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CHAPTER 8 Political Theory and the Postmodern Politics of Ambiguity Ruth Lessl Shively Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. . . . The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing. —Chesterton, Orthodoxy “Is political theory a form of politics?” This essay looks critically at one form of thought that answers “yes.” My criticism of this answer takes its inspiration from Chesterton’s insight above. I will argue that those who would “free” theory and politics from the prison of rational order, would bring both to a lamentable end. For this order is to politics and theories of politics as the three sides are to the triangle. It is one of the “limitations” that constitutes the thing we are doing. POLITICS OF AMBIGUITY The theorists I address in this essay—those who answer “yes” to the question above—go by different names. They include in their ranks “militant” or “politicized” liberals like William Connolly and Richard Flathman, “virtu theorists” like Bonnie Honig, poststructuralist feminists like Judith Butler, “extravagance” theorists like William Corlett, and others who generally fall into the postmodernist camp. What they share, of importance to this essay, is the conviction that political theorists’ attempts to order the world—and, in particular, their efforts to make it conform to the ideals of reason and community—are inherently ambiguous. In one sense, these attempts are taken to be 173 174 RUTH LESSL SHIVELY ambiguous because the ideals of reason and community are not what theorists generally take them to be: they are not objective insights into truth and order, but are formed out of, and sustained by, issues of power and control. In another, more normative sense, these attempts are taken to be ambiguous because the humane goals toward which they are directed lead to inhumane results. That is, because most people are unwilling to admit to the ambiguity of their ideals, they are driven to silence and exclude those who call attention to this fact: those, for example, whose irrationality or disruptiveness underlines the fragility of all reasons and harmonies. Political theory is political, then, in two key ways: first, in that its seemingly apolitical ideals about reason and community take their form only out of the political realities of power and conflict; and second, in that its efforts to impose rational and social order on the world inevitably involve it in the coverup of ambiguity and, as such, in the political activities of exclusion and control. This is the gist of the argument made by the enthusiasts of ambiguity —or the “ambiguists” as I will hereafter call them (not with an intent to be disparaging, but to accentuate the set of assumptions that most distinguish and drive this group).1 To flesh out this argument a bit, let us add some detail to each of its key ideas. First, what is it that makes reason ambiguous for the ambiguists? Or why might they say that the ideal of reason is not what it seems to be? The key answer given here is that reason is formed and sustained by its oppositions: by irrationality, madness, chaos, flux. In William Corlett’s words, rational forms can emerge only “by sequestering the mysteries, accidents, and madness of flux”; or by creating a temporary “border between reasonable order and epistemological insanity (Corlett 1989, 88–89, and 149).” Thus, to exist and to accomplish its ends, reason must silence or “sequester” nonreason. It must create a dividing line—however arbitrary and unstable—between the rational and irrational. But then this is where the ambiguity of reason enters in, for, from this perspective, reason can never completely do away with nonreason. Its oppositions—insanity, mystery, flux, disorder—remain in the background , in the margins, because they are necessary to it. Madness, Corlett (1989, 180) argues, does not simply connote the absence of reason, but “plays a constitutive role in the possibility of reason and order.” It is that against which we define ourselves as sane and our ideas as ordered . It is both “the death of reason and also its most profound resource ” (Corlett 1989, 160). Which is to say, in other words, that reason is ambiguous because it must do what it cannot do: it must exclude the chaos and madness from which it springs and is sustained. [18.117.137.64] Project MUSE...

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