Learning public deliberation through the critique of institutional argument.

• Author: Doxtader, Erik

In a society, institutions are frequently charged with the responsibility of representing the public good. Relying on argumentation, institutions interpret public interest in order to define, articulate and support the norms that sustain collective life. Often, this process benefits those who inhabit the public domain. Institutions enact their value when they coordinate social, economic and political interactions that better everyone's quality of life. At other times, however, institutional arguments about the public good reduce the terms of social and political development to a functional equation that robs individuals of the ability to articulate visions of collective interest. Using "stability" to trump criticism, institutions outflank those who seek to question or revise the form and content of public good.

This essay investigates how institutions argue about the idea of public good. Institutional arguments about public interest shape the deliberative interactions that constitute public opinion. Discussions of particular policy choices often affirm the general authority of institutional practices of reasoning and codify norms of public interest. This study engages arguments lodged in the courts, the field of economics, and those charged with developing environmental protection policy. Investigating the problem of how these practitioners place a value on shared environmental resources, the essay illustrates both how institutions argue about the idea of public interest and how these arguments structure the possibilities of deliberative pluralism.

Concerned that the tasks of public life are increasingly the rote chores of institutions, the essay develops critique in order to open up arguments that claim to work on behalf of the public. By exposing how decision makers justify public policy, the essay argues that institutions can create paradoxical claims about the value of public deliberation in order to short-circuit political debate. Such arguments enact discursive double binds that co-opt the ability of "citizens" to recognize their interests. I maintain that this process is one in which institutions sustain their power by using the form of public deliberation in order to empty its content.

The study of argumentation and debate can easily overlook how institutions argue about the ends of public life. Theory often brackets how institutions forge the norms of public policy by either reducing institutional actions to monologic technique or integrating their announcement into the pragmatic study of how to achieve desired policy outcomes. Abstracting its own contingency, criticism thus forgets the basic relation between instrumental technique and human interest (Habermas, Knowledge 314). In response, this essay examines how argumentation occurs when methods of expressing, comparing and evaluating the public good differ among various democratic for a for argument.

Today, there is great uncertainty about the composition and value of public goods. Developing out of the demands of political identity formation and economic complexity, a public good is perhaps best described as a relation that underpins human substance and motivation (Burke 337). Variously theorized in rhetoric, philosophy, economics and law, a public good is the enactment of reasoning processes dedicated to negotiating the relationship between private and collective modes of existence.(2) Accordingly, a public good is a space and time in which to express interest. In public, private experience is the possibility of representation, shared reference, and power (Arendt, Human 57). As ontology, public good is the necessity of expression to the end of self-definition with others. However, a public good is also a reification of experience. As symbolic constitutions of interest, public goods are necessarily exclusive and incomplete. The politics of the public good is universal only as ideology.

Given its complex and often violent legacy, there are important reasons to be suspicious of actions justified on the grounds of public good.(3) Indeed, the political, philosophical and social value of public interest today is very unclear. Critics debate a continuum of claims. Some see the public sphere as an unrealized but attainable hope of civility. Others find public interest to be but an artifice that can only assimilate difference into a monolithic vision of sociopolitical development (Baudrillard 277; Benhabib 346; Butler 7; Lyotard 5; Fraser, Rethinking 124; Farrell 282; Goodnight, Personal 225; Habermas, Further 425). Such debate prob-lematizes the forms of reason and communication that underpin social and political deliberation.

My work here advances the hypothesis that the contemporary value of the public sphere develops in relation to critical-theoretical study of institutional argument. Mimicking poststructuralism, institutions use the contingency of public discussion to tactically disarm the force of criticism that would offer contravening norms of political development. This means two things. First, institutions maintain that they act on the basis of a political will that is the synthesis of public and private interest. In other words, institutional claims to represent citizens presuppose that the mission of the institution is to service those public goods forged through open-ended deliberation about the relative value of private need. Second, however, institutions embed their appeals to collective interest in operational logics that equivocate public deliberation and social instability. As such, institutions work to overcome the uncertainty of political debate by prescribing "acceptable" modes of interaction. The possibility of representation based on critical public dialogue is replaced by decision-making techniques that screen out expressions of interest which do not comport with pregiven norms of sociopolitical development.

Today, the complex dynamic between private and public forms of life must be theorized in relationship to processes of institutional argument. I begin a defense of this claim by explicating Jurgen Habermas' thesis that modern institutions can rationalize the dilemmas of democratic pluralism by colonizing the lifeworld of citizens. Wary of Habermas' inability to differentiate colonizing actions from justified forms of problem-solving, I claim that colonization processes are discoverable through a study of how institutional arguments lose any purchase on public understanding insofar as they use the contingency of collective norms against the public. Working though a study of how institutions rely on the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) to determine the worth of despoiled environmental resources, I will argue that critical-public argumentation theory benefits from critique that reveals how institutional arguments structurally foreclose the ability of citizens to express their interests.

1. LIFEWORLD COLONIZATION AS INSTITUTIONAL ARGUMENT

   Jurgen Habermas' practice of critical social theory investigates the relationship between reason and communication in an effort to explain how public actors might engage institutions in order to reclaim the grounds of deliberative pluralism. (Theory 2:374; Structural 200). There are two claims at the core of Habermas' project. First, argumentation is a form of rational action geared toward intersubjective understanding. Second, public life in the modern welfare state rests on the critical reconstruction of lifeworld norms which have been subverted by bureaucratic systems (Habermas, PostMetaphysical 94). To be sure, people depend on institutions for resources necessary for modern life. However, these resources are assembled and distributed in a way that is not understandable to the citizen who bears the risk of becoming a client of the state.

   Habermas' arguments rest on several basic concepts. First, he holds that argumentation enacts a process of social rationalization through which individuals reach normatively meaningful agreements. Argumentation is a court of appeal given over to the task of openly coordinating action (Habermas, Theory 1:17-27). Second, the procedures and process of communicative action develop within the lifeworld - more a phenomenological horizon than an autonomous sphere of human activity. In the lifeworld, individuals draw from culturally transmitted and linguistically organized interpretive patterns in order to offer, criticize and redeem the claims that, in turn, sustain social action coordination (Habermas, Theory 2:119-126). As such, the possibilities of collective action are supported by learning processes that proceed through the medium of open communication. The vision is ideal, but the ideal is practical to the degree that it creates a referent for discussing how norms develop and take hold (Jay 271).

   Based on the foregoing assumptions, Habermas' position is that in a complex society, public deliberation decays when interested individuals can neither codify procedures for resolving which issues are appropriately called "public," nor define rules for debate over these issues. Today, Habermas claims, these abilities are usurped by institutional systems that instrumentally define the scope and force of public opinion. Enacting, what Habermas calls, the colonization of the lifeworld, the force of institutional systems stems from a dynamic of self-sealing rationalities deployed in order to appropriate the experiences of citizens.(4)

   Basic to Habermas' colonization thesis is the argument that institutions emerge in order to coordinate social development by way of purposive-rational subsystems (Theory 1:342). Codified in the form of law and market regulations, these subsystems resolve disputes by reaching through the lifeworld in order to stabilize contingency and manage complex forms of action coordination (Habermas, Theory 2:355). In other words, advanced institutional steering systems codify technical procedures for social development that refer to, but...