Elsevier

Geoforum

Volume 43, Issue 4, June 2012, Pages 677-686
Geoforum

Situating the geographies of injustice in democratic theory

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.03.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Post-Marxist and poststructuralist ontologies of the political have been important reference points for recent discussions of democracy in critical human geography and related fields. This paper considers the conceptual placement of contestation in a strand of democratic theory often denigrated by these approaches, namely theories of deliberative democracy informed by post-Habermasian Critical Theory. It is argued that this concern with contestation derives from a focus on the relationships between different rationalities of action. It is proposed that this tradition of thought informs a distinctively phenomenological approach to understanding the situations out of which democratic energies emerge. In elaborating on this phenomenological understanding of the emergence of political space, the paper proceeds in three stages. First, it is argued that the strong affinities between ontological conceptualisations of ‘the political’ and the ontological register of canonical spatial theory squeezes out any serious consideration of the plural rationalities of ordinary political action. Second, debates between deliberative and agonistic theorists of democracy are relocated away from questions of ontology. These are centred instead on disputed understandings of ‘normativity’. This move opens up conceptual space for the analysis of phenomenologies of injustice. Third, using the example of debates about transnational democracy in which critical theorists of deliberative democracy explicitly address the reconfigurations of the space of ‘the political’, it is argued that this Critical Theory tradition can contribute to a distinctively ‘topological’ sense of political space which follows from thinking of political action as emerging from worldly situations of injustice. In bringing into focus this phenomenological approach to political action, the paper has lessons for both geographers and political theorists. Rather than continuing to resort to a priori models of what is properly political or authentically democratic, geographers would do well to acknowledge the ordinary dynamics and disappointments which shape political action. On the other hand, political theorists might do well to acknowledge the limits of the ‘methodological globalism’ that characterises so much recent work on the re-scaling of democracy.

Highlights

► Contestation is central to post-Habermasian democratic theory. ► This concern derives from a focus on different rationalities of action. ► This focus informs a distinctive understanding of the phenomenologies of injustice. ► This highlights the situations in which injustice is recognised and collective action generated.

Section snippets

Introduction: who’s afraid of ‘the political’?

Engagement with democratic theory in human geography and related spatial disciplines such as urban studies and urban planning remains faithful to the terms of a contrast between theories of deliberative democracy on the one hand, and post-structuralist theories of radical democracy and agonistic pluralism on the other. In this framing, the consensual orientations of deliberative democrats, personified in the avuncular figures of Jürgen Habermas or perhaps John Rawls, are off-set against the

Against ontology

The post-Marxist ontologization of ‘the political’ stands in a longer tradition of political interpretations of Heidegger’s analysis of ontological difference. In this tradition, Heidegger’s distinction between the ontic and the ontological is mapped onto a distinction between politics and ‘the political’ (Barnett, 2004a). The critical authority of ontologies of ‘the political’ depends on two related conceptual moves. First, they consistently misconstrue ontological difference as a difference

From ontologies of ‘the political’ to moral grammars of conflict

Ontologies of the political have an easy affinity with accounts of the social in which the rationalities of action, interaction and coordination are reduced to the dynamics of subjectification, governmentalized direction, or affective priming of actors (Barnett, 2008a). This affinity between ontologies of the political and reductionist accounts of action is an index of a more fundamental fault-line running across the field of critical social theory regarding the possibilities of theorising

Extending democratic agency

The central problem of democratic theory from a critical-theoretic perspective is how to render the exercise of coercion legitimate and rational, a concern which acknowledges the necessarily double-sided quality of democracy as a form of rule. In the Critical Theory tradition of conceptualising radical democracy, it is presumed that it is possible to acknowledge the ineradicability of ‘power’ in politics while also distinguishing ‘the use of force by a powerful actor’ from ‘the legitimate use

Situating democratic agency

The previous section traced how the reformulation of the all affected principle in contemporary Critical Theories renders the spaces of democratic action contingent on patterns of inclusion and participation in effective communicative practices. There are two consequences of this conceptual translation. First, the translation of the all affected principle into a deliberative norm implies a methodological focus on the variable enactment of affectedness as a register of claims-making, reflected

Conclusion: contestation is ordinary

I have argued here that ontological conceptualisations of ‘the political’ have only a remote engagement with empirical processes, which are too readily regarded as merely ontic residues of more fundamental structures of existence. The most serious deficit that arises from this ontologization of political theory is the difficulty that these styles of thought have in acknowledging the determinative role that practices of justification have in coordinating and ordering social practice (e.g.

Acknowledgements

An earlier draft of the argument presented here was presented at the Workshop on Space, Contestation and the Political, at the University of Zurich in February 2009, organised by the ESRC Spaces of Democracy/Democracy of Space Network and Working Group on Geography and Decision-making Processes of German Society of Geographers. Thanks to the participants in that event, to three anonymous referees, and to Michael Samers for their critical responses to earlier versions, which have helped me to

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