The Clamour of Political Beings

Politics is a noisy place. This can be seen its everyday machinations: parliamentary speeches, the bustle of protests, various heated discussion on the value of free speech. This essay seeks to investigate how western political philosophy has placed a primacy on speech throughout its history. It will be argued that the very nature of politics—the manifestation of political philosophy—is centred around being noisy. This is often manifest in the importance of the speech to not only political praxis, but political theory as well. If this is the case, then what does silence, the opposite of noise, have to do with politics? And is politics possible without noise? If not then what is the exact status of things such as the environment, which have increasingly become the object of political machinations in their own right, but which are silent, which do not make speeches, cannot talk? Can western political philosophy grant these objects a proper political status, or do they remain external?

This essay argues that we can understand these external beings, namely animals and the environment, as capable of communication and interaction in a curtailed sense and this gives them an entrance into being seen as political beings. In order to make this point, it is important to understand the significance of speech in the history of political philosophy.

The primacy of speech can be traced back to origins of western philosophy in Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s oeuvre is set up in a dialogical form, and while the substance of the rejoinders Socrates receives in the dialogues can be challenged (they often consisted of some variation on “yes, Socrates”), the importance of dialogue and speech is present in the very form of his foundational text. in the very form that the cornerstone in which western philosophy is presented. However, it is not just form that matters here; in the Phaedrus, Plato goes so far as to present an argument for the primacy of dialogue as a superior form of communication over and above speeches and writing.^[1]

In Aristotle, likewise, man is a political animal, but importantly, he is more than that. He is an animal with speech, and alone amongst the animals in this fact. It is through speech that man is able to “indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is just and unjust.”^[2] Speech then does not just separate man from animals, it is what gives man politics, in so far as politics is itself an attempt to discover and institute what is just and what is good.

This foundation of speech is carried through the tradition of western political philosophy. There is a lull in its development, as speech does not play a crucial role in the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes’ (1588 – 1679) account of politics (the Leviathan can have arbitrary power, the need for rules to be communicable is non-necessary).^[3] However John Locke (1632 – 1704), another English philosopher, not long after makes consent a foundation of his anti-Hobbesian political philosophy, stating “thus every man by consenting with others to make one Body Politick [sic] under one Government, puts himself under an Obligation to every one of that Society…”^[4]. The primacy of consent here, which forms the basis for ideas of the social contract, is presumably acted out in speech or writing (as we will see later, these two are not so different).

Locke lays the foundation for social contract theory – the idea that the rules of society are agreed upon. Returning to the speech/writing issue, whether the rules are spoken or written, they are presented in some way. They are then heard or read, i.e. interpreted. They are then agreed to, in a process that requires verbalisation. In Locke, this agreement can take a tacit form, but the tacit agreement remains a response to a written or spoken contract, and the ability for dissent remains crucial for, indeed is the whole point of, Locke’s political philosophy. Locke’s political philosophy thus reinscribes the importance of speech back into political philosophy after Hobbes.

Locke’s use of consent in turn makes dissent a speaking act – the political act par excellence. This can be seen in On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873), our third English philosopher, where he discusses freedom of speech at length, noting that “human beings should be free to form opinions, and to express their opinions without reserve.”^[5] Mill maintains that any attempt to coerce an individual is itself illegitimate, regardless of popular mandate.^[6] Mill will later qualify this in the case of a speech act that can be seen as “instigation to some mischievous act”^[7], which can be restricted in so far as they cause harm to other people. Mill’s theory is based on assumptions about when one can speak and what they can say when they do. His theory of politics thus revolves around speech as a key action – one that can only be restricted when it would cause harm and must otherwise remain unfettered. (Of course almost all debates in politics on free speech are arguments over what is harmful and how harmful such things are).

With this history in mind, the emphasis on speech is visible in more modern examples as well. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, first published in 1971, fundamentally seeks to find procedural constraints that will lead to agreement on the principles of justice.^[8] Here the move is away from dissent towards consent, towards agreement. However both notions contain the idea of speaking and presenting views. This is highlighted in the complex work of Jürgen Habermas, the former head of the Frankfurt School, which seeks to set out a theory of how individuals communicate and reach agreement. Foundational to this is Habermas’ notion of universal pragmatics, or the “universal conditions of understanding.”^[9] Habermas places this idea in a position of primacy, stating, “other forms of social actions – for example conflict, competition, strategic action in general – are derivatives of action oriented to reach understanding.”^[10] Thus for two of the key political thinkers of the 20^th century, speech remains in a fundamental place.

Naturally this primacy of speech in political philosophy has provoked sharp responses. However many of the more critical responses have to do with regaining speech for those who are denied it. This means that the critiques themselves reinforce the importance of speech as political gesture. Consider the work of the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida’s in Plato’s Pharmacy. In it Derrida argues that our notions of speech and writing are not separable in the way necessary for the Phaedrus’ point about the primacy of speech to work.^[11] However what happens here is that not only is speech inflected by the art of writing, but writing itself is inflected by the art of speech. As mentioned earlier, speech and writing cannot be seen as wholly separate. This means that the primacy of speech in the history of western political philosophy is contained in the primacy of writing. Derrida’s critique of the Phaedrus means that the written aspects of politics (constitutions, laws, etc.) are themselves part of this history of the primacy of speech.

Critics of Rawls and Habermas, most notably the Belgian born political theorist Chantal Mouffee, centre their critiques around notions of speech. Their argument is that, unlike in the models of Rawls and Habermas where consensus is achieved, politics itself is endless noise – there is always dissent. Mouffe even sets her position as in contradistinction to the project of the enlightenment.^[12] She sees politics as always necessarily exclusionary, and thus there is always a place from which dissent and struggle occur: “Liberal-democratic politics consists, in fact, in the constant process of negotiation and renegotiation.”^[13] This process of negotiation and renegotiation always comes in the form of a declaration, a speech or a manifesto. In the political theory of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, who is roughly lumped together with Mouffe and provides similar critiques of the notion of consensus, the organising idea is one of dissensus, the opposite of consensus.^[14] Indeed Rancière devotes much of his book Disagreement to discussions of speaking, and what is involved when one speaks to some else and one makes political noise: stages a protest, delivers a manifesto, articulates demands, etc. Thus even some of the main critiques of the history of western political philosophy find themselves giving primacy to speech.

Speech and writing are the mediums through which politics occurs. However the unthought other of this is silence. Often critiques of existing politics discuss the silence of a marginalised group. However these ‘silenced’ groups are in many instances the ones who have the potential to speak; they are victims of historical contingency. However if a being is incapable of speech, then politics, as articulated through western political philosophy, is closed to it. We rarely think of the environment or animals as political beings in their own right – they are silent to us. If one attempts to think through what is means for animals or the environment to be a political being, it seems only nonsense is possible – we can represent these grievances as our grievances, but the idea of animal rights or environmental rights, while possible, remains problematic. It seems that those beings that are silent to us remain beyond the tradition of western political philosophy.

Regarding issues of environmentalism then we appear to be at an impasse. The very structure of the thought that grounds politics (political philosophy) does not allow for animals or the environment to be political beings in their own right. Indeed the very task of imagining what it would mean for animals or the environment to enter into public life conjures absurd images: a parliament of pigs, an assembly of fronds. The images of the animal trials from the medieval era are something found to be farcical, and rightly so. However, if we wish to take the environment (and animals) seriously as objects of politics, we need to deal with the puzzling interaction of “habitual spokesperson and electors with mute entities.”[15] For the French sociologist Bruno Latour, natural entities, under the current framework of politics, are only represented by specialist knowledge (namely scientists) and that is incommensurable with public life: they cannot have a political voice or representation.[16]

Latour is cautious to avoid collapsing the distinction between man, environment and animal (in this he is close to Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am when Derrida asserts there is a clear distinction between men and animals), but argues that we can incorporate these things into our politics. While I cannot do justice to his argument here, Latour provides an illuminating example. Latour quotes a passage describing the effort to canalise a river, in which the regressive erosion that occurs during the process of canalisation is described as “the river’s revenge.”[17] He defends this phrasing, claiming, “there is no anthropomorphism in the reference to the river taking its own revenge, merely the painful revelation of a being in its own right with its own freedom and its own ends.”[18] Latour is attempting to make an explicitly Kantian point in his article, but the crucial point here is that there is a way for the environment to interact and communicate. The river’s revenge is a response to stimuli, a demand and a request. While this communication is of course far from the kind of speech that has dominated the history of political philosophy, it tells us that nature is neither a passive nor silent object. That this voice can be silenced or not heard remains true, but these are traditional problems of political philosophy, and it does not form a problem that is beyond the very structure of politics. Indeed this very idea of not being heard is something Rancière, Mouffe, Spivak, and many of the more critical scholars explore in their wholly anthropocentric work: it is part of the tradition of (western) political philosophy. Thus it is possible to engage in a political struggle for animals and the environment within the confines of political philosophy: it does not need to be reinvented for this to happen.

In this way, we have a primacy of speech, as shown by the short history of western philosophy given in this essay. However this fact does not close off the possibility for the environment or animals to become political beings. How this happens is an issue that requires careful consideration, and will challenge the primacy of speech in political philosophy. Given that, at least prima facie, if it is possible to conceive of the environment as capable of a form of communication, then there is hope that a genuine politics of the environment and animals can be formulated from the historical resources of political philosophy.