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Published in: European Journal of Social Theory 14:2 (May 2011), 161-80.

Power, alienation and performativity in capitalist societies1

Colin Tyler

University of Hull, UK

Abstract

The article presents a model of performative agency in capitalist societies. Section one

reconsiders the problem of third-dimensional power as developed by Steven Lukes,

focusing on the relationships between universal human needs and social forms. Section

two uses the concepts of the ‘self’, ‘I’ and ‘person’ to characterise the relationships

between human nature, affect, individual alienation, social institutions and personal

judgement. Alienation is argued to be inherent in human agency, rather than being

solely created by capitalism. Section three applies this analysis within an agonal theory

of civil society that is driven by the individual’s performative participation in

associations that compete within institutional settings. Section four considers the

political ramifications of this model, rejecting contemporary constitutionalist

approaches in favour of a revised form of pluralist associationalism. Throughout, the

article warns of the dangerous marginalisation of emotions (or ‘affect’) by excessively

self-conscious, rationalist approaches such as Mead’s social theory, liberal universalism

and even some performative theories.

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Keywords

affect; agonal politics; alienation; human needs; performativity; power

Introduction

There has been a marked revival of interest in civil society in recent years. Partly this

reflects the reorientation of at least the rhetoric of many states; partly it reflects

increasing academic interest. Among social and political theorists, communitarians,

republicans, left-liberals, certain conservatives and multiculturalists have advocated

active citizenship in civil society organisations, orientated around freely-endorsed

conceptions of the common good and civic virtue.2 Critical theorists, agonists and the

radical left generally question this approach, arguing that establishing new common

ground means establishing new power relationships and forms of marginalisation

(Habermas, 1987; Honneth, 1995; Young, 2000). Their alternative accounts of civil

society often look to conflict to construct less alienating public identities. They tend to

emphasise the reifying tendencies of institutional embodiment, which many associate

with stylised, distorted and stultifying economic, cultural and political processes and

identities. Taken in certain directions, the individual’s identity becomes purely

constructed through conflict, lacking any innate characteristics no matter how abstract

(Laclau and Mouffe, 2001).

This article outlines a model appropriate to the situations of distance and mutual

endeavour which characterise capitalist societies. It emphasises a vital if previously

under-explored aspect of associational life: the processes through which associational

interaction gives substance and direction to the individual’s innate and yet initially

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inchoate basic needs and drives. It presents a ‘general’ theory of identity formation,

guided by the conviction that all sectors and levels of the social structure (economic,

civic, cultural, artistic, ‘private’, political and so on) are irreducibly interconnected,

even if some (especially the economic) tend to exert greater influence over others. It is

informed by the belief that oppression in any one area can be understood only when

viewed as a process of this wider structure.

The article is structured as follows. Section one considers the problem of third-

dimensional power as developed by Lukes, drawing on Taylor’s characterisation of the

articulation of universal human needs through social forms. Section two theorises

individual alienation, social institutions and personal judgement in terms of certain

conceptions of the ‘self’, ‘I’ and ‘person’. Rather than being the creation of capitalism,

alienation is argued to be an unavoidable feature of human life. Section three uses this

analysis to develop a model of agonal civil society, based on performative participation

in institutional settings populated by competing associations. Section four turns to the

political sphere, defending a revised form of pluralist associationalism, having rejected

contemporary constitutionalist approaches. The article warns against overly self-

conscious, rationalist approaches including liberal universalism, classical Marxism and

certain performative theories. The model fosters the rotation of power’s incidences

throughout the citizen-body, thereby minimizing key problems resulting from the

inscriptions of domination in contemporary public structures.

The article concerns complex processes rather than reified institutional political

architectures. Consequently, it rejects the static, propositional analyses that are the

stocks-in-trade of analytic political philosophers, as their method necessarily either

ignores or reifies what are in reality inherently dynamic transitions. The following

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performative model captures the continual conflict and contestation of the structures and

dynamics of civil society (broadly conceived to include civic, economic, cultural and

associated social spheres). It will be shown that there is no performative utopia, only

practice and struggle.

Only a ‘general’ theory can capture these structural dynamics, and a general

theory of this type can only be formulated at a relatively high level of abstraction.

Consequently, terms such as ‘social’ refer here to these complex, multi-facetted

processes; applying the model to particular spheres areas would require more sphere-

specific nomenclatures.

§1 Power, culture and universal needs

Some of the most significant problems facing contemporary pluralistic societies stem

from endorsing three conflicting claims. First, social systems are authoritative to the

extent that they respect every individual as an agent who lives within irreducibly thick

frameworks of meaning and value, and who, economically, civically and politically, is

respected as a free and equal citizen. Second, no innate morally or publicly-salient

hierarchies should obtain between sub-categories of human beings (based on, say,

gender, economics or genetics). Clearly, one should baulk at any form of social

organisation that either presupposes, asserts or implies the existence of such innate

hierarchies. Indeed, the whole idea of ‘sub-categories’ of human beings might make

one uncomfortable. Third, the qualities that give value to an individual’s life in the

individual’s own estimation are not simply ‘there’ from birth fully formed, but must be

given substance as determinate ideas and practices through the individual’s particular

experiences. This implies that the institutions of civil society and the state, and the

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individuals and groups they affect, should not harm the loose structures from which

these ideas and practices derive.

Such claims have marked significance for free agency in complex societies.

This becomes evident when one considers Lukes’s writings on power in economically-

advanced societies, particularly his ‘case for the existence of power as the imposition of

internal constraints. Those subject to it are led to acquire beliefs and form desires that

result in their consenting or adapting to being dominated, in coercive and non-coercive

settings.’ (2005: 13) Supplementing more explicit forms of direct coercion of one agent

or group by another and of agenda-manipulation, this third dimension of power as

hegemony is inherent in every structure, and via social forces it conditions the actions of

every individual and group.

Central to this conception of power is that ‘A in some way affects B’ ‘in a non-

trivial or significant manner’ (Lukes, 2005: 30). Power is thus an essentially-contested

concept, because the requirement to justify the criteria for deciding which matters are

‘non-trivial or significant’ introduces an irreducibly ‘evaluative element’. Nevertheless,

an effect is always ‘significant’ to the extent that the individual’s freedom is

compromised: to the extent that it is made more difficult for her ‘to live as ... [her]

nature and judgement dictate’ (Lukes, 2005: 114). Lukes surveys various specifications

of this phrase, concluding that each ‘address[es] the ways in which domination can

work against people’s interests by stunting, diminishing and undermining their powers

of judgement and by falsifying, distorting and reducing their self-perceptions and self-

understandings.’ (2005: 123-4) This fosters situations in which third-dimensional

power ‘secur[es] the consent to domination of willing subjects’ (2005: 108).

If one wishes to counter third-dimensional power, one must retain a notion of an

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underlying human nature without collapsing into some form of determinate

essentialism: the belief that certain thick needs are ‘truly human’ and therefore that their

satisfaction should take priority over other, more ‘local’ values. I suggest that the key

to achieving this is found in Taylor’s observation that, ‘The range of human desires,

feelings, emotions, and hence meanings is bound up with the level and type of culture,

which in turn is inseparable from the distinctions and categories marked by the language

people speak.’ (1971: 25; also Taylor, 1983) The determination of which concrete

goods should be used to satisfy even the most immediate needs is heavily conditioned

by one’s social existence (Walzer, 1983: chapter 1). Consequently, one can have some

rather abstract universal needs but no, or at most few, universal goods to satisfy those

needs. More fundamentally, many anthropologists, social scientists, psychologists and

philosophers have questioned whether universal needs are lexically-ordered of

necessity, noting that even the most basic needs, including for nutrition, are socially-

conditioned (Lister, 2004: 23-33).

Some form of universalism is hard to avoid in ethics (for example, slavery seems

obviously unacceptable). Taylor argues that one should construct a critical perspective

by fusing one’s horizons with the culture to be judged. However, it is not clear that this

would resolve the problem, because such fusion seems to require the individual to

accept uncritically possibly oppressive elements of the hermeneutic landscape.

In short, while universal basic needs and the conditions for their realisation do

exist for particular persons, they do so only when instantiated within fairly thick and

choate hermeneutic landscapes, landscapes that we inherit via socialisation and which if

fortunate we can reform. The problem that Lukes’s analysis of power highlights is that

of critiquing a landscape from its adherents’s perspective without ignoring the latter’s

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internal structures of domination. This is one of the main issues to be addressed by the

model developed below. The following section introduces the model’s key concepts

and falsification method.

§2 Alienation, institutions and judgement

One begin by conceptualising a more adequate model of the relationship between

underlying but abstract and fluid universal basic needs, and the heuristic ideal (if not

reality) of a determinate internally-complex, coherent and free person. In Mead’s

classic theory (1934: Part III), socialisation tends to construct determinate identities for

individuals – a ‘me’ – that is intelligible to other members of their community. In this

way, socialisation overcomes the inexpressibility and practical impotence of instinctive

presocial drives and desires (1934: 209-11). Mead claims that the individual can correct

the gaps and inconsistencies within her scheme of meanings and values by adopting the

less imperfect scheme of meanings and values underpinning the wider society that

socialised her, which he calls the ‘generalised other’ (1934: 154-8).

Mead’s theory is problematic. Even if the individual seeks refuge from her

uncertainties in a viewpoint of society as a whole, Mead’s ‘generalised other’

presupposes a degree of social homogeneity that is absent in capitalist societies.

Moreover, Mead valorises conscious articulacy and rational agency as universally the

highest forms of life, thereby marginalising as almost subhuman the affective sides of

‘normal’ lives. While accepting the existence of ‘impulsive conduct’ (conduct not

controlled consciously, by the ‘me’) as socially progressive in certain circumstances

(1934: 210), ultimately Mead gives only cautious endorsement to non-rational action

(actions expressing something other than a ‘me’). For all its strengths, in these and

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other ways Mead’s theory glides too rapidly from the universal level of abstract basic

needs to that of determinate coherent personalities. Moreover, by invoking a

‘generalised other’, Mead fails to take due account of the dangers of third-dimensional

power.

The alternative position defended below employs a distinction drawn in different

ways by Ricoeur, Hesse and others between a ‘self’ and an ‘I’, adding the notion of a

‘person’ as a constellation of ‘I’s within an individual.3 The ‘self’ refers to the general

reservoir of meanings and values which functions as the individual’s inchoate

substratum of meanings, values and dispositions. Hesse (1965: 71) articulated the core

point beautifully, when he observed that, ‘every ego, so far from being a unity is in the

highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and

stages, of inheritances and potentialities.’ It is from this ‘self’ that one’s various

potential ‘I’s are iteratively constructed, with every particular ‘I’ being a cluster of

meanings, values and dispositions to act in certain ways in specific situations. In this

sense, the ‘self’ is general (rather than abstract), thin and shifting, rather than concrete

and relatively stable in the way that it is helpful to think of the ‘I’.4

The ‘I’ is a cluster with which the agent identifies herself and through reflection

on which she develops a determinate conception of the various aspects of her complex

personality. Every ‘I’ is a situated identity, conceived as an agent’s sense of who she is,

that is intelligible only with reference to a particular context of other agents,

environments, possibilities and plans. It is argued below that this results from

performative iteration, although it is also an identity whose constituent elements

originate in general, poorly-defined and underdetermined forms in the self qua

substratum. By reflecting on the various ‘I’s that she projects in her various contexts of

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action, the individual arrives at a conception of herself as one particular person with

many facets to her character. Hopefully but not necessarily, she will also be able to

conceive of herself as an internally coherent and worthwhile person.

One does not move straight from an inchoate and fluid field of possible

meanings, values and dispositions to a cluster of dispositions (a series of ‘I’s). To

render innate drives intelligible, they must be conditioned initially by socially-

privileged meanings and values. Butler (2007: 185) describes such processes as

‘performative’ ‘fabrications’ of an identity. Institutions constitute the fabric of the

social structure, and, in capitalist societies, include such complex ideas as masculinity,

femininity, private property, free exchange, heterosexuality, and so on. The individual

appropriates aspects of networks of institutions to make sense of her innate drives. By

acting in accordance with her society’s institutions, she constructs the orientation of

these desires and gives them specific voices. By acting iteratively, she ‘performs’ and

hence continually constructs, reiterates and revises her identity.

Performative theorists such as Butler ascribe little innate substance or direction

to ‘preontological’ (2005: 96-7) or ‘precategorical’ (2007: 178) drives: one’s agency is

not conditioned by a pre-social tendency to be, say, more attracted to the opposite sex or

to one’s own. On the view defended here however, the boundaries between

‘precategorical source of disruption’ (Butler, 2007: 178) (unarticulated basic needs that

generate identities) and the ‘diffuse and active structuring of the social field’ (their

respective modes of instantiation) are far more opaque. Partly this blurring arises from

contingencies of the social fields within which the individual must try to articulate and

refine such needs; partly it is due to differences in types of basic need. For example, the

needs for nutrition and warmth can be satisfied in ways that are less conceptually-

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complex than the needs for self-respect, or for community. The precise forms taken by

the individual’s needs are expressions of her perceptions of the social field, and reflect

her (mis)understandings of ideas and purposes embedded within conventional forms.

These inherently individuated perspectives prevent the agent from being subsumed

completely under any conventional mode or genre of being (the ‘diffuse and active

structuring of the social field’) (see Tyler, 2009: 180-1).

Every move from an amorphous self towards a relatively stable determinate ‘I’

is an iterative process driven by inchoate conceptions of unfulfilled possibilities and

internal contradictions. An ‘I’ is sought which the individual recognises and affirms as

helping to manifest her basic needs within a coherent system of determinate and

enriching meanings, values and dispositions. Whichever needs it seeks to satisfy, every

such move entails the decontestation and partial reification of the individual’s self in

accordance with the spirit and imperatives of social forms, and the subsequent

projection in praxis of the resulting ‘I’s. As some degree of self-censorship is

unavoidable here, every agent is doomed never to realise some basic needs

simultaneously and fully. Often, censored elements are either insignificant to the

individual or so poorly formed as to be capable of suppression without representing

repression. In other cases, censoring will constitute repression, tending to exacerbate

the agent’s feelings of alienation.

One challenge is to reconcile the repression required for the construction of a

determinate and complex sense of personal identity with the abundance of potentially

valuable facets that the individual could realise. This concern drives much of the

present normative analysis. Furthermore, this model rests on the contention that a free

personal life is one in which the individual pursues and ultimately obtains objects and

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ways of life that she judges to be inherently valuable for herself, and which she pursues

or enjoys because she judges them to be inherently valuable (see Tyler, 2010: 117-19).

The individual fails to live a free life to the extent that she is motivated by fear or blind

convention, even when her life is one that she would judge to be inherently valuable if

she were more insightful regarding her values, feelings and objects.

This understanding of a free life resists a highly rationalist, reified conception of

personal judgement. Instead, here judgement emphasises the importance of intuitions

which cannot be articulated fully, in addition to commitments that can be stated in

words. Moreover, judgement is conceived here as an unending process rather than the

discovery of a static ‘answer’ to a definite question. This is important given Lukes’s

observation (2005: 123-4) that third-dimensional power is ‘domination [which] work[s]

against people’s interests by stunting, diminishing and undermining their powers of

judgement and by falsifying, distorting and reducing their self-perceptions and self-

understandings.’ In opposition to the overly-rationalist conception, personal judgement

is conceived as a process combining affective qualities such as instincts, drives and

emotions, with the structuring capacities of self-knowledge, reason and self-restraint.

That this conception of personal judgement need not require reason to either

suppress or subsume affective qualities completely, runs counter to two essentialist

approaches which dominate many Western societies (and have done for much of the

latters’ histories). On the one hand stands the view that the individual lives her (or,

more usually, his) life well and freely to the extent reason controls her instincts, desires

and emotions.5 On the other stand those such as Freud (1962: 45-54), Mead (1934) and

T.H. Green (Tyler, 2010: chapter 5) who hold that the non-rational, affective facets of

the individual’s being contribute to the architecture of a well-lived life only when

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sublimated by her reason and morality, so as to become valuable objects the pursuit of

which forms the core element of a conscious and chosen life. Whether conceived in

terms of suppression or sublimation, both approaches agree that one’s ‘animal’ instincts,

drives and emotions should be checked or transformed by one’s ‘humanity’. However,

the following model denies the necessary sovereignty of structuring capacities over

affective qualities: to be ‘bad animals’ is to be ‘miserable men’ (Morris, 1973: 192), or

rather, alienated individuals.

Free agency should be conceived with reference to the feelings of affirmation

and alienation that arise non-consciously from the individual’s exercise of her own

judgement. In practical terms, an individual is free to the extent that she expresses in

action an ‘I’ or series of ‘I’s which her judgement leads her to affirm as constitutive of

her personality, and between whose parts she feels no fundamental disharmony.6 Here,

the term ‘alienation’ denotes the individual’s sense of deep-seated psychological

disturbance, resulting from estrangement from those qualities the expression of which

she feels or conceives (even if only inchoately) would constitute the core of the most

satisfying life she could live.

This is not to say that her rational facets can or ever should be in complete

abeyance no matter how active her affective sides. In fact, except in the most unusual

instances, both facets will constantly tend to influence the (re)formation of her various

‘I’s in numerous ways. Differences of strength and predilection within both the

individual’s particular underlying self and her existing ‘I’s will affect the ways in which

both sides influence her development. Furthermore, her performative engagements with

social forms tend to foster expressions of her affective potentials, while within the same

expressive acts others tend to condition instantiations of her rational capacities.

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The ways in which these facets will be expressed, their relative strengths,

resilience and adaptability can be neither modelled nor predicted in the abstract. What

is certain however is that the hindrance of one side by the other is a source of alienation.

Moreover, in that both the rational and affective tendencies are aspects of the

individual’s inchoate self, the alienation arising from their competition expresses a

‘tragic conflict’ in the sense of being a clash ‘not merely of good with evil, but also, and

more essentially, of good with good’, understanding ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in relation to

‘anything that has spiritual value, not moral goodness alone’ (Bradley, 1965: 86). Such

tragic conflicts are unavoidable, as well as being morally and aesthetically ambiguous.

This extenuates problems of practical judgement, as becomes clearer below.

To minimise these problems, what follows emphasises falsification rather than

verification: the individual’s feelings of alienation tend to provide the clearest

indications that the individual is not living as her performatively constructed and

therefore particularised and shifting ‘nature’ (her ‘I’s) ‘dictate[s]’ (Lukes, 2005: 114).

The more pervasive and intense her feelings of inner disturbance, the more credible they

are as markers of the deep-seatedness that is involved in alienation (as distinguished

from, say, feelings of ennui or disappointment). Here then, the agent’s feelings of

alienation arise from her sense of distance from her own projected and inchoate ideal of

herself as a person, with this ‘person’ being internally differentiated as a complex series

of (congruent even if not actually mutually supporting) ‘I’s, each of which brings

definition and order to some part of the otherwise ill-defined and fluid substratum of

meanings and values that make up the individual’s ‘self’.

For many on the left, alienation is an inherently capitalist phenomenon that will

disappear if capitalism disappears. The individual would then escape her present

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alienation (Marx, 1975: 347-8). From the perspective developed here however

alienation, estrangement and conflict are ubiquitous, rather peculiar features of

capitalism, because the basic elements from which human beings seek to construct a

fully coherent and perspicuous identity necessarily defy full articulation and perfectly

coherent organisation. Moreover, the necessarily performative iteration of these

identities requires the individual to act in concrete circumstances. Yet, the inherently

shifting character of performative contexts stymies attempts to construct fully coherent

and perspicuous identities. This is a second unavoidable source of human alienation.

Read in the context of this analysis of performativity, personality, alienation and

falsification then, the fundamental dynamics of the economic, civic, ‘private’ and

political dimensions of a normal human life have more deep-seated and ‘natural’ origins

than Marx and others believe. At root they are not created de novo by capitalism,

stemming instead from the individual’s innate drive to express in action, become

conscious of, and articulate in words her most profound self-images and values, and to

enjoy and contemplate the worlds formed by those images and values.

In short, although each of us is driven innately to seek our own contentment,

these efforts are thwarted by our most basic abstract nature. This is not to say that all

circumstances are equally alienating and laden with third-dimensional power. (Hence it

is perfectly possible in this framework to acknowledge that capitalism exacerbates

alienation in particularly acute ways.) In positive terms, some social environments offer

the individual greater opportunities for contentment than others. Indeed, it is argued

below that variations in associational and institutional environments are crucial in

regard to both an agent’s performative identities, and the stability and articulation of

criteria by which to judge principles of social cooperation.

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§3 Agonism, associations and institutions

Wittgenstein argued (1967: §66) that when attempting to organise objects of

consciousness, the closest that one is likely to get to a common core is a field of ‘family

resemblances’: ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing:

sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.’ In relation to anti-

essentialism in the social sphere, these objects are the meanings and values held by

members of the same culture, each generating numerous ambiguities regarding the

nature and boundaries of group membership of all types (economic, civil, cultural,

political, legal and so on) (Modood, 1998: 382; Modood, 2007; Tully, 1995: 103-16,

223-4). Social forms are therefore internally contested and imperfectly circumscribed

by ambiguous borders, being neither monolithic, static nor univocal (Tully, 1995: 11-

13).

This feature of contemporary societies has provoked various responses.

Multiculturalists such as Tully and Parekh authorise community ‘leaders’ to coalesce

family resemblances by declaring authoritatively on the ‘truth’ of cultural practices,

rights and duties. Unfortunately, in practice this tends to become a negotiation between

self-appointed, artificial cultural elites (Tully, 1995: 129-30; Parekh, 2000: chapter 9;

Tyler, 2004: 22-5, 28-31). For liberals such as Barry (2001: 259), this gives Tully’s

‘interculturalism’ the air of a reborn Herderian romantic conservative nationalism

wherein, ‘the culture of each group is in some sense uniquely suited to it. Those who

belong to the culture will never thrive unless they remain true to it and ensure that any

developments that do occur maintain the purity of its spirit.’ There is much to be said

for this concern (Barry, 2001: 260-1; Barry, 2002: 206-12). The problem remains then:

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shifting social forms cannot provide solid collective identities. Mere acceptance of

fluidity is an inadequate response, in that fluidity undermines the agent’s capacity to

locate herself and to decide how to live according to her own freely-endorsed

conception of her own identity and ‘good life’. Something else is required to stabilise

meanings.

It is helpful to distinguish collections of individuals cooperating via a modus

vivendi to serve their respective private interests, from thickly-constituted associations

(or, synonymously here, groups) which are orientated around shared ideas and practices,

in pursuit of a common purpose. On this view, every particular social movement is an

association whose struggles within – and often against – an institutional setting provide

‘centres of gravity’ (Nettleship, 1901: 33-8; Tyler, 2006a: 170-9) for its members.

These centres help to orientate the association’s efforts to construct a public identity on

the basis of which it can pursue its members’s purposes with other citizens and

associations. At this associational level, every valuable struggle must be concrete: a

particular trades union, say, in dispute with a particular employer at a particular time

and place, over particular issues. Associations and institutions facilitate this by

constituting points of orientation: they instantiate fundamental values, meanings and

dispositions that help arrange more particularised and determinate meanings, values and

dispositions. They do this because they are performatively-constructed manifestations

and specifications of particular shared ideas and dispositions that are orientated toward

the achievement of shared goals. They tend to create mutually sustaining centripetal

forces within the conflicting parties. In this sense, inter and intra-association conflicts

introduce, sustain and gradually renegotiate contours within the various landscapes of

aspectival collective life.

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This has profound implications for performativity and alienation. The identities

of conflicting participants are given definition and direction through their respective

identifications with the internal structures and goals of groups in which they participate.

Determinate identities are consequences rather than causes of particular struggles.

Conflicts multiply and intensify to the extent that the processes from which they arise

create practices and conceptions that the individual cannot appropriate in enriching

ways. This reflects the fact that both contingency and deliberate manipulation embed

the third-dimensional power which distorts interrelationships between practices,

conceptions and their deeper meanings. We live in worlds of folk culture, mass culture

and, increasingly, the culture industry (Adorno, 1991). Power and oppression mark our

clustered practices as much as do struggles for the articulation and satisfaction of our

presently inchoate needs. Consequently, we struggle continually to create coherence in

an institutionally-structured world constituted partly out of meanings and values that

have inherent tendencies to clash and undermine one another, and to demand

reformulation. Even the most socially-integrated members tend to be driven by

insatiable needs for self-expression to rebel against established institutions. In short,

associations and institutions have an innate tendency to generate responses against

themselves as reactions to the feelings of alienation that they produce in their own

members. This ensures that the individual’s sense of personal identity is inherently

dynamic and concrete, rather than expressible within a single, static system.

This analysis finds its kin among agonal socialists. Young (2000: 89) rejects the

‘logic of substance’, wherein ‘an entity is what it is by virtue of the attributes that inhere

in it, some of which are essential attributes.’ She replaces this with the ‘logic of

relation’, thereby making oppression the pivotal mode of social relation: a group is

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constituted by its particular place in the structure of oppression that creates and sustains

it. In explicating the conception of structural difference which underpins this theory,

Young (2000: 86-7) observed: ‘Social structures often position people unequally in

processes of power, resource allocation, or discursive hegemony. Claims of justice

made from specific social group positions expose the consequences of such relations of

power or opportunity.’ Individuals mediate and express these relations, sometimes

consciously, sometimes not. Significantly, at root these processes rely on performative

acts. By creating a specific ‘I’ in a particular context of oppression the individual is

empowered to assert herself against others.

Walzer (2004: 30) objects that ‘members of stigmatized groups are not

individuals held together only by the disadvantages they share ... In the real world of

durable inequality, individuals do not become members of these groups because they

are disadvantaged; they are disadvantaged because they are members.’ Here at least,

Walzer seems to assume that individuals gain their identities prior to entering into

power-laden social relationships, as if we raise children in ways that do not reflect

broader social relationships, and hence do not transmit to them the structures of

domination underpinning those relationships. Clearly, this is not the case: power

relationships are inculcated into the individual from the moment her socialisation

begins; to the extent that those relationships are absent, her identities drift.

Bringing together Young’s agonism with performative theory it can be seen that,

irrespective of whether she does so consciously or not, the struggles outlined above

require the individual to iteratively fabricate herself: to continually construct and project

an identity against others, for particular purposes. In this way, threatened and

previously suppressed basic needs are articulated and prioritised as concrete goals to be

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realised here and now, in the face of this danger, posed by these agents, associations or

institutions. Performative action orientated around and against individuals, associations

and institutions is required to define and stabilise the points of orientation that

individuals require when acting as self-asserting and self-determining beings.

Yet, remember that institutions and associations exist for the individual only in

the manner and to the extent that she perceives them through her performative activities.

Consequently, although associations and institutions exert some hegemonic power

within society, their control can never be total because agents never fully understand

them as they ‘understand’ themselves: for example, as they are articulated formally in

law. From the latter perspective, to some degree the individual always has an

incomplete and distorted understanding. She will often fail to see an association or

institution as authoritative in the same way and to the same degree that others do (Tyler,

2007: 40-5; 2009: 180-1).

This perspectivalism is profoundly significant, as it tends to dissolve and

destabilise social hegemony, thereby undermining the latter’s third-dimensional power.

Institutional and associational structures, policies and particular actions provide points

of orientation in the individual’s public struggles, thereby facilitating the formation,

maintenance and reform of the individual’s multiple identities. Thus, the individual

fabricates herself conflictually in particular determinate social contexts in response to

particular contingent situated struggles. Yet, even those individuals who aspire to be

loyal agents of the status quo are condemned to seek to construct contents that

overcome the gaps and ambiguities in their understandings of hegemonic perspectives.

The agent is complicit in her own oppression to the extent that her performative actions

instantiate and so perpetuate the third-dimensional power to which she is subject, but of

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necessity she is also an agent of reform in that she must always (partly) fail to

perpetuate hegemonic perspectives through her actions.

Consequently, the normal and healthy state of society and its constituent

individuals is one of change not statis. Even the contours of conflict themselves remain

subject to contestation and revision. First, they change with the shifting perceptions of

oppression faced by their members. Second, no social form is perfect: each is

incoherent or outmoded when conceived as a context in which members seek self-

realisation; each tends to fabricate an artificial authoritative perspective; and each fails

to address fully its members’s psychological needs and limitations.

We have seen now that the individual is most vividly aware of her fundamental

drives as feelings of alienation, as yearnings for deeper and more abiding satisfaction.

As universal human characteristics, potentially more satisfying meanings and values can

be specified only abstractly. To be ‘known’ to the individual (whether in articulated or

affective forms, or some combination of the two), they must be instantiated in practices

and conceptions that initially at least are ‘given’ to, rather than created by, the

individual. Each instantiating practice and conception is intelligible only when

understood as related to and conditioned by other particular practices and conceptions:

that is, only through interrelationships with other practices and conceptions. These

relationships are opaque to varying degrees, making it correspondingly difficult to

interpret and judge them (Tyler, 2009).

The problem is that healthy struggles can become social wars. Consequently,

many people look to politics to manage the countervailing tendencies between order,

enlivening disputes, reform and total social disintegration. Moreover, political processes

might control third-dimensional power within social structures. Hence, this article

21

concludes with some political ramifications of the performative model outlined above.

§4 The state and third-dimensional power

As has been noted, there is no performative utopia, only practice and struggle.

Consequently, determining precisely which political structures and policies are most

likely to facilitate healthy and beneficial performative interaction is an irreducibly

practical matter which no theoretical model can determine in the abstract with any real

degree of precision or certainty. Nevertheless, performativity does tend to favour

certain political approaches over others. One can begin to draw out these implications

by considering the deficiencies of certain mainstream philosophical approaches.

Performativity rejects theories that invoke allegedly universal determinate basic

needs or interests such as the early Rawls (1971) and the later Barry (2001: 80-90, 279-

91; but 2002: 206-12). Similarly, the fluidity of the performative construction of

determinate needs undermines appeals to coherent, determinate and shared

‘comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines’ (Rawls, 1993: xvi) and

constitutions founded on the ‘endorsement of principles and ideals acceptable to ...

common human reason’ (Rawls, 1993: 137; also D’Agostino, 1996). Performativity

undermines also the constitutional and political primacy accorded in various ways to the

relatively reified and homogenising category of ‘cultural groups’ (Parekh, 2000; 2008;

Scruton, 2000; Taylor, 1994; see Young, 1995; Tyler, 2004). As noted above, even

political approaches that invoke a logic of relation for civil society can collapse easily

into a logic of substance, via the mechanisms of constitutional negotiations between

self-appointed elites (Tully, 2008: vol. 1, parts 2 and 3 passim). Issues of intra-group

power, including third-dimensional power, are elided by such moves. Indeed, even

22

well-intentioned elitism is of acute concern to performative theorists.

As in the model’s earlier stages, personal judgement is central at the political

and constitutional levels, which prioritise inclusion and openness in the development

and revision of constitutional norms, seeking thereby ‘democratic communication that

includes all differentiated social positions’ (Young, 2000: 114). Iterative interaction of

these particularised perspectives tends to generate ‘objective’ accounts and ‘objective’

political judgements (Young, 2000: 114). The performative account takes seriously

Barber’s observation that ‘political judgment is not the application of abstract,

independent standards to political actuality ... [but] the forging of common actuality in

the absence of abstract, independent standards.’ (Barber, 1988: 118, quoted D’Agostino,

1996: 4) Yet, the ‘common actualities’ that are forged performatively are not the formal

constitutional principles sought by philosophers such as D’Agostino and Rawls. They

are widely-understood even if not legally-privileged conventions and norms regarding

the modes and boundaries of acceptable political action. A society is well-ordered to

the extent that these modes and boundaries are congruent with and sustained by webs of

particular performative activities of individuals within the economic, civil, and ‘private’

spheres, and by agents of the state. These performative iterations ground the legitimate

exercise of state power.

In comparison to Barber, D’Agostino and Rawls’s reliance upon constitutional

conventions, the performative model is far more responsive to changes in regularities in

performative iterations. That, in turn, makes the model far less likely to reify such

processes, and therefore far less likely to ossify conventional understandings of the

nature and boundaries of legitimate domestic state action.7 Moreover, on this decentred

model, through their daily actions members of the general populace themselves

23

continually create, affirm and revise the terms of legitimate political action including

those relating to the state. Consequently, performativity accommodates constitutional

decontestation without restricting its agency to a small group of specially-selected

delegates. As such, it is much less likely than constitutionalist theories to collapse into

elitism (D’Agostino, 1996: 129-30).

The question is, institutionally how does one balance individual performativity,

group action and the state? Promising but problematic answers are offered by pluralists

such as G.D.H. Cole and Paul Hirst. Cole rejects the social contract model of political

obligation, emphasising instead the political salience of our socialisation into pre-

existing social forms. He criticises the presumption that the state is the primary arena of

democratic activity (Cole, 1920: 4-5). Sub-state associations routinely command our

obedience, and are seen as authoritative by their members, giving associations a quasi-

political character. Cole welcomes the fact that ‘social purposes’ are ‘the raw materials

of social functions’, and that ‘social functions’ are ‘social purposes selected and placed

in coherent relationship[s]’ (1920: 54). These social functions ‘emerge’ in the life of

the community, with ‘the main lines of demarcation’ of ‘the most vital forms of

association’ then being articulated and formalised ‘most carefully and exactly’ (1920:

55-6). He insists that the less important functions should not be precisely identified as

this would inhibit social dynamism. Instead, he trusts participation within associations

to counter social domination, and sees participation as the key to the ‘fullest self-

expression of all the members’ (1920: 57-62, 113, 208). Cole’s state ‘merely’ co-

ordinates groups and protects them from foreign threats (1920: 139).

From a performative perspective there is obviously much to be said for Cole’s

pluralism: it emphasises the common pursuits of associated members, rather than crude

24

geographical factors; it seeks to foster individual self-realisation through spontaneous

participation in associations; it recognises the interrelation of individual identities and

social practices; it acknowledges the role of civil society in determining the complex

structures of the various public sphere; and it rejects the totalising state. Unfortunately,

Cole’s weak state and uncritical acceptance of the authority of conventional social

functions and purposes means that his model serves to entrench third-dimensional

power rather than countering it.

Paul Hirst’s ‘associational democracy’ represents an explicitly sympathetic

advance on Cole (1994: 15-21). He too understands ‘self-governing voluntary bodies’

as ‘the primary means of organising social life’, although his conception of political

authority and the proper sphere of state action are more sophisticated than Cole’s. Hirst

bases his model on three claims that dovetail perfectly with performative politics:

groups should be joined through ‘free choice’ and in order ‘to fulfil common purposes’;

they should ‘be allowed to develop’ and organise themselves as members wish; and the

state should interfere with associations only where the latter undermine the freedom of

individuals and other groups (1994: 44). Hirst’s state merely delineates and enforces

‘framework legislation’ (a relatively sparse body of law designed to prevent groups

from clashing), it upholds certain basic individual rights, and counters inequalities of

resources and hence overt power (1993: 116-20). Hirst’s state actively favours those

associational groups who adhere to principles of peaceful co-existence, by giving them

‘enhanced role[s] in social governance within their own sphere[s]’, by providing

additional funding and protecting their position within ‘their’ spheres (1993: 119).

Unfortunately, once again Hirst’s pluralism runs the danger of reifying social

hierarchies and power structures between and within already-dominant groups. Like

25

Cole, Hirst tends to entrench third-dimensional power.

Fortunately, the particularised, active and fluid nature of performative agents

mitigates such problems. On this view, the state should distribute resources in ways

that facilitate activities of any association engaged in particular identifiable struggles if

that group cannot fund itself, so long as the group’s values and actions do not

contravene the principles and aims of performative life set out above. Which resources

are required depends on circumstances but might include finance, information and

advice on legal and organisational matters, as well as help with more prosaic things

such as office space and web design. Of course, some groups will not wish to accept

resources from the state, fearing co-option. Yet, by empowering all groups that accept

its assistance, the state would help to counter third-dimensional power by bolstering the

system of social checks and balances (Dahl, 1956: 36). Where a problem is too big for

a group to address, the state should act (Bosanquet, 1915). For example, while local

ecological projects might be better undertaken by citizen-led groups, rarely can they

resist large corporations. It is a practical rather than theoretical judgement as to where

local activism is best, and where and how state intervention is required.

Clearly, performative politics faces many challenges. For example, how should

one manage the strains of commitment that arise in pluralistic societies of the type

promoted by this model? The stresses on the state are related to its functions and

circumstances. A ‘performative’ state does fewer things than some others, although it

tends to be highly interventionist in certain areas (for example, health and welfare

provision). However, structures only get one so far. The guiding ideal is a citizen-

based politics, supported by a public culture in which both the state and wider

population accept the rights of individuals and groups to act performatively. In policy

26

terms a significant amount of empirical research shows social order tends to be greater

and more robust in more egalitarian societies (Wilkinson et al., 2010: 49-62). This is

part of a broader point. Any form of exclusion tends to exacerbate strains of

commitment. At least as far as the current research is concerned then, the performative

model will tend to work best in societies that value equality and inclusion.8 Citizens of

complex societies seem likely to endorse this model of political legitimacy only if they

acknowledge the irreducibly tragic nature of their shared existence. As noted above, a

‘tragic conflict’ is a clash ‘not merely of good with evil, but … of good with good’

(Bradley, 1965: 86): social strains are easier to bear if they are recognised as the

inevitable consequences of the fact that we are all vulnerable beings ‘on the borderline

of difference and change’ (Bhabha, 2003: 178).

This point must be emphasised. Members of capitalist societies often fail to

respect participants whose demands might thwart their own. Moreover, given the

ubiquity of these strains under performativity, one must concede that it is unrealistic to

expect this model to work at the birth of new states (for example, after succession or

decolonisation). Indeed, it seems inevitable that, if not addressed, the strains of

commitment generated by any performative system will tear apart even established and

stable political communities. Ultimately, both social stability and free performative

action require a significant level of normative affirmation of the principles of collective

life, rather than simply a pragmatic consensus. Performative political arrangements can

be sustained only to the extent that their agents and institutions co-exist freely and

peacefully, bearing the burdens of social living and valuing intrinsically the very

diversity of their common life. Welcoming plurality tends to stabilise diverse valuable

struggles and conflicts.

27

Another potential problem with performative politics is that no beliefs, rights or

values seem inviolable. Indeed, every performative theory must accept some

diminution of the range of ‘sacred’ rights and values. However, this creates the

significant danger of giving equal weight to all individuals and groups, no matter how

offensive or socially-destructive. Fortunately, the ubiquity of third-dimensional power

ensures that performativity does not necessarily favour an amoral, minimal state.

Performativity prioritises freedom understood as individuals’s abilities to act as ‘their

nature and judgement dictate’ (Lukes, 2005: 114). Similarly, it rests on a theory of

basic needs and agency. Consequently, any group whose actions are incompatible with

those principles should be suppressed, something that only the state is powerful enough

to ensure in extremis. Yet at almost all other times, state-led social engineering of the

type advocated even by some liberal philosophers (Scanlon, 1982: 128) will be too

coercive, unsophisticated and imprecise to be appropriate (see Kennedy-Pipe, 2004).

Fundamentally, ‘objective judgements’ of a type that can ground performative

politics emerge from the interactions of civil society groups whose beliefs and values

support performative values, including for example in the UK City of Sanctuary groups,

the Equality Trust and Liberty. The resulting, continually contested and revised

objective judgements help to determine and revise the terms of public debate and the

form, content and authority of the state’s framework legislation. Hence, the political

sphere enables individuals and associations to challenge third-dimensional power by

‘hinder[ing] hindrances’9 to a performative civil society.

Conclusion

This general model rests on a claim that also underpins Lukes’s conception of third-

28

dimensional power: realising one’s basic needs is a universal human drive and a

prerequisite for living a life which one judges to be meaningful and worthwhile.

Individuals seek instinctively to be not merely haphazard aggregates of ‘I’s, but

‘persons’: that is, individuals the facets of whose character (their ‘I’s) co-exist without

clashing. Operating within performative frameworks, every ‘I’ facilitates the

individual’s ability to act here and now. Only when acting – or reflecting on her

process of acting – can an individual become conscious of herself as a person rather

than a thing, because only then does she direct herself to attain a willed object. Such an

object is necessarily constituted by her determinate thinking: by her concepts, actively

conceived as interrelated to each other and to herself as a particular ‘I’. Moreover,

every freely-willed object is pursued for reasons that inherently relate these systems of

concepts to the good or will of the individual as a particular agent in a particular context

(as an ‘I’).

Each ‘I’ must be situated in order to be internally coherent, to be intelligible to

the agent herself, and to be capable of generating an effective will. This requires the

individual to exercise her situated performative judgement. In so doing, manipulation

contends constantly with the innate and largely inchoate revolt of the human spirit

against those forms of life and culture through which third-dimensional power is

inscribed into our lives. Central to this model are the various processes of pragmatic

decontestation of one’s multifaceted fluid self that are involved in the continual

reconstruction of the various facets of one’s identity. These processes themselves

facilitate and continually restructure mass participation in civil society. Such a revolt

can occur only when citizens engage personally in iterative performative actions in

definite economic and wider social contexts, and in pursuit of particularised shared

29

goals. Only when these processes function as they should, can there be an on-going

redistribution of significant opportunities to exercise power, and a rotation of power’s

incidence throughout the citizen-body. The state is legitimate to the extent that it

facilitates these processes.

One manages third-dimensional power then, not through abstract philosophical

reflection and principle- or boundary-drafting, but through recognising the centrality of

dispute and conflict within and between individuals, associations and institutions,

processes that should be circumscribed by one’s affirmation of diversity itself as a

fundamental good of one’s irreducibly diverse and dynamic society. Hence,

associations, traditions and institutions including the state are tragic: while sustaining

some levels of third-dimensional power and oppression, they are preconditions of

performative lives that are simultaneously unique, socially-disruptive, revitalising and

free.

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Biography

35

Dr Colin Tyler is a Reader in Politics, in the Department of Politics and International

Studies at the University of Hull, where he is also Joint Director of the Centre for

Idealism and New Liberalism. His most recent monograph is The Metaphysics of Self-

realisation and Freedom (2010), and he is co-editor of JA Hobson, Selected Writings of

John A. Hobson, 1932-1938 (2011).

Contact details

Department of Politics and International Studies

University of Hull

Cottingham Road

Hull

HU6 7RX

Email: c.tyler@hull.ac.uk

Telephone: +44 1482 465765

Fax: +44 1482 466208

Notes

1 Thanks to Jim Connelly, Gerard Delanty, Kathleen Lennon, Noël O’Sullivan, seminar

participants at Durham, Hull and York, and the anonymous referees. The usual

disclaimer applies.

2 This otherwise disparate group includes Barber 1990, Dagger 1997, Dryzek 2000,

Hirst 1993 and 1994, Honohan 2002, Parekh 2000 and 2008, Pettit 1997, Sandel 1996,

Scruton 2001, Viroli 2002, Walzer 2004 and Warren 2001 (see Tyler, 2006b).

36

3 Ricoeur 1992: 16-23. The theory defended here diverges from Ricoeur’s in crucial and

obvious respects.

4 Hesse uses the term ’self’ to refer to both what are called here the ’self’ and its ‘I’s.

5 This approach can be traced to Plato (1969: 80b; 1987: 571a-572a) and Aristotle

(1976: 1097a15-1098a27). It underpins the Christian tradition (Augustine, 1984: Book

14, chapter 6).

6 Plato (1969: 80b; 1987: 443c-445b) thought harmony and contentment were

unattainable ideals in this life. His pessimism undermines claims that alienation is a

product of capitalism alone (§3 below).

7 For the international level, see Tyler, 2007.

8 Fraser (1998: 19), Tully (1995: 90-91) and Parekh (2000: 197-199, 202-205)

emphasise the disruptive effects of assimilation policies.

9 Bosanquet (1923: 178) coined this phrase.