Lisa Disch

More Truth than Fact Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writings of Hannah Arendt

My assumption is that thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings. Hannah Arendt

Structural Constraints and Pluralist Contradictions in Hazardous Waste Regulation

Local community opposition constitutes the single greatest hurdle to the siting of hazardous waste facilities in the United States. Conventional explanations of its causes focus on questions of risk and equity; that is, on outcomes of facility siting. In this focus it is assumed that hazardous waste management is synonymous with facility siting, when siting is in fact only one of many possible answers to the management problem. Rather than ask why local communities oppose facility sitings, it is asked how the waste management problem gets defined as a siting problem in the first place, and how public participation in the siting process is postponed until it is defined around a specific location. The analysis shifts the focus from siting outcomes to the fundamental structure of hazardous waste regulatory policy. A strong claim is asserted: that the basic assumptions of hazardous waste regulation define the hazardous waste problem as a locational problem confronting the state, rather than an investment problem for capital, and that local opposition to hazardous waste facility siting is a reaction against these basic assumptions. Local opposition to facility siting is explained in terms of the structural constraints that dispose the state to define management problems as siting problems and to arbitrate the siting disputes by means of interest-group conflict. This explanation, in turn, helps to clarify the conceptual and practical relationship between state structure and political process by disclosing the ways that pluralist democracy helps the state to manage politics in a way that sustains the basic assumptions that structure its relation to capital.

Democratic Representation and the Constituency Paradox

That acts of democratic representation participate in creating the interests for which legislators and other officials purport merely to stand gives rise to the “constituency paradox.” I elucidate this paradox through a critical reading of Hanna Pitkins The Concept of Representation, together with her classic study of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein and Justice . Pitkins core insight into democratic representation is that democratic representation is “quasi-performative”: an activity that mobilizes constituencies by the interests it claims in their name. I develop this insight together with its implications for contemporary scholarship on the political effects of economic equality. I conclude by arguing that the fundamental democratic deficiency of the US political system goes much deeper than its disproportionate responsiveness to wealthy interests; it is a matter of system biases that foster the formation and expression of those interests, while mitigating against mobilization by those Americans who want inequality to be reduced.

THE IMPURITY OF REPRESENTATION AND THE VITALITY OF DEMOCRACY

This article compares the conceptions of democratic representation found in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Hanna Pitkin. Whereas Laclau takes Pitkin as his foil, I contend that her treatment of representation has much more in common with Laclaus than he gives her credit for. Pitkin made a bold critique of foundationalist notions of responsiveness and acknowledged representations constitutive function. Yet, her antipathy to symbolic representation made Pitkin recoil from the most radical implications of her argument: she would see as a threat to democratic politics that which Laclau casts as its vitality. Laclaus work, then, does not merely refute Pitkins but advances a line of argument that she set into motion.

Representation as 'spokespersonship': Bruno Latour's political theory

In his most recent book, The Politics of Nature, Bruno Latour offers political ecologists an unusual piece of advice. To paraphrase, the gambit goes something like this: Next time you are called upon to argue for the Kyoto protocol, whether on National Public Radio’s ‘Science Friday’ or over dinner with your nation’s president, resist the temptation to speak as an expert ‘on’ climate change. Imagine speaking as an advocate for the associations of interested parties, both human and non-human, that agreements such as this one would have to take into account. In other words, think of yourself as representing. And I don’t mean this term in the postmodern ‘cynical’ sense of telling a story about the world that is just one fiction among others. I’m talking about the ‘ancient political’ sense of this ‘crucial word’: the representative as ‘spokesperson’. Take this gambit, and no longer will you be invited to settle political disputes by recourse to matters of fact. You will be charged, instead, with representing your non-human constituents ‘as faithfully as possible’. On this matter of faithfulness, it is not to epistemology that you must turn but to politics, ‘probably the best model that we have to understand this relationship between forces and their spokesmen.’

Talk of power, power of talk : the 1994 health care reform debate and beyond

Introduction The Context The United States Health Care System The History of Health Care Reform Health Care Reform in the 1990s The Text Senate Battleground Congressional Record Textual Features The Discourse Discourse Patterns The Deliberation The Triumph of the Big Government Argument The Implications An Ethical Assessment Scholarly Horizons Contemporary Currents Bibliography Index

“The Most Damage I Can Do”: Joel Olson in Political Theory, Political Critique, and Political Activism

The following essays were initially written for a roundtable in celebration of Joel’s work that was convened at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association in 2012.We set out to speak about the wide range of commitments and concerns that shaped Joel’s career as an activist-teacher-scholar: anarchism, the abolition of whiteness, the virtues of fanaticism, the dangers of corporate capitalism, and the necessity and joys of grass-roots action. Joel set so many forces in motion that what we hoped to accomplish by our engagement was not merely to look back in remembrance but to keep moving forward. Yet very few, if any, of us feel equal to the example that Joel set. From the beginning of his academic career at the University of Minnesota in 1991, Joel integrated political activism with intellectual inquiry. This is not to say that he bent ideas to serve political ends but that he posed questions to the history of political thought that would bring insights to his politics. Early on, that politics was anarchism and his political theory interlocutor was Hannah Arendt. A seminar that he took with me inspired him to a critical engagement with Arendt’s “council democracies” and the revolutionary committees of the Spanish anarchists. It first took shape as a seminar paper but Joel lost no time in asking me what it would take to develop it for publication. He was characteristically New Political Science, 2014 Vol. 36, No. 2, 238–265, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2014.894702