Not democracy

I came along to Cornell with Paul and his research assistant today. Paul's a real scholar and goes to libraries to do research. I rarely read anything that isn't immediate or portable. Signs fit the former category (well, actually both but that's beside the point). We stopped in a coffee shop on the way down. A sign there advertised a meeting that had something to do with democracy and involved watching "The Control Room." I think democracy is the wrong word. And, I think that having the courage to face this (which a great, unapologetic, post at  k-punk does in a way I still pathetically hesitate to do) is politically crucial today.

So, why is democracy the wrong word for the meeting? Aren't people being invited to discuss, to exchange views and information, to build alliances within the terrain of civil society? Yes and no. Yes, if one wants a metalevel description of participant activities, a description that could just as easily apply to the activities of anti-tax and support-our-soldiers groups. No, when one recognizes that the invitation is not intended to extend to those who are anti-Arab and pro-war, that is, when one properly recognizes that such participants would be intruders, disrupters of the goals of the organizers to build an anti-war alliance. 

And this leads to the more important no: the meeting is deliberately, specifically partisan. It is offered as a counter to the hegemonic presentation of media in the US. It is countering the majoritarian view (shared by nearly every member of congress as well as the msm) that terrorism is the primary threat to the US, that there is a line between civilization and its enemies, and that 'war is peace.'  The primary issue of those organizing and attending the meeting is not, presumably, a claim that they or their voices have been excluded but that they and their views have been defeated. They aren't claiming that, well, if our voices had been heard, then, shock and awe would have been justified or legitimate. No, they are claiming that such miltaristic views are simply wrong, regardless of how many people hold them and regardless of the process leading up to their implementation. They are not asking for debate. They are asking for, maybe beginning to demand, change. (I should add that Paul thinks that I am relying on an overly formalistic view of democracy as the view of the majority or the people here; this could be true in the abstract, but it seems to me that in the context of this example an appeal to a more substantive conception of democracy--say, one that involves peace and economic justice is premised yet again on a more fundamental non-democracy to secure it.) 

Are the claims made by the organizers and participants at the meeting (now fully an object of my imagination) those of the excluded? Yes, if we mean excluded from the decision--which is simply another way of saying that they reject the decision. No if we mean excluded from deliberation or society. What if we say they are speaking for those who could not speak, say the bombed Iraqis? I don't find this alternative satisyfing insofar as Bush et al also claimed to speak for the Iraqi people. So, I'm left with the view that those holding the meeting are speaking for themselves, because they must, because the truth of the situation demands it. And this is not democracy. It is another politics and it should be endorsed.

Comments

[Alain]

Jodi

It sounds like you are describing some sort of counter insurgency. While this might be necessary in today's environment, I do not think this is a model for political action in general. Assuming the imaginary people in the room you describe were to assume power, would they rule by fiat or by law? Would they maintain a state of permanent revolution or establish economic justice and step down? It just seems that this is not a good alternative to democracy, though it may be an effective way of forming strategy and policy.

[Jodi]

Alain,
Your points are appropriate and I don't have a good response. I can say that right now I'm reading a book I hate on deliberative democracy and trying to formulate my critique. Generally speaking, I vacillate pathetically between the questions of even how to do political theory: is it a matter of justifying forms of governance or of understanding struggle or resistance or all sorts of other things. (I generally think of my concerns as those of affiliation, as in, what is the best way to think political affiliation in light of the insights of psychoanalysis). In the interest of full disclosure, I'll confess that I am a recovering Habermasian. I finished my dissertation in Frankfurt and my first book was so orthodox as to rightly be considered an instance of habermanian (or, as I describe in a later, critical, book--habermasochism). It may be that my issue is that what's the point of justifying some kind of ideal government when all it does it protect the horrors of the present. So, it would be in favor of some kind of insurgent take over of the US government that created a national health insurance (for the reasons you so aptly describe in your comment), put caps on salaries and benefits, took over microsoft and released its source code to everyone, created a social welfare base and adequate housing, installed gun control and made arms sales illegal, and rewrote the constitution to guarantee all this and create a parliamentary system. A new constitution isn't so far-fetched, the creation of the one we have was an illegal act with regard to the articles of confederation. So, forcing the dissolution of the current constitutional system in favor of a more just one seems like a good idea to me. (if completely far fetched...)

[Alain]

Jodi

My sypathies regarding your Habermasian disorder. I think your idealism is exactly what we need to promote in the current climate. To implement much of what you advocate (and I agree with you) would require a rewriting of the constition. But I am not so sure it is a far fetched idea. There are many who would like to see a "health care bill of rights" with some teeth to it. If things get bad enough, such an issue may rise to the level of a constitutional amendment. You never know.

[k-punk]

Hi Jodi...

A recovering Habermasian, LOL...

The great bribe of liberal democracy is its presenting of itself - compromised, inegalitarian (and no-one is better than Badiou describing this: see for instance http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=794- as the ONLY alternative to fascism and authoritarianism. The reality of course is that lib democracy and fascism are complementary and complicit, both empirically and conceptually.

Universality not difference is the only effective alternative to the global tyranny of Kapital. Badiou is especially forceful in making this point in the early part of the St Paul book. Rather than being threatened by differences, Kapital (re)produces and commodifies them. Disabled Serbian lesbians? Come this way please, we have a whole set of things you can buy, and please, come and debate with us on TV. As Badiou says, it's a case of universality (of communism) versus universality (of capital) NOT particularity versus universality. We're embedded in concrete situations, but the orientation shd be to move OUT of them into the Immortal, the unviversal, the radically non-localized.

But the key move in both Badiou and Zizek is the claim that universality is only possible under CONCEPTS. You don't 'achieve' universality by aggregating up animal interests: you posit the concept of a General Good as a means of SUSPENDING animal interests and attaining the 'disinterested-interest' of rational collectivity.

[Adam Kotsko]

I agree entirely. One of the most tired tropes of the run-up to war was leftists or liberals complaining that dissent was being silenced. When Chomsky's book on 9-11 is prominently featured on bookstore shelves, when all you have to do is reach for something a little out of the ordinary on the magazine rack to find an anti-war position -- that's not what silencing dissent looks like. The apparent belief that speaking the truth is directly and immediately efficacious on all hearers is ridiculous -- we need people in real positions of real power.

I am reminded of Adorno's critique of Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age ..." He reminds Benjamin that one should not trust the lower classes instinctively, that the lower classes are simply necessary to make the revolution, but that setting aside their structural position, their consciousness is still thoroughly warped by bourgeois society.

[Jodi]

Adam and K-punk, thanks for your comments. In addition to reading Schmitt's critique of parliamentary democracy this am, I've been reading portions of infinite thought and will now add in the interview k-punk linked. I agree with the point on universality--this view is one of the reasons I find Zizek appeal (Laclau also views universality this way). One of my questions is what sort of politics this affiliates with, or, perhaps, what sort of governance. It may now be primarily critical, anticipatory, part of a clearing through and out. On Adam's point: in his reading of Brecht (as you probably know), Zizek takes totally seriously what Brecht says a joke: it's time to dissolve the people and elect another one.

[k-punk]

Adam, yes absolutely....

As Zizek put it in the 'interview' with Doug Henwood ('interview' in strongly inverted commas, since Henwood clearly had one aim, to stitch SZ up):

"Let me give you a very naive answer. I think that basically the facts are already known. Let's take Chomsky's analyses of how the CIA intervened in Nicaragua. OK, (he provides) a lot of details, yes, but did I learn anything fundamentally new? It's exactly what I'd expected: the CIA was playing a very dirty game. Of course it's more convincing if you learn the dirty details. But I don't think that we really learned anything dramatically new there. I don't think that merely 'knowing the facts' can really change people's perceptions."

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/modernism/Henwood_Zizek.htm

The fact that ppl can be quite aware of the facts and still want that kind of regime poses the question that can only be answered by Spinozism and psychoanalysis: WHY do people fight tooth and nail for their own oppression?

Chomsky and the type of anti-capitalism in which he is a key player are not at all problematic for Kapital, because their focus is exclusively on molar politics, as if the only issue is 'persuading' 'Bad' people to be more 'decent' somehow. This brings me to Jodi's point, which I think is crucial, and needs a great deal of working through: what is the relationship to governance then?

Think the benefit of Badiou and Zizek is that it can get us out of a number of deadlocks that Deleuzianism led into: (1) quasi neo-con apologias for the dehumanizing sublimity of Kapital (in reality this position had little to do with D/G but they fed into it); (2)psychedelic fascism - the idea that going into the woods, taking drugs and 'escaping' is the way to go (this a temptation to which D/G tend to succumb a great deal) (3) naive anarchism - the view that you can just ignore the State.

Badiou's interview in the Ethics book suggests a way forward: that you can't just ignore the State, you have to make certain demands of it. I'm still interested in thinking this through in relation to the D/G / De Landa/ Braudel disinction of markets VERSUS capitalism. What sort of politics, what sort of system of governance could there be that was communist but not State socialist? It's an open question, because it precisely involves what is impossible in the current regime of thought.

[ozric]

yes i must remember it's universality and not particularity--wouldn't be surprised if the particularists were also psychedelic fascists who obviously have nothing to do with the rational collectivity which sure as hell sounds exciting...guess badiou readers unlike the unfortunate disabled serbian lesbians who must have mucho dinero are somehow safe from being merely purchasers of the latest brand name commodity...over here many druggies are jailed while the commies go to grad school---i usually cap OUT as the title of the novel by natsuo kirino...

[k-punk]

guess badiou readers unlike the unfortunate disabled serbian lesbians who must have mucho dinero are somehow safe from being merely purchasers of the latest brand name commodity

You're missing the point - but then you want to, so no doubt your happy.

No-one is 'safe from being a mere purchaser' - but being a Badiouian is not the issue for intelligent readers of Badiou . Certainly it isn't treated as a cause for CELEBRATION that capital has invented a new category (a new variant of dying animal for you to belong to).

Druggies are sent to jail? Boohoo. Much worse would happen to 'commies' if they were anything other than Academic Marxists. But that's beside the point. Just because the State oppresses you doesn't mean that your position is valid. On the contrary: being forced into identifying with the categories that Kapital and/or the State produce is already to have lost.

btw Jody, which Schmitt are you reading? Got The Concept of the Political the other day but haven't started it yet...

[Jodi]

I think the unfortunate disabled serbian lesbian remark is hilarious....

I also agree with K-punk's characterization of the appeal of Z and B against items 1, 2, 3. None of these works politically, in my view. The popularity of D & G (I love the way this is also a designer lable) among post-Nietzschean political theorists is strong; I find it too close to capital, to some weird neo-Darwinianism, and to bizarre brain science (even as this characteristics some of my best friends....). Also, refusing and dropping out strikes me as politically useless--except for one thing: the possibility of forming something other and counter, and here Z on slums and favelas, the open source and antiproperty versions of tech/net people, and maybe even Ozric's drug adled prisoners suggest alternative modes of affiliation that provide possibilies for another politics. (this is a pretty big maybe). On 3, anarchists (because of their kinship with libertarians) and general abandonment of ideas of solidarity seem to me to feed into the dominant views in the market.

I don't know anything about de landa and the alternative accounts of markets you mention, k-punk, but this sounds really interesting. In a stupid, naive way I was recently thinking about open air markets in the former USSR and hanging out in cafes etc there and saying to myself, oh, right, they had had markets, so markets alone aren't necessarily the problem--but then I started thinking about something else...

Schmitt: critique of parliamentary democracy; unsurpassed--no one seems to be able to answer it, only to invoke the horrors affiliated with Schmitt but not to say where his arguments are wrong. I've taught the Concept of the Political a couple of times. As I usually do, at first I thought it was completely wrong. Within 2 years I found that I, in some unconscious way, had fully accepted the basic premise, namely, that the fundamental political relation is that between friend and enemy. (Before I thought that the very notion of a fundamental political relation was wrong...)

last thing--is there a quick way to distinguish between B and Z's account of the subject? From the B interview, it seems that his notion is quite different from Z's, that is to say, that for B 'subject' is a response to the truth of an Event, an effect of interpellation. For Z, subject is the lack or absence filled in (but never completely) through interpellation (in response to the truth of an event...)

[Alain]

Ozric

"Disabled Serbian Lesbians" is the funniest psudo-theory babble I have ever read. Please keep it coming!