°Canada elect
Some very nice - as in refusenik - posts on the election in Canada, which Matt Craig has collated over at Long Sunday. Both Craig and others have couched their arguments for not voting in terms of seeking a more authentically democratic politics. I can see the logic and affective purchase of that argument, but I’d like to rejoice for a moment in something more profound at work.
Let me put it this way. RIPope’s post ends with this remark:
If you step back from voting, then you suddenly want to actually do something for the transformation of the system – and you acknowledge your own place within it. This is the precise opposite of “voter apathy”; it is precisely because I feel so much pathos that I won’t just make myself feel a bit better by voting. I’m willing to suffer this hell for the sake of something Other.
In other words, and despite the rhetorical appeals to a more authentically democratic politics, here there is a break with the sense of democracy as the only horizon of politics. For something Other. Which is also to say, to stand aloof from the affective purchase of nationalism, from the bond between kratos and demos, while insisting that such a move does not render politics obsolete. On the contrary, it is this break which makes politics possible.
This, in one sense, is what Agamben’s ‘passive politics’ implies - to fleetingly reference a discussion elsewhere.
It’s also been noted that not voting in AU incurs a financial penalty, while publicly advocating not voting - or voting in such a way as to render the compulsory preferential system void - has in the very recent past incurred people jail time. So, um, everyone should vote. Hurrah for elections. Hooray for democracy.
(Not that it matters, but I collated it.) I’ve added this post to the list, by the way.
Craig [January 24, 2006 @ 5:24 pm]
My bad.
s0metim3s [January 24, 2006 @ 5:54 pm]
I don’t agree on the not voting thing. I think by having a non-voting platform you’re actually giving undue legitimacy to voting. If you decidedly don’t vote then people usually think there must be a reason for it and want you to justify yourself. So people come up with: it’s not real democracy, there are peculiarities with the vote counting, corruption, tendency for two-party systems, party leaders/cabinet, seperation of executive and legislature, etc. All this stuff massively over-estimates the importance of voting.
I prefer the: “vote or don’t vote, either way it makes basically no difference.” (The “basically” is for the occasional times/places where our class can actually do something by voting… but right now in the Anglo countries - UK, Aus, Canada, US, Germany, etc. - it makes absolutely no difference.)
In fact, I’m at the point where the only reason I don’t vote is that it’s slightly more effort to vote than to not: i.e. have to bother getting on the roll, go to the booth, find out/remember what day.
I reckon we should drop the whole “thy should or should not vote” discussion and go to what really can matter: everyday life. Like what you do at work/uni/school/exodus, how we treat people around us, revolutionary organisation (non-Leninist), creative activity. Whether or for whom you vote need not and should not have any relationship to that, in either creating voter apathy or non-voter activity.
Patrick [January 24, 2006 @ 9:24 pm]
Hey Patrick, true enough about the need to focus on everyday life. But refusing to vote doesn’t rule out refusing to see politics as reducible to or confined by its statist and/or democratic variants, or to - more importantly - in practice take one’s leave from such. My sense is that for some, the only way to begin thinking seriously about the latter is to make a decision about the former.
s0metim3s [January 24, 2006 @ 10:40 pm]
Here’s the thing. We’ve had our run ins about ‘democracy’ and whatnot, but what it comes down to, for me, is basically that I agree with Patrick’s and what I imagine must be your position (if you are consistent): abstention, as a deliberate statement of opinion of the voting system (and one foreseen by that system when it is noncompulsory) is still a kind of electoralism, the degree zero of electoralism. If you make a huge deal out of not voting - and I think even people like Pete say things like, look at the huge abstention rate, that shows the refusal of the system - well, that’s a reproduction of electoralism. Abstention becomes a referendum on the system; but from the perspective of the system, low participation is just one possible and for some sectors, a desirable outcome.
The point isn’t to say “vote, you morons!”, but that actually dismantling the system for something better (you call this ‘Other’, I see no reason to be so mysterious) can’t possibly be reduced to a strategy of not voting, in fact, that strategy has nearly no meaning so long as we’re not working on something better. In my view, also, if there are meaningful distinctions at stake in an election, you might as well vote, there is no reason to polish that beautiful soul. The system isn’t reproduced at the ballot and what makes voting or not voting reproduction or nonreproduction of the system is not the act of voting as such, but the context in which it takes place; you can’t just will voting or nonvoting into being one or the other, but you can create a situation that makes it a reality.
TCO [January 25, 2006 @ 8:49 am]
Thiago, given you want to hold fast to democracy, it’s not real clear to me what’s at stake for you here other than, well, an argument (and one conducted in bad faith I think).
In any case, what’s at stake here, for me, is this:
here there is a break with the sense of democracy as the only horizon of politics. For something Other. Which is also to say, to stand aloof from the affective purchase of nationalism, from the bond between kratos and demos, while insisting that such a move does not render politics obsolete. On the contrary, it is this break which makes politics possible.
That isn’t about voting or not voting, but about the paths taken. That, as I said, is what I would rejoice in.
s0metim3s [January 25, 2006 @ 10:22 am]
You can second guess my faith if you like, but I have none in votes. I’m not just making an argument: I am asking - what’s the strategy, what is the path? So, we’re not voting. Ok, I rarely vote (in fact, twice - for the student union - and I see no reason to do it again), and I have advocated abstentions in the past; that experience turned out to be a lot like voting. But if the central point of the strategy is,well, that you’re not voting, that’s an implicit referendum. What is the other path, the one that makes notvoting significant, the one which makes it not a referendum?
The whole point is that there are institutions which convert your refusal of the vote into just another kind of vote. You can’t just will this away, or (not)vote against it.
Personally, I think that it is the position of the people at Long Sunday that is in bad faith. They’re like atheists who believe god is dead. They feel that voting would make them feel better, so they must not do it - an ascetic exercise which I think is fairly seriously invested in polishing spotless souls, but no matter. Look, if you can convert that into some kind of propulsion for an Other politics, it’s all good - but this affective terrain is very alien to me. I think that comes from being in Australia for so long as a non-citizen. Australian formal politics looks so stupid I thank the stars I am not Australian, and the six thousand miles to Brazil provide enough perspective that I am not really vulnerable to blackmail by the PT. Those politics look as silly as Ukranian or for that matter Canadian politics.
Aside from that, the only point, I think, where we disagree, is that I think that actually existing democracies are about as democratic as actually existing communism was communist: the specific, concrete sense of this is that there are and have been both democratic and communist movements, and infact actually existing democracy and actually existing communism were largely about containing these movements. We might disagree on that. But unless you really think that people (not the people) should have no investment and control over their own lives, I can’t see how the disagreement isn’t verbal.
TCO [January 25, 2006 @ 11:52 am]
The whole point is that there are institutions which convert your refusal of the vote into just another kind of vote.
Am I not being clear? What’s interesting about RIPope’s refusal to vote is not that they are refusing to vote per se, but that they are marking this refusal as the beginning of another kind of politics.
That’s not an asceticism. It’s a crossroads. It deserves to be emphasised. Precisely because - and these are my reasons for doing so - the argument so often made for democracy is that everyone should and can partake in the democratic process, that they might do so equally and universally. (By the by, this is why I think Montag’s piece on necro-economics is, among other reasons, insightful - because it shows the ways in which this universality is rationed).
This pressure to partake is kind of the argument you profer here, as if “people having control over their lives” might not - with rather serious implications - involve a disagreement about whether one means the people or not. This is what we disagree about, over and beyond any theological understandings of democracy, and any similar inflection of communism (which socialists, with their notion of ‘necessary stages’, ushered in). Both socialist and democratic politics are, in one sense, a deferral of politics. This is why RIPope’s remark about seeking something other is important.
s0metim3s [January 25, 2006 @ 12:23 pm]
Well, it’s great that they are at a somewhat trivial cross roads which we have long, long left behind, Angela. It’s hardly some kind of Kehre. As I said, if they can get something out of it, that’s valuable. But what is it? What is the Something Else? The real theology is just saying there is something Other and leaving it at that. How is that not a deferral, or at least an IOU on doing something?
I don’t understand how you can make a critical argument about the rationing of universality - without implying a norm of good distribution, as well as need. That’s in the meaning of the word ‘rationing’.
You’re also confusing my point with the point I am criticising; obviously I don’t mean the people . But do I think that a conflict will emerge about that? Well, why would I think that, when that conflict is entirely obvious at every level before us? Isn’t that what we are discussing?
Obviously, I don’t believe in ‘necessary stages’ and whatever, the whole point is that you can not believe this, and see that there were lots of movements with all sorts of radical (and yes: democratic or communist) potentials. Federici does it. I don’t read too much into it. I really do think that in fact, there is nothing to this.
TCO [January 25, 2006 @ 1:37 pm]
What’s other is something that can only be explored in concrete experiments, in given situations and is always a question of movement. We’ve been down this argumentative road before. And I will continue to fail to see how what’s radically other must be declared as forseeable (or foreseen), without invoking either a transhistorical inclination or disposing of the very sense in which radically other might be different from the same.
In other words, just because capitalist universality is not (in some senses) universal does not oblige one to try and make it so, a la Negri. There’s a difference between immanent critiques (for want of a better phrase) and assuming this is an eternal condition or the basis for the proposition of something radically other, a la some kind of Hegelian dialectic.
I do think there’s a discrepancy, which can be detailed and I have in places, between movement and the organisation of visibility (of recognition and so on). This is the material weight of an anti-utopian politics, for me. It’s the inclination toward soothsaying as a substitute for concrete experimentation I find mystical.
s0metim3s [January 25, 2006 @ 3:25 pm]
Great post. TCO, “Other” as I’m using it has a Lacanian ring to it, and maybe in the hands of others it picks up a Messianic edge. In any case, I think it is entirely wrong to say that it is the non-voters at Long Sunday who are Beautiful Souls, a fairly strict impossibility considering, at least in my case, I’m trying precisely to acknowledge my own (non-)place in the system.
Now don’t think I’m happy with not voting. Of course I’m not. And that’s kind of my point, or part of it. I’m not saying not voting in itself changes anything, just that it somewhat clears a space for me to take my anger/pathos somewhere else.
RIPope [January 26, 2006 @ 12:55 am]
other
zap
dr.woooo [January 26, 2006 @ 3:43 pm]
“And I will continue to fail to see how what’s radically other must be declared as forseeable (or foreseen), without invoking either a transhistorical inclination or disposing of the very sense in which radically other might be different from the same.”
Yes.
Matt [January 26, 2006 @ 11:56 pm]
vote better to vote as left as reasonable practicable better to vote be left and not left right behind.
cheers
left a comment before but it didnt seem to register
..
clifford duffy [January 31, 2006 @ 4:11 pm]
sorry that does not clarifying : here then: better to have voted left as in ndp creating at least the possible desire machine of what is left of left in reaction airy times and places. canada is a country of vast immanences _to coin a phrase_surrounded and engulfed by the molar transcendence of u.s.. with in it implodes to conservative reactions to transcend its immanence:in this case immanence as bordom.
dig reading yer blog
cheers
clifford duffy [January 31, 2006 @ 4:14 pm]
Clifford, commenting here is a bit like gambling, but it probably requires more patience. Sometimes comments get through, sometimes not. In some cases, they just get sent to moderation - as do mine here, always - don’t ask me why.
s0metim3s [January 31, 2006 @ 8:43 pm]