Vázquez Arroyo - Political responsibility: responding to predicaments of power

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

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ANTONIO Y. VZQUEZ-ARROYO

Responding to Predicaments of Power

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

And that something often is an eminently heteronomous and collective predicament.

Accordingly, political responsibility is here understood as the need, on the one hand, to respond to a predicament of power both as an individual and as a member of a collectivity and, on the other, to face the burdens of acting and thinking as a participatory member of a collectivity. From this perspective, one raises important political questions that current accounts of ethical responsibility abjure or distort. One can ask, for instance, how does the idea of responsibility impact or affect the way in which the idea of the individual is conceived? Or how do ideas of political personation, collective life, and its political forms, relate to the idea of political responsibility? How does, say, intentionality figure in both individual accounts of ethical responsibility and in the more collective connotations of the term? Can one speak of degrees of responsibility? Or, stated differently: how does one reflect critically on the structural moment of political responsibility? Better still: how do questions of structural responsibility relate to questions about structural beneficiaries within political orders? Or how does one adjudicate responsibility to everyday bystanders? How do political forms binding and enabling a political order either foster or hinder a sense of political responsibility?

Out of this set of questions, or within it, emerges the difficult question of what and who are the subjects and objects of responsibility: who are the entities that are either deemed responsible or to which an individual or collectivity is responsible? There are two different aspects to this last question, even if both point to the centrality of fidelity in any conception of responsibility: first, the question of what is the concrete object or entity toward which one is responsible (say, responsibility toward God, oneself, ones country or collectivity identity, or humanity); second, the question of who is the agent and bearer of responsibility. Last, where does political responsibility become actualized and by what means? But the idea of political responsibility also has explanatory power: historically, the question of who is politically responsible requires understanding scopes of action, structures, and contingencies, which are dialectically interrelated in the way a political situation to which a political actor responds is constituted: a political actor that could contribute to radically change, modify, or ratify and further constitute the predicament in question. Therefore, in treatments of these concepts in European and transatlantic political thought one finds the idea of someone being responsible when one has to answer for ones actions or she needs to respond to a particular situation, its imperatives, openings, and constraints. In this case, the concept is already lined up with the idea of freedom. Without a modicum of autonomy and freedom, or meaningful realm of action, there is no responsibility. Similarly, political responsibility involves participation and shared power; without a measure of shared power, there is no genuine political responsibility.

Yet this effort will be carried on by way of crafting a constellation that would map the interstices of this problematic in its conceptual and concrete historical articulations. By thinking about the problematic of political responsibility in this way, this book critically engages with current proponents of a strictly ethical responsibility, or an ethical politics of responsibility, which subordinates the political to the ethical. In so doing, it brings political and theoretical traditions into the same field of vision to serve as both benchmarks and contrasts and thus bring into sharper relief aspects of formulations that otherwise would go unnoticed, or be seen in isolation, as determinations of a particular historical and political constellation.

But thinking responsibility as a problematic is just one dimension of the present inquiry. The formulation of a largely forgotten tradition of political ethic and its corollary ideas of political responsibility is another. It is along these lines that political responsibility is conceptualized as structurally entwined with other concepts and practices both at the level of ideas and in its concrete historical instantiations in predicaments of power. Stated differently, this book sets out to map the current usages and valences of ethical responsibility, situate these within the larger theoretical, historical, and political transformation in which it has emerged as a central concept, and offer an argument for a political recasting of this concept and the problematic it enunciates. Echoing Theodor W. Adornos well-known formulation about universal history, responsibility needs to be both construed and denied: for to avow its moralizing or solipsistic versions is at best to comply with the status quo and at worst to indulge in a cynical rhetoric of individualism whose main upshot is blaming the victim; to construe, because it is an indispensable component of political life, especially for any participatory account of democratic life anchored in ideas of substantial equality, freedom, and shared power. A critical maxim is thus evoked: to conceptualize political responsibility one