by Heike Delitz
(or: What is Public Interest Design?)
The following is in the context of the MA degree programme in Public Interest Design (PID) at the University of Wuppertal. The aim of this degree programme is to apprentice designers who are socially active beyond communication and product design insofar as they contribute to "shaping public interests" within the framework of a democratic understanding of the political (according to the subtitle in Rodatz/Smolarski 2018; see also the website of the degree programme www.pid.uni-wuppertal.de). I am now concerned with the socio-theoretical prerequisite of such a project, or with its socio-theoretical clarification - more precisely, it is about the 'social and political imaginary' of modern democracy.
Before I come to this, it may not be useless - given the topic of the series of lectures - to insert a historical reflection: Reinhart Koselleck linked the experience that the present is 'problematic' and that society can be shaped to the emergence of the modern world: Since the so-called Sattelzeit between 1750 and 1850, concepts of expectation have taken the place of the concepts of experience under which 'society' is presented. Problems were now thematised with a view to the future - in the hope of progress, in the fear of collapse. Of course, the entire 20th century is also full of fears for the future and the will to shape it.
Against this history of crisis and design, PID is a very modest endeavour: The starting point is the crisis perception of polarisation and the retreat to one's own interests, while a democratic society implies an interest in the general, public sphere. Or, according to Claude Lefort (1999), modern democracy is that "inform-setting of society" in which the conflict over one's own identity is institutionalised. I would like to outline this concept of 'society' and this definition of democracy in more detail, as one that is based on the concepts of the social and political imaginary. Here, the social imaginary denotes an ultimate meaning - the imagined social ground; and the political imaginary the notion of a unity of society that presupposes an apparent position beyond society. Both are related by Lefort and the authors associated with him - Cornelius Castoriadis, Marcel Gauchet, Chantal Mouffe - to modern democracy, which appears as a specific form of the creation of unity and justification of society. At the same time, society generally presents itself as an imaginary institution , as a collective existence essentially based on - counterfactual - ideas: social identity and unity are impossible, and that is precisely why their imagination is necessary.
The social and political imaginary
Castoriadis defines 'society' as an imaginary institution - or, society is defined as "non-being, which is more real than all being" (Castoriadis 1984: 191). The starting point here is the becoming and the self-institution of society - each changes permanently and each is contingent: "[W]hat is present in and thanks to history" is the "emergence of new societies" and the "incessant self-transformation" of every society (ibid. 314). Everything therefore takes place as if society had to deny itself self-transformation and also its self-generation. What is instituted is a social identity and a social ground - something that binds the collective. The collective is instituted in the idea that it owes itself to an Other (e.g. 'God'). It is instituted in the 'debt of meaning' (Gauchet 1977), in a central social meaning or the central imaginary. This imagined ground is the "unifying factor" of society; it is the "invisible cement that holds together the immense jumble of the real, rational and symbolic of which every society is composed" (Castoriadis 1984: 246). These last "meanings [...] denote nothing, but connote almost everything" (ibid.). Castoriadis refers to imaginary instances such as God, rationality, nation, people. In the foundation of the collective in these imaginary outside entities, the unity of the members is instituted, as is their temporal identity. At the same time, this is a cultural theory of society: imaginations are dependent on the symbolic (on bodies, not least on language).
Lefort, Gauchet and Mouffe have developed theories of the political imaginary in close connection with this thesis, focussing more on conflicts, hegemony and particularities. The 'political imaginary' can be understood as the idea of a unity of society that presupposes a separation of a political place - the institution of a 'place of power' from which society appears as a unity. Of particular interest is the way in which this is created in modern democracy. This appears as the only form of the political in which the unity and identity of society are constantly withdrawn from determination because the 'place of power' is emptied - no body occupies it. Post-Marxist thinking is also decisive here, both theoretically and politically. Theoretically, in contrast to the base-superstructure theorem, the unfoundedness of every society is emphasised - and therefore the necessity of imagining a reason. Politically, this is associated with the abandonment of the revolutionary subject. Politically, it means saying goodbye to the 'totalitarian adventure' to which Marxism has led. Or, politically, this leads to the defence of democracy, because every other form of society leads to the occupation of the place of power, to the claim to represent the unity of society, to know its truth. In contrast, modern democracy with its political discussions appears as a 'loss of the signs of security': it appears as a society whose unity is constantly being thwarted, whose identity remains floating, latent. This is because political conflict is constitutive here and society is founded on at least two (opposing) imaginaries.
Democracy: paradoxical justifications and ideas of unity
According to Lefort, the democratic paradox is that although all the institutions that characterise monarchy are continued (there is representation, there is a place of power and the people are presented as sovereign and subject), these institutions are simultaneously suspended: "Of all regimes" , this modern democratic society (the one after 1789) is the only one in which a "representation of power is established, which [at the same time] confirms that it is an empty place". Here the "distance between the symbolic and the real is preserved" (Lefort 1999: 49f.) - the difference between the claim to embody society and the actual embodiment of this unity in a person remains clear - measured against what was going on in the monarchy (in its notion of the sanctity of the king's body) and against it. The place of power continues to exist, but it is only temporarily occupied. Likewise, the political discourse permanently affirms that power does not belong to those who exercise it, that its "exercise requires a periodically recurring competition" and that "authority [...] is constantly generated anew as a consequence of an expression of the will of the people [...]" (ibid. 50). At the same time, a sovereign continues to be created, there is a political subject that is supposed to express itself, its unity is imagined: This is the 'democratic paradox'. Nothing makes this more visible than the institution of the election - because at the moment in which the people are supposed to manifest their sovereignty, their substance is replaced by pure "number" (ibid. 53). It is dissolved into the individual electoral vote. At this point, Lefort (1986: 28f., HD) writes: "Democracy is founded and sustained in the dissolution of the signs of security". On the one hand, democracy defends itself against the return of the prince - the 'totalitarian adventure'; on the other hand, it also invokes a political subject. Society no longer "takes shape in the body of the prince", but it does continue to be founded on 'subjects' (people, state, nation), from which "social identity and the social community receive their meaning" (Lefort 1999: 60). This society also remains in search of its "foundation" (ibid. 56).
Gauchet answers the question of what form this Other takes - in a discourse analysis of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. What does this declaration mean? Its function is the foundation of the new society - the creation of a justification that is as unquestionable as that of the monarchy. Its legitimisation through tradition and the notion of the sacred body of the king was just as fundamental: Faced with this "guardian figure rooted in history and faith", this person who embodied the "'perfect form of rule', the "new power" had to accumulate even more. The sanctification of the king is replaced by that of each individual (Gauchet 1991: 19); royal sovereignty is replaced by that of the people. The "competitive situation between the established power and the power to be established" was the "matrix of the revolutionary process", and in it was rooted that "founding radicalism whose first vector was the declaration of human and civil rights". Since then, modern democracy has instituted two ultimate grounds or social imaginaries - the obligation of human rights; and the sovereignty of the people, which require opposing policies.
Mouffe and Laclau have on the one hand formulated a general theory of society or collective identity that emphasises the counterfactual institution of unity. The formula is now 'impossibility and necessity of society': "The impossibility of a definitive fixity of meaning implies that there must be partial fixities," the two write with Derrida, and continue: "Even if the social is not able to fix itself in the intelligible and instituted forms of a society, it exists only as an endeavour to construct this impossible object. Every [social] discourse is constituted as an attempt to construct [...] a centre" (Laclau, Mouffe 2001: 149f.), to express the identity of society. On the other hand, Laclau and Mouffe introduce the category of the constitutive outside - identity assertion through difference (ibid. 27). This is always a hegemonic project, the attempt of a position to determine unity and identity. Thirdly, Mouffe also speaks of the democratic paradox, which she now relates to the reasons revealed by Gauchet - which underpin contrary notions of identity and call for contrary policies. Both set in motion the conflict that characterises modern democracy: this society formulates its identity in the "liberal tradition, which is based on the rule of law, the defence of human rights and respect for individual freedom" as well as in the "democratic tradition, whose main ideas are those of equality, the identity between rulers and ruled and the sovereignty of the people". Democracy institutes contrary imaginaries, its unity therefore remains controversial - and it is precisely the conflict over this definition of its own identity that is central to it.
'Public interest design' - shaping the interest in the public sphere
If consensus is unattainable, the 'public interest' is indeterminable. If the identity of a democratic society is to exist in dissent - then this is in the public interest: With these social theoretical and analytical considerations, what is to be understood by the 'imaginary' would precisely not be a vague vision of the future of a brave new world. On the one hand, the concept of the imaginary in this tradition is about the empty, unjustifiable instance that grounds everything else: the ground or the grounding outside to which a society commits itself. On the other hand - under the concept of the political imaginary - it is about the always controversial assertion of a unity and identity of society, which is made from an instance that is seemingly beyond it: in the symbolic separation of a 'place of power'. This takes on a paradoxical form in modern democracy: The identity of society is both asserted and thwarted, and there are at least two opposing imaginary grounds. As far as the aforementioned degree programme - Public Interest Design - is concerned, we can now see what it could be about: less about 'designing' in the public interest, about shaping the future on one's own authority, and more about stimulating interest in the public sphere, in the dispute about the social basis and identity, in the context of social polarisation as well as the retreat to one's own.
Literature
Castoriadis, Cornelius: Society as an imaginary institution. Entwurf einer politischen Philosophie, Frankfurt/M. 1984.
Gauchet, Marcel : La dette du sens et les racines de l'Etat. Libre 2, 1977.
Gauchet, Marcel: The Declaration of Human Rights. The debate on civil liberties in 1789, Reinbek 1991.
Laclau, Ernesto/Mouffe, Chantal: Hegemony and radical democracy. On the deconstruction of Marxism, Vienna 2001.
Lefort, Claude: La question de la démocratie, in: Ders.: Essais sur le politique (XIXe-XXe siècles), Paris 1986.
Lefort, Claude: Fortdauer des Theologisch-Politischen? Vienna 1999.
Mouffe, Chantal: The Democratic Paradox, Vienna 2010.
Rodatz, Christoph/ Smolarski, Pierre (ed.): What is Public Interest Design? Contributions to the design of public interests, Bielefeld 2018.
Heike Delitz, PD Dr phil. habil., currently holds the professorship for Comparative Cultural Sociology at the School of Cultural Studies at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder.
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