The politics of exemplarity: Ferrara on the disclosure of new political worlds

Rethinking disclosure

According to the Italian critical theorist Alessandro Ferrara, one of the fundamental aims of emancipatory democratic thought is the articulation of new values and needs, or what he calls the disclosure of new political worlds. It is through disclosure of previously unarticulated experiences, meanings and values that sedimented perceptions of the world are shifted and new possibilities for democratic thought and action fostered. At its best, political thinking should have the “distinctive ability…of setting our imagination in motion, inducing the feeling of enhancement, enriching or deepening of the range of possibilities afforded by our life in common…it possesses the potential for disclosing a new political world for us.” ¹ Disclosure of the new may not, however, be a straightforward task for the theorist not least because, given its multifaceted and nebulous nature, it may be difficult to identify it in the first place. Moreover, the “problem of the new” also partly lies, as Hannah Arendt has observed, with the assimilative tendencies of theoretical reason, which means that the distinctive nature of an emergent phenomenon, the newness of the new so to speak, is likely to be under-appreciated or effaced through absorption into established schemata. ² Of course, not all “new” facts and meanings will dislodge existing interpretative frameworks; some will simply confirm the already known. But others will have potentially destabilizing epistemic implications in so far as they disclose previously unrecognized aspects of social being and thus challenge established ways of seeing the world. In these cases, the theorist faces the dual challenge of discerning the political relevance of phenomena that are not yet important and of recognizing that their own settled frameworks may be in need of expansion or revision. Indeed, Ferrara argues that the preoccupation of much current democratic theory with formulating principle-governed accounts of justification blunts its sensitivity to the new and closes it off from experiences and perspectives not easily articulable within its pre-defined categories. While rule-governed models of reason are centrally important to democratic thought, their over-extension can lead to a “cognitive solipsism” that immunizes dominant paradigms against new dimensions of being and, at the limit, may render them increasingly rigid and “perverse” in relation to the changing social context. To counter such theoretical closure, the democratic thinker must endeavor to cultivate a “passion for openness,” defined as an “ethical receptivity towards ‘the other’” and a “cognitive receptivity toward untried paths for the self, untried doctrines, untried theoretical developments.” ³ While there exists no single conceptual or methodological formula that can automatically deliver such an open ethos, it is clear that it may be fostered through the pluralization of democratic reason and, in particular, by making greater space for the work of the imagination. For, according to Ferrara, the imagination is the only faculty with the crucial capacity “to make present in the mind what is not [immediately] before the senses” and thereby enable the disclosure of new contexts of meaning and new political worlds. ⁴

The disclosure of new worlds is also an animating idea in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School in so far as it forms a central plank of its broader critique of domination. In this view, capitalist society not only systematically produces inequality and oppression, but also routinely denies that it does so through the deployment of naturalizing and obfuscating justifications defined as “a system of convictions and practices that has the paradoxical quality of distracting one’s attention from the very social conditions that structurally produce that system.” ⁵ Disclosing critique aims to undermine the cognitive distortions brought about by this general pathology of reason by shining a light on the “hidden” or suppressed forms of suffering that are diagnostic indicators of the inherently in-egalitarian nature of the capitalist social order. It is this attentiveness to the particularities and patterns of negative social experiences that constitutes the foundational moment of emancipatory world disclosure and fuels a wider critique of power. It is important to note that for the critical theorist, the new is not so much understood as the radically new phenomenon or inaugural event, as stressed by Arendt for example, but as the “alienated familiar,” a neglected, un-thematized substrate of experience that when made fully visible delivers a “shock” to settled world-views by presenting the “old from a new angle.” ⁶

Despite the central place that disclosure, qua a “phenomenology of injustice,” has conventionally occupied in Frankfurt School critical theory, its prominence in the recent work of some of its leading exponents has declined significantly. Arguably, this diminished significance is in large part the effect of Habermas’s influential arguments about the inherently aesthetic, unstable, and therefore non-generalizable nature of disclosing critique. Habermas recognizes that world disclosure has a vital role to play in the realms of literature and art in so far as it stimulates the creation of alternative meanings and reinvigorates settled understanding of the world. But, as an essentially rhetorical and aesthetic phenomenon, it is based in nothing more than the free-play of the imagination and thus has a limited relevance to systematic political argument. Governed by the mere contingency of innovation, disclosure is an “abnormal” process whose validity cannot be established through the “normal” processes of rational justification that govern democratic discourse. It is only these discourses “specialised in questions of truth and justice” and indexed to “inner-world learning processes” that possess substantive problem solving capacities. Disclosing critique’s absence of formal propositional content obfuscates its relation to the “truth,” renders it democratically unaccountable and mystifies “intramundane praxis” as an impersonal, haphazard force, a “poetic demiurge” driven by “the anonymous hurly-burly of the institutionalisation of ever new worlds from the imaginary dimension.” ⁷

Habermas’s concerns about the connection between meaning, validity, and argumentation are important, but his portrayal of disclosing critique as a haphazard process of opening ever new horizons of experience is both questionable and has had a troubling effect on the intellectual direction of contemporary critical theory. His failure to see that disclosure may take the form of systematic sociological criticism and its consequent sequestration to a narrowly defined aesthetic practice is highly tendentious. Above all, his overly stringent separation of critique from discourse attenuates the fundamental, animating connection that should exist between emancipatory political theory and the experiences of unrecognized, marginal, and oppressed groups. Many socially invisible types of oppression are inchoate, opaque, and only partially understood, and often only come to the fore in the first place through symbolic and informal modes of expression. Even once they have become publically visible, such experiences do not necessarily translate straightforwardly into the prescribed logic of validity claims. Members of subordinate groups often have experiences that, from a hegemonic perspective, may appear “alien” or may not even be expressible within dominant frameworks because they are “full of structured heterogeneities and discontinuities.” ⁸ Subordination often partially takes the form of stigmatization and psychological injury, and may need to be revealed in a less procedural fashion through figurative speech, narrative, testimony, protest, and so on. Habermas’s reluctance to acknowledge the gap between the formal demands of theory and the lived reality of oppression means that, according to a number of his critics, an “extreme discrepancy” has opened up between discourse ethics and the experiences of those disempowered subjects whom it is supposed to represent. ⁹ With the loss of this experiential foothold, discourse ethics has relinquished the critical perspective from which it can effectively challenge the illusory notions of equality and other naturalizing fictions of pathological reason. Yet while Habermas’ successors have criticized his work for its excessive cognitivism and lack of phenomenological reach, it is notable that they have not attempted to address these shortcomings in their own work by investing the idea of disclosing thought with renewed critical relevance. Instead, on the whole, present day critical theory has abandoned experientially grounded forms of disclosing critique and moved toward meta-theoretical speculation on the foundations of justification (e.g. Forst) and the nature of social progress (e.g. Honneth). This shift has promoted a growing number of critics to claim that contemporary critical theory has become “domesticated,” that it has its lost its radical diagnostic bite and has accommodated itself to a liberal politics rather than one of emancipatory transformation. ¹⁰

It is against this backdrop that Ferrara’s work takes on significance. His attempt to reinstall an idea of disclosure at the heart of political thinking provides a valuable counter to Habermas as well as contributing, more generally, to an opening up of theoretical political reasoning beyond rule-governed notions of justification. In his formulation of world disclosure as exemplary universalism, Ferrara demonstrates how it does in fact have a systematic and inclusive rationale that renders it open to inter-subjective validation, albeit not in the hyper-rationalist terms prescribed by Habermas. Far from being marginal to democratic deliberation, disclosure is one of its indispensable pre-conditions in so far as it catalyzes the cognitive receptivity to particularity, qua the new and the other, that keeps political reasoning open and inclusive. An ability to see the relevance of the new, is crucial to combating the assimilative and potentially solipsistic tendencies of theoretical political reasoning, and consequently to maintaining ongoing emancipatory relevance to a changing social context.

Exemplary universalism

Ferrara establishes the centrality of disclosure to normative political reasoning through the idea of exemplarity and associated notion of a universalism without principles. Most notable about the exemplary instance is the way it reconciles, in its singular, innovative form, the usually disconnected realms of is and ought. The exemplar brings together facts and norms not just in a “passing, occasional and imperfect intertwining” but in a lasting, nearly complete and “rare fusion,” and in doing so sets the imagination alight. ¹¹ It is a concrete incarnation in the present of how things ought to be in the future; or, in Ferrara’s terms, the “force of what is as it should be.” ¹² Through its very exceptionality, it provides an “anticipatory prefiguration” of potential change in the world, embodying a tangible sense of “the rise of new patterns and the opening of new paths.” ¹³ Usually thought of in the aesthetic terms of an outstanding work of art, exemplarity also occurs in other social realms, epitomized in exceptional cases of authenticity, perfection, integrity, charisma, aura, courage, genius, and so on. Some kinds of exemplarity encapsulate a normativity of which we are already aware and which confirms an established sense of being. Others, however, have a strongly innovative character and enlarge horizons of understanding through the opening of “new vistas on what exists and new dimensions of normativity.” ¹⁴ Examples of this in politics include political revolutions, social movements, new religions, inspirational leaders, exceptional acts of courage, and so on. Given the trail-blazing character of such exemplary instances, it may often be difficult initially to grasp their full significance, to entirely comprehend the innovative even radical implications of their newness. It may be through approximating strategies, such as analogy with past experiences, that their sui-generis meaning can be intuited at first while their full originality only unfurls completely over time. The challenge, then, that the exemplar presents is partly one of interpretation itself, for it seems to require “that we formulate ad hoc the principle of which it constitutes an instantiation.” ¹⁵ The normative significance of its newness cannot be fully grasped according to pre-established principles, but nor can it be explained solely as a “reflection of locally shared and unquestionable preferences” given its impact across contexts. Rather in so far as it brings forth aspects of social being that have previously been unexpressed, its normative significance derives from its own singularity; it carries within itself its own principle of interpretation, so to speak.

Like Arendt, Ferrara sees the potential of this idea of the ground-breaking instance that cannot be fully interpreted according to established standards for expanding established accounts of normativity in politics. He draws on her reading of Kant’s idea of reflective judgment to explain the reasoning process that allows us to appreciate the sui-generis force of the exemplar. According to Kant, the judgment of a work of art as beautiful cannot merely be the expression of idiosyncratic subjective preference (“I like canary wine”) because it implies that others ought to agree (regardless of whether they actually do or not), and therefore that a certain type of universality is at stake in the assessment. This implicit universality is not based, however, in externally given norms that all must recognize because aesthetic judgments cannot compel agreement in the same manner as principle-based, that is, determinant, ideas of moral judgment. Aesthetic judgment can only solicit or “woo” agreement on the basis of a shared recognition of the uniqueness of the object itself as an “outstanding instance of authentic congruency” between the individual and wider, collective sensibility. The universal scope of aesthetic judgment rests, then, not on compliance with a principle, but on the capturing of a feeling; its normative force flows from the invocation of a transcendent sense of the promotion or furtherance of life. In Kantian terms, reflective judgment is grounded in an appeal to sensus communis defined as a “universal capacity to sense the flourishing of human life and what favours it.” ¹⁶ In so far as the normative force of the exemplar resides in its mobilization of a common sensibility, it embodies a universalism without principles, that is, one that flows from its own singular appeal rather than from the assimilative power of pre-established moral principles.

Ferrara uses the idea of exemplary universalism to recast key democratic issues in a way that he claims extends the normative scope of mainstream accounts of justice, obligation, freedom, political justification, and so on, which tend to be based in determinant, Western notions of reason. His main claim is that, by tapping deep and commonly held intuitions about human flourishing via the sensus communis, the exemplary instance transcends local boundaries more easily than the force of law or principles. In appealing to a wide variety of life-worlds, the exemplar reconciles pluralism with universalism in a seemingly more spontaneous manner than imposed regulating principles. So, for instance, a frequently noted problem with justifying human rights through universal principles is that the latter often presume the priority of Western values and norms. By aprioristically assuming their moral independence Rawls, for example, pre-empts consideration of the difficulties that human rights as contingent Western constructs may present for a post-colonial world. ¹⁷ Habermas bypasses moral foundationalism by using a legally derived vindication of human rights as possessing special foundational status (“extra-positive validity”) in virtue of their universal scope. Given their democratically enabling capacity, human rights can be justified at the level of international justice “as rights on their way to acquiring a full legal status.” But, Habermas’s proleptic justification also has potentially ethnocentric entailments in as much as it rests on acceptance of Western liberal-democratic constitutionalism. ¹⁸ These problems of latent cultural bias seem to be avoided, however, by relocating the normative force of human rights in their trans-cultural appeal as exemplars of a certain notion of human fulfillment. This superordinate identity is able to inspire a multitude of concrete struggles for equality precisely because it is not specifically Western but a “non-comprehensive” or “thin” conception that remains “impartial with respect to the particularism of the singular contending identities” that it embraces. The “reconstructible narrative” of flourishing constitutes the shared moral horizon around which diverse conflicts about rights and equality are oriented. If conflicts did not share this common orientation, they would not be understandable in the first place as struggles over “something.” ¹⁹

Priority of judgment

There is no doubting the prima facie appeal of Ferrara’s recasting of democratic ideals as “concrete universals” around which ordinary citizens, regardless of their socio-cultural location, may express their diverging political demands. It remains consistent with pluralist intuitions which do not require that non-liberal or non-Western individuals and peoples embrace assumptions that are not their own. ²⁰ It is not just that the idea of flourishing evoked in democratic ideals provides a normatively effective focal point, but also that exemplary universalism is an essentially disclosive rather than regulatory concept. In making visible previously unnoticed life-worlds and thereby challenging conventional political attitudes, every concrete struggle potentially contributes to the expansion and enrichment of the democratic imagination. Yet, despite this appeal, Habermasian thinkers would almost certainly remain unconvinced in so far as the disclosure of new political worlds still seems to be too haphazard and expressive a process to be able to bear the normative load that Ferrara wishes to place on it. In their view, the self-standing act of discernment, namely reflective judgment, which underpins exemplary universalism, is insufficiently tethered to the kind of systematic rational argument that is an indispensable feature of debates on justice. Without some “internal relationship to an ability to argue and deliberate well” the normative impact of exemplary disclosure remains “inexplicable” and rests on a “mythology of judgement.” ²¹

These misgivings are not without foundation, and are often expressed by Habermasians in relation to the Arendtian idea of judgment on which Ferrara draws. Unlike her inter-subjective conception of action, judgment is conceived by Arendt primarily as an individual act of contemplation and, in the eyes of her critics, this monological orientation obscures the ways in which it is connected to wider democratic politics. ²² Ferrara seeks to overcome this limitation by demonstrating that exemplary judgment has an inherently inter-subjective character which necessarily links it to processes of argumentation and democratic validation. What renders judgment more than a purely subjective act of discernment is partly its communicability. The judgment of the spectator about the exemplary status of a certain phenomenon is non-subjective in that it brings something into view that can only be validated by soliciting the views of others. If this something, this aspect of exemplarity, was not communicable at all, and therefore could not be understood by others, then it would inevitably remain a purely idiosyncratic perception devoid of general relevance. In addition to its communicability, the validity of judgment also turns around its inclusivity. One judges a particular object or instance to be exemplary not by assessing its consistency against the right external principle, but rather by taking the viewpoints of others into account: “valid are those judgements that are as inclusive as possible of all competing standpoints and are thus as ‘general’ as possible while remaining ‘closely connected with particulars’.” ²³ Inclusivity is a feature of Arendt’s idea of enlarged thought but, here again, is limited by its subjective emphasis on the individual’s capacity to go “visiting” in the imagination. Without a foothold in objective social relations, there is no independent way of checking that this internal thought experiment pays sufficient heed to all those “other” perspectives that are relevant, especially those beyond the individual’s direct experience. By replacing the individual imagination with the collective social imagination, Ferrara circumvents this difficulty by conceiving inclusivity in relation to the shared self-understandings and normative horizons that are the objects of democratic contestation and renewal. Judgment is no longer an arbitrary, self-referential act but can be said to have a certain impartiality by virtue of its communicability and inclusivity. Its inter-subjective structure establishes a connection to argumentation and also therefore to democratic validation, albeit not in the hyper-rationalist terms defined by Habermas. Nonetheless, judgments are not simply arbitrary discernments but, through argument, can be ordered on a scale of justifiability such that some can be said to be better than others. Such evaluations are made not on the basis of consistency with a set of rules (because this would be to pre-determine the criteria that are relevant to the matter at hand) but on the basis of the congruency of specific conflicting positions with the larger exemplary notion of flourishing. ²⁴

The inter-subjective formulation of judgment makes it possible to see how, in an analogous fashion, disclosing critique is more than just an arbitrary process of opening ever new horizons of meaning. By eliding disclosure with aesthetics tout court, Habermas fails to appreciate that far from being guided only by the contingency of innovation, disclosure in the context of the critique of power is always subject to the constraint of possessing some kind of correspondence to what we understand to be main features of the world. There are better and worse interpretations of the world and a variety of methodological indices, standards of evidence, and conceptual logics with which to explore the explanatory and normative merits of any given act of disclosure. As Axel Honneth puts it: “whereas in aesthetic representation the opening of new contexts of meaning can transpire without bounds…In social criticism it remains bound to the limits set by the actual constraints of social reproduction.” ²⁵ The disclosure of a new or suppressed aspect of social life does not amount to the presentation of a new truth in-itself, for this would be to fetishize the experiential realm as the ends of critical knowledge. In this respect, Habermas is correct to assert that the normative force of disclosure does not have a direct relation to the truth because it rests on rhetorically conveyed assertions rather than direct propositional claims. But he is not correct to depict world disclosure as an unredeemable and random insight and thereby to deny it systematic sociological and normative coherence and separate it so sharply from deliberative processes of validation. It would be more accurate to say, with thinkers such as James Bohman, that disclosure has an indirect relation to the truth, it raises a “claim” to be relevant to the truth, the validity or relevance of which remains to be verified by further reflection and deliberation. ²⁶ By bringing new or obscured aspects of social experience to the fore, disclosure asks us to see the world differently, to question assumptions and deeply held convictions, to enlarge our understanding of what is considered relevant to the debate at hand and, if necessary, to expand or even radically revise prevailing frameworks. It represents a “calculated effort to change the preconditions under which a society conducts evaluative discourse on the ends of common action.” ²⁷

When it is cast in terms of relevance, it becomes apparent that disclosure operates at a level prior to propositional claims, that is, at the level of the evaluative structures which precede and determine what is regarded as a relevant claim in the first place and what is not. In this respect, disclosure is a necessary precondition of democratic deliberation about truth and validity, and Ferrara’s argument about the autonomy of judgment helps elucidate the nature of this priority. The autonomy of judgment refers to the way in which it is always in some sense prior to and enabling of justification. ²⁸ Drawing on Arendt, Ferrara argues that, unlike Habermas, she does not think that judgments can be evaluated from a third-person standpoint (the “we” of communicative discourse) because this itself tacitly presumes the rationality of a consensus not yet formed. For Arendt, it is not possible to take a stance (third person) outside of the actual debate itself; there is only immersion in deliberation and this means that, in media res, an initial act of judgment must be the basis from which to choose from the alternatives at hand, not a presupposed consensus. Before a justificatory process can even begin we need a prior act of judgment which selects a topic, decides on an appropriate way of framing an issue, works out the relevance of certain facts and positions to it, situates interlocutors in a field of debate, and so on. In the same way that judgment is necessary to kick start debate, so disclosure plays a fundamental role in initially orienting deliberation in a relevant way and in sustaining its ongoing receptivity to the new, the other, the alien. Outdated or reactionary forms of thought often lack such receptivity, evident in their tendency to assimilate the world to unchanging schemata and to filter out new, potentially threatening elements by deeming them anomalous, marginal, or irrelevant. In this way, for example, assertions of the inherent inferiority of women, black people, and gays have been deployed to exclude them from the relevant category of moral personhood that renders them worthy of consideration as democratic equals. This discounting of the other is not limited to explicitly reactionary types of thought but is also common, in a less pathological form, in seemingly more open types, and is connected to what social epistemologists regard as a widespread cognitive reluctance to have one’s world view disconfirmed. ²⁹ Given the potentially exclusionary effects of this cognitive bias toward self-confirmation, it is clear that emancipatory political reasoning cannot be structured exclusively around justificatory procedures but must also include, as a priority, types of thought that work against such theoretical closure. This is even more necessary when deliberation is actualized in the world where, unlike the a-temporal, definitive scenarios of theory, it is a dynamic, ongoing process where circumstances change and new interlocutors emerge. Here, democratic reasoning does not just turn around the ability to assess the validity of specific claims against certain principles; indeed, it would be deficient if it did so. It must also encompass the ability to see the significance of newly emergent factors and to respond to them appropriately, should new interlocutors be included in debate, should the frame of reference be expanded, should argumentative procedures be altered, and so on. Justificatory reason on its own cannot foster such a responsive sensibility because it cannot be prescribed by formal rules but springs from the contingencies of the discursive scenario itself and the contextually grounded discriminations that this may necessitate. Regulatory rules and procedures are not in themselves critically self-reflexive, they cannot generate on their own a preparedness to question their modus operandi and sedimented mental habits because, eo ipso, they deal with new phenomena by subsuming them under a pre-defined rationale. Their very formalism may make it difficult to see the relevance of that which stands outside of established categories, that is, to recognize the new as new, the other as other and, if necessary, to change in response to this. It is the disclosure of new experiences not fully understandable under existing frameworks that provides the impetus for such critical self-scrutiny and thus by implication sustains the responsive, open stance to the world that is a necessary precondition of emancipatory thought. As Ferrara puts it: “all the important junctures where something new has emerged in politics and has transformed the world…were junctures where what is new never prevailed by virtue of its following logically from what already existed, but rather by virtue of its conveying a new vista on the world we share in common and highlighting some hitherto unnoticed potentialities of it.” ³⁰ In short, disclosure is not, contra Habermas, an unguided process of meaning creation secondary to the core business of democratic justification. Rather, along with justification, it lies at the very heart of emancipatory thought, enabling the former to counter its own self-reifying tendencies and maintain its openness and relevance to the changing social context.

Politics of exemplarity

Yet despite the persuasiveness of Ferrara’s argument for the centrality of world disclosure to political thought, its critical promise is undermined by his decision to ground exemplarity in the questionable abstraction of sensus communis. Clearly, not all types of world disclosure generate the type of critical insight that necessarily enhances progressive democratic thought. What gives disclosure its normative force, from the perspective of critical theory, is the way in which it fosters a critique of the dominant order by rendering visible the overlooked experiential worlds of marginalized and oppressed groups. In principle, Ferrara seems to hold a similar critical view of disclosure which aims to challenge “sedimented social constructions” by bringing to the fore “the experience of victims’: without…the ability to see thing with the eyes of another, different from us, nothing can pierce the immunizing armor of our collective representations.” ³¹ In practice, however, it is precisely this capacity of the exemplar to expand understanding of the world by opening up new contexts of meaning that is stymied by its foundation in sensus communis. This deracinated artifice directs attention away from any specific life-world toward a speculative pre-social unity and, in so doing, has the practical effect of blocking a critical understanding of entrenched, and hierarchical, social relations.

Ferrara acknowledges that sensus communis is a potentially problematic concept caught between universalism and particularism, between Kantian formulations as a naturalized faculty of the mind, on the one hand, and the phenomenological formulations as “thick” local practices, on the other. Accordingly, he situates his account of sensus communis somewhere in between, defining it as a “pre-cultural” yet “non-natural” intuitive sense located in a somewhat elusive space that is “equi-accessible” from the plurality of existing cultures. ³² Sensus communis comprises, in essence, a matrix of “denaturalised but not culturally thickened” intuitions about flourishing and the furtherance of life that traverse all cultures and perspectives. This intuitive commonality is sufficiently deep-rooted in the constitution of human subjectivity that it transcends socio-cultural difference even under the intense conditions of “hyper-pluralism” that characterize the contemporary world. ³³ Indeed, the idea that hyper-pluralism might serve to deepen socially atomizing forces and hence incommensurability between groups and cultures is dismissed by Ferrara as making no philosophical sense. By virtue of being situated in the same “division of labour,” individuals share a “common moral space,” however thin and this provides the concrete anchoring point around which otherwise deeply divergent world-views turn. ³⁴ We could not understand ourselves as disagreeing if we did not tacitly agree on the basic underlying terms of the disagreement in the first place.

It may be correct, in a purely abstract sense, for Ferrara to warn against a negative metaphysics that reifies difference as “total inaccessibility.” Far more questionable, in a sociological sense, however, is his extrapolated claim that therefore a unifying intuitive substrate can be said to precede and transcend all socio-cultural “bifurcation.” The postulation of a pre-social realm of shared intuitions effectively enables Ferrara to markedly understate the problem of entrenched social division and deep difference and therefore to underplay the antagonism and conflict that these may produce in political interaction. Put differently, the socially weightless device of sensus communis operates as a symbolic denegation of power that forecloses consideration of the relations of domination and subordination around which differences are inevitably organized and which divide groups from each other. In Ferrara’s flattened out vision, hyper-pluralist politics appears to be a domesticated value pluralism where, in Rawlsian terms, reasonable persons non-problematically accept the right of other reasonable persons to hold differing ends. Nothing of import seems to hang on these ends; they lack urgency, force, and are devoid of concrete political stakes, because they are divorced from the context of power which ineluctably undergirds all democratic disagreement and struggle.

When hyper-pluralist conflict is considered in the context of social hierarchy then issues of equality, oppression, and disempowerment come into view more sharply, along with an account of social being as more internally divided than Ferrara’s frictionless depiction. A not uncommon experiential effect of hierarchized social conditions is, for instance, alienation; oppressed groups often feel estranged from privileged social groups and mainstream society more generally. ³⁵ The lived reality of subordination may mean that these groups feel they have little, if anything, in common with the norms and aspirations of dominant groups. In cases of enduring oppression, they may also feel that dominant groups have no interest in genuinely listening to them or in doing anything substantive to rectify their plight. Critical race theorists have, for example, extensively documented the ways in which entrenched racial division means that many black people in the USA feel that, despite formal equality, they live in a world set apart from the social world of whites; ³⁶ set apart in both the material sense of seemingly unbreakable cycles of poverty, deprivation, and mass incarceration, and the symbolic sense of pervasive racial prejudice which is frequently downplayed or even denied by the dominant order. Du Bois famously captured these experiences of exclusion and alienation in his striking image of the veil that obscures black people from the white gaze not in a way that renders them completely invisible, but that bestows a false visibility in the form of impoverished and distorting stereotypes. ³⁷ Such estrangement takes the form not just of externally imposed stigmatization but also of an internally lived subjection; a self-alienation arising from the internalization of racial stigma in psychologically injurious and self-destructive ways. Du Bois and Fanon are among the many writers who have shown how difficult it is for the black subject to form an integral, purposive sense of self in a symbolic order that is permeated by racist meanings, “a world which yields no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” ³⁸ Lacking an affirmative stance of recognition, the black subject is often left struggling with negative feelings of self-worth, ennui, rage, despair, and so on. ³⁹ It is the depth and persistence of this self-alienation that, inter alia, has given rise to the long-running and contested debate about the most appropriate terms in which the internal life of Black America might be positively reconstructed. ⁴⁰

The issue of alienation is significant here not only because it is entirely absent from Ferrara’s world view, but also because it complicates his account of the rootedness of exemplary disclosure in the pre-social, unifying force of sensus communis. The persistent patterns of stigmatization that routinely cast whiteness as coextensive with humanity and blackness as “other,” as “non-personhood” and non-humanity demonstrate that superordinate notions of flourishing are unavoidably contingent, socially loaded constructs. ⁴¹ Ideas of human well-being don’t spontaneously emerge from a quasi-ontological realm of intuition, but are the products of a specific history and social circumstances. As such, their meaning is often coded in a way that, even when not explicitly exclusionary, may tacitly favor certain groups over others; white persons over black, men over women, and so on. Even in its most intuitive, “culturally unthickened” form, meaning necessarily bears within itself the traces of the social hierarchies from which it arises and which render it a site of disagreement and struggle rather than of quasi-naturalistic consensus. From this perspective, political debate is not, as Ferrara envisages, an orderly process where subordinated groups insert their own particular content into a “shared conception of who we are.” Rather, it may involve a far deeper and contentious interrogation of the latent (white, male) content of the overarching identity itself and, by implication, of the very parameters of the debate itself. Who defines the superordinate identity? Is it tacitly skewed to favor some groups over others? Is it even a relevant way of framing the concrete social issues at stake? Indeed, for disempowered groups, the very idea that there exist shared aspirations and expressions of flourishing that transcend social differences seems to be a case of liberal wishful thinking that prefers to focus on fictitious universals rather than the reality of enduring social inequality.

In so far as it abstracts from such issues of power, the critical bite of Ferrara’s exemplarity is thrown into doubt since it does not so much disclose new horizons of meaning, qua the experiences of subordinate groups, as confirm consensually held, extra-political truths. This is not to say that the idea of exemplarity must be abandoned; Ferrara’s general case about its normative centrality to emancipatory political thought is undoubtedly compelling. It is to argue, however, that the critical impact of exemplarity is more effectively conceptualized in relation to the concrete dynamics of political struggle than the free-floating universal of sensus communis. Understood as a symbolically significant moment in a given conflict, exemplarity takes on an interpretative complexity that is smoothed away in Ferrara’s syncretic account. For example, the history of the African-American struggle for equality in the USA has many exemplary occurrences that continue to have inspiring effects on the contemporary political imagination: Rosa Parks’ defiant act, Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech, the Black power salute at 1968 Olympics, “taking the knee” at recent sporting events, to name only a few of the most obvious events. To construe the galvanizing effect of these instances in terms of a normativity that proceeds from a shared conception of who we are would be a strangely tangential and apolitical interpretation that ignores how, for many, a deepening racial divide means that “the discovery of commonality and agreement between the races [is] a dim prospect.” ⁴² It is an interpretation that denudes these exemplary instances of a force and urgency that comes not so much from the invocation of a shared humanity as from the need to make visible the brutality and violence of racial domination that has continued in a relatively unbroken, though transfigured, line from slavery to present day formal equality. Their normative impact resides partly in the attempt to make visible experiences that are more usually overlooked, devalued, even denied, by mainstream society. Thus, what gives the song Strange Fruit (and the blues more generally) special political significance in the history of black struggle is the exceptional lyrical expression it gives to the suffering and violence that has marked the lives of African-Americans. ⁴³ In the words of Ralph Ellison, blues is the autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically, it is the “impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it near tragic, near comic lyricism.” ⁴⁴ Ferrara might well argue that in its depiction of the “radical negativity” of lynching and hanging, Strange Fruit reminds us anew of the fundamental right of all human beings to lead a flourishing life. But in so far as this catch-all interpretation is detached from a concrete sense of historicity, it fails to appreciate that the exemplar, in these circumstances, acts as black counter-testimony, its impact flowing not from the abstract anticipation of future well-being but from the shocking reminder of past suffering. If past injustice is to be adequately acknowledged and present inequality properly understood, then, the “abstract thought of universality” must be tied to “the anamnestic power of a remembering that goes beyond the concepts of morality itself.” ⁴⁵ For many oppressed groups, it is imperative that justice has retrospective, rectificatory dimensions, and to pass over these dimensions is arguably to indirectly compound oppression in the cognitive form of the historical amnesia which typifies white ignorance. ⁴⁶

If the power of exemplary disclosure comes not from the affirmation of a shared ideal but from the rendering visible of an overlooked experiential world—the alienated familiar—then it acquires a polemical aspect that is also underplayed by Ferrara. Polemical in as much as the rendering visible of suppressed experiences may serve to confront the dominant order with its own disavowed shortcomings. The force of this type of exemplarity comes not so much from the assertion of a right to be included in a political order that is “already up and running and presumed to be reasonably decent,” but from the condemnation of that order and implied demand that it be transformed. ⁴⁷ This confrontational dynamic is captured in Ellison’s description of Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy: “he [Wright] has converted the American Negro impulse toward self-annihilation and ‘going-under-ground’ into a will to confront the world, to evaluate his experience honestly and throw his findings unashamedly into the guilty conscience of America.” ⁴⁸ As a performative enactment of the divided nature of the social world, the exemplar is likely to be deeply challenging, its reception contested and potentially divisive. It does not one-sidedly endorse collective norms but rather, as a counter-hegemonic utterance, engenders political dis-identification with the status quo. It doesn’t simply “frame a collective body” but instead produces a “multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of common experience that change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable, and the feasible.” ⁴⁹ So, for example, the black power salute given by the US athletes (Tommie Smith and John Carlos) in the 1968 Olympics was undeniably an exemplary political gesture, but it was also confrontational and contentious. The athletes were lauded in certain quarters and condemned in others, including the Olympic organizing committee which, using the threat of expelling the whole US team from the games, barred the two men instead.

Polemic, antagonism, and contestability are not features limited to a certain type of political exemplar but are arguably also deep-rooted characteristics of democratic politics more generally. Indeed, the choice of what constitutes an exemplar itself is also potentially contentious—why this act rather than another?—but is airbrushed away in Ferrara’s unifying account, which seems to take for granted that a commitment to liberal norms is already in place. For example, in the light of the deepening racial divide in the USA, Ferrara’s description of the exemplary status of Obama’s election as a reminder of the “extraordinary rapidity with which a constitutional order has proven capable of bringing racial equality from being a contested terrain in the 50’s and 60’s…to a reality fully implemented in the supreme executive institution” seems both naive and unaware of its politically partisan nature. ⁵⁰ This prior, not fully articulated commitment to liberal norms is problematic not least because it stands in tension with his claim that, by virtue of their pre-cultural status, the ideals invoked in exemplary instance are not culturally thickened but appeal to all groups regardless of their social situation. But the selection of the Rawlsian notion of the “reasonable” as a governing ideal for trans-cultural deliberation seems not a little problematic in the light of its emergence from a tradition of Enlightenment thought that has historically treated women, black people, and other minorities as unreasonable others.

A worry about the political rethinking of exemplarity that I propose here would be that it unduly parochializes the notion by binding its normative impact to the immediate context of a given struggle, thus depriving it of general significance. It is possible, however, to explain the trans-contextual force of the exemplar without deploying the quasi-naturalized construct of sensus communis but using instead what Ellison calls a “sociology of sensibility.” ⁵¹ For instance, exemplarity could be recast around Raymond Williams’ idea of a structure of feeling which denotes a dynamic substrate of ideas and experiences—“thought as felt and feeling as thought”—vying to emerge at any one time in history. This social experience “in solution” may not yet be articulated in a fully worked-out form but nor is it mere flux; it is a structured formation of embodied affects and dispositions that “exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and action.” ⁵² On this view, the normative reach of the exemplar resides in the way it taps into this experiential substrate, crystallizing its fluid and semi-articulated dynamics, in a singular, inspirational form. Thinking about exemplarity in such socially immanent terms avoids the depoliticizing entailments of a free-floating universal and renders the connection to political agency more visible. Politics is, after all, a scenario of action; it involves processes of mobilization, protest, and struggle, but in Ferrara’s decontextualized account there is little evidence of active, concrete agency. If agency can be discerned at all, it appears either in the strangely pacified mode of disembedded individuals politely introducing their own perspective on commonly agreed ends or in the impersonal, evanescent instance of the exemplar that verifies extra-political truths about the human condition.