To be filled with fear and trepidation when confronted with the task of answering the question “What is political theory?” is to commit a cognitive error before a vague formulation of an answer is attempted.  One reason for this anxiety could be traced back to an assumption on the part of the asked party that the fruit of his or her investigation is meant to last the test of time, or in other words, that the resulting statements are in some fundamental way worthy of being right. The likelihood of acquiring such a certain and immutable description is undermined by the “prismatic ambiguity attaching to the term politics and its cognates. The facets of meaning that give shape to the concept of politics often support rhetorical and distorting refractions, since the concept refers not only to a historically and culturally circumscribed activity but often to the study of that activity as well” (Gunnell, 213). Consider the following example: the distinction between political and politics.   If we substitute these variants into the question posed above, it appears we actually have two distinct questions to deal with -- what is political theory? and what is a theory of/for politics?   This division will prove to be  useful since it is often a state of affairs implied in the work of  political theorists in the broadest sense. However, the differences between the two forms has been explicitly developed in the writings of Sheldon Wolin, who regards “each appearance of the political [as] distinct, since …[it] is unfamiliar, unsettling, boundary denying. And it is unsustainable, episodic, unpredictable, rare” (Xenos, 15).   Politics, on the other hand, is “about the contest over the resources of the collectivity [and] is continuous” (Xenos 12).     Based on this, there is the  possibility of having (at least) two mutually exclusive or overlapping sets of “theory,” making the question far more complex than it originally appeared; political theory might not be singular activity which produces multiple theories, but a multiplicity of theorizing practices, which in turn produce a variety of  theories.    What deserves attention in this matter then is not the particular contents and details of  these resultant theories because such a comprehensive undertaking does not really answer the question, but only points to a linguistic object designated as such without awareness of how it came to be.   Rather, investigating the “becoming” of forms of political theory within  social and intellectual processes  shall constitute the focus of the question at hand.

 

§ 1. Tomorrow’s not today: the temporal aspect

            At the most rudimentary level, we need to locate where political theory[1] exists and where it has the potential to be.   This requires that we temporarily set aside its subsets for the time being and try to understand what is accomplished by the act of theorizing at its most general level.   Taking our departure from Quentin Skinner, when  people are talking about an idea, they are really talking about sentences  (38). Thus, “any statement, as I have sought to show, is inescapably the embodiment of a particular intention on a particular occasion, addressed to the solution of a particular problem, and thus specific to its situation in a way that it only can be naïve to try to transcend” (Skinner, 50).    Accepting such a premise thus opens up two closely related options before the actor: 1. The statement formed in the mind a person has the potential of being socially transmitted, which depends upon one’s intention as well as the nature of the problem being addressed; 2.   The statement might find its audience solely within the mind of the person who thought it, in order to resolve some sort of “inner” predicament confronting a person. One way of conceptualizing the former alternative is in the notion of “techniques of the self [that] are designed to foster affirmation of a contingent, incomplete, relational identity interdependent with the difference it contests rather than discover a transcendental identity waiting to be released” (Connolly, 145).    As to the latter, the problematically embedded and contingent nature of a communicatively intended statement  is intensified due to its uniquely social location. As a result of this,  Wittgenstein’s concept of language games becomes an important mechanism which provides a means to their realization.                          

            What he means by this term is that each of the various categories of utterance                

             [,denotative, performative, and prescriptive,] can be defined in terms of rules

             specifying their properties and the uses to which they can be put – [as in the

 example of a chess game.]  [T]heir rules do not carry within themselves their

 own legitimation but are the object of a contract, explicit or not, between

 players (which is not to say that the players invent the rules). The second is

 that if there are no rules, there is no game, that even an infinitesimal

 modification of one rule alters the nature of the game, that a “move” or

 utterance that does not satisfy the rules does not belong to the game they

 define.  …[T]he observable social bond is composed of language “moves”      

 (emphasis added) (Lyotard, 10 and 11).

           

            It is apparent that what we are dealing with in the formulation and promulgation of statements is a linguistic zero-sum game of sorts --  either a set of rules are initially agreed to, remain in operation, or they are disrupted by a change, thereby dissolving the language game entered into by the actors.   This places a great deal of responsibility in the hands of the actors to formulate a system of  discourse aimed at the resolution of an immediate problem, be it the removal of a large boulder from the doorway of a cave or placement and ranking of troops involved in the battle of Waterloo.  If its rules are unable to address any particular issue related to the problem at hand, it is up to the parties to see that the inadequate “game” is superceded by another whose constructions seem capable of meeting the challenge.

            Of course, this rests on the assumption that the speaker’s intent will be completely  relayed to his or her audience and visa versa and that the problem faced will be soundly overturned.  As Strauss pointed out in his investigation of Socrates, “we are more familiar with the situation of man as man than with the ultimate causes of that situation. … This understanding of the situation of man …includes, then the quest for cosmology rather than a solution to the cosmological problem” (Strauss, 39);  the end to be met might not be possible to bring about fully, thus leaving one with the unending pursuit to engage in.  Similarly, if such uncertainty is applied to the relationship between the actors, we are confronted by Foucault’s realization that “there are only reciprocal relations, and the perpetual gaps between intentions in relation to one another” (Connolly, 150).

Further complicating the issue is the fact that these relations do not occur within a vacuum occupied by the immediate group of actors involved with a situation, for people are born into a world with previously constituted relations  which one may or not become aware of over the course of one’s life.  The perspective of the individual might not “amount to much” within the enormity of the world, “but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before.  …[A] person is always located at “nodal points” of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be” (Lyotard, 15).  The ability to form for problem solving within a context is thus “something which circulates,” much like electricity in the analogy of computer circuitry, …It is never [simply] localized here or there, never in somebody’s hands. … Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization.  [Individuals] are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power;  they are always also the element of its articulation” (Foucault, 98).  

Such articulation takes various shapes and forms through time much in the same way that computers have undergone numerous modifications over time in order to tackle dilemmas they are faced with, such as the need for increased calculation in the natural sciences and computerized means of relaying massive amounts of information.  Likewise, the necessity for constant adaptation in social problem solving has grown into such a highly contingent phenomenon -- as Strauss would say, “the extreme case” (Strauss,

 47) -- that “what counts as an answer will usually look, in a different culture or period, so different in itself that it can hardly be in the least useful even to go on thinking of the relevant questions as being “the same”  in the required sense after all.   More crudely: we must learn to think for ourselves”  (Skinner, 52).

 

§ 2.  Theorizing, or the problem of the Gordian Knot

            An optimist might regard Skinner’s admonition as a hopeful one, in which the individual actor might find his or herself, through a little elbow grease and determination,  at the reins of this transformational nexus at work in the world.   However, one would do well to remember that “there is a politics of forgetfulness built in to social discourse, the imperatives of social coordination, the drives to revenge against the contingency of things, and the insecurities of identity.” (Connolly, 150).   There is in essence an unconscious routinization of the statements that we make in and about society and other realms where difficulties might arise; a fall-back position one adopts as a result of its prior prescriptions being successful.   Such mental devices predominantly mask themselves as part of something that is above contingency, which at the same time takes advantage of their continued employment to combat the entropy inherent to all conventional structures (Lyotard, 15). 

            If one thinks of the hand being quicker than the eye, the subtle changes made to the pre-existent rule typically go unnoticed by actors as the general appearance of the system’s usual means of dispatching a situation is maintained.  Connolly’s investigation of the uncanny in relation to Christian morality nicely illustrates this “slight of hand”:  “Augustine subdues the uncanny within morality by investing it in an omnipotent, benevolent god who commands morality and exceeds its dictates. …[This] represses the uncanny within morality, because now any identification of it there constitutes impiety against the mysterious god who commands it. Piety is the key Augustinian weapon, … a self-protective tactic” (Connolly, 136). “Self-protective” in used here a way that is quite parallel to a “technique of the self” adopted by an agent. What it signifies is a strategy  being employed by the language game to deal with a particular anomalous event (which “is what always escapes our rational grasp, the domain of ‘absolute contingency’” (Foucault, 113)), which is simultaneously being written into the rules itself.  Instead of cutting the knot of Gordius to become king as Alexander had done, the typical response to the problem it presents is to simply untie it, a task which the knot constantly foils by rearranging its mass of tangled cords whilst the unsuspecting soul believes that progress is being made .

            Framing of theory in a  more useful way due to this predicament: how do we “cut the knot?” Conventionally speaking, the rules of a language game whose “playing” do not arrive at problem’s dissolution need to be consciously broken by a performer.   “[T]o speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics. This does not necessarily mean that one plays in order to win. A move can be made for sheer pleasure of its invention … of turns of phrase, of words and meanings.  …But undoubtedly  even this pleasure depends on a feeling of success won at the expense of an adversary – at least one adversary, and a formidable one: the accepted language, or connotation” (Lyotard ,10).   Regarding  this struggle of words, there is a commonly adopted misconception that success lies in  a statement acting as an element  within  an ongoing synthetic processes, in that the new “turn of  phrase”  is subsumed by dynamic, more inclusive totality. With invention, “we are not dealing here with a dialectical, but a strategic proposition, [precisely because] it [expresses] the possibility for a  local situation to count as contradiction of the whole” (Foucault, 144).

§ 3.  Political  Theory’s Language Game: an Overview

            There is a more recognizable incarnation of this adversarial totality at large in common discussions,  and it goes by the name of the system, but what is it?   Foucault provides us with a partial description in regard to the concept of sovereignty: “When we say sovereignty is the central problem of right in Western societies, what we mean basically is that the essential function of the discourse and techniques of right has been to efface the domination intrinsic to power in order to present the latter at the level of appearance under two aspects: one the one hand, the legitimate rights of sovereignty, and on the other hand, as the legal obligation to obey it” (95).  Similarly, Strauss states that “political things are by their nature subject to approval and disapproval, to choice and rejection, [etc.]. …It is their essence not to be neutral but to raise a claim to men’s obedience, allegiance, decision, or judgement” (12).   Lastly,  Connolly contributes the following to our understanding of “the system”: “the regulation of other is likely to be intensified and the attribution of responsibility  to them to be inflated by those whose response to unorthodox acts, deviant beings, and surprising events is governed by the imperative to defend the vision of an intrinsic moral order” (13).

            Underneath all of these pictures, we can make out this enemy of endless resources to be none other than politics in the manner that Wolin has referred to it.    As discerned from Foucault above, the most prominent manifestation has been the legal system.  For thinkers like Habermas, the dominating demeanor of this aspect is inevitable, leaving one to make due and work within it. In other words, “deliberation is certainly supposed to provide the medium for a more or less conscious integration of the legal community, but this mode does not extend to the whole of society in which the political system is embedded as only one among several subsystems. [At the same time,] politics must be able to communicate through the medium of law with the other legitimately ordered spheres of action” (Benhabib, 30).  Contrary to this compromised, procedural view of  political deliberation, Wolin envisages “the highest political expression of the postmodern ideal [to be] a [c]onference where the representatives of boundary transcending human interests meet face to face with representatives of sovereign states” (Benhabib, 35).

            Let us assume that such a confrontation does indeed transpire.   There is still one obstacle that needs to be overcome in order to proclaim victory, and this is also the most resilient mechanism of systemic coordination – the use of implicitly normalizing, accepted language games.  Due to this underlying web of intellectual constrictions, the combustible nature of a political speech act can be swiftly undermined by the speaker without his or her  awareness of doing so.  In the university, the contemporary locale of those who practice political theory,

It is not only a matter of attempting to meet such general formal academic standards as objectivity, …but the more subtle demands of speaking in the

idiom of various political authorities who informally govern academic

discourse but who often both render it inaccessible to the very constituency

that one hopes to address and persistently draw discussion away from the particularities that initiated concern (Gunnell, 201). 

 

 

An example of this phenomenon is Foucault’s observation that “political theory has never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign. …What we need, however is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the king’s head: in political theory that is still to be done” (Foucault, 121).

            Despite the appearance of an inspiring rallying cry, it, too, is guilty of falling prey to being subtly included in systemically directed language games in the shift from political theory to political philosophy.  The primary concern for political philosophy  is a regime, which constitutes “the order, the form, which gives society its character.” Constructing such a coherent object further equates “social life [with] an activity which is directed towards such a goal as can only be pursued by society; but in order to pursue a specific goal, society must be organized, ordered, constructed, constituted in accordance with this goal; this however, means that the authoritative human beings must be akin to that goal” (Strauss, 34).   Not only does political philosophy have a unifying intent quite contrary to Foucault’s genealogical investigations, but such “second order discourses characteristically, in a variety of ways, often seek to validate their object and underwrite it, but this also often involves a search for self-validation [as well as] a search for second order cognitive domination” (Gunnell, 33).

            As was alluded to in the beginning, the way in which this sort of “trap”  helps to bring political theory and its related conception of  a “theory of politics” into the light.  The aim of statements, either in the form of an obvious expression (defending Western rationalism, for example) or an unconscious one, is not enact any fundamental change within the present social/moral/economic matrix one is situated in. Examples of this range from “histories of intellectual pursuits… marked by a fairly stable vocabulary “of characteristic concepts,” which set the expectation that “each classic writer will be found to enunciate some doctrine on each of the topics regarded as constitutive of his subject” (Skinner, 7); “truth as a system of ordered procedures for production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements [or also known as] a regime of truth [that] was a condition of the formation of development of capitalism” (emphasis added) (Foucault 133); “the general paradigm of progress of science and technology” (Lyotard, 7); Humbolt’s aspiration for the legitimate subject: 1. “deriving everything from an original principle,” 2. relating everything to an ideal, unifying these into a single Idea” (Lyotard 33); and “politics has so often been abstracted and romanticized by the [competing] metapractices, such as political theory, [because] its actual manifestations have been perceived and encountered, in a variety of ways, as pathological, banal, dangerous, and mundane” (Gunnell 203).

            The key then is defining criticism/creation as the enemy from the perspective of the system at large.  As the difficulty of Foucault’s statement previously addressed attests to, it is apparent that the political moment is “the fertile moment where all political traditions  [or grand narratives] were shaken” (Strauss, 22). It has a “vitality that exceeds every [systematic attempts for the] stabilization of things, that resists imputing either a logic or plasticity to that which precedes culture. It is fugitive , deniable, and contestable experience, always resistant to articulation” (Connolly 146, 147).

            This last point is the source to both the problems ahead of positing a new language of purposeful activity as well as the “unrequited hope” within the hearts of those engaged in political moments.  The majority of this paper has endeavored to shed some light upon the peculiarities which present themselves in an assault on a question like “what is political theory.” Political theory cannot be thought of as a final answer; it is simply a response to the fleeting ambiguities which one reckons with in day-to-day existence. What we do is construct makeshift edifices of language behind which one can (and does) resist the unreflective proliferation of cliches that are “mere movements of the tongue to which nothing corresponds in the heart or mind” (Strauss 20). Political theory asks questions and urges action from people in a purposefully new, unfamiliar way, a way which involves people in its expression and subsequent resolution.