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America is waiting
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …
If a consideration of privelige occupies the thoughts of North American progressives, by contrast the principle that has sometimes preoccupied radical politics in Italy (and perhaps, in other versions, radical politics elsewhere) is non credere di avere diritti – don't believe you have rights.
Where the first seeks to comphrend the existence of asymetrical power relations in a society that declares its – albeit promissory – exemption from inherited inequalities, the second offers a reconsideration of the proposition of the 'promise corrupted' as the really-existing bind of the complex theology of democracy.
We, in flesh and blood, must put ourselves in the place of the missing guarantee, of the justice which is yet to be done, of the truth which is yet to be known. – Liberia delle Donne di Milano, Non credere du avere dei diritti. (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier. 1987)
If this is suggestive of a critique of the Derridean 'to come' – at least as its more liberal (Americanised?) expressions slip into an acqueiscence to infinite deferal, and indifference – it nevertheless remains alert to what a politics without ground would oblige, which is to say: a different sense of the political. In other words: not the presumption of individual equalisation or presumptuousness of privelige that is assumed, or might be anguished over in any encounter, but the insistence that each encounter, each tie or relation, requires decision – requires politics as decision and discernment –, without the transcendental guarantee, promise and alibi of right.
Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people. […] The people reign in the American political world as the Deity does in the universe. They are the cause and the aim of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in them. […] the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. – Democracy in America.
But while Democracy in America is remarkable for its attention to democracy as theology, or the discussion of the constitution of public homogeneity and privatised difference which immunises the political body from difference, among other things, it is no less significant for its apparently paradoxical formulations: 'democratic despotism', 'tyranny of the majority', the uniformity of sentiment that democracy generates, etc. Here, and contrary to those who read Democracy in America through the concept of 'lack', Tocqueville does what few commentators on democracy have been prepared to do before and since – that is: to refuse the propensity to define democracy in Platonic terms, as the pure Idea, subsequently contaminated. This deference to democracy as Idea is nothing less than the destinal conviction that, throughout the 20th century, will exhaust every sense of freedom. Mario Tronti, in 'Politica e destino':
In the past fifty years, according to those who see the problem from the point of view of radical democracy or the critique of democracy, democracy has either been corrupted or completed. I believe that it has been completed.
In "Heiress at Twilight", Ida Dominijanni recalls a moment of intersection between two threads of post-1968 politics in Italy, the politics of difference and Operaismo, as it travelled through the writings of Luisa Muraro, Carla Lonzi, Mario Tronti, among others. Converging around a critique of "the homogenizing power of equality and the totalizing drive of identity" that democracy is, this critique recalls the seemingly paradoxical formulations of Tocqueville's and reposes them on the terrain of difference, strategy and encounter.
Here, liberal indifference, as well as Schmittian idealisations of difference, give way to an understanding of politics as bodily, sensory, affective and sensible, the polis as street - tangere enim et tangi, nisi corpus, nulla potest res (for nothing but body is capable of touching or of being touched).
And so, as Muraro argued, paraphrased by Dominijanni:
The democratic states of the late 20th century responded to the explosion of difference in the 1970s with the strategy of 'obsessive parity'.
Similarly and before this, Lonzi:
Equality is what is offered as legal rights to colonized people. […] The world of equality is the world of legalized oppression and one-dimensionality. – Sputiamo su Hegel (1971)
As an aside: To what extent are the history of struggles represented as if they are always engaged in the project of the democratic telos?
In any case, Tocqueville's 'paradoxical' understanding of democracy suggests less a set of contraries – tyranny - democracy, homogeneity - diversity – that might be worked out as the temporal unfolding of one or other idealised pole – the either/or – than the existence, as democracy, of both the abstract, 'empty' equality of the citizen and the substantive identity of the the people. [+]
Dominijanni:
It is not only a matter of the denunciation and criticism of the false neutrality of the individual and the demos, but also of the exposure of and attack on the heart of the identitarian root of democracy. (Sexual) difference is not an element that can be expansively included in democracy. It is rather the explosive and unhinging element. If the democratic order constructs itself on an identitarian base and consolidates and globalizes itself through the assimilationist and homogenizing valence of equality, difference is the element that disorders this double base by unhinging it. If, in the democratic order, the identitarian root and assimilationist and homogenizing valence of equality suffocate human and political freedom, decomposing them in the liberty of the (neutral) citizen assured by rights (that are ‘precious to live together with others but poor for existing in a way that begins with oneself’), difference is the refounding element of freedom or, to put it another way, the category with which to rethink the subject. The semantics of freedom and the grammar of difference touch each other in the central and crucial political project of the present, which is called ‘for the critique of democracy.’
[xposted]
By s0metim3s | June 28, 2006 in Democracy, Sovereignty, Tocqueville | Permalink
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Angela, interesting post. I'm not sure I understand the last quote. What I take from your last paragraph on Tocqueville might be something like the parallax quality of democracy: that democracy is both substantive identity and formal abstraction but that these two moments cannot be thought together. If that's the case, then I would disagree insofar as democracy holds that those who are part of the people are equal to each other; Schmitt, I think, is right with his criticism of democracy as ultimately dependent on homogenity and the eradication of heterogenity. Perhaps my failure to understand the last cited passage is because I have this Schmittian notion in mind.
Posted by: Jodi | Jun 28, 2006 1:44:19 PM
This is a wonderful post (and essay too). It may be tightly-knotted prose for a general, or liberal audience, but really, worth the effort.
That the essay remains faithful to Nancy even in bending toward Tronti is provocative.
But from the post:
Tocqueville does what few commentators on democracy have been prepared to do before and since – that is: to refuse the propensity to define democracy in Platonic terms, as the pure Idea, subsequently contaminated
To whom is this referring, specifically? Would it be too much to ask for names? I find naming, in such cases, often very helpful. Otherwise, the accusation might be left to imply practically everyone, from say Hegel up to Derrida. (To latter of whom might have asked, "And if the contamination was there from the beginning?")
But this notion that democracy has been "completed" (i.e., to rule out its other headings)–serves a real polemical purpose, it seems to me, which may be useful (and possibly stretching Nancy's distance from Derrida?), but may also risk undermining, or degrading the historical (and civic) ground on which it plays. Such that, taken to its logical extreme:
On the contrary, democracy is this very oscillation and, hence, this very ‘crisis’.
the critique, by definition even, would appear to naturalize this risk, or crisis.
In any case much food for thought here, A; thanks.
Posted by: Matt | Jun 28, 2006 3:26:49 PM
While perhaps not Angela's point, what partially distinguishes Tocqueville's argument from its predecessors is that he purposefully defines democracy as "a form of society." Traditionally, democracy is defined as a "form of government." In this sense, a "form of government" can be specified a priori in a system involving all the other forms of government and we can even distinguish, a priori, between 'good' and 'bad' or 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' instances. In this sense, democracy as a form of society has no resemblance to Plato or Aristotle or Polybius, or perhaps more directly for Tocqueville, to Montesquieu - that other great renegade aristocrat-philosopher.
Posted by: Craig | Jun 28, 2006 3:42:41 PM
Jodi, I think that these 'two moments' can (should) indeed be thought together – I thought this is what I was suggesting Tocqueville does, or at least provides the means to do so. Similarly to Schmitt, Tocqueville also presents democracy as inclining toward, the word he uses, uniformity. My problem with Schmitt isn't on this score, btw. In any case, Dominijanni, too, talks about the homogenising valence of equality. I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with exactly, but I'd like to hear more. If those who are part of the people are equal to eachother, this raises the question of by what measure they are equalised, and it therefore presupposes non-value (the non-citizen), hierarchisation (rendered as numerical and individuated) within the people, and identity (as the materiality of the links between demos and kratos).
Perhaps Craig's remarks on Tocqueville are a way to parse this question. For me that means talking about the relation between abstract labour and concrete labours, among other things, but likely Craig would take it elsewhere (?).
Matt, yes, it's a sweeping remark. For now, it will stay that way, for better and worse. Do you think that a critique of democracy must also secure it?
Anyway, while I take the point of the risks of normalising, I will add that there is more, or other, than a polemical purpose to insisting that the state of emergency is the norm, as it were. Or, rather, the point is to insist that democracy is not the absence of war but its geopolitical administration and organisation.
I don't think this is eternal, even if democracy eternalises itself in that temporalisation of the split between 'democratic Idea' and really-existing democracy.
In talking about democracy as a corrupted idea, I immediately had in mind the critiques of Bush et al. I find it interesting that, here, democracy is presented as degraded, while the export of democracy, the very recourse to democracy in this second instance, is regarded as rhetoric (in the sense of propagandistic, a lie). This in no way touches on the question of why Iraqi sovereignty is indeed crucial – as the condition of maintaining a level of control over oil resources, movements of labour in the region, etc – for the US, AU, Japan and UK. And, if I'm convinced of anything, it's that democracy does not provide the ground upon which an opposition to the war can be constructed – it provides, at best, for nationalist 'exit strategies', a kind of reassertion of 'world war' as 'civil war', the development of 'low-intensity conflict', 'bringing our troops home', etc.
But, really, consider this post as an albeit scattered provocation.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Jun 29, 2006 12:33:38 AM
Angela,
I enjoyed this very much. This may be somewhat obvious, but the Italian critique of rights-based theory (together with the underlying premise of "the homogenizing power of equality and the totalizing drive of identity" which it presupposes) reminds me of Wendy Brown's argument, in States of Injury that these sorts of rights, when mobilized discursively,
are more likely to become sites of the production and regulation of identity as injury than vehicles of emancipation. In entrenching rather than loosening identities' attachments to their current constitutive injuries, rights with strong and specified content may draw upon our least expansive, least public, and hence least democratic sentiments.
(Of course, Brown makes these remarks in the context of a distinction between a discursive mobilization of specific, concrete rights, which she opposes, and an evocation of rights "in their abstraction from the particulars of our lives--and in their figuration of an egalitarian political community," which she supports, on account of the fact that it is here that "they [rights] may be most valuable in the democratic transformation of these particulars"--while you appearing to be questioning even this latter, abstract usage.)
Posted by: crojas | Jun 29, 2006 1:48:30 PM
Crojas,
That Brown quote is interesting, thanks for posting it. I'm not entirely sure I follow, though. Can you unpack a bit please what is meant by specific concrete rights and rights in their abstraction? Can you give an example of each? Also, there's an ambiguity here. To say that rights "may" and "are likely to" have a bad result is not the same as saying that they do or must have this effect. It implies they sometimes have another effect, presumably not pernicious or less so. Under what circumstances, then, do these different results come about? Is the argument that there's some sort of telos to rights, such that assertions of rights which don't have these effects are somehow preventing the rights/assertions from fully realizing themselves?
Best,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Jun 29, 2006 2:39:00 PM
Nate,
Wendy Brown is concerned with the paradox whereby a struggle for specific rights (and she cites the American Civil Rights movement as one among many potential examples) “may operate as an indisputable force of emancipation at one moment in history” while later becoming in turn “a regulatory discourse, a means of obstructing or coopting more radical political demands…. At the moment a particular ‘we’ success in obtaining rights, it loses its ‘we-ness’ and dissolves into individuals” (98). Those “individuals,” Brown argues, may well come to feel constrained by the delimiting and regulatory nature of the rights which the group (the “we”) has struggled so hard to obtain.
In practical terms, we might think of the feminist movement. The first, and important, step was an assertion of solidarity, an appeal to specific rights which had been previously denied. However, as the movement gradually achieved many of its early goals, many women came to feel that the movement itself was constraining, that it was defining (out of earlier political necessity) a model of womanhood and feminity which did not necessarily fit all women (we may think of examples ranging from subaltern women in developing countries, to upper-class first world women perfectly happy to be housewives). She is speaking at the level of historical tendencies in the modern era, not of absolute necessity, but I believe that she would argue that any politicized movement which managed to side-step these problems would be one which had already incorporated precisely the sorts of solutions which is is advocating here (see below).
Part of the problem here, Brown argues, is a tension between the “universal idiom and the local effect of rights”:
The question of the liberatory or egalitarian force of rights is always historically and culturally circumscribed…. Yet rights necessarily operate in and as an ahistorical, acultural, acontextual idiom: they claim distance from specific political contexts and historical vicissitudes, and they necessarily participate in a discourse of enduring universality rather than provisionality or partiality (97).
In order to resolve this impasse between an underlying, universal ground of emancipatory discourses and the specific rights-based claims which are made by specific groups, wherein “legal recognition become[s] an instrument of regulation, and political recognition become[s] an instrument of subordination” (99), Brown suggests that this rights should not be abandoned, but rather should be constantly interrogated:
But to suggest that rights sought by politicized identities may cut two (or more) ways—naturalizing identity even as they reduce elements of its stigma, depoliticizing even as they protect recently produced political subjects, empowering what they also regulate—is not to condemn them. Rather, it is to refuse them any predetermined place in an emancipatory politics and to insist instead upon the importance of incessantly querying that place (121).
Posted by: crojas | Jun 30, 2006 11:02:33 AM
Thanks, Carlos. I had Wendy Brown on my mind while writing this, but wasn't sure how to work it in.
I like Brown a lot, for many reasons, but I sometimes feel like, as in other instances (eg, Keenan, whom I also like quite a lot), that there's a fear that to refute rights tout court is to risk legibility itself, particularly in a US context. Brown distinguishes between the 'egalitarian community' and individuation, so as to suggest that rights can still be demanded, but in ways that I'm not sure are tenable.
Alain posted some Brown here a ways back, a follow-up here, and an excerpt from Brown's "'The Most We Can Hope For …' : Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism", here.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Jul 1, 2006 12:39:08 AM
The people reign in the American political world as the Deity does in the universe. They are the cause and the aim of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in them.
What a splendid eye! As in Irony. Really Alex de Tokeville just wanted a decent Gulag-Tech I position, benes and pension up the a** like most of us.
Posted by: Perezoso | Aug 8, 2007 10:40:26 PM
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