Our interpretation is open to contestation but comparatively better than a model that allows affirmation of anything whatsoever – criticisms of “exclusion” do not invalidate the utility of using a model of debate centered around state praxis as a regulative ideal toward which debate moves towards – their model reduces politics to luck

After the collapse of metaphysical justifications for universality, we do not have any choice but to admit that the version of universality we conjure into existence – and the a priori norms that support this universality – inevitably arises in a particular context: it is historically and culturally specific even as it strives to transcend this specificity. But – and my point here mirrors the argument I made about rationality above – this does not mean that our universalism is intrinsically worthless; while the loss of metaphysical foundations for our normative systems complicates their claim to universality, it does not automatically invalidate them. This is exactly what Allen is getting at in the passage I quoted at the beginning of this chapter: we make a mistake if we assume that our only options are either the delusion of being able to transcend our context into a realm of "pure" universality or a descent into "anything-goes" relativism. More specifically, Allen argues that we can profess the universal validity of some of our principles – such as the principles of equality, reciprocity, or mutual respect – as long as we remain aware that these principles are derived from the historical and cultural resources of Western modernity. In this manner, Allen advocates what she calls "principled contextualism": we may take our norms "to be universal and context transcendent, as long as we recognize that the notions of universalizability and context transcendence are themselves situated in the context of late Western modernity" (PS 180). An important part of this recognition is the admission that "it may turn out from some future vantage point that our normative ideals are themselves, in some ways that we have yet to realize, pernicious and oppressive" (PS 180). That is, we need to be "more historically self-conscious and modest about the status of our normative principles" (PS 180); among other things, we need to be open to the possibility that our principles can be contested. Yet this does not imply that "we are incapable of making normative judgments in light of such principles" (PS 180). Allen is looking for a way out of nihilistic relativism by proposing that our awareness that we must continuously interrogate our ethical principles does not mean that these principles are devoid of all value. Nor does our recognition that our principles cannot be divorced from their context mean that we cannot claim that they are capable of transcending their context; that is, our principles can be context-transcending without being context-neutral. This, as we saw in Chapter 2, is Butler's argument in Parting Ways, even if she ends up backpedaling on the univcrsalist implications of her approach. 14 More important for our present purposes, this is how Allen arrives at the "historical a priori" I have referred to in passing. As Allen explains, "The historical specificity of our a priori categories, their rootedness in historically variable social and linguistic practices and institutions" (PS 31-2) does not cancel the power of these categories to order our existence. However, if we want others to be convinced by our a priori ideals, we need to persuade them through a democratic process. If the Enlightenment resorted to aggression to spread its views, the Habermasian democratic method, according to Allen, relies on more collectively formed public opinions. Allen's point is akin to the one Benhabib makes through her notion of "democratic iterations": rather than the solitary Kantian subject trying to figure out in the abstract what everyone might conceivably agree on, the Habermasian approach offers a model where social agents collaborate with each other to forge a perspective that everyone can agree on. This junction of compatible views, then, becomes the current "historical a priori," the current version of the universal. Any given "historical a priori" can obviously take hegemonic forms. I grant, as does Allen, that we need to remain vigilant about the constitutive exclusions that a priori norms often imply. Yet the merits of a normative system that is brought into being through a continuous democratic process – a process that can accommodate the tensions of rethinking, refinement, and renegotiation – also seem considerable. Borrowing from Fraser, one could say that the historical a priori is always open to reframing. Such reframing happens, for instance, when individuals or groups who have been excluded from a given ethical frame demand admission to it, thereby automatically altering the parameters of the frame. Proposing that "misframing" may be "the defining injustice of a globalizing age," Fraser advocates – echoing Butler's observations about the necessity of revising the frames of perception that eliminate some populations from the status of the fully human – "an enlarged, transnational sense of who counts as one's fellow subjects of justice." 15 This implies that when the frame shifts – say, from a national to a transnational one – so does the historical a priori: an a priori that was formulated in a given national context might not be appropriate for a transnational one. There must thus be a period of readjustment, but this does not imply the neutralization of the a priori – as some cultural relativists might assume – but merely its reconfiguration. Or, to restate the larger argument I have tried to articulate, the concept of the historical a priori requires that we admit that an a priori principle can be normatively meaningful even as it is open to alteration; the a priori – as I noted above – holds until it is deemed somehow flawed or unjust. In Fraser's words, "The result would be a grammar of justice that incorporates an orientation to closure necessary for political argument, but that treats every closure as provisional – subject to question, possible suspension, and thus to reopening" (SJ72). The model Fraser advocates hence treats every ethical closure as provisional. Fraser calls this model "reflexive justice," specifying that it scrambles the opposition between the Habermasian democratic model on the one hand and the more poststructuralist, Marxist, and skeptical model (which she calls "agonistic") – the model that dominates contemporary progressive criticism – on the other. If the first of these is sometimes accused of being excessively normalizing, the second-which is essentially the model I have been analyzing in this book (with the exception of Levinas) – is, as Fraser puts it, "often seen as irresponsibly reveling in abnormality" (SJ73 ). Against this backdrop, the advantage of Fraser's model is the following: Like agonistic models, reflexive justice valorizes the moment of opening, which breaches the exclusions of normal justice, embracing claimants the latter has silenced and disclosing injustices the latter has occluded-all of which it holds essential for contesting injustice. Like discourse ethics, however, reflexive justice also valorizes the moment of closure, which enables political argument, collective decision-making, and public action – all of which it deems indispensable for remedying injustice. (SJ73-4) In this manner, Fraser declares the standard opposition between the Habermasians and the agonists to be a false one, for it is possible to admit the best insights of both by acknowledging the value of both opening (contestation) and closure (binding norms that enable ethical and political decisions). Such an approach rejects relativism, enabling normative judgments and political interventions, but without thereby locking the content of such judgments and interventions into a fixed, immutable definition. All of this of course implies that there is one norm that stands above every other: what Fraser calls "the overarching normative principle of parity of participation" (SJ60). On this view, Fraser explains, "Overcoming injustice means dismantling institutionalized obstacles that prevent some people from participating on a par with others, as full partners in social interaction" (SJ 60). In other words, for Fraser's paradigm to function, one needs a base-level faith in the democratic process even as one acknowledges that it is always going to fall short of its own ideals. Like Levinasian justice, which knows that it will never he able to live up to the demands of ethics, concrete democratic formations are invariably guilty, humiliated by their failures, but this cannot, for the Habermasians at least, discourage us to the point that we stop trying to improve them. As Benhabib explains: As with any normative model, one can always point to prevailing conditions of inequality, hierarchy, exploitation and domination, and prove that "this may be true in theory but not so in practice" (Kant). The answer to this ancient conflict between norm and reality is simply to say that if all were as it ought to be in the world, there would be no need to build normative models, either. The fact that a normative model does not correspond to reality is no reason to dismiss it, for the need for normativity arises precisely because humans measure the reality they inhabit in the light of principles and promises that transcend this reality. The relevant question therefore is: Does a given normative model enable us to analyze and distill the rational principles of existing practices and institutions in such a fashion that we can then use these rational reconstructions as critical guidelines for measuring really existing democracies? 16 Allen sums up the matter by noting that though imbalances of power are important for Habermasian critical theory to grapple with, the solution to this "can only be more discourse or debate" (PS 18). This continued faith in the perfectibility of the democratic process is what distinguishes the Habermasian feminists I have cited in this chapter from the thinkers – perhaps, again, with the exception of Levinas – I have discussed in earlier chapters of this book. The latter thinkers, as well as those aligned with these thinkers, would in fact ridicule the Habermasian stance for its naive inability to recognize how power corrupts the democratic process, how, for example, neoliberalism and global capitalism have torn democracy into shreds. As Wendy Brown explains, "This is a political condition in which the substance of many of the significant features of constitutional and representative democracy have been gutted, jettisoned, or end- run, even as they continue to be promulgated ideologically, served as a foil and shield for their undoing and for the doing of death elsewhere." 17 Indeed, what good can the ideal of participatory parity do in the context of biopolitical and other invisible forces of power that constitute us as compliant subjects well before we understand the basic principles of such parity? If our psychic lives, including our unconscious desires, fantasies, and motivations, are shaped by hegemonic power, then participatory parity seems like a mere stopgap measure – something that makes us feel slightly better about being nothing but the obedient marionettes of power. 5 To some degree I agree with such pessimism about the Habermasian democratic process. But I am not convinced that the alternative approaches I have analyzed in this book necessarily fare any better in terms of being capable of addressing the problem of power. I have already explained my reservations about the ability of Zizek and Badiou to do so. Butler may at first glance seem more competent in this regard, given that the critique of disciplinary power has always been central to her theory. Yet, as I have demonstrated, I am not reassured by her assertion that opposing power is a matter of negotiating with it. Nor am I persuaded by the haphazardness of her understanding of resistance – a haphazardness that arises from her rejection of agency. Take her assertion that the Benjaminian messianic rupture of divine violence – outlined in Chapter 3 – offers the possibility of a political intervention based on distraction: Perhaps we need to be more distracted, as Baudelaire was said to be, in order to be available to the true picture of the past to which Benjamin refers. Perhaps, at some level that has implications for the political point I hope to bring out here, a certain disorientation opens us to the chance to wage a fight for the history of the oppressed.JS Butler here offers disorientation and chance – rather than action, choice, or decision – as a political strategy. As she adds, "We have to be provisional situationists, seizing the chance to fight when it appears" (PW 110). This is not a new problem, for long before Butler's turn to ethics, she wrote, in relation to our tendency to identify with the power structures that subjugate us: "The very categories that arc politically available for identification restrict in advance the play of hegemony, dissonance and rearticulation. It is not simply that a psyche invests in its oppression, but that the very terms that bring the subject into political viability orchestrate the trajectory of identification and become, with luck, the site for a disidentificatory resistance."19 I have already expressed my dissatisfaction with the idea that the psyche invariably "invests in its oppression," but in the present instance I want to call attention to Butler's reduction of resistance – here configured as a practice of disidentification – to a kind of lucky break from the generalized background of power. Allen has noted the same problem, arguing that luck is too flimsy a basis for political resistance, and pointing out, furthermore, that Butler's reluctance to theorize the social world as anything but hegemonic makes it difficult for her to envision the possibility of social solidarity, including nonsubordinating, nonstrategic forms of mutual recognition. As Allen asserts: Without a more fully developed and less ambivalent notion of recognition, Butler is left unable to explain the possibility of collective or, ultimately, individual resistance .... Without an account of how the recognition of our commonality provides the basis for political community and collective resistance, Butler is left suggesting that the transformation from identification to disidentification, from signification to resignification, from subjectivation to a critical desubjectivation, is nothing more than a matter of luck. (PS 93) Exactly. As complicated and potentially flawed as the democratic ideal of participatory parity may be, it still seems like a better basis for political action than dumb luck.