While dissent has played a central role in our national history and in the American cultural imagination, it is usually dangerous to those who practice it, and always unpalatable to its targets. War does not encourage the tolerance of opposition at home any more than it does on the front: if the War on Terror is to be a permanent war, then the consequences for American political freedoms cannot be overestimated.
"Dissent in Dangerous Times examines the nature of political repression in liberal societies, and the political and legal implications of living in an environment of fear. This profound, incisive, at times even moving volume calls upon readers to think about, and beyond, September 11, reminding us of both the fragility and enduring power of freedom."
--Nadine Strossen, President, American Civil Liberties Union, and Professor of Law, New York Law School.
Contributors to this volume
Lauren Berlant
Wendy Brown
David Cole
Hugh Gusterson
Nancy L. Rosenblum
Austin Sarat
While dissent has played a central role in our national history and in the American cultural imagination, it is usually dangerous to those who practice it, and always unpalatable to its targets. War does not encourage the tolerance of opposition at home any more than it does on the front: if the War on Terror is to be a permanent war, then the consequences for American political freedoms cannot be overestimated.
"Dissent in Dangerous Times examines the nature of political repression in liberal societies, and the political and legal implications of living in an environment of fear. This profound, incisive, at times even moving volume calls upon readers to think about, and beyond, September 11, reminding us of both the fragility and enduring power of freedom."
--Nadine Strossen, President, American Civil Liberties Union, and Professor of Law, New York Law School.
Contributors to this volume
Lauren Berlant
Wendy Brown
David Cole
Hugh Gusterson
Nancy L. Rosenblum
Austin Sarat
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Overview
While dissent has played a central role in our national history and in the American cultural imagination, it is usually dangerous to those who practice it, and always unpalatable to its targets. War does not encourage the tolerance of opposition at home any more than it does on the front: if the War on Terror is to be a permanent war, then the consequences for American political freedoms cannot be overestimated.
"Dissent in Dangerous Times examines the nature of political repression in liberal societies, and the political and legal implications of living in an environment of fear. This profound, incisive, at times even moving volume calls upon readers to think about, and beyond, September 11, reminding us of both the fragility and enduring power of freedom."
--Nadine Strossen, President, American Civil Liberties Union, and Professor of Law, New York Law School.
Contributors to this volume
Lauren Berlant
Wendy Brown
David Cole
Hugh Gusterson
Nancy L. Rosenblum
Austin Sarat
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472025527 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 02/22/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 341 KB |
About the Author
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.
Read an Excerpt
DISSENT in Dangerous Times
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2005 the University of MichiganAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-09864-4
Chapter One
POLITICAL IDEALIZATION & ITS DISCONTENTSWendy Brown
Ritual recognizes the potency of disorder. -Mary Douglas Everything that the [love] object does and asks for is right and blameless ... -Sigmund Freud
What is political love and what is the relationship of political love and political loyalty? If one loves a political community, does such love require uncritical solidarity with certain elements of that community, and if so, with which elements-its laws, its principles, its state institutions, its leaders, or actions taken in its name? What kind of loyalty does political love engender and require? To what extent is love compatible with critique and to what extent is critique compatible with loyalty? What counterintuitive compatibility might be discerned between critique and fealty, between critique and attachment, even between critique and love?
This essay explores these questions about civic or political love, fealty, and critique through a consideration of the relationship of love and idealization. It considers this relationship as it emerges both in conservative expressions of national patriotism and in radical dissent from state policy. It asks about the productivity as well as the costs of political idealization and considers how we might successfully navigate some of its perils as we think about, and practice, democratic citizenship.
These reflections were incited by the widespread call for American national unity in the immediate aftermath of September 11. For the most part, this call demanded unwavering patriotism, uncritical support for state policy, and solidarity with a national narrative about our goodness and our victimhood. In this context, criticism of America or dissent from state policy were, quite simply, equated with disloyalty. And disloyalty, in turn, associated dissenters with what had overnight become the enemy.
The equation of dissent with disloyalty has its cultural and political ramifications, especially when combined with state declarations such as "if you're not with us, you're against us"-a formulation that tacitly endorses restrictions on dissent enacted by corporate and media powers while sustaining the legitimacy of the state as a protector of free speech. However, the most worrisome ramifications may be less the explicit incidents of censorship than the discursive framing of all dissent as un-American, a framing that not only constrains what may be said and heard, but replaces a critically important political debate about what America is, stands for, or ought to do in world politics with a more polemical argument about loyalty or a more narrowly legalistic one about free speech. The instantiation of this polemicism and this legalism in the title and substance of the USA Patriot Acts, and in the now unquestionably necessary arguments about those pieces of legislation, is but one example of this diversion.
Two caveats before beginning. First, what follows is not a generic or universal formulation of the relationship between citizenship, loyalty, and critique; rather, it explores these relations as they are configured by a time of crisis and by a liberal democratic state response to that crisis. The essay does not ask, generically, whether there is some point at which political dissent or critique undercuts citizenship or some point at which political rebellion is legitimate. Rather, it considers the relation of love, loyalty, and critique within a political order, the existence and basic legitimacy of which is not called into question. In other words, this is a distinctly nonrevolutionary formulation of the problematic of dissent; it not only presumes something of a stable nation-state population but presumes as well an investment from both critics and noncritics in preserving rather than overthrowing the state.
The second caveat concerns the effect on nation-state citizenship of the dramatic transnational migrations occasioned by the latest phase of capital, often termed globalization. My argument presumes reasonably strong identification by citizens with the nation-states in which they are living. However, this identification cannot be taken for granted today. Western liberal democracies harbor substantial and growing populations that often have limited identification with and fealty toward the states they find themselves living in, or that may have fealty in the direction of two or more "nations," or that may assert a cosmopolitan "world citizenship" or "transnational citizenship" rather than one tied to a single nation-state. Apart from the question of immigration occasioned by globalization, nation-states themselves are receding, however slowly and unevenly, as the basis of collective identification and collective action. It may be that nothing is so important as trying to understand what nation-state citizenship-loyal, critical, disgruntled, or otherwise-means in this historical context, but that is not the aim of this essay.
1. SOCRATIC LOYALTY
We begin with Socrates and the complex model of radical patriotism that is figured in the Platonic dialogues concerned with his trial and death sentence. Socrates, who insisted on the intimacy of love and citizenship, love and knowledge, love and virtue. Socrates, who embodied a perverse but compelling form of citizenship rooted in challenging the premises and practices of the status quo, indeed, who made intellectual work into a distinct form of citizenship. Socrates, who would not flee the city that voted to execute him for his peculiar way of loving it but also would not be bullied into a more conventional form of affection. Surely this character is almost too extreme for thinking about today's dissident-only occasionally intellectual, often angry and alienated from other citizens, hardly a practitioner of love, and more likely to sue the state for abridged liberties than to bow before its sentencing. Yet, as the etymology of the word theory itself recalls-in ancient Greece, theoria emerged as a term for seeing enriched by journeying-there is often self-knowledge buried in places remote from our own.
In the Apology and the Crito, Socrates wrestles with the nature of his relationship and obligations to Athens, both of which configure his life as philosopher and critic, and both of which are activated as topics by his conviction and sentencing. Charged with corrupting the youth and with a specific kind of impiety-introducing new divinities-Socrates understands these charges to be rooted in the effects of his vocational calling and especially in the effects of his relentless critical interrogation of the contemporary Athenian way of life. In his defense against the charges, Socrates literally reverses them, casting his questioning of every individual and collective practice in Athens as loyalty not simply to an inner calling or to truth but to Athens itself. He roots this claim of loyalty in his love for the citizens of Athens, a love practiced and demonstrated by his commitment to improving them, a commitment for which he stakes his life. Pressing the argument still further, Socrates insists that he cares far more about Athenian citizens than his accusers do, indeed cares about them so much that he is willing to be put to death for his efforts on their behalf, just as devoted soldiers are willing to die in battle.
For wherever a man's place is, whether the place which he has chosen or that in which [he] has been placed by a commander, there he ought to remain in the hour of danger, taking no account of death or of anything else in comparison with disgrace.... Strange, indeed, would be my conduct, O men of Athens, if I who, when I was ordered by the generals whom you chose to command me at Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delium, remained where they placed me, like any other man, facing death-if now, when, as I conceive and imagine, God orders me to fulfill the philosopher's mission of searching into myself and other men, I were to desert my post through fear of death. (Apology 28d-e)
The comparison with military service is no minor one, of course, since the soldier in battle is the ultimate icon of political loyalty, and it is Socrates' loyalty to Athens that is at issue. Yet the comparison could also not be more strained: the city's generals command the soldier while "God" commands Socrates, and the question of which god(s) Socrates hears or obeys animates one of the main questions about his potential civic subversiveness. Indeed, the tension between the fealty Socrates may have to a god other than Athens or to other than an Athenian god is articulated by this comparison even as it is also rhetorically finessed by it. If Socrates' daemon is uniquely his and if the god commanding him is Truth rather than an Athenian deity, then even his willingness to die for his commitment sustains rather than eradicates the potential tension between his inner calling and his civic loyalty, between serving truth and the effect of this service on the city he claims to love. Socrates finesses the tension through the trope of sacrifice and through the figure of the servant common to both, and thus allows obedience as such-to the point of risking death-to constitute proof of his loyal character. But civic patriotism is not loyalty as such and is not measured by willingness to die for one's cause whatever it is; rather it entails loyalty to the specific collectivity by which one is harbored and is generally measured by willingness to sacrifice for that collectivity.
Still, in this articulation and finesse, Socrates has articulated a dimension of our problem. Is political fealty appropriately attached to "actually existing political communities," to their laws, policies, or utterances, or to the political ideals we hold out for these communities? Is it sometimes one and sometimes the other? How do we know which, when? If one loves another Athens, another America than the one whose actions or laws one decries in the present, what is the place of loyalty in mediating between this love and the polity as it presents itself now, here? Or, if one loves what one is harbored by, but is also ruthlessly critical of and devoted to improving, is this loyalty? When might thoughtful disagreement or passionate critique be the ultimate act of love, even the ultimate act of solidarity-not simply because it is engaged but because it constitutes a more comprehensive address of this attachment insofar as it engages the ambivalence inherent in passionate attachment?
From Socrates in the Apology, we have an argument that dissent from existing practices, even wholesale critique of the regime, is not merely compatible with love and loyalty to a political community but, rather, is the supreme form of such love and loyalty. Moreover, it would seem that dissent can have this value even when it happens at the fringes of the regime, outside the domain of the officially political realm and thus outside the usual purview of citizenship, suggesting that it need not be a critique with immediate political efficacy (where the political is equated with policy). Socrates makes the case for intellectual critique as the highest form of loyalty if and when this critique is aimed at improving the virtue of the citizens.
In arguing that his unconventional ways and venue of working permit the greatest expression of political loyalty to the city, Socrates implies that the conventional political and military domains are not so fertile for the practice of loyalty understood as love-they are too fraught with immediate concerns of the day, with power politics, and above all, too inimical to the thoughtfulness that he takes as both the basis and the necessary content of this love; dutiful citizens carrying out an unjust policy or dutiful soldiers fighting an unjust war are presumably slavish and unthinking rather than loving in their loyalty. What is also striking about Socrates' argument is that even as it is couched in terms compatible with modern Thoreauian themes of individual conscience, he is not making a moral or ethical argument but rather a political one about what constitutes true citizenship and loyalty. This is not simply a claim that "the examined life" is the most valuable thing for the polis. Rather, it is an argument that citizenship consists of a relation to individual virtue and justice, and is thus more importantly a relation of citizen to citizen than of citizen to state. Put starkly, Socrates defines good citizenship as the cultivation of virtue in oneself and others rather than in terms of an orientation toward law and the state.
Dana Villa's recent work, Socratic Citizenship, allows us to take this point further and to connect it with the problematic of critique. Villa argues that the Socratic activity of disputing common opinion-of what Villa calls "dissolving and purging"-would be mistakenly construed as only a project of disillusionment. Rather, drawing on Arendt, Villa argues that Socrates' commitment to thinking and to inciting thoughtfulness in his fellow citizens is a strategy for averting evil and injustice. In Arendt's study of Eichmann, she argued that the precondition for radical political evil is not some moral or ontological predisposition to evil but rather "ingrained thoughtlessness," and it is precisely such routine thoughtlessness that Socrates aims to disrupt. If citizen virtue consists in avoiding evil, and if evil springs from such thoughtlessness, then thinking itself becomes the penultimate citizen virtue. Two conclusions follow from this positing of an inherent relation between thoughtfulness and justice and between justice and citizenship. First, any moral or political belief that is sheltered from interrogation, insofar as it becomes a thoughtlessly held belief, becomes an incitement to injustice. Second, insofar as Socratic thoughtfulness-the work of interrogation and critique-requires a certain withdrawal from the immediate scene of political life, part of the action of political justice inherently occurs in a distinctly nonpolitical realm, in what Socrates called private life but in what we would call intellectual (not necessarily academic) life, a zone that is neither public nor private in the modern sense.
In sum, Socrates' defense in the Apology would seem to make an argument for (1) critique as the basis for practicing virtue and justice, and hence as essential rather than inimical to civic loyalty; (2) the space of this critique as one that either redefines the parameters of the political to include this intellectual work, this cultivation of thoughtfulness apart from the public realm or, alternatively, puts political life into necessary tension with intellectual life; (3) love of one's fellow citizens as the index of civic loyalty; and (4) devotion to improving citizen virtue as the index of this love. Again, this defense should not be misread as a valorization or cultivation of merely private virtue, merely individual dissent to the existing state, or merely intellectual critique of political life. Rather, Socrates aims to render politically potent a space (the private), an activity (philosophizing, critique), and relations (of individual citizens to one another and of the intellectual to the political) ordinarily conceived as unpolitical or irrelevant to the political. Perversely, his trial and punishment suggest at least partial success in this aim: the philosophical gadfly was figured by his accusers as a consequential political player in Athens.
But within the framework of political loyalty I have been developing via Socrates, what are the limits to critique? In particular, where might these limits obtain political definition? How far can critique go, and in particular how aggressive can it be toward the polity before it ceases to be loyal where loyalty is roughly equated with love? What must be preserved or protected amidst its deconstructive aims? The Crito offers something of an answer to these questions; the dialogue sketches a political container for the work of critique in the form of a warning against overly loosening the threads of the collectivity that sustain its inhabitants. Indeed, the dialogue as a whole represents a kind of limit on the activities defended in the Apology, a limit in which Socrates' own preference for living in the city of Athens is made to represent a tacit commitment not to violate or destroy the collectivity that has harbored, educated, and sustained him. The dialogue also contains an argument that the work of critique, Socrates' work, must be preservative, and to this end must be animated by love. Otherwise it will neither carry its own limits nor have any reason to be tolerated by those who wish to preserve the state. Socrates, in other words, was neither a simple defender of political free speech, nor a detractor of it. Rather, he crafts an argument about the kind of critical speech that is politically and ethically valuable and legitimate.
(Continues...)
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