Democracy and the Political Unconscious

In this chapter I use feminist theory and politics as a case study for showing how a deliberative approach can help move people through trauma and repetition. In the span of recorded history, as far as we can tell, fully half of the human race has undergone some kind of repeated trauma. Women nearly universally are considered second-class citizens, if citizens at all. Still today, they are victims of degradation and violence. Much of the feminist consciousness that has risen to counter this history itself bears the marks of this trauma, visible through its language of oppression. Here I unpack a suspicion that much feminist thought about politics flows out of a misconception about the nature of the problems that women face, ultimately a misconception about the nature of politics and the public sphere. I suspect that the more conventional feminist approaches have a rather flat or narrow idea of politics as primarily a one-way transmission of power, flowing from the oppressors to the oppressed. In this view, little if anything is done to conceptualize or problematize the media through which this supposed transmission passes; the media disappear, and all that is visible are actors with either sinister or innocent intentions. Just recall Catherine MacKinnon’s claim that on day one men oppressed women and then on day two they set up the stereotypes of femininity and so forth that would uphold and conceal the oppression. I want to draw out another feminism that sees how actors or subjects are situated in a matrix of signs and symbols, of meaning making (semiosis), of perspectival interpretation and perception.

To do this, I use the resources in various semiotic and pragmatist traditions, which have a much richer view of politics and the public sphere as discursive and semiotic processes and arenas. My initial suppositions coincide with those of John Dewey, that the public finds itself communicatively. From there I have turned to semiotics, developing my own synthesis of Peirce’s and Kristeva’s views, to see how the public sphere is a discursive space in which subjectivity, identity, and meaning are created, dispersed, and interpreted. In this second picture of the public world, feminist thought has a different task than in the first one: instead of simply “fighting power,” feminist practice calls for rethinking how meanings and identities are created in discursive and communicative processes and matrices. In this second perspective, political thought moves from an agonistic toward a more deliberative view of the political public sphere. In short, the model of fighting oppression gives way to thinking about discursively and deliberatively reconstituting the public sphere, claiming freedom, and building new worlds.

When feminists identify the problem as that of an oppression that can be peeled away, as the effect of an other that can be excommunicated, what we get is a politics of exclusion and another repetition compulsion. This might take the form of separatism, as championed by radical feminists such as Mary Daly. Or it might take the shape of agonistic politics—a politics of struggle—with adherents ranging from Chantal Mouffe to Bonnie Honig and, some argue, Hannah Arendt (though she can be read otherwise as well). By “agonistic” I mean the view that politics is a struggle over resources, over who gets what, where, and when, a competitive, aggregative process driven by self-interest. Feminist theorists and practitioners have long taken this position, engaging in the agon in order to garner a more just and equitable distribution of power and resources for women.

Many of the current generation of political theorists grew up in a world where freedom or resources for one group came at the expense of the liberty and goods of another, and even as gains are being made, many of these theorists, feminists included, are on the side still struggling. An agonistic lens shows the continuity between first-wave feminists who fought for equal rights and second-wave feminists who have been fighting for sexual and cultural freedom. Tying them together is the notion that patriarchy, the fathers in power, have found it in their own interests to deny women basic rights and resources. Feminist political struggle, in this view, is a battle to increase women’s portion of the political pie. We can see this common orientation across the spectrum of feminist approaches: liberal feminists seek more rights; cultural feminists seek greater validation of historically female practices and institutions; socialist feminists seek more access to economic power; and radical feminists want to attack the root of the problem, to undermine patriarchy’s project of oppressing women.

All of these approaches, in one way or another, divide the world between female friend and male foe. Seeing the problem as one of oppression, they see men’s and women’s interests as antithetical;therefore, any triumph for women will be at men’s expense. They share the notion, flowing out of this analysis, that politics is agonal (that is, a matter of struggle) and is democratic when previously excluded or marginalized people, namely women, get entrée into the public arena. This feminist politics sees political struggle as a means to create a more democratic society. One French “radical democrat,” Chantal Mouffe, writes that “far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic confrontation is its very condition of existence” (Mouffe 2000:103). She traces the word “politics” back to the Greek polemos, struggle and war. (In my own etymological sleuthing, I have found no such connection.) She uses this etymology to support the common notion that politics is war by other means. For Mouffe and her early coauthor Ernesto Laclau, political success, following Antonio Gramsci, is the creation of a new cultural hegemony, in which the values and aims of the previously marginalized groups come to dominate and appear transparently as what is right and good (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Under this new hegemony, the needs of the majority of people will move to the fore, becoming the new public policy. In the sense that this new politics will meet the needs of the majority, this view considers itself to be democratic. The means, though, are not democratic: they might include propaganda, manipulation, ways of creating a new hegemony of those who have been excluded over those who held power beforehand. In other words, Mouffe’s radical democracy arguably has a more democratic end in mind—a public sphere that includes all who have previously been denied the prerogatives of citizenship—but the politics itself is not necessarily democratic. Agonal feminist political theory is democratic only in the majoritarian sense, wanting to create a new hegemony of the previously silenced majority.

Because of my own peculiar biography and set of experiences, this approach never sits right with me. The closest I have been able to accept is that something we might call the sociosymbolic system oppresses us. Iris Young’s analysis in her classic book, Justice and the Politics of Difference, moves a bit closer, seeing oppression largely as an effect of social structures. From this point of view, men and women are all implicated together, for there is no other that foists the system upon us. We are all a part of it, simultaneously its victims and its perpetrators. And sometimes freedom from one oppression leads to a wholly new one (just as my ability to be a mother and a philosophy professor rests upon my economic privilege to pay others much less than I make per hour to care for my children).

Nonetheless, the notion of a sociosymbolic system can be even more powerful than Young’s notion of structures. If we bring in Lacanian conceptions of the symbolic, we can see even more thorough and pervasive ways in which sociosymbolic systems “oppress” women. These systems are not something we can sanely reject, though, for they are the very systems that allow us to differentiate and judge, think symbolically and speak with our fellows, write books and present at conferences. If this is an “oppression,” it is a very assiduous one indeed. It cannot be peeled away like a dirty garment. Perhaps it can be reworked or reformed by replacing bad structures or dichotomies with more liberatory ones. As I’ll discuss shortly, this may be a fruitful approach, but if we pursue it then we may find that the language of “oppression” is no help at all, for such language presumes flat flows of power and ignores the multidimensional trajectories of meaning and intervention that occur in a communicative public space.

But before I turn there, let me take one more pass at how feminists define “the problem.” When the problem is seen as the product of an external oppressor—that is, when one is still in the throes of an unworked-through trauma and its concomitant repetition compulsion—it is natural to look for a politics that seeks to banish, triumph over, or even annihilate the other. There are strands within feminist theory itself that call this approach into question and hence undercut the very ideas that underlie agonistic politics of repetition compulsion. (These strands can be found in feminist critiques of liberal theory. See Mansbridge 1998, Jaggar 1983, and Frazer 2002.) And theorists such as Nancy Fraser, Jane Mansbridge, Carole Pateman, Iris Young, Seyla Benhabib, Anne Phillips, and many others have provided powerful critiques of the view of politics inaugurated by Joseph Schumpeter and played out through much of the twentieth century.¹ They take issue with the idea that self-interest is formed prepolitically. Both agonistic and liberal political theory seem to presuppose that one’s interests precede one’s entrance into politics, which is the arena where one acts to maximize one’s own given set of interests. But for these other feminists I am now alluding to, and for pragmatists and others who have read Hegel seriously, there is no self prior to its formation in a sociohistorical world. So it does not make sense to think of politics merely as an arena in which one barters (the liberal view) or struggles (the agonal view) to become better off than others. Self-interests or, to put it better, our conceptions of the good—of meaning, value, and purpose—are formed in the thick of politics, in and through our relations in a sociohistorical world. In short, as I have indicated in the preceding chapters, subjectivity and its concomitant desires are formed socially and experientially in a world with others. There is no exclusion of the other without some dissolution of oneself. Hence, agonistic politics is a serious misadventure.

So how might the problem be conceived otherwise? Perhaps the fault lies not in oppression from without but in the way that sociosymbolic systems constitute us through and through. Various theoretical frameworks try to get at these systems. Both psychoanalysis and semiotics consider how the self is constituted through language and relations with others. Certain approaches to linguistics, history, economics, and other social sciences consider how the social world, in time and through time, constitutes the self. American pragmatism and German critical theory dispute old concepts of fixed identity in favor of historical views of how the self performatively announces itself in a field with others. Heirs of Marx look at how the economy and its structures help shape our possibilities. Philosophers from Bergson to Royce consider the way that our understanding of time, extending backward through memory and forward through hope, connects us to a world of others, helping to create an identity in community. All these theoretical lenses open up aspects of our sociosymbolic world as a matrix through which we are constituted and positioned. We are not the holders of signs and symbols; they hold us. We can interact back, with the sort of techniques and probes Robert Innis discusses in his work; but these actions are always within a field that interacts back again.

A promising feminist project follows along the lines that Charles S. Peirce drew: an examination of the signs that make up our world and, with it, our selves. Instead of seeing politics as a flat field in which power flows from oppressor to oppressed, a semiotic approach sees a multidimensional world permeated by signs, with meaning and identity being produced as subjects (or at least those positioned as subjects) actively produce, interpret, and reinterpret meaning. The realm of signs, the semiotic public sphere or sociosymbolic order, is a dynamic repository of subjects’ sublimations, their transformations of energy and desire into a publicly accessible space of language, art, and culture. We make, transform, and find ourselves in and through these cultural representations. Looking pragmatically and semiotically, we can see how the world is permeated by these “signs” of ourselves—or sometimes our selves are occluded by their exclusions from the public sphere—and how signs demand interpretation. And we see that any active, novel interpretation, offered perhaps as a political act, produces new meanings and signs that in turn demand interpretation.

I think it is a step forward to move from a flat model of oppression to a multidimensional semiotic model, but then we see the magnitude of the task at hand. We live in a world in which signs and symbols, in multiple and overdetermined ways, constitute deep structures that continually keep women as second-class citizens, if citizens at all. These structures have positioned women as beings less able to engage in meaning making, semiosis, and civilization. But feminists attuned to this symbolic framework understand that the systems at hand cannot simply be tossed away and replaced. The task is to find ways to reconfigure the signs, along with their semiotic processes and structures, that produce negative conceptions of the feminine, conceptions that disappear from view and become “natural” insofar as they operate at the level of metaphysical thinking, suppositions about what is “really real.” The feminist project, then, is huge: to raise to consciousness the fundamental myths at work in the dichotomies of real/ apparent, natural/cultural, active/passive, one/many. It is also to intervene in the way that signs are deployed, to transform the structures that have heretofore served to exclude women from semiotic engagement.

Theorists who take signs at face value, as tools wielded by oppressors, fail to appreciate the ways that signs can be played with and turned on their head. Even with theory lagging, though, feminist and other activists have been able to intervene. Think of the way Madonna inverted the trappings of femininity, how the group the Guerrilla Girls unmasked the masculine bias of the art world, how the gay liberation movement used the derogatory term “queer” to gain power. These activists understood the power of signs, the kind of autonomy they have, and the ways they can be redeployed for political ends.

A constellation of feminist theories take up this challenge. Over the past two decades, some feminists have begun to approach politics in a way that can be recognized as pragmatic, democratic, and deliberative. As opposed to those who see it as a contest, I think they understand that the fundamental task is to understand politics as a symbolic field in which the meaning of what it is to be a woman is discursively or semiotically constituted. The forces at work are not exactly anonymous, but neither are they the forces of particular agents, e.g., oppressive men, misogynists, or patriarchs. Nefarious actors do not run the scene. Rather, we are all, men and women, born into a world in which symbolic structures always already constitute us as feminine or masculine with all the supposed affiliated attributes; that is, our subjectivity is formed through these semiotic processes and structures. We learn to speak and to think in and through them, and then we in turn raise or inculcate other generations into and through them. This does not mean that we are passive victims of patriarchal structures, but it does mean that feminists are in the funny position of having to use the tools of a patriarchal structure or symbolic field in order to try to transform it. From a semiotic point of view, the hope of a political activist, feminist or otherwise, is to intervene in the way that signs are deployed. Such interventions do not come from outside these semiotic processes, but in and through them; in other words, discursively and semiotically. We refashion language and symbols by using language and symbols, by discursively highlighting and questioning the ways semiotic processes function. There is no outside the system, no we/they dichotomy that the oppression model supposes. Instead of a politics of one party trying to overcome another, this alternative model understands the need to use language to work through these traumas, to come out the other side as related members of a common sociosymbolic field. Rather than pointing to agon, this model moves toward interventions into what we all share.

Of course, feminists understand that this common public sphere situates members differently, with women nearly universally positioned at the negative poles of binary thinking. In a symbolic field that sets at odds and hierarchizes concepts such as active and passive, mind and body, culture and nature, the feminine is positioned on the lower end. Situated at the negative poles of the symbolic field, women who intervene can come at them from the margins. The French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray does this famously well, though I won’t go into how. Suffice it to say that her interventions use the language of the sociosymbolic field, but in a way that shows its weaknesses and blind spots. Hence, such interventions are critical without being oppositional. Likewise, other feminist theorists who focus on sociosymbolic fields part company with agonistic feminism.² I have in mind some thinkers loosely known as continental feminists, though they also have strong affinities with pragmatist thought: Julia Kristeva and some continental feminist theorists based in the United States such as Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Kelly Oliver, Linda Zerilli, Cynthia Willett, and the late Teresa Brennan.

It might be a stretch, but I think I can safely say that their ultimate interest is the commonweal and not the partisan interests of one segment of humanity. Then their approach is open to what Sheldon Wolin describes as the political, “the idea that a free society composed of diversities can nonetheless enjoy moments of commonality when, through public deliberations, collective power is used to promote or protect the well-being of the collectivity” (Wolin 1996:31). While none of them directly addresses democratic theory, their views point toward democratic feminist politics in the same way that Peirce’s semiotics paved the way for Dewey to argue that the public “finds itself” communicatively. Attending to sociosymbolic structures and processes and the ways these formulate “the feminine” is the fundamental political task for feminists. Only after such work has begun can we take on more tangible tasks, such as legal reforms and economic measures. In a real sense, these other problems or symptoms are superstructural effects of fundamental maladies in the communicative public sphere.

As I discussed earlier, the poststructural, semiotic term “the sociosymbolic field” is ultimately another way of talking about the central category in democratic thought today: the public sphere. Drawing on Habermas’s notion that this is a communicative arena in which lifeworld questions—questions of solidarity, kinship, meaning, purpose, love, and justice—are addressed, we can see from another angle the ways such matters of the commonweal—fundamentally political questions—are attended to discursively. They are constituted symbolically from and by the multitude of public actors, citizens, and subjects. The political public sphere is not a place but an ongoing semiotic happening, the grids and flows of communication: the mass media, dinner table conversation, Web logs, cable access television, the local paper, the art world, PTA meetings, letters to the editor, chattering on the playground and in the classroom. All of these are intersecting communicative fields in which meaning, identity, and purpose are created.

Feminists who understand “the problem” as how this sociosymbolic field or discursive public sphere is structured tend to work directly on various ways the field structures subjectivity and experience. Many see subjectivity as a process, not a static entity, as do many process philosophers. Radically departing from the Cartesian picture of the self as mind, a glassy essence that is indivisible and fully transparent to itself, pragmatically inclined feminist thinkers understand that the self is continuously constituted via dynamic processes. They argue that it emerges through a particular culture, language, history, time, and place. This does not mean that subjectivity is constituted groundlessly, but that it is always a product of some particular sociohistorical symbolic framework.³

Along with much of the rest of philosophy in the twentieth century, continental thinkers took the linguistic turn. Continentally inspired feminists did so in especially productive ways. Kristeva, for example, develops the conception of le sujet en procès or the subject in process and on trial (Kristeva 1984). She points to the ways we constitute ourselves through our signifying practice. In short, the signifying process includes not only our straightforward attempts to be meaningful but also the subterranean effects of our affects and drives. These make their way into language, not directly but through a kind of channeling or sublimation, as Kelly Oliver has argued. To put it simply, our “animal” or libidinal energy and desire are transformed into “human” meaning, the signs and symbols of a sociosymbolic sphere. We take part in human community, or what Aristotle called the polis, at least to the extent that we are able to join in this quintessentially human, political activity. The public sphere is an effect of sublimation, a repository of past identity formations; those who have been othered are foreclosed from speaking.

Attempts to silence someone, through torture or other dehumanizing activities, deprive them of membership in the sociosymbolic field. This is the evil of sexism, racism, and colonization. Changing and recovering from these systems require that those who have been silenced begin to speak. Kelly Oliver argues that survivors of political brutality reconstitute their own subjectivity by bearing witness, publicly, to the wrongs they endured. Thus they performatively re-create their sense of being a self worth heeding.

To this point I have sketched out two feminisms. With strokes that might seem too broad, I have painted one as an agonistic view that sees the self standing outside of politics, which is an arena one enters to battle for one’s own given interests. The other I have found in the traditions that take Hegel seriously, that see the subject as always emerging in history. Adopting the second view necessitates working through the trauma of sexism that still imprisons the first one. It calls for a political mourning that might free up the imagination. In this way, feminists working within post–Hegelian traditions—pragmatism and continental philosophy—might imagine the self otherwise; they can decide not to take “the self” at face value, as some given subject with given attributes, something prior to history that can be restored to purity, freedom, and autonomy once the vicissitudes of history have been corrected. This other feminism begins with an understanding that subjects come to be in time, in a sociosymbolic field, a semiotic public sphere that structures our sentiments, identities, ideals. Theorists who take this semiosis, this public production of meaning, seriously focus on the field, not on the hapless patriarchs, bigots, and misogynist policies its structures produce. Instead of fighting power in a friend/foe schema, they attend to the semiotic workings of the public sphere itself. By differentiating between agonistic politics and the politics of the public sphere, I do not mean to exclude the ways contestation enters into politics. The making of the public sphere always involves difference, struggle, discord, and tension; but this agonistic dimension is not the meaning of politics per se. Central to politics, central to the motivation of anyone who cares to enter into the fray, is the hope that some kind of agreement might be reached. Without such hope, there would be no will to enter.

One of the most important figures in political thought in the twentieth century was Hannah Arendt, a woman who had little, if anything to say about feminism. Yet feminist theory inspired by her work can be very productive for both feminism and politics. In this vein, Linda Zerilli’s Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, while decidedly a feminist book, has much to say about politics as well, even about deliberative democracy. The book argues for a feminism that is freedom-centered rather than mired in the question of sexual difference. This question, Zerilli argues, has consumed feminist theoretical energy regardless of which way it has been answered—whether for sameness or difference or even for a radical skepticism about the possibility of categorizing woman and hence about a feminist politic. The question itself is misguided for at least two related reasons: it sees feminist politics as a matter of finding the right concept of “woman” as a base, when it is mistaken to think that any politics can be grounded on or guided by a concept; and it occludes a better goal for feminist theory, which is to orient feminist politics around issues of freedom.

Feminists would be better oriented toward political freedom, Zerilli argues, though not the freedom of liberal sovereignty but rather a political freedom of collective participation in world building. Political freedom breaks with the realm of causality. Following Arendt, Zerilli argues that this is the freedom to create something new without needing any ground, cause, or determining antecedent. People postulate new concepts, figures, and possibilities by putting them forward, by holding them, by claiming them to be so. Whether these claims succeed is a matter of whether they are taken up by others (closure) or continue to circulate, contested, in a political back-and-forth (openness). The question “What is a woman?” for example, is a question whose answer will not be found; the answer is to be created politically, built with others. The intersubjective validity of a claim arises in a collective world-building politics.

What becomes truly interesting politically is not just whether some group or category of things exists but what these things mean. Their meaning is to be created in world-building political practices. Zerilli argues that feminists have for too long searched backward and underneath their theorizing to find a ground or a concept that can guide feminist politics. But any ground they have found has quickly been undone by other feminists. There is nothing to stand on, but it is wrong to think that something cannot stand. Feminists should take a leap, create, and lay claim to a world and identities and possibilities that they want. The frightening and exhilarating thing about freedom is that by taking it up we claim the power to create the kind of world we’d like to live in. It is not created willy-nilly, because it has to pass the muster and judgment of a community of others likewise striving.

Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom is certainly oriented toward feminists and feminist theory. But the very same theoretical resources, including those developed in the chapters on Monique Wittig’s Les Guerilleres and the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, could easily be marshaled toward other kinds of politics, not just of other identity groups but also of democratic and republican traditions. What Zerilli says about feminism and freedom we can also say about democracy and freedom. Her work helps explain some otherwise inexplicable features of deliberative democracy. These are features that I have noted, in one way or another, for years; but the way that I will state and inflect them here is already inflected by my reading of Zerilli.

Public deliberation does not require impartiality; it can use the plurality of perspectives on an issue to develop a better sense of the whole.⁴ Unlike a Habermasian model of deliberation, which seeks rational agreement, NIF and other integrative approaches to deliberation are more forgiving of disagreement; in fact, they realistically accept that political problems become political problems in large part because of disagreement. Where some think the solution is unanimity, whether found through the force of the better argument or through a common identity, Arendt, Zerilli, and most people who have participated in or observed deliberative forums know the value of multiple and even clashing views. The task of deliberation is to be able to understand other perspectives, to be able to see what others see, even if one doesn’t share the same view; Zerilli quotes Arendt on how public speech, as the Greeks found, opens to the door to seeing from multiple viewpoints:

In [their] incessant talk the Greeks discovered that the world we have in common is usually regarded from an infinite number of standpoints, to which correspond the most diverse points of view. In a sheer inexhaustible flow of arguments, as the Sophists presented them to the citizenry of Athens, the Greek learned to exchange his own viewpoint, his own “opinion”—the way the world appeared and opened up to him—with those of his fellow citizens. Greeks learned to understand—not to understand one another as individual persons, but to look upon the same world from one another’s standpoint, to see the same in very different and frequently opposing aspects. (quoted in Zerilli 2005:139)

Zerilli points to the continuing political importance of this ability to understand how the world looks from many different positions at once. “Arguments are valuable,” she writes, “not when they produce agreement—though they well may do so—but when they enable us to see from standpoints other than our own and deepen our sense of what is shared or real” (Zerilli 2005:140). In an increasingly polarized world, this skill is more endangered than ever. One of the striking things people have said about their experience in deliberative forums is that while it might not have changed their own views on issues, it changed their views of other people and their views. By beginning to see how a problem appears to others, participants begin to appreciate its complexity. The problem takes on new meanings, suggesting new ideas about what will need to be done to address it best for all involved.

In integrative deliberations, participants are motivated to fashion a new public world, which is like putting together a puzzle, trying to see what all the pieces are, especially the pieces held by other participants, and then seeing how they might fit together, however imperfectly and provisionally. In order to come up with a practical way to solve a problem, participants in deliberative public forums need to be able to integrate the multiple perspectives in the room into one larger whole. Zerilli calls this the practice of judgment. The resulting more comprehensive picture might ultimately show us a direction that might work.

Public deliberation is a kind of politics that calls for and helps cultivate certain political skills, which add up to political judgment. One such skill is listening to others without presuming that they are just like oneself or radically different, finding commonality with someone from a different social and economic space without collapsing into uniformity. In her chapter on the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, Zerilli traces the collective’s development of the political skill of using plural and unequal points of view. At the start they learned the pitfalls of a feminist ideology that supposed that the members of the collective were all the same. A major insight came when one member made the startling pronouncement that “we are not all equals here” (108), voicing the obvious but unspoken differences of class, social standing, and abilities. Yet it was not enough for there to be plurality without assessing and judging differences. They needed to create ways for the collective to start making judgments through and even about their differences. Until they had a space “for strong conflicts or disagreements,” the Milanese had “no space for strong desires and no possibility of genuine politics” (109).

The space of the forum can also be a political one. In “political” we need to understand a difference that Zerilli and Arendt, as well as Sheldon Wolin, identify. Recall Wolin’s observation that unlike the politics of contesting and bartering for resources, the political is “an expression of the idea that a free society composed of diversities can nonetheless enjoy moments of commonality when, through public deliberations, collective power is used to promote or protect the well-being of the collectivity” (in Benhabib 1996:31). What makes this collective power palatable is that it can be of the sort that Arendt says arises when people “gather together and ‘act in concert’” (Arendt, The Human Condition, 244, quoted in Zerilli 2005:21)—not power over but power with. Using Arendt’s idea, Zerilli gives an account that could, word for word, apply to the kind of politics at work when regular folks enter into a deliberative forum to talk about what their political communities should do. They come with their plural interests and predilections, but they expect to act or work together to try to develop a coherent public judgment. Or, as Zerilli puts it:

Foregrounded in Arendt’s account is politics . . . as a world-building activity, for which the pursuit of interests may be enabling or corrupting but is, either way, certainly secondary to the practice of freedom. In contrast with the idea, central to liberalism and to most forms of feminism, that the function of politics is to pursue individual and group interests (that is, people come to the table with certain interests already in hand, which then need to be articulated as claims and adjudicated in terms of their validity), we have the idea that interests serve as the occasion, a catalyst of sorts, to engage in politics. The instrumentalist or adjudicative approach to politics sees the pursuit of interests not only as the motor but also the raison d’etre of politics itself, for which speech and action are a means. . . . Arendt, by contrast, holds that speech and action can themselves be political, regardless of the interests we pursue or the ends we may realize when we come together politically. In a very specific sense, then, politics may involve the articulation of interests but is not driven by the questions of expediency; it is not a means toward an end. Political are not the interests as such but the world-building practice of publicly articulating matters of common concern. (Zerilli 2005:22)

With Zerilli’s conceptual tools, we can observe that deliberative politics pushes toward a public judgment that is not grounded on logical proof but on the sensus communis that arises in the political practice of taking in other points of view. To those steeped in more conventional deliberative theory, this seems almost heretical, for as Habermas argues, the force of the better (read, most logically compelling) argument will prevail in deliberations. Others worry that letting the views of others influence their own is tantamount to heteronomy or illegitimately coercive. But as I have observed over the years, people in deliberations welcome other views and make their collective choices not on the basis of logical proof, but according to a new picture of the whole that emerges in deliberation. As Zerilli puts it,

[The] ability to persuade others of one’s views does not depend on facility in logic. One may well have the so-called force of the better argument and fail to convince one’s interlocutors (and not because they lack competence, that is, fail to understand what a good argument is). The ability to persuade depends upon the capacity to elicit criteria that speak to the particular case at hand in relation to particular interlocutors. (144)

In the course of their deliberations, participants may make assertoric claims, but the force of their claims is performative. On this point, Zerilli writes, “political claims have a fundamentally anticipatory structure: we posit the agreement of others, that is, we perform an act of closure. Whether others do agree, however, is another matter and part of the openness of democratic politics itself” (171). Political claims are not knowledge claims, she successfully argues. They anticipate a world that those making the claim think should be. And in making the claim, sometimes, if it is taken up successfully by others, they help bring that world into being.

Public deliberation creates something new; deliberative public forums alter and open up the world. This is really an act of imagination, of creating possibilities that had hitherto not existed. The possibilities are not built on some ground or by some kind of deductive, logical process. They are built when old ideas are put into relationship. Zerilli describes imagination as the “faculty that allows us to bring particulars into an unexpected and potentially critical relation with each other—critical because we are able to see something new, something not given in the object itself” and to note “the context in which we engage other points of view in forming a judgment” (61). For example, years ago I helped organize a series of deliberative polls on public utility issues in Texas. All the stakeholders who helped write up the materials and oversee the process thought they had listed all the possibilities, and most anticipated that Texans would rank renewable power last in preference, since it is so expensive and only able to supply a fraction of energy needs. But the participants in those forums put in relation things that no one had expected, and they came up with an option to let ratepayers choose to have a portion of their electricity supplied by renewable energy, at a slightly higher rate than most could afford. This novel idea occurred when people had the space, opportunity, and freedom to imaginatively build something together. Subsequently, the state legislature and the utilities turned this notion into real policy—a real-world, world-building example.

Unlike the kind of politics that simply aggregates personal preferences, discourages choice and judgment, leaves people in their own private cocoon of opinions, public deliberation pushes participants to judgment, to a new understanding of the whole. Zerilli quotes Arendt on this point: “If the world, as Arendt argues, ‘is the space in which things become public,’ then judging is a practice that alters that world. In this space, the objects of judgment appear. She writes, ‘The judgment of the spectator creates the space without which no such objects could appear at all’” (160).