Democracy Today: Four Maxims

Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM Theory & Event Theory & Event Volume 13, Issue 2, 2010 Johns Hopkins University Press Article Viewed Save View Citation Additional Information Democracy Today: Four Maxims Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo — (bio) Worldwide, the summer of 2009 was a throwback. The world witnessed Manuel Zelaya getting ousted in Honduras – in what seemed an anachronism in the post-cold war era – by a coup d’ état, with a mild reproach by the United States. Even so, a!er some additional rebuking by the international community, Zelaya remained out of o"ice. Coeval with this, an election, the minimal marker of democracy, was blatantly stolen in Iran, with Ayatollahs in tow, to the temporary outrage of the west; of course, the same west that scolded the Afghan elites was silent about the fact that during the same week in which the photo of the young Iranian woman killed in the streets of Tehran was widely circulating the web, a death that was prominent enough to elicit a public lament from Obama, as well as the outrage of bien-pensant liberals, US drones killed 60 people in Pakistan, including women and children. https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 1 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM Likewise, stealthily or overtly, the war on terror has been extending to Pakistan, a move that has gone hand in glove with the escalation of the war in Afghanistan – the latter garnered a headline in Il Manifesto about the homologies between Afghanistan and Vietnam; and all of it by the newly minted president, who a few months later became a Nobel laureate for peace, thus lending a new lease of credibility to the benign face of American imperium, even if the war on terror is now Obama’s war (the continuous reliance on the mercenary armies of Blackwater has also become his). And this is without dwelling on the collusion of western democracies with on-going anti-democratic practices that their very ordinariness and dreariness render invisible, such as the apartheid occupation in Israel that e"ectively keeps the Palestinian population at the threshold of a humanitarian catastrophe; or the less violent, but no less deplorable unbroken occupation of Cyprus and the EU’s collusion in it. Not to dwell too much on the on-going corruption and thuggery of the likes of Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin, and Álvaro Uribe. Obviously, both Zelaya and Iran were swi!ly routed o" the networks by the sudden death of a global king, Michael Jackson. And yet, we live in democratic times. At least this is the strange message one not only hears in the corridors of power in the west and across the political spectrum, but also among intellectuals: at one pole of the political spectrum the Freedom House celebrates the twentieth century as “the democratic century”; on the other, we have figures of impeccable le!ist credentials, like Tom Nairn who asserts the awesome spread of democracy and the possibility of recasting a democratic form of national identity even if the spread of democracy has implied diluting it of substance. Also on the le!, one finds the wide-eyed miraculism of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s now complete trilogy (Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth), who despite having European, mostly French and Italian theoretical signposts, is drenched with chronic American upbeatness and the pieties of the “can do” credo whose popularity is in inverse proportions with its political import. Equally folded in the pieties of US political trajectory is Hardt and Negri’s account of US political form (the enthusiasm to the United States found its highest pitch in Empire, but the two sequels are not entirely bere! of it).1 And, finally, no less than the doyen of critical theory, Jürgen Habermas, has become a champion of humanitarian interventions and of postnational orders, such as the EU: an exercise in elite and oligarchic power whose main https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 2 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM achievement has been the expansion to the East, even if this entailed inclusion in a common market, not democratic incorporation. Of course, this is without dwelling on the political dearth of his conception of “deliberative democracy.” An illustrative recent example lending credence to the expression “we are all democrats now” is found in John Keane’s 2009 mammoth, The Life and Death of Democracy. This highly praised tome combines a sweeping narrative on the travails of democracy that while not bere! of local insights is thoroughly marred by a failed attempt at a demotic, chatty idiom – early on, referring to the citizenry of ancient Athens he writes, “the agora was their viagra”; later on, democracy is characterized as a “dominatrix” – and lack of conceptual and historical rigor.2 In it, he proposes a very fitting conception of democracy for post-political times, the idea of a “monitory democracy”: a thinning of democracy that is nothing less than the unpolitical temptation that the post-1991 (post-political) new nomos of the earth has conjured up, the proliferation of non-political, depoliticized networks, groups and institutions that in the hands of, say, Pierre Rosanvallon, is disingenuously theorized as democratic, even though in Rosanvallon’s case, such theorization is part and parcel of the French liberal quest for normalizing democracy by means of celebrating the unpolitical – and thus undemocratic – grounding of democracy that dispenses with any sense of meaningful shared power. Again, it echoes the pleas for the unpolitical not only found in Rosanvallon, but also prevalent in the recent writings of Philip Pettit, one of the doyens of contemporary “republicanism” (not to dwell on the Italian variants, from Massimo Cacciari to Roberto Esposito). In this way, the monitory, like the unpolitical, depoliticizes, and yet in the hands of Keane and Rosanvallon it presumably enhances democracy.3 The “monitory” variant, to be sure, is yet another adjective to qualify democracy, to make it stable and reliable, a rather disingenuous move that has a long pedigree in the history of western political thought. In Keane’s rendering, “Monitory democracy is a new historical form of democracy, a variety of ‘post-parliamentary’ politics defined by the rapid growth of many di"erent kinds of extra-parliamentary, power scrutinizing mechanisms. [ ... ] [Power-monitoring inventions] prompt much talk of ‘empowerment’, ‘high energy democracy’, ‘stake-holders’, ‘participatory governance’, and ‘deliberate democracy’; and they help spread, o!en for the first time, a culture of voting into many walks of life. Monitory democracy is the age of surveys, focus https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 3 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM groups, deliberative polling, online petitions and audience and customer voting.”4 If it not were for the popularity of the ideological conceits found in these formulations, one could claim that this book borders on the comic. Likewise, in a book aiming at historical and analytical comprehensiveness – there are not, to be sure, many studies that range from Athens in the fi!h century BCE to Papa Guinea in the twentieth century; even so, this comprehensive survey fails to mention Salvador Allende in Chile, or the Haitian revolution and its role in the abolition of slavery, while it celebrates Israeli democracy and only mentions the sabotaging of the 2006 elections of Hamas in a cursory note with no bearing on the overall narrative – there is no sustained account of the role of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and its inhabitance of a variety of political forms such as liberal democracy, or neoliberalism, in the story of democracy he tells; let alone a consideration of how the chosen metaphors and nomenclature, not to speak of their surrogates, used to explain “monitory democracy” unveil the thinness of this theorization. The general tenor of Keane’s The Life and Death of Democracy places it within that strange scholarly field in academic Anglo-American political theory that travels under the label “democratic theory,” but whose historical lineages have been not to theorize ways of enacting democracy, but to tame it, thus making it congenial to the powers of the day.5 As a fitting conception of democracy that attests to its own powerlessness, and that of ordinary people in the present political juncture, monitory democracy becomes a substitute, or better still a crutch, to try to cope with forms of power that have rendered substantive democracy anachronistic. It seeks to provide solace in an otherwise inhospitable present. Keane’s book suggests that postdemocracy is not such; instead, we have the unpolitical raise of monitory democracy whose e"ect is that of trickling down accountability and voting: “‘monitory’ democracy is a ... form of democracy in which power-monitoring and powercontrolling devices have begun to extend sideways and downwards through the whole political order.” Their net e"ect of this cascade, we are told, “is of potentially bringing greater humility to the established model of party-led representative government and politics.”6 The latter, of course, is unreflectively celebrated, as if this spread of democracy was not the upshot of the thinning of its substance. Accordingly, the overall message is clear: market failures and inequalities might threaten democracy, but once our predicaments of power are looked upon from the https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 4 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM perspective of the proliferation of monitory mechanisms, our realities are not as bad as they initially seemed. Like in Rosanvallon’s recent work – especially in his ongoing trilogy, of which two installments are already available – Keane o"ers a plea suggesting that our present is not as bleak as one think; look upon from this other perspective, that of surrogates like counter-democracy and monitory democracy, and one would see that while imperfect democracy is alive and kicking. It is particularly revealing that while Keane’s book announces warnings about how fragile and devoid of guarantees democracy is and how monitory democracy hardly represents the deliverance of “paradise” on earth, nowhere does Keane o"er a sustained treatment of these challenges to monitory democracy. Instead, under the heading of “Bad Moons, Little Dreams” we are told that democracy is a “special way of life” (hence, not a political form). And at the end of this long journey we are given a bland set of new rules (which I may add are neither as insightful nor as funny as Bill Maher’s) and the warning that monitory democracy cannot be taken for granted; it is the heir of a transformation of democracy, from the times of the Aegean seas to the Euro-Atlantic experiments with representation to today, that has sought to tame power “as a way of life.”7 For all the sincerity of these hopes and aims, it is hard to fathom how could such a taming takes place when the forms of power imperiling democracy’s realization are not even thematized. Of course, there are less sanguine appraisals of the fate of democracy in the contemporary scene, such as those found in, say, Enrique Dussel, Luciano Canfora, Jacques Rancière, and Sheldon S. Wolin. But, for the most part, democracy has become center of gravity in post-political times insofar as its substance has been diluted. What is celebrated is arguably a shell of its former self. Hence, “we are all democrats now.” But a critique of the current hegemony of “democracy” in a world that is inhospitable to it needs to go beyond just unveiling the undemocratic conceits found in its celebration and recast democracy, not only as a way of reclaiming its radical edge, but as a way of delineating its history and, in light of it, ponder its future prospects. Democracy thus not recast as a “way of life” or as an ethos or sensibility, but as a political form. In what follows I o"er four maxims that constitute initial jottings for a rethinking of democracy, as well as a reclaiming of its critical valences, in post-political times. https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 5 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM 1. Liberal Democracy is a Myth This maxim is not meant to assert that liberal democracy is a myth in the sense of it having no existence, or of being an arcane idea or form inherited from sedimented, pre-modern traditions. Rather, what this maxim seeks to convey is at once simpler and more complex: liberal democracy is a myth in so far as it has become a form of “depoliticized speech.”8 That is, it is a myth in the sense famously thematized by the early Roland Barthes in his wonderful text, Mythologies. One needs not rehearse all the intricacies of Barthes’s semiotic treatment of myth to appreciate the extent in which his formulation shows the ways in which terms like liberal democracy become part of a synchronic political discourse bere! of its diachronic evolvement, whose function is precisely that of de-politicization. Su"ice it to say here that in Barthes’s coruscating formulation myth stands for “depoliticized speech.” A!er o"ering a series of wonderful disquisitions ranging from “wrestling” to “wine” and “milk” in French culture and then to “Einstein’s brain,” Barthes then proceeds to thematize the multifarious ways in which myth works politically. Myth is thus depicted “as a mode of signification, a form” that is a metalanguage devoid of its historical, diachronic evolvement. It is in that sense, Barthes claims, that myth “is always a languagerobbery.”9 It thus dehistoricizes its signified and hypostatizes the signified as a signifier despoiled of history. “When it becomes form,” he writes, “the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains.”10 Or as stated in another of Barthes’s oracular formulations (this time approvingly citing Marx): “Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all History. In it history evaporates.”11 But myth never is just a “lie,” let alone a devise of plain occlusion that a critic needs to unveil. Instead, in Barthes’ nuanced treatment myth is an “inflexion” that seeks to “naturalize” a signifier and thus hypostatize it.12 It is in that precise sense that liberal democracy is a myth. Its status as a signifier for democracy in the contemporary scene is one that relies on the depoliticization of democracy that current exaltations of the unpolitical, or of its monitory and counterdemocratic variants, further enable, especially when conjured in a post-political age of neutralizations rather than, say, in an age of hyperpoliticization. Barthes’s rendering of the political is central in understanding his formulation of myth and the claim of the mythical nature of liberal democracy and how it constitutes https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 6 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM depoliticizing speech. For as Barthes contends: “One must naturally understand political in its deeper meaning, as describing the whole of human relation in their real, social structure, in their power of making the world; one must above all give an active value to de-: here it represents an operational movement, it permanently embodies a defaulting.”13 In its deeper meaning, the political entails power: if the political form at stake is democracy, it entails sharing power to cope with predicaments in which the make up of collective, human endeavors is mediated by institutions and practices that embody and enact the forms of power that at once enable and constrain forms of political participation; in other words, the political and its surrogate, politicization, entail the idea that one’s predicaments are amenable to be refashioned by means of action. Democracy thus entails politicization; historically, it has meant the extension of the demos’ range of power to areas that were constitutive of human relations, but that were deemed outside its purview. When liberal democracy becomes a signifier for democracy, when it has historically sought to precisely depoliticize it, it has the e"ect of operating as a myth. A brief diachronic account of liberal democracy su"ices to sketch the political import of this first maxim.14 Historically, liberal democracy’s leitmotif has been depoliticization and the accommodation of demotic energies in a liberal framework, while seeking to tame them. Although more than a few liberals are fond of granting a pedigree to liberal democracy that goes back to the Thermidorian moment during the French Revolution (and some even less historically minded trace its lineages to the so-called Glorious revolution in England), a careful historical and conceptual elucidation of liberal democracy suggests a di"erent historical pedigree: like totalitarianism, it is of twentieth century provenance and probably its first sustained usage found expression in the early twentieth century at the hands of José Ortega y Gasset. Better still, what are o!en marshaled as the doyens of “liberal democracy” in the French scene, sometimes Tocqueville and more recently Constant, were far from being democrats. In more than one occasion these luminaries were willing to sacrifice democracy as a form for the sake of the always enticing, but equally elusive, political center on the basis of the political version of the “neither-nor” criticism famously criticized by Barthes.15 With di"erent accents and inflections, in France thinkers like Furet, Gauchet and Rosanvallon are the most prominent heirs. The liberal-democratic ideological conceit has had the e"ect of claiming democracy while constantly https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 7 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM shrinking it, or rendering democracy into a content that can be housed in liberal, non-democratic forms devoid of the political literacy demanded by democratic political tenets, such as sharing power and a robust, meaningful political equality.16 What, then, has lent credence to what is at best a twentieth century invention? Capitalism is part of an answer to this question. For liberal democracy exploited the formal separation of the economy and the political within capitalism and sought to incorporate the democratic demands while drying up the wells that initially nourished it through depoliticization; this, by sacrificing democracy for the sake of managerial values and securing the necessary stability for the expansion of capitalist imperatives. As Karl Polanyi famously explained in The Great Transformation, there has never been a pure market economy (something which, of course, Karl Marx thematized most e"ectively before anyone else). That is, despite the formal separation of the economic and the political the functioning of a capitalist economy has relied on Statist institutional frameworks and systems of coercion. Historically, capitalism has coexisted with these tensions as long as the autonomous logic of the political field does not violate the principle of e"icacy of the economic, even if it can intrude in it, and modify it, for its preservation. During the times of the New Deal and the Great Society, the political field enjoyed a relative degree of autonomy and the struggles that led to this conquest became objectified; no less so because of the existence of a total enemy, communism, structuring the political field. Hence, the emergence of the notion of liberal democracy and its depoliticizing impulses in the first half of the twentieth century – a political form that in the United States eventually found theoretical expressions in the writings of John Rawls. It is its elevation to the status of a myth that confers liberal democracy a conceptual stability and genealogical pedigree that it never had and what leads thinkers to posit the supposed tension that presumably exists between it and the neoliberalism that characterized much of the Atlantic world during the eighties and nineties. Commonplace narratives treat neoliberalism as a colonization of the political field by the imperatives of production of capitalism and its economic rationality. By the end of the twentieth century, or so the narrative goes, the field of the political was increasingly becoming colonized by these imperatives, or at least they pervade it less subtle ways. In a way, that is why Pierre Bourdieu, while reflecting on the eminent hegemony of neoliberalism in the nineties, asked for stern https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 8 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM politicization involving uncompromising democratic action as alternatives to the neoliberal predicament. Yet the set of political practices and discourses associated with the advent of liberal democracy fostered the depoliticization that neoliberalism has exploited to great e"ect. One way of retrieving the political import of democracy is to formally debunk the myth of liberal democracy and its hypostatization, especially by the Center-Le!, by reintroducing history to diachronically apprehend the depoliticizing drive found in its synchronic forms. Such debunking, however, entails thinking of democracy and liberal democracy as two distinct political forms. This seemingly formalist inflection will render it both more amenable to a critical historicization and would pave the way for a retrieval of democracy’s political edge.17 2. Democracy is Not an Ethos Even the most cursory look at what travels under the banner of democratic theory in Anglo-American academia, or what passes as theorizations of democracy, reveals the centrality of ethos in discussions of democracy and the increasing casting of the latter from the perspective of ethics. In Commonwealth, for instance, Hardt and Negri comfortably avow the predominantly ethical lineaments of their miraculous multitude by defining their project as “ethical,” one consisting of nothing less than “an ethics of democratic political action within and against empire.”18 And yet, even a politically astute thinker like cultural theorist Fredric Jameson blurbs this book as “a powerful and ambitious reappropriation of the whole tradition of political theory for the le!.” Hardt and Negri are hardly alone in the ethical bandwagon. The prevalence of ethical tropes, such as ethos and sensibility, in discussions of democracy are symptomatic of the onset of a post-political condition, whose emergence can be dated to the end of the cold war, the collapse of communism, and the demise of anticolonial nationalism. One need not be endorse the political choices of Carl Schmitt during the highest pitch of politicization in interwar Europe to appreciate the analytical power of his reflections on the onset of the age of neutralization and their relevance to understand https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 9 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM our current post-political age. Neutralization for Schmitt meant the absence of structuring conflict a!er the closure of an intense epoch of politicization, the erasure of political enmity that accompanied what he aptly call “the calm mood of restoration.”19 The onset of a New World Order was precisely such a period of restoration. A!er the end of history was proclaimed, new enemies emerged, to be sure. But these lines of enmity were primarily cultural or religious: witness Samuel Huntington’s vulgar culturalism. Either that or the lines of enmity were drawn in relation to the amorphous enemies to which the American polity waged war: first the war against drugs, followed by the war against terror. But an even more revealing instance is found in the transformation of emphases in the two commanding formulations of John Rawls’s liberal theory: from the centrality of redistribution in the initial formulations of “justice as fairness” and the salience of civil disobedience in A Theory of Justice (1971), to the centrality of the di"erent tribulations US Kulturkampf in Political Liberalism (1993). Likewise, at this juncture critics of the Kantian lineages of Rawlsian liberalism, and of its communitarian critics, have consistently emphasized the language of ethos in theorizing democracy. William E. Connolly’s liberalism is perhaps the more visible instance of it.20 But he is hardly alone. In what is the most sustained theorization of the centrality of ethos for “late modern” democracy, Stephen K. White has identified its salience as a trope in a variety of thinkers – alongside Connolly one finds G. A. Cohen, Richard Bernstein, Chantal Mou"e, and James Tully, among others – even while he acknowledges that its widespread usage “is not always matched by clarity of meaning.”21 Indeed. But irrespective of the multifarious meanings adjudicated to it one thing is clear: most of these theorizations and usages bracket out what Tully has aptly called “the mainstay of political theory”: the forms of power crystallized in the democratic and constitutional arrangements that frame the scenes in which citizens act.22 In perhaps the most compelling formulation of the critical import of “ethos,” Tully further asserts that ethos refers to “a mode of civic conduct.” And this is a mode of civic conduct that he thematizes, by way of Arendt, Foucault and Wittgenstein, as necessary for the sustenance of political freedom. By emphasizing how a political form relies on a specific ethos, one is able see what forms of citizen participation and self-governance enact and transform the political form in question. Tully, to his credit, avoids collapsing the nature of a political form https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 10 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM with a focus on the ethos that helps to sustain or transform it. Yet, as a form of civic conduct, an ethos also authorizes a political form and its practices of power, not just enacts or transforms it. Accordingly, an ethos cannot be theorized in isolation. Rather, there is a dialectic between ethos and political form. To avow one and not the other impairs the ability to reckon with structural questions of power. A political form is enacted, authorized and modified by an ethos, but the latter’s fidelity to the former is what renders it politically concrete. Stated somewhat di"erently, democracy certainly requires what is nowadays christened as a political ethos: a democratic citizenry cultivates and tends a political sensibility that is the correlate of the political literacy that the sustenance of democratic political forms requires. But neither the content of democracy nor its form can be reduced to it. In predicaments mediated by forms of power that are everything but democratic, embarking in solipsistic elucidations of modes of conduct amount to a depletion of democracy at the level of theory that is consonant with the depletion of democracy in the myth of liberal democracy and its practical widespread. Or, to put it more starkly, there is a homology between the hypostatization of ethos at the level of theory and the onset of a post-political age in which depoliticizing liberal democracy has become a hegemonic myth. All in all, the reduction of the scope of democratic theorization to forging an ethos is a tacit admission of powerlessness at best and a depoliticizing move at worst. For a theorization of an ethos of democracy to be politically meaningful, it cannot dispense with a theorization of democracy as a robust political form. Without the latter, theorizations of ethos are bound to remain abstract, to say the least. Even so, a question emerges: if democracy cannot be reduced to an ethos or a sensibility, does that entail a complete disavowal of ethics in political life? Hardly. Instead, what it entails is the avowal of a political ethic (una poliética, in the more felicitous Spanish expression found in the writings of Francisco Fernández Buey) in the tradition of Thucydides, Machiavelli, Weber, Gramsci, and Weil. Not all of which were democrats, to be sure, but thinkers that forged a sense of political literacy as a precondition of a political ethic whose locus of fidelity was upholding a political form. 3. Democracy Cannot Not be a Political Form https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 11 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM The argument of the previous maxim can be sum up in the following way: for an ethos to be concrete and have political teeth it needs to be theorized in relation to the political form that it at once promotes and relies on. Once such a dialectical elucidation is carried on, the depoliticizing liberal lineaments of pseudo democratic theorizations of ethos become clear. Kenneth Burke’s account of forms of thought in his masterful A Grammar of Motives sheds light on this dialectic: while thematizing “the Scene-Act ratio” Burke recurs to the metaphors of “container” and “contained” in order to suggest the ways in which actor and scene dialectically interact with one another.23 Just like “container” and “contained,” “act” and “scene” are distinct but interdependent. One cannot be thematized without reference to the other. If one draws from Burke in relation to ethos and political form, one can claim that ethos is correlative to act and political form to scene; namely, an ethos is contained in a political form. And while one is bound to the other, the two cannot be collapsed. For any theorization of ethos to have any political import, it needs to thematize the political form that contains it and that it, in turn, sustains and authorizes. Otherwise, how can the actor, the contained, be thematized without referent to the container, the scene for its civic conduct? In a way, predicaments of power are “situations” (as Jean-Paul Sartre o!en called them) in which this dialectic unfolds. But is democracy a political form? Critics of the current hegemony of a depoliticized sense of democracy constantly urge us to think of democracy not as a political form. Once formalized, we are told, democracy has become an empty container or a shell in which anti-democratic practices are contained; or, in a slightly di"erent rendering with a post-structuralist flourish, democracy has evolved into an empty-signifier devoid of content and thus amenable to di"erent forms of power, even anti-democratic ones. But is such characterization the best way to understand the relationship between form and content? Is democracy just a shell or a container? Again, part of the di"iculty in posing questions of democracy and form is that the most vehement defenders of democracy concede, albeit for di"erent reasons, that it is at best a mistake to understand democracy as a form. Two of the most compelling theorists of democracy without banisters, Jacques Rancière and Sheldon S. Wolin, both insist that democracy needs to be theorized as something other than a form. Indeed, once theorized as a form, it runs the risk of becoming politically mute. Instead, we are invited to understand democracy as a fugitive experience that cannot https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 12 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM be housed in any form without normalizing it (Wolin), or to see democracy as the power of the people that is at once beyond and beneath constitutional forms that seek to give it fixity and thus normalize it (Rancière).24 Both theorists of unbound democracy rightly react to the attempt to try to reduce democracy to a constitutional-juridical form and thus empty it out of substance. Once housed in one Constitutional Form, as opposed to the experimentation and innovation that Wolin’s alternative idea of “democratic constitutionalism” suggests, democracy becomes a form devoid of history, a myth. That is a historical lesson that is hard to contest. Even so, in reacting to this tendency, which is no less present in the academic usage of democracy by political scientists, they are dispensing with the notion that democracy is a form that has content. Here one is dealing with the proverbial question of the content of the form.25 In the hands of these two democrats, democracy is a concept conjured up to denote a political experience, a form of power and thus constantly inaugurating something new, political innovations on the basis of values of shared power and equality that resists containment in a fixed form. The attempt to provide fixed nomenclatures to democracy gives the impression of taming democracy by housing it in a political form, when democratic experience in fact strives against such formalization. But is democracy formless? Or is it rather a concept, a rule that has a form, which in turn has content? Form, to be sure, is not a univocal concept. Raymond Williams has aptly captured the two predominant senses of the word “form:” “a visible or outward shape, and an inherent shaping impulse.”26 In their rejections of form, Wolin and Rancière reject the former sense of form, but their theorizations of democracy avow the latter, even while they fail or refuse to thematize it as such. Namely, democracy is a shaping impulse that as they both rightly emphasize cannot be housed in a (liberal-capitalist) constitutional arrangement, let alone reified in a perennial institutional make-up; but it is a political form whose content is an unwavering commitment to shared power that only becomes possible on the basis on substantive political equality. For as Wolin stated it elsewhere, democracy is the only political form whose content “condemns its own denial of equality and inclusion.”27 If democracy is a political form with its own shaping impulses, the question is not one to reject its status as a form, but to reject attempts to house it in non-democratic constitutional forms. Actually, the pressing theoretical question is what is the content https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 13 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM of democracy as a political form?; namely, rather than hypostatize the binary form/content, one can then think of this opposition dialectically. The notion of the “content of the form” may well be the more productive way of carrying on this dialectical reversal that neither hypostatizes the binary, nor collapses it into a higher synthesis. There are, indeed, di"erent ways in which democracy as a content is inseparable from democracy as a political form. Democracy can thus be housed in di"erent institutional arrangements as long as these enact rather than compromise this form. Not only as Fredric Jameson reminds us “pure forms still bear the traces and the marks of the content they sought to extinguish,” but these forms also betray the historical unfolding of a content that they have struggled to avow, as well as those that they have tried to disown and vehemently resist.28 Dwelling on these historical struggles of avowals and disavowals, however briefly, suggests the centrality of enmity for a political form, which is the subject of the next maxim. 4. Democracy Entails Drawing Lines of Enmity This is the last, and for any historically minded student of democracy, perhaps most obvious maxim: the centrality of lines of enmity in the historical trajectory of democracy as a political form. But how does one theorize enmity democratically? Isn’t democracy supposed to be the rule of the people? Doesn’t enmity revert to a danger that Jacques Derrida drew to our attention a long time ago; namely, that of having a constitutive outside, the non-democratic barbarian, in reference to which democracy establishes its identity? These are all important questions. But I would like to suggest that these are ultimately misguided ways of posing the issue of democracy and enmity, let alone the best way to respond to the political illiteracy of post-political times. The forms of enmity that democratic political form entails, to be sure, are not always external. Rather, these lines of enmity can be found in the ambivalence of the initial conjuring of this idea in the fi!h century BCE, when demos used to refer to both the people and the many/the poor. Yet, at its most vibrant, the meaning that had prevailed was the latter. From its inception on, democracy has struggled against elites, from oligarchs to princes, experts, technocrats, managers and CEOs. One need https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 14 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM not revert to a transhistorical notion, say, the multitude, to apprehend how the travails and tribulations of democracy have consisted in the struggles between the few and the many to master and share the forms of power of a collectivity; a struggle that nowadays does not unfold in a field of contestation defined by the proximity between demos and elite, nor is it always direct, but rather a struggle of elites to continue taming a demos that has to contend with discourses and institutional practices that are expressions of the forms of power mediating and constituting their predicaments: predicaments of power in which corporate values and practices are the prevailing content. Accordingly, at a subjective level, the historical enemies of democracy are elites, oligarchs, managers, and despots, which today are o!en embodied in CEOs and financial buccaneers; at a structural level, it is capitalism in its di"erent guises, along with bureaucratic rationalities and the rule of technocracy. For democracy to be a political form that can challenge the forces of antidemocracy, this sense of enmity needs to be avowed both in the intellectual and the political field. The imperative to draw democratic lines of enmity needs to be incorporated and critically thematized as part of the mainstay of political theory by any theorist of democracy worth the name. But it also needs to be avowed politically. Here, theorists of unbound democracy, like Dussel, Rancière, and Wolin, otherwise thinkers of very di"erent staples, provide a clue of what it means to draw those lines of enmity politically.29 In order to conclude these reflections, it might be helpful to briefly dwell on Wolin’s recent treatment of the transformation of political form in the United States; namely, on Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated, where an impassioned critique of the transformation of US political form under the reign of Bush Jr. is traced and where lines of enmity are drawn. In it, Wolin magisterially traces the role of elites in truncating democracy in the United States, and though he overstates the nature of the changes between Bush and its predecessors – something that Wolin’s own writings of the nineties attest to – he o"ers a nomenclature of political forms that provides an important clue to understand the present predicament of power.30 With more than dim echoes of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, in Democracy Incorporated Wolin argues that forms of total power, or totalitarianism as he calls it, can take di"erent forms, even if the animating principle remains the same. Equipped with this caveat, Wolin thus challenges prevalent, self-satisfied accounts https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 15 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM that will reduce the experience of total power to the historical instantiations of the past century and dismiss the idea that a deeply anti-democratic form of total power has crystallized in the United States, especially a!er 11 September 2001. Previous to this juncture, Wolin has argued that the nineties were distinguished by what he called an heir to the Economic Polity, the idea of Superpower which embodied a benign form of total power in its capitalist, neoliberal guise. Once more reverting to Aristotelian taxonomies, in Democracy Incorporated he identifies Superpower as the good political form that characterized the US of the Clinton years, with its booms and other neoliberal avatars, and Inverted Totalitarianism with its perverted form. Namely, if during the nineties democracy in the United States has been housed, and thus continued to be rendered domestic, by what Wolin calls Superpower, in the first decade of the millennium it became further subjugated by Inverted Totalitarianism, Superpower’s perverted form. What, then, can one make of Barack Obama’s election and the first year of his presidency in light of Wolin’s dissection of the travails of democracy in the land that many an account across the political spectrum sees as its modern berth? Is the Obama administration likely to be a restraint on the transformation of political form that Wolin diagnoses? Hardly. Wolin’s nomenclature sheds some light on what is the best to hope for. What is in store, using Wolin’s nomenclature, is a reversal to Superpower or what he nowadays calls “managed democracy,” the non-perverted form: promising to close Guantanamo and the change in rhetoric might suggest that. But such changes hardly bring solace: the crux of the distinction between Superpower and the Inverted Totalitarianism of the Bush years is not structural. Obama’s hopeful pieties leave unaltered the structures of power that have led to the current erosion of democracy. Witness his bailout plan and faint-hearted vision of universal health care. If the American le! is ever to leave its current stupor, it would be well advised to emulate Wolin’s long-standing sobriety about the United States and, rather than longing for deliverance from Obama, to begin to cultivate the necessary conditions for democratic renewal, a precondition of which is to let go of the temptation of finding silver linings in the present. But yielding to this temptation is precisely what Obama’s election has done. It has lend credence to a racial liberalism pivoting on what Adolph Reed Jr. – another rare sage in the American Le!, whose political sobriety has consistently debunked the https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 16 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM mythology around this politician, which should lay to rest the liberal pieties built around him – has aptly called the ideology of the “First.” Namely, the depoliticizing elevation of those who “first” break a racial barrier to the status of icons, cloaked by pieties about the American dream, a staple of racial liberalism; it is an ideology of “equal opportunity” that leaves unaddressed larger questions of racial justice and equality and instead re-instills elitism by means of a rhetoric of individual responsibility consonant with neoliberal ideologies of success that disavow any sense of shared, collective responsibility. That the American polity has done something that three decades ago was unthinkable is not negligible; nor is it the di"erence in style and political sensibility between Obama and his predecessor. But to invest it with a hyperbolic rhetoric of racial justice is just pure fantasy. A more pious and rationally administered empire seems in store, one that domestically can rehearse a mild politics of redistribution while still committed to global imperium and leave unaltered the structure of managed democracy, except that it will be buttressed by reigning in unfettered neoliberalism. Absent the popular pressure that can lend credence to all the current talk about the commons and might move him from the center, Obama, to borrow a phrase from J. M. Coetzee’s masterful novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, is “the lie that empire tells itself.” Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota where he teaches political theory. He has just finished a manuscript titled Scenes of Responsibility: Responding to Power and Su!ering in a Post-Political Age. Currently, he is working on a book tentatively titled Shadows of Catastrophe and continuing to work on the idea of universal history and the dialectical legacy of critical theory. He can be reached at [email protected] Notes 1. It is not without irony that Negri’s fame in US academia largely relies on these books and not on his early work, where regardless any local disagreements one may have with his formulations Negri’s standing as a coruscating and original political theorist is beyond dispute. In addition to his fine writings on Spinoza and Descartes, see Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For an https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 17 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM account of his political and theoretical trajectory see his book, with Cesare Casarino, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 2. John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (New York: Norton, 2009), 14, 848. 3. See Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Le légitimité démocratique: impartialité, réflexivité, proximité (Paris: Seuil, 2008), esp. 9–56, 353–59. Rosanvallon was a contributor to a book co-authored with François Furet and Jacques Julliard, La république du centre: La fin de l’exception française (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1988), 9–12, and 133". 4. Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy, 688, 691 5. For a coruscating account of the emergence of democratic theory see Richard Bellamy, “The Advent of the Masses and the Making of the Modern Theory of Democracy,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Political Thought, ed. Terrance Ball and Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 70–103. 6. Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy, xxvii, xxviii. 7. See Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy, 872". 8. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 142". 9. Barthes, Mythologies, 109, 115, 131 10. Barthes, Mythologies, 117 11. Barthes, Mythologies, 151 12. Barthes, Mythologies, 129 13. Barthes, Mythologies, 143 14. Here I draw from an extended historicization of liberal democracy that I sketched in my essay “Liberal Democracy and Neoliberalism: A Critical Juxtaposition,” New Political Science 30 (June 2008): 140–48 15. Barthes, Mythologies, 81–83, 153. Unsurprisingly, the Bonapartist moment in Constant is constantly downplayed in recent interpreters, from Marcel Gauchet to Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson and Helena Rosenblatt. 16. For a scathing account of the travails of universal su"rage and the complicit of nineteenthcentury liberals in it, see Luciano Canfora, Democracy in Europe: A History, trans. Simon Jones (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 54". https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 18 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM 17. Barthes anticipated this objection when he asserted, “the more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism.” See Barthes, Mythologies, 112. 18. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), vii. 19. Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” in The Concept of the Political, expanded edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 81". 20. I have o"ered a critical discussion of Connolly’s liberalism and its lack of democratic import with reference to his reduction to democracy to an ethos in Antonio Y. Vazquez-Arroyo, “Agonized Liberalism: The Liberal Theory of William E. Connolly,” Radical Philosophy 127 (September/October 2004): 8–19. For a spirited response see Stephen K. White, The Ethos of the Late Modern Citizen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 97". 21. See White, The Ethos of the Late Modern Citizen, 1, 113–14n. 2. But see Carl Schmitt, Catolicismo y forma política, trans. Carlos Ruiz Miguel (Madrid: Tecnos, 2000); this is the Spanish translation of Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form (1923–25). 22. See James Tully, “The Agonistic Freedom of Citizens,” in Public Philosophy in a New Key: Vol. 1, Democracy and Civic Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 135–59. 23. See Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 3–20. 24. See, respectively, Sheldon S. Wolin, “Norm and Form,” in Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. J. Peter Euben, John R. Wallach, and Josiah Ober (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 29–58; and Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2006). 25. Here I am indebted to the work of Fredric Jameson. For a recent formulation of this question, see Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (London and New York: Verso, 2007), ix–xxi. But see also Terry Eagleton, “Jameson and Form,” New Le" Review 59 (September/October 2009): 123–37. 26. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 186. 27. Revealingly, Wolin refers to “idea” not form in the full passage. See Sheldon S. Wolin, “Transgression, Equality, Voice,” Demokratia: A Conversation on Democracies Ancient and Modern, Josiah Ober and Charles Hendricks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 80. 28. See Jameson, The Modernist Papers, xvii. 29. See Enrique Dussel, 20 tesis de política (Mexico, DF: Siglo XXI, 2006). Now available in English translation: Twenty Theses on Politics, trans. George Cicariello-Mahler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 19 of 20 Project MUSE - Democracy Today: Four Maxims 11/25/20, 5:16 PM 30. I have o"ered a lengthy discussion of Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated in “Inverted Totalitarianism” Telos (Forthcoming 2010). Copyright © 2010 Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo and The Johns Hopkins University Press Additional Information ISSN 1092-311X Print ISSN 2572-6633 Launched on MUSE 2010-07-01 Open Access No This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Accept https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/article/384021 Page 20 of 20