Abstract
Much work in the field of education for democratic citizenship is based on the idea that it is possible to know what a good citizen is, so that the task of citizenship education becomes that of the production of the good citizen. In this paper I ask whether and to what extent we can and should understand democratic citizenship as a positive identity. I approach this question by means of an exploration of four dimensions of democratic politics—the political community, the borders of the political order, the dynamics of democratic processes and practices, and the status of the democratic subject—in order to explore whether and to what extent the ‘essence’ of democratic politics can and should be understood as a particular order. For this I engage with ideas from Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière who both have raised fundamental questions about the extent to which the ‘essence’ of democratic politics can be captured as a particular order. In the paper I introduce the figure of the ignorant citizen in order to hint at a conception of citizenship that is not based on particular knowledge about what the good citizen is. I introduce a distinction between a socialisation conception of citizenship education and civic learning and a subjectification conception of citizenship education and civic learning in order to articulate what the educational implications of such an ‘anarchic’ understanding of democratic politics are. While the socialisation conception focuses on the question how ‘newcomers’ can be inserted into an existing political order, the subjectification conception focuses on the question how democratic subjectivity is engendered through engagement in always undetermined political processes. This is no longer a process driven by knowledge about what the citizen is or should become but one that depends on a desire for a particular mode of human togetherness or, in short, a desire for democracy.
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Notes
I confine myself to Mouffe’s ‘later’ works. One important line that deserves further exploration but is beyond the scope of this paper has to do with the difference between the concept of ‘hegemony’ as articulated by Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and Rancière’s idea of the ‘distribution of the sensible’. I will return to this briefly below.
In French Rancière sometimes (but not always and not always consistently) makes a distinction which is difficult to translate and which has not always been picked up consistently by translators, between ‘la politique’ and ‘le politique.’ The first refers to the domain of politics in the general sense, whereas the latter indicates the moment of the interruption of the police order (‘la police’ or ‘l’ordre policier’). The latter, according to Rancière, is the ‘proper’ idea of politics and in several of his publications he has shown how particularly political philosophies but also particular forms of politics have tried to suppress the political ‘moment’.
This suggests that there is an important difference between how ‘order’ is understood by Rancière and by Mouffe. For Mouffe—and this goes back to her work with Laclau on hegemony (Laclau and Mouffe 1985)—the socio-political order is defined by a constituting lack or gap that makes hegemonic struggle possible. In this struggle a particular claim comes to fill in the absent hegemonic ‘nodal point’—thus becoming a universal claim through which other struggles are temporarily united. For Rancière the social order is not defined by a lack but rather by ‘supersaturation’—which is the reason why he sees the social order as all inclusive. This means, however, that the interruption of the order is not to be understood as a process of hegemonic struggle that leads to the elevation of the particular to the temporary universal but rather has to do with the emergence of a new, uncertain political subjectivity that lacks a clear identification. I return to this latter point below.
I deliberately refer to some of the work with in the deliberative tradition, as there are other voices within this tradition that have argued for a broader and more encompassing conception of deliberation—see particularly the work of Iris Marion Young (2000); see also Biesta (2009b) for a more detailed discussion, and Deirdre Kelly’s contribution in this issue.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Robert Lawy, Carl Anders Säfström and Claudia Ruitenberg for conversations that have been formative for the ideas presented in this paper. I have also greatly benefited from feedback from an anonymous review, particularly with regard to deepening my understanding of the differences between Mouffe’s and Rancière’s understanding of the socio-political order.
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Biesta, G. The Ignorant Citizen: Mouffe, Rancière, and the Subject of Democratic Education. Stud Philos Educ 30, 141–153 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-011-9220-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-011-9220-4