They have sequencing backwards—it’s not that we have to make deliberation affective, we have to make affect deliberative—affective redescriptions are only useful insofar as they facilitate deliberative testing based on shared understanding—this straight turns their offense

To put this in the language of Deleuze, deliberative redescription can function as a war machine. The experimenting with resonating reasons in a public on the part of activists is an exercise in “plugging in” a resonance machine into the public sphere. The transformative power of the resonance machine, understood as an inventive redescription of our received practices, has the power to transform the way citizens see their shared world, their own interests, and the suffering of others. The work of counterpublics is to “smooth” the striated space of public political culture so as to displace old prejudices and allow new identities and claims to flourish.

But if this is so, then deliberative democracy does not stop here. This “weaponry” of redescription is of value only insofar as it opens up conceptual spaces for reason giving. It is here, along this destratified plane, that citizens and spectators have to make use of what Deleuze calls “tools” to build up reasoned but revisable agreements about what causes to pursue, what practices to quash, or which candidates to elect or kick out. Indeed, the creative work of redescription is only the mise-en-scène of a democratic praxis through which ordinary people offer and contest what they think to be good arguments and reasons about political issues. It is only through the reflective pursuit of overlapping agreement that collective action becomes possible. [End Page 287]

Once we see all this, that the modern public sphere is an indefinite sphere for the circulation and contestation of expansive reasons, we have grounds for questioning Connolly’s characterization of deliberative intellectualism. Recall that this claim is that deliberative democrats are captured by too narrow a vision of thought, one that makes no place for the visceral and affective registers of thinking. I want to turn this argument around and suggest that Connolly himself focuses too closely on the moral psychology of the individual citizen and does not give enough credence to the decentered institutional registers by which deliberative persuasion takes place. The public sphere serves as a mediating institution between the visceral and the conceptually articulate, the actual and the virtual.

Connolly describes the visceral register and the amygdala as inscribing cultural values and judgments directly into the “soft tissue” of thought. Connolly’s argument hinges on the claim that what the body remembers, in this visceral sense of proto-thoughts, is both distinct from and more concrete than the conceptually refined thinking of reasoned argumentation. But when this argument is refracted through a critical theory of the public sphere, the dichotomy between visceral and intellectual he introduces falls flat. Of course the limbic system and even the stomach can be said to learn cultural codes, discourses, and symbolic orders. Yet these codes and discourses are themselves primarily linguistic orders that circulate at the level of reasons and understandings in the public sphere. They are precisely the sorts of discourses that circulate in the public sphere and are thus subject to its rationalizing, radicalizing, and democratizing power. While you cannot argue with the disgust you feel in your stomach directly, the kinds of understandings that provoke that disgust are part of a lifeworld that reproduces itself through the exchange of reasons. For example, the relatively recent transformation in the popular perception of smoking from something innocuous to something disgusting over is a clear example of how the publicization of reasons to avoid smoking, combined with cultural practices that reflect and rearticulate these reasons (bans on smoking indoors, more explicit warnings about health costs, etc.), feed back into the visceral judgments about its value. It is at the level critical publicity, not visceral manipulation alone, that these discourses are challenged and transformed.

Negotiation

Tactics and techniques alone are insufficient for reinvigorating democracy in our late-modern world. Cooperation, deliberation, and collective action are needed first and foremost. But does Connolly really frame the [End Page 288] distinction between the two in such stark terms? Surely this way of putting the point must overstate the case. As I have mentioned, he issues a number of caveats that stress that he is not to be taken as suggesting that he sees no value in deliberation or public reason. As we have also seen, however, the power of dialogue and mutual understanding can have little place in his vision of politics owing his critique of intellectualism and his Deleuzian micropolitics. He foregrounds the multiple registers of thinking, an ethics of self-care, and a micropolitics of manipulation, all the while downplaying the issues of the public sphere, publicity, and political dialogue. But there is another theme lurking in the background of Connolly’s texts. Behind the celebration of ethics and micropolitics there are vague but regular appeals to another ingredient in his ethos of pluralism. It is something he refers to, all too in often in passing, as negotiation (1999, 35, 92, 143, 186; 2002, 138; 2005, 65, 123–26).21

An ethos of pluralism may come about through tactical interventions into the visceral but also through a modus vivendi negotiated between interdependent parties who honor different “final moral sources.” In negotiation, the parties bring their comprehensive conceptions to bear on issues of political disagreement. According to Connolly, negotiation is a conception of political dialogue that abstains from hiding behind a privileged Kantian account of right that magically floats above the messy world of competing conceptions of the good. Rather, it takes place between the unavoidable conceptions of the good that citizens bring to politics. This thick negotiation means that deeply held convictions about religion, the good, and so on are put on the table and are opened up to the scrutiny and critique of others. To endure the agon of opening oneself up in this way, all parties need to acknowledge the “comparative contestability” of their fundaments; that is, citizens need to acknowledge that their conception of the good is just one among others and that they have no special privilege or insight that would make it right for them to impose their understanding of the good on others (1999, 8). Trying to reach some understanding across these differences, in a situation in which the interdependence of identities and interests is not something abstracted from deliberation but the very substance of it, is the hard work of an agonistic democratic politics. Shared understandings or consensus are of course not the likely outcome of this sort of negotiation, but good negotiation will make for revised self-understandings and maybe even some sort of self-transformation of the participants involved. Good negotiation, as Connolly calls it, shares information, challenges prejudices, and produces [End Page 289] a degree of mutual respect, or rather an affirmation of “ comparative contestability,” when agreement is not possible. That is, good negotiation is good deliberation.

Rereading his comments on resonance machines from the perspective of his comments on negotiation gives a different impression of how Connolly thinks a transformative democratic politics ought to function. That is, folding the politics of affective infusion into an agonistic but respectful process of negotiation begins to look a lot more like the redescriptive politics of the public sphere proposed by deliberative democracy. The generous ethos of public engagement Connolly champions as negotiation, then, appears to be an instance of deliberative democracy, not an alternative or even a supplement to it. However, his account of negotiation is incomplete as it stands. Connolly’s negotiation captures the normative concerns of deliberative democracy but lacks the accompanying explanatory function of a critical theory of deliberative democracy. Where are the fora of this negotiation if not in the public sphere, and how do these moments of responsive negotiation add up to displace the stingy sensibility that has puts a strangle hold on a more civil and egalitarian public ethos? Without a revised account of how negotiation contributes to a democratic public sphere—through participating in it, drawing on it as a resource, transforming its subjectless claims, and being transformed by them in turn—negotiation lacks the critical resources to mobilize a democratic left today. Torn between the adversarial and manipulative politics of war machines on one side and an ethically sensitive negotiation that seeks understandings and mutual respect on the other, Connolly’s recipe for a democratic reinvigoration of the left oscillates back and forth between a worrisome politics that would subvert popular reflection and a dialogical art that would provoke it. A critical theory of the public sphere, however, closes this gap and finds room for both power and legitimacy, strategy and communication, within a sociologically complex defense of a radical alternative: deliberative democracy. [End Page 290]