Democracy and the Political Unconscious

In chapter 1, in discussing the public sphere, I began to describe what I mean by democratic politics. As noted there, democracy takes place in this public realm where public meaning and purpose are created, ultimately the meaning and purposes that steer a political community. A true democracy begins early and deep, in the abilities of all members of the polity to feel themselves members of a common public space with a hand in shaping its contours. Democracy takes place in the assembly and the town meeting, not merely in the private space of a voting booth. A democracy is not an agglomeration of free individuals; it needs a public, in the Deweyan sense, that can develop judgment and set direction about things common. My approach is very Aristotelian, but it does not require importing all of Aristotle’s metaphysical biology or politics. It simply means thinking that human flourishing involves being part of the project of forming a public life together. (Those who want to mind only their own business may want nothing to do with this, though they should be aware that abdicating public business also involves severely curtailing what counts as one’s own affairs.) Yet even as it is Aristotelian, my view is highly informed by both poststructuralist and pragmatist thought. The result is a nonfoundational theory of politics that goes much further than the work of many to whom I am indebted, including Iris Young and Jane Mansbridge. In the last half of this book I develop a model of deliberative democracy that I call integrative, for it sees participants in deliberative discourse as weaving their various and partial perspectives into a view of the whole that might guide their actions.

This view of democracy and politics merges uncannily well with the psychoanalytic theory of sublimation and human development. What matters in both democratic politics and sublimation is what happens in public. Dealing with trauma that besets the public sphere calls for public work, not private decision making. This is not just a theoretical edifice. Let me describe how it works in practice, internationally in some of the most challenging parts of the world.

Elections, it seems, may exacerbate societal divisions rather than heal them. Elections lead to a winner and a loser and, as in the case of many countries in the Middle East, the loser may be a group that has long enjoyed privileges and power that it is not willing to give up without a fight. Elections tend to equate the act of being a citizen to that of becoming a voter. By so doing, it limits the whole responsibility of citizenry to that of choosing among a slate of candidates. Most often it is a solitary act, performed by the individual in the confines of a small voting booth. In divided societies, the challenge for any political intervention aimed at promoting sustainable democratic change is to move the individual from the confines of his or her self (often defined by the tribe or ethnic identity) to the wider realm of a citizen actor, often defined by the national identity. This transition from one narrowly defined identity component (tribe/clan/confession) to a more inclusive one (the nation-state) is the major challenge to any democratic transformation in a divided society. Representative democracy, per se, is least capable to help with this transition. (Slim 2007)

What is needed is the creation of dialogue spaces, deliberative meetings, and opportunities for collaborative work that provide testing grounds where one citizen may listen to the other and understand where he or she is coming from, may try joint safe activities like brainstorming together, and eventually, may understand the self and what and how the individual has to change in order for societal change to happen. The story of Nelson Mandela is great testimony to the reality that self-induced change in one’s own attitude about the other side, one’s image of “the other,” is a necessary precursor to a changed relationship with that other. What is missing from the work of most international organizations involved in this area is just this embracing of a broader concept of democracy that moves beyond technical assistance (with its mere machinery) to the promoting of sustainable and safe spaces where people can, over a sustained period of time, learn and test the basic underpinnings of citizenship on which democracy rests. (Slim 2007)

Slim works closely with Harold Saunders, an architect of the Camp David Peace Accords and a prominent career diplomat until 1981, now the chairman and president of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue. They have both been writing about a “citizens’ peace process,” which focuses on working with the unofficial sectors of societies and regions in conflict. Their work continues a project begun under the Eisenhower administration, when Eisenhower asked Norman Cousins to try to get some kind of unofficial but high-level dialogue going between the United States and the Soviet Union. The two nations, mired in the Cold War, couldn’t talk with each other officially, but Eisenhower understood that it was vital for some kind of discussion to occur. Cousins was on the board of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, which he enlisted to help. The first meeting of former officials from both countries was at Dartmouth College, and all the many subsequent meetings were dubbed the Dartmouth Conferences. The participants met regularly throughout the remainder of the Cold War and developed modes of relating that largely involved each side talking about its own affairs, not opining or railing about the other’s affairs. I think these conferences were a vital part of preventing the Cold War from ever becoming catastrophic.

As the Cold War ended, the Dartmouth Conferences became regional conflicts task forces. Participants began to focus on and draw in people from regions in conflict throughout the world. During the 1990s Saunders and Slim worked in Tajikistan, starting a citizens’ peace process to get through the country’s civil war. As of this writing they are working with unofficial leaders from various parties and sectors in Iraq, bringing them to safe places outside the country to start to find some way to forge a nation together. The key task in all such work, Saunders writes, is for the parties to develop relationships, by which he means “the continuous interaction within and among clusters or associations of citizens that make up a whole body politic” (Saunders 2005:55). In a peace process that has involved deeply conflictual and traumatic pasts, Saunders sees five dimensions of relationships that need to be developed. First there is identity, which is largely founded on a people’s experience.

No person, group, or country can be fully described in terms of a snapshot or measurement of physical characteristics at a particular time. It is essential to know where a person or group “is coming from.” What developmental process or interactions with others have brought them to the present place and moment—shaped their worldviews and their approach to others? How individuals are taught to “remember” past interactions—traumatic experiences that produced a sense of grievance or victimhood or of great achievement—may be more important in shaping their present sense of identity than knowing objectively what happened. Each party to an experience depicts, mourns, or lauds it differently. People do not easily forgive. Some may let go of past pain; others will hug the pain close. (Saunders 2005:66)

Identity thus includes the “chosen traumas” and “chosen glories” that Saunders’s friend and colleague, eminent psychoanalytic theorist Vamik Volkan, described. Volkan, whom I quoted at the very start of this book, writes that he uses the term “chosen trauma” to describe the collective memory of a calamity that once befell a group’s ancestors (Volkan 1997:48). A chosen trauma is “more than a simple recollection; it is a shared mental representation of the event, which includes realistic information, fantasized expectations, intense feelings, and defenses against unacceptable thoughts” (ibid.). Volkan uses the word “chosen” in this context not to indicate that the group volunteered for the trauma or its psychic consequences but because “the word chosen fittingly reflects a large group’s unconsciously defining its identity by the transgenerational transmission of injured selves infused with the memory of the ancestors’ trauma” (ibid.) He lists a handful of examples, including Czech identity founded on the defeat in the 1620 Battle of Bilá Hora that deprived the Czechs of freedom during 300 years under the Hapsburg monarchy; the Lakota people’s memory of defeat in the battle of Wounded Knee in 1890; the ways the Jews will “never forget” the Holocaust; and the Crimean Tartars’ definition of themselves by their 1944 banishment from Crimea. I could add the traumatic identity of the Roma in central Europe, the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, the Basques in Spain, the Armenians in Turkey, and much of the eastern Mediterranean countries vis-à-vis the Turks/Ottoman empire. How such groups deal with or work through their chosen traumas shapes the kind of relationships they might be able to forge with others.

The other four factors, according to Saunders, include:

(2) interests, both concrete and psychological—what people care about—that bring them into the same space and into a sense of their dependence on one another, interdependence, to achieve their goals, (3) power, defined not only as control over superior resources and the actions of others but as the capacity of citizens acting together to influence the course of events with or especially without great material resources, (4) perceptions, misperceptions, and stereotypes: and (5) the patterns of interaction—distant and close—among those involved, including respect for certain limits on behavior in dealing with others. (Saunders 2005:56)

Through all these aspects of developing political relationships following conflict and trauma, the ability of participants to work through trauma is crucial. Every step of the peace process involves creative talk and what Christopher Bollas calls unconscious freedom. Peoples will not be free to imagine and forge new relationships if they are imprisoned by past traumas. So the talk that goes on in any peace or transitional process must always also involve a working through from trauma to freedom of and for the political unconscious.

Much political philosophy of the late twentieth century takes its cue from Immanuel Kant, certainly and rightly a hero for those championing democracy and justice. In the deontological tradition, perhaps less in Kant’s own theory than in contemporary “projects of Enlightenment,” such political theory postulates that the aim of public deliberations is agreement on questions of justice, mutual understanding of and agreement on what courses of action can pass the test of universalizability. Such theory calls on participants to strip themselves of particular attachments and proclivities in order to adopt a universal point of view.

Where such theory seeks universal answers to moral and political questions, democratic theories that draw from the pragmatic tradition and kindred continental philosophical traditions offer a vision of deliberation as a practice that helps a public to find or make itself, helps this public develop an understanding of the political topography of its problems, and aims for integrating multiple, particular points of view into a provisional public judgment that can be used to create just and sustainable public policy. Note that the third feature can work hand-in-glove with a psychoanalytic understanding of “working through” loss and trauma. Even in a deliberation on a matter as mundane as energy policy, there are, when plumbed, deep choices about sacrifice, potential and real loss, that have to be grieved or worked through.

I draw on Dewey, Derrida, and other allies to develop a pragmatic understanding of the public and of what deliberative public judgment might be.¹ Where deontological approaches try to strip themselves of particularity (at least in their logical tests for universalizability, though less so in the form of the humanity principle), integrative and pragmatic approaches aim to unearth the richness of particularity. In deliberatively trying to understand problems, this richness has two sides: the manifold aspects of a problem itself as well as its consequences for all involved; and the meaning it has for all of us in connection with our own ever-evolving values, concerns, and purposes. When we look for the meaning of an event or a problem, it is not just what it means but what it means for us. Public deliberation helps elucidate the topography of a problem and the range of political permission on what can be done. In fact, in deliberations, a seemingly inordinate amount of time is spent trying to understand the problem itself (whether it’s crime, immigration, the U.S. role in the world, or anything else). This may be the case because understanding the problem and its meaning for us is a matter not just of excavation and discovery but also of creation, interpretation, and working through. In articulating what a problem means for us, we also begin to articulate (both retrospectively and prospectively) the meaning of “us”: who we are, what we want to stand for, and with whom we are in relation, including those who might have seemed to be our enemy.

The meaning of “us” in a deliberative context provides a way of thinking about who we are as a “public.” Investigating the meaning of “public” in “public deliberation” is, I think, worthwhile. Let me start by saying, much as I think Dewey knew, that the public is not a thing, and this nonthing we call a public is quite intriguing and baffling. We often refer to it with the definite article, the public. To use the term “publics,” as some with multicultural sensibilities sometimes do, is to twist the word beyond recognition, for “public” seems designed to connote a collectivity, really an uber-collectivity of members of a political community (on whatever scale); if there is more than one collectivity, then any one of them isn’t a collectivity or a public at all. Instead of a public, we might call it a faction.

I say the public, whatever it is, is not a thing. By that I mean that it is not waiting in the wings. It is ephemeral. It seems to come together one day and disperse the next. A public is always in relation to something else, whether a problem that can, upon recognition, band people together, or a cultural production or a speech. Yet with the latter, “a public” seems to mean anyone paying attention, and calls for little more than paying attention. That’s what we call an audience, not a public.

Since public deliberation calls for participants, not observers, we need to try to understand what this public is in a civic dimension rather than a spectator sense. But civically speaking, there is a widespread concern that perhaps, as Walter Lippman claimed, the public is a phantom. We invoke the phantom public to make ourselves feel that we have a real democracy. But look around, he noted; people seem to be unable to fathom the complexities of the problems that beset them, and much less are they able to engineer solutions. They barely know what is going on. They are like the theatergoer who shows up in the middle of the second act and leaves before the curtain closes, having stayed just long enough to figure out who the villains and the heroes are.

Well, maybe you are right, John Dewey replied. The public is inchoate, but this is largely because people have not found a way to fathom the problems that beset them—and each other. “At present, many consequences are felt rather than perceived,” Dewey wrote; “they are suffered, but they cannot be said to be known, for they are not, by those who experience them, referred to their origins. . . . Hence the publics are amorphous and unarticulated” (Dewey 1954:131). To become a public, people need something that brings them together as a public. “An inchoate public is capable of organization only when indirect consequences are perceived, and when it is possible to project agencies which order their occurrence” (ibid.). When people seem unable to cohere as a public, to grasp problems or identify solutions, the remedy is not to take away their authority but rather, Dewey argued, to find ways to help the public find itself.

Identifying problems and beginning to see how these problems affect them and their fellows helps a public start to find itself. Dewey noted two other essential processes: the public needs to be able to produce a knowledge of what could be done to address the problems, in the form of public opinion, public judgment, or public will, knowledge that ideally could help shape public policy; and members of the public need to be able to communicate together to help create this public knowledge. “Systematic and continuous inquiry into all the conditions which affect association and their dissemination in print is a precondition of the creation of a true public. But it and its results are but tools after all. Their final actuality is accomplished in face-to-face relationships by means of direct give and take. Logic in its fulfillment recurs to the primitive sense of the word: dialogue” (ibid. 218).

The public can find itself, or to put it more aptly, make itself by coming together to talk about the pressing problems of the day, to identify their sources, see how the problems differentially affect others, and try to decide together what should be done. Out of these processes, which all amount to what we call public deliberation, might emanate informed public opinion about what should be done. This information has a special status. Dewey put it this way: “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied” (ibid. 207). The public may enlist experts or governments to fix its problems, but it alone is the best judge of what needs to be addressed and whether the remedy is successful.

Dewey’s clarification still leaves us with many problems. For one, how in fact the public can make itself, especially when its members have been polarized or wounded; what help it needs; who can help; and how. For another, how the public creates its intelligence, opinion, or judgment. And finally, how the public’s understanding of what should be done can have any impact on those in the business of governing. Dewey might have had a nice rejoinder to Lippman, but history took its cue from Lippman, not Dewey, and the political system generally proceeds as if citizens are merely clients, taxpayers, and occasional voters, not a potential public with any valuable knowledge or authority to shape public policy.

A public makes itself performatively. It is in the process of doing public work that people become a public. Recently I heard a talk where the author made such a claim about the body itself (Morris 2006). If we notice what happens when a part of the body is immobilized, say, when a broken arm is put into a cast, we notice that over time, as the bone heals, the muscles atrophy. After the bone mends, its strength is only recovered when it is repeatedly tested. Physical therapy involves putting the body to work precisely when and where it is not yet up for that work. The bone is not healed until it is able to withstand stress, and it only can come to withstand stress by doing the work when it’s not ready. It becomes a body by bodying. The body is an effect of a body working.

Likewise for the public. Writing in the 2004 issue of the Higher Education Exchange, David Mathews proposes that “a sovereign or democratic public comes into being only when people begin to do the work of citizens, which Harry Boyte of the University of Minnesota calls ‘public work.’ This way of conceptualizing the public sees it as a dynamic force rather than a static body of people. . . . In other words, the public doesn’t just do the work—doing the work creates the public” (88). This process-oriented view suggests that there need not be unity or unanimity in advance of the public work of deliberation; whatever might emerge will do so in the process.

The problem with a performative answer to the question of how a public makes itself is, ultimately, a chicken-and-egg problem: where to begin. If public making occurs through a public working, how did this public find itself in the midst of this work? If public making, as Mathews writes, “isn’t separate from collective knowing, deciding (deliberating), and acting,” if “it is those activities,” how does it find itself there?

I think that individuals become a public when they come together, with their individual opinions, preferences, and complaints, and begin to talk together, or whenever they are thrown together and start to figure out how and why they were thrown together. A few years ago I heard an Argentinean woman describing a moment outside the bank doors, when once again the political system was in crisis and the financial markets in turmoil. She was standing in line with hundreds of other people similarly worried about their savings, and then she and others looked around and at each other and begin to identify themselves as a public created in this moment of recognition, of this connecting of the political crisis, the financial crisis, and their collective welfare.

If individuals are treated only as individual complainants, or even as individual citizens to be surveyed, addressed, assured, a public cannot come into being. If politics proceeds by recording individual preferences or adding up individual votes, nothing like public work can take place. The major problem of our day is that Lippman and later Joseph Schumpeter convinced political thinkers and leaders that democracy can happen so long as individual views are aggregated. So long as public policy is consistent with individual preferences, they argued, a society is democratic. But this view of democracy is more about satisfying individuals, like a well-functioning market (in fact, it entirely takes its cue from market logic), than about rule by the people, that is, if we are to think of “the people” as some kind of collective public.

There are two problems here. One is that the aggregated sum of individual views is inferior to the public understanding that comes about when people compare notes. An aggregated sum adds up partial perceptions and blind spots, but public understanding results when people begin to fill in and interconnect partial views. When people deliberate together about issues, in a conversation that might ramble among stories, reasons, interpretations, and perspectives, an integrative process takes place. Together they unfold a problem through the back-and-forth of conversation, offering perspectives, anecdotes, and concerns. As this process goes on, participants create an understanding of the topography of a political issue and begin to see how various options would or would not be able to navigate that terrain. No aggregation of preferences on an issue could ever approximate what deliberation produces.

The other problem is that aggregating individual views does not do any of the work of deciding what should be done. The task of politics is ultimately to decide what to do, work that still has to occur after an aggregation; but in this model the work is done by officials, not the public. Unlike democracy, here officials take the aggregation of individual views under advisement as they do the work of deciding what to do. In a democracy, it is the considered opinion or judgment of the people, the demos, the demes, that charts the course.

Despite the hold that Walter Lippman’s and Joseph Schumpeter’s desiccated notions of democracy have on us, there is something else about public opinion that has an even stronger hold. Politicians continually refer and defer to it, even well between election cycles. There seems to be some kind of democratic ideal that gives public opinion gravitas even as the usual ways of gathering public opinion leave much to be desired. Asking a mass of individuals for their views, never tempered through public deliberation, and then tabulating the results delivers a table of preferences, not a public opinion.

Putting this more poetically, Jacques Derrida writes, “public opinion is de jure neither the general will nor the nation, neither ideology nor the sum total of private opinions analyzed through sociological techniques or modern poll-taking institutions” (Derrida 1992:87). No public comes into being through aggregation. If public opinion is to be more than “the silhouette of a phantom,” to borrow Derrida’s wonderful phrase, it must be something other than the aggregation of private opinions. Instead of asking individuals what they think, people need to come together to decide what to do, to render a judgment on matters affecting the polity: “Opinion, as its name indicates, is called upon to pronounce itself by means of a judgment,” Derrida writes. “This judgment is not some knowledge, but an engaged evaluation, a voluntary act. It always takes the form of a ‘judgment’ (yes or no) that must exercise power of control and orientation over this parliamentary democracy” (Derrida 1992:90–91).

The ideal of public opinion is that it guide public policy, that the people be ultimate arbiters of what the polity should do, where its policies should go. The democratic hope is that public opinion be both authoritative and more able to grasp what is at stake than elected officials might. “As the place of a potential electorate,” Derrida writes, “public opinion is an assembly of citizens called upon to decide, by means of a judgment, issues that are within the competence of legal representation, but also issues that escape them, at least provisionally, in a zone that is being extended and differentiated today in an accelerated way, thereby posing serious questions about the present functioning, if not the very principles, of liberal democracy” (ibid. 91–92).

The problem today is that the representative system of liberal democracy produces a gap between the public and its representatives, and any opinion that a public manages to form must be heard, and represented, by these representatives, who no longer have much interest in heeding or taking seriously what the public might deem important. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The mystery, if there is a mystery, of how a public performatively creates itself is not in its finding itself doing the work. It is not that people might occasionally come together to talk—though we could certainly use more opportunities and occasions. The mystery may be in the work itself. What is this work? What is this public doing? Derrida says it is judgment, not a knowledge; a deciding what should be, not an ascertaining of what is true or false.

Compare Derrida’s view to that of one of the leading theorists of deliberative democracy in the Kantian mold, Jürgen Habermas, as he criticizes the communitarian movement. Notice how Habermas disparages deliberations aimed at public self-understanding and public making in favor of deliberations aimed at reaching understanding about what is universally right for all (the moral equivalent of “true or false,” not the ethical judgment Derrida calls for). “According to the communitarian view, there is a necessary connection between the deliberative concept of democracy and the reference to a concrete, substantively integrated ethical community,” writes Habermas, borrowing Hegel’s language. While an ethical community (sittlichkeit) is concerned with what is good for itself, a moral order (moralität) is concerned with what is universally good for all (Habermas 1996b:24). Political philosophers term these concerns ethics versus morality (rather confusing, since usually the terms are barely distinguishable), as well as “the good” (what is good for us) versus “the right” (what is just or right for all). Habermas favors focusing on universal morality rather than particular notions of the good. His worry about communitarianism’s use of deliberation is that it is focused on particular attachments, not universal justice. In Habermas’s view, the communitarian focuses on the ethical community because “otherwise one could not explain . . . how the citizens’ orientation to the common good would be at all possible. . . . The individual can get a clear sense of commonalities and differences, and hence a sense of who she is and who she would like to be, only in the public exchange with others who owe their identities to the same traditions and similar formation processes” (ibid.). The communitarians’ focus on “the clarification of collective self-understanding,” says Habermas, “does not sit well with the function of the legislative processes they issue in” (ibid.). Insofar as collective deliberations are about regulating our lives together, that is, about law, they should focus on universal principles of justice.

To be sure, discourses aimed at achieving self-understanding—discourses in which the participants want to get a clear understanding of themselves as members of a specific nation, as members of a locale or a state, as inhabitants of a region, and so on; in which they want to determine which traditions they will continue; in which they strive to determine how they will treat one another, and how they will treat minorities and marginal groups; in short, discourses in which they want to get clear about the kind of society they want to live in—such discourses are also an important part of politics. But these questions are subordinate to moral questions . . . [emphasis added], questions of justice. The question having priority in legislative politics concerns how a matter can be regulated in the equal interest of all. (Habermas 1996b:24–25)

In Habermas’s ideal politics, questions of universal moral validity, that is, justice, take precedence over questions of solidarity. Habermas subordinates deliberation aimed at choosing what kind of community we would like to be to deliberation aimed at questions of justice. The distinction itself is fine, at least for analytic purposes; but the notion that these can be engaged in independently of each other is wrong. Whenever people deliberate about what kind of community they want to be, they are addressing matters of justice. And whenever questions of justice are on the table, they are approached in the context of a particular community’s concerns. A political community addressing an issue of immigration is simultaneously struggling to integrate its desire to stand for openness and freedom with the exigencies, whether real or felt, of limited resources. Communities that are deliberating about how to “treat minorities and marginal groups” are very much involved in questions of justice while struggling to forge their own self-understanding. What I or we stand for is very much a part of who I or we are. In such cases, deliberations turn on how to forge a particular community that upholds values that all might be proud of upholding. Our own self-understanding is tempered by what we think others will think of us, and most of us want to be seen as member of a moral order. So deliberation aimed at forging collective purposes is always already wrapped up with questions of more universal morality.

Moreover, it is these very deliberations aimed at deciding what kind of community we want to be that turn a people into a public that might also take up questions of justice. Unless a public makes itself in the work of deciding what it ought to do on matters of common concern, there will be no public to adjudicate questions of justice.

Michael Sandel makes a similar point in his rejoinder to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. Like Habermas, and also following Kant, Rawls prioritizes the right over the good, universal principles of justice over particular concerns of a given community. Sandel argues that questions of justice are posed somewhere, in some particular context, among some particular people. The public work that makes a people a public is as vital as the public work of deciding matters of justice, and probably prior to it as well.

I asked earlier about this work that makes people a public; what kind of work is it? Derrida in his writing on public judgment said it was a judgment, a yes or no, not a knowledge. Likewise, Aristotle long ago noted that choice and deliberation in politics are about matters that have no certain answer. We deliberate about what we should do. We deliberate well when we have a sense of what good ends are, and that can only be arrived at through practical deliberation, not scientific knowledge. Yet Habermas’s political questions take a form more akin to questions of knowledge than questions of purpose. He is quite explicit about this. Normative questions can be answered formally and cognitively, and their answers are either universally valid or not. The answers are found through the process of reason-giving in conversation when all who are potentially affected have an opportunity to weigh in on whether the proposed policy would be best for all. Ultimately, in this round robin conversation, the force of the better argument will prevail.

Note how different this is from the “engaged evaluation” that Derrida says is called for in forming public opinion (Derrida 1992:90). Recall: “this judgment is not some knowledge, but an engaged evaluation, a voluntary act. It always takes the form of a ‘judgment’ (yes or no).” Habermas also sees the end result of deliberation as forming a kind of public opinion—public will—that, normatively, should exercise control of sorts over parliamentary politics. But where Derrida’s public judgment is formed through engagement, decision, a yes or no, Habermas’s is formed through a cognitive appraisal of which policy is right, which will lead to unanimity on which policy meets the test of universalizability. The less tainted by parochial concerns, by matters of solidarity and self-understanding, the better.

Does a public form itself in a Habermasian deliberation? No—in the volley of argumentation, there is little room for the sharing of perspectives that can be integrated into a better understanding of the whole. In fact, coming to deliberation with partial perspectives is detrimental, Habermas thinks, to reaching understanding and agreement. His model of the deliberative forum is more like a logic class, while the Derridean, and I’d add Deweyan, one is more like a literature class. English professor Peggy Prenshaw described her own experiment in bringing deliberation to literary studies in an article she wrote for the 1998 issue of the Higher Education Exchange. In a project on the humanities and public deliberation, she thought through the relationship between understanding literature and deliberating on public policy:

The comparison I am pursuing here is that of the empirical undecidability of the questions raised by the text and a similar undecidability of public policy questions raised in citizens’ forums. Resolution is reached by persuasion, by enlisting empathetic agreement, by noting facts, recalling historical precedents, reporting relevant personal experience, raising questions about the language and actions manifest in the text. An interpretation of a literary text, like a group’s response to discussion of a public issue, is an act of judgment, an act that is language-bound, culture-bound. It is contingent on the disposition of a group of individuals in a given place at a given moment. (Prenshaw 2004:67)

Prenshaw’s observation is vital to understanding the gulf between deliberations aimed at universal answers and deliberations that can give rise to a public and public judgment. Like the broken limb that is healed in returning to its function, in bearing weight, the public is formed by connecting disparate people through a process of forging common meanings and delineating possible courses of action. Any course of action will continue the process of public formation, so with trepidation and anything but universal certitude, we make our choices.

In the late 1980s I was doing some research and writing for the Kettering Foundation, which had, beginning around 1980, been helping to foster a national informal network of grassroots deliberative forums called the National Issues Forums.² The foundation, along with a group in New York called Public Agenda, produced three books a year that would each address a political issue and lay out three or four possible policy options, using nontechnical, “public” language. Issues (such as immigration, poverty, health care, violence, and foreign policy) and policy choices were laid out in a way that most any reader would find something palatable, as well as something problematic, in each option, so that by the end he or she would have difficulty choosing any one simple proposal; and in a room full of people deliberating on an issue, participants would likely hear points of view they hadn’t considered before. In the process they would likely find that they were each as torn individually as much as they all might be collectively. Their deliberations, as Aristotle noted, would be about matters that had no definite answer, no right or wrong solution waiting to be discovered. They were to decide, to judge, which course of action would be best for the political community, but “best” had no ground other than their own estimations of which policy might fare best and best satisfy the values of the community, values always in the making, even being made in such deliberations.

From the outside, an NIF meeting looks like a simple public discussion, but one of its architects set up the process to aim at coming to public judgment. This was one of Public Agenda’s founders, the opinion researcher Daniel Yankelovich, who had long been studying how public opinion can move over time into a stable, coherent public judgment. In the 1970s he had been a colleague of Hannah Arendt at the New School for Social Research and he was very taken by her idea of representative thinking. He was also interested in Freud, whose work led him to think that public opinion cannot become public judgment unless people have an opportunity to consider choices, grieve what they will lose when they choose one path over another, and work toward making a choice and resolution. The other force behind NIF, the president of the Kettering Foundation, David Mathews, received his doctorate from Columbia University, where he had pursued his interests in American pragmatism as well as ancient Greek democracy. He then became the youngest president of the University of Alabama and served for a few years as Gerald Ford’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, where he became much chagrined with electoral, bureaucratic, and top-down politics. For many pressing reasons, Mathews and Yankelovich thought it was important to put the public back into the policy-making process, to resurrect the old “town meeting” model, which might result in what Habermas would separately call “public will formation,” public will that might make its way into law, for the benefit of the political community. So they brought together community leaders from around the country and started the National Issues Forums.

NIF got going before the heyday of democratic theory in academic circles, before deliberation got defined as a process of the give-and-take of reasons aimed toward mutual understanding. The thinkers behind it were more influenced by Aristotle, Dewey, Mary Parker Follett, and Arendt than they were by Habermas or Rawls. At various meetings to discuss these ideas, they were joined by Jane Mansbridge, Ben Barber, Harry Boyte, and other democratic theorists, and a broader circle of political philosophers (Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, Dan Kemmis, Paul Starr) lent articles to their publications and students to their summer research programs. At the grassroots level, the people who convened and moderated local NIF forums had little if any background in theory, but they were keenly aware of the need to create public spaces for tending to matters that affected their communities. These moderators included community college teachers, extension agents, local officials, labor organizers, adult literacy teachers, and other volunteers. They focused on developing ways of talking with fellow citizens that would elicit comfort, openness, and freedom. With a little help from the Kettering Foundation, but mostly of their own accord, they developed principles and practices that would guide public deliberations: making sure that everyone had an opportunity to talk; defusing dogmatic assertions with requests for stories that explained points of view, personal history, experience, and context, stories that might bring forth people’s underlying values and hopes.³

This storytelling feature of NIF is the most noticeable difference from the way most deliberative theorists envision deliberations. Rather than the back-and-forth argumentation one might witness in a seminar room, in a forum people take turns telling stories, giving their own perspectives on problems and on the possible consequences of proposed solutions. Most importantly, each two-hour public forum is designed to culminate with some kind of choice. Toward the end of the session, moderators ask, on this issue that affects us all, what are we going to do? The answer says as much about participants’ thoughts on the issue as it says about who they are—or hope to be—as a community. In fact, the way they respond is a way of performatively choosing what kind of community they will be.

In the 1990s, having returned to graduate school, I lived a kind of double life. I helped write training manuals for NIF moderators and convenors, edited a journal on deliberative politics, and helped direct a national deliberative opinion poll with the political theorist James Fishkin. At the same time, I was writing a dissertation on politics and subjectivity in Kristeva and Habermas. It seemed that my studies of Habermas’s discourse ethics and deliberative politics should have been more intertwined, but the truth was that they seemed to be operating in different universes. For many years I thought that something was amiss, that perhaps the practice wasn’t living up to the theory, and then it finally occurred to me that the theorists were missing a human, real, and vital part of what happens when people deliberate and engage in politics together. Since then I have been integrating insights from continental and pragmatist theory, including psychoanalytic and semiotic research, into understanding actual politics. Having seen how people in actual political communities deliberate and decide together about matters of common concern, I have developed a certain sensibility about political theories. In the next chapter, I show how that sensibility reads feminist theory and what kinds of ideas in feminist thought are most productive for democratic life.