Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power

THIS BOOK argues for a retrieval of a political ethic of responsibility. It challenges the notion that contemporary predicaments of power need an ethical ground or supplement that is philosophically deduced, either in advance or outside the realm of political life. In this vein, it offers a historically informed exploration and critique of the current transatlantic “ethical turn” in the humanities and social sciences and the primacy it grants to ethical responsibility. Absent in these ethical theorizations of responsibility is a conceptualization of the predicaments of power in which responsibility would gain political edge. Overall, these are ethical theorizations that privilege a normative ground over the political field of power, and are symptomatic of the onset of a depoliticized politics that characterize the present in the North Atlantic world.¹ The impact of the ethical turn is thus contradictory: while having done its share in restoring the ethical import of responsibility, it has done so to the detriment of a political conception of responsibility. In the proliferation of rather solipsistic accounts of responsibility, the intersubjective moment of commonality that historically underwrites this concept since its early political incarnations is either abstractly posited, eschewed, or ultimately disavowed. What one finds instead are intrasubjective accounts of responsibility in which relations with others are abstractly invoked outside the texture of historical and political life. The upshot of intrasubjectivity is the desertion of any sense of commonality, of any mediating or shared sphere of action, which is often the domain of political life. One consequence of the turn to intrasubjectivity is the tacit disavowal of any meaningful sense of collective life, or of how a political situation is constituted, and the virtual eviction of any genuine notion of political responsibility; equally disavowed is a genuinely critical, sober mapping of the contexts impairing or enabling concrete ethical responsibility. Appeals to responsibility that disavow this moment of commonality end up curtailing the possibility of a sense of responsibility that assumes the burdens of acting collectively and is answerable to a genuinely democratic political form and its binding principles. For even a concept like imputation implies something beyond the attribution of an action to an agent: it also connotes having the responsibility to do something, to respond to something.² And that something often is an eminently heteronomous and collective predicament.

Accordingly, political responsibility is here understood as the need, on the one hand, to respond to a predicament of power both as an individual and as a member of a collectivity and, on the other, to face the burdens of acting and thinking as a participatory member of a collectivity. From this perspective, one raises important political questions that current accounts of ethical responsibility abjure or distort. One can ask, for instance, how does the idea of responsibility impact or affect the way in which the idea of “the individual” is conceived? Or how do ideas of political personation, collective life, and its political forms, relate to the idea of political responsibility? How does, say, intentionality figure in both individual accounts of ethical responsibility and in the more collective connotations of the term? Can one speak of degrees of responsibility? Or, stated differently: how does one reflect critically on the structural moment of political responsibility? Better still: how do questions of structural responsibility relate to questions about “structural beneficiaries” within political orders? Or how does one adjudicate responsibility to “everyday bystanders”?³ How do political forms binding and enabling a political order either foster or hinder a sense of political responsibility?

Out of this set of questions, or within it, emerges the difficult question of what and who are the subjects and objects of responsibility: who are the entities that are either deemed responsible or to which an individual or collectivity is responsible? There are two different aspects to this last question, even if both point to the centrality of fidelity in any conception of responsibility: first, the question of what is the concrete object or entity toward which one is responsible (say, responsibility toward God, oneself, one’s country or collectivity identity, or humanity); second, the question of who is the agent and bearer of responsibility. Last, where does political responsibility become actualized and by what means? But the idea of political responsibility also has explanatory power: historically, the question of who is politically responsible requires understanding scopes of action, structures, and contingencies, which are dialectically interrelated in the way a political situation to which a political actor responds is constituted: a political actor that could contribute to radically change, modify, or ratify and further constitute the predicament in question. Therefore, in treatments of these concepts in European and transatlantic political thought one finds the idea of someone being responsible when one has to answer for one’s actions or she needs to respond to a particular situation, its imperatives, openings, and constraints. In this case, the concept is already lined up with the idea of freedom. Without a modicum of autonomy and freedom, or meaningful realm of action, there is no responsibility. Similarly, political responsibility involves participation and shared power; without a measure of shared power, there is no genuine political responsibility.

Political Responsibility conceives responsibility as a “problematic,” provided this term is understood in terms of Fredric Jameson’s recasting of it. What it offers is “not a head-on, direct solution or resolution, but a commentary on the very conditions of existence of the problematic itself,” along with a broad sketch of an alternative way of casting the problematic of responsibility politically, a political account of political responsibility that critically engages with predicaments of power.⁴ Another of Jameson’s formulations carefully conveys the stakes of this interpretative principle: “it converts the problem itself into a solution, no longer attempting to solve the dilemma head on, according to its own terms, but rather coming to understand the dilemma itself as the mark of the profound contradictions latent in the very mode of posing the problem.”⁵ Yet this effort will be carried on by way of crafting a constellation that would map the interstices of this problematic in its conceptual and concrete historical articulations. By thinking about the problematic of political responsibility in this way, this book critically engages with current proponents of a strictly ethical responsibility, or an ethical politics of responsibility, which subordinates the political to the ethical. In so doing, it brings political and theoretical traditions into the same field of vision to serve as both benchmarks and contrasts and thus bring into sharper relief aspects of formulations that otherwise would go unnoticed, or be seen in isolation, as determinations of a particular historical and political constellation.

But thinking responsibility as a problematic is just one dimension of the present inquiry. The formulation of a largely forgotten tradition of political ethic and its corollary ideas of political responsibility is another. It is along these lines that political responsibility is conceptualized as structurally entwined with other concepts and practices both at the level of ideas and in its concrete historical instantiations in predicaments of power. Stated differently, this book sets out to map the current usages and valences of ethical responsibility, situate these within the larger theoretical, historical, and political transformation in which it has emerged as a central concept, and offer an argument for a political recasting of this concept and the problematic it enunciates. Echoing Theodor W. Adorno’s well-known formulation about universal history, responsibility needs to be both construed and denied: for to avow its moralizing or solipsistic versions is at best to comply with the status quo and at worst to indulge in a cynical rhetoric of individualism whose main upshot is blaming the victim; to construe, because it is an indispensable component of political life, especially for any participatory account of democratic life anchored in ideas of substantial equality, freedom, and shared power. A critical maxim is thus evoked: to conceptualize political responsibility one cannot not think in terms of collective life and ideas of shared political power. The double negative of this maxim is deliberate: it places the question of political responsibility squarely as a question of the advent and sustenance of genuinely democratic, and, by extension, socialist, political orders.

Broadly speaking, this book argues for what Sheldon S. Wolin once called, in connection with Machiavelli, a “political ethic”—or, more precisely, una poliética, in Francisco Fernández Buey’s felicitous but ultimately untranslatable formulation—that is bound to democratic political forms and formulates the corresponding concept of political responsibility. What is a political ethic (poliética) and how does it differ from the ethical politics currently on offer? Paraphrasing Bertolt Brecht, a political ethic attends to the ethical dimension of political life. Its aspirations are ethical, even if the goal is not to craft an Ethics, but rather to think about the ethical dimension of collective life. By and large, the overarching concerns of a political ethic are best defined as an attempt to re-cognize and theorize the diremption of ethical and political imperatives in political action.⁶ The term political ethic simultaneously refuses to damp the political element of collective life and to abjure ethical considerations in the realm of the political, while it acknowledges the impossibility of a smooth connection between the two and the intractability of blending the two poles—ethics and politics—in order to intervene in fields of power that demand a speculative yet historically concrete rendering of the two, which is precisely what the idea of a political ethic seeks to encompass.⁷ It is thus akin to a public ethic that deals with questions of collective life and power. It recasts universal commitments in light of the particular political forms that sustain them and understands political ideals—say, equality, freedom, solidarity—as thoroughly mediated by particular predicaments of power in their historical unfolding.⁸ Like art, a political ethic is extraethical: there is a politics and ethics of art, but art is ultimately governed by aesthetic criteria; similarly, there is an ethics to political life that respects the specificity of the political as a semiautonomous field, with its imperatives and predicaments.

In this vein, political responsibility is recast as inseparable from the exercise of power to redress a political condition or situation. For political responsibility to be actualized, it requires a meaningful sharing of political power. This emphasis need not disavow questions of intentionality or accountability; rather, it reformulates the terms of these questions in order to fully apprehend the political dimension of responsibility. Responsibility, as the Spanish philosopher Manuel Cruz has accurately suggested, is a “structurally intersubjective” concept.⁹ In contrast to moral formulations that heavily emphasize ethical and individualist meanings of responsibility, this book disentangles the question of responsibility from the concern with abstract discussions of agency, accountability, and otherness. Instead, political responsibility emphasizes the element of response, recasts the role of answerability, and separates responsibility from notions of guilt, while fleshing out the element of collectivity that its intersubjective and political connotations establish. In contrast to guilt, which is primarily an introverted and solipsistic concept marred by legalistic connotations, responsibility is foremost an intersubjective and dialogical category that, instead of adjudicating culpability, calls for an accountable response. The ambiguity of intentionality in any given political scene, which is frequently due to the mediating role of a vast array of imperatives, from administration and governance to market rationalities, is obvious enough. Yet a political account of responsibility, as opposed to a strictly moral conception, has to critically account for these forms of power and the nature of their imperatives. If, from the perspective of moral responsibility, one can answer to moral law, to a law of conscience, or to an ethical principle, politically one can answer to the state, its laws and imperatives, as in the tradition of reason of state, or one can respond out of fidelity to a political identity and the principles and institutions that promote it. Responsibility, as Joan C. Tronto emphasizes, “has its root meaning in response, and since a response is always a response to something, it is, by nature, even when expressed abstractly, about a relationship,” a relationship that, by extension, is always enacted in the context of historically constituted and politically sanctioned situations.¹⁰

Relatedness, however, cannot be conflated with the hypostatization of abstract intersubjectivity. On the contrary, the intersubjective moment of political responsibility has to reckon with differentiations, spatial and temporal, that only a mediated and necessarily limited sense of responsibility, responsibility in situation, can account for. Tronto herself has identified one of the crucial political questions: “who is responsible for caring what, when, where, and how.”¹¹ Responsibility is thus necessarily concrete, and cannot be conceived as infinite, or unlimited. To speak of political responsibility is to raise political questions about allocating responsibility for actions and situations, something that cannot be conflated with individualist notions of blame or blameworthiness. It rather pertains to collective life and how its forms of power are produced and reproduced, structured, restructured, and sanctioned.

In this vein, one can recast the element of answerability: say, from the perspective of a genuine socialism and its democratic political forms, answerability cannot be reduced to answering to the state and its surrogate logics of power, which undermine basic democratic principles of participation, equality, shared power, and accountability. Rather, answerability is conceived as a response that answers to the need to avoid compromising these democratic principles: that is its moment of fidelity. It is thus recast as the need to respond to rather than just answer for a predicament of power.¹² Emphasis is thereby placed on the responses demanded by virtue of one’s inhabiting, as a full participant, a political situation and its attendant scenes of power, the locus where one’s responsibility resides—that is, a sense of responsibility bound by a sense of fidelity to one’s political identity, but also defined by one’s position in the structure of power relations shaping the situation, as well as the benefits that one derives from it, sometimes just by virtue of being a recognized member of the collectivity. To invoke political responsibility today is to pose the need to respond politically to the predicaments of power in the context of the modalities of depoliticized politics characterizing liberal and neoliberal democracies, especially the United States, while pondering the prospect of facing the burdens of acting collectively and exploring the possibilities of critically assuming the obligations involved as a member of a democratic collectivity, one that is attentive to the forms of power it generates as well as to its uses and abuses. Recasting answerability also entails reconceiving “answering for” as “responsibility for” outside of moralism and discourses of lawful subjugation. Rather, political responsibility consists of responsibility for “the care of commonality” and the concomitant practices of “tending” and “intending” that the care of commonality involves. With characteristic political literacy, Sheldon S. Wolin articulated what is politically necessary: “in keeping with the idea of the political with commonality, res publica, common possession,” the practice of political responsibility requires “‘responsibility for’ the care of commonality…to tend and defend the values and practices of democratic civic life.”¹³ Not that such a politics, which is necessarily concerned with limits to the exercise of power, only bears the defensive edge Wolin frequently emphasizes. For democracy to be meaningful and sustainable it needs to be similarly offensive: to attack inequalities, patterns of domination, and forms of exploitation embedded in structures of power that ought to be abolished and whose beneficiaries need to be held accountable. This indispensable spirit of attack is not only curbed by the defensive moment invoked by his ideas of caring and tending—any politics worth the name, to be sure, needs a place for both moments—but by the sobering political literacy that only arises out of the political experience of becoming a participatory citizen. Citizenship, the basic category of democratic action in a delimited political space of shared fate between rulers and ruled, requires caring for collective endeavors, acting and deliberating with others, along with the responsibilities that come with the exercise of political power, its lessons, opportunities, and demands. Such care is constitutive of a democratic socialism—central to its political ethic.

It is to Manuel Cruz’s credit to have conceptualized the question of responsibility by way of the acute expression hacerse cargo—for which there is no exact equivalent in the English language. Possible translations range from felicitous expressions like “assume” or “take responsibility for” to less poetic and overly willful renderings such as “to take up,” “take over,” “take charge of,” or “take on board”—which captures the emphasis on response, as opposed to guilt, and the concept’s intersubjective and collective dimensions. Out of the possible English renderings, the verb assume or the expression to take responsibility for come close to capturing its nuances and thus would be the preferred choices. Hacerse cargo, once understood politically and bound to a politically constituted space, demands from a political actor a sense of political literacy and a defined and concrete locus of action. In an important sense there is no such thing as an “apolitical” standpoint, and whoever claims one simply refuses to assume political responsibility in the predicaments of power he inhabits.¹⁴ This is, in short, its core spatial determination.

There is, of course, a temporal determination specific to political responsibility. It is best understood in terms of how the past bears on the present, on a political situation in which one acts and to which one responds as well as the present and future projections that political responsibility entails, the weight of the past and how one is responsible for the historical structures of power bearing one’s name and from which one differentially benefits. This, not out of any essentialist sense of belonging, but by virtue of one’s benefiting by inhabiting these structures of power as a citizen or becoming their structural beneficiary. Retrieving a sense of historicity is thus constitutive of the citizen’s political responsibility. Responding to present-day predicaments of power and acting with others to redress them, while avoiding the reproduction of practices and dynamics of inequality and domination in the present and in foreseeable futures, is what political responsibility for a democratic political life ultimately entails.

Correspondingly, if the collectivity in question is one that in the past had been on the receiving end of asymmetries of power and privilege, political responsibility resides in acting politically to break with the orders of its reproduction, while recasting losses as defeats, rather than dwelling unreflectively on wounded attachments.¹⁵ Unlike guilt, moralism, or liberal pieties of shame that reduce larger dynamics of power into individual conceits that cast a political question in personal terms, or defensively collapse guilt with responsibility, political responsibility entails calibrating one’s response, in the midst of emotional and often visceral reactions when one is asked to take responsibility for the actions performed in one’s name and for the structures of power that constitute the stage in which one enjoys certain rights, privileges, and status. Again, responding politically to a situation at once presupposes and sustains a degree of political literacy that is attained and cultivated by way of difficult encounters, experiences, and actions. A political ethic of responsibility needs to ponder the obligations—past, present, and future—of human beings in their domain of life and action as members of a political collectivity. Finally, it requires conceptualizing the ethical dimension of collective life from the perspective of the imperatives of political action and the political forms at stake in binding the collectivity in question.