Time, politics and contingency

One of the most distinctive aspects of the work of William Connolly is his attempt to integrate the closely related themes of time and contingency into political thought and to develop the consequences of doing so for political activity. He does this not by defining political terms independently and then applying them but by describing and developing the logic of their presence and their effects upon the ways in which politics is thought and acted. This approach was established in Connolly’s breakthrough work, The Terms of Political Discourse ([1974] 1993a). Using Gallie’s somewhat oxymoronic notion of ‘essential contestability’, Connolly demonstrated that political discourse could not be reduced to logically definable categories and concepts that could be applied and measured independently of the differing, and in many cases opposed, political projects within which they make sense. Indeed, for Connolly, logical reductionism was itself bound up with political projects of a generally technocratic and non-democratic kind. Introducing a different approach into political science, Connolly con-

tributed to the larger interpretive fightback against the dominance of positivism, behaviourism and empiricism in the social sciences more widely. Since then, a characteristic of Connolly’s approach has been to find contestation in both politics and in those discourses that would name, conceptualise and represent it, and which are, therefore, themselves political (as well as about politics). That goes for Connolly’s political thought as well. His work is antagonistic, seeking to persuade those who encounter it of the good sense of conceiving of political discourse as an agonistic activity in order to make its political character more visible. Connolly developed this approach to political discourse in a series of sub-

sequent works. Not all of those address the issue of the political dimension of time and contingency but one that does is a critical account of the doublecoded relation to time that Connolly argued characterises the dynamics of modern political thought (Connolly, 1988). This claim rested on the observation that modernity categorises a historical period, an epoch, and so takes place in historical time, yet at the same time modernity proposes the idea that

time and history are subject to human intervention in order to break with the past and determine a future in the moment of the here and now made by the break itself. Modernity occurs in time and at the same time makes time. Hence two codes operate within modernity: the time in which it occurs and the time which it makes. Logically the simultaneity of both codes is contradictory and impossible but that does not prevent its existence and its effects – one of which can be summarised by characterising modernity as a constant process of modernisation and as such ‘an eternal coming into being’ (ibid.: 3) in order to prevent the code of making slipping back into the code of occurrence. From simply meaning ‘that which is new’, modern comes to refer to ‘that which will always be new’ and the social, political and economic forces that will sustain it. Connolly calls the simultaneity of both these codes ‘the modern frame’ (ibid.: 1) and by describing the logics of their co-existence demonstrates the core of contestation around which modernity revolves. Connolly’s argument is not a rejection of modern political thought but

neither is it a straightforward celebration of it. In certain respects, it can be viewed as an attempt to be more modern still, to shatter what has become sclerotic about modernity and re-activate its energy. After all, to break with modernity would be a continuation of it, not simply because the idea of the break is a modern one, but also with respect to the fact that even the attempt to frame modernity, to relativise and objectify it, is itself ‘a paradigmatic idea of the modern age’ (ibid.: 3). Instead, by way of the Heideggerian notion of ‘enframing’, Connolly seeks to uncover the processes by which the modern frame is established, and which are unthought in the sense that they do not appear as systematic propositions that construct positive knowledge but as symptoms of the attempt to do so. Thus, the frame is both ungrounded, precisely because of its unthought dimension, and excessive, because the unthought dimension is not contained by the truth criteria it seeks to establish in rendering an account and justification of itself through the formulation of propositions of positive knowledge. The unthought dimension is not exhausted by the dominance of the double-coded here and now because it is its condition, and cannot be reduced to either the time of making or the time of occurrence. Arguably the unthought element is that which prevents the simultaneity of both codes dissolving in contradiction or, to say the same thing differently, enables something that is logically impossible to be possible. Instead of breaking with modernity, then, Connolly continues its project by

way of other means that the analysis of its enframing provides, making the unthought aspects of modernity thinkable but not as propositions that would resolve the contradictions of its double coding. This is achieved by describing processes of enframing in the borders or margins of those thinkers who establish the modern frame (for Connolly, Hobbes, Rousseau and Hegel are exemplary here) and in those who are happy to push at the boundaries from within (such as de Sade and Nietzsche). This provides a critical resource for Connolly’s project of establishing a ‘reconstituted, radicalized liberalism’ (ibid.: 174), deepening the logic of the unthought dimension of modernity so

that the notion of a break is replaced with that of critical opening, and the dominance of the here and now is replaced by relations of ‘antagonistic indebtedness’ (ibid.: 175). These ideas stem from an additional achievement of Connolly’s analysis –

to bring the self-completion of modernity into question, both with respect to the double-coding of its temporal aspect, but also with respect to its limits or borders, such that the question of the interiority and exteriority of modernity remains as a question. For that reason Connolly’s fidelity to modernity is to its constitutive failure which the analysis of enframing reveals, its unthought presence in the occurrence of the impossibility of breaking into time at the same time as occupying the space created by such an action. One of the main unthought elements that Connolly’s analysis makes

thinkable, and which perhaps provides the deepest link between Connolly’s political thought and modernity, is the notion of contingency. Simply put, contingency is the idea that something could as equally exist as not exist or, put differently, that the reason that something exists is not ‘necessary’ – a concept to which contingency is normally opposed in order to be defined. Contingency is not subsumed within reason as whatever counts as reason is subsequent to it. In that respect, contingency is both the ground of the modern idea of radical intervention and the condition of its failure. That is to say, the break is contingent in that no necessary cause conditions or grounds it, and therefore no necessary cause or ground sustains what the break seeks to establish, and in seeking to establish a ground for itself, modernity erases its own contingency and ceases to be itself, which in turn gives rise to the constant process of modernisation to which Connolly refers. In much of Connolly’s later work, contingency and its consequences have

become an explicit object or theme of political reflection. However, in contrast to other thinkers who have recognised the importance of contingency, for instance, the Panglossian approach of Rorty or the decisionism of Laclau and Mouffe, Connolly continues to think through and deepen the radical consequences of the notion. In this respect, Connolly’s thought continues to push at the limits of the modern frame and invents the political consequences of the space that doing so creates. These challenge the extent to which contingency is thinkable as a political category within conditions in which politics is, with respect to the full ambivalence the term now acquires, unthinkable without it. Connolly does not simply announce the fact of contingency, to be cele-

brated or denounced, but attempts to render it as a political category. This chapter will examine two of the ways in which this is done: through the introduction of the political significance of ontology as the terrain on which to pose the question of contingency, time and politics; and through a confrontation with the ethical question of the subjective and enunciative nature of political action, including the action which is called thinking politically, insofar as that is conceived within the temporal dimension of ontology in the light of contingency. The chapter will attempt to show that insofar as this

succeeds it is at a considerable cost that not everyone will be able to afford. Connolly’s political thought is not universalisable or deontological, but as it considers itself as taking place in the ruins of those requirements (which are themselves neither universalisable nor deontological), then that characteristic is not necessarily the basis of an objection to it. However, an absence of universalisable criteria does not entail that Connolly’s thought exists in a particular category of its own that prevents it from being discussed critically. This is not simply because other notable post-foundationalist political thinkers hold similar views but also because the themes of time, contingency, politics, ontology, and so on are not Connolly’s own. Therefore, in order to get a sense of Connolly’s appropriation of these themes, the chapter begins with a more general discussion of some of the problems associated with them, showing some of the tensions and points of contestation, the agonism, within Connolly’s political thought. It does so with the hope of demonstrating Connolly’s fidelity to modernity, which is to say to modernity’s constitutive failure, to its impossibility, and thus the viability of the project that is built on it and on which its political aspect depends. The stakes of that project are shown at the end of the chapter through a discussion of Connolly’s consideration of the costs of contingency for those who are unable to absorb them for reasons that are not entirely contingent.