Why so timely? Politics of representation and its entanglement in presentism

The threat/promise of immediacy: Haste, simultaneity and untimeliness

As mentioned earlier, democratic theory approaches immediacy with great caution since it is associated with issues such as the threat of arbitrariness and a relentless search for authenticity, which are juxtaposed to the more deliberative and mediated forms of political action. As Jürgen Habermas puts it, ‘an actor acts rationally when he acts on reasons and knows why he follows a maxim’ which ‘is what differentiates intentional action from spontaneously motivated action in general’. ²¹ Iris Young expresses a similar concern about spontaneity when she claims that ‘moral reason certainly does require reflection, an ability to take some distance from one’s immediate impulses, intuitions, desires, and interests in order to consider their relation to the demands of others’. ²² Among these theorists, Urbinati has arguably provided the most sustained critique of such aspiration for unmediated, or direct, presence. A ‘spontaneous will’, she writes, is ‘unreliable’ ²³ because it tends to be driven by exterior impulses and does not spare the ‘time, the dimension of the inner sense’ ²⁴ to turn inwards and expose itself to the judgement of mind. However, the idea of immediacy also takes on other meanings in her text than haste. Sometimes, it connotes the more spatial sense of being simultaneously co-present with others. It can moreover imply the ontological sense of searching for an authentic identity to be re-presented. At other times, it comes closer to meaning untimely ruptures. Here I will explore these various manifestations of immediacy in her theory to demonstrate a blind spot in her outlook on the concept. I will first start with haste and then move on to others.

For Urbinati, immediacy constitutes a serious threat to democracy because it inhibits ‘cogitation’, which always entails ‘avoiding haste’ and reminding oneself that ‘deliberative reasoning is time-consuming and assists participants to cool their passions and increase their ability to make sound decisions’. ²⁵ The main issue with this hasty sense of immediacy has to do with its self-centred character because when someone acts with such speed, they do not have the time to consider their own opinions from the perspective of others. Deliberative engagement, in contrast, grants people the time to ‘situate themselves from the point of view of others when they judge political issues and evaluate one another’s behavior’. ²⁶ Such deliberative interactions build up in citizens the capacity to communicate ‘both within themselves (pondering) and among themselves (consultation)’. ²⁷ This all gets lost when politics becomes dominated by immediacy and rash behaviour, which ultimately turns a political community into ‘a container of countless substantial identities that do not communicate with one another’. ²⁸ For Urbinati, in short, haste serves the demonstrative function of showing what deliberative politics should not be like. This explains why Urbinati posits ‘hastiness’ as ‘the antithesis of deliberation’. ²⁹

While Urbinati’s criticism of haste is quite clear, this opposition in her work between haste and deliberation is not always as rigid as it might first appear. Sometimes she deems a decision as immediate even if it might be reached through deliberative means. For instance, she calls the Athenian assembly an ‘immediate democracy’ ³⁰ even though the decisions in this ancient political forum were reached through deliberative means. This draws our attention to a different mode of immediacy that is operative in her theory even though she never fully dissects the concept as such. This other sense of immediacy is the ontological sense of aspiring for an authentic presence. It is true that Athenian democracy was based on deliberative procedures such as individual speeches and collective discussions, but deliberation was restricted only to those occasions where people were co-present to each other. As Urbinati puts it, in Athens ‘sovereignty entailed physical presence and spatiality, so that the power to transform a proposal into a law required nondeferred action’. ³¹ In a representative democracy, on the other hand, co-presence ceases to be the norm since representing means making something or someone present when and where they are actually not. That is why in modern democracies ‘popular sovereignty is representational and fictional…in the sense that it does not have a simple or unique physical location or a body, individual or collective, nor does it have a privileged space and time’. ³² Being fictional here does not mean being unreal or spurious. The decisions that are made by the representatives do have real consequences for the represented. It rather has the artificial sense of being ‘constructed and nurtured’. ³³ It points to the highly fluid character of the sovereign body that

“does not belong to the people who in electing representatives, not pure delegates, acknowledge it is not their master. It does not belong to the representatives either, who… do not have the power to produce any ultimate obedience or an obedience that is immune from contestation and revocation”. ³⁴

My decision to consult Derrida here is not an arbitrary one given that the literature has already been borrowing from him for some time by now. For example, when Young mobilizes the concept of deferral to make sense of representative politics, she consults Derrida’s concept of ‘différance’. ³⁷ Disch is another democratic theorist who refers to Derrida in formulating her opposition to ‘the belief that “reality” exists prior to and as a condition of the possibility of its being represented’. ³⁸ Urbinati herself cites him when she claims that ‘representatives are like “signs” of a deferred presence’. ³⁹ Derrida, in short, has been a much frequented archive in these contemporary discussions on representation. Despite his strong presence in the literature, however, the political implications of his critique of teleological reasoning and his affirmative reading of untimeliness remain largely untapped.

Affirming the untimely: Jacques Derrida

Contemporary literature on representative politics tends to borrow from Derrida selectively. When they engage with his conceptual reflections on representation, they mainly consult his earlier works ⁴⁰ such as Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays (1973). In these early texts Derrida spends most of his energy to deconstruct what he calls the ‘metaphysics of presence’ ⁴¹ which resembles the critique that Urbinati develops towards the ontological yearning for authenticity. Another key text in this context is Margins of Philosophy (1982) ⁴² where Derrida relates his critique of presence to the idea of deferral as the postponement of all aspirations for full presence. The literature also draws on his more overtly political concepts such as ‘democracy to come’ ⁴³ which is tied to the idea of a democratic will that keeps deferring itself to the future without any finalization. A fourth text that can be added to the list is Sending: On Representation (1982) in which Derrida expresses his dissatisfaction with the interpretations of political representation as ‘the delegation of presence, of reiteration, rendering present once again, in substituting a presentation for another in absentia’. ⁴⁴ This brief survey demonstrates the central place that Derrida has been occupying for the current literature on politics of representation. But there is one particular text that has not received the kind of attention that it deserves in these discussions. I am referring here to Specters of Marx (2006) ⁴⁵ where Derrida expands his critique of metaphysical thinking from immediacy to teleological reasoning by focusing on the concept of untimeliness.

Outside of the literature on politics of representation, some democratic theorists did focus on Derrida’s reflections on untimeliness. Samuel Chambers, for example, underlines ‘a subtle but crucially important distinction’ in Derrida ‘between the future as simply future present and the future as the yet-to-come, avenir’ to criticize ‘a linear or dialectical conception of time’. ⁴⁶ Wendy Brown also points to this tension between ‘timeliness and untimeliness in critical political theory’ ⁴⁷ as she proposes ‘untimeliness’ as ‘a technique for blowing up historical time’ and generating ‘alternative possibilities and perspectives in a seemingly close political and epistemological universe’. ⁴⁸ She accordingly invites political theory ‘to grasp the times by thinking against the times…to “overcome the present” by puncturing the present’s “overvaluation of itself”’. ⁴⁹ These affirmative readings of untimeliness have been pivotal in imagining the concept of immediacy anew by giving it a positive inflection. However, the connection between such affirmative reading of untimeliness and its meaning for the ongoing debates in the literature on representation still remains underexplored, which is what I am planning to establish here.

At first, it is quite hard to distinguish untimeliness from the other senses of immediacy that have been introduced thus far since they all display what Wittgenstein would call a significant family resemblance to each other. However, a closer analysis of the concept reveals that untimeliness is actually based on a quite different ontology than the other senses of immediacy. Unlike the haste to bring a latent identity to completion or the aspiration to retain the originality of an authentic presence, untimeliness stands for the inevitably ‘unhinged’ ⁵⁰ character of the present moment, which means that it accommodates disjointedness and rupture as structural aspects of the way the present relates itself to the future. In Derrida’s words, untimeliness embodies an ‘ultimate event (immediate rupture, unheard-of interruption, untimeliness of the infinite surprise, heterogeneity without accomplishment)’ which ‘can exceed at each moment, the final term of a phusis, such as work, the production, and the telos of any history’. ⁵¹ It ‘comes from the future or as future: as the very coming of the event’ ⁵² and therefore its immediacy corresponds to puzzlement, hesitancy, and not knowing how to engage with something that ‘no longer belongs to knowledge’. ⁵³ Its ontology, in other words, belongs to emergence or nascence rather than closure and determination.

But this juxtaposition between untimeliness and the other senses of immediacy can be somewhat misleading because it does not tell us how these different aspects of the concept relate to one another. After all, untimeliness is not just a different sense of immediacy. It is rather the deconstructive element that explodes the very presumption of the ‘reappropriable identity of the present’ ⁵⁴ that is sustained by these other senses of immediacy. This is the case because the present moment can never be a series of completely discrete moments that exhausts itself in the immediacy of such experience because its intelligibility always hinges on its repetition and iteration from one moment to the next. Immediacy, in other words, ‘gathers itself only in dividing itself, in differentiating itself, because it is not original or originally a sending from’. ⁵⁵ This is what Derrida means by the idea of ‘an originary delay’, ⁵⁶ which designates repetition and division as the underlining conditions of any experience, including the most immediate ones. This brief introduction to Derrida’s reflection on immediacy yields two key insights regarding his thoughts on immediacy and mediation. First, the idea of having an immediate, or unmediated, relationship to the world does not go any further than being an illusion. An experience of immediacy implies repetition, which makes it always already a product of representation. Secondly, being iterated or represented means being immersed in difference. It is true that iteration can enable a presence to reaffirm its identity and unity as it ensures continuity over time. However, it also harbours the structural possibility of alteration because representation necessarily implies repetition with a difference. The concept of immediacy, therefore, cannot be disassociated from untimeliness since the latter occupies the very grammar of the former.

This is how Derrida openly disassociates his thought from all forms of presentism: ‘a democracy to come’ is ‘not of a future democracy in the future present, not even of a regulating idea, in the Kantian sense’. ⁵⁷ ‘To come’ refers to what is already among us but whose representability remains deeply contingent and open-ended since it is yet too heterogeneous to be accommodated in representation. In Rogues, he makes this point quite explicitly when he explains it through the temporal register of urgency rather than delay:

My pointed reference to urgency is meant to suggest that in the necessarily finite time of politics and thus of democracy, the democracy to come certainly does not mean the right to defer, even in the name of some regulative Idea…The to-come of democracy is also, although without presence, the hic et nunc of urgency, of the injunction as absolute urgency. ⁵⁸

This is the problem that Derrida has in mind when he engages in Specters with Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the end of history and the ultimate triumph of the liberal ideology. Fukuyama insists that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist regimes should be read as revolutionary events that embody the actualization of the liberal telos. Derrida responds to Fukuyama by reversing his question. Instead of focusing on the timeliness of liberalism, he wants to know what sort of damage is incurred to our commitment to political openness when timeliness and teleological judgement becomes our signpost in political judgement? Derrida particularly detects one key issue with Fukuyama’s emphasis on being more timely, which pertains to liberalism’s erasure of Marx and his political inheritance. As the liberal ideology declares its authority and permanence in the present moment, it becomes too reassured of its complete detachment from the Marxist critique and loses an awareness of the very inconsistencies and contradictions that accompany its triumphant arrival. Put differently, the liberal ‘teleology locks up, neutralizes, and finally cancels historicity’ ⁶⁰ as it disavows its own untimeliness. This self-reassurance is caught up in an intriguing paradox. As the liberal ideology represses its own disjointedness and contradictions to reassure its authority over the present moment, it also becomes haunted by the discrepancies and ruptures that make up that fiction such as ‘massive exclusion of homeless citizens’, ‘the contradictions in the concept, norms, and reality of the free market…the aggravation of the foreign debt’ and ‘the arms industry and trade’. ⁶¹ This is the strange temporal grammar of teleological reasoning. The neoliberal ideology can only declare its advent as an empirical event by downplaying its own empiricity and positing itself only as a regulative ideal that is deferred to a more perfected future to come. This ‘paradoxical hunt’ ⁶² acknowledges untimeliness only to push the excess away and domesticate it altogether. In other words, the timeliness of the telos is accompanied by the necessity to testify its own anachronism or untimeliness only to disavow it again.

This paradox highlights the impulsive element in teleological judgement as it is driven by the tendency to renounce its entanglement with untimeliness. Yet it also testifies to the impossibility of such a task. It is not so much that untimeliness happens to teleology as an external event that the latter can avoid if it were to be more cautious. The critique is much more radical than that. Teleology is rather necessarily bound by its own untimeliness because the more it reassures itself of the domestication of untimely ruptures, the more it becomes bound by the urgency to acknowledge the reproduction of the untimely excesses that it tries to forget. This observation yields two key political insights. First, it alerts us to the potentially crisis-producing aspect of teleological judgement and its tendency to generate the very type of impulsive behaviour that Urbinati criticizes. Second, it invites us to be attentive to the fissures that always already occupy the very representability of such idealizations so that such fictions are not granted more authority than they deserve. Now I would like to go back to Urbinati’s text to show how the teleological vein in her theory prevents her from formulating such an affirmative reading of untimeliness.

Nadia Urbinati and the teleological defence of representative politics

On the one hand, Urbinati demonstrates a strong commitment to the deconstructive sense of deferral. She develops this insight through Claude Lefort’s emphasis on the essentially empty character of modern sovereignty. Modern sovereignties are empty because, in Lefort’s words, the ‘power belongs to no one; that those who exercise power do not possess it; that they do not, indeed, embody it; that the exercise of power requires a periodic and repeated contest’. ⁶³ Representation is the most appropriate form of governance to capture such fluidity because its deferred character circulates the democratic will with no promise of finalization. As Urbinati puts it, in a representative democracy the designation of the sovereign will works as ‘a circular march that starts outside the government, reaches political institutions, ends temporally with the vote of the representatives, and returns to society’. ⁶⁴ When the idea of deferral is construed as such, it remains fully compatible with politics of untimeliness because it does not posit a certain telos as the proper content of politics of representation.

However, there is another sense of deferral that is operative in Urbinati’s theory, which is the teleological sense of sending something to the future so that it can be perfected over time. She develops this sense of deferral through Immanuel Kant’s ‘as if reasoning’, ⁶⁵ which refers to the imaginative capacity to project an idealized horizon onto our reality so that the world can fictionally appear to us in a new light. As she puts it, the as if reasoning forms a ‘teleological inference that allows us to derive maxims or instructions for behavior’. ⁶⁶ Such inference gives our imaginary a ‘utopian (future-oriented)’ ⁶⁷ twist so that it does not ‘consume itself in the instant one decide’. ⁶⁸ This is how she forms the association between teleological reasoning and ideological politics. A teleological idealization works as ‘a process of ideological unification’ ⁶⁹ that slowly ‘filters and sorts out the irreducible partiality of social or cultural identities by making them issues of political alliances and programs’ and generating a ‘dialectics between parts and whole’. ⁷⁰ This ‘ideological dimension’ of representative politics gives the community a ‘future-oriented perspective’. ⁷¹ It accordingly enables people to ‘transcend the immediacy of their experience and interests’ and become attuned to ‘the idealizing and judgmental nature of politics’. ⁷² Such transcendence guides representatives in organizing the messy world of differences in accordance to a ‘teleology and the ideal world of principles’. ⁷³

This teleological framework is founded on a hierarchical relationship between particularity and universality. Normally, a representative relationship is thought of as a two-way relationship between a principal (the represented constituency) and an agent (the representative actor). Urbinati correctly diagnoses this framework as too simplistic. Even though leaders are primarily responsible to those who elect them, they are equally obliged to render the wishes of their constituencies generalizable enough to make them fit to become the law of the nation. Once representation is approached from this larger perspective, it ceases to be a two-way road and instead operates as a tripartite relationship among the specific constituency being represented, the person who represents it, and the rest of the political community. When the representative acts, she mediates between her own constituency and the polity at large: ‘Representatives represent the entire nation, not just the constituency that elected them’. ⁷⁴ Urbinati puts her fingers on a key point when she underlines the necessity to conceptualize representative politics beyond a ‘principal-agent model’. ⁷⁵ Universalization does serve the democratic function of generating a productive alienation from the immediacy of one’s own perspective and allowing people to see the world in a new light.

But what universalization also does is to ascribe society a determinate identity and designate any disruptive differences that emerge within that totality as a threat to the continuity of that projected identity. As Ernesto Laclau puts it, ‘the ideological effect’ hinges on ‘the belief that there is a particular social arrangement which can bring about the closure and transparency of the community’. ⁷⁶ Lasse Thomassen highlights a similar problem when he associates ideological politics with an anticipation of ‘the fullness of the community with a clear division between inside and outside’ and ‘the space of signification within which both the community and its antagonistic other are constituted’. ⁷⁷ Urbinati unfortunately undermines this darker aspect of teleological/ideological reasoning because she does not see anything problematic with it. Hence, she focuses exclusively on the threats that are posed by immediacy and accordingly overlooks the fact that ideologies produce their own set of democratic problems as they can drag political constituencies down the slippery slope of becoming lost in their own fictions.

Besides missing the fact that teleological/ideological representation has a potentially crisis-inducing element about it, Urbinati’s theory also neglects the possibility that ideological convictions can be the source of hasty judgements. In her recent book Democracy Disfigured, for example, Urbinati associates a ‘protest like Occupy Wall Street’ directly with a claim ‘to occupy the representative institutions and win the majority in order to model the entire society to its ideology’. ⁷⁸ Her fear is that unless such incorporation takes place as soon as possible, politics become dangerously exposed to the threat of immediacy. It is true that the Occupy’s motto was ‘we are the 99%’ which is a populist discourse with a claim to a universal ‘we’. But it is also true that this emergent constituency, if we can even consider it as such, did not have the kind of linearity and solidity that we would expect from an ideological position. It can even be argued that what gave the protests its momentum and inclusive character was its determination to postpone the teleological inclination to identify itself with an ideological position that were at their disposal. Seen from this perspective, Urbinati’s ideological interpretation turns out to be too hasty in associating the political significance of the Occupy with an aspiration to be incorporated into an ideological block. It also becomes possible to pinpoint a different sense of deferral or postponement that is operative in politics of representation that corresponds to the decision to delay the impulse to search for an ideological anchor to hold on to. If the Occupy had taken that ideological route in the name of gaining more permanence in the political arena, it would compromise its contingent and experimental nature. When the 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney dismissed the Occupy Wall Street by defining the participants as ‘bad actors on Main Street’ who should be ‘found and plucked out’, ⁷⁹ his hasty judgement about this protest was a testimony to this impulsive aspect of ideological thinking. Romney had to render the Occupy representable in discourse as soon as possible because the more this protest remained an enigma, the more it could play the subversive role of destabilizing the very opposition through which Romney’s ideology would define his own position. This is not to say that Urbinati would agree with the conclusions that Romney arrives at. Yet her ideological approach to the protests brings her theory to a dangerous proximity to the kind of hasty conclusions that I have been associating with such politics.

It is important to note that ideological politics can also be captured from a non-teleological angle. Michael Freeden’s ‘morphological pluralism’, for example, conceptualizes ideologies as constructs of ‘fleeting, temporary and strictly circumscribed consistencies’ that come ‘out of more fundamental, abstract and purist inconsistencies’. ⁸⁰ Similarly, Gerald F Gaus argues that ‘if we understand “making sense” as accounting for the main values and having a place for all the things to which we are attracted, then a successful ideology will almost inevitably be contradictory’. ⁸¹ This specific reading of ideologies draws our attention to a key distinction between ideological thinking and idealization as it welcomes the ‘normalization of indeterminacy’ at the expense of a ‘retreat into the safety of modelling utopian worlds’. ⁸² That is why Freeden is quite critical of Rawls’s ‘philosophical understandings of perfectionism’ and the ‘ideal-type prescriptive approach to liberalism’. ⁸³ This is a philosophical point with serious political implications because teleological rendition of ideologies can lead to ‘the ideological exploitation of time as a means of social control’ ⁸⁴ by presuming an ‘internal harmony that complex ideologies would otherwise lack’. ⁸⁵ Consequently, such presumption of harmony can be used to legitimize the silencing of those voices that are regarded as too disruptive and disharmonious. When Urbinati associates ‘time, the dimension of the inner sense’ with ‘narrative, teleology, and the ideal world of principles’, ⁸⁶ she potentially allows the suppression of those untimely voices that are deemed as too inconsistent to pass the test of ideological coherence.

No such reassurance can be found in Freeden who adopts a pluralist conception of time where ‘ideologies employ different methods for structuring time. It may be frozen, repetitive, accumulative, incremental, radically forward-looking, or imaginary’. ⁸⁷ Again, this is directly tied to politics. Let’s consider Urbinati’s approach to political parties as an example. Urbinati designates political parties as the epitome of representative politics because they embody the most sublimated forms of ideological contestation. She formulates her argument in binary terms here. Either ideological politics is mediated by the party structure or it becomes ‘trapped by and within the extraordinary power of other kinds of potentates, such as ethnic tribes and religious communities, private media tycoons and communitarian affiliations’. ⁸⁸ Politics without party structure equals to politics without true ideological contestation. Freeden’s morphological approach is not committed to such a binary. If an ideology like liberalism ‘may no longer be doing very well in the realm of organized party politics’, ⁸⁹ this does not mean that it has lost the ideological fight against its contenders. It would rather demonstrate the fact that liberalism’s ‘internal morphological flexibility, or tolerance of multiple decontestations, allows for, say, diverse understandings of liberty to co-exist within its orbit’. ⁹⁰ Not being incorporated into a party form does not have to lead to being trapped by extra-ideological elements since this can also be a sign of active resistance against the teleological tendencies that threaten to harden an ideology beyond any flexibility: ‘If indeed liberalism appears to be the reflection of a minority culture, the typical yet misleading association between party and ideology maybe one contributing factor’. ⁹¹ Party structure does not have to be the telos of political representation.

As shown by this example, Freeden’s morphological approach to ideologies places him in great proximity to Derrida’s commitment to indeterminacy, contestability and untimeliness of ideas and concepts. ⁹² Ideologies are untimely because they can never be fully reassured by the processes idealization. The next section will use this insight to criticize Derrida’s own rendition of liberalism. Yet it is also true that Derrida’s approach to untimeliness dwells on a unique problem that is not fully captured by Freeden. I am referring to those circumstances where the representative imaginary faces a radically new phenomenon, which remains foreign to any of the ideological frameworks that are available to us. Let me flesh this point out by dwelling on a specific example. When analysing different ideologies, Freeden investigates the relationship between green ideology and liberalism. He contends that since green ideology constructs pluralism as a matter of ‘aversion of control over nature’, it produces a sense of ‘all-encompassing pluralism beyond even the imagination of liberals’. ⁹³ In comparison to green ideology, liberalism’s pluralism thus remains quite anthropocentric. While this might be true, there is also something quite comforting about green ideology because it can keep the boundary between the human and the natural intact. Liberalism can see the green ideology as an effective critique of its own anthropocentrism and yet remain reassured of its own boundaries by identifying itself as a properly human ideology. In other words, green ideology might be untimely in the sense of unsettling the scope of liberal ideology without necessarily disrupting the fundamental principles of liberalism.

Now consider a much untimelier disruption in our contemporary political imaginary where the lines between human and nature ceases to be tenable. I am referring to artificial intelligence (AI), which pushes both liberalism and green ideology to its limits. AI is man-made, but not human. It has the automaticity of a natural phenomenon, but it is also self-learning. It has the intriguing quality of imitating and exceeding human intelligence. We can confirm the accuracy of its results without necessarily comprehending the process that leads it to those results. Given that we are facing this radically new form of intelligence, how should we incorporate it to politics? Should the AI have the right to rule over the people if its intelligence proves to be much higher than humans? Can it be held accountable for its actions given that its form of thought is not very conducive to open dialogue? Where does the faculty of human judgement reside in that picture? These are very pertinent questions that demand an urgent answer since technologies such as ‘facial recognition, sentiment analysis, and data mining could be used to discriminate against disfavoured groups, or invade people’s privacy’. ⁹⁴ Despite the urgency of the matter, however, a Derridean approach would postpone the urge to find an immediate answer to these questions since the issue goes beyond a matter of reconfiguration or ‘cross-fertilizations’ ⁹⁵ of already existent ideologies. Given the radically untimely nature of the problem, the guidelines provided by the available ideologies will probably be more misleading than beneficial. An affirmative reading of untimeliness, therefore, requires an experimentation with the new in its own singularity instead of looking for different ways of making it fit into an ideological form. I am not able to follow this more fundamental critique of ideological thinking in Freeden’s work. ⁹⁶

This Derridean insight can also be applied to more overtly political events such as the Occupy Wall Street. Whenever we would become too sure of the identity of the Occupy and render it fully representable, we would also lose its essence. The Occupy remains an experiment in the making that can be partially recognized in Black Lives Matter protests, a women’s march, the new interest in minimalist living and the Dakota Access Pipeline just to name a few other political protests that have been occupying the contemporary American political imaginary. These political events do not necessarily share the same ideological position since they are informed by different histories, experiences, expectations and grievances. They also relate to politics differently. Some have more anarchist orientations and others are more committed to conventional institutions. Some operate at the level of ideals and others prioritize power. Yet they also have certain similar sensitivities such as a general critique of capitalist exploitation and the deterioration of the commons. The Occupy movement does take the class problem very seriously and utilizes symbols that are informed by Marxist theory, but once you reduce it to a class-based politics, you would miss something essential about it. What matters for the purposes of this paper is the acknowledgment that this untimely quality of this emergent constituency cannot be considered as what makes its representation impossible. We should rather treat such opacity as a part of politics of representation as a democratic check against the threat of becoming lost in our own idealizations. As Derrida puts it, the legacy of these emergent political phenomena keep ‘living-on [sur-vie]’ by ‘disjoin[ing] or dis-adjust [ing] the identity to itself of the living present’. ⁹⁷ This can be a rebuttal against the tendency to attribute untimeliness a historicity only if it is captured from a teleological angle.

I take issue with Urbinati’s theory because, contra to Derrida and Freeden, she does not have the conceptual tools to affirm untimeliness as a constitutive (let alone affirmative) element of representative politics. However, I consider this as an immanent critique of her theory as it speaks to the very democratic objectives that Urbinati sets up for herself. After all, she defends representation on the basis of its capacity to deepen democratic pluralization and render political contestation a truly open-ended process. As she puts it, a process of idealization ‘interrupts fragmentation, not, however, by imposing homogeneity or concealing difference’. ⁹⁸ She does not defend ideological unification, in other words, in the name of creating a more homogeneous society. Similarly, she imagines the ‘symbolic of unity of the nation’ as a constantly evolving entity where ‘the sovereign judgment’ remains ‘permanently in action’. ⁹⁹ The aptitude for change conditions the very possibility of representative politics. I fully concur with these democratic ends that Urbinati designates for representative action since they match with my own defence of representation as an agonistic practice. I part ways with Urbinati when she tries to achieve these objectives via teleological means since this framework turns out to be quite inadequate to fulfil the task. My disagreement with Urbinati in that regard works as an internal critique. I identify with the ends that she aspires for, but take issue with the conceptual tools that she utilizes to achieve them. Freeden’s work is helpful here to capture ideologies from a non-teleological angle even though it is not sufficient to get at the heart of Derrida’s point on untimeliness as a matter of engaging with the radically new. Now that I fleshed out what is politically and conceptually at stake with my critical engagement with ideological politics in its different manifestations, next I would like to turn to Urbinati’s interpretation of revolutionary politics as a useful illustration of this tension that I have been highlighting between the two different ways of treating immediacy in politics of representation.

Representation and the revolutionary problematic

Urbinati’s cautionary stance on immediacy finds its sharpest expression in her reflections on revolutionary politics. Revolutions exemplify for her the perfect manifestations of politics of immediacy because they reduce politics to ‘pure command, extralegal actions, or sudden decisions’ at the expense of ‘opinion formation, reflection, revision, and amendment’. ¹⁰⁰ During such ‘spontaneous (as lawless) expressions of the will’, ¹⁰¹ the public becomes ‘exposed to ignorance, sectarian interests, and the intemperance of passions of the masses’. ¹⁰² Such events of ‘extreme political instability’, ¹⁰³ in short, collapses the possibility of representative politics because their suddenness obliterates democracy’s conduciveness to organize itself around overarching ideals. This specific encapsulation of the revolutionary problematic leads Urbinati to the following question: ‘how to legalize the revolution’ so that ‘democracy could be saved from the problem of presentism’ and citizens can have ‘sufficient “alone time” to reflect on issues?’ ¹⁰⁴ She wants to divest democracies of the revolutionary problematic to ensure the survival of representative politics.

This is, however, a peculiar way of conceptualizing revolutions and it is the one that makes most sense when immediacy is associated either with haste or with a desire for authentic presence. What is missed in such formulation is the more emergent sense of revolutions, which highlights a problem that is internal to representative politics: How to allow the represented community to begin anew in the face of a political inertia that is exerted by its own idealized image of itself? This emergent aspect of revolutions becomes completely sidelined by Urbinati because she associates representative politics only with an ‘uninterrupted temporality’ ¹⁰⁵ and ideals that transcend the complexities and inconsistencies of the present time. As established so far, such temporality cannot be the norm in capturing the democratic essence of representative politics because political contestation can only remain genuinely open-ended when ideals become more accommodating of their finitude and their crisis-inducing potential. Besides this point, Urbinati’s interpretation of revolutions is also limited for a different reason. In her critique of revolutions, her focus remains mainly on the problem of immediacy and its present-centric grammar. What she does not mention is the fact that teleological reasoning is just as vulnerable to such presentist practices of revolution. It is true that teleological reasoning is essentially based on the idea of deferral. But the telos cannot defer itself forever because if that was the case, such perpetuity would deprive it of its political salience. At some point in time the ideal needs to become empirically present, which brings teleological reasoning to a dangerous proximity to the kind of presentist logic that Urbinati associates with immediacy. Let me flesh this out by focusing on the actual political context within which Specters was written.

Earlier, I had dwelled on the critique that Derrida had developed towards the teleological foundations of Fukuyama’s the end of history argument. What is even more intriguing about Derrida’s assessment of the presentist logic in teleological judgement is that he identifies this problem not only with the liberal telos, but with the Marxist revolutionary tradition itself. He sees the communist history as a sustained effort to preserve a strong ontology that persistently conspired against untimeliness:

For one could be tempted to explain the whole totalitarian inheritance of Marx’s thought…as a panic-ridden fear before the ghost in general…Marxist ontology was also struggling against the ghost in general, in the name of a living presence as material actuality. ¹⁰⁶

It turns out that Fukuyama and orthodox Marxism is not revolutionary at all since they cannot account for their own untimeliness. Put differently, they are only revolutionary in the narrow sense of bringing something to closure or full presence, which is what Urbinati tends to associate only with immediacy, but should also be considered as a constitutive aspect of teleological reasoning. But this is also a good place to shed a critical light on Derrida because he chooses to study liberalism only from a specific angle, which is the one that is provided by Fukuyama. He, in other words, dwells on a certain image of liberalism (i.e. the neoliberal world order) and dismisses other representative possibilities within that ideology. Freeden’s ‘morphological analysis of liberal concepts’, ¹¹¹ in contrast, treats liberalism as a complex ideology with its own rich archive. The search for the true form of liberalism turns out to be a vain endeavour because this ideology is made up of ‘an intricate morphological composite of a number of values’ ¹¹² that cannot be reduced to a single vision. Instead, it should be studied as ‘a mixture of historical contingency and of recurring patterns of thought’, ¹¹³ which harbours different, and sometimes conflicting, elements. For example, while liberalism can rely on the moral equality of individuals, it can also push for ‘a rationalism that evokes elitism’. ¹¹⁴ It can appear both as ‘constitutional liberalism – a ‘horizontal’ liberalism of equilibrium and constraints’ – and ‘welfare liberalism – a “vertical” liberalism of movement and enablement’. ¹¹⁵ The inclination to ‘subscribe to notions of original exemplars and deviations from, or distortions of, those “clear” positions’, ¹¹⁶ Freeden contends, misunderstands the very fabric of ideological thinking. This diagnosis aligns with Derrida’s own ideas of representation and untimeliness. But it also underlines a key shortcoming in the latter’s work. When Derrida identifies liberalism only with the neoliberal order, he becomes a part of the ‘battle for monopolizing liberal political language’ ¹¹⁷ by overlooking the fact that liberalism has enough ‘internal ideological polysemy’ ¹¹⁸ to counter the totalizing momentums within itself. This narrows down the scope of revolutionary politics only to Marx and his legacy, which undermines the viability of other representative options such as a potential dialogue between the Marxist critique of neoliberalism and the liberal defence for welfare policies. This contradicts with the very agonistic ends that Derrida sets up for his own account of representative politics.

Going back to Chambers’s response to Isaac, which is how I started this article, a teleological account of history cannot incorporate the truly agonistic potential in representation because it implies ‘an enervating narrowing of political choices’. ¹¹⁹ A true ‘political responsibility to 1989’ ¹²⁰ means resisting the lure of timeliness and becoming more attentive to the political erasures that are enacted by such claims to be timely. This is the subversive element about politics of untimeliness that can only be properly foregrounded when we approach immediacy with more affirmation. When Urbinati tries to disassociate the revolutionary problematic from politics of representation, she is mistaken on two different fronts. On the one hand, she presents a restricted sense of revolutionary action since she reduces it to haste and undermines its more emergent and hence untimely dimension. On the other hand, she neglects her theory’s own entanglement with the kind of presentist practices of revolution that she is critical of. However, even a theorist like Derrida is not immune to the lure of teleological reasoning as demonstrated by his reductive reading of liberal ideology.

Concluding remarks

Even though she might not acknowledge it, Urbinati has always been a participant in the debate on un/timeliness because her teleological account of representative politics has close ties to a logic of presentism. This has important implications for the very objectives that she sets up for her theory since it diminishes her theory’s ability to fully capture the agonistic potential in political representation. Like Fukuyama and Isaac, Urbinati sees immediacy only as a problem that derails the course of representative action. I, on the other hand, along with Derrida, Freeden, Chambers and Brown, have paid closer attention to untimeliness and located timeliness itself as the heart of the problem due to its dangerously reassuring quality of making representations much more continuous, unified and smooth than they are. This intervention is not meant to negate the political significance of teleological judgement. As noted before, teleological reasoning does serve the democratic function of giving communities a certain of stability and continuity. It is rather meant to show its limitations.

I particularly underlined three core elements here. First, the current literature does not pay enough attention to the crisis-inducing aspect of ideological politics as it remains too preoccupied with the problem of immediacy. Freeden convincingly shows that ideological contestation does not have to lead to such crises since ideologies can incorporate untimeliness. However, as noted by Derrida, there is still a need to form a critique of ideological thinking per se in the face of radically untimely ruptures in representation. Second, the contemporary discussions on representation rely too much on the binary between immediacy and teleology, which can take multiple other forms such as urgency/delay, short-sightedness/long-term vision and haste/deliberation. This binary can be deceptive because teleological reasoning can also fuel impulsive behaviour as it generates certain ideological convictions about the identity of the present moment and its relationship to the future. Also, immediacy can be mobilized as a disruptive element that underlines the limits of such teleological judgement. Again, ideological thinking does not have to follow such a teleological route, but when it does, the threat of impulsivity becomes very real. Third, once we place untimeliness at the heart of our theoretical inquiry into representation, we become cognizant of subterranean practices of representation that operate below the threshold of ideological contestation. Instead of privileging transparency, unity and universalization, this diverts our attention to the democratically enabling qualities in opaqueness, plurality and singularity to sustain the truly agonistic potential in representation. This is what I tried to establish by pointing to the Occupy Wall Street, artificial intelligence and the revolutionary problematic in general. Freeden’s critique of party-based politics is another good example here.

Finally, I should add that when we talk about an affirmative reading of untimeliness, such affirmation should not be interpreted as blind acceptance. When a political community engages with untimely possibilities, it still needs to sift through and decide on what it ultimately will find acceptable or unacceptable. Such political negotiation about the untimely is precisely what keeps representative contestation alive and makes it an ongoing process without any finality. Affirmation should rather be valued for the kind of emergent possibilities that it presents to the political imaginary, which would rather be buried down by the dominance of ideological options, instead of the kind of conclusions that it draws on. It is this invigorating and unsettling quality about untimeliness that makes it essential to a democratic account of representative politics and is what I see as missing in the teleological defence that is presented by Urbinati.