuing such a theory, might we be better served in our normative and emancipatory goals by attending to the ways in which relations of power shape and structure the very possibility of political agency in the first instance. Thereby we can begin to develop critical theories and grammars that amplify and elevate those practices of non-domination that further relations of equality, not simply in terms of extending orders of recognition and ‘discourse friendly relations’ (Pettit 2001), but more fundamentally, in terms of dissensually reconfiguring social space, reason, and the figure of the human.

Acknowledgements

This article has benefited from feedback from colleagues at the PSAI Political Theory section workshop, where I presented an earlier draft of the manuscript. Both Hasret Cetinkaya and Kevin Ryan took the time to carefully and critically read numerous drafts of this argument at various stages and they provided remarkably insightful suggestions, to them both I am indebted. I would also like to thank the Editor of Distinktion, and a special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful feedback.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Liam Farrell

Liam Farrell is a Lecturer in Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton. His research seeks to open up new avenues for thought by bringing contemporary anglophone democratic theory into dialogue with critical developments in post-foundational political philosophy, critical theory, post-colonial and post-humanist theorising and black feminist thought.

Notes

1 Pettit himself begins his A Theory of Freedom with an aspiration to develop a ‘theory of freedom in the classical, comprehensive mould exemplified by Thomas Hobbes […] and Immanuel Kant’ (2001, 1). What these two thinkers shared, according to Pettit, was a commitment to theorizing political liberty in relation to the ontological questions of free-will and personhood.

2 Fabian Schuppert (2013) and Arto Laitinen (2015) have each sought to read Pettit’s account of the normative conditions of freedom as non-domination alongside recent interpretations of Hegel’s theory of recognition and freedom. I think it is not entirely infelicitous to take this line of thought a step further, and to understand Pettit’s account of discursive control, read in conjunction with his democratic theory of will formation, as, in and of itself, a theory of recognition that is operating within a (post)Hegelian paradigm and ontology of politics.

3 I borrow this concept of a ‘proprietary order’ from Mark Devenney’s (2020) Towards an Improper Politics. I do not follow Devenney’s connection between ‘the proper’ and relations of property explicitly in this paper. I address the relationship between property relations, self-ownership and the subject of non-domination in my forthcoming book.

4 Here, it is worth recalling that consensus in Latin combines two words: con- (com), with/together; and -sensus from the Latin sentīre: to feel, to hear, to sense, drawing us to sensibility and the sensible, a proper order. Its opposite, dissensus, can similarly be traced etymologically to the Latin compound of: dis-, and -sensus. Dis, meaning ‘apart, asunder, in a different direction, between, or lack of, not’. We might say, then if a politics is to be located in its opposition to consensus, politics qua dissensus is improper to the relations of power that structure ‘common sense’. As such it is concerned with the disidentification with the dispositions, roles, and proper names of the hegemonic distribution of the sensible – it proceeds in the name of equality (cf. Rancière 2004).

5 Given the post-foundational critical theoretical frame through which I am engaging with Pettit’s thought, I do not believe there is any such thing as the ‘pre-political’. I use this phrase descriptively, but with Butler (1995) – who I quote as an epigraph to this essay – I take any theoretical positing of the Subject as decidedly political in nature – and more specifically belonging to the logic of what Rancière calls ‘the police’.

6 Gädeke sees potential in Pettit’s discourse-theoretical framing of non-domination in providing a clearer sense as to the normative basis of the politics of non-domination. She argues however that Pettit’s discourse-theoretical account of arbitrary power is intersubjective in a weak sense, and thus lacks explanatory and critical force (Gädeke 2020, 38).

7 In this sense, Allen is a good reader of both Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault. If there is a friendly ghost that haunts the analysis I develop in this paper, it is undoubtedly that of Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1997) urgent warning about the authoritarian and destructive dimension of rationality in The Dialectic of Enlightenment.

8 It is important to note that this is the only point at which Pettit discusses (potential) domination arising from racial difference in more than 800 pages of theorizing (1997, 2001, 2012). Such a fact is both astonishing and instructive as to the normative priorities and core assumptions of Pettit’s neo-republicanism and the forms of domination it prioritizes as being in need of critique and political rectification.

9 The objective of Pettit’s theory of democracy in its dual-temporality form is the dis-embodiment of popular sovereignty, such that ‘the people’ disappear from political action, as a potential source of domination. I understand this gesture by Pettit to be part of a longer history of poetics in Eurocentric political theory, which is productive of ‘normative fictions’ (Ryan 2020, ch. 1) which serve to conceal operations of power and violence that are constitutive of the possibility of normativity in the first instance, or as Achille Mbembe (2019, 67–68) describes it, the nomos of political space.

10 ‘Ratiocinative’, here, refers quite simply to the ability of the subject to reason with themselves and others, such that they can make up their own mind based on reasons given and discovered through discourse with others, or through their independent development of their own reasoning capabilities in given areas of discourse.