Disruption and Democracy: Challenges to Consensus and Communication

Five Assumptions Academics Make About Public Deliberation, And Why They Deserve Rethinking

“…8 When leading practitioners in the field describe their everyday practice in terms that conflict with scholars' routine assumptions, that disconnect deserves to be investigated in order to understand better the perspectives of both sets of strategic actors, not in order to get at some decisive "truth" about deliberation. Questioning the virtues of consensus is one of the key insights of deliberative theory (Drexler and Hames-Garcia 2004;Mansbridge 1980;Young 2000), and this investigation of complexity is made in that self-critical, reflexive spirit that characterizes deliberative practice.…”

Politics Improper: Iris Marion Young, Hannah Arendt, and the Power of Performativity

“…However, as I have argued elsewhere, “In this way, she makes a significant implication about the nature of rhetoric: that its ultimate impetus is ‘illocutionary”—meaning that its purpose and design is to produce understanding. “It is oriented towards reaching persuasion and agreement; even though it may be an ‘untraditional’ mode of rational communication, its rational impetus remains, and even though it may be seen as disorderly or disruptive, it is nevertheless ‘reasonable’ and ‘appropriate’ because it opens up public space for deeper inclusion of peoples and perspectives” (Drexler and Hames‐Garcia, 2004, 57).…”