°Absolutism
In Hardt’s and Negri’s Multitude, the chapter on democracy begins:
The end of the cold war was supposed to be the ultimate victory of democracy, but today the concept and practices of democracy are everywhere in crisis. Even in the United States, the self-proclaimed global beacon of democracy, such central institutions as electoral systems have been seriously drawn into question, and in many parts of the world there is barely the pretense of democratic systems of government. And the constant state of war undermines what meagre forms of democracy exist.
And so we are invited to begin - as all Hegelian narratives must do - with the juxtaposition of an apparently authentic, conceptual democracy from its actually-existing forms. The argument proceeeds as if it is a question of the “concept [of democracy] itself” at a time of “globalization”, the task therefore being the presentation of a concept of democracy that is, therefore, global. In other words, the answer is already given by the juxtaposition, in the very adherence to a “concept” of democracy which is insufficient because it is not ‘absolute’. Democracy is, to their mind, an “unfinished project”.
Metaphysical, totalitarian nonsense.
hi Angela,
I could swear I found a reference in some Negri thing in Spanish to different forms of electoral college. I can’t find the quote now, though. If I do I’ll send it your way. In the quote there’s also this stuff: “today (…) democracy [is] in crisis”, and “have been seriously drawn into question” - it’s not just concept compared with actuality but a weird and weirdly stated (sometimes implied) historical narrative. Democracy today is in crisis, presumably it functioned fine before, then, before the questioning that ook place? Do you think it’s more of the epoch stuff, declaring what’s new etc?
best,
Nate
Nate [August 15, 2005 @ 5:46 pm]
There’s definitely a lot of that ‘this is new’, ‘the time is ripe’ schtick. Particularly the latter, along the lines of: ‘the time is now ripe for real democracy’, but it’s being obsctructed by x, y and z’. And, as for all good Hegelians, those ‘obstructions’ (war, US unilateralism, etc) aren’t inherent to democracy. So, yes, definitely a wierd kind of historical narrative.
The other thing I find remarkable about Multitude - aside from the fact that I keep having to catch myself from writing ‘Multitudes‘, meaning: I have to recall that they really do mean the One - is that it illustrates the proximity (rather than distance) between Spinoza and Hegel.
I’ve been meaning to go through Multitude for a while now, but it annoys me so much every time I read it I don’t know where to start. But I’ve a mind to be done with it, so I’ll add some more remarks soon.
s0metim3s [August 15, 2005 @ 6:09 pm]
Negri is an interesting theorist. However, he is living proof that interesting theory does not always lead to correct practice.
As he advocated voting for the pro-capitalist European Union constitution, against the wishes, as turned out, of the working class voters of France and The Netherlands: see http://dearkitty.modblog.com/?show=blogview&blog_id=602526&offset=0#590241 [scroll down as well]
dearkitty [August 15, 2005 @ 6:47 pm]
I have to lay off the nitrous for a while. Cue Timpani - “Everywhere, democracy is imperilled. In the US, it is criticised…elsewhere, it barely exists!” Dum-dum-dee-dum!
The book is so bland that Michael Albert managed to deliver a stinging critique of it from the left.
TCO [August 15, 2005 @ 8:31 pm]
I’m still intrigued with the blanding of Negri that has come from his partnership with Hardt - not that much of what he writes in Italian solo is a lot better, but it is certainly different in both flavour and language …
Steve [August 15, 2005 @ 9:02 pm]
Couldnt the argument about yesterdays democracy be a question of whom they are adressing? Does it necessearly mean that Hardt and Negri would have been supporter of national parliamentary democracy in an earlier era. Isn´t it more of a way of making their aims speak louder to an audience that would have supported national parliamentary democracy in an earlier era?
Franz Biberkopf [August 16, 2005 @ 1:07 am]
The second, Franz - I think that’s quite right. They’re addressing a reader who believes that ‘globalisation’ puts democracy into crisis. (Which explains something of what Steve was mulling over - the reader being addressed is definitely a US one.) And trying to persuade them that an authentic democracy is only possible on a global scale, as “absolute democracy”. Looks a lot like Hegel’s World Spirit to me.
The argument proceeds as if democratisation is not intimately bound up with war (including ‘humanitarian interventions’, the armed export of democracy, etc). As if nation-states have not always been a part of the world market. As if capitalist space does not require segmentation, territorialisation just as it requires deterritorialisation, abstraction, etc. But, worst of all, as if ‘absolute democracy’ is not the absolutism of the universal equivalent rendered in rather idealised political terms.
If that’s their project, so be it. But the ostensible choice between nationalism and globalism - much like the choice between pessimism and optimism, or reactionary critiques of capitalism and progressivist celebrations of its destruction of ‘bonds’ - is a non-choice for anyone who wants to go beyond capitalism. Capitalism oscillates between these.
Anyway, I really should sit down and write a closer reading than this - and then I can give Steve the book back.
s0metim3s [August 16, 2005 @ 1:52 am]
Picking up on Nate’s and Steve’s comments, yup, it’s definitely a historical narrative they’re putting forward: the direct democracy of the Athenian city state worked pretty well at the time, but couldn’t cope with the expansion of the polity; then (a long historical jump here) representative democracy fitted pretty well with the nation-state post-1789, but with globalization is now in crisis; so now we need a new democratic form. There’s no doubt about that.
And I don’t think that this is simply supposed to be a strategic argument (addressing the Penguin common reader); it parallels too closely the historical narrative that gives us skilled worker -> mass worker -> socialized worker -> multitude. In other words, and again contra the notion of Michael Hardt’s making Negri “bland,” this is an old argument, albeit dressed up in new clothes.
Jon [August 16, 2005 @ 1:51 pm]
Jon, do you recall where they talk about Athenian democracy?
s0metim3s [August 16, 2005 @ 2:22 pm]
I don’t have Multitude on me, so I can’t remember if it was there, or in a talk I saw Michael give at the MLA a few years ago. (I may also be misremembering, but I very much doubt it.)
Hmm… [googles] This is the kind of thing I mean:
“What I think we need, and I know this is an ambitious task, is the same kind of reinvention of democracy that was accomplished in early modern Europe. They didn’t simply take the Athenian notion of democracy and plant it in Paris and London; they reinvented it for the nation-state. In the same way that I think democracy has to be reinvented and mean something different, I think, too, that the concept of communism needs to be reinvented and mean something different than it has previously. I see them as fundamentally linked.”
http://www.dukemagazine.duke.edu/dukemag/cgi-bin/printout.pl?date=111201&article=empire
Jon [August 16, 2005 @ 2:47 pm]
I guess I got the “post-1789″ bit wrong, though, if that snippet is any guide. :) But then their history is at best, well, loose.
NB this is all related to the question of the multitude’s historicity, about which I briefly raise a couple of questions here. Which is why I raised the parallel with the progression skilled worker -> multitude.
Put another way: their discussion of “democracy” is simply a rephrasing of the question of “constituent power.”
Jon [August 16, 2005 @ 2:53 pm]
Actually, that parallels the story told by just about every single historical sociologist of the liberal state (Hobsbawm, Tilly, Mann, Huntington, Anderson…) which is that in Athens, there could be democracy because there were only a few people involved and they really had common interests (but what do we know about Athenian democracy? Very little, I’d say), then when the democracie arose again, there was a ‘need’ for a collective basis of action, for similutude, hence the imagined comunity, the mass citizen, the nation state, starched shirts and ironed underwear. Then this falls apart because there is a ‘crisis of democracy’, brought about because trade is now a little bit more internationalised than it was in 1890.
So now we ‘need’ something else to take its place. I think the problem is rather with the place, not what fills. But I am being stupid and literal: of course we need something else.
TCO [August 16, 2005 @ 2:58 pm]
If ‘democracy’ is simply a placeholder for the question of constituent power, then one sets aside all the troubling questions about democracy, presenting its vacuous, emptied aspects as its only inherent ones. A kind of terra nulliius, in other words - and all that this implies about the relationship between democracy, colonialism, abstract labour.
s0metim3s [August 16, 2005 @ 3:28 pm]
Angela, your comment is a little too condensed for me to figure out.
TCO, I think the point is that if you see the problem of democracy as a translation of the problem of constituent power, then it becomes rather more interesting than the mere technical matter that Hardt and Negri, in line indeed with the sociological tradition you mention, sometimes suggest. Or rather, the technique of democratic administration resolves into the issue of constituted power’s (in)adequacy to constituent power. Hence the interest of the Roman mob or Athenian demagogy.
(Perhaps that’s how the “troubling questions about democracy” return.)
But again, for me, the fundamental issue has to be the historical and ontological priority of the multitude.
Jon [August 16, 2005 @ 4:04 pm]
Has anyone else seen the recentish documentary on H&N made by a UK television station? There’s one horrible bit where Negri says something like: “in the 70s we [ie the Italian movements of the time] were fighting to defend democracy”. There was mass looting, squatting, wildcat strikes, proles shooting cops at demonstrations and all this to defend democracy? What a bunch of leftist crap.
cheers
Pete
Pete [August 16, 2005 @ 7:11 pm]
Sorry, I’ve a bad habit of joining the dots at breakneck speed. I’ll unpack a little.
If it’s the case that democracy is simply a version of the question of constituent power, then so too is fascism, monarchism, and so on. All these, if one were inclined to analyse them along those lines, pose the question of constituent power . But we would be reluctant to say that they answer that question. So, why does it seem more plausible to say, as N&H do, that democracy not only poses the question, but answers it, at least at a conceptual, global level?
Democracy (unlike fascism, say) presents as a kind of emptiness, a void. This void is an indifference, its emptiness is akin to the emptiness proclaimed in the legal concept of terra nullius. In that respect, it’s inseperable from questions of landed property, from colonisation. And, it’s this history which illustrates why the question of constituent power can seem so easily reducible to that of democracy. Democracy has colonised politics.
s0metim3s [August 17, 2005 @ 3:18 pm]
This may be another argument about names, and to be honest I’m not all that invested in the terminology, but in so far as the promise of democracy has always been the promise of fullness, the term seems fair enough seems fair enough for Hardt and Negri’s purposes, in that they are trying to envisage a society that is fully self-present.
Of course, in way in which democracy has been realized has indeed been in terms of emptiness and indifference. But this is the paradox of representation, and the void or distance that it institutes in the name of efficiency: the people (because they are constituted as a people) are both present and not present in their representatives.
And, yes, fascism, monarchism, etc. are all responses to the question (or the force) of constituent power. But they promise other things: purity, order, for instance.
Jon [August 17, 2005 @ 4:35 pm]
The dream of a society (or a ‘demos’ or ‘community’) fully present to itself is indeed a totalitarian dream. I can’t think of anyone who has written on ‘the promise of democracy’ who would share that dream of plenitude and self-presence. Quite the opposite. They all insist on finitude.
As for terminology: I’ve no doubt investments (in terminology) can be indifferent to content, in an abstract sense. But, what does that say? Anyway, that people decide to use particular words and not others is something that requires explanation. So while I understand the disposition toward an indifference, I don’t believe for a moment that someone decides between ‘democracy’, ‘communism’, ’security, or ’shoe’ without this having some meaning for them.
s0metim3s [August 17, 2005 @ 5:48 pm]
On democracy’s promise: I was thinking of tradition of thinking about democracy in terms of popular sovereignty, registered even in liberalism’s concern about “participation.”
Here’s Laclau: “Democratic theory, starting with Rousseau, has always been highly suspicious of representation, accepting it only as a lesser evil, given the impossibility of direct democracy in large communities like modern nation-states. Given these premisses, democracy has to be as transparent as possible: the representative has to transmit as faithfully as possible the will of those he represents.”
As to totalitarianism: well, that’s the traditional criticism made of democratic “enthusiasts,” “fundamentalists,” and “fanatics” from at least Luther’s time; but it’s a criticism usually made too fast for and too obvious reasons.
On terminology: well, of course. Indeed, I was trying to suggest ways of thinking about the meaning “democracy” holds for Hardt and Negri, and so to explain (for myself, at least) why they choose to use that particular word.
Jon [August 17, 2005 @ 6:39 pm]
That’s what they say - direct democracy is impossible because there are too many people with different views, and (this is the tacit assumption, which rarely made explicit) democracy only works if people already agree . But this is a very disingenious argument, I think, since the nation-state form was essentially created to prevent democracy from taking place.
TCO [August 17, 2005 @ 8:54 pm]
Jon, I haven’t read Laclau for a very long time. Should I make the effort? Anyway, I’ve been meaning to ask if you’d explain something of what you mean by ‘posthegemony’. I can see something of what you’re getting at over there, but not quite. Maybe I haven’t read all that closely …
Pete, I haven’t seen the doco. Sounds dull.
Thiago, are you sure that democracy and the nation-state are quite so contrary?
s0metim3s [August 18, 2005 @ 1:39 am]
Laclau: I feel I’ve read far too much of him for far too long. He’s profoundly wrong, but in fairly interesting and fairly useful ways. You might want to glance at this review I just wrote.
Posthegemony: well, that’s obviously my current preoccupation, and what I’m trying to play with on the blog. I suppose it’s just an attempt to explain things otherwise, beyond hegemony theory and its assumptions. I see it as trying to redescribe social formations in terms of affect, habit, and the multitude, rather than (say) emotion, signification, and identity.
Documentary: I have a copy, but don’t remember much about it, except for a scene where Negri’s eating pasta, and another where Michael’s at a baseball game.
Jon [August 18, 2005 @ 1:51 am]
hi all,
Jon, you’re right that Hardt and Negri’s are in many ways making an old argument with regard to the history they tell. The question is, why, and what does the historical narrative deployed accomplish? The narrative of changing class compositions and corresponding hegemonic figures was initially developed by people with political views that I think all of us in this discussion are opposed to. And the narrative was put into service of those politics and organizational forms, or at least there was an attempt made to do so. I don’t know the history of this narrative (my Italian isn’t good enough, mainly) but I think it’s a problematic story. In part because it says “now x (democracy, communism, multitude) becomes possible” then turns the possibility of x into the paradigmatic trait of an era.
The narrative also cuts backward into history, and the implication is that x has never before been possible. That, to my mind, is highly problematic and, well, a little gross. It’s like saying “reproductive labor became productive labor in the transition to postfordism”, which implies that housewives didn’t ‘really’ work (in the marxian sense of being productive for capital and of being potential political agents) until the 70s. I’ve never seen Negri articulate this aspect of his work, what it implies for reading prior historical moments, but I think it’s a pretty clear conclusion to be drawn from his declaration of an absolutely new era, and it’s a pretty conservative reading of history. Put differently, it seems to me that Negri is arguing that the multitude achieves ontological priority in a given historical era, rather than treating the ontological priority of the multitude as (among other things) a principle for the historiography of struggles.
take care,
Nate
Nate [August 18, 2005 @ 5:23 am]
it seems to me that Negri is arguing that the multitude achieves ontological priority in a given historical era, rather than treating the ontological priority of the multitude as (among other things) a principle for the historiography of struggles.
I like this way of putting things.
To be fair, they do equivocate on this point.
Jon [August 18, 2005 @ 8:58 am]
I should have written: the nation-state was created to prevent democracy from taking place outside it. But even then that’s not so clear, because I agree with you that ‘democracy’ makes little since outside the nation-state in one way, but from another perspective, that’s kind of a fascist way of thinking, or rather, marks the point of indistinction between fascism and liberal democracy.
Essentially, I agree with Jon in that I think there must be a way of stating a generalised concept of autonomous decision making outside the state or organic community. There isn’t anything particularly hegelian about making that point, ie. that there it isn’t democratic to allow people to make decisions, so long as they already agree because they all go to the same church, talk the same language or look the same. Someone could quite legitimately argue that that just isn’t democracy at all, though it is exactly the description of what takes place in liberal democratic theory, and above all in the idealization of athenian direct democracy. You could argue that the liberal theorists were, and continue to be trapped by racism and statism, and Hardt and Negri have now joined them in that cozy prison. But, to draw an analogy, the critique of apartheid isn’t wrong because people fail to see the nation state as apartheid writ large; rather this failure is a failure because the critique is right.
Now, there is another point which is that democracy means the determination of a demos within the scope of kratein and so is doomed in some logical way to always be ensconced within the state, so it makes no sense to think of a democracy ‘outside’ it. I think this is taking words a little too seriously. If there is an argument to be made here, it is historical, not logical, and the meaning of words is contingent and contestable. But I agree with what you wrote on this; I just don’t think that puts a wall around democracy.
I don’t know Angela - maybe I am trying to have it both ways, but I don’t see what the contradiction would be. You can define terms however you like, and it isn’t obvious to me that ‘democracy’, in some sense of self-determination, autonomous decision making, etc… should be ditched, so people can do…what? Not make decisions, not be determined by anything? That sounds nice,but what does it mean? Someone might ask - isn’t “not being determined by anything” just the same as being able to decide for one’s self? and then the gambit is called, and it turns out the fancy language just maks a very conventional and widely understood idea ater all, as trite as Multitude. Ok, there is a long history in which all these terms (self-determinatin, decision making, popular sovereignty, democracy) become the bad guys, and I am the first one to agree; but actually, that’s the case with every word in political philosophy. Freedom and trasngression are similarly fucked. If you don’t want unfreedom, you want freedom; there is no great mystery or oppression in this, it’s just liberal hypocrisy to say that if you don’t want unfreedom, you can have the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court and the cops. So, more generally, I am not entirely sure you would be able to articulate any kind of critique, let alone alternative, should you apply your critical methodology consistently.
I don’t mean to be antagonistic, I am not sure I understand what you mean; I find it very hard to think about this, let alone express it in any sort of clear way. I’d love for there to be a way of explaining these ideas to my dad and the guy who sells Big Issue.
TCO [August 18, 2005 @ 9:59 am]
Following on from Thiago - although maybe wandering off course: I’m also a bit perplexed with how to handle ‘democracy’, and whether the word can usefully describe practices that challenge capital and the state (and organic community of all kinds).
There is the tradition from Bordiga which rejects any talk of ‘democracy’, but celebrating ‘organic centralism’ as an alternative practice doesn’t seem to get you very far, from what I can tell.
So while I think that talking about democracy without any adjectives obscures more than it explains (and is that the intention in Multitude?), is it possible to talk of democracy *with* adjectives? Or is it better to say something like ’social self-organisation’, since that carries at least a few different connotations?
It’s ironic (to me at least) that Negri used to seethe at the Roman autonomists for their celebration of ‘direct democracy’ …
Steve [August 18, 2005 @ 11:34 am]
Doesn’t the proliferation of adjectives (absolute democracy, radical democracy, deliberative democracy, and so on) signal a fundamental weakening in the concept of democracy? Otherwise, why specify?
And this just as homo democraticus becomes nothing other than homo economicus. When democracy is no longer, as the liberal theorists claimed, the least worst of political systems, but the only possible political system - the only horizon under which politics can be thought.
Hence the need to see democracy for what it is and not one fantacise/theorizes it might be. Part of what Tronti calls, contra Schmitt and Agamben, the ‘political atheism’ of our time.
Alternatives best appear in process and not projects.
Part of me wants to believe that H&N know this. But they vacillate between sounding like Monbiot and wowing about the way neurons network. Not very helpful.
Pity because their synthesizing abilities as analysts of present world constitution are strong, even dazzling.
In any case, it is the practice of democracy and not the theory that seems to me the problem. No more so than in the era of its armed export. The task then becomes to build a critique. But from where? And under what skies? There’s a danger here. And that, I think, is why adjectives proliferate.
bmn [August 18, 2005 @ 4:49 pm]
I was on the verge of using the word ’suffocation’ to describe the ways in which democracy has become the “only horizon under which politics can be thought”.
Seems to me that this suffocation is evident in a reluctance to dispense with democracy on the grounds that doing so implies totalitarianism (or fascism or a recouse to centralisms).
I can understand that concern, but I can’t agree. If fascism (or more broadly, ‘organic community’) seems to indicate a suspension of democracy, it’s because it literally is a suspension of what democracy does. But it’s not I think something that happens external to or without a relation to democracy. We already know this, historically and if we care to look around - and not because we can understand something of the Greek etymology.
Democracy isn’t abstract formalism or substantive identity. It’s both - or, rather, as a political form it ‘manages’ the swing between the two. Precisely: homo economicus.
I think perhaps, Steve, this (the oscillation and suffocation) is related to what you’ve been trying to get at by way of Gramsci’s notion of the interregnum.
s0metim3s [August 18, 2005 @ 5:57 pm]
First, you misunderstand me. I am not saying that either you have democracy, or you have totalitarianism; the fascims I see is the one that demands democracy, or political life can only exist in the state, so we’re in agreement on that point.
But I can’t buy the argument that because some liberal squadrista tells me that TINA, that’s the end of the matter. Besides, this kind of argument works only if you think Samuel Huntington is the paradigmatic liberal, rather than Noam Chomsky.
It’s also important that bourgeois rights were won from the state kicking and screaming. These, and the nation-statist form of democracy, were without doubt ways in which to capture fury and insurgency and redeploy them in a nice civilised and ultimately genocidal manner. But there has to be a way of expressing fury and insurgency which isn’t just white noise.
Of course you all agree with this: that there has to be some way of being free of the state and this whole mess. But the argument here seems to be that there isn’t, because Margaret Tatcher and Jurgen Habermas say so. Therefore, we need a whole new, incomprehensibly difficult ontology. That’s the only thing that I find actually suffocating: its like shouting vacuum.
I need air. All I am asking is: what is this other horizon you mention? How do you retain a vocabulary capable expressing freedom, articulating hopes for autonomy and self-determination, without being captured? This, I think, is where the comment that we shouldn’t dream about democracy could be seems to me very misguided, but maybe I misunderstand. I certainly could not accept an injunction like that without first hearing what the alternative is supposed to be. Sure, we shouldn’t fantasize about what we have in front of us; but who are we to go up to people and say: your delusions of wanting freedom and a say in your own life, bah, that’s just junk because you see, in 1789…
TCO [August 18, 2005 @ 7:11 pm]
But why would a critique of democracy amount to saying to anyone - well, ourselves, since the figure of Joe Blow is a rhetorical, populist one - that their (our) desire for freedom is a delusion? And 1789 is perhaps less pertinent to this discussion than 1989.
In any case, I think if we stopped imagining that democracy’s problems reside in its inauthentic or ‘unfinished’ application, that’s when the pressure to explore political forms begins to be really felt. Which is the point.
s0metim3s [August 18, 2005 @ 11:08 pm]
There does seem to be a movement here from democracy as absolutism to democracy as prophylactic. Perhaps that is because more than suffocation there is danger. In thinking beyond democracy there is a kind of total risk.
I understand the desire for a pre-stated alternative. But such a wish seems only to demand utopianism in return - some kind of program which is out of history and can therefore provide guarantees.
What about the kind of thought that doesn’t wait around for alternatives but rather seeks to create them in the present – Benjamin’s tiger’s leap? The other horizon then is not really a horizon, but a ground riddled with contingency, accident, chance: not once in a while but always, everyday.
The line between these positions is ghostly thin. But to remain under democratic skies seems to me more like economic calculation than political invention: give me insurance or leave me with Hobbes.
bmn [August 18, 2005 @ 11:47 pm]
So you think it is possible for someone to desire freedom and for that not to be a delusion? Ok, then that person desires freedom, not, say, bourgeois rights or the capacity to appeal to High Court or something like that. Well, where did they get this idea from? A textbook? The state? And where did they get the idea of running their own lives? From observing the working of actually existing democracy? I doubt it.
I think the answer is that we have ideas of what freedom and democracy (or: equitable decision making) that go well beyond the bourgeois freedoms of the state, and we are capable of seeing those concessions as limited and contrary to our freedom precisely because we have such concepts and desires, though they are nowhere actualised. I want to know what happens to these when we go beyond democracy.
At any rate, I think this reverses the problem. There is a reason why these things are not actualised, and it is largely because they are actively repressed. In fact, there is nothing at all utopian about the democracy which is captured by the state; insurgency doesn’t take place only on paper, but in the streets and workplaces, if it did, it would be worthless and would not scare anybody. But it is real, and has to be contained - often with great violence, sometimes by compromise. And as for utopianism itself, at least it is better to dream up some crappy utopia and get caught without pants than it is to simply level an injunction for ‘thought’ to create the alternative in the present - without explaining or giving an example of what this might be. As for guarantees, that’s cannot be meant seriously. What risk is there in not proposing anything ? That, to me, seems like the real insurance strategy, and one in which nobody gets insured except the writer.
Sure, let’s be contingent, let’s not set five year plans - by all means, I deeply desire this. But how? You talk about ‘thinking beyond democracy’ - what is there? Why is it so hard to say what it is?
Part of me tends to think that that is because you don’t know; I doubt there is nothing there, however.
The figure of Joe Blogs is not rhetorical. On the one hand, it is personal: to be honest, I have a very great degree of difficulty understanding these arguments, they are probably at the very extreme of what I could possibly understand, out on a thin limb way beyond the merely wordy Heidegger. And I have more than a decade solid reading under my belt, read four languages and can beat the computer at scrabble. On the other hand, it is a strategic issue: just who are we writing and thinking to? Ourselves? Well, I am having trouble hearing you. And even if by accident we happen to hit upon the Key to the Universe, the Great Recipee for Transcendent Social Change, at this rate we could not tell it to anyone. There has to be a way of making this critique more intelligible.
TCO [August 19, 2005 @ 12:59 am]
It’s been a long time since I was involved in a form of politics that might be described as democratic. The political forms around s11, Woomera2002, the flotilla, these were more akin to sociocracies than democracies. You don’t need me to tell you that there are experiments with political forms all the time. And you certainly don’t need me to resolve any difficulties you or anyone else might encounter with those process of experimentation by assigning them with a label or a model. You want freedom but you want someone to tell you where to go to get it?
Do I think the figure of the companion (the socius) is more interesting than the citizen? Definitely. Do I think that Nancy’s discussion of the (k)not - or the tie - holds far more possibilities than the panic politics of ’security’ or ‘protection’? For sure.
But writing does not I think have a priveliged role in this experimentation. It always lags, even if just a little. So what?
s0metim3s [August 19, 2005 @ 1:48 pm]
Why is it so difficult to say what it is?
Perhaps because it exists as potentiality. Because it resists the logic of exemplification and proposal. Because it refuses to equate the not-now with the not-yet.
The migrant who destroys his or her papers does not seek to exemplify or propose anything. Nonetheless, there is a stab for freedom – an attempt to criculate, a refusal of political subjectivity as we know it, a moment of preferring not to be.
Thought should not be separate from the workplace and the street. Context can be as important as intelligibility. But what’s so complex about ceasing to utter democracy and freedom in the same breath?
bmn [August 19, 2005 @ 2:47 pm]
hi all,
I don’t understand the debate happening about democracy etc. Personally, I am on the one hand very strongly attached to the word ‘communism’ and on the other hand have what I think of as a nominalist tempermanent, so that I feel like perhaps terms aren’t all that important. That’s neither here nor there, though, as I’m not sure what you lot are arguing about. Angela, can you please unpack these a little, as I don’t follow:
What is a sociocracy, as opposed to a democracy? What do you mean by the terms companion and socius?
As for the citizen, I’m generally underwhelmed by arguments about extending citizenship. On the other hand, I don’t feel like it’s my business either way to tell undocumented folks in the US what they should or should not want, I’m not engaged in those struggles. The analog that I know a little bit about is workplace activity. In the US we have almost no workplace rights on paper, and in practice the labor board has been pretty consistent in undermining the few rights that still exist. Many people propose struggles to change the law, but my general take is that those codifed rights were the product of a great deal of shopfloor power across the country, and that getting more of what we want will come from building the latter.
That said, it seems to me that struggles which are in my view ultimately short sighted can have a recompositional effect - both an entry point for people who haven’t yet had the other experiences and read the books we have - and can also set fires bigger than the managers of those struggles want them to. By analog, might it be possible in your view that people using imperfect terms like democracy might not practically overstep the limits of what they might be expected to do, judging by the idioms they use?
take care,
Nate
Nate [August 20, 2005 @ 7:06 am]
I think that’s something of a cop out, and not just a little bit condescending. Do you really think that you have the power or intellectual authority to exert such power over what I think that, were you to tell me what you think, I would be deprived of my freedom? This intellectual pose is really worn out: the intellectual refuses to give a recipee, ostensibly venturing to go beyond this form of authoritarian relation but in fact establishing it as hegemonic. In fact, I am just curious about what you might think is beyond democracy, what kinds of actions might not be subsumed to the statist logics, but apparently for me to ask this is tantamount to admitting that I have no such ideas myself and must go figure them out for myself. Now, that’s kinda silly.
And then it turns out that instead of democracy, we’ll have a sociocracy which differs, if I understand your hint, by being couched in terms of companionship rather than citizenship. Well, all along I have been arguing that some kind of notion of democracy should be conceivable beyond the determination of the citizen, and now you have invented a word for it. So be it, I agree with you up to a point, at least, though Nancy is a fatuous wanker…
BMN, I think the difficulty with detatching democracy from freedom is that democracy captures certain points which are essential to freedom, specifically the coordination of my decisions with yours, which might be necessary if we want to live in the same universe. First of all, I’d like to return here to the point I made above, which is that if we are not going to talk of democracy (it’s just a word, so that’s not a big deal) there has to be some way of talking about the problematic of coordinated decision making, what is fair for a number of people, etc. Perhaps, and I am strongly inclined to agree with you, this involves non-programmatic actions like burning one’s papers (which, from another point of view, is an intensely programmatic and indeed ideological thing to do), but I don’t know how do generalise from that, possibly because it cannot be done; I also agree there is no formula for liberation. But at some point we will have to come around to working out how to divide the world fairly, and unless you can explain to me how democracy is not relevant to this, or how that problem doesn’t arise, or how to do it justly without democratic principles… You know, these problems of resource and time distribution already arise within things like the sans papier movement, or the organization of S11, and there are elaborate, and in my view disturbing ways in which these issues are dealt with (I wrote about this on my piece on consensus). Practically the only place it does not arise is in the internet; the virtual is not preamble.
TCO [August 20, 2005 @ 11:59 am]
I said before that I think the line between these positions is thin, and not just because we are arguing over a word. So I suspect there is a strong inclination to agreement.
But I also suspect that discourses that fill themselves with words like ‘fair’ and ‘just’ do not escape the field of power. Can such words be defined in ways that do not serve an agenda? Are such discourses (including yours) innocent of the attempt to coerce?
I can’t think of an actually-existing democracy where stated principles of fairness, eqality, justice, etc. do not serve serve as instruments of power (and uneven distribution). If I could perhaps I would be happy to accept democracy as it is. Sure you can say these must be principles of some future or theoretical democracy, but that would be to think struggle in terms of these principles and not vice versa.
I would agree with Foucault (in the debate with Chomsky) when he says that if justice is at stake in stuggle then it operates precisely an instrument of power (and not as the hope that a future society will make equitable decisions, etc.)
http://criminyjicket.tripod.com/chomfouc.html
That’s why I think that democracy (at least as it exists or as you have defined it) is not essential to freedom. Even Tocqueville recognised that freedom has not been exclusively bound to a single social condition.
As for time and resources in the context of movements – sure, things can get nasty. But does that mean we should renounce experimentation for some parliamentary or constitutional model of distributing justice?
There’s much creative effort to be put into political experimentation. And I think we’d do better to work on that rather than scoring points off each other here.
bmn [August 20, 2005 @ 6:09 pm]
Nate, ’socius’ is usually translated as ‘companion’. This reminds me of the whole affinity group structure, for a number of reasons you can probably work out. And I didn’t invent the word ’sociocracy’ - Quakers did, as far as I’m aware.
Thiago, I don’t think there’s anything condescending about my insisting that you can answer those questions you believe are pertinent. The question - or at least one of them that animates what has been an apparently fragmented series of entries on this blog - isn’t about ‘alternatives to democracy’, but about the relationship between democracy and (if you will) its ‘exceptions’.
s0metim3s [August 21, 2005 @ 1:51 am]
The problem with that Foucauldian stance, BMN, is that anything is an instrument of power; what do you want, to neutralize the bacillus of power, disinfect the world, flee off somewhere where there isn’t power? I want to know what that might look like, but I am very strongly inclined to think that it would not be articulable on Foucauldian premises. You can have a counterpower, but not an absence of power. Unless you are Habermas, but I doubt you are Habermas.
Now, I haven’t defined democracy at all, except to say that it involves coordinating our decisions in some kind of fair or just or desirable or antiauthoritarian manner. You can also coordinate decisions in an unfair and undesirable manner, say the way that actually existing democracies do it; but this has as little relevance to the issue of the conceptual coherence and desirability of democracy as the existence of the USSR makes communism identical to the Stalinist totalitarian system.
All of language is suspect.
I think that to establish equitable, fair or desirable methods of coordinated decision making, we should experiment, I am above all curious to know what people desire from such experiements, because, you know, I’d like to help and I think maybe I can learn something; I don’t know who is supposed to be arguing for a constitution and state here.
I don’t get it why you should think Tocqueville should be the examplary democrat, rather than the CNT or the wobblies or these people who were totally hostile to liberal bullshit, but also for self-determination/autonomy in the workplace (what we could call democracy, if we take enough precautions; but is the argument just that the precautions are too cumbersome? Above you make it seem so - too many adjectives, etc…)
The problem, I see Angela, is that I am perfectly aware that I can answer these questions up to a point. It would be nice to find out how you solve them. Maybe I fucked something up in my reasoning, maybe you did, maybe the questions don’t make sense in some way - all this would be nice to talk about. I don’t know why you bunker yourself down on these points. It’s understandable when Foucault or Chomsky take a stance like this, because there is an army of people out there to venerate their every word, and there is a very serious problem with the authority of the intellectual. But who made you an intellectual, or me, or anyone for that matter? Why bow down to this, of all things?
TCO [August 21, 2005 @ 3:34 pm]
Thiago, you can explore the question of ‘alternatives’ to democracy if that is what you want to do. You can also try and solve the problems of those ‘alternatives’ in the context of writing about them, if you wish. The problem is not a failure of logic on either of our parts. The ‘problem’ is that we see the problem quite differently to begin with.
I see the complete contraction of the political imaginary to democracy as part of the problem. I think the process of adjudicating on ‘alternatives’ in an abstract fashion is a part of this contraction and cannot escape it: utopianism, in the specific sense that Marx talked about it, is a version of TINA, ultimately. That seems to me a bunker more resolute than my insistence that escape is a matter for practical experimentation.
But, as I said, you can explore the question of ‘alternatives’ if you like. I just don’t see why you think I want to explore that here, or are demanding that I do so here. And surely you’ve picked up by now that there might be a connection between democratic politics and particular forms of intellectual practice. Is it so odd that I’d want to question particular forms of address (the figure of ‘Joe Blow’, eg), the notion of a ‘public sphere’, the role assigned to intellectual practice, etc?
s0metim3s [August 21, 2005 @ 6:03 pm]
I’m not proposing vacuums anymore than I’m proposing veneration (for Foucault, Tocqueville, Joe Bloggs, or anyone else). If all language is suspect, please don’t get upset if I question your use of the word democracy.
If we agree that actually existing democracies distribute justice unequally, how can such equitable distribution be a key feature of democracy as such? Democracy is first of all what the name says it is: the sovereignty of the people. That identity is its fundament. Watch out if you disagree with the people!
One has only to believe that society is divided in classes to begin to question this identitarian fundament. Let alone to raise other forms of difference. And difference, I think, must be central to any notion of freedom.
The critique of democracy need not pose alternatives (really, the demand for alternatives is a classic way to block any critique). But it should, I think, be accompanied by a rigorous rethinking of freedom and its practice. That’s the point of strategy. Once the notion of freedom is separated from democracy all sorts of things become possible.
Freedom, at least since 1989, has been a keyword for the right. There is much at stake in questioning its use in phrases such as ‘the liberation of Iraq’ or the ‘North American Free Trade Agreement.’ If we can say that the U.S. has democratised Iraq but not liberated it, something opens up. If we insist that democracy and freedom go together, a chance is lost.
The reason I worry about constitutions etc. when you say we need to hold on to democracy as we experiment is because I don’t think the symbolism or theory surrounding democracy (as strong as they may be) can escape the mud of what it has become in practice.
And yes, I would say the same of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I would never attempt to recuperate the word socialism on the basis of conceptual coherence. It too has become incarnated in something more than terrible.
Communism is another matter. I don’t know if it has ever actually existed. But perhaps it would be better to see the CNT and IWW as experiments in communism rather than experiments in democracy.
bmn [August 21, 2005 @ 9:10 pm]
Hey gang,
I have a quote that I ran across that reminded me of this discussion. I’m really having a hard time following the conversation, though, so I’m going to read it over again and see if I can get it together to ask a question. For now, this quote:
“in order to maintain that respect for particularity is a universal value, it is necessary to have first distinguished between good particularities and bad ones (…) to have established a hierarchy in the list of descriptive predicates. It will be claimed, for example, that a cultural or religious particularity is bad if it does not include respect for ohter particularities. But this is obviously to stipulate that the formal universal be already included in the particularity.” Badiou, Theoretical Writings, p144. Reminds me a fine Richard Rorty quip, to the effect that he is not a relativist but rather an ethnocentrist.
best,
Nate
Nate [August 22, 2005 @ 3:33 pm]
Don’t get me started about Badiou, or Rorty …
I prefer a discussion of the theme of ‘universality-particularity’ in the context of a discussion about the commodity-form and its relation to political forms. Hence the extract from Hamacher’s “Lingua Amissa” (above), but also the fragment from Nancy’s discussion of citizen and subject (in a prior posting).
The theme of ‘universality-particularity’ has the dubious advantage of presenting itself as an eternal philosophical question. Which means that the oscillation between the two seems eternal. But the question as to why ‘universality’ and ‘particularity’ seem to not only imply eachother, but that one is also the other in very particular ways, is a question of history, or better: of abstract labour.
s0metim3s [August 22, 2005 @ 6:57 pm]
hi Angela,
I’ve got an embarassing soft spot for Rorty. He was part of my extricating myself from Hegel and Hegelian Marxism, for which I will be forever grateful. He’s a fuckwit and an enemy in terms of political judgments/ commitments, but I think some of his arguments are interesting philosophically. Since then I’ve thought that what I take to be his basic view (”I’ll do what I like, you do what you like, and if we come into conflict over those things then I will hope to win”) was pretty sound if applied/translated to class, that the motivation is class hatred not any universal principles which we really take seriously. I think Foucault said something to this effect in the debate with Chomsky, about the proletariat and moral justification (or lack thereof/lack of need for). Andrew Bowie’s got a book on Schelling that deals with some of Rorty and other contemporary Anglo-Americans, I remember it being really good reading but it’s been a while. I don’t really know about Badiou, I’ve only just started to read anything by him. I’m sectarian and prejudiced against anyone who ever makes Lenin noises, and yet some people I know who I respect a lot take Badiou seriously and try to do some things that I think are interesting.
take care,
Nate
Nate [August 23, 2005 @ 4:55 pm]
I am really interested in finding access to cultural Sociologist Philip Rieff for my thesis. I would be grateful if you could give me any form of communicating with him either by e-mail or an address.
With thanks.
Ita Mannion
Ita Mannion [September 27, 2005 @ 12:18 am]