Fear of Breakdown

Politics and Psychoanalysis

Noëlle McAfee

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231549912
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Teoría crítica

What is behind the upsurge of virulent nationalism and intransigent politics across the globe today? In Fear of Breakdown, Noëlle McAfee uses psychoanalytic theory to explore the subterranean anxieties behind current crises and the ways in which democratic practices can help work through seemingly intractable political conflicts. Working at the intersection of psyche and society, McAfee draws on psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott's concept of the fear of breakdown to show how hypernationalism stems from unconscious anxieties over the origins of personal and social identities, giving rise to temptations to reify exclusionary phantasies of national origins.

Fear of Breakdown contends that politics needs something that only psychoanalysis has been able to offer: an understanding of how to work through anxieties, ambiguity, fragility, and loss in order to create a more democratic politics. Coupling robust psychoanalytic theory with concrete democratic practice, Fear of Breakdown shows how a politics of working through can help counter a politics of splitting, paranoia, and demonization. McAfee argues for a new approach to deliberative democratic theory, not the usual philosopher-sanctioned process of reason-giving but an affective process of making difficult choices, encountering others, and mourning what cannot be had.

1

DEFINING POLITICS

There are two overlapping problems that mark politics today. One is the uneven development of democracy: the fact that all voices are not equally heard. The other is that there are no a priori truths the collectivity can agree on when attempting to answer the question of what ought to be done on some contested matter. Because of this first problem, political debates are often veneers for something like class or gender warfare, about who the “we” of our polity is and should be. This creates a politics of contestation that sidelines the indeterminacy of political questions for a notion that one side is right and the other wrong—because of the occlusion of the experience of those marginalized. This leads to a belief that somewhere there is a right answer waiting to be found. The hope is that perhaps with enough scientific—or hermeneutic, or deconstructive, or analytic, or whatever—inquiry, we can discover the best political direction and cudgel the other side into agreeing. Consider debates about teaching evolution, fluoridating water, vaccinating children, subsidizing corn and soy farmers, addressing global warming, etc. (And note that on a couple of these matters even those who have similar political leanings may disagree.) Surely, some may well believe, if there is sufficient research, and if science is on our side, then we can raise public awareness and offer an option that will be objectively best. But the point here is that democratic deficits lead to a denial of the reality that no number of “facts” or amount of inclusivity alone can settle a political argument.

Even in the most democratic of circumstances, there is no truth of the matter that can settle political debates, for even if there is a truth of the matter, people will still disagree about whether it is true. Moreover, the issue to be addressed is often multifaceted and complex, and people hold a diverse array of values and viewpoints. Some democratic theorists argue that democracy is better than other alternatives at solving problems because it brings together a multiplicity of cognitive points of view.1 Like the view sketched above, they think that politics is a matter of getting to the right facts (hence cognitive) but also a matter of testing various arguments (and hence rational, too). I have a bit of a quarrel with these views, since they presume, contra Aristotle’s sound view, that decisions requiring deliberation admit to right or wrong answers. I hasten to add that rational cognition doesn’t go very far in addressing political questions.

So, what is to be done about the impossible situation of there being no truth of the matter with which to settle political disagreements? For most of human history, decisions about “what should be” were based on one external standard or another: the word of God, a metaphysical principle, the glory of antiquity, natural law, what have you. In the twentieth century, all such “banisters,” as Arendt called them, began to crumble. But the answer she pointed to was not to find new foundations or banisters but to learn to think and judge and act without a banister. Politics, for Arendt, calls for thinking, the “habit of examining and reflecting on whatever happens to come to pass.”2 Thinking is what allows us to see something as a problem in the first place, to be able to observe some state of affairs and make a judgment: “that is not right” or “it shouldn’t be this way.”3 For many whites in South Africa through most of the twentieth century, namely those who didn’t cultivate the habit of thinking, apartheid wasn’t a problem; it was a solution. Thinking and judging, along with widespread speech and action by those seeking freedom, rendered apartheid a problem.

Even the clearest political issues are laden with indeterminable questions, such as what the best kind of life to live is, and no laboratory or logic class can answer them. We come back to the conundrum that we must decide what to do without a foundation but nonetheless in a thoughtful and deliberative fashion. Echoing Arendt, Barber writes, “To be political is thus to be free with a vengeance—to be free in the unwelcome sense of being without guiding standards or determining norms yet under an ineluctable pressure to act.” If politics is in fact the process of people having to decide together what to do about a common concern in the face of uncertainty, then citizens, that is, political actors, are those who undertake these difficult choices.4 This is hard enough to do alone, but in politics it becomes a collective act of trying to understand different perspectives, making difficult choices about what ought to be done, to win the consent of others.

Another feature of the view of politics I hold in this book is that it occurs throughout the public sphere, not just in governmental structures but throughout civil society, in family life, in the workplace, and anywhere else people take up matters of public concern. I see politics and public deliberation potentially operating throughout a decentered public sphere.5 This is not a common view. Today our dominant political imaginary eschews the idea that people have a direct role in deciding matters of common concern. It tends to see members of political communities not as citizens but as subjects whose best hope is to petition government to do the right thing. In the dominant imaginary, politics is what governments do, and the governed have only the opportunity to protest, beseech, or elect different representatives. Or as Cathy Cohen and Joseph Kahne describe it, participatory politics is being able “to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern.”6 This formulation suggests that when the public exerts its voice, it is not involved in politics per se but only trying to influence those who are involved, that is, those in government. The formulation denies the political impact of what happens on the streets and town squares around the world when people step out to engage in public clamor and discussions about what kind of political communities they want. Rather, the success of these public expressions is measured by whether they lead to regime change or cause those in government to change policies.

This common view of where politics happens and who political agents are is, I think, quite deleterious. What does it mean to leave this kind of decision making, this sort of meaning making, out of the definition of what is immediately political? In terms of the public and the kinds of conversations each of us routinely experiences, politics would then occur elsewhere. That many think this is how participatory democratic politics is understood is a strange phenomenon, one that goes largely unremarked upon. Most of the participatory ideals of democracy that grew out of the New Left movement of the 1960s and beyond still treat politics as what elected officials do.7 All the activity that citizens can engage in—various forms of voting, petitioning, lobbying, protesting, and mobilizing—revolve around electing and influencing politicians. The public sphere is one place, the political world another. What I would like to do here is broaden the frame and see these and other citizen actions as connected to a richer conception of democratic politics, one where citizens are in fact deeply involved in deciding what ought to be done on any given matter of common concern. Even the protesting activist is not merely trying to influence elected officials; whether she knows it or not, she is also engaged in the larger political practice of identifying and thematizing issues that the public will need to take up, deliberate on, and decide. This is true regardless of whether the protesting activist develops sets of meaning that ultimately come to be broadly influential. Surely while much of politics occurs in government, in a democracy it is only the public that can ascertain the legitimacy of governments and public policies.

In thinking about the political, I propose that we shift the weight of our attention to such ordinary talk not only when it achieves polity-wide influence but even when it occurs at a small scale. As the Swedish media theorist Peter Dahlgren argues, “At the most fundamental level, the political emerges through talk or other forms of communication—which may not be formalized deliberation at all.”8 Dahlgren describes the process on a continuum, “where talk can be seen as moving from the pre-political, to the parapolitical … and then to the full-blown political itself. From there it may enter the arena of formal politics itself.”9 As Dalhgren sees it, even if political talk never enters formal politics, it is a vital element of an alternative politics that takes place in a broad cultural and political milieu. “Certainly some instances of the political will be part of formalized politics and involve decision-making and/or elections, but it is imperative that we keep the broader vista of the political in view as the terrain of political agency and participation.”10

In much media studies, this broad understanding of the political is widespread. As Stephen Coleman, a British theorist of political communication, writes:

In fact, politics was—and still is—being redefined. Few any longer believe that the political can be confined to a narrow cluster of institutional activities in which voting is the high point of civic action and law-making the end point of governing. The political seems to be seeping out of all sorts of cultural corners and relationships, from claims about casual racism on TV to changes of national mood regarding healthy eating following a campaign by a TV chef; and public battles about the political implications of religious morality. This myriad conglomeration of contentions cannot be confined to old-fashioned partisan politics, resolved in museum-like chambers of parliamentary deliberation, or acted upon through traditional repertoires of collective action.11

The importance of recognizing the priority of ordinary talk about matters of common concern is that it gives us a different context for understanding the basic acts of participatory politics. For democratic politics to occur here, with citizens, and not just there, with the governing class, citizen action needs to be part of the larger project of deciding what to do in the face of uncertainty and disagreement. This means that texting “free Tibet” can be political only if it is part of a larger conversation that is seen as integral to deciding what to do, not just beseeching others to do the right thing. As I’ll discuss more in these pages, much of what people do when they converse together about matters of common concern is deeply political, including speech and action aimed at identifying and thematizing problems, deliberating about what to do, forming public will, and deciding where to go next.

Many of my views about politics resonate with those of Hannah Arendt, who might also agree, though she is not explicit on this, that politics is a practice of deciding in the midst of uncertainty. Seemingly unable to tolerate such uncertainty, those who have taken on projects of founding new societies still have looked backward for support, back to some earlier founding as a foundation for their present one. Even the American “founding fathers,” Arendt notes in On Revolution, looked backward to a Roman model.12 Despite their self-understanding as creating something that imitated the past, the founders, like other human beings, sought political foundations to serve as banisters in activities that can hardly have any. This fruitless search can lead to bad ends, as I will discuss in due course. But for now my object is to define politics.

In Arendt’s view, the political has the following features: (1) Human beings distinguish themselves (become a “who” and not just a “what”) through their speech and action in the company of others, others who may record these words and deeds to save them from futility. (2) Political actions create something new, and no one can predict what they will trigger. (3) When people in all their plurality come together in the space of appearance, a form of power emerges, not strength, certainly not violence, but a power potential that can be used toward world-disclosing and world-building activities. “Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company,” Arendt writes, “where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.”13 And a fourth point, less explicit in any single text of Arendt’s but drawn from the whole, is that politics calls for “thinking without banisters,” that is, without appealing to any given truth or foundation. And it really calls for thinking, as in the two-in-one activity when I question what I am thinking one moment and then turn it around and think about it from another side. Nothing can be taken as a given, as “just the way it is.” In collectively fashioning our world with others, there are no antecedent metaphysical or even technical truths to lean on. We are left with wooing the consent of others on the basis only of how compelling our vision might be.14 Hence politics for Arendt is a communicative process of thinking and deciding and creating new realities.15

From Aristotle to Arendt and Wolin, a notion of the political emerges: that it is a matter of deciding what ought to be done on matters of common concern in the midst of uncertainty and disagreement. Without a standard and in the midst of a plurality of points of view, democratic politics is the practice of wooing the consent of others, of debating and deliberating, weighing and choosing, imagining and constituting new futures. For Arendt, politics is decidedly not about exercising coercion or violence to get one’s way. Rather it is about exercising public freedom in concert with others to decide the future. It will also involve (to draw in some of Arendt’s later work on judgment) appreciating others’ different perspectives and trying to offer directions that people with these other points of view would agree to in order to successfully woo their consent. For Arendt, then, all real politics is participatory and deliberative, especially democratic politics, where the public at large is the tribunal of public judgment.

Arendt provides ways of thinking about democracy and political speech and action in a postmetaphysical age; that is, she shows how people can make political claims to one another when there is no ground on which to ground their claims. For Arendt, the momentous task of thinking and natality starts the moment we ...