Get the man an editorial column, congressional seat, something...

I've voted for Ralph Nader several times,

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Popular, Responsible

Via s lot, from The Lost Art of Cooperation by Benjamin Barber:

...While Darwin famously saw evolution as an exercise in species-enhancing competition, the Russian thinker Peter Kropotkin insisted that it was an exercise in cooperation. In Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), he argued that survival was fostered by cooperation within and among species rather than by murderous rivalries. Similar arguments can be found among evolutionary biologists and social scientists today, as Robert Wright shows in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (2000). The communitarian paradigm offers a portrait of humans as naturally embedded in communities. Here, the political project is one of individuation: creating artificially the conditions for personal freedom from a cooperative democratic process. In this view, democracy is not a product of freedom, freedom is a product of democracy. Democratic societies do not secure cooperation by sacrificing freedom, they create conditions for freedom by associating us in cooperative communities.

Let us apply this short lesson in political theory to the American experience. In the American ideal of “liberal democracy,” the two tendencies embodied in this term are supposed to stand in a healthy tension. The “liberal” part of our culture is individualistic and competitive, focused on private freedom and property; the “democratic” part is communitarian and cooperative, focused on public freedom (civic freedom), justice, and the common ground that makes private property possible. Today, the liberal element dominates the democratic communitarian element, upsetting the delicate balance.

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The Venezuelan Referendum: an Exodus from Constituted Power

Commentary on the recent Venezuelan referendum, particularly among foreign observers, has turned into a rather tiresome to and fro between self-satisfied opponents of Chávez, who like to think that the Bolivarian revolution has been stopped in its tracks, and equally self-satisfied supporters, who think they have refuted the claims of Chávez's dictatorial tendencies.

The referendum has also been interpreted as a weathervane for the region's Left Turns as a whole.  With the Bolivian constitutional process also stymied, Lula quiescent, Bachelet unpopular, and the Kirchners apparently reinstating Peronist husband-and-wife politics as usual, have we reached the high water mark for Latin America's renascent left movements?

But in all this discussion, the central point has been lost: that the process of setting constitutions registers a balance of forces between constituent and constituted power.

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Successful states, failed theories

In "The Failure of Political Theology", a review essay for Mute of Forrest Hylton's Evil Hour in Colombia and Achille Mbembe's On the Postcolony, Angela Mitropoulos (aka s0metim3s of the archive) skewers the assumptions of "failed state" theory.

She points out, on the one hand, that the notion of "failed states" presupposes the norm of the "successful" state as a more or less harmonious instance of the social contract at work.  This is a presupposition shared by liberalism and by Gramscian hegemony theory alike.  And obviously enough I thoroughly agree with her assessment of hegemony theory as no more than "a variant of social contract theory with Marxian pretensions."  Indeed, as Mitropoulos's reading of Hylton's book shows, if anything so-called progressives are more wedded to the social contract (and so to the repression of the state's founding and ongoing violences) than are liberals.  The (populist) demand to refound the state by means of an organic representation of subaltern classes is a ruse of the state's feigned self-cancellation.

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Human Rights and Cosmopolitanism

Below the fold, extracts from Judith Butler's review of Hannah Arendt's The Jewish Writings, Gary J. Bass' review of Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights: A History, and Michael Blake's review of Seyla Benhabib (et al)'s Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations.

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International Slugfest

Holy Shit.  Time to visit Nairn's most necessary corrective once again, I guess.

A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true [updated]

Having just watched the later, 60's film version of Hemingway's The Killers (after the Tarkovsky and Burt Lancaster) featuring one Ronald Reagan, I cannot help but feel I understand these comments about "time and space" in a whole new way.  Ronald was an odd duck wasn't he (the word, "stilted" seems invented just for him, back when art of faux-working class swagger and unflinching confidence was quite enough).  A common thought:  why was America always so much behind the times?  Anyway this guy Rx is saying something very much in the manner of cognitive dissonance with this mashup; perhaps usefully provoking: Download freedom101Rx.mov

Those familiar with the story and even those not may find this engaging article by Ron Berman useful reading:

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Open Letter

(The following by guest author Jane Dark:)

While I appreciate the refined level of discourse here at Long Sunday, I'd like to bring it down a little. What follows is my open letter to the National Rifle Association.

Dear NRA,

You pussies.

That's right, National Rifle Association, I'm talking to you. You are cowards, lightweights, hypocrites, hand-wringing do-nothings.

My recollection is that it has been claimed you're just gun-toting bullet-freaks interested only in your right to extreme animal-killing convenience and click-click-boom phallic stroke fantasies, maybe popping off at the occasional illegal immigrant.

And my further recollection is that you have defended yourself against such scurrilous accusations through the patient insistence on your constitutional right to bear arms. You, the NRA, would be part of a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state."

Which is to say, your entire position and organization rests on the proposed belief that when bad government abrogates your rights and freedoms, and leads the nation along a course which the citizens have not mandated -- using force of arms to do so -- you are prepared and willing to resist that course, and refuse that government, using every means at your disposal, including the means guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

And yet we find ourselves with a government that is currently in the midst of an escalating military action seemingly not mandated by the population -- an action which is either explanation for or parallel with increasing depredation of your civil rights, most ominously in the case of the Fourth Amendment but as well the Sixth and Eight at a bare minimum. Were there to be a doomsday clock of civil rights, sometime in these last months we would surely have heard its chimes at midnight.

That the electoral legitimacy of the President whose administration has in main authored these violations is shrouded in doubt would seem to argue even further for a principled refusal of this abrogation of the rights and interests of the American people.  This should be your finest hour. This is what you have been waiting for; on moments such as this is the very justification for both your rights and your existence premised. If you will not in the gravest and most evident circumstances exercise the freedom invested in you by your beloved Second Amendment, your authority to claim it must be found to have withered. And surely these are dark days. If not now, when?

What are you waiting for, you pussies?

Respectfully submitted,

Jane

800,000 Privileged Youths Enlist To Fight In Iraq

'We've Been So Selfish'

January 10, 2007 | Issue 43•02

WASHINGTON, DC—Citing a desire to finally make a difference in Iraq, in the past two weeks, more than 800,000 young people from upper-middle- and upper-class families have put aside their education, careers, and physical well-being to enlist in the military, new data from the Department Of Defense shows.

"I don't know if it was the safety and comfort of the holidays or what, but I realized that my affluence and ease of living comes at a cost," said Private Jonathan Grace, 18, who was to commence studies at Dartmouth College next fall, but will instead attend 12 weeks of basic training before being deployed to Fallujah with the 1st Army Battalion. "I just looked at my parents in their cashmere sweaters and thought, 'Who am I to go to an elite liberal arts college and spend all my time reading while, in the real world, thousands of kids my age are sacrificing their lives for our country?' It's not right."

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This is what voting in America looks like

Allow me to echo some of the recent sentiments at Daily Kos:  that anyone should have to stand in  line for five to six hours in the dark to vote, after a full day of work and before dinner, is just a real pain in the ass of North American democracy.  Update:  apparently it was all part of the new war on immigrants that served the Republicans so well an ID verification bottleneck, and not a problem with the voting machines.  So Colorado, especially, has got some work to do.  Nevertheless, browsing the footage at Video the Vote this morning, what comes across most plainly to me, and despite all the lingering and shameful problems, is a sense of grassroots vigilance not about to go away.  (And then there are the adorable stories that just warm your heart, such as the man who expressed his general feelings about electronic voting machines with a cat paperweight's ears.) 

Anyway, I thought these two especially deserved a wider audience (as in:  kids, please don't peel away that plastic strip over the modem connection...please):   

How dryly amusing that in America on Veterans Day blue collars have to work, but cannot cash a paycheck as all the banks are closed.  On voting day, meanwhile, citizens of most states simply have to work, then go home for a late dinner and crash before another working day.

This really makes no sense.  Turnout is higher in every country where voting takes place over the weekend.  We should have a national holiday that respects this most basic right.  It could even fall on the Friday before voting weekend.  Polls could close late Sunday morning.  (If a few procrastinating vacationers had to skip church, it wouldn't be the end of the world.)

Americans are working more hours than ever before, for less; a trend for which we may safely thank Reagan, but one also exponentially heightened and solidified under Clinton.  In light of which, frankly, the minimum wage increase legislation is but a patronizing and cruel joke (who the hell can  ever live on $5.15 an hour, anyway? - it's less expensive not to work).  People need to know their worth.  Fortunately, the manufacture of wage slaves has the added benefit of barring them from ever traveling to Europe.  And if they decide it's more lucrative to sell drugs (or even in some cases if they don't), there's always a new prison or six waiting to be filled.  One wonders what Pelosi and Obama really think of this situation.

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appropriate background music

If current predictions hold, Republicans will need appropriate background music this coming Tuesday to help them emote in a way consonate with their new status. I would like to suggest the well-loved Albinoni Adagio in G Minor, for Organ and Strings. Turn on the TV, leave off the volume, and watch election returns with that in the background.

But what about other voters who are not Republicans? And even some Republicans who have decided the Bush Presidency has written checks its competence can't cash? Don't they need background music?

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David Held: "Reframing Global Governance"

The other night I attended a lecture given by David Held, who is apparently a rather large figure in something called the "new political economy" or "international political economy."  I'm not a political scientist and I'm a pretty bad sociologist - for a lack of time and interest, I pay little attention to the more "politicy" or "practically" oriented scholarship in either discipline.  This was, quite frankly, my introduction into what passes for liberal or left scholarship in the academy from an empirical perspective or approach.

I must say, I was rather dismayed.  Admittedly, I was not expecting much from the lecture.  A quick perusal of his publications indicated that his interests largely did not overlap with mine.  He's written on "cosmopolitan democracy," "cosmopolitan law," "governance," "globalization" and "social democracy."  These interests seem comparatively recent as his early work was on critical theory, having written books on "Horkheimer to Habermas" and an introductory text on critical theory in the early eighties.  He also seemed to participate in the late seventies/early eighties renewal of interest in state theory.  Thus, his earlier interests resemble more closely my own, even if, with him being a Habermasian of sorts, I expected significant theoretical differences.

At any rate, the following is a brief summary of his lecture, the text of which is available here.   He opens, "The paradox of our modern times can be stated simply:  the collective issues we must grapple with are of growing extensity and intensity and, yet, the means for addressing these are weak and incomplete."  The rest of the lecture is an attempt, as one might expect, to grapple with, if not resolve, this paradox.  Consequently, he first lays out the "collective issues" before moving on to "the means for addressing these."  Clearly, this is a man pushing a particular political programme.  (I'd point out at this point that my relunctance to accept his position does not require that I advance a better one - no blackmail of the status quo, as it were, will be accepted.)

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In need of heroic readers (more than heroes)

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."

Some readers may have already seen Benjamin Kunkel's essay in the Sunday Book Review (bugmenot), in which he writes, among other things:

What Thoreau has to overcome during his time in the woods is not a lapse in mental health.  His great problem is to escape the mental health of his neighbors, their collection-plate opinions, their studious repetition of gossip.  Thoreau isn't against self-esteem (he admires a friend who has learned to "treat himself with ever increasing respect"); but his main task is to lose his esteem for society in which "trade curses everything it handles" and the singular natural resource of time is wasted in barren productivity.  Maybe he had vices out there in the woods, but that's not his concern, or ours.  The overwhelming impression is of his philosophical ardor, which he tries to fuse with his practical ardor.  There's not a note in the book of self-pity, or nostalgia.  And why did he quit his cabin in the end?  "It seemed to me that I had several more lives to live."   This accent of futurity is missing among contemporary memoirists.  They sigh over their past woes; sigh with relief now that they're better; or sigh the long sighs of nostalgia. 
(emphasis added)

Indeed, and not just among contemporary memoirists, but also American Presidents.

Anyway, I would like to concur with Marco Roth (another editor of n+1), that in the current marketplace of literature's ongoing infantilization, the legacy of the "heroic reader" may be one thing we can not afford to let alone. 

The paradox of the heroic reader is that she must actively distance herself from the sick world.  She must submerge herself, one might say, in the very limitless task, in the important and arresting and non-trivial stakes of reading, with all the terror–indeed, potential madness–this implies, but significantly in order to then re-enter society with both sincerity and sympathy, and with an attention–dare we call it philosophical–to living (zoe!) as opposed to mere endurance of the "safe" thrills of organized spectacle or pre-packaged experience.

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Democracy without rest

Democracy is the sovereignty of the people. Its various qualifications – as liberal, social, procedural, radical, deliberative and so on – suggest versions of a ‘proper’ connection (representation or ‘fit’) between the demo- (the people) and -cracy (the state), but they in no way distance themselves from, or void, the sense of democracy as the sovereignty of the people.

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Questions Concerning Democracy

(1) Can democracy be thought independently of its adjectives?  That is, is there such a thing as "democracy as such"?  What is the significance of democracy in locutions such as "radical democracy," "liberal democracy," "parliamentary democracy," "representative democracy" and so on?  Can democracy only exist insofar as it is connected to these other things - representation, parliament, liberalism, radicalism?

(2) If democracy can be thought, how can it be thought?  That is, is democracy but a secularized political theology?  Is there a horizon of politics - any politics at all - beyond the theological?

(3) If democracy can be thought, can it be acted or is it always "coming" yet never arriving?  (An asymptotic politics, if you will.)  That is, is democracy merely a demand or an imaginary - perhaps the radical imaginary?

(4) Is democracy tied to, on the one hand, representation and, on the other hand, modernity or are there other forms that democracy can take - anti-modern, post-modern, or even pre-modern?

(5) If democracy is the horizon for all present politics, is there a politics that is anti-democratic or beyond democracy? Can a "progressive" politics be non- or anti-democratic?  How can a progressive politics articulate its demands in a non-language and in a non-thought?  (That is, a politics that can neither be spoken or thought because it is beyond the horizon of all politics.)

(6) Who, or what, is supposed to be democratic?

(7) In terms of "really existing" democracies, why do they tend to come about anti-democratically and tend to die democratically?

The Politics of Standing Still

[This is a guest post by John, from SlowLearner.]

Speaking at a seminar in Padova on “Democracy and War” in January 2005, Giorgio Agamben reflected on the nature of movement as a word and a concept, noting that the word “movement,” in its explicit political context, lacks a concrete definition, and, as such, “risks compromising our choices and strategies.” With the operative organizing concept undefined from the beginning, Agamben seems to ask, how can any political action that arises from its conceptualization be possible? This ambiguity raises a number of questions in itself: How does one differentiate between so-called ‘democratic’ movements—labor, political, social? How does a movement begin or end? And, perhaps most importantly—where are they going?

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Democracy in Practice: Intelligent Design v. Evolution

I'm currently reading Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. The book is a terrific read and a complete horror show. In a chapter on so-called intelligent design, Goldberg discusses a document called "The Wedge Strategy," a five year plan for attacking evolution and pushing so-called intelligent design. She writes:

The plan, then, is to undermine the Enlightenment conception of the physical world as a prelude to undermining the Enlightenment's social legacies. What the authors of "The Wedge Strategy" want to discredit isn't just Charles Darwin--it's the very idea that truth can be ascertained without reference to the divine. Religious law makes much more sense when religion is seens as the foundation of reality.

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Fleeting Demos (How I learned to love democracy)

A funny thing happened on my way to a contribution.  I found I had nothing to say.  I thought I had something to say, but it turns out - this shouldn't come as a surprise - that nope, not a thing of value.   I read what had already been posted and was struck by how different were the conceptualizations of democracy being put forward.  So, in a very short post, I tried to hint at the notion that perhaps democracy is precisely the form of government or subject of government that corresponds best to contesting its content.  But I also offered an afterthought, that perhaps democracy is the form of government that best maintains the hyphen seen in the ethico-political.  Adam insightfully suggested that these were indeed the same definition, something that I think is true, more or less.

It's worth exploring this definitional co-identity further, but before I do so, I want to offer some context.  And so, contrary to my normal giddy theoreticism, I want to try some personal backstory.

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Lustrum

[This is a guest post by Brett Neilson, from Life During Wartime.]

In ancient Rome the completion of the census every five years was marked by a ceremony known as the lustrum. Three animals (a bull, a sheep and a pig) were led around a group of assembled citizens by people with luck-bringing names such as Felix or Dives. After this, the animals were sacrificed to Mars. Overseen by one of the two censors, magistrates responsible not only for the census but also for the upkeep of public morality, the occasion marked a renewal of public affairs and the ritual purification of the state.

It is tempting to understand the modern census as a similar exercise of state purification. The rendering of flesh and blood as statistical construct, the casting of individuals as undifferentiated atoms distributed through abstract space and time, the reduction of complex lived relations to cycles, curves and pyramids: all suggest the cleansing of social and cultural messiness in the name of regularity and probability. But it would be a mistake to claim that quantitative knowledge, any more than its qualitative counterpart, necessarily serves as an instrument of domination. Whether one enumerates or whether one qualifies is surely not the issue, particularly when it comes to assessing the links between demography and democracy. At stake is rather how these processes combine to circumscribe the demos, at a time when this bordering is becoming ever more militarised and violent.

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Twilight of the Idols

[This is a guest post from Carlos Rojas, from The Naked Gaze]

In 2001-2002, Great Britain, the birthplace of modern democracy, gave the world another institution grounded on the popular vote: the television show “Pop Idol,” which allowed audience members to vote on their favorite amateur singer. Although “Pop Idol” was suspended after its second season, it nevertheless spawned wildly successful imitations throughout the globe, including the US (2002), Australia (2003), Canada (2003), and China (2005), among many others.

Where ever they go, “Pop Idol” spin-offs inevitably inspire comparisons with the democratic process—a phenomenon frequently referred to as “Idol Democracy.” For instance, the press quickly noted that more votes were in “American Idol’s” season finale this past March than have been cast for any single candidate in any US presidential election (Ronald Reagan came closest, in 1984, with 54.4 million). Similarly, when 400 million viewers watched (and 8 million text message votes were cast in) the August 27th finale of the second season of China’s spin-off, “Super Girl” (超级女声), both Chinese and foreign pundits were quick to ask whether this might herald the beginning of a true democratic reform. (For instance, the Economist reported that “A front-page headline last week in the state-run [English-language] Beijing Today put the question with astonishing frankness: “Is Super Girl a Force for Democracy?” [see also here and here). Finally, one of the most intriguing examples of a marriage of “Idol” voting and democracy can perhaps be found in the 2004 British ITV show “Vote for Me,” which used a “Pop Idol” approach to select 10 potential parliamentary candidates.

Although the implications of this sort of Idol-inspired “dial-in democracy” are not without interest, I will focus here instead on the way in which the “Pop Idol” shows underscore two other, somewhat more troubling, facets of modern democracies. 

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extension du domaine de la lutte

I'm a bit daunted, now, by the passage that I breezily told Angela I'd deal with for this symposium. It's from E.M. Forster's Howards End (1910), and it deals with a central character of the work - or, better, a character whose centrality to the work is very much the question, the issue, at play.

Leonard Bast is 21 when the novel opens, something of a would-be social and intellectual climber, an auto-didact, who has somehow pinned himself on to the Schlegel sisters, who fascinate him as avatars of cultural capital and unearned income. (The "umbrella" in the passage below refers to an embarrassing incident, fraught with class-anxiety, that occurs when Leonard first meets the sisters...)

The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more. He knew that he was poor, and would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food. Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming, "All men are equal--all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas," and so he was obliged to assert gentility, lest he slipped into the abyss where nothing counts, and the statements of Democracy are inaudible.

It's an interesting passage, very tough to pin down the narrator's tone here, the degree of affiliation or remove from Bast's own sense of things. Our first response might be that Forster says Democracy when he really means Capitalism. This anxiety that haunts Bast, the necessity of constantly scrambling, constantly reinforcing the foundations of the self, lest he slip into the "abyss" is not, of course, a matter of political self-representation or governmental organization, but rather a matter of market forces, economic liberalism, and individual gumption. Or, if were more politically charitable to Forster, then he means us to hear the euphemistic usage of the word Democracy as euphemistic. And then there is the reactionarily nostalgia, ironized or not, for "the brightly coloured civilizations of the past." It is true, even if it doesn't mean all that much, that were Leonard born under pre-democratic / capitalistic feudalism, he at least wouldn't have suffered from this anxiety about the abyss - either in it or not, but no nervousness about climbing and falling. And, it follows, why leathern wings, exactly? The angel of democracy, as it grants the ability to fly, also turns the classes satanic, naturally unnatural?

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Neocon Clusterfuck in Middle East (open thread)

"...in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel...it is sentimental to discuss the subject of war, or peace, without acknowledging that a great many people enjoy war–not only the idea of it, but the fighting itself."

"....somthing frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime..."
-Doris Lessing

Post-oracular hypothesis:  that no thinking person would honestly dispute the distinction between a free-wheeling, cultural-political, descriptive or generic or even centuries-old genetic "desire" for (what will become of the concept of) "war," and someone ignorantly wishing it to happen, or for that matter, refusing the responsibility that comes with power, and for  having significantly, predictably, knowingly, and against the consensus wisdom merely prescient of the glaringly obvious, helped it to happen.  The very intensity and stakes of the current 'crisis' (what makes it new–though never purely original–this time) have everything to do with a certain pressure on 'democracy,' it seems to me.

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Dictatorship of the proletariat

[This is a guest post by Nate Holdren, from Whatinthehell.]

The current discussion here on democracy includes two posts I like very much on thinkers who I've recently encountered and who I find provocative and compelling, Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou. I had planned to engage with both in my post. Happily, much of what I'd wanted to say has been said in these fine posts, and more clearly than I'd been able to say it. This frees me up to focus solely on Louis Althusser, an important figure for both Ranciere and Badiou.

Althusser decried the abandonment by the French Communist Party (PCF) of the category "dictatorship of the proletariat," or, in a formulation he preferred, the domination by the proletarian class of the bourgeoisie.

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Shared Processes

(This is a guest post by Eric Beck, from Recording Surface.]

Seeing as how the contributors so far to the democracy symposium have addressed the current conjuncture, the problems, failures, and relevance of democracy, using more or less contemporary philosophers as their springboards, I feel like a bit of a cornball using a 150-year-old economic text. Anyway, a warning of sorts.

The first dozen pages of the part of Grundrisse now known as the Chapter on Capital--but which Marx himself, significantly or not, called the Chapter on Money as Capital--represent Marx's most extended, albeit obscure, commentary on the relation between capital and democracy that I'm aware of. The long second paragraph of the section begins:

[I]t is in the character of the money relation...that all inherent contradictions of bourgeois society appear extinguished in money relations as conceived in a simple form; and bourgeois democracy even more than the bourgeois economists takes refuge in this aspect (the latter are at least consistent enough to regress to even simpler aspects of exchange value and exchange) in order to construct apologetics for the existing economic relations.

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(democratic?) multitudes good and bad

The question regarding democracy is whether or not we can imagine an anti-democratic, or better non-democratic, politics.  In other words, is politics tied to democracy, or can it be imagined beyond democracy?

(A supplementary question might then be whether or not we can and should imagine a beyond to politics itself: a post-politics.)

The prevailing consensus would seem to be that politics is unimaginable without democracy, that it is only democracy that opens up the possibility for politics.  Without democracy, all we are left with is (variously, or perhaps in combination) power, administration, fanaticism, hatred.

Such is the view of Ernesto Laclau, but also, for instance, Jacques Rancière, who writes:

There is politics, the art and science of politics, because there is democracy.  Politics is encountered as already present in the factuality of democracy, in the very strangeness of the combination of words which joins the unassignable quantity of the demos to the indefinable action of kratein.  (On the Shores of Politics 94)

Rancière traces the mixed fortunes of both politics and democracy from its invention in Athens to the current "end of politics." 

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Generic Democracy

In “Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy” (from 1998’s Abrégé de métapolitique, translated as Metapolitics), Badiou claims that since the historical collapse of socialist States, it is now ‘forbidden’ not to be a democrat.  Certainly this silent edict resonates with anyone who was still at school during Glasnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Apartheid (the emerging horrors of Yugoslavia and, a little later, Rwanda, not quite proper subjects for inclusion in this delight in our unified new world, which resembled nothing so much as a Benetton advert without the controversy).   The school projects we were given, the compiling of newspaper clips to present to the rest of the class skipped merrily around certain key concepts: multiculturalism, the liberalisation of information, meritocracy.   Democracy as a kind of inevitable magic glue slinking its slow and binding way across continents.   A consensus all the more successful for its relative lack of content – were we really ever told what democracy was?   A vote every four years from 18-onwards?   Or perhaps something like a projected benevolence on the part of our hard-working, egalitarian leaders that implied that we no longer had to worry about the rest of the world being a threat, so that our major approach could forevermore be a species of apolitical pity and concern: the starving children of Africa, the ‘victims’ of natural disasters, the intermittent Western ‘enjoyment’ - Live Aid to Live 8 - that took it upon itself, to help out, though with the proviso that we never look back, never acknowledge any role in any particular situation:   ‘this is the 21^st century, fergodsake!’ It is no surprise that in the narration of this drama, mediated by the self-disguising gelatinous medium of Democratic nations, the opposite of ‘victim’ can only be something so immeasurably evil that we can only play poker with it, as if gaming with the very Devil himself.

The Marxist critique of ‘democracy’ seems relatively straightforward.  If the aim of politics is the withering away of the State, then bourgeois democracy and even proletarian democracy (the dictatorship of the proletariat) as forms of State organisation can only be understood as unfinished stages on the way to something that dispenses with power and its representation, not to mention private property, altogether:   ‘This is what we might call generic communism’ states Badiou.   Democracy for Marxism is presented by Badiou as neither a properly philosophical word (it remains tied to consensus and opinion, thus sophistic), nor a properly political one (its ultimate aim is not classless generic communism, the free association of men and women, ‘the complete return of humankind to itself as social’, to use the language of the Marx of 1844).

There is, nevertheless, in the very early work of Marx a certain defence of a moment of democracy that also depends on a certain conception of the generic which deserves some explanation. 

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Reading democracy

A belated introduction.  In some ways, a symposium on democracy at Long Sunday has been a long time coming.  Various discussions between contributors, here and at associated blogs, have hovered around or dealt with this theme over the last year or so.  And, it seems, this current symposium on democracy follows a thread through previous LS symposia: from Walter Benjamin's considerations of violence, written between the Treaty of Versailles and the electoral ascendancy of the National Socialists to government in Germany – to the symposium on Mario Tronti, who in his recent writings argues that the critique of democracy is the most urgent of tasks – to Gayatri Spivak and the play of differences that remain irreducible to universal tendencies – and, not least, the most recent symposium on Carl Schmitt, for whom democracy is not commensurate with liberalism but, instead, the sovereignty of the people (ein Volk).  Indeed, does it not also relate to previous discussions of solidarity and populism?

This is in no way to suggest that all of the contributions to the series of Long Sunday symposia have explored these threads, although some have. It is, however, to suggest that there is something of a conversation here, undertaken in quite different ways and from different perspectives, that nevertheless has, at this time, turned to the question of democracy as a question.

Is this because this is a time in which the military export of democracy coincides with the recourse to democratic principles in the very critique of that war or, from another perspective, when – as Agamben puts it – the threshold between democracy and the state of exception blurs into indistinction.  But this, of course, is only to raise one aspect of what is at stake or seen to be so.

Given democracy is such an immense topic, we envisaged that each of the contributions would take a text or writer on democracy, using it as a point of departure or simply providing a reading of what the text or writers brings to a conversation on democracy. To that end, the provisional schedule of posts, at this stage is:

Friday: Jodi (Zizek) | Saturday:  Jon (Ranciere and/or Laclau) | Sunday:  Adam K (Nancy); IT (Badiou/Marx) |  Monday: Eric (Marx) | Tuesday: Carlos (Brown)  | Wednesday: Matthew C (Derrida and/or Levinas); Adam T (Blanchot/Derrida) | Thursday: Nate (Althusser and/or Ranciere) |  Friday: Craig (Lefort) | Saturday: Angela (?). 

There are three other contributors who have yet to schedule in their posts: CR (on Forster's Howard's End), Brett, and Matt (on Derrida) - but, as with previous symposia, the schedule is tentative and likely to sort itself out as the week proceeds.  Contributions on Arendt, Agamben, Mouffe, Tocqueville - or any other text (theoretical, literary or without deferral to such distinctions) - that is of relevance to the discussion on democracy would also be appreciated.  (If you're interested, drop in a comment here - and the same goes for administrative queries, timeswapping, etc.)

We hope the contributions spark discussion, debate, musings and meanderings.

[Craig + Angela]

Democracy: Two Truncated Definitions

Democracy :   

• as regulative ideal
• as aspirational ideal
• as empty space
• as end of the body politic

• in need of reform
• to come
• inadequate to the task (what task?)

• deliberative
• radical
• liberal
• procedural

Attempts at Definition:

1. The form of government most constituted by the contesting of its content.
2. Or alternately, the form of government that best maintains the hyphen separating the ethico from the political.

Legitimacy

Speaking of legitimation, ethics and so on, and to perhaps encourage someone to explore Hannah Arendt's work on democracy further:

it is quite conceivable that one fine day a highly organised and mechanised humanity will conclude quite democratically - namely by majority decision - that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.  - from The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Approaches to democracy

•  It's a decision procedure. It's just a way to decide who should rule. At one time, the decision procedure was: pick as monarch the first male person to come out of so-and-so's womb. The great thing about decision procedures is that if they are widely accepted, there's no need to fight over who the next leader will. This is not small benefit, given the struggles that result when such procedures are not at hand or not sufficiently legitimated

Continue reading “Approaches to democracy”

Dead Man's Chest

Based on a song from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the subtitle of Gore Verbinski's newest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, “Dead Man’s Chest,” is actually a pun. Taken literally, it refers to the chest cavity of Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), the (un)dead captain of the Flying Dutchman. Jones’ torso is of interest here because it is actually empty—Jones having carved out his own heart due to loneliness (or heartbreak), locked it in an elaborate wooden chest, and then buried on a remote island. In this way, Jones was attempting to rid himself of a potential weakness, but in practice he succeeds only in displacing and externalizing that vulnerability. The heart, together with the (wooden) chest now containing it, therefore, become Jones’ Achilles heel, insofar as the destruction of the heart will cause Jones to lose his powers, and all of those (dead or undead) who have previously sold their souls to him would thereby be released from their debts.

Among those who had sold their souls to Davy Jones is the movie’s protagonist, Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), who previously made a Mephistophelean pact with Jones in order to acquire his ship, the Black Pearl. Now that his debt has come due (condemning Sparrow to spend a century working on Jones’ ghost ship), Sparrow’s only hope lies in finding the buried chest (and the heart it contains), and destroying it.

Although ostensibly a sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbinski, 2003), Dead Man’s Chest can perhaps be more profitably viewed as an unorthodox sequel to Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 animated feature, Howl’s Moving Castle (Hauru no ugoku shiro). In particular, Castle, like Chest, revolves around a displaced heart—in this case, that of the sorcerer Howl (voiced by Takuya Kimura in the Japanese version, and by Christian Bale in the English), who dreams longingly of a fantastic moving castle. In an exquisite moment of wish-fulfillment, Howl’s own heart is then transferred to a falling star, which then becomes animated as the fire demon Calcifer—the soul and furnace of the gothic “moving castle” which Howl had dreamed of possessing. This displaced heart then comes to assume an unanticipated significance when Howl is joined by Sophie (Chieko Baisho/Emily Mortimer, Jean Simmons)—a girl who has been transformed into an old lady by a curse, but who subsequently travels with Howl in the castle and effectively "steals his heart."

In both movies, therefore, disembodied hearts function to distance their former owners from their own feelings and desires (and, arguably, moral centers), and in return help them to achieve an unprecedented mobility and autonomy (viz., Jones’ Flying Dutchman, Howl’s moving castle and, at one remove, Sparrow’s ship, the Black Pearl, which he will lose if he does not succeed in finding Jones’ heart). Equally importantly, just as these disembodied hearts are located at the periphery of the embodied subject, similarly the vehicles which they help to secure circulate at the margins of the national/imperial body politic. Both Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones, for instance, are pirates (albeit a ghostly one, in the case of Jones) operating on the margins of the seventeenth century British empire, and Howl, formerly the prized apprentice of the English king’s head sorceress, also moves pirate-like through the kingdom in his ambulatory castle, declining requests that he lend his formidable powers to the king to help win the war (based on a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, the movie appears to be set in Britain during an unspecified war reminiscent of WWI) .

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Possible? Maybe. Necessary? No.

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.

Continue reading “Possible? Maybe. Necessary? No.”

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.

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The Two Politicals

1. A number of commentators have speculated on the relationship between the people, the state and the political in Carl Schmitt’s political theory. Some, of course, have pointed out that this is a futile task: on the one hand, the English translation of The Concept of the Political is of the second edition and not the apparently decisive third and, on the other hand, the situation in the Weimar Republic is hardly comparable to our own. Thus, in one case we are told not to speak because of a lack of information and in the other case we are told not to speak because of the inherent difficulties in transposing concepts developed in one conjuncture to another. Readers of Carl Schmitt should, apparently, remain silent. (Indeed, some critics would prefer that Schmitt not be discussed at all.) And, yet, non-stop chatter, discussion and inquiries. The present 'symposium' is, by some measures, the most successful to date: it looks as though it will last the entire month featuring a diversity of contributions (many unduly neglected!) from a wide spectrum of contributors.

Continue reading “The Two Politicals”

Introduction: Carl Schmitt

In place of something substantive...

"Anybody who is at all committed to liberal democracy does not at all need to read Carl Schmitt." - Kurt Sontheimer

Introduction - First, I would like to thank everyone who has agreed to contribute a short piece or scattered thoughts on Carl Schmitt's essay, "Theory of the Partisan," which will likely end up dominating Long Sunday content for about the next week.  I am especially greatful because this is, by far, the longest piece yet proposed for a symposium and, therefore, the time committments I've asked of people is, most certainly, unreasonable.  I look forward to reading the posts!  Second, if you have not volunteered to post something, but would still like to or would like to contribute a more detailed response to an individual (or series!) of posts than can be adequately done through comment threads, then please do contact me and we'll arrange something.

The texts under discussion can be found here: from the New Centennial Review and Telos; two journals which incidentally published translations - with some interesting differences - of the same text in the same year.  A bibliography of Carl Schmitt's works in English can be found here.

Additionally, this post can be used as an 'open thread' regarding administrative matters, comments, etc that do not fit into the already existing posts.

Continue reading “Introduction: Carl Schmitt”

Resistance with irony

The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, blogger at the irregular Life During Wartime.

1. ‘Triumphant global finance capital/world trade can only be resisted with irony.’ I am simultaneously drawn and worried by this claim from Spivak’s 2000 essay ‘From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory.’ Perhaps this is because the work of irony is never done. Reaching on the one hand toward insubordinate refusal and on the other toward an unbearable ontological lightness, irony holds forth a promise it cannot keep. As such, it provides no chart of programmatic action--no twelve steps for overcoming global capitalism. Its tactics are inevitably polluted with ideological longings that, as Spivak’s teacher Paul de Man points out, it can know but never quite overcome.

Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world

Is this precisely the impossibility that drives Spivak to rewrite her observations on reading Marx after Derrida so many times?

Continue reading “Resistance with irony”

Four notes on the periphery of a speculative morphology

1. "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" is, perhaps, for those who arrive at it from literature, cultural studies, philosophy or similar, Spivak's most 'difficult' or elusive of essays. It seems to be the one that, more than any other, makes readers blink, their eyes glaze over.

Sometimes, at best, this is expressed as a bewilderment as to what might be at stake in the argument or, as a slightly different question, as a consideration of what is at put at stake in reading at a particular conjuncture. At other times, with a more or less implicit embarrassment that Spivak herself notes, the readers' gaze is averted from the discussion of 'economics', or better: labour-power and value - which is to say, that which is least familiar and proper to the aforementioned disciplines but which, as it turns out, the essay is about.  Other times, still, the confusion that results from Spivak's indisciplined writing cuts the other way. But, indeed, "before there is language, there are languages", as someone would say  (though, it remains to ask whether this statement exists in its temporal, integrative sense, as the hope or promise of a lingua franca).

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Discovery (The Social II)

(Second in a series of short thoughts.)

The discovery of society introduces a radical break into history.  It is co-extensive with the destruction of what Michel Foucault calls the 'classic episteme' and the birth of the 'modern episteme'; "it is a radical event that is distributed across the entire visible surface of knowledge."  Foucault's periodization of the break suggests certain problems -- problems that are common to his entire school limiting 'the social' primarily to statistical regularities and, in the case of Donzelot, 'the policing of families' through 'social work'.  On the one hand, 'society' had been mobilized as a term designating what we might want to call a club or association; that is, a group formed between the 'public' and the 'private' for specific purposes.  In this way, The Royal Society, founded in 1660 stands out as a marker of a new use of the word.  Yet, for these natural scientists, 'society' had as of yet to be discovered.  What remains certain, however, is that by 1748, when Charles Louis de Secondat (the Baron de Montesquieu) published The Spirit of the Laws that 'society' had been discovered in the epynomous concept.  And, certainly, by 1789 it was taken for granted that society was an object of action; that is, it could both act -- society could make demands -- and, on the other hand, it could be acted upon -- society could have demands made against it.

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The Social

Radical politics and neo-liberalism most fully interpenetrate one another in the figures of Ernesto Laclau and Margaret Thatcher.  (One shudders at the thought of their bastard offspring -- and rightly so, do we not find that figure in Tony Blair's ideologue, Anthony Giddens?)  Making parallel but inverse claims, both Laclau and Thatcher assert the death of the social in their aphoristic philosophy. On the one hand, Laclau proudly informs us that "society is impossible" and, on the other hand, Thatcher smugly proclaims "there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families".  While their politics, presumably, do not coincide, the basis of their politics do. According to Laclau, "'Society' is not a valid object of discourse".  This is to say that the referrent of 'society' cannot be 'fixed' and any attempt to 'fix' the meaning of 'society' is an instance of 'hegemony' -- the imposition of a false universal.  For Laclau to claim that society is impossible is to claim that demands cannot be made in the name of society or against society.  Thatcher fully agrees with this analysis.  Asserting that there are, on one hand, individuals and, on the other hand, families, Thatcher is arguing for a stringent division between the public and the private.  Thus, publically, people interact as individuals on the market and, privately, people interact intimately in morality. Morality, 'Victorian values', and 'family values' are equivalent: moral demands can only be made against intimates.  All other demands -- those that occur in public -- take on a market form and are thus most fully resolved through tort law.  Either way, society as a moral domain, one able to make demands on individuals and groups and one subject to demands by individuals and groups does not exist; indeed, it cannot.

Consequently, making demands in the name of the social; that is, asserting the priority of the social over other forms of organization, especially the economy, is, from this perspective, both the most criminal and the most naive thing one could say.  To assert the social is to destroy neo-liberalism.

Continue reading “The Social”

When will this labour end?

Labouring against work. Mulling over the contributions and remarks made during the course of these readings, this is what strikes me as the first paradox, which is also the specific paradox of abstract labour and concrete labours that, in turn, characterises Marx's distinctive account of capitalism, that which brings all others paradoxes to the fore and makes them boil over. It's all about specificity, the difference and the cut. And is there anything more paradoxical than communism, a class politics that gears itself toward the abolition of class society? Operaismo - ie., workerism - against work. And Tronti's essay is nothing if not paradoxical.

Who would have guessed that a discussion of the refusal of work would result in so much toil?

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How No Can You Go?

(The following is a guest essay by Keith Tilford, author of the weblog Metastable Equilibrium.  It is very long but, like everything on Long Sunday, hardly bored, or boring.  Update:  Part II is now here.)

Michael Blum, still from "Wandering Marxwards", 1999

What follows definitely took some liberties with a reading of Tronti.  I used “The Strategy of The Refusal” more as a point of departure than anything else, as I wanted to focus generally on the notion of refusal – on its creative/inventive capacities - and attempt to make visible some of the relationships between art practices since the 1960’s and the trajectory of operaismo and autonomia along with the theoretical works that have come out of Italy.  So perhaps in the spirit of Zizek’s book on Deleuze that he didn’t write, this can be my post on Tronti that I didn’t write.  The post is divided into four parts, the first two will be here at LS, but because of excessive length I’ll be posting the last two parts over at my blog if the reader is interested (one is a more in depth consideration of the work of artist Francis Alys, and the other on “anorectic subjectivities” which acts as a kind of conclusion).  This is really part of a wider research interest of mine, but I am very pleased that this symposium took place since it gave me the chance to return to some of those interest.  Call this a draft, then. Many of the themes taken up in the second part of this post are also adressed in Howard Slater's essay "The Spoiled Ideals of Lost Situations", which is meant to accompany a reading of the book Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, where most of the artist's writings I've used can be found.  Two artists that I have not been able to squeeze into this, but would highly recommend that anyone interested with what’s being said here check out are Thomas Hirschhorn (see here) and especially Santiago Sierra (a little about him here).  Also, I should point out that while the word “practice” appears throughout, many artists today (including myself) really don’t like this word.  I’ll skip giving reasons for the moment.  Perhaps Ranciere’s “ways of doing and making within the aesthetic regime of the arts” would have been better, though long-winded – and out of laziness I have not yet modified any of that.  However, the word does appear in inverted commas at several points, which I’m sure Matt will appreciate.

I. Double-Headed Histories

"Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults into a terrain of particles each containing its own void." – Robert Smithson

"The clear division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history impossible as well as a science of history." – Jacques Ranciere

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