Over at Long Sunday I've posted the following on democracy. For folks who have been reading I Cite for a while, the themes will be predictable. But, some of the gang are putting together posts on democracy and invited me to come along:
In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek considers democracy
to be impossible but necessary, an idea I think as kin to notions of
democracy as a regulative idea or a Derridean democracy to come. In all
his later work, he rejects democracy as inadequate to confronting the
situation of global capitalism and racist fundamentalism. I agree with
this view (and, explore it further here--cue, self-promotional link).
In this little post, though, I want to raise a few questions as to
whether democracy is possible and what this possibility might mean in a
few other, very generally described, locations.
Liberal democrats, and there newest siblings, deliberative democrats, find that a set of procedures are necessary for democracy. The procedures are supposed to guarantee free and equal access to information, free and equal access to the means of participations understood as speech, voting, and the opportunity to be elected, and the accountability of the elected to those who elected them. Now, without even picking on the problems with all these requirements, the way that capitalism (with its entrenched inequalities, global scale, and installation of neoliberalism's so-called market 'requirements') and racism (with its 'obscene supplement' or nightly law, to use Zizek's terms, that foreshorten and deny officially established laws even as they bind together those who will count as the commmunity), we can see that the underlying presuppositions work against democracy: presuppositions of shared notions of truth, of value, of reason; presuppositions of literacy and specific cognitive, moral, and cultural competencies; presuppositions of time and interest.
Older views of democracy, take Jeremy Benthams, didn't have this problem: they presumed from the start that only elites would take on the hard tasks, that a middling group of interested, somewhat informated people would provide input and feedback, and that the majority wouldn't care. Versions of elite democracy in the 20th century continue this line of argument. The point is that contemporary liberal and deliberative democrats face a problem: the people. The people that they posit as democrats don't exist. (Which reminds me of a line that Zizek attributes to Trotsky: "But, Lenin, this is the only working class we've got!").
How could liberals get their democratic populace? By non liberal means.
Ok, so what about so-called radical democrats? Posthegemony has been running an insightful set of posts about radical democracy (unfortunately, in a not particularly positive review of a book edited by a friend, but, oh well). If we think of radical democracy in Laclau's terms as a struggle to articulate together differing groups within a larger empty signifier or symbolic identity, then we can see how changes communication make symbolic identities less available. I understand these changes in terms of Zizek's notion of the decline of symbolic efficiency. The idea I'm trying to push is that with the decline of symbolic identities (black, worker, woman, citizen), imaginary identities move to for (celebrity, criminal, goth, MILF, Nascar Dad, drag queen) that don't provide the sort of larger empty signifier able to filled in by multiple contents and hold together an articulatory chain.
Butler, in Excitable Speech, emphasizes resignification as pregnant with democratic potential. The problem is that she presumes that this resignification will necessarily move in democratic and progressive directions, two different matters. So, she doesn't consider that democratic directions may well be nationalist and militarist. Not does she consider that specific assemblages, say those of government or capital, might do their own, malign significations: Swift boat controversy, anyone?
So, deliberative democrats can't account for their people, radical democrats depend on signifying structures that are no longer operative (which is why Zizek, in my view rightly, rejects Badiou's emphasis on naming), or on suppositions of the way that open, resignified language will lead.
I had found deliberative and radical democracy the most promising accounts of democracy available, Unfortunately, they can't uphold their promises. So, the left needs desperately to return to and develop visions of socialism adequate to the present. I don't know what these will look like. I know that they are incompatible with the current main stream media climate and the current prominence of religious, fundamentalist, and conservative ways of thinking.
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