Gutmann and Thompson fail to allow for difering conceptions of the Real or difering approaches to truth, preferring instead to instal claims of mutual acceptability and general accessibility in a supposition of morality rather than in an epistemic, political, or aesthetic formation. Accordingly they include (only to dismiss) Fish's point that ·accounts of deliberative democracy "make decisions and policies seem more moral when they are not" (46). Given their use of Bush's march to war as an example of deliberative democracy, Fish's comment hits the mark in advance. How else can one describe their treatment of Bush than as making a decision and a policy seem moral when it is not?
Employing their own rough notion of a performative contradiction, Gutmann and Thompson claim that if Fish is giving reasons while arguing against reason then he "enters willy-nily into the forums of deliberative democracy, and falls under its obligations of reasonable argument" ( 48) . But Fish's point is that the practice of reason giving that Gutmann and Thompson advocate is part of a specific practice, the academic practice of the university. He is participating in this practice-ofering reasons. So the issue is not whether one participates in justifcatory practices. Rather, it is whether these practices establish the terms and conditions of politics and whether these practices legitimize political outcomes. Gutmann and Thompson don't answer these questions. Instead, they present justification as a neutral, fundamental fact of the matter, a fact that transcends the settings in which it could have meaning. Theyjgnore this presentation's dependence on a prior acceptance of the authority of a certain account of knowledge. They fail to consider that the practices of academic debate, practices discussed here in terms of the discourse of the university, do not coincide with the multiplicity of discourses operating ir politics.
To be sure, Gutmann and Thompson don't claim that current democracies are perfect or even that theories of deliberative democracy have provided a final account of political legitimacy. Yet in an allowing for the fallibility of accounts of deliberation, they oscillate between diferent loci of failure or sites of insuficiency. A failure at one point is thus supplemented by the potential of the second point. This process of oscilation and supplementation enables them to produce an imaginary synthesis between proponents and opponents of preemptive war against Iraq. It also encloses hopes for the future into a justifcation for present injustice. Let's consider these points in more detail.
90
THREE