°Democracy without rest, pt2
I’m not sure where to reply to Nate’s remarks on the most recent post on democracy, posted as part of the Long Sunday discussion, so I’ll put it here and trackback.
First up Nate, I’m interested as to why you don’t, quite, specify any reason to commit to democracy. :)
Anyway, I don’t think rights, as such, require the figure of a sovereign people. Rights assume sovereignty – the power to confer and/or claim rights is not confined to democracy, after all. But perhaps here too you’ll have to specify what particular rights you might be referring to that are dependant upon a sovereign people, upon democracy. Because, as far as I can tell, those rights which are recognised by way of the figure of the people are precisely those rights which are most problematic.
On that note, and on the question of whether certain rights might disrupt or explode the terms upon which rights are conferred, demanded or recognised in democracy, I should probably point you in the direction of this essay, which begins with a question about rights at the very border of the figure of the people, and which might be said to be that instance of a claim for rights which might be considered as potentially disruptive or explosive. But, this demand for freedom of movement is not something that can be recognised, included or bestowed by democracy. It’s the limit beyond which democracy cannot go. It’s not a trivial matter that, for instance, there is no right to asylum – there is only a right to seek asylum. Right, therefore, remains on the side of sovereignty, in this case, as it’s articulated through the figure of the people and its borders.
The essay was written a long time ago, and there are aspects of it that I would want to rewrite, so I plan to revisit the question of rights soon. Actually, I’m in the middle of doing so. But, in the meantime, it might give some indication of the trajectory that has led me to the point of rejecting democracy tout court.
Do all utterances of “the people” really mean that which Angela - rightly - objects to as the people?
Well, I do think there is such a thing as lying. But, whether such articulations are cynical, opportunistic or false doesn’t really get around the fact that this figure of the people is seen as the priveliged means by which to articulate demands (or politics). Nor does it get around the fact that, however cynical, false or opportunistic, such expressions mobilise affect, desire and identification in particular registers and not others. Of course, one could say that those involved in such didn’t know better or had no choice but to defer to such expressions – but that explanation or alibi seems patronising to me, not to mention that its inclination is to suspend criticism, and perhaps politics.
I’ve left the question of small-d democracy and small-c communism for the end, because I’m not really convinced one can draw the parallels, or draw them for the purpose you wish to. In the absence of actually your spelling out what this small-d democracy might be – and I don’t think one can reject the sovereignty of the people and still call it democracy – it seems an odd parallel to draw. Communism is not commocracy, after all. Its relation to, and its history as, statist politics remains ambivalent – and that ambivalence is marked by the proliferation of different terms (such as state capitalism, socialism, social democracy) not just the expansion of qualifiers (as in radical democracy, liberal democracy, and so on).
That’s not to suggest I don’t think there is some serious reckoning to be done, particularly in relation to what is considered to be common, the salus communis, the commons and so on. And I remain on the doubtful or critical side of these discussions, some of which is apparent in the piece on precarity.
But the question I wanted to raise here, and one of the reasons why the Hamacher piece seems important to me, is that of the ways in which the figure of the people seeks to suspend antagonism in one register (that of class war, or class struggle) and (re)deploy it, conduct it, as biowar – as democracy.
Be thankful that I haven’t gone on at length, again, about Battlestar Galactica, but there is a reason why the war there is conceived as one between machines and humans.
hi Angela,
Thanks for responding. As to why I’ve not put forward a positive argument for democracy, it’s because I’m largely convinced of your position. Just not totally convinced, yet, in part because of the things I didn’t understand before and which I’m now going to mull over.
I had previously taken you to be saying that rights claims as such involve what you define as the people. I found that convincing enough to take seriously, but I wasn’t entirely sure. Now I see, as I should have expected, the position is more nuanced. The basic question, which I think you’ve suggested might be answered affirmatively at least on occasion, is if it’s possible that some utterances of “rights” and “democracy” don’t imply that which you convincingly reject under those names. (I’ll read the Borderlands piece soon and will respond further afterward if I have anything to add.) I’m not thinking here of cynical or dishonest demands. I’m thinking of an example like this:
In the trucking industry in the US the use of independent contractor status is rampant. This means truckers are legally not workers, and so have no access to the protections and welfare state provisions available to workers under law. These legal protections and provisions are meager, but can be useful tactically in organization and just for getting by. Similarly, all over the US, employers can legally fire employees for any reason or no reason at all with a small handful of exceptions (and with little to no enforcement in the case of violations). A response to this situation is frequently “they have no right to do that!” or more rarely a formulation as the presence of a right on the part of the worker(s), “I/we have a right to not be treated this way!” or “I/we have rights too!” In terms of legal rights, this is a mistake on people’s part much of the time. When they do have the rights, legal recourse is useful (I got some backpay once via use of the law) but on a very limited and purely scale. On the other hand, there’s another content to this utterance such that the presence or absence of a right means less a claim about legal rights and more about something that is right or wrong - “it’s outrageous that …”. Much of my comments in that other post and here is a rather longwinded and awkward way, because I wasn’t clear before that this is much of the stakes for me, of asking if, for you, people are making a mistake in doing so. A rather paltry pay off, I know, but it’s the status of idioms is something I get hung up on a lot.
Your point about their being no right to asylum is quite helpful, and about rights which can not be “recognised, included or bestowed by democracy” is quite helpful. Essentially I think what it’s rattling in the back of my head is that I think people might still express in the idiom of rights or democracy a demand for - or assert the existence of and practice - that which is not only not bestowed or guaranteed by democracy but that which is antithetical to democracy. There would here, then, be two different things which may only relate to each other as homonyms (as I would say about Communism and communism).
As to what specifically I am attached to in democracy, mainly I’m committed to a kind of democratic class organization, where decisions are made by members and where the short term aim is more decision making power on the shopfloor at work and in the long term the end of workplaces. This isn’t democracy as a type of governance, of course - the posts at Long Sunday that were more positive about democracy qua governance left be a bit cold but also a bit distant as government isn’t a register I look or aim at much.
That’s another basic question - am I correct that your remarks on democracy are intended in relation to democracy qua form of state/government?
Thanks again for clarifying. I found this helpful.
Take care,
Nate
Nate [August 1, 2006 @ 12:40 am]
I haven’t read Nate’s comments to your original post in detail, so I’m not sure how the question of right vis a vis the democratic people arises. Ange is absolutely correct: “right” as such pre-exists democracy by a long shot and is, therefore, found in other forms of regime. Feudalism, for one, was an exremely complex system of rights, duties and reciprocity - and the whole point of the nobility against the monarchy was that the monarchy was using positive law (which they did not understand) written by the bourgeoisie against their privilege from time immemorial. This question, of course, is consitutive of modern law: rights born in a time forgotten versus rights created through law - natural versus positive right - but also the question of what sort of person or what sort of subject carries which sort of rights. (A noblesse d’epee wouldn’t accept commands from a noblese de robe on the battlefied.) The strange thing about modern democracy is that it partially confuses natural and positive right when right is universalized to the category of human. Rights only exist insofar as they are listed in declarations and made by the people, yet these rights are also called natural an inalienable.
See Montesquieu, for instance, as a really interesting attempt to grapple with this question. Compare the early books on principles and laws in the various sorts of regimes with the final part (roughly 20% of the book) on the history of the French (that is, Frankish) constitution from the Roman invasion to the fall of the Carolingians.
Craig [August 1, 2006 @ 4:07 am]
Craig, I brought it up because I know Angela’s critical of rights discourse as well, and I have a similar confusion with that as I do with democracy, which is whether Angela’s is a historical (this conjuncture) or critical (problematic concept) attack. It’s largely the latter, it seems. Also, on right pre-existing democracy, the figure of the people that Angela’s talking about pre-exists democracy as well, at least modern democracy, the criticism of democracy as a relationship between demos and sovereignty extends to more than what are formally recognized as democracies. From what I know of Peron, for example, his government was rather undemocratic from one set of lights but held some of its power precisely via something like the sovereign people.
cheers,
Nate
Nate [August 1, 2006 @ 4:26 am]
Kind of both a conceptual and historical critique, Nate, insofar as I would want to insist that the ‘idea’ of democracy is there in its operations, and not something which can be counterposed to the latter, in Hegelian fashion, as that which has been frustrated in its coming or which stands in for paradise, etc.
Anyway, the point about distinguishing between rights and democracy (and therefore the particular cast of rights in democracy) is still important to note.
On Peronists, fascisms, et al - I don’t think it’s all that easy to separate them from democracy. The conceptual and historical connections are far too intertwined for that to be the case. The Hamacher essay, Schmitt’s take on democracy, Agamben, Arendt, and so on, being relevant.
am I correct that your remarks on democracy are intended in relation to democracy qua form of state/government?
Yes. But, then again, maybe ‘no’ - in that I’m not sure it’s possible to distinguish between democracy as a state form and its more diffuse invocations in political organisation generally. The questions to ask of the latter, eg, would be to what extent they coincide with the former (hence my question about whether non-US citizens could join your IWW branch), as well as what the ostensibly formal procedure of one-person-one-vote means - Eric’s post is a useful starting point on this last question.
But on Montesquieu, Craig, I’ve been reading the Persian Letters as it happens. This was prompted by a couple of Susan Maslen’s essays (and why the phrase “capable of evincing sentiment” appeared in the previous post.) The Persian Letters are an interesting way to approach the question of the separation and coincidence between the figures of man and citizen, not to mention the public/private split, sexual difference and the colonial imagination.
I still think you should have picked Montesquieu for your thesis topic.
s0metim3s [August 1, 2006 @ 2:03 pm]
I waver! Very often. I haven’t committed to a topic, yet - at least I haven’t deposited a dissertation proposal with the Faculty yet. I originally thought I would write about Montesquieu… There’s certainly a lot to be said - and a lot of interesting things to read in conjunction with it, especially the figures of the Scottish Enlightenment.
The Straussians organized a conference (one of those fake conferences where a number of important people agree to show up and in which the papers are to be published in an edited volume just in time for the editor’s tenure review) in Toronto on Montesquieu last fall. My supervisor attended, giving a paper (although he’s not a Straussian), and he tells me that the conference was actually exciting after Pangle picked a fight, causing the group to split into factions. Who knew an unread yet cannonical text from nearly three hundred years ago could be so decisive.
Writing such a dissertation would, at least, give me an avenue to discuss the obscure history of the French aristocracy leading into the French Revolution.
Craig [August 1, 2006 @ 3:29 pm]
hi again Angela,
I didn’t mean to say you were eschewing history for ideas. What I meant was that your criticisms are not directed against this or that democracy but democracy as such, as an idea (social form?) that runs a very long time. It’s fair to say the critiques runs from demos to democracy, right? Such that the presence of the demos in some fashion (sovereign, aspiring to democracy, invoked or summoned in the service sovereignty - I’ve just been reading E.P. Thompson so “Church and King mobs” are on my mind) is what’s attacked?
If you have time and interest at some point, I’d be keen to hear more of your thoughts on rights and democracy, and rights against or post-democracy. I’ve taken you before as against rights as a useful concept as such, whereas the disentangling of rights and democracy here makes me wonder if I’ve been making a mistake in doing so.
Re: organizations, I may be belaboring my point here, but I think for some organizations “democracy” or “democratic” means essentially “we make the decisions” and not much more. Your remark is quite interesting on the coincidence of an organization with the or a demos. I think we’d both agree that the absence of the term democracy doesn’t indicate absence of some degree of said coincidence. Re: the IWW in particular, anyone can join with the sole exception of those who have the power to hire and fire others, and the organization has an active disinterest in participation within the state (two things that might be thought of as exceptions to this, depending on how “participation within the state” is defined, are the defensive use of labor law/unemployment/ets, and the occasional use of legal provisions and attendant gov’t agencies around forming a legally recognized union. This latter is in disfavor within many quarters in the union.) Most members are in the US right now but not all. That makes for occasional concerns, but these concerns can be addressed successfully (for example, many of us don’t know anything about labor law outside the US, especially compared to what know about it in the US, which puts a limit on our abilities to usefully assist and train people in organizing outside the US). Each branch sets its own procedures, from consensus to voting to whatever. And the dues are low and flexible based on income - financial modes being important ways in which (coincidence with) the demos is constituted.
Take care,
Nate
Nate [August 2, 2006 @ 1:57 am]
ps- sorry, I forgot to say this. On Peronism, fascism, democracy… the point I was trying to make is that I think your criticism of democracy and demos extends well beyond what is often thought of as democracy, and not only in terms of the historical relationships between fascism and democracy. I think, for example, that the relationship between democracy and Franco’s coming to power in Spain, or the coming to power of the military dictatorship in Argentina in the 70s, is different than that of fascism in the early 20th century asments and identifies a figure of the demos present (and it could apply as well to “Communism” qua state capitalism in many cases). Regardless of the relationship of origin between democracy qua parliamentarianism and fascism, the criticism you make holds for these phenomena across the board. Appeals to differentiation between these phenomena like the ones I’ve suggested as examples, while important in many ways, occur downstream from the site of your account of and attack on the demos.
Nate [August 2, 2006 @ 2:08 am]
Nate, I mentioned that I’m in the process of revisiting the question of rights, so for the moment there are the notes here and the previous essay. On radical and/or worker organisations, I guess I would ask why the figure of class has been displaced by that of the people, or what benefit is seen to come from describing those organisations as democratic when they are not (insofar as they exclude bosses, for instance).
s0metim3s [August 2, 2006 @ 3:30 pm]
hi Angela,
I look forward to the results of your revisiting and will read that essay soon. On this “what benefit is seen to come from describing those organisations as democratic when they are not”, that’s the primary remaining disconnect that keeps happening for me as I read your stuff on this. Essentially, to my mind if there’s a use of the term which doesn’t indicate that which you rightly reject under that term, then the two uses relate to each other as homonyms. So, the critique and rejection of democracy takes as its object or range something which does not include council democracy or the internal procedures characterized democracy inside groups like the IWW. Given that that’s so, I don’t see why one term is to be taken as the correct use of the term (what democracy really means) and the other incorrect. What you’re saying seems to imply the contrary, which would mean that there’s some mistake made such that when a group says “we’re democractic” they’re really not but are in error or are dishonest. There’s not a mistake being made, just a difference in idiomatic usage of a word.
Take care,
Nate
Nate [August 2, 2006 @ 11:20 pm]
No, I’m suggesting that there are benefits which accrue from positioning oneself as ‘not foreign’, or a desire to identify (transliterate) a subjectivity (such as class) in populist terms or as popular. And that it is important to ask about the extent to which this is in play.
Disentangling this history is not really something I’m preoccupied with doing, or not at the moment, but it does seem to me that it remains to be done. One could begin with, say, the Chartists (and The People’s Charter) as a particular inflection of these processes. Not only did they confine their demand for enfranchisement to adult males, but it was a demand for inclusion in England.
As for council democracy, this is Arendt’s term. There was a time it was called council communism. :)
s0metim3s [August 3, 2006 @ 7:22 pm]