Psychoanalysis, Public Reason, and Reconstruction in the "New" South Africa

I

In theory at least, democratic procedures and practices broadly follow the tenets of practical reason. They are predicated upon the free availability of information, ¹ allow full and unconstrained use of individual deliberative capacities, and assume that by and large reasoners implement mechanisms of belief-formation that tend to produce epistemically and morally justifiable outcomes.

Given the wide acceptance of the view that a desirable model of social and civic participation in the “new” South Africa needs to go beyond one generated by merely procedural democratic tenets, it seems that discussion, deliberation and reasoning together in the manner described above should be essential components of democratic interaction. The guiding idea is one of autonomous citizens ² engaged in determining together the fundamental conditions of culture and society.

From a psychoanalytic perspective the presumption that these elements might be available in any society however “advanced” in the direction of free and equal participation might well appear naive not to say deluded. Any reservations from this quarter would be underpinned by much recent political thought highlighting the peculiar difficulties within pluralist democracies of finding shared bases of political agreement through ordinary procedures of rational and reasonable discussion.

These difficulties can be expected to be exacerbated in societies in which fundamental, historically entrenched cultural divergences predominate, of which South Africa can be taken as paradigmatic.

One important and influential line of argument within contemporary political theory suggests that even in the best of actual social circumstances where there is significant diversity, only if most of the contentious issues are effectively removed from the public agenda (of discussion and of institutional concern) is there any hope of attaining even minimal consensus, and recommends that this is probably the most prudent and judicious way to go. ³

Whatever the merits of this policy with respect to societies already “well-ordered” by concepts of justice (and there certainly are detractors even with respect to these more uncontroversial and straightforward applications), it seems a particularly unavailing one with respect to societies where even the most fundamental democratic values are alien, where they do not inform individual or interactive conduct to any appreciable extent. ⁴ The result of accepting the implications of the claim that public reason cannot deliver resolution of disputes in contexts of freedom and diversity would be to accept defeat in the face of insurmountable obstacles.

But an alternative reading of these difficulties might be that the standards of public reasoning themselves are a major source of the problem: On their own these standards are too restrictive, stringent and unrealistic to do the job of delineating a domain of public deliberation for anything but ideal reasoners, and much less of enabling the emergence of a shared understanding of past, present and future social and political democratic practices in societies where the status quo has been inimical to the very idea of autonomous citizens or democratic culture.

In this paper, I shall explore the possibility that psychoanalytic theory has the resources to deal systematically with contentious social and political issues, thus obviating the need to embrace a “strategy of avoidance” (or denial?) with respect to problems of diversity, and suggesting a way towards a more substantive social stability. In particular I shall focus on whether psychoanalytic procedures and interpretative strategies may be extrapolated to the public political and social realm and in such a way as to allow for a principled weakening of the strictures of practical reason in this domain. If so, there would be some hope of accommodating non-rational or irrational aspects of the deliberative situation which practical reason on its own is not equipped to handle.

II Practical Reason in the Public Domain

Even in the best of cases, living in a political society involves dealing with non-voluntary and non-intimate relations between strangers where intractable social and political conflicts may be expected to arise. The best case scenario—one in which all involved come to accept the circumstances in which they must coexist and are motivated to achieve social unity on the basis of rational agreement—in many actual instances seems...