Radical Pluralism

In the context of an increasingly diverse and secular academic environment, some Catholic universities have appealed to concepts of a "centered pluralism" and a community in difference. This paper uses Chantal Mouffe's theory of agonistic pluralism to partially affi rm these efforts, while clarifying how such pluralism is "confl ictual" and cannot evade the exclusions of "the political." I argue such agonistic pluralism entails a non-foundational account of reason that, at the same time, can resonate with the often overlooked call for "crossdisciplinary confrontation" in the controversial Land O' Lakes Statement on Catholic higher education. In light of the Congregation on Catholic Education's highlighting gender theory as a key topic of "educational crisis" today, I conclude by pointing to the theological work of James Alison on gender as a helpful exemplar in agonistic disputation.

For the form of an alternative democratic structure in multinational countries, the question arises about the form of governance based on decentralized or federal models. In order to enforce justice, be it in the sense of representative democracy or direct democracy, we also need an alternative economic system to the democratic regime. Here an attempt is made to combine two types of democratic approaches, one belonging to the radical pluralists in the theories of Laclau and Mouffe, and the other in the participatory approach that emerges from the Rousseauian tradition, in order to present an alternative democratic system, less inclined towards tyranny, and on the other hand, democracy and politics can be institutionalized in multinational societies. I also seek to redefine national identity based on inclusion and plurality, not exclusion and rejection. Finally, let's look at the alternative economic plan for the transition to a post-capitalist future, because without a plan for an economy that institutionalizes justice and equality, there is always the danger of tyranny for the upper class.

In this chapter, I engage with the work of political theorist Chantal Mouffe that puts forward a malleable and relational understanding of identity beyond simple demographic categories—specifically her account of how political identities are contingently formed through processes of ‘identification’ and ‘antagonism’. Bringing in illustrative vignettes from discussions in a teacher education classroom, as well as some recent neuroscience research, I gesture towards the power of identification and antagonism in fomenting confidence and collective resolve. I also draw from those discussions and sources to raise questions about the potential hazards with such collective identification and antagonism, especially those of us who are committed to education—even of ‘them’ whom ‘we’ are utterly opposed.

In this paper, I introduce the idea of 'radical relativity' to elucidate a very important, albeit ignored, justificatory context for endorsing and promoting radical pluralism. Radical relativity describes the contingent, non-causal, and yet non-arbitrary relation between ordinary concepts and the radically diverse reactions people form vis-à-vis their worlds. This idea can be extracted, I argue, from three notions discussed by Wittgenstein-'concept formation', 'agreement in reactions', and 'world pictures'-whose combined consideration provides a solid logical foundation for affirming radical pluralism. I accept D.Z. Phillips's characterization of radical pluralism, drawn from Wittgenstein, that certain radical differences between people's ordinary practices prevent these practices from being reduced to a necessary set of common interests that refer to the same meanings or truths. I argue that Hilary Putnam's notion of conceptual pluralism, also indebted significantly to Wittgenstein, offers a similar radical suggestion. Yet neither Putnam nor Phillips utilizes anything akin to radical relativity to justify their affirmations of their respective versions of pluralism or that of Wittgenstein. I therefore offer an appreciatively critical discussion of Phillips and Putnam to show the essential role that radical relativity plays in justifying any logical support for radical pluralism.

As natural resource management is inherently riddled with different opinions and ensuing conflicts, there is no consensus that doesn’t necessarily exclude parts of society. At the same time, there is a need to manage natural resources in order to prevent their depletion by a few. According to Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, this undecidability renders every decision that is taken an act of power that favours one possibility over others. This study provides a framework to analyze the paradox of undecidability in a conflict case around the construction of a hydroelectric power plant around the river Isel in Austria and the conflicting designation of the river as a protected area. Sensemakings from in-depth interviews and a media analysis are used to analyse identity construction, hegemonic projects as well as discursive strategies of depoliticization and politicization. The conflict case also gives input to how participation processes in environmental conflicts could look like, if ...

This article aims to demonstrate that the Social Summits of the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) are close to Chantal Mouffe's agonistic pluralism. To achieve this goal, a bibliographic review of the Social Summits is carried out, based on the publications available on the MERCOSUR website, and on agonistic pluralism, based on the main works of Chantal Mouffe. As a result, it appears that the Summits are concrete mechanisms for the stability of democracy and its institutions. Furthermore, we observe the transformation of antagonisms into agonisms, the agonistic confrontation, the formation of political identities, the multiplicity of conflicting interests and values, the sharing of power, the constitution of collective subjects, the channeling of demands into regional public policies, between others.

Concerned about the limits of normative deliberative pedagogies, we designed and organized a workshop to explore to possibilities of an agonistic pedagogy for global citizenship education. We brought together a range of participants including national and international primary and university students, researchers and curriculum developers and we created pedagogical activities in which disagreement was fostered. We aimed to normalize conflict, create channels for the expression of political emotions and generate opportunities for the emergence of new subjectivities. Our findings suggest that the plurality of participants and the conflict-orientated pedagogies facilitated the normalization of conflict, the participants’ affective engagement with Others and the creation of new subjectivities. They also indicate that older participants had less positive attitudes towards conflict-orientated pedagogies and discussions on abstract topics did not foster ‘affective’ engagement. We examine p...

An increasingly common complaint about philosophy of religionespecially, though not exclusively, as it is pursued in the "analytic tradition"-is that its preoccupation with questions of rationality and justification in relation to "theism" has deflected attention from the diversity of forms that religious life takes. Among measures proposed for ameliorating this condition has been the deployment of "thick description" that facilitates more richly contextualized understandings of religious phenomena. Endorsing and elaborating this proposal, I provide an overview of different but related notions of thick description before turning to two specific examples, which illustrate the potential for engagement with ethnography to contribute to an expanded conception of philosophy of religion. Keywords Thick description • Expanding philosophy of religion • Radical pluralism • Ethnography • Interdisciplinarity • Animal sacrifice • Buddhism [I]f one wants to philosophize about religion, then one needs to understand religion in all its messy cultural-historical diversity. Insofar as one considers only a limited set of traditions or reasons, one's philosophy of religion is limited. (Knepper 2013, p. 76) What's ragged should be left ragged. (Wittgenstein 1998, p. 51

This issue of the Nordic Wittgenstein Review is the first one produced by the new editorial team, appointed by the editorial board in September 2019: Gisela Bengtsson (Uppsala), who will continue as editor, is joined by Oskari Kuusela (Norwich), and Cato Wittusen (Stavanger). Jasmin Trächtler (Bergen) steps in as a new book review editor, while Alois Pichler (Bergen) continues as the editor of the "From the Archives" section, and Simo Säätelä (Bergen) remains editor-in-chief. This is also NWR's first double issue: due to the publication of a Special Issue on "Post-Truth" earlier this year we did not publish an ordinary June issue. The present issue is probably also the last one published according to our old publication model (two issues per annual volume, published in June and December). This publication model was originally intended for publishing a print journal and has proved somewhat cumbersome and not very well suited to Open Access electronic publishing. We are now instead moving over to a continuous submission/publication model, where submissions that have been accepted after the review process are pre-published for open review, lasting for approximately six weeks. After this, the author will have the possibility to make corrections and amendments resulting from the open review. The final version of the paper is then published on the website. At the end of the year, all submissions published during the year are collected into an annual volume that will also be available in printed form (print on demand). We aim at publishing approximately the same number of articles per year as in earlier volumes. Another piece of news is that our long-awaited and longpromised print on demand solution is finally taking concrete shape. We have, after a time-consuming process, found a provider of a solution that promises to satisfy our criteria for quality, ease of use, and reasonable price. We hope (but dare not yet promise) that print copies of previous issues, starting with issue 3(1), will be available for order from January 2020.

In this paper, I introduce the idea of ‘radical relativity’ to elucidate an undervalued justificatory context for Wittgenstein’s affirmation of radical pluralism. I accept D.Z. Phillips’s definition of radical pluralism as the view that certain radical differences between people’s ordinary practices prevent the latter from being reduced to a necessary set of common interests, meanings, or truths. I argue that radical relativity provides this form of pluralism with the logical justification it requires in that it accounts for how pluralism became radical. More specifically, I argue that the contingent, non-causal, and yet non-arbitrary relation between ordinary concepts and the pluralistic world through which they emerge explains the reality of radical pluralism. Radical relativity is suggested in Wittgenstein’s three notions of ‘concept formation’, ‘agreement in reaction’, and ‘world pictures’, I argue, without endorsing traditional forms of relativism. Finally, I show that although D.Z. Phillips and Hilary Putnam promote notions of pluralism indebted to Wittgenstein, neither philosopher utilizes the radical relativity suggested in his work to justify his respective version of pluralism or Wittgenstein’s version of radical pluralism.

Agonism as a political theory emphasizes the ontological aspect of conflict in human political interaction. This article aims to shed light on the political practice of agonism – and in doing so on its limits – by viewing 'crisis discourse' as an agonistic political practice. As my analysis of the Dutch Socialist Party and the Freedom Party's speech in the European Sovereign Debt Crisis shows, crisis discourse aimed to (re)create a 'people' and to justify radical change in economic and social structures. Crisis discourse is employed to construct an 'other' that can be based on ethnic and nationalist terms and to justify retroactive application of the law and the stripping of Dutch citizens of their rights. This attention to crisis discourse as an agonistic political practice highlights an unease within agonism itself: where must the agonist accepts limits to the conflict and contestation she so values? The article starts with Chantal Mouffe's answer to this question-her insistence that legitimate conflict must always recognize the shared values of equality and liberty-and proceeds to show that Mouffe's view unnecessarily relies on a deliberative democratic desire for consensus. Other than Mouffe, I draw on Honig's emphasis of perpetual contestation to propose that the issue of limits can be best answered by reference to the core of agonistic thought: the preservation of the struggle over political norms and processes. It is not shared values or even a shared political space that matters, but that the political space of the 'people' – however contested membership therein might be – remains a place that the 'other' can re-enter.

This is a critical study of music for electric guitars by composer-performer Rhys Chatham (b. 1952), work that distils and synthesises elements from various genres, primarily, minimalism and rock. I investigate the development, realisation, and import of these works, created between 1977 and 2006, in an analytical, biographical, and cultural account that examines unpublished performance directions, scores, and original interviews with this significant, yet under-explored artist and his collaborators. An immanent sublime aesthetic characterises Chatham’s formative experiences in downtown music, and I explain how this informs his composition, performance, and listening practices (including attendant issues of entrainment, frisson, and perceptualization). This reading is situated within major music traditions of the later twentieth century and at the forefront of a nexus of postmodern radical pluralism, operating across the borderline of the avant-garde and the popular.
I use a range of research methods: aesthetics, cultural theory, interviews, musical analysis, music theory, and my own experience of performing several of these works. Part One maps Chatham’s development as a composer and performer through his engagement with modernist, serialist, electronic, minimalist, improvised, North Indian classical, popular, and rock music between 1952 to 1978, to interpret how he distilled key components of these experiences. Part Two outlines how he synthesised these elements in several non-notated works for the electric guitar, from 1977 to 1982, using idiosyncratic and inventive approaches to composition and performance. Part Three provides in-depth analyses of Chatham’s notated music for increasingly large ensembles of electric guitars from 1984 to 2006, to outline the development of his post-Cagean musical language, and interpret the wider import of these works.
I argue that the interpenetration and reciprocity of musical elements in these works expand, and implode, pre-established forms of art and rock music. While this eludes ‘either/or’ classifications, per se, this is a particular kind of post-minimalism, with significant components of popular music, identifiable as part of a post-1945 culture that was distinguished by immanence, participation, and subjectivity.

"It is Chantal Mouffe’s contention that the central weakness of consensus-driven forms of liberalism, such as John Rawls’ political liberalism and Jurgen Habermas’ deliberative democracy, is that they refuse to acknowledge conflict and pluralism, especially at the level of the ontological. Their defence for doing so is that conflict and pluralism are the result of attempts to incorporate unreasonable and irrational claims into the public political sphere. In this context, unreasonable and irrational claims are those that cannot be translated into universalizable terms. However, for Mouffe, it is this intentional exclusionary act itself that is detrimental to a well- functioning democratic polity. It is only through the inclusion of a diverse body of subject positions that a democratic polity can be said to be truly representative of the polity, and therefore constitute a functioning and inclusive democracy.

This paper will examine Mouffe’s account of agonistic pluralism. In doing so, it will demonstrate that instead of being a source of instability within the democratic discourse and therefore relegated into the private non-political sphere, passions and values that are constitutive of these subject positions ought to be incorporated into the public political sphere. Mouffe’s rationale for doing so is that it is precisely through their incorporation that citizens will retain their allegiance to the democratic polity. However, as part of this examination, this paper will also draw attention to an under-developed aspect of Mouffe’s account of agonistic democracy, specifically problems regarding both participation and exclusion. Whilst Mouffe does provide a robust counterpoint to both Rawls’ political liberalism and Habermas’ deliberative democracy, it is my contention that she fails to explain adequately what it is that persuades participants to act democratically and adhere to the requirements of agonal respect, nor what should happen when the ethico- political principles of liberty and equality are not accepted."