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The Politics of Speed: Connolly, Wolin, and the Prospects for Democratic Citizenship in an Accelerated Polity

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Polity

Abstract

Is there a speed limit for democracy? Do the system imperatives of late-modern economic polities necessitate a shrinking of democratic oversight and control? Are the accelerated life-experiences of citizens in late modernity fundamentally hostile to the formation of civic identities, deliberative skills, and democratic habits? In this paper I examine recent work in democratic theory on social acceleration in order to address these questions. I argue that liberal theorists such as William Scheuerman focus excessively on institutional adjustments to the democratic polity rather than on ways in which democratic participation can be nurtured in an attempt to surmount the challenges of social acceleration. At the same time, radical pluralists such as William Connolly come close to romanticizing the effects of speed while ignoring its ill consequences for democracy (and for pluralism). I end the paper with an examination of the work of Sheldon Wolin, whose understanding of democracy has led him to formulate the idea of a “multiple civic self” that is nurtured through slow-time political practices. Wolin's theory of the multiple civic self, I argue, offers us the best way to think about the challenges for democracy represented by social acceleration, especially in conversation with Connolly's emphasis on “bicameral” citizenship and Bonnie Honig's treatment of the “Slow Food” movement.

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Notes

  1. Ida H.J. Sabelis, “Global Speed: A Time View on Transnationality,” Culture & Organization 10 (December 2004): 291–301. John Urry, “Social Networks, Travel and Talk,” The British Journal of Sociology 54 (June 2003): 155–75; Hartmut Rosa, “Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High-speed Society,” Constellations 10 (2003):3–33; Reinhart Kosselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. K. Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985); Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. M. Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext, 1986); Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1995); Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity, 1998); Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000); Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalisation Is Reshaping Our Lives (London: Profile Books, 2002); David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, eds., Global Transformation: Politics, Economics, and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Sheldon Wolin, “Agitated Times,” Parallax 11 (2005): 2–11.

  2. William Scheuerman, “Liberal Democracy and the Empire of Speed,” Polity 34 (2001): 58. Even when deliberative bodies fulfill their legislative duties, the executive branch selects certain parts of the new law to enforce, letting others wither. Daniel Schulman “W's Poison Pen,” Mother Jones 32 (2007): 27.

  3. Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, 46.

  4. Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean: The Changing Landscape of Corporate Power in the Age of Flexibility (New York: Guilford Publications, 1997); Harrison and Bluestone, The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

  5. Witness the rise and fall of Enron, Bear Sterns, or Lehman Brothers.

  6. Gary Burtless and Christopher Jencks, “American Inequality and Its Consequences,” Discussion paper (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, March 2003); Simon Head, The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age (London: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jeffrey Winters and Benjamin Page, “Oligarchy in the United States?,” Perspectives on Politics 7 (2009): 731–51.

  7. See Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. M. Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext, 1986). For a brief, excellent introduction to Virilio's work, see Ian James, Paul Virilio (London: Routledge, 2007).

  8. The quote from Virilio and the citations of Kosselleck and Bauman above demonstrate that the discourse of social acceleration is hardly limited to North American political theory. In the case of William Connolly and others, for instance, the line between Continental and North American theory has been transgressed so many times that the line itself is blurry if not crossed out. In this article, however, I have focused my examination on a more limited range of authors in contemporary American theory. If there is no ultimate justification for this parochial bias, then the least I can do is to acknowledge it. For more on Connolly's French influences, see James Der Derian, “Becoming Connolly: Critique, Crossing Over, and Concepts.” in The New Pluralism: William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition, ed. David Campbell and Morton Schoolman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

  9. Quoted in Scheuerman, “Liberal Democracy and the Empire of Speed,” 50.

  10. This trend accelerated under the presidential administration of George W. Bush, yet it crosses partisan lines to touch all of the recent presidential administrations. See Robert J. Spitzer, “Presidential Prerogative Power: The Case of the Bush Administration and Legislative Power,” PS: Political Science and Politics 24 (1991): 38–42; M.T. Kline, “The Line Item Veto Case and the Separation of Powers,” California Law Review 88 (2000): 181–232; Bruce Ackerman, “The Emergency Constitution,” The Yale Law Review 113 (2004): 1029–91.

  11. Scheuerman, “Liberal Democracy,” 58. See also William Scheuerman, “The Economic State of Emergency,” Cardozo Law Review 21 (2000):1869–94.

  12. William Scheuerman, Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 195–213.

  13. Ibid., 61.

  14. Hence Dewey's assertion that “politics is the shadow cast over society by big business.” Quoted in Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), 440.

  15. Scheuerman, Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time, 187.

  16. Ibid., 23. In Scheuerman's most recent work on the subject, he re-iterated these points: “speed and its cousin busyness are here to stay: the real question is how we can preserve the indispensable normative kernel of liberal democratic citizenship while some of its forms inevitably undergo acceleration.” “Citizenship and Speed,” in High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity, ed. Hartmut Rosa and William Scheuerman (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 287–305.

  17. Michael Shapiro, “Time, Disjuncture, and Democratic Citizenship,” in Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political, ed. Aryeh Botwinick and William Connolly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 232–255.

  18. Shapiro, “Time,” 233.

  19. Ibid., 235.

  20. See Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

  21. The term is Wolin's. See his Presence of the Past (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 23.

  22. Shapiro, “Time,” 238. See also Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997).

  23. Shapiro, “Time,” 238.

  24. Ibid., 233.

  25. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” reprinted in Michael L. Morgan, Classics of Moral and Political Theory (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2005).

  26. Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 41.

  27. Isabel V. Sawhill, “Trends in Intergenerational Mobility,” in Economic Mobility Project (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2007).

  28. Gary Solon, “Cross-country Differences in Intergenerational Earnings Mobility,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 16 (Summer 2002): 59–66.

  29. William Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

  30. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 159.

  31. Ibid., 170.

  32. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), 94.

  33. Ibid., 97.

  34. Connolly, IdentityDifference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 215.

  35. William Connolly, Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 16.

  36. In a telling aside, Connolly—immediately after he defends “the bond of identification”—writes, “I know from experience some will skip this clause.” As a dedicated reader of Connolly, I would argue that the heralded “skipping” results from the fact that such parenthetical asides often remain just that. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, xviii.

  37. William Connolly, Neuropolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 148. “Fascist becoming machines” is borrowed from Deleuze; it expresses the idea that forces associated with fascism—xenophobia, jingoistic nationalism, militarized central government—resonate off each other to catalyze a larger formation.

  38. Connolly, Identity, 215.

  39. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 160, emphasis added.

  40. By, for instance, extending sabbaticals. Connolly, Neuropolitics, 143.

  41. Ibid., 158.

  42. Ibid., 148, emphasis added. See also William Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2005), 166.

  43. Connolly, Neuropolitics, 161.

  44. Ibid., 160. In this context Connolly develops what he calls “critical responsiveness” and “agonistic respect”—two virtues essential, he thinks, to democracy's prospects. See the conclusion below.

  45. Since his early work with Michael Best, Connolly has “tried to keep one finger on political economy.” Mark Anthony Wenman, “Agonism, Pluralism, and Contemporary Capitalism: An Interview with William Connolly,” Comparative Political Theory 7 (2008): 216.

  46. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist Left (New York: Routledge, 1997).

  47. William Connolly, “Assembling the Left,” Boundary 26 (1999): 47–54; Bradley J. MacDonald, “Towards an Ethos of Freedom and Engagement: Interview with William Connolly,” Strategies 15 (2002): 165–80.

  48. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 87. See also Connolly, “The Power of Assemblages and the Fragility of Things,” British Journal of Politics & International Relations 10 (2008): 241–50.

  49. As least as far as impact-accidents were concerned. Spontaneous roll-overs were another story.

  50. William Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 92–93. See also Connolly, “The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine,” Political Theory 33 (December 2005): 869–86.

  51. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 83. See also Michael H. Best and William Connolly, The Politicized Economy (Lexington, KY: D.C. Heath and Company, 1982).

  52. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. 62–63.

  53. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, xi.

  54. William Connolly, “The Nobility of Democracy,” in Vocations of Political Theory, ed. John Tambornino and Jason Frank (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

  55. Connolly, “Nobility,” 324.

  56. Connolly, “Nobility,” 307, 311, and 324.

  57. Connolly, Neuropolitics, 144. Also, Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1977), 177–78.

  58. Connolly, Neuropolitics, 146. Also Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1997), 7.

  59. Connolly, Neuropolitics, 160.

  60. Frederick C. Gamst, Meanings of Work: Considerations for the Twenty-first Century (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995); Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78 (May 1973): 1360–80; Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

  61. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 36.

  62. It is in this light that we can perhaps understand some of the rancor (and ill-informed doxa) surrounding the debates on health care reform in the United States. Paul Krugman, “Health Care Realities.” The New York Times, 31 July 2009.

  63. Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), x. Connolly has acknowledged a deep indebtedness to figures such as Deleuze and Foucault for the formulation of his own ideas on normalization and difference. Connolly has talked about being “infected” by Foucault at an early stage in his career. However, one wonders if Connolly's reading of Foucault has not itself been infected by an American ethos of expansionism that critiques settlement as normalization while forgetting that (for Tocqueville and for others) Americans are habitually “unsettling.” Fed by currents in late modern capitalism, this tendency undermines the possibility of concerted attention to common problems of health care, public infrastructure, and the environment. Compare Wolin's discussion of the American tendency to be “forever on the go” with Connolly's anxieties of territorial and arboreal democracy. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 233; Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 135–61.

  64. Connolly, “Nobility,” 314.

  65. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, xviii. See also David Campbell and Morton Schoolman, The New Pluralism: William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 313.

  66. Sennett, Culture of the New Capitalism.

  67. Campbell and Schoolman, The New Pluralism, 316.

  68. Sheldon Wolin, “What Time Is It?,” Theory & Event 1 (1997), 1–10.

  69. Sheldon Wolin, “Democracy, Difference, and Re-cognition,” Political Theory 21 (1993): 472.

  70. Ibid., 472.

  71. Wolin, “Fugitive,” 41.

  72. Sheldon Wolin and John Schaar, The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond (New York: Vintage, 1970).

  73. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 606, emphasis added.

  74. See Wolin's discussion of collective identity, myth, and political birthrights in his Presence of the Past.

  75. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 603. See also Wolin, “On the Theory and Practice of Power,” in After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, ed. Jonathan Arac (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991).

  76. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 604.

  77. Wolin, “Democracy, Difference, and Re-cognition,” 477.

  78. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 578.

  79. Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,” Political Theory 34 (2006): 690–714.

  80. Sheldon Wolin, “The Destructive Sixties and Postmodern Conservatism,” in Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).

  81. Wolin, “Agitated Times,” Parallax 11 (October 2005): 2–11, at 3.

  82. Ibid., 5.

  83. The “striking common features” of the various forms of agitation in this period included popular discussion, rampant pamphleteering, a speeded-up tempo for politics, the existence of Parliament, and the contrast between the rapid movement of ideas and the slower tempo of tradition bound society. Ibid., 4.

  84. Ibid., 6.

  85. Ibid., 6.

  86. Ibid., 9.

  87. Wolin, “What Time is It?” 2.

  88. Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 252.

  89. Wolin, Presence of the Past, 139.

  90. Wolin and Schaar, The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond, 95, emphasis added.

  91. Wolin, Presence of the Past, 190.

  92. Ibid., 191.

  93. Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds, 257.

  94. Just one example would be the struggle between state and federal regulators over carbon emissions standards. Paul Grimaldi, “Federal Judge Lets Fight Over Auto Emissions Standards Go Forward,” The Providence Journal 1 (January 2008).

  95. Wolin, “The Destructive Sixties and Postmodern Conservatism,” 154.

  96. Tocqueville described it thus: “feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another,” in Democracy in America, ed. J.P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Perennial Classics, 2000), 515.

  97. Connolly himself has publicly praised Wolin's work as a “luminous source of inspiration” and put the convergence between their political and theoretical projects at a robust “84%” William E. Connolly, “Wolin, Superpower and Christianity,” Theory & Event 10 (2007) available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory-and-event/toc/tae10.1.html. This 84% is restricted to the “non-Nietzschean” sections of Wolin's most famous work, Politics and Vision.

  98. See Connolly, Pluralism, 4–5 and 123. See also Campbell and Schoolman's interview with Connolly in The New Pluralism, especially 313–16.

  99. Connolly, Pluralism, 4 and Campbell and Schoolman, The New Pluralism, 316.

  100. Campbell and Schoolman, The New Pluralism, 317.

  101. Connolly, Pluralism, 4. This line of thought seems almost opposite to Connolly's earlier emphasis on sedimentation and inertia as the organizing tendency of political and subjective life—a deviation or shift in his rhetoric that is left unexplained.

  102. Bonnie Honig, “The Time of Rights: Emergent Thoughts in an Emergency Setting,” in The New Pluralism, ed. D. Campbell and R. Schoolman, 85–120. Reprinted in Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

  103. Quoted in Honig, Emergency Politics, 58–59. Original quote is from Alexander Stille, “Slow Food,” The Nation, 20 August 2001.

  104. Honig, Emergency Politics, 58.

  105. Carl Honore, In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed (New York: Harper One, 2004).

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The author owes a debt of gratitude to the many people who read and commented on the various iterations of this paper. Peter Euben and Romand Coles read nearly every draft, and offered excellent suggestions for revision. Joel Schlosser and Ali Aslam each contributed thoughtful advice at various stages. An early version of this paper was presented at the 2006 Association for Political Theory conference, and the panelists and audience members provided useful feedback. The author would also acknowledge the Political Theory Articles Working Group at Duke, and especially the faculty convener Michael Gillespie and the graduate coordinator James Bourke, for suggestions on a late draft. Lastly, the three anonymous reviewers for Polity each contributed helpful and thoughtful criticism.

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McIvor, D. The Politics of Speed: Connolly, Wolin, and the Prospects for Democratic Citizenship in an Accelerated Polity. Polity 43, 58–83 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2010.23

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