Reclaiming Democracy: Judgment, Responsibility and the Right to Politics [1 ed.] 1138021997, 9781138021990

Citation preview

RECLAIMING DEMOCRACY

Democracy is in shambles, economically and politically. The recent economic meltdown in Europe and the US has substituted democratic deliberation with technocratic decisions. In Athens, Madrid, Lisbon, New York, Pittsburgh, and Istanbul, protesters have denounced the incapacity and unwillingness of elected officials to heed to their voices. While the diagnosis of our political-economic illness has been established, remedies are hard to come by. What can we do to restore our broken democracy? Which modes of political participation are likely to have an impact? And what are the loci of political innovation in the wake of the crisis? It is with these questions that Reclaiming Democracy engages. We argue that the managerial approach to solving the crisis violates ‘a right to politics,’ that is, a right that our collective life be guided by genuine politics: by discussion of and decision among genuinely alternative principles and policies. The contributors to this volume are united in their commitment to exploring how and where this right can be affirmed in a way that resuscitates democracy in the wake of the crisis. Mixing theoretical reflection and empirical analysis, the book offers fresh insights into democracy’s current conundrum and makes concrete proposals about how ‘the right to politics’ can be protected. Albena Azmanova teaches political theory at the University of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies, where she heads the postgraduate program in international political economy. Mihaela Mihai is the 50th Anniversary Lecturer at the University of York, UK. Her research interests cut across political theory, political science, and law.

Routledge Advances in Democratic Theory Edited by David Chandler and Paulina Tambakaki (both University of Westminster) Advisory Board: Benjamin Barber (City University of New York), Rajeev Bhargava (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies), Bhikhu Parekh (House of Lords), Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame), John Keane (University of Sydney), Chantal Mouffe (University of Westminster)

Democracy is being rethought almost everywhere today: with the widespread questioning of the rationalist assumptions of classical liberalism and the implications this has for representational competition; with the Arab Spring, destabilising many assumptions about the geographic spread of democracy; with the deficits of democracy apparent in the Eurozone crisis, especially as it affects Greece and Italy; with democracy increasingly being understood as a process of social empowerment and equalisation, blurring the lines of division between formal and informal spheres; and with growing demands for democracy to be reformulated to include the needs of those currently marginalized or even to include the representation of nonhuman forms of life with whom we share our planet. Routledge Advances in Democratic Theory publishes state-of-the-art theoretical reflection on the problems and prospects of democratic theory as many of the traditional categories and concepts are being reworked and rethought in our globalised and complex times. The series is published in cooperation with the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, London, UK. 1. Nations and Democracy New Theoretical Perspectives Amanda Machin 2. Reclaiming Democracy Judgment, Responsibility, and the Right to Politics Edited by Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai

RECLAIMING DEMOCRACY Judgment, Responsibility, and the Right to Politics

Edited by Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Reclaiming democracy: judgment, responsibility and the right to politics / edited by Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai. pages cm.—(Routledge advances in democratic theory; 2) Includes index. 1. Democracy. 2. Representative government and representation. I. Azmanova, Albena. II. Mihai, Mihaela. JC423.R3258 2015 321.8—dc23 2014034938 ISBN: 978-1-138-02199-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-85091-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-77737-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai

vii 1

PART I

Loci of Democratic Politics

15

1 Agonism and the Crisis of Representative Democracy Paulina Tambakaki

17

2 Freedom, Democracy, and Working Life Keith Breen

34

3 Technology: The Promises of Communicative Capitalism Jodi Dean

50

4 Ungovernability Claus Offe

77

vi

Contents

PART II

Modes of Democratic Politics 5 Democracy, Law, and Global Finance: A Legal and Institutional Perspective Tamara Lothian 6 Democracy and the Absolute Power of Disembedded Financial Markets Alessandro Ferrara 7 Success and Failure in the Deliberative Economy Arjun Appadurai 8 The Promise of Global Transparency: Between Information and Emancipation Matthew Fluck

87 89

110 126

144

PART III

Democratic Critique 9 Neoliberalism, the Street, and the Forum Noëlle McAfee

163 165

10 Founding Political Critique in a Post-Political World: Towards a Renewal of Utopian Energies Nikolas Kompridis

184

11 From the Assembly to the Agora: Nonlinear Politics and the Politicisation of Everyday Life David Chandler

202

List of Contributors Index

219 223

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The series editors, Paulina Tambakaki and David Chandler, encouraged us throughout the whole process. Our editors at Routledge, Natalja Mortensen, Lillian Rand, and Darcy Bullock, offered their professional help at all stages. We would like to thank our universities and families for providing us with the necessary support to complete this project. We acknowledge that, while working on this collection has supplied plenty of evidence in support of the adage ‘Academic cooperation is much like herding wildcats,’ the pleasure of intellectual companionship that came with it decidedly offsets the scratches and the shortness of breath. We probably owe an apology to all contributors for the likely misunderstanding to which we are exposing their work by enabling unintended associations among the ten pieces, but we hope they will never request it. It is with curiosity—not guilt—that we look forward to the debates the book might trigger.

7KLVSDJHLQWHQWLRQDOO\OHIWEODQN

INTRODUCTION Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai

The ‘government of anybody and everybody’ is bound to attract the hatred of all those who are entitled to govern men by their birth, wealth, or science. —Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy

Liberal democracy is in dire straits: the street revolts against markets and governments; voters propel anti-establishment parties into parliament; heads of state venture to save private banks with public money; and well-meaning public intellectuals of the left and the right demand, in the name of democracy, that more power be given to the people who are already at a loss how to handle the maddening complexity of the world they inhabit. In a word, democratic hopes have been thwarted by the current economic—turned social, turned political— crisis. Notwithstanding increased street mobilisation, the impact citizens have on politics has reached its nadir. Public discontent, which was rising even during the prosperous 1990s, has reached new heights since the onset of the financial meltdown of 2008 and the ensuing economic and social destitution. The formerly silent spectators are not just demanding more accountability and transparency; they request different politics: they are turning to contention and contestation, rather than validation of rule through the rituals of electoral democracy. From Athens to Madrid, from Lisbon to New York and Istanbul, los Indignados, the 99%, the Occupiers, and a Geração à Rasca all send the same anxious message—a deep distrust in the capacity and willingness of elected officials to manage the crisis in ways that serve the common good. And here we face a paradox: while the streets have seen the most intensive social mobilisation of the past decades, nothing meaningful follows in policy. The apparent impotence of social protest marks liberal democracies’ unglamorous

2 Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai

entry into the twenty-first century. Politics appears to have been confiscated by experts promising redemption through suffering: the politics of austerity. Endorsing the ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA) dictum that spurred the neoliberal turn in the 1980s, decision-makers have suspended decision-making. As some commentators have aptly remarked, we live in a time of post-politics. Public policy discussions are not even minimally plural: the ‘common sense’ of austerity has displaced any substantive debate on resolving the crisis, as the societal crisis itself is being presented as just a crisis of public finance. The imperative of national competitiveness in the global economy has made the cuts in social provision appear unavoidable—a trend that in fact predates the crisis. As incumbent political elites are doing away with politics and the social safety net is wearing out, social risk is being thrust onto the weakest citizens. Under such adverse circumstances, democratic hopes vanish, giving way to desperation and right-wing fantasies. The aspirations to freedom that spread after World War II on both sides of the iron curtain—aspirations that made possible the democratic revolutions of 1989—are now drowning in a swelling fear of freedom. The time for judgment and responsibility, for weighing options, for imagination and change—that is, the time for politics—seems to have passed. This volume argues for the need to overcome the naturalisation of the political discourse about the crisis and its iron-clad, unique solutions, and reclaim a notion of politics that involves several key elements: first, a meaningful commitment to making visible and problematising the forces stalling the democratic game; second, inclusive collective deliberations about alternative courses of action; third, the relativisation of expert knowledge for politics and resisting the concomitant temptation to reduce citizens to the status of clients, patients, or mere spectators to elite decision-making; fourth, the free play of the imagination as a force of political innovation and institutional experimentation. Taken together, these interlinked elements constitute the essential background conditions for exercising what we would like to call ‘the right to politics.’ If the Enlightenment’s emancipatory promise for a life of experimental self-realisation is to have any real purchase, it presupposes a fundamental right without which democracy, self-determination, and any meaningful political engagement are impossible—the right to politics. Activating the right to politics is the only viable antidote to the toxic policy logic of ‘there is no alternative’ that is now annihilating human control over the future, thus rendering policy decisions about our collective existence empty of choice and, with that, void of moral content, thereby disabling political responsibility. In what follows, we will discuss each of these interrelated elements in turn, with a view to substantiating the theoretical promise this book makes. The first condition for the exercise of the right to politics is that of identifying the agents responsible for the current predicament—as well as the social dynamics and structures making it possible—in a way that avoids vacuous references to impersonal, unpredictable, uncontrollable forces of the market whose impact nobody can appraise, foresee, or withstand. The language of inevitability and

Introduction 3

catastrophe absolves the culprits of the responsibility to redress the harm and to try to prevent future crises. The only beneficiaries of the portrayal of the crisis as ‘inevitable,’ ‘unforeseeable,’ or ‘anomalous’ are those responsible for the crisis and those carrying the guilt of failing to protect citizens in case of a crisis. We argue that no effective management of the crisis and its aftermath is possible without an honest reckoning and reflection about the noninevitable policy steps and the institutional arrangements that led us here today. Several of the chapters in this book contribute important historical—legal and political—analyses that denaturalise the language of inevitability, thus supplying the basis for a meaningful debate about the current predicament. Secondly, we take the essence of democratic politics to be the discerning and weighing of alternative courses of action, legislative proposals, practices, policies, candidates, and institutional structures, in formal fora but also in alternative spaces for politics. Democracy presupposes choices and careful examination of competing options in view of serving the common good. Yet the response to the crisis has invariably been austerity and structural adjustment for the sake of financial stabilisation. The dissenting voices have been marginalised and delegitimised through a variety of strategies: the ‘ideological’ proposals of heterodox economists have been counterpoised to the scientificity of neoliberal models— forgetting it was these models that brought about the crisis to begin with— while social movements have been taunted for being naïve, confused, incapable of delivering a plausible alternative solution. The ground was thus cleared for imposing the unique solution, a solution with massive negative effects on the already disempowered citizens. Several contributors to this collection build on work in the history of political thought and contemporary political theory to highlight the merits of rethinking the parameters of citizen agency and to assess alternative spaces and practices of claims-making beyond strong publics. Which brings us to the third element of our take on politics: the desacralisation of science in order to undermine the epistemic privilege experts enjoy in contemporary democratic society. Appeals to science and expertise give technicians privileged place in decision-making. It is the supposedly neutral technicians—and not elected representatives—who decide on both the diagnosis and the therapy for the crisis, thus eroding further the already diminished political power of ordinary citizens. Given the increasing complexity of international markets, technicians’ voices are being granted predominant weight in decision-making. Such views of the role of experts obscure the fact that, in the name of objectivity and reliability, science and expertise serve as conversation and contestation stoppers: no deliberation makes sense once the scientists have spoken. Correlated with the privilege experts enjoy is the relegation of citizens to the status of clients or patients of unaccountable elites and their specialists in crisis management. The angry voices of those who bear the brunt of the austerity policies do not resonate in the halls of power. Citizens’ political efficiency—the capacity to have political claims translated into meaningful policies by political leaders—has

4 Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai

reached troubling lows. While we think there is effectively room for experts in democratic politics, we propose that their voice should be relativised, that their epistemic privileges should be challenged, and that their claims of impartiality should always be seen as suspicious by citizens who refuse to resign themselves to the role of spectators of elite decision-makers. Several chapters in this volume discuss the values that should guide experts’ intervention in democratic deliberations and exemplify what such interventions might look like. In addition, imaginative ways of reclaiming politics by ordinary citizens make the object of reflection in this volume. Last but not least, we argue that ours is a time when the courage of the imagination must be cultivated so that we can arrive at alternative visions of our common life for the future. The social destabilisation that crises trigger tends to unleash conservative instincts for clinging to the familiar in search of safety. It is by force of this logic that, in the middle of economic crisis, voters propelled to power the same centre-right economically liberal elites whose neoliberal policies of extreme deregulation set off the economic crisis. If elections are any indicator of prevailing preferences, the popular vote at the nadir of the crisis in the mature democracies of Europe suggests that neoliberal capitalism has considerable popular support.1 Yet crisis is the best time for institutional experimentation. When familiar blueprints prove useless and old solutions don’t work, when suffering is enhanced by the very recipes applied to alleviate it—by prescriptions given without citizen input—it is time that we look for available sources we have for projecting a different future of our community. It may be that the image will only be a negative one—one that merely tells us what we do not want our community to look like in the wake of this crisis. Yet this will still be a great advance over the stubborn rehearsing of the same old truths reified in our common sense. Some of the chapters in this book deal precisely with the challenges imagination faces in the era of post-politics. The possibility of a positive notion of critique and political mobilisation that avoids the pitfalls of the beaten track makes the object of careful reflection in several contributions to this collection. Given the contours of the account of democratic politics sketched here, it is important to emphasise that this book positions itself in opposition to recent contributions to democratic theory. Upon analysing the ever-diminishing space for meaningful democratic deliberations, some have proposed that we should tame our democratic expectations and calibrate our theorising in line with these new political realities. In an age when politics is experienced through the mass media as appearance and manipulation, in times of personalised politics and increased discretionary power of the executive, leaders produce public opinion rather than respond to it. We are told that in such circumstances, the time for an ‘ocular’ understanding of representative democracy has arrived. Representative of this take on contemporary democracy is Jeffrey Green’s widely discussed The Eyes of the People: Democracy in the Age of Spectatorship, where the author invites the audience to reconcile itself with the idea that vocal models of democracy

Introduction 5

are out of touch with the ways in which citizens experience politics nowadays. A more relevant and useful matrix for thinking about democracy today would be, the argument goes, to focus on the eyes of the people as the locus of political empowerment. Most of our political experience is reduced to listening and watching professional politicians speaking on our behalf, so much so that the majority of citizens are not decision-makers, but spectators who relate to politics with their eyes. Given this reality, democratic theory is invited to reinvent itself ‘in a manner that respects the everyday structure of political experience’ (Green 2010, 4–6). Sceptical of the impact the voice of the people can have today, Green proposes that the gaze of the people, which inspects and tries to capture leaders off guard, in moments of candour, can ensure surveillance over the leadership. A plebiscitary—rather than a deliberative or participatory—model of democracy is thus deemed appropriate for the age we live in: ‘the plebiscitary model I shall defend strives for ideals especially suitable to the fallen conditions that shape the way democracy has come to be experienced today’ (Green 2010, 7). Nowadays, he urges, politics is not about participative goal setting and deliberative decisionmaking; it is mostly about empowering a (admittedly imperfectly legitimate) political class to govern. Popular empowerment lies with watching the leaders in a matter that examines, supervises, inspects, and scrutinises. Such a scenario of the democratic game does allow the public to increase the pressures on elites for the purpose of reason-giving and justification. And while Green admits that the elite of participating citizens—the most likely audience for his book—will find his proposal problematic, he concludes that, for the mass of citizens, plebiscitary democracy is a more appropriate ideal. Green’s diagnosis of the contemporary predicament might be correct, yet his fallacy (and the quiet folly of traditional social theory more generally)2 is that he takes ‘the everyday structure of political experience’ as a given. He discusses ‘the fallen conditions that shape the way democracy has come to be experienced today’ as unalterable and asks us to adjust to these conditions. In the silent and sanitised world of ocular democracy, where the ‘masses’ have no other political vocation but to bestow their blessing on politicians and experts, or sanction them with silent disapproval, the right to politics is demoted to a right to be governed.3 Green’s attempt to build an ethical model on the poor conditions of democracy today amounts to an invitation to theoretical resignation; it trivialises critique and should therefore look suspicious to those who believe in the necessity of reclaiming politics from technocrats, professionals, and ‘saviours’ of all stripes and colours, that is, from the often impermeable and unaccountable class of political leaders. It is oblivious of the wisdom of the first, and often most insightful, adepts of democracy—that democracy is more than granting rulers a popular mandate to rule. In highlighting the power of democratic legitimacy and the fallibility of democratic governance, James Madison has warned that giving democratic form to despotic rule is among the greatest of political calamities.4 Democratic, responsive, power is neither always responsible, nor always competent, as Alexis

6 Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai

de Tocqueville already observed at the dawn of modern democratic government, because ‘the men who are entrusted with the direction of public affairs . . . are frequently inferior, in both capacity and morality, . . . are unskilful and sometimes contemptible,’ while exercising arbitrary power ‘still greater than in despotic states’ (Tocqueville [1835] 1990: 240–41, 209). Contra Green and in tune with Madison’s and Tocqueville’s warnings, this collection seeks to capture the background conditions that make democracy— not ocular or spectatorial, but participatory and contestatory democracy—possible again. We should not reconcile ourselves with the diagnosis of the shrinking of the realm of politics and adjust the format of democracy, and the nature of critique, to that reality. Focusing on the gaze is futile, nay, perilous, if citizens have no power to shape the reality they perceive. Access to a wealth of information does not increase control over the very production of information. The worrisome ascent of far-right, populist parties across Europe highlights the dangers of placing our hopes in the people’s supervisory capacities. Populist leaders candidly provide the kind of theatre that can entrance the vision of the demos and supply it with readymade, simplistic, and deceiving visions of who is culpable for its woes. The chapters in this volume constitute an invitation to resist resignation, to contest the experts’ confiscation of decision-making, to think outside the hegemonic common sense, to offer alternative diagnoses, and to experiment with alternative cures. Generally, but particularly in times of crisis, it is perilous to underestimate, like the adepts of ‘ocular democracy’ do, the importance of challenging leaders’ managerial views of politics, and especially of proposing alternative courses of action. In this sense, the book prizes Hannah Arendt’s insight that contextual, reflective judgment is the political faculty par excellence. Through reflective judgment, novelty is possible in the political space. And, since everyone has the capacity to judge ‘without banisters,’ citizens must reappropriate politics and not let themselves be transformed into customers, patients, or gazing spectators. The contributions in this volume invite the reader to ponder the imperative to reclaim politics, inside and outside conventional arenas of public life. While thinking creatively is an ever-present feature of democratic politics, it is particularly important in times of political and economic crisis. We take uncertainty, fallibility, contention and contestation, plurality, and imagination to be the defining features of politics. In denying all these features, that is, in suppressing the possibility of novelty through a naturalisation of the TINA doctrine, the current democratic leaders have forgone a political approach to the crisis. Without fetishising crisis, we argue that it provides us with an opportunity for innovation, for contesting the ossified and silencing ‘common sense.’ It is the time for alternative communities of judgment to assert themselves, muddy the clear waters of technocratic approaches to politics, expand the ethical universe to the economy, and provoke institutional actors to respond to new ways of thinking about ‘our’ shared world. Against ocular views, the contributors to this volume see crisis as a time to act, not to adjust and resign ourselves to the confiscation of politics.

Introduction 7

Given our understanding of the conditions for the exercise of the right to politics—as well as our concurrent scepticism towards ocular views of democracy—we have isolated three main concerns for our project: First, the loci of revival: Where can democratic politics flourish in the wake of the crisis? What are the spaces where the right to politics could be meaningfully exercised? Second, the modes of revival: What are the practices that embody the right to politics? What strategies of generating constructive political conflict and reclaiming democracy should be adopted to effectively influence policy? In other words, what innovative practices can count as exercises of the right to politics, and how can they be politically efficacious? Third, the critique of revival: How should we reinvent democratic theory to grapple with these challenging times? How can we theoretically reinvent ourselves to account for the challenges—but also the opportunities—facing those who want to exercise their right to politics? This collection is structured to address these three themes of the spaces, the practices, and the critique of democracy’s resurrection through a revival of the right to politics. The first part of the book seeks to identify new spaces for democratic politics to flourish, by raising a series of interconnected questions: Under what conditions can citizens discern viable social and political alternatives to the naturalised status quo? In what fora can citizens make claims efficiently? What are the geographies democracy needs to (re)appropriate for its regeneration? Where can pressure be applied? Do we need to transform or rather substitute representative democracy? And can the new media empower protest? The authors in this section tackle these questions with a view to identifying productive spaces for democratic reclamation. The first article in this part of the book responds to those who have lost faith in representative democracy. Against claims about its demise, Paulina Tambakaki works within an agonistic framework and tries to defend the salience of representative institutions by arguing that they can still be important venues and targets of claims-making. Her perspective avoids messianic tones and concedes that neoliberal hegemony may not be vulnerable to punctual, precise claims that press for responsibility and responsiveness. Nonetheless, such processes of claims-making are likely to intensify the struggle against depoliticisation. It is by force of these contestatory dynamics of claims-making that representative institutions still have the potency to revitalise democracy. In contradistinction to Tambakaki, Keith Breen tries to expand our notion of traditional democratic spaces and contests the assumption, shared widely by ordinary citizens, elites, and theorists (including Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas), that work processes and workplace organisation must rest in the hands of managers, not workers themselves. He appeals to normative arguments for institutionalising meaningful forms of work and for workplace democratisation grounded on the ideal of freedom. To support these arguments, the chapter explores two important examples of successful workplace restructuring—Volvo’s innovations in automotive assembly in Uddevalla, Sweden, and the recent emergence of

8 Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai

‘worker-recuperated enterprises’ in Argentina. Thus, the chapter directs attention to successful instances of institutional experimentation that suggest already available resources for activating alternatives to the neoliberal status quo. Jodi Dean’s contribution scrutinises another widely acclaimed space for democratic appropriation—the virtual sphere—and dispels our enchantment regarding the potentialities for democratic action thought to be latent in it. While the digital revolution has been celebrated as marking a new age for political mobilisation and participation, Dean argues that, as an expression of communicative capitalism, it is profoundly depoliticising. A distinction emerges between two independent forms of politics: politics as the circulation of content through the new media, and politics as the activity of officials. While democracy presupposes that communication in the public sphere influences political decision-making in formal institutions, a dramatic disconnect between these two forms of politics seems to mark the present. What is more, the multiplication of communications and their increased intensity prevents the formation of a strong counter-hegemonic position that would serve as a meaningful counter-force to the activity of officials. ‘Expanded and intensified communicativity neither enhances opportunities for linking together political struggles nor enlivens radical democratic practices—although it has exacerbated left fragmentation, amplified the voices of right-wing extremists, and delivered ever more eyeballs to corporate advertisers’ (Dean, p. 53 this volume). With voices across the political spectrum now calling for divesting the state from its coercive power over citizens and repatriating power to ‘the people,’ the state has become an unlikely venue of democratic politics. That is why Claus Offe’s contribution to the volume is rebelliously illuminating as it places the state (back) in the centre-stage of democratic politics. Offe argues that public authority is suffering from a political affliction known as ‘ungovernability,’ which is being played out—experienced—as a failure of democracy as a political regime. To vindicate democracy, we need, therefore, to rebuild the political infrastructure of public authority in such a way as to enable it to govern, again, in the public interest. Here Offe articulates a perspective of critique that focuses on the endogenous dynamics of crisis and renewal within the institutional arrangements that guide policy action by providing particular incentives to actors. He suggests that we ‘endogenise,’ in an institutionalist perspective, those factors that deprive democratic governments of their authority and capacity to act effectively. The perspective of theorising is thus framed to steer us away from both the rationalism of agent-centred models and the functionalism of anonymous structures— trajectories of analysis that have enabled many analysts of our predicament to make the shortcut of imputing the societal crisis either to inept politicians and greedy bankers or to the unruly play of untameable market forces. This in turn invites us to seek solutions in the direction of institutional restructuration of contemporary capitalist democracies. Within this broad perspective of what we might call ‘endogenous institutionalism,’ the contributions in the second and third sections of this collection develop specific modalities of critique.

Introduction 9

The second section of the collection addresses the theme of the practices of democratic renewal. What are the faculties and attitudes necessary for overcoming the current impasse? How can the represented begin to exist politically in a meaningful way, beyond the moment of delegation? Which new and increasingly influential modes of political discourse should be rejected, and why? And what new and untried modes of democratic politics should be adopted, and why? The articles in this section perform two functions: a diagnostic one—various authors try to trace the historical processes that have brought about the current democratic deficits—and a therapeutical one, pointing to potential mechanisms of redress. While coming from two different disciplines (law and political theory), Tamara Lothian and Alessandro Ferrara share a historical perspective and reinforce each other’s conclusions and solutions. Ferrara’s analysis invites us to rethink our conception of democracy in its historical context and emphasises the challenges that recent economic changes pose for the possibility of accountable government by the people. Contemporary democracies have to face tremendously inhospitable conditions, within and beyond their borders. The market’s absolute power over democracy is the defining feature of contemporary politics: the market can influence the lives of all without being subject to the law. Laws— domestic and international—are made in view of providing an optimal setting for economic transactions. Harnessing the absolute power of the markets requires a realistically utopian vision of democratic re-embedment through the application of five principles, all deriving from the values of democratic accountability and transparency: (a) the revitalisation of the principle of separation of saving and venture capital; (b) the principle of tax-payers’ ‘temporary takeover’ of banking institutions in distress; (c) the principle of democratic ‘trickle-up,’ as opposed to neoliberal ‘trickle down’; (d) the principle of individual accountability for the aggregate effects of one’s economic actions and the creation of state-run insurance plans, mandatory for all individual investors; (e) the principle of the full accountability of rating agencies for the effects of their judgments. (Ferrara, p. 119 this volume) While not constituting a fully fledged blueprint, these guidelines constitute important starting points for denaturalising the language of inevitability and for imagining institutional innovation. Lothian agrees with Ferrara in arguing that finance has become ‘the star example of “capture” of government by powerful private interests’ (p. 90 this volume). Building on a rigorous analysis of the historical processes that culminated in the crisis, Lothian offers a structural argument that positions itself against naturalising and depoliticising narratives about the origin of the crisis. Three crucial themes have been obscured in discussions over how to tackle the financial crisis: the link between redistribution and recovery, the connection of finance to

10 Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai

the real economy, and the lack of democratic accountability. The diagnosis, as much as the treatment, requires us to look beyond the economy, rethink the very constitutional organisation of the state, and use law innovatively to protect democracy. Like Ferrara and Tambakaki above, Lothian believes in the capacity of representative institutions to experiment with various solutions within the framework of possibilities that democracy provides, with a view to building a toolbox of contextually attuned legal-institutional arrangements. The next two papers shift the focus from the macro, institutional level to the level of citizen empowerment. Arjun Appadurai invites us to stop prizing politically efficient citizen action and to inquire whether there is something to be learnt from instances of political inefficiency. Even when failing to achieve their intended goal, claims to injustice that the disadvantaged utter destabilise the contexts in which these claims are made. Thus, these very failures constitute a resource for achieving justice, rather than a cause of desperation. Appadurai directs our attention to the global South and examines the nature of deliberative contexts in poor democracies like India. In his paper, he investigates the role of apparent failures of efforts to increase the role of the poor in deliberative contexts, to suggest that what might seem failures in any given instance may transform the political environment in the long run. Building on insights from the philosophy of language and on work about failed performatives by Judith Butler and Shoshana Feldman, Appadurai argues that, while it is obviously the case that many statements by the poor have no positive effects within deliberative spaces, they may, when repeated, rehearsed, and reiterated, contain the seeds of performative success. Through a combination of philosophical and ethnographic work, he shows how failed claims by the poor can, in the long run, alter a disempowering and unfair context of deliberation. The challenge is to maintain sufficient political hope to continue the transformative work of failing. Matthew Fluck’s contribution critically examines the value of whistle-blowing and the promise of transparency in times of political disenfranchisement and economic dire straits. The paper dispels the vain hopes we might be tempted to place in such practices and invites us to critically reconsider this crucial value of transparency. The emancipatory and legitimacy-enhancing function of transparency has been historically celebrated by the champions of democracy. Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange currently enjoy global notoriety. While these instances of whistle-blowing make it appear that transparency is having a comeback, Fluck warns us not to overestimate the democracy-enhancing role that transparency—understood as access to information—plays nowadays. Instead of focusing on accessing pre-formatted data, citizens’ efforts should focus on the quality of the data, and on interpreting and assessing it critically. A conception of transparency as publicity—as collective citizen evaluation of the way in which data are produced—is more appropriate for the twenty-first century and the problems facing democratic societies.

Introduction 11

It its third section, the book addresses more directly the issue of critique. The pluralisation of the places and practices of democratic engagement does not in itself guarantee that democracy will have any performative purchase. What does this all mean for democratic theory? How can we rethink democracy when the streets are bustling with mobilisation, yet nothing gets through to those who govern? How can we reinvent a modus of thinking about democracy to prevent democracy’s becoming captive to the powerful legitimation resources of neoliberal capitalism that demand self-reliance and self-empowerment? Are our tools of critique sharp enough for making sense of today’s reality, or do we need to reconsider our approaches? Do we need to reach out to other disciplines? And where can our hopes lie? The right to politics, on which we assert that the effective resurgence of democracy depends, expands the spectrum of conceptualisation of democracy much beyond authoritative notions of self-rule. It demands that democracy takes a distance from itself, that it resists the seduction of becoming its own justificatory horizon. Of all the authors in this volume, Noëlle McAfee is the one who most directly takes on the challenge of criticising the depoliticising, naturalising, and conservative effect of neoliberal discourses about policy, in general and in particular in relation to the financial crisis. Building on the work of Hannah Arendt—and expanding her notion of the political to include social concerns—McAfee tries to contribute to current democratic theorising by proposing a notion of political deliberation that will hopefully help remedy legitimacy deficits. Her main argument is that, while acting according to different guiding principles, social movements and public deliberative bodies can complement each other in countering the depoliticising tendencies of political leaders disconnected from their constituencies. Incorporating insights from actual practices of contestation, McAfee offers an account of how political efficiency and accountability could be enhanced through a combination of public deliberation and social activism. Nikolas Kompridis’s chapter intervenes in debates over the work democratic theory can do in times of crisis and tries to offer an alternative account of critique. On his view, critique should play a disclosing role, one that reveals to us the possibilities for innovation for our future collective life. Building on Arendt and Gadamer and engaging with Foucault and Derrida, Kompridis seeks to displace the understanding of critique as interrogation and deconstruction. Instead, he pleads that we need to return to utopian thinking: no democracy is possible without utopian longing. To give concreteness to his notion of positive critique, Kompridis discusses students’ reactions to the disproportionate use of police force on campus in the UC Davis case. Through their silent human chain, the students proposed an alternative way of being together as a community, thus exemplifying that utopian longing so essential for a positive notion of critique. Tracing the emergent trend in democratic theory of sourcing the collective will from plural and diverse publics in the private and social spheres, rather than the public-political sphere, David Chandler’s analysis focuses on what he names

12 Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai

‘nonlinear’ approaches to democracy. These approaches seek to overcome the rationalist assumptions of the public/private divide, thus discerning the democratic potential of everyday life. Within these approaches, democracy is no longer seen to operate as a collective will standing above society; democracy becomes endogenous to society, thereby becoming a mechanism to distribute power more evenly through the social empowerment of individuals and communities in their everyday practices. Disclosing surprising affinities between the modes of thinking of John Dewey and Friedrich Hayek, Chandler simultaneously provides an alternative to authoritative discourses on democracy and a suggestive illustration of the traps such alternatives carry in their turn. For when we appeal to bringing government back to the people, and seek democracy in the personal decisions made in everyday life, don’t we absolve public authority from its political responsibility? Does the devolution of power from the heights of political management to the depths of everyday life—devolution done in the name of democracy— deprive democracy of that infrastructure without which the right to politics loses its potency, as in the case of ungovernability that Claus Offe addressed earlier in the volume? It was a deliberate choice of ours to refuse to take a side between the allegedly dated authoritative notions of democracy and the innovative approaches that sparkle with fresh ambition. Even as we urge democracy to reinvent itself, mobilising the redemptive resources of the current crisis, we prefer to keep our awareness that, in the process, it risks reinventing itself out of existence. **** Taken together, the voices we’ve gathered in this volume invite readers to seek the resources needed to (re)claim democracy by invoking the fundamental modern ‘right to politics’ and securing the conditions for its actualisation. The overall ambition is to point out several possible mechanisms and venues for reclaiming politics and thus re-energise democracy, discerning possibilities to (re)constitute the places for democratic engagement, to (re)invent democratic practices, and to (re)consider our understanding of social critique. Without falling prey to a romantic notion of the democratic public sphere, the book cultivates realistic hopes: realistic, for in seeking opportunities one must also take into account the difficulty of overturning the limits of the normalised possible; hopes, because a commitment to democracy is incompatible with resignation. In this sense we, as editors, see the chapters neither as definite diagnoses of our democratic predicament, nor as recipes to be followed, but as provocative invitations to a debate about the direction we take from here, politically and theoretically. It might be our personal biographies as thinkers brought into intellectual existence by a discontent with the everyday political reality of autocratic socialism in our native Bulgaria and Romania that has made us intolerant of stale political regimes, whatever their substance. A democracy resigned to its deficits is to us unpalatable. We are not ready to say, along with the Spanish Indignados, ‘We are not

Introduction 13

against the system, the system is against us.’ It is not enough to tinker with an otherwise objectionable system to make it more inclusive. An inclusive but lame democracy, comfortably reconciled with its flaws and adjusted to its professed limitations, void of the tempestuous energies of competing alternatives and conflicting interests—in a word, a democracy that has given up its right to politics— is hardly much better than its contemporary rivals, the uncertain autocracies of the post-communist world. We trust that a combative, restless, inspired democracy, nourished by a rebellious penchant for experimentation and improvisation, is attainable, and therefore worth a good fight. —Albena Azmanova (Brussels and Plovdiv) & Mihaela Mihai (York and Edinburgh)

Notes 1 Elections in 2010 and 2011 brought to power the centre-right in Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Finland, Andorra, Ireland, Italy, Denmark, Britain, and the Netherlands—to consider only the ‘mature’ democracies of Europe. In that period the majority of the vote went to the centre-left only in Sweden, where the Social Democrats scored only 0.6 percentage points higher than the economically liberal Moderate Rally Party. 2 Here we have in mind the difference between ‘critical’ and ‘traditional’ social theory, as conceptualised by Max Horkheimer. While the latter is committed to a correct description of social phenomena, the former scrutinises the structural and institutional circumstances of domination and oppression, seeking to identify a path of emancipation, ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’ (Horkheimer 1982, 244). 3 On the difference between politics and governance, see Azmanova 2012, ch. 1. 4 ‘One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one’ (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay [1787–88] 1961, 311).

Bibliography Azmanova, Albena. 2012. The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment. New York: Columbia University Press. Green, Jeffrey Edward. 2010. The Eyes of the People: Democracy in the Age of Spectatorship. New York: Oxford University Press. Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. [1787–88] 1961. The Federalist Papers. Edited by Clinton Rossiter. New York: Mentor. Horkheimer, Max. 1982. Critical Theory. New York: Seabury Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2006. The Hatred of Democracy. Translated by Steve Corcoran. New York: Verso. Tocqueville, Alexis de. [1835] 1990. Democracy in America. Vol. 1. Translated by Henry Reeve. New York: Vintage Books.

7KLVSDJHLQWHQWLRQDOO\OHIWEODQN

PART I

Loci of Democratic Politics

7KLVSDJHLQWHQWLRQDOO\OHIWEODQN

1 AGONISM AND THE CRISIS OF REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY Paulina Tambakaki

The topic of representative democracy has once again come to the forefront of political theorizing. Partly as a result of the euro-crisis, which saw elected governments being replaced by technocratic administrations in Italy and Greece; partly as a result of the explosion of the mantra ‘no alternative’ in view of neoliberal politics and a stagnant party system; and partly as a result of the Indignados and the Occupy movements that gave renewed visibility to institutional misworkings, the very frame of representative democracy has re-emerged as the subject of analysis and critique (Tormey 2012; Lorey 2011; Hardt and Negri 2012; Green 2010). Although much of this critique is already familiar in that it draws on the usual mistrust of representative institutions, there is something in contemporary accounts of representation that merits further reflection. This is the idea that institutional representation (democracy as we know it), far from showing signs of malaise (as the by-product of the 2008 economic crisis), is itself in holistic crisis, at an irreversible turning point, and this invites us not just to rethink but also, crucially, to re-create the space for politics, perhaps by moving away from institutional representation. Of course, times of crisis—that is, times of dislocation— highlight the moment of political action (Laclau 1996). However, what is interesting in the contemporary case against representation is that its crisis signals neither the arrival of a post-democracy of sorts1 nor the return of something already constitutively problematic (after all, representative democracy has always been seen as impure by its critics).2 Instead, references to (economico-political) crisis accentuate the cul-de-sac of the representative process—its irreversibility— and in so doing give strong impetus to visions of politics as post-representative rather than simply as nonrepresentative or direct. Indeed, one immediate effect of the interlacing between talk of crisis and representation is that it evades immediate rejections of representative democracy—for example, on Rousseauian grounds.

18 Paulina Tambakaki

Another, related, effect is that it contextualises and, inevitably, refashions those aspects of institutional representation that constitute as much as contribute to the current democratic problem. Two such aspects stand out. The first concerns the way in which institutions of representation are imbricated in the workings of neoliberalism. Although institutions of representation have always been seen as elitist, detached (from the citizenry), and exclusive, they are now increasingly sketched as too complicit in the workings of neoliberalism (that benefits the few), too vested in a neoliberal rationale (that proletarianises), and too convenient a tool in the hands of power and vested interests (that seek to consolidate their hegemony). Therefore, if neoliberal hegemony (that is, the wider context which informs the workings of institutions of representation) is to be challenged, then the transformation (if not overturning) of those very institutions that nourish and buttress it appears a good starting point. Representative institutions thus transpire in this case not simply as obdurate to democratisation—because they are, for example, constitutively impure—but as one obvious barrier to democracy. This brings us to the second related problem with institutional representation as it has been refashioned by current accounts. While representative institutions promote and consolidate neoliberal policies that benefit the few at the expense of the many, egalitarianism, which defines democracy, evaporates—with the implication being, of course, that democracy also evaporates. Therefore, democracy, in this reading, surfaces not just as ‘distorted,’ exclusive, or ‘closed’ (as is the case with standard sceptical accounts of representation), but as endangered—because the rule of the many, its very basis, is endangered. It follows that to recover egalitarianism and to challenge neoliberalism, a move beyond institutional representation is both possible and desirable. The nature of this move differs within the relevant literature. At one end of the spectrum are those theorists who suggest that processes and institutions of representation, a locus of power, hierarchy, and domination, could be overcome and replaced by horizontal political relations—a network type of politics that involves (and revolves around) bonds of affinity and immediacy of action (Tormey 2012; Robinson and Tormey 2007; Hardt and Negri 2012; Lorey 2011; Day 2005). The politics of singularity, argue the Deleuze-influenced theorists,3 entwines action with difference, subjectivisation with commonality, and, in so doing, it escapes the trap of (the mediating process of) representation—which implies, in turn, that representative processes are neither constitutive nor necessary from this perspective, and can therefore be transgressed. In the middle of the spectrum, there are those theorists who explore the revival of communism (Dean 2012; Bosteels 2011). Tying communism with the idea of the sovereignty of the people—their ‘self-steering’—these theorists expose and critique the malfunctions of representative institutions (their complicity in the consolidation of neoliberal hegemony) but do not altogether dismiss the frame of institutional and, particularly, party representation—at least not immediately (Dean 2012, 117).

Agonism and Representative Democracy 19

Interested primarily in the revitalisation of left politics, such theorists flirt with the prospect of post-representation, with the idea of horizontal political organisation, yet they concede that horizontalism (and a network type of politics) coexists with and challenges institutional representation—notwithstanding, of course, its ever-growing potential to transgress it. Similarly sympathetic to horizontal political organisation, particularly in light of the discourses of the Indignados and the Occupy movements, the third group of theorists that occupies the other end of the spectrum outrightly rejects the prospect of post-representational politics (Prentoulis and Thomassen 2012; Decreus, Lievens, and Braeckman 2014; see also Thomassen 2007). Seeing processes of representation as constitutive of sociopolitical, and not just of state, relations, these theorists highlight the inescapability of representation (especially in horizontal politics) and, ultimately, its necessity for processes of collective subjectivisation. Importantly, the defence of representation that we encounter here does not deny that institutional representation is currently under strain. What it does is build a case for counter-hegemonic politics as one way of challenging the neoliberal hegemony that representative institutions buttress and perpetuate (not overcoming representation per se as the root cause of the democratic problem). Therefore, at stake in this debate about representative democracy is, first, the function, and then, inevitably, the import of institutional representation to democracy. Although this is certainly an old objection within the relevant literature, the distinction between democracy and institutional representation gains new significance in light of the growing appeal of the politics of singularity on the one hand, supported by new social movements, and the neoliberalisation of all areas of socio-political life on the other hand, where institutional representation transpires as one among many terrains of neoliberal contamination. For these two reasons, it now appears increasingly credible to distinguish between democracy and institutions and to start exploring other (perhaps deeper and better) forms of democracy in networks and horizontal assemblages—whether these involve acts of representation or not. After all, the socio-political world seems today more complex and interconnected, and as a result, representative, institutional, and state politics no longer sufficiently engages (let alone channels the demands of) the surpluses which exceed its remit—whether these are global activists concerned about common problems, the excluded, marginalised, the different, the poor, or simply the many, the 99 percent. The second issue at stake in this debate about representative democracy concerns, interestingly, the meaning and purpose of radical politics, because it is no coincidence that all theorists currently questioning the workings (if not purchase) of representative democracy subscribe to the radical strand of democratic theory. At this level of analysis, the difference between the Deleuze-influenced theorists, open to the overturning of representative institutions, and the Laclau/Mouffe4-influenced theorists, suggesting the idea of counter-hegemonic projects, becomes clear. While the former envision radical democracy in terms of an imminent break from institutional and representative

20 Paulina Tambakaki

politics, the latter envision radical democracy within frames of representation, with radical demands infiltrating, transforming, and bettering (but never fleeing from) representative mechanisms (and institutions). By so doing—that is, by so entwining representation with radicalisation—this second group of theorists comes close to agonistic theory, whose particular insights into the role of contestation in representative democracy, although influential, have so far been missing from our discussion. Therefore, the question arises: Does agonistic theory, with its twin focus on representative and radical democracy, which is precisely what is at stake in current debates about the crisis of representative democracy, have something specific to contribute to these debates? Seeking to address that question, this chapter suggests that agonistic theory provides a useful angle from which to enter current debates about representative democracy. Not only because we find in agonism a caution against the closures and normalisations which institutions of representation effect—and hence a powerful critique of institutional and, inevitably, representative democracy (that guards against conformism); but also because the agonistic emphasis on contestation shows one way of expanding on and, indeed, radicalising democratic politics. For these related reasons, the chapter argues that agonistic theory offers a fruitful, dynamic field of conceptual reflection that enables us to both identify and address the current limits of representative democracy—thereby siding with the idea of counter-hegemonic projects that the third group of theorists brings to discussions of representative democracy. However, this argument for agonism develops also a question against agonism, insofar as the differences between agonistic theorists become especially glaring (and arguably irreconcilable) once we narrow down the discussion to the topic of representative democracy (rather than pluralism, which they are renowned for) and start enquiring into the implications of their writings for the crisis of representation. This is because the growingly Deleuzian influence on William Connolly’s work, with his emphasis on abundance, becoming, and assemblages, is increasingly at odds with Chantal Mouffe’s outright defence of representative democracy (particularly in Agonistics) and James Tully’s focus on democratic games between governance and freedom (see Connolly 2002, 2005, 2011; Mouffe 2013; Tully 2008a, 2008b). Therefore, reproducing from within agonistic theory the divisions which already arise in debates over (post-)representation, the frame of representative democracy which this chapter employs, serves both to expose the limits of the agonistic position (its unity as a position) and highlight its specific contribution—which ultimately resides in the synergy it effects between necessary institutions and open-ended contests. Seeking to strengthen this synergy in the face of the crisis of representation, the chapter concludes by exploring the idea of claims-making as a necessary component of the contestatory politics that agonistic theorists defend. Claims-making, I argue, transfers attention from process to outcomes and from contestation to acts of construction, that is, to the second, inescapably representative dimension of contestatory politics. This second dimension, already clear in

Agonism and Representative Democracy 21

Mouffe’s version of agonistic theory, probes deeper reflection on the limits of democratic representation and invites a re-evaluation of the ‘remedies’ for its crisis. The next section starts by examining the agonistic approach to representative democracy.

Agonism and Representative Democracy Seeking to identify the ways in which agonistic theorists approach representative democracy (and institutions of representation in particular) is, in the first instance, a straightforward task. Theorists who subscribe to agonism, such as William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, Chantal Mouffe, and James Tully, to name a few, immediately agree that (state and representative) institutions, although key to the workings of democratic regimes, neither exemplify nor exhaust democratic life (Honig 1993; Connolly 1991, 1995; Mouffe 1993; Tully 1995). This is, first, because democratic life, through the agonistic lens, always exceeds institutional and procedural blueprints and cannot be confined to particular sites or reduced to the particular forms and identities that institutional politics sets. As Honig puts it, ‘the always imperfect closure of political space tends to engender remainders . . . [that may] destabilise the very closures that deny their existence’ (1993, 15). Remainders, therefore, or simply put, ever-present differences, which do not conform to dominant standards or are excluded from particular configurations, exceeding and escaping these, always (return to) contest and disrupt institutional closures. This reveals that democratic politics not only has the potential to normalise, close off, and exclude differences that do not conform to the rules it frames (particularly in its institutional form), but also, crucially for us here, has the potential to disrupt and unsettle institutions, if and when differences are expressed in the political arena. This last point brings us to the second, related, reason why representative institutions do not exhaust democratic life according to agonistic theorists. Given that frontiers between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ relations of identity/difference, constitute a necessary component of pluralistic democracy, democracy for agonistic theorists rests on openness and thrives on strife. Conceived as an agon, a political activity and attitude of contestation, strife exposes hegemonies through the agonistic lens, bolsters pluralism (by ensuring that democratic imaginaries remain open to different interpretations), and stirs democratic renewal. Neither dispensable nor a problem to be solved, therefore, strife means politics in the agonistic vocabulary, and points to the idea that a vibrant democracy might not call for simply an institutional haven, but also the cultivation of such ethos of contestation. Thus, what we notice here is that the case for contestatory politics, which agonistic theorists put forward, does not simply proceed from the onto-political assumption that institutional mechanisms fail to capture (and, inevitably, represent) the whole of democratic life, because differences (excesses or remainders) always escape and challenge their workings, but also from the assumption that the challenge these

22 Paulina Tambakaki

differences pose to institutions equally constitutes democracy. Indeed, the very emphasis which agonistic theorists put on the democratic nature of the agon both displaces institutions and representative processes (such as voting) from the centre of democratic theorizing and questions institutional workings—or, to be more precise, it alerts us to their (mis)workings. James Tully’s work (1995, 2008a) gives us a clear idea of what these institutional (mis)workings are, which agonism wards off: first, norm framing, that is, the settling of norms, which disqualify and exclude the multiplicity of voices and activities constitutive of the human condition; second, ‘inherited languages of description and reflection’ that restrict our ability to understand, affirm, and redescribe that which escapes the vocabulary we are accustomed to (for example, the language of modern citizenship that often prevents us from grasping the ‘democratic’ aspect of new practices of freedom); and, third, the dispersion of practices of governance and freedom (as a result of globalisation) along with the ways this dispersion challenges modern representative politics. These dangers, which Tully explores throughout his work, are interrelated in that his analysis of their implications for political thinking revolves around one particular aspect that they all share in common, namely, the idea of a ‘limit.’ A limit, explains Tully, means: . . . either the characteristic forms of thought and action which are taken for granted and not questioned or contested by participants in a practice of subjectivity, thereby functioning as the implicit background or horizon of their questions and contests, or it can mean that a form of subjectivity (its form of reason, norms of conduct and so forth) is explicitly claimed to be a limit that cannot be otherwise because it is universal, necessary or obligatory (the standard form of legitimation since the Enlightenment). (2008a, 75) Read, therefore, against the background of this (Foucauldian) idea of a ‘limit,’ it appears that what specifically concerns Tully and other agonistic theorists when it comes to institutions is the way in which they settle and limit norms of thinking and acting, thus constraining us to think and act otherwise. From this reading, then, it immediately follows that a democracy reduced to institutions could be, and often is, a ‘limit’ democracy—since it ticks all the boxes of what Tully explains to be a ‘limit practice’: its norms and practices are dominant and settled (by representative institutions) and its limiting language of description and reflection is increasingly failing us to grapple with the effects of globalisation. To grapple, therefore, with these effects, and to question, in the process, the limit-practices of state democracy, Tully, along with other agonistic theorists, problematises further the link between democracy and representative institutions. This brings us to the third reason that explains the distance between agonism and institutional democracy. This reason becomes more apparent when we look at recent agonistic writings.

Agonism and Representative Democracy 23

In particular, seeking to fine-tune agonism with a growing literature that draws out the implications of globalisation and complexity on state politics, agonistic theorists step up their critique of representative institutions and strongly question the link between democracy and institutions of representation—that is, they question the efficacy of a contestatory politics (democracy) that targets representative institutions only as a springboard for change. Not only are such institutions too imbricated in disciplining and normalisation to react to the squeezing that issues from global pressures (Connolly 1991, 1995, 2002, 2011), but also contestation is limited when it does not target (multiple, mobile) domains of domination, or involve cross-border alliances around a variety of issues (Tully 2008b; Connolly 2005, 2011). William Connolly clearly states the problem facing institutional democracy when he suggests that as the micropolitics of disciplining intensify, channelling apparatuses grow, and antagonisms together with resentments amplify on a global scale—as a result of what he refers to as ‘an abstract resonance machine’ that exceeds the control of any one state—it is the democratic state itself, its institutions and processes of representation, that transpires as a limited site (and target) for renewal (Connolly 2011). Although it needs to be noted here that this escalating mistrust of institutional democracy, perforating agonistic writings, by no means implies the rejection (or even transgression) of institutional representation, there is a strong case to be made that agonism as a theoretical position sits, in the end, somewhat uneasily with practices of institutional representation. After all, this is where agonism owes its forcefulness to: the challenge it posed to the primary focus on institutional politics and the necessary focus of institutional politics on securing consensus. By stressing the need for expressing conflict within society and against institutional narrowness and finality, agonism opened the way for conceptualizing democracy in a way that neither reduces nor inflates it above institutions. This explains why agonistic theorists, including Chantal Mouffe, agree that institutions of representative democracy do not exhaust democratic life—thereby making the task of this section, in the first instance, straightforward. However, the nature of the task changes upon closer inspection. Once we shift focus slightly to institutional representation, the agreement among agonistic theorists evaporates. The different assumptions about democratic representation, found in and across the work of agonistic theorists, not only show fissures in the agonistic position, thus making it difficult to take agonism as a unified position, but also carry implications for the current crisis of representation that the next section explores in more detail. Of course, agonistic theorists do not directly write about representation. And there is an argument to be made, especially if one follows Hanna Pitkin’s (1967) seminal study on representation, that the latter necessarily attaches to institutional politics. However, as more and more theorists question the institutional locus of representation, as we earlier saw (see also Saward 2006), it is instructive to distinguish between the two and trace the effects of this distinction in the writings of Connolly, Tully, and Mouffe.

24 Paulina Tambakaki

In so doing, we notice two different approaches: on the one hand, an approach to representation as constitutive of political reality found in the work of Tully and Mouffe (and other agonistic theorists such as Norval [2007], who emphasize the expressive dimension of contestatory practices); on the other hand, Connolly’s approach to representation as (sole) prefix to institutions. Indeed, looking at Connolly’s work through the frame of representation, there is a clear sense in which processes of representation remain confined to state institutions and do not arise in or infiltrate the assemblages that he suggests can counter and redirect the global ‘abstract resonance machine’ (that includes institutional politics). Influenced by the work of Giles Deleuze and his ontology of abundance, Connolly prioritises ‘pluralisation’ over the grounding which representation processes initiate (see Tønder and Thomassen 2005, 1–13). That is, he prioritises the amplification, openness, and limitlessness of agons on the ontological presupposition that unforeseen changes (a politics of becoming) could spring out of unpredictable causalities and reverberations in interconnected force-fields (2005, 121; 2011, 37, 42, 73, 129, 135–47). From this prioritisation of (never-ending) pluralisation, then, we are in a position to infer that democracy for Connolly, the counter-resonance machine that contests mobile targets and multiple roles, does not just surpass representative processes, but also, notably, does not need the unification, grounding, and consistency that representation processes set motion to (or at least, it is not clear how it does). More than that, unification for Connolly (and ultimately representation) points to closure—and thus risks dogmatism and exclusion.5 By contrast, if we turn to the work of Tully and Mouffe, we notice a different approach to representation (unification and grounding). In the emphases that Mouffe places throughout her work6 on adversarialism—the adversary who develops within and out of processes of representation, that is, processes of identification with various discourses and projects; on the left/right distinction, which represents opposing views of the socio-political world; on (counter-)hegemonic discourses, which (re)articulate (institute and ground) a new ‘common sense’;7 and, more recently, on her defence of a ‘strategy of engagement with,’ we find not just a clear case that representation is inescapable and constitutive of sociopolitical processes, but also that there is need for more representation—for the construction and unification of demands for a type of order different from the neoliberal one. Likewise, when we look at the work of Tully, we have again a clear sense that representation is ever present. In his early work (1995), this transpires in his exploration of ‘diverse struggles over recognition.’ In his later work (2008a, 2008b), the inescapability of representation surfaces both in the attention he pays to the ways in which agonistic struggles (over the modification of the rules of the democratic game) constitute and bind citizenries, and in his related insistence on omnipresent practices of freedom as the necessarily ‘democratic side of practices of governance’ (2008a, 25). Indeed, the very redescription of democracy that Tully proposes, as practices of civic freedom,8 develops precisely

Agonism and Representative Democracy 25

on the back of the assumption that representation is possible and constitutive of all socio-political practices (not just institutional ones).9 Therefore, what surfaces from the above exposition is that, depending on where we lay emphasis, institutionalisation or democratic representation, we find two equally plausible narratives of the relation between agonism and representative democracy. According to the first narrative, agonistic theorists, outrightly suspicious of institutionalisation (of the closures and normalisations that institutions effect), alert us to the role that difference—the expression of limited and democratic conflict—can play in institutional politics: exposing sedimentations, challenging hegemonies, and safeguarding openness. This implies, in turn, that institutional democracy needs agonism and agonism (as a theoretical standpoint) needs and (develops within) institutional democracy. According to the second narrative, which exposes the differences among agonistic theorists, democratic agonism withdraws from representation, if one follows Connolly—partly because the need for representation, for unification and grounding, dissipates in the face of the politics of becoming, of rhizomes and ever-potentiality; partly because representation, the sibling of state institutions, partakes in the flaws and narrowness of such institutions and, in the end, blends in the abstract resonance machine. Or, if one follows the work of Tully and Mouffe, agonism encases democratic representation, insofar as the disputation of the rules of the political game constitutes and binds collectivities together (Tully) and renders antagonistic confrontations adversarial and, hence, democratic (Mouffe). Of course, it can be objected at this stage that the many differences between agonistic theorists, if one still accepts the tag of agonism, make their contribution to current debates about the crisis of representation at best difficult to pin and at worse scarce (and thus thin). However, it is the argument of this chapter that far from hollowing out the agonistic contribution, the very intricacy of these two (or, more accurately, three) narratives within agonistic theory offers an edgy entry point into contemporary debates about representative democracy and a useful angle of reflection on their limits. The next section explains the reasons for this argument.

Crisis, Contestation, and Radical Politics To explain why agonism offers useful insights into current debates about representative democracy, we need to return to the debates that we started with and isolate the relevant inferences. One is that representative democracy—state and institutional—is in deep crisis (institutional, economic, social), from which it cannot recover in its current form. Second is that growing inegalitarianism, emblematic of the crisis, issues from the consolidation of a neoliberal hegemony, which state institutions buttress and promote. Third, and as a result of the above, the very import of representative institutions to democracy, to the people or the ‘have nots,’ to use the apt expression of Jacques Rancière (1999), has to be

26 Paulina Tambakaki

radically questioned and democracy, in turn, creatively rethought—as horizontal/ network democracy and perhaps communism. While the force of these inferences goes certainly without question—after all, representative institutions are complicit in the consolidation of neoliberal hegemony—the diagnosis of the problem, the idea that representative democracy is in crisis from which it cannot recover, and the prognosis of another type of democracy (post-representative) as an alternative to democratic representation, both invite further reflection. To this reflection, agonistic theory makes an interesting contribution. Let’s take the idea of crisis first. Although the 2008 global financial crisis accentuated the misworkings of representative institutions (particularly when one focuses on Southern Europe), it is difficult to reconcile talk of crisis with the failings of democratic representation. One reason is that institutions of democratic representation always and already operate on the matrix of power relations and vested interests (whether there is crisis or not). Another reason is that power relations are constitutive of processes of democratic representation—in that representation rests on and proceeds from acts of power (Laclau 2007; Laclau and Mouffe 2001). Therefore, the deeper, if only slightly reformulated, question at issue in current debates about representative democracy concerns, on one side, the nexus between power and institutions of democratic representation—as a result of talk of crisis; on the other side, it concerns the turn to a post-representative (postpower?) democracy—as a result of the institutional rejection evinced in the protests of the Indignados and the Occupy movements that support the case for post-representation. Agonistic theory, I argue, enables us to address this two-sided question. By alerting us to the inescapable dangers of institutionalisation—norm-setting, closure, and exclusion—what agonistic theory essentially does is to draw our attention to power, to its (re)production through institutions, and to the dominating effects it has via institutions. Impossible, then, to be rid of, through an agonistic lens, power can only be exposed and challenged. This is precisely what the agon does. Understood as ethos in the work of Connolly, the agon guards against and disrupts institutional closures and, by so doing, ventilates institutional politics. Perceived as confrontation between adversaries in the work of Mouffe, the agon counters and triggers the construction of counter-hegemonies. Finally, seen to lie in the frictions and provocations that practices of freedom pose to relations of domination, the agon, in the work of Tully, challenges and modifies, but does not finish off, games of governance/government. In a nutshell, the agon does not end power; that’s why it has to be ongoing—because power relations are ever present, not because the agon is weak. This explains, also, why agonistic theorists do not in the end reject institutions of representation. More notably, by tying the agon with democracy, agonistic theory enables us to change the terms of current debates about representative democracy. At issue is no longer what do representative institutions do for democracy, but what does democracy (contestation) do for institutions. This is where the edge of the agonistic angle into current

Agonism and Representative Democracy 27

debates lies. The redescription of democracy that agonism offers opens the way for the idea that the problem today might have less to do with democracy (which is ever growing in terms of contestatory politics), or even with its institutions of representation (that are, of course, imbricated in power relations), and more with the hegemonic discourse of neoliberalism. Although the two, neoliberalism and institutions of democratic representation, are, as we have seen, related, they are also distinct concepts, and their distinction, I will now argue, is important to keep in sight—first, because a focus on hegemony,10 as separate from a focus on representative democracy, narrows attention to the naturalisations of the neoliberal discourse, to the repressions that this effects, and, ultimately, to the alternatives excluded by this repression. From this narrowing of attention, the possibility arises that the transformation of institutions of democratic representation might be, indeed, one alternative currently repressed by the sedimentations of the neoliberal order. Of course, suggesting the ‘revival’ of representative democracy by no means undermines the depth of the problem—the complicity and unresponsiveness of representative institutions to egalitarian politics; nor does it overplay the role that institutional representation can have (if it ever did) in securing a different type of politics—especially when issues and pressures often escape its remit. Instead, what it does is problematise the increasingly dominant prognosis that by moving away from institutional representation, we rescue democracy and challenge neoliberal hegemony. This brings us to the second reason why it is important to distinguish between representative democracy and neoliberal hegemony: by so doing, we are in better position to concretise the political task at hand. As this volume puts it, this task consists in reclaiming democracy, by exercising the right to politics—something that, in turn, involves judgment and responsibility (see particularly Urbinati 2006). In short, it involves engagement in acts of representation and contestation of processes and dynamics of representation. Mouffe’s version of agonistic theory agrees with this task. In Agonistics, Mouffe argues that ‘the aim of a counter-hegemonic intervention is . . . to re-articulate a given situation in a new configuration’ (2013, 79). Rearticulation, insists Mouffe, accompanies contestation (which she refers to as disarticulation in Agonistics), and it involves the construction of an alternative to the hegemonic neoliberal order. Key to this construction, which sets off a counter-hegemony, is not the identification of a clear enemy (which is what inevitably happens when one contests something), but, crucially, the production of an adversary. Adversarialism for Mouffe suggests a specific idea. It suggests the confrontation between two or more discourses/projects that, while they share some common ground (they agree, for example, on some basics, such as the defence of basic representative institutions), offer opposing interpretations of these institutions. They do not outrightly reject them, because rejection points to antagonism, according to Mouffe, not to democratic agonism. More than that, democratic agonism for Mouffe, which thus develops on the terrain of

28 Paulina Tambakaki

representative democracy, suggests (re)engagement with this democracy and brings forth the radical transformation of its institutions (not their abandonment)—which implies, in turn, that counter-hegemonic interventions also envelop adversarialism for Mouffe, because they involve agonistic encounters with representative institutions. Therefore, Mouffe offers a different suggestion to the literature enthralled by ‘revolutionary’ shifts to post-hegemony and post-representation in the wake of the Occupy movements and the Indignados. She suggests that to radically transform society today, to replace the neoliberal hegemony with a counter-hegemony, there is no simple—immanent—way out, other than confronting its institutions—not seeking to move beyond these institutions. At stake in this suggestion is, indeed, the meaning of radical politics. In particular, and as we saw in the previous section, there are two strands within agonism. One is Connolly’s, which prioritises pluralisation; the other is Tully’s and Mouffe’s which prioritises representation. Now, we are in a position to explain further that these are not just two different approaches to representation, but also two different versions of radical politics—particularly when viewed against the backdrop of the alleged crisis of representative democracy. By pointing to two different ways of envisioning radicalisation today, from within (Mouffe) or outside (Connolly) processes of democratic representation, these two versions replay the divisions found in current debates about representative democracy (horizontalism versus counter-hegemony) and, in so doing, they confront us with a limited choice. The choice is obvious. Its limit is that the agon remains, in the end, a game (Edwards, 2013). While the game is compelling, in the case of Connolly (and Tully), boundless, and reassuring, the game is indispensable, in the case of Mouffe, and requires boundaries and work. A necessary part of this work, I now argue in a step further from Mouffe’s version of agonistic theory, is not to (re)invent the adversarial rules of the representative game (the left/right distinction that might be impossible to reinvent), but to seek, perhaps through claims-making, to play the adversarial game differently. Of course, Mouffe (and Laclau) emphasise the importance of turning demands into claims through chains of equivalence (Laclau 2007; Laclau and Mouffe 2001). As Laclau explains in his more recent work, a negative unity, constructed around claims to an unresponsive power, is as important to counter-hegemonic politics as are difference and contestation. Contestation is not on its own sufficient, according to Laclau, because heterogeneous struggles ‘do not tend spontaneously to coalesce with each other’ (Laclau 2007, 108); they need to be brought under a common denominator, in order to challenge a given hegemony, and this requires the transformation of many, unmet, demands into claims. Therefore, claims-making, a constitutive dimension of counter-hegemonic politics, transpires as one, necessary, part of such politics. However, claims-making is not its most visible part, because it spirals the unity that counter-hegemony needs; it does not exclusively engineer this unity. Claims-making exclusively engineers unity in Michael Saward’s work (2006). The performative, aesthetic, and creative

Agonism and Representative Democracy 29

dimensions of the representative claim that Saward makes the case for, a claim that a variety of political actors can make in civil society, exclusively produces subjects, objects, and audiences. The claim itself generates representation for Saward. Or, as he puts it, ‘‘‘representation” can be said from this perspective not to exist; what exists are claims and their receptions’ (2006, 306). Heightening thereby the constitutive part that claims-making has in representative politics, Saward, much like Laclau and Mouffe, opens interesting lines of enquiry into the role that claims-making, and ultimately representation and partial closure, play in counterhegemonic politics. But there is a limitation. Claims-making in Saward’s account is an everyday practice. It is not what specifically triggers counter-hegemonic politics—and this implies, in turn, that adversarial contestation is not a prominent component of the type of representative claim that Saward makes the case for. This sort of claim captures foremost the moment of identification, when a group identifies with a claim and, thus, accentuates the success or failure of the actors who formulate the claims, the representatives. Although this is not in itself a problem, insofar as Saward extends representation to civil society, it becomes a problem once we focus on accounts of post-representation—where representation, the buttress of neoliberalism, is as such rejected. Seeking to overcome this limitation and, in the process, counter accounts of post-representative politics, claims-making, I now argue, needs certainly to build on the insights of Saward, Laclau, and Mouffe, but it also needs to move slightly beyond them. In particular, claims-making, in line with Saward, Laclau, and Mouffe, encapsulates a creative and, for this reason, constituting and unifying, political moment. Although as an inescapably representative moment, that is, a moment that necessarily involves representation, claims-making involves closure, the closure it involves is only provisional, because it can always be challenged, countered or, as Mouffe puts it, disarticulated. Therefore, claims-making, as I here sketch it, follows the emphasis that Laclau, Mouffe, and Saward place on the constituting process of making the claim, but also, crucially, it places emphasis on the claim itself, on the idea of producing a specific request—since it is the specificity of the request that inevitably constitutes and unifies political projects. More than that, the emphasis on the claim serves to distinguish claims-making from issue-based politics. While issue-based politics seeks to air an issue (say inequality) and expose the way that this is approached, claims-making comes after exposure/resistance, and it seeks to reformulate and, indeed, renegotiate the issue at hand. Claims open the way to renegotiation because they are, first, necessarily narrower, target specific, and limited (or even limiting, depending on where one stands) than contestations are. Second, claims to someone or something arise out of frontiers and, crucially, press to establish a relation of interdependence between these frontiers—between the side that produces the given claim and the side that responds to the claim. Third, and perhaps more importantly, claims already envelop counter-positions, since this is precisely what defines and distinguishes them as claims: the requests or alternatives they encase.

30 Paulina Tambakaki

All this indicates, in turn, that claims-making adds a further layer to the idea of contestation itself—not just to the wider frame of representative democracy that contestation seeks to open up. At stake in this layer is no longer the opposition, or even balance, in a democracy between consensus and dissent, between securing consensus on institutional representation on the one hand and fomenting agonistic dissent in civil society on the other. Instead, it is the very synthesis between dissent and representation, exposure of issues and claims-making, openness through contestation and provisional closure once in contestation. In short, at stake here is attending to the second dimension of contestation, the dimension of representation, while keeping into focus, if not calling forth, the interplay and interdependence of emerging frontiers. This is precisely what claims do—and what the idea of claims-making captures. Claims tie contestation with representation (because they affix and represent given requests), and, importantly, (divisive) claims tend to attach cords to partitions and divides (between those who make the claims and those who respond, the representatives and represented, and so on). Does my focus on claims suggest that the need for a specifically left politics evaporates? No, it doesn’t. Claims do not arise de novo. As Saward convincingly shows in his work on the representative claim, claims draw on familiar frameworks and existing resources (2006, 303). In so doing, claims—I argue in a step further from Saward—tap into left politics (or at least they have the potential to do so), and they construct partial and ideologically selective readings of the political process. Finally, and as a result of the above, claims-making shifts attention to outcomes: to victories and losses that renew, and perhaps even radically transform, the game of democratic representation. They do not evade it. Of course, the turn to claims-making at this late stage of my discussion neither offers nor intends to offer a conclusive account of its potential within agonism. It serves only to highlight, first, one limit of the agon as a necessarily incomplete game: the priority it accords to process over outcomes—a limit that the literature on representative democracy (and its alleged crisis) rightly draws attention to when it points to institutional unresponsiveness to egalitarianism; and second, my focus on claims-making, which serves to highlight the different set of challenges (and lines of enquiry) that open up once we recommit to the struggle for and against representative democracy. To this second end, agonistic theory, surely, offers useful insights. By affirming, yet forcefully challenging, the very frame of representative democracy, it invites us to rethink its ‘crisis’ and also, crucially, to reconstruct debates and ‘remedies’ for this ‘crisis.’

Conclusion This chapter has argued that agonistic theory offers a useful starting point for reflecting on current accounts of post-representative democracy. While such accounts insist that the problem today has to do with representative institutions

Agonism and Representative Democracy 31

that buttress neoliberal hegemony, agonistic theorists point out that the problem might have less to do with institutions (that are, after all, limited, yet necessary) and more to do with neoliberal hegemony. Is contestation, which agonistic theorists insist on, in turn, sufficient for challenging neoliberal hegemony? It isn’t, if it does not involve representation. Some versions of agonism affirm (Tully) and heighten (Mouffe) this need for representation and, inevitably, unification of political projects. However, they either do not flesh it out (Tully), or tie it with the ready-made adversarialism of the left/right distinction. This chapter ties it with claims-making—the making of claims that are narrow and target specific, divisive and unifying, that press for responsibility and, crucially, for response to the propositions they envelop and from the parties they confront. To be sure, claims do not hold the same revolutionary promise that a move beyond institutional representation holds. Claims do not promise to eradicate neoliberal hegemony. Claims proceed from and within democratic representation, and they only point to that step forward that intensifies and, perhaps, strengthens the struggle against neoliberal hegemony.

Notes 1 See Crouch 2004 and 2011. In addition, Jodi Dean gives a good review of the postdemocracy debate in Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (2009). 2 For an excellent analysis of this position, see Pitkin 1967. See also Disch 2012. 3 Here I need to clarify that although neither Isabell Lorey (2011) nor Richard Day (2005) is immediately influenced by the post-structuralist theory of Giles Deleuze, their case for affinity-based politics (Day) and presentist democracy (Lorey) shares significant common ground with the Deleuze-influenced accounts of post-representative politics. 4 Laclau and Mouffe 2001. 5 This is a common criticism of Connolly’s work. See David McIvor 2011. 6 See Mouffe 2000 and 2005. 7 See Laclau and Mouffe 2001. 8 Tully explains (2008a, 57): ‘It is always possible to contest and negotiate the form of governance of any organisation: to graft democratic practice on to it. If the terms “democracy” and “participation” are used to refer only to the formal institutions of representative government, then local and global struggles to democratise decision making in dispersed practices of governance will not be seen as democratic practices. However, the boundary drawn around the use of “democracy” in the eighteenth century can be contested, and its use can be extended (or reextended) to refer to any activity in which people assemble and negotiate the way and by whom power is exercised over them, on the grounds that these too are games of “governance” (in the non-restrictive sense).’ 9 Of course, the difference between Tully and Mouffe needs to be noted here. While Tully’s insights into the inescapability of representation lead him to defend an ‘expansive’ conception of democracy (and in this sense he comes closer to Connolly than Mouffe), these same insights lead Mouffe in Agonistics to defend representative institutions (and to explore ways for their transformation). For this reason, Tully’s approach

32 Paulina Tambakaki

to representation can be convincingly construed as a separate, third, approach that at the same time affirms and questions the constitutivity of representation—especially if one reads Tully’s case for expanding agonism as a way out of the limit practices of representation. 10 Here I draw on Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001) concept of hegemony.

Bibliography Bosteels, Bruno. 2011. The Actuality of Communism. London: Verso. Connolly, William E. 1991. Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1995. The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2002. Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, and Speed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2005. Pluralism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2011. A World of Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Crouch, Colin. 2004. Postdemocracy. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2011. The Strange Non Death of Neo-Liberalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Day, Richard. 2005. Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. London: Pluto Press/Toronto: Between the Lines. Dean, Jodi. 2009. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2012. The Communist Horizon. London: Verso. Decreus, Thomas, Matthias Lievens, and Antoon Braeckman. (2014). ‘Building Collective Identities: How New Social Movements Try to Overcome Post-politics.’ Parallax 20 (2): 136–48. Disch, Lisa. 2012. ‘The Impurity of Representation and the Vitality of Democracy.’ Cultural Studies 26 (2–3): 207–27. Edwards, Jason. 2013. ‘Play and Democracy: Huizinga and the Limits of Agonism.’ Political Theory 41 (1): 90–115.  Green, Jeffrey E. 2010. The Eyes of the People. Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship. New York: Oxford University Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2012. Declaration. New York: Argo Navis Author Services. Honig, Bonnie. 1993. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Laclau, Ernesto. 1996. ‘Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony.’ In Deconstruction and Pragmatism, edited by Chantal Mouffe, 47–67. New York: Routledge. ———. 2007. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Lorey, Isabell. 2011. ‘Non Representationist, Presentist Democracy.’ Transversal Journal, Issue Occupy and Assemble 10. Accessed June 9, 2013. http://eipcp.net/ transversal/1011/lorey/en. McIvor, David. 2011. ‘The Politics of Speed: Connolly, Wolin, and the Prospects for Democratic Citizenship in an Accelerated Polity.’ Polity 43 (1): 58–83. Mouffe, Chantal. 1993. The Return of the Political. London: Verso. ––——. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso.

Agonism and Representative Democracy 33

———. 2005. On the Political. London: Routledge. ———. 2013. Agonistics. London: Verso. Norval, Aletta J. 2007. Aversive Democracy: Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pitkin, Hanna F. 1967. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Prentoulis, Marina, and Lasse Thomassen. 2012. ‘Political Theory in the Square: Protest, Representation and Subjectification.’ Contemporary Political Theory, advance online publication. Accessed July 9, 2013. Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by J. Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Robinson, Andrew, and Simon Tormey. 2007. ‘Beyond Representation? A Rejoinder.’ Parliamentary Affairs 60 (1): 127–37. Saward, Michael. 2006. ‘The Representative Claim.’ Contemporary Political Theory 5: 297–318. Thomassen, Lasse. 2007. ‘Beyond Representation?’ Parliamentary Affairs 60 (1): 11–126. Tønder, Lars, and Lasse Thomassen. 2005. ‘Rethinking Radical Democracy Between Abundance and Lack.’ In Radical Democracy: Politics Between Abundance and Lack, edited by Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen, 1–13. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Tormey, Simon. 2012. ‘Occupy Wall Street: From Representation to Post-Representation.’ Journal of Critical Globalization Studies 5: 132–37. Tully, James. 1995. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008a. Public Philosophy in a New Key. Vol. I, Democracy and Civic Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008b. Public Philosophy in a New Key. Vol. II, Imperialism and Civic Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Urbinati, Nadia. 2006. Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2 FREEDOM, DEMOCRACY, AND WORKING LIFE Keith Breen

Introduction The dominant understanding of working life in contemporary liberal democracies rests on prejudices widely shared by ordinary citizens and elites alike. One prejudice is that in order to be efficient, work processes and the workers who carry them out must be controlled and directed by those with superior technical knowledge and training, that is, managers. Another, following directly from the first, is that the organisation of workplaces must also rest in the hands of managers, given their assumed technical superiority. Together these prejudices have a paradoxical impact on societies supposedly committed to realising the democratic values of freedom and equality. In contrast to the political sphere, where these values are taken as axiomatic, working life is not thought a realm in which citizens—beyond the minority who lead and manage—should act autonomously. And work, an activity in which many spend or hope to spend a large portion of their lives, is deemed for all but a privileged few to be of instrumental rather than intrinsic value, a means to external ends rather than meaningful in itself. This instrumental conception of work and the assumption that workplaces are best structured in an authoritarian manner found clearest expression in twentieth-century technicist,Taylorist models of work organisation, but they have a remarkably long lineage, going back through classical economists such as Adam Smith to the ancient Greeks (Murphy 1993). What is more notable, however, is their acceptance by theorists who are otherwise stalwart opponents of technicism and authoritarianism. In The Human Condition, for example, Hannah Arendt offers sweeping ontological assertions to the effect that working life, unlike a life of action in the ‘public realm,’ is either devoid of human meaning or, if open to such meaning, necessarily instrumental in character. Though critical of Arendt, Jürgen Habermas arrives at similar conclusions based on the functionalist claim

Freedom, Democracy, and Working Life 35

that the modern economy operates according to a ‘systemic’ logic distinct from the communicative basis of the ‘lifeworld’ sphere of civil society. For both authors, the goal of a critical politics is to defend the public realm or the lifeworld from incursions from the economic sphere.The thought that the economic sphere, and thus working life, might be a domain of ethical aspiration is dismissed as utopian at best. My purpose in this chapter is to contest this view of working life by drawing on two normative arguments grounded on positive conceptions of freedom. Appealing to the ideal of autonomy, the first argument asserts that work is intrinsically valuable to people and that they have a right to ‘meaningful work.’ The second calls for workplace democratisation in line with the principles of individual ‘self-development’ and collective self-determination. Both reject the claim that the workplace is unamenable to ethical reflection and reorganisation. To support these arguments, I explore two important examples of successful workplace reorganisation. The first example, Volvo’s innovations in automotive assembly from the 1970s to the early 1990s, shows that meaningful work is not a mistaken aspiration in even the most historically technicised of work environments. The second, the emergence of ‘worker-recuperated enterprises’ in Argentina from the late 1990s onwards, reveals that workplace democratisation is not a utopian demand, but rather a living ideal and a pragmatic recourse in difficult economic circumstances.

Devaluing Working Life The devaluation of working life in Habermas’s and Arendt’s thought issues from their response to what they consider one of the key problems of the modern age.1 In Arendt’s case, that problem is the loss of individual freedom occasioned by the reduction of politics to the administration of things and the rise of a society in which ‘mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance’ (Arendt 1958, 46). This predicament arose in part, she claims, from a pernicious confusion of ‘labor,’ ‘work,’ and ‘action,’ those distinct human activities that together constitute the vita activa or ‘active life.’ For Arendt, labour, work, and action form an ontological hierarchy whose principle is the degree of freedom and meaningfulness displayed by each activity, action (praxis) occupying ‘the highest position’ (Arendt 1987, 30). As exemplified in housekeeping and the provision of consumer goods, labour (ponein) serves the condition of earthly life, the ‘metabolism’ of the body with nature that never finds satisfaction because it lies within the eternal cycle of hunger and consumption. Ceaselessly repetitive, in labour what appears is not the human person, but rather meaningless animal need, animal laborans (Arendt 1958, 96–109). In this, labour contrasts with work, which incorporates both fabrication (poie-sis) and art, understood in the sense of technical skill (techne-), and is genuinely creative, marked by conscious design.Through activities such as manufacture, tool-making,

36 Keith Breen

and architecture, work creates the use-objects—furniture, houses, art objects, et  cetera—that make up the ‘human artifice,’ an objective world separate from nature and providing human beings with a durable home. Governed by an instrumental logic, however, work is ‘entirely determined by the categories of means and end,’ the techniques employed by the craftsman, homo faber, turning on the belief that all material, whether natural or human, is manipulable in line with a preconceived image or idea. Such manipulation contains an ‘element of violation,’ entailing the seizure and remodelling of nature by a creator whose use of tools places him or her in the position of sovereign mastery (Arendt 1958, 139, 143). Action differs fundamentally from labour and work in corresponding to the uniquely human ability to initiate via words and deeds ‘unprecedented processes whose outcome remains uncertain and unpredictable,’ which for Arendt (1958, 231–32) is the essence of freedom. Because it is free, action escapes the natural necessity and circularity of labour. Because it is grounded in human plurality, in the fact that only ‘men’ rather than ‘man’ can act, it differs from work in not proceeding from a preconceived image or idea and in presuming an irreducible intersubjectivity in which none is master. Generating the ‘web of human relationships,’ action is necessarily ‘in concert’ because it represents a mode of endeavour inseparable from the capacity for speech (Arendt 1958, 183–84, 244). And it is on action in the ‘public realm,’ wherein men and women reveal ‘who’ they are and in which the ‘glory’ of their deeds shines forth, that human meaning depends, since without this shining forth in public there would be no reality, no reliable sense of ourselves or the world (Arendt 1958, 50, 180). In delineating the elements of the vita activa, Arendt (1958, 73) wishes to show that ‘each human activity points to its proper location in the world.’ Taking her cue from Greek antiquity, she believes labour belongs in the private realm—in the household or oikos—work in the workshop and marketplace, and action in the public realm, the polis, the only space where free citizens could meet. Arendt thus draws a categorical distinction between the economic and political spheres. A central claim repeated throughout her writings is that only in the latter sphere are equality and freedom possible. Determined by biological necessity, as in the case of labour, or relying on technical expertise and instrumental mastery, as in the case of work, economic concerns are not open to free deliberation and debate—the hallmarks of politics—but are instead matters to be ‘administered’ by technocratic elites. Indeed, to her mind, the qualities of the statesman or the political man and the qualities of the manager or administrator are not only not the same, they very seldom are to be found in the same individual; the one is supposed to know how to deal with men in a field of human relations, whose principle is freedom, and the other must know how to manage things and people in a sphere of life whose principle is necessity. (Arendt 1977, 274)

Freedom, Democracy, and Working Life 37

For Arendt, the tragedy of modern politics stemmed from a failure to acknowledge this basic divergence between economic and political matters. On the one hand, those organs of authentic political freedom, the revolutionary councils, Räte, and soviets, condemned themselves to ruin in thinking that factories and workplaces could also be structured according to the principles of autonomous citizenship (Arendt 1977, 273–75). On the other hand, modern society and consciousness gradually came to equate politics with simply the organisation of the means for securing the necessities of life, thereby raising animal laborans and mere biological existence above all else (Arendt 1958, 33, 320–25). It is clear, then, that for Arendt working life is not meaningful in itself, that economic activity can only be organised technocratically, and that the political realm, properly understood, should not be governed by, and must be insulated from, socio-economic concerns. With others, Jürgen Habermas has questioned Arendt’s ‘Aristotelian theory of action’ and ontological boundary drawing, claiming that her call for ‘a politics which is cleansed of socio-economic issues . . . leads to absurdities’ under modern conditions (Habermas 1977, 15). Despite the harshness of that criticism, however, there exist strong parallels between Habermas’s and Arendt’s positions. These parallels issue partly from a shared critique of Marx. Echoing Arendt’s (1958, 101, 321) claim that Marx elevated labour above all other human activity, Habermas accuses Marx of mistakenly identifying emancipatory human activity with ‘social labour.’ The problem with this identification is that it reduces all aspects of social reality to economic endeavour and the technical forces of production undergirding the economic sphere. Although contrary to Marx’s purpose, his prioritisation of social labour ‘could very quickly be misinterpreted in a mechanistic manner’ in which the movement of history is understood in terms of material causal laws (Habermas 1973, 169; 1987, 343). In turn, this misinterpretation lends credence to a belief in technological determinism and technocracy: if the movement of history is impelled by material causal laws, then only those with knowledge of these mechanisms should rule. The result is a ‘scientisation’ of politics, the equation of political activity with technical administration, and thus a denial of the moral-ethical content of political life, the need for citizens to deliberate over their shared ends (Habermas 1971). To hold firm to the moral-ethical dimension of political life, Habermas arrives at a two-level theory of society grounded on a division between ‘labour,’ on the one hand, and ‘interaction,’ on the other. Labour corresponds to the material reproduction of our species, our attempt to control nature, while interaction corresponds to our social reproduction, the linguistic generation of a shared way of life. As separate ways of relating to reality, labour and interaction map onto Habermas’s (1973, 168–69) fundamental distinction between ‘instrumental’ and ‘communicative’ action. When we act instrumentally, we reason in terms of the technical criteria of efficiency and success as to the best means to our desired ends, viewing objects and people as instruments to those ends. By contrast, communicative action is guided by the internal end of mutual understanding, where

38 Keith Breen

actors reason dialogically in accordance with intersubjective validity claims— truth, rightness, and sincerity—with the hope of arriving at ‘rationally motivated assent’ (Habermas 1984, 287). On the basis of this separation of action types, Habermas distinguishes two modes of world-historical development, ‘lifeworld’ and ‘systemic’ rationalisation. By ‘lifeworld’ he means the intersubjective pre-given horizon in which people live, act, and interact. Lifeworld rationalisation entails that the symbolic achievements of cultural knowledge transmission, social integration, and identity formation, the paths along which a genuinely human life is formed, increasingly issue more from ‘communicatively achieved understanding’ than from custom or prereflective tradition (Habermas 1984, 340). Systemic rationalisation, in contrast, denotes the intensifying material productivity and formal organisation of social orders, the criterion of which is not communication but instead the ‘complexity’ of institutions that operate according to an instrumental, depersonalised logic (Habermas 1987, 173). For Habermas, both modes of rationalisation represent evolutionary advances—lifeworld rationalisation bringing freer, more reflective ways of intersubjective life, systemic rationalisation leading to ever-greater productivity and organisational efficiency—but they remain irreducible to one another, functioning in line with discrete principles. A central goal of his social theory is therefore to explain how in modernity, ‘system’ coalesced into realms of ‘normfree sociality’ that broke away or ‘uncoupled’ from the ‘lifeworld’ contexts of the family, civil society, and the public sphere (Habermas 1987, 154, 171). Impelled now by an impersonal strategic rationality working behind the backs of actors, the subsystems of the capitalist economy and bureaucratic state are ‘regulated only via money and power.’ In these realms the ‘norm-conformative attitudes and identityforming social memberships’ definitive of the lifeworld ‘are neither necessary nor possible,’ being instead rendered ‘peripheral’ (Habermas 1987, 154). The parallels between Habermas and Arendt are clear. First, both take pains to counter the confusion of technical progress with the realisation of freedom. Doing so, they understand the economic as an instrumental category whose value lies in the products or commodities produced rather than in the activity of working life itself. Public action or communication oriented to mutual understanding, instead of labour or work, are thus to their minds the prime source of human meaning and emancipation. Second, both fear the same development: the increasing technicisation and commodification of modern life. Habermas understands systemic rationalisation as functionally necessary, the market and modern administration being in his view the only means by which to determine equivalences between different goods and to coordinate policy. However, systemic imperatives become destructive when they invade and reconfigure lifeworld structures, transforming citizens into ‘clients’ and individuals into ‘consumers.’ Such ‘colonisation’ has deleterious effect because communal and individual life then cease to be the result of communicative intersubjective will and are instead experienced as alien and oppressive (Habermas 1987, 332–78). Third, in responding to this

Freedom, Democracy, and Working Life 39

threat, Habermas recalls Arendt’s separation of the economic and the political. As a consequence of ‘uncoupling,’ a critical politics trying to render systemic imperatives less destructive of lifeworld infrastructures must nevertheless be self-limiting and respect the logic of the capitalist market economy. Instead of democratising system, the aim should be to indirectly curb or guide it towards a balance with lifeworld domains. Undemocratisable ‘from within,’ system can be held in check only by citizens acting in civil society ‘to erect a democratic dam against . . . colonialising encroachment’ (Habermas 1992, 444).

Freedom, Meaningful Work, and Workplace Democratisation The concerns motivating Arendt and Habermas are no doubt important. It is assuredly a mistake to reduce human emancipation to technical progress or material prosperity, and it is right to seek to counter the deformations wrought by unrestrained markets and bureaucracies. However, the way in which Arendt and Habermas address these concerns is beset with problems. The most obvious relates to their attempt to partition socio-political reality into opposed spheres— the public realm of freedom versus both the economic realm of necessity and the administrative management of state affairs, lifeworld versus system—housing activities deemed to be fundamentally distinct. Under scrutiny, this partitioning comes undone. For example, although Arendt insists that the realms of action and of labour and work stand in opposition, she notes that ‘specialization of work and division of labor’ have in common ‘the general principle of organization,’ which owes its origins to ‘the strictly political sphere of life, to the fact of man’s capacity to act and to act together’ (Arendt 1958, 123, my emphasis). She therefore implies that all domains of human life contain elements of action, that there are no realms defined exclusively by freedom or necessity (Schaap 2010). A similar criticism applies to Habermas’s assertion that the economy represents a sphere of ‘norm-free sociality,’ in contrast to the communicatively generated, normconformative lifeworld domain. This assertion stands belied by the truth that economic institutions, just like lifeworld institutions, depend on and give expression to moral-ethical norms and ideals, capitalism and market exchange being impossible without trust, the assumption that contracts will be honoured, and the wider acceptance and embrace of an enterprise culture (Booth 1994; Keat 2013). However, for our purposes here, by far the greater problem is that Arendt’s and Habermas’s theories, with very little being advanced by way of evidence, unduly limit the scope of normative discourse and aspiration. Classifying economic activity as inherently less meaningful than political engagement and ruled by an instrumental, technical mode of rationality, these theories envisage labour and work as preconditions of a meaningful human life, but not as intrinsic parts of that life. Labour and work are thereby purged of internal moral-ethical import, the sole evaluative criteria applicable being productivity and efficiency, and not the nature

40 Keith Breen

and character of the human interrelationships that constitute these activities. The social and psychological significance of economic activity, its role in the development of our personalities and sense of ourselves, of ‘who’ we are and can be, is thus veiled from view. This has the effect of not only neglecting the impact that occupations and employment status have on our sense of self-esteem, but also the manner in which different forms of work facilitate or impede freedom and personal happiness (Honneth 1995; Sennett 1998). A further effect, of course, is an ironic reinforcement of venerable prejudices. Declaring the goal of a critical politics to be the prevention of the encroachment of economic imperatives onto the public realm or lifeworld, Arendt and Habermas take it for granted that work processes and workplaces must be controlled and organised according to technicist, managerial principles. Arch-critics of technocracy, these thinkers nonetheless conclude by legitimating this form of rule across large sectors of social life. This pessimistic vision of working life is not universally shared. Believing there to be no principled distinction between the economic and political realms, a number of theorists have advanced two freedom-based arguments against the legitimation of managerial control. Their first argument focuses on work processes, the manner in which work is coordinated and carried out, and claims that these can and ought to be restructured in ways that allow for individual autonomy and the experience of ‘meaningful work.’ Appealing to the ideal of freedom as ‘self-development,’ the second addresses the organisation of the workplace generally, arguing that workplace democracy is required both as a matter of justice and as a supporting condition of democratic citizenship. While neither argument views work or labour as the prime source of human meaning, each rests on the assumption, contra Arendt and Habermas, that working life is of intrinsic value and open to intervention and change. The argument for restructuring jobs and work processes in line with the principle of autonomy rests on the distinction between ‘meaningful’ and ‘nonmeaningful’ forms of work. Meaningful work is work that is subjectively experienced by people as meaningful, but which also has certain objective features (Hsieh 2008, 75–76). Chief among these objective features is that the work is relatively complex, requiring decision-making and initiative on the part of workers and the exercise of various skills and capacities. These skills and capacities are developed over time in learning processes in which individuals simultaneously master a trade or profession and acquire a specific identity, whether that of carpenter, farmer, or chemist. Nonmeaningful work is work lacking these features, as in the case of jobs—line assembly, routine clerical work, many service occupations, et cetera— structured in terms of the ‘detailed division of labour.’ As analysed by Braverman (1998, 77–83), the detailed division of labour rests on three organisational principles central to technicist, Taylorist models of work design. The first organisational principle is the detachment of work from the skill or knowledge of workers, with the effect that worker expertise is no longer necessary. The second demands the separation of ‘conception’ from ‘execution,’ of designing work from the activity of

Freedom, Democracy, and Working Life 41

carrying it out, and according the former exclusively to managers and the latter to workers. The third principle prescribes tight managerial control of all aspects of standardised work systems. For those within these systems, the results are the acquisition of only minimal skills, the loss of an understanding of the overall work process, and the reduction of work to the repetitive performance of itemised tasks. The conflict between the detailed division of labour and the ideal of autonomy, of being able to rationally determine one’s goals and pursue these effectively, is acute. Rather than planning and deciding on work tasks themselves, workers in technicist work arrangements are required simply to behave, to react, in accordance to the directions of others. These work arrangements not only prevent individuals from acting autonomously in their working life, but also offend against their status as free and equal beings in erecting a hierarchical division between managers whose responsibility is always to lead and workers whose duty is always to follow. The degrading effects of this division are wide-ranging, going beyond the workplace into other areas of life. Indeed, when people ‘work for considerable lengths of time at jobs that involve mainly mechanical activity,’ as argued by Adina Schwartz, ‘they tend to be made less capable of and less interested in rationally framing, pursuing, and adjusting their own plans during the rest of their time’ and are thus ‘caused to lead less autonomous lives on the whole’ (Schwartz 1982, 637; see also Roessler 2012). If we believe people have a basic right to autonomy, we therefore ought to ensure their work permits them the opportunity to properly exercise their intellectual abilities and decision-making powers. An analogous claim underpins some calls for workplace democracy, understood as a regime wherein workers have a right to participate in the governance of enterprises and to control, either by themselves (worker cooperativism) or in concert with others (workplace codetermination), enterprise practices and policy formation. Carol Gould (1988, 40), for instance, grounds her case for workplace democratisation on freedom conceived as ‘self-development,’ that is, the freedom ‘to develop oneself . . . through activity in the course of which one forms one’s character and develops capacities.’ Freedom as self-development presumes individual agency and a range of possibilities for the actualisation of that agency, including joint activity with others. Such joint activity is a basic precondition of self-development ‘in making possible the achievement of ends that could not be achieved by an individual alone.’ However, joint activity is freedom-enhancing only when characterised by relations of ‘reciprocity’ and equal respect, hence Gould’s avowal that ‘every person who engages in a common activity with others has an equal right to participate in making decisions concerning such activity.’ But if this is accepted, then justice would demand that the workplace, as a crucial site of common human activity, be structured in democratic as opposed to authoritarian ways (Gould 1988, 84, 133–59). Allied to this justice-based defence of workplace democratisation is the argument, first advanced by John Stuart Mill and guild socialists such as G. D. H. Cole, that workplaces represent a key training ground for learning the virtues definitive

42 Keith Breen

of mature citizens. Dubbed the ‘psychological-support argument’ by Cohen, the central idea here is that the quality of democracy at the communal and political levels hinges upon ‘forms of association “outside” the state, particularly in the economy, that strengthen the forms of thought, feeling, and self-understanding that give substance to democratic citizenship’ (Cohen 1989, 28; see also Pateman 1970, 45–66). Two psychological preconditions are of particular importance to mature citizenship, namely, having an ‘active character,’ being persons who are confident in their ability to shape their own destinies, and a ‘sense of the common good,’ being willing and able to judge in terms of the interests of all. In vesting decision-making rights primarily in the hands of owners and their managerial appointees, authoritarian enterprises deny workers important opportunities to become active persons and to reflect upon general interests, ‘thereby fostering passivity and a narrower basis of political judgement’ overall (Cohen 1989, 29). Thus, if establishing a vibrant democratic society is our goal, that society needs to be founded upon economic associations which themselves embody and give expression to democratic ideals. These arguments for institutionalising meaningful modes of work and for democratising enterprises have far-reaching implications for the ordering of liberal democratic societies. They also enjoy significant plausibility. Against the Habermasian assumption that individual autonomy is preserved by insulating lifeworld domains from systemic encroachment, a wealth of empirical evidence supports Schwartz’s claim that being unable to act freely in working life inevitably undermines autonomy across our wider lives. The negative consequences of the detailed division of labour—reduced psychological functioning, increased levels of mental illness, the dampening of ambition and of a sense of personal efficacy— are therefore not compartmentalisable to one sphere, but instead impact upon our personalities as a whole (see, for example, Kohn and Schooler 1983; Kornhauser 1964; Lane 1991). This being true, it appears reasonable to believe, with Gould and Cohen, that the degree of discretion and democratic control experienced at work materially conditions our ability to act as self-determining citizens. Moreover, against Arendt’s belief that managerial technicians alone possess the expertise to decide on economic concerns, it is not implausible to suppose that workers, because of their immersion in work activity, can acquire the knowledge and experience to come to opinions on enterprise policy at least as informed as the opinions of owners or managers (Dahl 1985, 118–19; Blaug 2009). And in matters where specialist, technical expertise is required, this remains compatible with granting workers the right to democratically determine the scope and range of that expertise.

Lessons on Reclaiming Working Life The question to be addressed, then, concerns not the cogency or normative attraction of the arguments for making working life freer, but whether this

Freedom, Democracy, and Working Life 43

aspiration is feasible under contemporary socio-economic conditions. That many resign themselves to jobs that deaden their sensibilities and take workplace authoritarianism as the natural order of things suggests that the pessimism exhibited by Arendt and Habermas has deep roots in everyday consciousness. Yet there are good reasons for being hopeful. In the following, I offer a brief sketch of two cases of workplace restructuring which show that meaningful work and workplace democracy are possible not only under contemporary conditions, but also in decidedly trying circumstances.

Volvo and the Uddevalla Assembly Plant2 Analysis of the automotive industry, a trendsetter for modern production methods generally and in which technicist views have long been predominant, reveals important examples of meaningful work being successfully institutionalised. One example is Volvo’s innovations in truck and car assembly from the 1970s to the early 1990s, the high point of which was the Uddevalla final-assembly car plant on the west coast of Sweden. Planning for the Uddevalla plant began in 1985, production commencing in 1989 and lasting until 1993, when the plant was closed. Influenced by the Scandinavian ‘socio-technical’ school of industrial job design, the goal from the beginning was to arrive at a ‘reflective production’ system fundamentally at odds with the suppositions underpinning the detailed division of labour (Ellegård 1995). The impetus for this project stemmed from a number of factors (Berggren 1992, 71–89). Most significant was Volvo’s desire to expand its production capacity in a labour market characterised by low levels of unemployment and extensive social security provision. Recruitment and retention of workers were thus serious challenges, which required breaking with the unappealing work conditions typical of Volvo’s Taylorist assembly plants (for instance, the Torslanda plant in Gothenburg). A second factor was the relatively powerful position of unions, arising from high union membership and a tradition of employer–union codetermination of corporate policy, and the commitment of the Swedish Metal Workers’ Union, along with key individuals within the Volvo Corporation, to the idea of ‘good work.’ The institutional context was thus favourable to the view that ‘human capabilities and needs, as well as market demands, should be the starting point’ for designing the technical and social elements of Uddevalla’s assembly process (Engström and Medbo 1995, 67). Based on advances in earlier plants, and through an extended experimental process, the planning group arrived at a production system in which Taylorist principles of assembly were ‘completely abolished’ (Sandberg 1995, 3). As regards production design, the moving assembly line, where workers repetitively executed a limited number of tasks with short cycle times (one to two minutes), was replaced by stationary parallel ‘dock assembly,’ where groups of on average eight workers assembled entire cars.This system allowed for long cycle times (two hours or more) in which the work was paced not by a mechanical line but by

44 Keith Breen

the assemblers themselves. These technical design innovations were accompanied by major changes in the social organisation of work within the plant. Unlike the dense hierarchy characteristic of Taylorist factories, there was a reduction of the organisational structure to only three levels (plant manager, product shop leaders, and assembly teams). Under this arrangement, the role of management altered from one of controlling workers’ performance to one of facilitating a work process that was now the primary responsibility of ‘autonomous’ assembly teams. These teams chose their leaders on an alternating basis, with team leaders taking over much of the work formerly performed by managerial supervisors and engineers. Team members were jointly responsible for planning the totality of the assembly process, determining its sequence and the distribution of tasks. They also had responsibility for functions and tasks beyond assembly itself, including instructing new members, quality control, maintenance, personnel matters (recruitment, shift rotations, et cetera), and production engineering work. This nonhierarchical organisational structure was supported by a vocational-training regime tying pay to an employee’s level of competence in assembly and nonassembly tasks. The results of the Uddevalla project were impressive. Within a short time of production commencing, there were substantial upturns in worker satisfaction and a notable decrease in employee turnover, absenteeism, and repetitive strain injuries. Just as significant, however, in terms of productivity, quality control, and organisational flexibility, the Uddevalla plant equalled and in certain respects exceeded its more traditional rival plants within Volvo’s car division, thus demonstrating that wide-ranging innovation was consistent with efficiency and profitability imperatives (Berggren 1993).

Argentina and the ‘Empresas recuperadas por Sus trabajadores’ Since the late 1990s, Argentina has witnessed the rise of a grassroots worker movement in which employees occupy and seek to take over failing firms and factories with the aim of maintaining them as going concerns based on cooperative principles. These empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores, or ‘worker-recuperated enterprises,’ typically take the form of small- to medium-sized firms and are found in a variety of industries and sectors, including food processing, ceramics, textiles, appliance manufacture, waste recycling, aluminium production, hotelkeeping, and printing (Rossi 2014, 2). The context for the appearance of the empresas recuperadas was the gradual unravelling of Argentina’s aggressive neoliberal reforms during the 1990s, which culminated in the collapse of the economy in 2001 and acute societal unrest. By late 2001, there were circa 2,600 bankruptcies per month, leading to levels of unemployment (25 percent) and poverty (60 percent) never before experienced in modern Argentina (Ranis 2005, 96; Vieta 2010, 298). Desperate to hold on to their only source of income, and facing indifference from the state and many trade unions, some workers chose to avoid unemployment by taking over

Freedom, Democracy, and Working Life 45

their places of work, which either had been abandoned by their private owners or were in bankruptcy proceedings. The impetus to these take-overs was usually nonpayment of wages, layoffs, production stoppage, and fraudulent asset stripping on the part of management. To counter this, workers physically occupied enterprises, restarting production and refusing to leave the premises when confronted by the police or the owners’ hired enforcers. The take-overs were often protracted and fraught, marked by violent expulsions and subsequent reoccupations by workers with the support of neighbourhood and other community groups. If they weathered this phase and were able prove to a bankruptcy court that their enterprise had failed due to owner mismanagement, workers could secure the right to run the firm themselves (Rossi 2014, 3–4). Worker-recuperated enterprises which secured this right consciously embraced a cooperative organisational model. Founded on the democratic principle of ‘one member, one vote,’ the central organ of these enterprises is the workers’ assembly, which decides policy, determines the allocation of revenues, and elects a management council for day-to-day administration purposes (Ranis 2005, 105). In contrast to the hierarchical system of discipline and income inequalities encountered within capitalist firms, workers in the empresas recuperadas mutually agree their own codes of conduct and in most cases choose to distribute income on an equal or near-equal basis. In order to effectively organise production and secure clients, workers had to learn skills—commercial logistics, accounting, marketing, et cetera—that were previously the preserve of white-collar employees. They also had to show ingenuity and adaptability so as to compete with rival privately owned firms. One noteworthy development here is the emergence of ‘economies of solidarity,’ where worker cooperatives ‘pool resources, approach markets collectively, share customer orders and production input costs, and more effectively tackle the various challenges they face’ (Vieta 2010, 308). This collaborative approach to business is accompanied by policies of communal integration in which enterprises double up as community centres, providing a location for health clinics, adult education programmes, political meetings, radio stations, cultural events, and even primary schools (Ranis 2005, 106;Vieta 2010, 312–14). In embedding themselves within their communities, the worker cooperatives both deliver much needed services to impoverished neighbourhoods and increase their social legitimacy, thereby securing further protection against eviction and closure. Despite their origins in extreme economic crisis, most of the empresas recuperadas managed to secure a market share and continue to operate. Although figures vary, there are currently circa 200 worker-recuperated enterprises in all, providing work for over 10,000 people (Hirtz and Giacone 2013, 89).Their position within the Argentine economy remains vulnerable, subject to attack from centre-right politicians and to fluctuations in the market. However, that position has gradually become less precarious on account of successes obtained through concerted political struggle, in particular changes in 2002 and 2010 to the Bankruptcy Law and the passage of legislation by the Buenos Aires municipal council in 2004,

46 Keith Breen

which together guarantee workers the legal right to form cooperatives out of failed firms (Rossi 2014, 6–7). What is the significance of these two cases? Focusing first on Uddevalla, its significance consists in decisively departing from the three suppositions underpinning technicist divisions of labour and thus contradicting Arendt’s claim that working life cannot be a site of genuine freedom or human meaning. Uddevalla shows that the ways in which we organise work and carry it out, far from being matters of ontological ‘necessity,’ are underdetermined, susceptible to revision in line with our normative ideals. In marked contrast to Taylorist work systems, the fact that workers had to assemble entire cars and to arrange the sequence of assembly required that they have a ‘transcendent’ understanding of the complete production process (Berggren 1992, 238). The separation of conception and execution underlying the detailed division of labour therefore ceased to be a foundational principle, assemblers merging both in their chief activities. Key here was a dramatic expansion in worker knowledge and skill. Based on a comprehensive training programme (lasting sixteen months on average), the minimum expectation was that each team member would be able to construct one quarter of a car, a competence that ‘equals the competence of at least 60 workers taken together in a plant with an assembly line’ (Ellegård 1995, 54). Workers thus attained a level of expertise akin to that of skilled mechanics, an extraordinary achievement in the context of the established automotive-assembly standards. The discretion afforded assemblers in their work signalled a clear reversal of management’s prerogative of control on the shop floor. As against in traditional assembly plants, where supervisors direct and control the work process, the Uddevalla assembly teams had substantial degrees of autonomy, being free to coordinate and pace their work in diverse ways. This had a twofold effect. On the one hand, the assumption of roles once reserved for managers and engineers contributed to a weakening of the status division between white- and blue-collar work. On the other, there was a fundamental change in the experience of the work itself. Although their jobs remained demanding, the assemblers at Uddevalla enjoyed the goods of self-development, realising their capacities and powers, and of taking pride in being responsible for a producing a complex product in its entirety (Berggren 1992, 13, 164). Moreover, in meaningfully contributing to a productive organisation, they also acquired a ‘professional identity’ denied to assemblers in the past (Nilsson 1995, 83).Their work, contra Arendt, was therefore no longer simply an instrumental condition of, or, worse, an impediment to, their lives, but transformed into an important part of who they were and could become. In terms of the extent to which freedom is actualised, the empresas recuperadas are of even greater consequence than Uddevalla.While workers in Uddevalla had real autonomy on the shop floor, they had little control over strategy and policy at either the plant or corporate level, which instead rested in the hands of management.This lack of organisational control and the endurance of power disparities between white- and blue-collar employees were contributing factors—along

Freedom, Democracy, and Working Life 47

with worsening market conditions, the increasing reliance on assembly plants outside Sweden, and the sidelining of figures committed to humanistic work systems—in the plant’s closure, notwithstanding its efficiency and productivity gains (Breen 2012b, 627). In the recuperated enterprises, however, the power disparities between white- and blue-collar work have largely been eliminated, all members possessing full decision-making rights in determining their joint activity on a cooperative basis. Breaking with the hierarchical relations definitive of many capitalist firms, their organisational structure is essentially reciprocal, with parity of voice, horizontal work arrangements, equitable distributions of revenues, and a pooling of commercial risk among members. The recuperated enterprises are thus living testimony to the truth, contra Arendt’s and Habermas’s denials, that it is feasible to structure working life in accordance with the principle of democratic freedom. This truth finds acknowledgement among many workers themselves. Although ‘rage and fear at the possibility of being without work nearly always fomented their actions,’ they gradually came to view the cooperative structure as valuable in itself, discovering in the process of taking over and running their enterprises ‘that it is indeed possible to change their own circumstances’ (Vieta 2010, 302). An initial response to extreme economic adversity was therefore a catalyst to the realisation and embrace of freedom as an organisational ideal. The experience of self-management bolstered workers’ sense of personal efficacy and awareness of their own capacities, granting them the confidence to contest authoritarian work arrangements and to shape their collective destinies.Yet the import of the empresas recuperadas goes beyond their salutary impact on workers’ characters. Most obviously, they show that Habermas’s functionalist claim that a critical politics must respect the logic of the capitalist market economy and not seek to transform it from within to be questionable, if not altogether baseless. While these enterprises currently form only a small part of the Argentine economy and continue to face challenges—in particular the problem of underproduction due to difficulties in securing capital for infrastructure investment (Vieta 2010, 304–05; Hirtz and Giacone 2013, 97)—their endurance as viable going concerns signals that market economies are receptive to a variety of organisational forms and logics. Moreover, in replacing competition and ruthless profit-seeking with cooperation and mutual aid, the economies of solidarity in which recuperated enterprises are engaged give expression to economic practices that may, following Ranis (2005, 112), ‘become the nucleus of an alternative labor relations network with substantial consequences for the future.’ And one of those consequences, as attested to by the cooperatives’ integration with their surrounding neighbourhoods and provision of communal services, is the development and expansion of commercial enterprises having lifeworldenhancing rather than lifeworld-damaging effects for society as a whole. Rather than posing, then, a colonising, systemic threat to social relations, when suitably configured economic activity has the potential to both augment and enrich our shared ways of life.

48 Keith Breen

Conclusion The lessons taught by Uddevalla and the empresas recuperadas are that the realm of work, just like the public realm or civil society more generally, is a domain of genuine ethical aspiration and that the scope for institutionalising freedom is much broader than commonly supposed. We therefore need to take care in theorising working life so as to not reinforce prejudices and peremptorily rule out possibilities for change. When faced by work arrangements which deny our autonomy or subject us to the commands of others, it lies within our power to alter these arrangements and to strive towards, exercising institutional imagination and displaying a willingness to experiment, alternative ways of working together. Of course, the sceptic will counter by saying that attempts at reclaiming working life will vary widely in success and often conclude in failure. But this retort is of little moment, since all human endeavour is marked by uncertainty and chance.3

Notes 1 Here I draw on earlier discussions of Arendt and Habermas (Breen 2007; 2012a). 2 For a more in-depth discussion of Uddevalla and its ‘reflective production’ model, see Breen (2012b). 3 My thanks to Mihaela Mihai and Albena Azmanova for their comments and editorial guidance.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 1977. On Revolution. New York: Penguin. ———. 1987. ‘Labour, Work, Action.’ In Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt, edited by James Bernauer, 29–42. Dordrecht: Nijhoff Publishers. Berggren, Christian. 1992. The Volvo Experience: Alternatives to Lean Production in the Swedish Auto Industry. New York: ILR Press. ———. 1993. ‘Volvo Uddevalla: A Dead Horse or a Car Dealer’s Dream?’ Actes du GERPISA 9: 129–43. Blaug, Ricardo. 2009. ‘Why Is There Hierarchy? Democracy and the Question of Organisational Form.’ Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 12: 85–99. Booth, William J. 1994. ‘On the Idea of the Moral Economy.’ American Political Science Review 88: 653–67. Braverman, Harry. 1998. Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press. Breen, Keith. 2007. ‘Work and Emancipatory Practice.’ Res Publica 14: 381–414. ———. 2012a. Under Weber’s Shadow: Modernity, Subjectivity and Politics in Habermas, Arendt and MacIntyre. Farnham: Ashgate. ———. 2012b. ‘Production and Productive Reason.’ New Political Economy 17: 611–32. Cohen, Joshua. 1989. ‘The Economic Basis of Deliberative Democracy.’ Social Philosophy and Policy 6: 25–50. Dahl, Robert. 1985. A Preface to Economic Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ellegård, Kajsa. 1995. ‘The Creation of a New Production System at the Volvo Automobile Assembly Plant in Uddevalla, Sweden.’ In Enriching Production, edited by Åke Sandberg, 37–59. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Freedom, Democracy, and Working Life 49

Engström, Tomas, and Lars Medbo. 1995. ‘Production System Design: A Brief Summary of Some Swedish Design Efforts.’ In Enriching Production, edited by Åke Sandberg, 61–73. Aldershot: Ashgate. Gould, Carol. 1988. Rethinking Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. Toward a Rational Society. London: Heinemann. ———. 1973. Theory and Practice. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1977. ‘Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power.’ Social Research 44: 3–24. ———. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action: Vol. I. Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action: Vol. II. System and Lifeworld: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1992. ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere.’ In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 421–61. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hirtz, Natalia, and Marta Giacone. 2013. ‘The Recovered Companies Workers’ Struggle in Argentina.’ Latin American Perspectives 40: 88–100. Honneth, Axel. 1995. ‘Work and Instrumental Action: On the Normative Basis of Critical Theory.’ In The Fragmented World of the Social, by Axel Honneth, 15–49. New York: SUNY Press. Hsieh, Nien-hê. 2008. ‘Justice in Production.’ Journal of Political Philosophy 16: 72–100. Keat, Russell. 2013. ‘The Ethical Character of Market Institutions.’ In The Anxiety of the Jurist, edited by Maksymilian Del Mar and Claudio Michelon, 173–94. Farnham: Ashgate. Kohn, Melvin, and Carmi Schooler. 1983. Work and Personality. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Kornhauser, Arthur. 1964. Mental Health of the Industrial Worker: A Detroit Study. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Lane, Robert. 1991. The Market Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murphy, James. 1993. The Moral Economy of Labor. New Haven: Yale University Press. Nilsson, Lennart 1995. ‘The Uddevalla Plant.’ In Enriching Production, edited by Åke Sandberg, 75–86. Aldershot: Ashgate. Pateman, Carole. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ranis, Peter. 2005. ‘Argentina’s Worker-Occupied Factories and Enterprises.’ Socialism and Democracy 19: 93–115. Roessler, Beate. 2012. ‘Meaningful Work: Arguments from Autonomy.’ Journal of Political Philosophy 20: 71–93. Rossi, Federico M. 2014. ‘Building Factories without Bosses: The Movement of WorkerManaged Factories in Argentina.’ Social Movement Studies: 1–10. Accessed May 20, 2014. doi: 10.1080/14742837.2013.874525. Sandberg, Åke. 1995. ‘The Uddevalla Experience in Perspective.’ In Enriching Production, edited by Åke Sandberg, 1–33. Aldershot: Ashgate. Schaap, Andrew. 2010. ‘The Politics of Need.’ In Power, Judgement and Political Evil, edited by Andrew Schaap, Danielle Celermajer, and Vrasidas Karalis, 157–69. Farnham: Ashgate. Schwartz, Adina. 1982. ‘Meaningful Work.’ Ethics 92: 634–46. Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character. New York: W. W. Norton. Vieta, Marcelo. 2010. ‘The Social Innovations of Autogestión in Argentina’s WorkerRecuperated Enterprises.’ Labor Studies Journal 35: 295–321.

3 TECHNOLOGY The Promises of Communicative Capitalism Jodi Dean

Republished from Jodi Dean,‘Technology: The Promises of Communicative Capitalism,’ in Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 19–48.

No Response Although mainstream media in the United States supported the Bush administration in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, critical assessments of the government’s justifications for war circulated throughout global capitalism’s communications networks. Alternative media, independent media, and non-US media provided thoughtful reports, insightful commentary, and critical evaluations of the ‘evidence’ of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They highlighted the falsity and venality of the administration’s articulation of the attacks of September 11 with Iraq, its elision of Osama bin Laden into Saddam Hussein as public enemy number one. Amy Goodman’s syndicated radio program Democracy Now regularly broadcast shows intensely opposed to the militarism and unilateralism of the Bush administration’s national security policy. The Nation magazine offered detailed and nuanced critiques of the justifications offered for attacking Iraq—particularly those cloaked in humanitarian goodwill. Anti-war activists working to supply citizens with opportunities to make their opposition known circulated lists of congressional phone and fax numbers via email. On websites, they posted petitions and announcements for marches, protests, and direct-action training sessions. As the administration’s preparations for a seemingly inevitable war proceeded, thousands of anti-war bloggers commented on each step, citing other media to support their positions. True, the mainstream news media failed to cover demonstrations such as

Technology 51

the September 2002 protest of 400,000 people in London or the October 2002 march on Washington when 250,000 people surrounded the White House. Nonetheless, myriad progressive, alternative, and critical left news outlets supplied frequent and reliable information about the action on the ground. All in all, a strong anti-war message was out there. But the message was not received. It circulated, reduced to the medium. Bush acknowledged the massive worldwide demonstrations of February 15, 2003. He even reiterated the fact that a message was out there: the protestors had the right to express their opinions. He didn’t actually respond to their message, however. He didn’t treat the words and actions of the protestors as sending a message to him that he was in some sense obliged to answer. Rather, he acknowledged the existence of views different from his own. There were his views and there were other views. All had the right to exist, to be expressed. But that in no way meant, or so Bush made it seem, that these views were involved with each other, that they inhabited a common space, that they were elements to be considered and integrated in the course of reaching a consensus on American foreign policy. The terabytes of commentary and information, then, did not indicate a debate over the war. On the contrary, in the days and weeks prior to the US invasion of Iraq, the anti-war messages morphed into so much circulating content, just like all the other cultural effluvia flowing through communicative capitalism’s disintegrated spectacles. We might express this disconnect between engaged criticism and national strategy as the difference between the circulation of content and official policy. Both are politics, just politics of different sorts, at different levels.Terms like democracy, it would follow, confuse matters by blurring these levels. So on one hand, we have media chatter—from television talking heads, radio shock jocks, and the gamut of print media to websites with RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds, blogs, podcasts, email lists, and the proliferating versions of instant text messaging. In this mediated dimension, politicians, governments, and activists struggle for visibility, currency, and, in the now quaint term from the dot.com years, mindshare. On the other hand are institutional politics, the day-to-day activities of bureaucracies, lawmakers, judges, and the apparatuses of the police and national security state. These institutional or state components of the system seem to run independently of the politics that circulates as content. They go about their work, the business of politics, and the other level reports on it, talks about it, treats it as content about which it opines. Anyone even slightly familiar with democratic ideals should reject out of hand this distinction between politics as the circulation of content and politics as the activity of officials.The fundamental premise of liberal democracy is the sovereignty of the people. Governance by the people is exercised through communicative freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press; it relies on norms of publicity that emphasise transparency and accountability; it consists of the deliberative practices of the public sphere. Democratic communication steers, influences, or, more minimally,

52 Jodi Dean

informs politics as the governing and legislating activity of elected officials. Ideally, the communicative interactions of the public sphere, the circulation of content and media chatter, not only impact but also constitute official politics. In the United States today, however, they don’t. Less bluntly put, there is a significant disconnect between politics circulating as content and official politics. Pundits gesture to this disconnect when they refer to the bubble of concerns ‘inside the Beltway’ and the ‘real concerns’ of ‘ordinary voters.’ So multiple opinions and divergent points of view express themselves in myriad intense exchanges, but this circulation of content in dense, intensive global communications networks actually relieves top-level actors (corporate, institutional, and governmental) from the obligation to answer embedded in the notion of a message. Reactions and rejoinders to any claim are always already present, presupposed. In this setting, content critical of a specific policy is just another story or feature in a 24/7 news cycle, just another topic to be chewed to bits by rabid bloggers. Criticism doesn’t require an answer because it doesn’t stick as criticism. It functions as just another opinion offered into the media stream. So rather than responding to messages sent by left activists and critics, top-level actors counter with their own contributions to the circulating flow of communications—new slogans, images, deflections, and attacks; staged meetings or rallies featuring their supporters; impressive photo-ops that become themselves topics of chatter. Sufficient volume (whether in terms of the number of contributions or the spectacular nature of a contribution) gives these contributions their dominance or stickiness. Contestations today rarely employ common terms, points of reference, or demarcated frontiers. In our highly mediated communications environments, we confront instead a multiplication of resistances and assertions so extensive as to hinder the formation of strong counter-hegemonies. The proliferation, distribution, acceleration, and intensification of communicative access and opportunity result in a deadlocked democracy incapable of serving as a form for political change. I refer to this democracy that talks without responding as communicative capitalism.1 The concept of communicative capitalism reformats as a criticism the neoliberal idea of the market as the site of democratic aspirations, indeed, as the mechanism by which the will of the demos manifests itself. In Thomas Frank’s words, ‘to believe in the people is to believe in their brands.’ (Frank 2000, 151) Consider the circularity of claims regarding popularity. McDonalds, Walmart, and reality television are depicted as popular because they seem to offer what people want. How do we know they offer what people want? People choose them—they must be popular. This equation treats commercial choices as the paradigmatic form of choosing. In so doing, it displaces attention from the fact that the market is not a system for delivering political outcomes, even as many of us can’t tell the difference between political campaigns and advertising. Unlike marketing’s catch-phrases and jingles, political decisions—to go to war, say, or to establish the perimeters of legitimate

Technology 53

relationships—involve more than the mindless reiteration of faith, conviction, and unsupported claims. They rest on contestable and divisive assertions of justice and right generally, potentially universally. Unlike the economy under neoliberal capitalism, moreover, the political is not a domain for the extraction of work and value from the many to enrich the few. It is, rather, the terrain upon which claims to universality are raised and defended. Political claims are partisan claims made in the name of and on behalf of a larger group, indeed, of an all that can never be fixed or limited (and so remains non-all), a group perhaps best understood as comprising anyone. Such claims are general rather than individual, and they require those who make them to think beyond themselves as specific individuals with preferences and interests and consider what is best for anyone. The concept of communicative capitalism designates the strange merging of democracy and capitalism in which contemporary subjects are produced and trapped. It does so by highlighting the way networked communications bring the two together. The values heralded as central to democracy take material form in networked communications technologies (cf. Dean 2002, 2004). Ideals of access, inclusion, discussion, and participation come to be realised in and through expansions, intensifications, and interconnections of global telecommunications. Changes in information and communication networks associated with digitalisation, speed (of computer processors as well as connectivity), and memory/storage capacity impact capitalism and democracy, accelerating and intensifying some elements of each as they consolidate the two into a new ideological formation.2 Expanded and intensified communicativity neither enhances opportunities for linking together political struggles nor enlivens radical democratic practices— although it has exacerbated left fragmentation, amplified the voices of right-wing extremists, and delivered ever more eyeballs to corporate advertisers. Instead of leading to more equitable distributions of wealth and influence, instead of enabling the emergence of a richer variety in modes of living and practices of freedom, the deluge of screens and spectacles coincides with extreme corporatisation, financialisation, and privatisation across the globe. Rhetorics of access, participation, and democracy work ideologically to secure the technological infrastructure of neoliberalism, an invidious and predatory politico-economic project that concentrates assets and power in the hands of the very, very rich, devastating the planet and destroying the lives of billions of people. Saskia Sassen’s research on the impact of economic globalisation makes clear how the speed, simultaneity, and interconnectivity of electronic communications produce massive distortions and concentrations of wealth (Sassen 1996). Not only does the possibility of super-profits in the finance and services complex lead to hypermobility of capital and the devalorisation of manufacturing, but financial markets themselves acquire the capacity to discipline national governments. As David Harvey explains, neoliberalism’s endeavour ‘to bring all human action into the domain of the market’ requires ‘technologies of information creation and capacities to accumulate, store, transfer, analyze, and use massive databases to guide

54 Jodi Dean

decisions in the global marketplace’ (Harvey 2005, 3). Sassen’s and Harvey’s work supplies powerful empirical evidence for the convergence of networked telecommunications and globalised neoliberalism into communicative capitalism. In the United States, the proliferation of media has been accompanied by a shift in political participation.3 Rather than actively organised in parties and unions, politics is a domain of financially mediated and professionalised practices centred on advertising, public relations, and rapid adaptation to changes in the technologies and practices of communication. The commodification of communication reformats ever more domains of life in terms of the market: What can be bought and sold? How can a practice, experience, or feeling be monetised?4 Bluntly put, the standards of a finance- and consumption-driven entertainment culture produce the setting of democratic governance today. Changing the system—organising against and challenging communicative capitalism—seems to entail strengthening the system. How else can one get a message across? Doesn’t it require raising money, buying television time, registering domain names, building websites, making links, and increasing awareness? I am not claiming networked communications never facilitate political resistance. One of the most visible examples to the contrary is the experience of B92 in Serbia. Radio B92 used the Internet to circumvent governmental censorship and disseminate news of massive demonstrations against the Milosevic regime (Matic and Pantic 1999). My point is that the political efficacy of networked media depends on the setting. Under conditions of intensive and extensive proliferation of media, conditions wherein everyone is presumed to be a producer as well as a consumer of content, messages get lost. They become mere contributions to the circulation of images, opinion, and information, to the billions of nuggets of information and affect trying to catch and hold attention, to push or sway opinion, taste, and trends in one direction rather than another. What in one context enhances the potential of political change, in another submerges politics in a deluge of circulating, disintegrated spectacles and opinions. Differently put, the intense circulation of content in communicative capitalism occludes the antagonism necessary for politics, multiplying antagonism into myriad minor issues and events.5 In relatively closed societies, that antagonism is not only already clear, but also apparent at and as the very frontier between open and closed. Communicative capitalism is a politico-economic formation in which there is talk without response, in which the very practices associated with governance by the people consolidate and support the most brutal inequities of corporatecontrolled capitalism. One way to understand the hold of communicative capitalism is to consider its animating fantasies, fantasies that, for many on the left, are inextricable from their faith in democracy. This chapter takes up three such fantasies, those of abundance, participation, and wholeness. The hold of these fantasies on the political imaginary, the promises and aspirations they inscribe in the ideological structure of our most basic communicative activities, helps account for

Technology 55

the persistence of belief in democracy in the face of knowledge of the way that the democratic form continues to strengthen the place and power of the wealthy and diminish the lives and opportunities of the poor. In the months before the 2002 congressional elections, just as Congress abdicated its constitutional responsibility to declare war to the president, mainstream media frequently employed the trope of ‘debate.’ Democratic leaders, with an eye to this ‘debate,’ asserted that questions needed to be asked. They did not take a position or provide a clear alternative to the Bush administration’s emphasis on preventive war. Giving voice to the ever-present meme regarding the White House’s public relations strategy, people on the street spoke of whether Bush had ‘made his case.’ Nevertheless, on the second day of Senate debate on the use of force in Iraq, no one was on the floor—even though many were in the gallery.Why, at a time when the means of communication have been revolutionised, when people can contribute their own opinions and access those of others rapidly and immediately, has democracy failed as a political form? Why has the expansion and intensification of communication networks, the proliferation of the very tools of democracy, coincided with the stunting of left political ideals and the diminishment of progressive political struggle? These are the questions the idea of communicative capitalism answers.

The Fantasy of Abundance: From Message to Contribution The delirium of the dot.com years was driven by a tremendous faith in speed, volume, and connectivity.6 The speed and volume of communicative transactions would generate new ‘synergies’ and hence wealth. Although that bubble burst (to be followed by a smaller one encompassing social networking sites, the user as producer, and the Web 2.0 meme), a similar belief underlies the conviction that enhanced communications access facilitates democracy. The belief begins with the observation that more people than ever before can make their opinions known. The Internet enables millions not simply to access information but to register their points of view on websites and blogs, to agree or disagree, to vote, and to send messages. Communications, media, and information enthusiasts point to this abundance of messages as an indication of the democratic potential of networked technologies. Optimists and pessimists share this fantasy of abundance.7 Those optimistic about the impact of networked communications on democratic practices emphasise the wealth of information available on the Internet and the inclusion of millions upon millions of voices or points of view into ‘the conversation’ or ‘public sphere.’ Pessimists worry about the lack of filters, the data smog, and the fact that ‘all kinds of people’ can be part of the conversation (Dyson 1998; cf. Dean 2002, 72–73). Despite their differing assessments of the value of abundance, both optimists and pessimists characterise networked communications in terms of exponential expansions in opportunities to transmit and receive messages.

56 Jodi Dean

The fantasy of abundance covers over the way facts and opinions, images and reactions circulate in a massive stream of content, losing their specificity and merging with and into the larger flow of data. Any given message is a contribution to this ever-circulating content, a drop in the ocean of cultural and political stuff engulfing us. This morphing of message into contribution is a constitutive feature of communicative capitalism. One of the most basic formulations of the idea of communication is as a message and the response to the message.8 Under communicative capitalism, this changes. Messages are contributions to circulating content, not actions to elicit responses. The exchange value of messages overtakes their use value. So a message is no longer primarily a message from a sender to a receiver. Uncoupled from contexts of action and application—as on the web or in print and broadcast media—the message is simply part of a circulating data stream. Its particular content is irrelevant. Who sent it is irrelevant. Who receives it is irrelevant. That it need be responded to is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is circulation, the addition to the pool. Any particular contribution remains secondary to the fact of circulation. The value of any particular contribution is likewise inversely proportionate to the openness, inclusiveness, or extent of a circulating data stream: the more opinions or comments that are out there, the less of an impact any given one might make (and the more shocking, spectacular, and new a contribution must be in order to register or have an impact). In sum, communication functions symptomatically to produce its own negation. Communication in communicative capitalism, then, is not, as Jürgen Habermas would suggest, action oriented towards reaching understanding (Habermas 1984). In Habermas’s model of communicative action, the use value of a message depends on its orientation. A sender sends a message with the intention that the message be received and understood. Any acceptance or rejection of the message depends on this understanding. Understanding is thus a necessary part of the communicative exchange. In communicative capitalism, however, the use value of a message is less important than its exchange value, its contribution to a larger pool, flow, or circulation of content. A contribution need not be understood; it need only be repeated, reproduced, forwarded. Circulation is the setting for the acceptance or rejection of a contribution. How a contribution circulates determines whether it has been accepted or rejected. Does it circulate widely, among a variety of differentiated groups, such that teenagers in the US, accountants in Estonia, and indigenous groups in the Amazon speak in its terms, wear its logo, or hum its jingle? Does it circulate narrowly and influentially? Does it catch on but in an ironic, counter-intuitive way, a way potentially counter to its original intention or reception? The questions alert us to how the sender (or author) becomes immaterial to the contribution, just as the producer, labour, drops out of the picture in commodity exchange. The circulation of logos, branded media identities, rumours, catch-phrases, blog posts, urban myths, and even positions and arguments exemplifies this point.

Technology 57

The popularity—the penetration and duration—of a contribution marks its acceptance or success. Thinking about messages in terms of use value and contributions in terms of exchange value sheds light on what would otherwise appear to be an asymmetry in communicative capitalism: the fact that some messages are received, that some discussions extend beyond the context of their circulation. It is also the case that many commodities are not useless, that people need them. But what makes them commodities is not the need people have for them or, obviously, their use. Rather, it is their economic function, their role in capitalist exchange. Similarly, the fact that messages can retain a relation to understanding in no way negates the centrality of their circulation. Indeed, this link is crucial to the ideological reproduction of communicative capitalism. Some messages, issues, and debates are effective—public relations, advertising, and political consulting are some of the industries depending on the production of such efficacy. Some contributions make a difference. But more significant is the system, the communications network. Even when we know that our specific contributions (our messages, blog posts, podcasts, video uploads, books, articles, films, letters to the editor) simply circulate in a rapidly moving and changing flow of content, in contributing, in participating, we act as if we do not know this. This action manifests ideology as the belief underlying action, the belief that reproduces communicative capitalism (Žižek 1989). The fantasy of abundance both expresses and conceals the shift from message to contribution. It expresses the shift through its emphases on expansions in communication—faster, better, cheaper; more inclusive, more accessible; high speed, broadband, et cetera. Yet even as it emphasises these multiple expansions and intensifications, this abundance, the fantasy, occludes the resulting devaluation of any particular contribution. It presumes that all contributions, all sites, are equal, equally likely to be heard or to make a difference. Enthusiastically reiterating the idea that anyone and everyone can participate, contribute, express themselves, and create, the fantasy of abundance also prevents us from recognising the underlying inequalities inextricable from complex networks. Recent developments in network science demonstrate structure in seemingly random networks. On the web, for example, sites are not equally likely to have the same number of links. Nor are links randomly distributed among sites in a predictable, bell-curve fashion. Instead, there are clusters and hubs wherein some sites are nodes to which many sites link. These hubs serve as connectors for other nodes. In his path-breaking work on structure in complex networks, Albert-László Barabási (2003, 63) finds hubs on the web, in Hollywood, in citation networks, in phone networks, in food webs in ecosystems, and even in cellular networks where some molecules, like water, do much more work than others. Barabási explains that degree distribution in networks with hubs, most real networks, follows a power-law. He writes,

58 Jodi Dean

[p]ower laws mathematically formulate the fact that in most real networks the majority of nodes have only a few links and that these numerous tiny nodes coexist with a few big hubs, nodes with an anomalously high number of links. The few links connecting the smaller nodes to each other are not sufficient to ensure that the network is fully connected. This function is secured by the relatively rare hubs that keep real networks from falling apart. (2003, 70) In most real networks, nodes don’t have an average number of links. Rather, a few have exponentially more links than others. Barabási describes the difference between random networks and networks that follow a power-law degree distribution with the term ‘scale.’ In random networks, there is a limit to the number of links a node can have as well as an average number of links. Random networks thus have a characteristic ‘scale.’ In most real networks, however, ‘there is no such thing as a characteristic node. We see a continuous hierarchy of nodes, spanning from the rare hubs to the numerous tiny nodes.’ (2003, 70). These networks don’t scale. They are ‘scale free.’ Barabási notes that others have observed power-law degree distributions. The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noticed that 20 percent of his peapods produced 80 percent of the peas—nature doesn’t always follow a bell-curve. He also found that 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. In business and management circles, Pareto’s law is known as the 80/20 rule (although he did not use the term) and is said to apply in a variety of instances: ‘80 percent of the profits are produced by only 20 percent of the employees, 80 percent of customer service problems are created by only 20 percent of consumers, 80 percent of decisions are made during 20 percent of meeting time, and so on’ (Barabási 2003, 66). Further examples might be Hollywood’s ‘A list’ or the ‘A list’ that emerged among bloggers. Like scale-free networks, Pareto’s law alerts us to distributions that follow power-laws. How can power-laws be explained? Is some kind of sovereign authority redirecting nature out of a more primordial equality? Barabási finds that power-laws appear in phase transitions from disorder to order (he draws here from the Nobel prize–winning work of physicist Kenneth Wilson). Power-laws ‘are the patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems’ (Barabási 2003, 77). Analysing power-laws on the Web, Barabási identifies several properties that account for the Web’s characteristics as a scale-free network. The first is growth. New sites or nodes are added at a dizzying pace. If new sites decide randomly to link to different old sites, old sites will always have an advantage. Just by arriving first, they will accumulate more links. But growth alone can’t account for the power-law degree distribution. A second property is necessary, preferential attachment. New sites have to prefer older, more senior sites. Differently put, new sites will want to link to those sites that already have a lot of links. They don’t link randomly but to the most popular sites, which thereby become hubs. Barabási argues that insofar

Technology 59

as network evolution is governed by preferential attachment, one has to abandon the assumption that the web (or Hollywood or any citation network) is democratic: ‘In real networks linking is never random. Instead, popularity is attractive’ (Barabási 2003, 86). Nodes that have been around for a while, that have to an extent proven themselves, have distinct advantages over newcomers. In networks characterised by growth and preferential attachment, then, hubs emerge. The fantasy of abundance—anyone can build a website, create a blog, express their opinions on the Internet—misdirects some critical media theorists away from the structure of real networks. Alexander R. Galloway, for example, emphasises ‘distributed networks’ that have ‘no central hubs and no radial nodes’ (2004, 33). He claims that the Internet is a distributed network like the US interstate highway system, a random network that scales, to use Barabási’s terms. Embracing Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s images of the rhizome, Galloway notes that in a rhizome any point can be connected to any other; there are no intermediary hubs and no hierarchies. For him, the web is best understood rhizomatically, as having a rhizomatic structure. Barabási’s work demonstrates, however, that on the web, as in any scale-free network, there are hubs and hierarchies. Some sites are more equal than others. Imagining a rhizome might be nice, but rhizomes don’t describe the underlying structure of real networks. Hierarchies and hubs emerge out of growth and preferential attachment. Networked communications are celebrated for enabling everyone to contribute, participate, and be heard. The form this communication takes isn’t concealed. People are fully aware of the media, the networks, even the surfeit of information. But they act as if they don’t have this knowledge, believing in the importance of their contributions, presuming, say, that there are readers for their blogs, articles, and books. People tend to believe, then, in both abundance and registration. They believe that there is too much out there and that their own specific contribution matters. Why? As I explain in the next section, networked communications induce a kind of registration effect that supports a fantasy of participation.

The Fantasy of Participation: Technology Fetishism In their online communications, people are apt to express intense emotions, intimate feelings, some of the more secret or significant aspects of their sense of who they are. Years ago, while surfing through Yahoo’s homepages, I found the page of a guy who featured pictures of his dog, his parents, and himself fully erect in an s/m style harness. At the bottom of his site was the typical, ‘Thanks for stopping by! Don’t forget to write and tell me what you think!’ This quaint image suggests how easy many find it to reveal themselves on the Internet. More contemporary examples are blogs, image-sharing sites like Flickr, video-sharing sites like YouTube, and social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Not only are people accustomed to putting their thoughts online, but also in so doing, they believe their thoughts and ideas are registering—write and tell me what

60 Jodi Dean

you think! They imagine themselves brave participants in a combative arena or prostrate confessors acknowledging their shortcomings. One believes that one’s contribution matters, that it means something to and within a context broader than oneself. Contributing to the information stream thus has a subjective registration effect detached from any actual impact or efficacy. Because of this registration effect, people treat their contribution to circulating content as communicative action. They believe that they are active, making a difference by clicking on a button, adding their name to a petition, or commenting on a blog. Slavoj Žižek describes this kind of activity with the term ‘interpassivity.’ When we are interpassive, something else, a fetish object, is active in our stead. Žižek explains: ‘You think you are active, while your true position, as embodied in the fetish, is passive . . . ’ (Žižek 1997, 21). The frantic activity of the fetish works to prevent actual action, to prevent something from really happening. Activity on the Internet, contributing to the circulation of affect and opinion, thus involves a profound passivity, one that is interconnected, linked, but passive nonetheless. Put back in terms of the circulation of contributions that fail to coalesce into actual debates, that fail as messages in need of response, we might think of this odd interpassivity as content that is linked to other content, but never fully connected. Linking or citing stands in for reading, which stands in for engaging. At each juncture, there is a gap. Networked communication and information technologies are exquisite media for capturing and reformatting political energies. They turn efforts at political engagement into contributions to the circulation of content, reinforcing the hold of neoliberalism’s technological infrastructure. Political intensities become shorn of their capacity to raise claims to the universal, persisting simply as intensities, as indications of subjective feeling. The more strident the voices, the more intense the feelings, the stronger the pull of communications media in their myriad, constant, and ever-ready forms. Media circulate and extend information about an issue or event, amplifying its affect and seemingly its significance. This amplification draws in more media, more commentary and opinion, more parody and comic relief, more attachment to communicative capitalism’s information and entertainment networks such that the knot of feedback and enjoyment itself operates as (and in place of) the political issue or event. Attention focuses on reflecting and commenting on the tangle of intensities—for the moment. More energies are invested in it. And the problem or issue is neglected, left to continue along its course, undeflected and unchanging despite the massive amount of interest and energy it has generated. This capture of political energies and investments and their reformatting as contributions is enabled by the reduction of politics to communicative acts, to speaking and saying and exposing and explaining, a reduction key to democracy thought in terms of discussion and deliberation. Struggles on the Internet are able to reiterate and thereby displace political struggles in local and institutional settings precisely because these latter struggles are envisioned as communicative

Technology 61

engagements. In turn, this displacement protects the activities of corporate and governmental officials who are able to market and monitor, expropriate and privatise, unencumbered even as their activities are observed and discussed.9 That people know what corporations and governments are doing doesn’t mean they can change them. That they are aware of a problem, have an opinion, and make their opinion known doesn’t mean they have developed the infrastructure necessary to write new legislation, garner support for it, and get it passed, much less carry out a revolution (a term the left has abandoned and the right embraced).10 When communication serves as the key category for left politics, whether communication be configured as discussion, spectacle, or publicity, this politics ensures its political failure in advance: doing is reduced to talking, to contributing to the media environment, instead of being conceived in terms of, say, occupying military bases, taking over the government, or abandoning the Democratic party and doing the steady, persistent organisational work of revitalising the Greens or Socialists. Under communicative capitalism, communication functions fetishistically as the disavowal of a more fundamental political disempowerment or castration. If Freud is correct in saying a fetish not only covers over a trauma but in so doing helps one through a trauma, what might serve as an analogous socio-political trauma today? A likely answer can be found in the left’s role in the collapse of the welfare state: its betrayal of fundamental commitments to social solidarity. A thorough account of this collapse is beyond the scope of my analysis here. Three aspects of left failure nonetheless mark the political trauma underlying technology fetishism: its abandonment of workers and the poor, its retreat from the state and repudiation of collective action, and its acceptance of the neoliberal economy as the ‘only game in town.’ In brief, the late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a set of profound changes in the world economy, changes associated with declines in economic growth and increases in inflation and unemployment. Powerful figures in the corporate and finance sectors took this opportunity to dismantle the welfare state (by privatizing public holdings, cutting back on public services, and rewriting laws for the benefit of corporations). For the most part, the American left seemed relatively unaware of the ways business was acting as a class to consolidate political power—a fundamental component of which was the passage of a set of campaign finance laws establishing the rights of corporations to contribute unlimited amounts of money to political parties and political action committees (Harvey 2005, 49). Instead, coming out of the movements associated with 1968, increasingly prominent voices on the left emphasised and fought for personal freedoms, freedoms from parental and state constraints as well as freedoms for the expression of differences of race, sex, and sexuality. While these ideals were situated within movements for social justice, their coexistence was precarious, as tensions at the time between workers and students made clear. Harvey writes, [p]ursuit of social justice presupposes social solidarities and a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more

62 Jodi Dean

general struggle . . . It has long proved difficult within the U.S. left, for example, to forge the collective discipline required for political action to achieve social justice without offending the desire of political actors for individual freedom and for full recognition and expression of political identities. (Harvey 2005, 42–43) Just as corporate, business, and financial interests were coming together politically, those on the left were fragmenting into particularities.11 Identity politics proved a boon for the right, enabling the alliance between social conservatives and neoliberals. The former opposed the welfare state for the way it allegedly undermined morality and family values; encouraged criminality, abortion, and sex outside of marriage; and benefited the drug-addicted and lazy more than the sober and diligent. Engaged in struggles against social conservatives on all these fronts, many leftists embraced the emphasis on freedom and attack on the state prominent among neoliberals. The state seemed but another repressive authority, its provisions tied to the sexism of the traditional family and the racism of the white mainstream.12 Unions appeared corrupt, already part of a status quo limiting opportunities to the white and the male. Likewise, in the wake of more than a quarter century of anti-communism, ever fewer leftists found in Marxism a viable language for expressing political aspirations. Observing how oppression occurs along multiple axes, they argued that a focus on class obscures the diversity of political struggles.13 The economic problems plaguing the welfare state, moreover, suggested to some the limits of political attempts at regulation and redistribution. Economist Michael Perelman notes that ‘by the time of the Carter administration, many liberals joined conservatives in opposing regulation’ (Perelman 2007, 56). Deregulation came to seem like a respectable policy. Given the imperatives of complex systems, even leftists started to agree that some form of capitalism would and should persist; what was needed were guarantees for the rights and differences of all within capitalist societies, a more radical or participatory approach to democracy. Yet as they echoed the criticisms of the state prominent on the right, leftists failed to provide a compelling vision of a new form of social solidarity. Instead, they continued to emphasise the plurality of struggles on a variety of social and cultural terrains and affirm different modes of living. Such an emphasis and affirmation enabled an easy coexistence with consumer capitalism insofar as choices of fashion and entertainment could be quickly read as politically significant. Anti-racist? Wear a Malcolm X t-shirt. Gay-friendly? Fly a rainbow flag. The ease of political expression, the quick availability of the affective thrill of radicality, could let more people feel like they were politically engaged even as the shift in political parties from person-intensive to finance-intensive organisation strategies reduced the political opportunities open to most Americans to voting or giving money.

Technology 63

In short, the American left responded to the attack on the welfare state, collapse of Keynesianism, and emergence of a neoliberal consensus by forfeiting its historical solidarity with workers and the poor, retreating from the state, and losing the sense that collective solutions to large-scale systemic inequalities are possible and necessary. The failure of solidarity was manifest perhaps most acutely in President Bill Clinton’s destruction of welfare guarantees (aid to families with dependent children) in favour of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (capped at five years) in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Republicans didn’t eliminate welfare; Democrats, the party associated with the interests of the poor and the working class since the Depression, did. This failure of solidarity is closely linked to the left’s withdrawal from the state—even as various elements on the right developed strategies for funding and winning electoral campaigns, interpreting the constitution, and rewriting laws, and even as corporate and business interests steadily increased their political investments, the left failed adequately to defend what had long ago been won, namely, the notion that the most fundamental role of the state is ensuring a minimal social and economic standard below which no one is allowed to fall. Indeed, many dismissed the state as useless and outmoded, preferring to theorise instead a politics beyond the state (a move which left an open field for conservative strategists).14 Finally, as it overlapped with a reluctance to offend any particular desires for freedom, backing away from the state resonated with a sense that there is no alternative to the market. And rather than simply an approach to the distribution of goods and services, this sense is more profoundly a sense of political inefficacy: we can’t do anything about anything. In part, the loss of agency results from the prior acceptance of the inevitability of capitalism. But it results as well from an underlying scepticism towards uttering the word we, towards speaking for others and thereby risk overlooking their specific differences. The splintering and collapse of the left constitutes a political trauma.Technology fetishism responds to this trauma, acknowledging and denying it at the same time. For many, new media let them feel like they are making a contribution, let them deny the larger lack of left solidarity even as their very individualised and solitary linking and clicking attests to the new political conditions. In the last decades of the twentieth century, information and communication technology spread beyond government and university settings on the promise of political empowerment. Ted Nelson, Stewart Brand, and the People’s Computer Company reconfigured images of commuting away from IBM and its technocratic experts and towards the emancipation and empowerment of ordinary people.15 In the context of the San Francisco Bay Area’s anti-war activism during the early seventies, they held up computers as the means to renew participatory democracy.16 This was the setting for Apple’s presentation of its Macintosh computer as changing the world, as saving democracy by bringing technology to the people. In 1984, the company placed an image of the Mac next to a picture of Karl Marx;

64 Jodi Dean

the slogan: ‘It was about time a capitalist started a revolution.’ During the nineties, Al Gore and Newt Gingrich promised ordinary citizens access to government. They appealed to the possibility of town meetings for millions opened up by the Internet. Their rhetoric of democratisation and education drove the Information and Infrastructure Technology Act, the National Information Infrastructure Act (both passing in 1993), and the 1996 Telecommunications Act17 (Dyer-Witheford 1999, 34–35). Networked communications technologies would ensure real political efficacy and governmental responsiveness. Democracy would be enhanced as all citizens acquired the ability to access information and express their opinions. This promise of participation was not simply propaganda. It was and remains a deeper, underlying fantasy wherein technology covers over our impotence and supports a vision of ourselves as active political participants. Think of the rhetoric encasing any new device, system, code, or platform. A particular technological innovation becomes a screen upon which all sorts of fantasies of political action are projected.18 Peer-to-peer file-sharing, especially in light of the early, rather hypnotic, mantra-like appeals to Napster, provides a clear example. Napster—despite the fact that it was a commercial venture—was heralded as a sea-change; it would transform private property and bring down capitalism. More than piracy, Napster was a popular attack on private property itself. Nick Dyer-Witheford argues that Napster, and other peer-to-peer networks, present ‘real possibilities of market disruption as a result of large-scale copyright violation.’ He contends, [w]hile some of these peer-to-peer networks—like Napster—were created as commercial applications, others—such as Free Net—were designed as political projects with the explicit intention of destroying both state censorship and commercial copyright. . . . The adoption of these celebratory systems as a central component of North American youth culture presents a grassroots expansion of the digital commons and, at the very least, seriously problematises current plans for their enclosure. (Dyer-Witheford 2002, 142) Lost in the celebratory rhetoric is the fact that capitalism has never depended on one industry. Industries rise and fall. Corporations like Sony and Bertelsmann can face declines in one sector and still make astronomical profits in other ones. Worries about the loss of the beloved paperback book to unwieldy e-books weren’t presented as dooming the publishing industry or assaulting the very regime of private property. Why should sharing music files be any different? ‘Sharing’ at one level (files) enables ownership at others (hardware, network access). Even the much-lauded ‘consumer as producer’ fails to attack private property. On one hand, large commercial sites like Amazon claim ownership rights to all content—book reviews, lists—placed on their site. On the other hand, production

Technology 65

is always and necessarily a kind of consumption, whether of raw materials or labour power.19 Joshua Gamson’s point about the legacy of Internet-philia is appropriate here: wildly displaced enthusiasm over the political impact of a specific technological practice results in a tendency ‘to bracket institutions and ownership, to research and theorise uses and users of new media outside of those brackets, and to allow “newness” to overshadow historical continuity’ (Gamson 2003, 259). Napster is a technological fetish onto which all sorts of fantasies of political action were projected. In this instance, the fantasy is one deeply held by music fans: music can change the world. Armed with networked personal computers, the weapons of choice for American college students in a not-so-radical oh-soconsumerist entertainment culture, the wired revolutionaries can think they are changing the world, comforted all the while that nothing really changes (except the price of compact disks). The technological fetish covers over and sustains a lack on the part of the subject. It protects the fantasy of an active, engaged, subject by acting in the subject’s stead. The technological fetish ‘is political’ for us, enabling us to go about the rest of our lives relieved of the guilt that we might not be doing our part and secure in the belief that we are, after all, informed, engaged, citizens. The paradox of the technological fetish is that the technology acting in our stead actually enables us to remain politically passive. We don’t have to assume political responsibility because, again, the technology is doing it for us. The technological fetish also covers over a fundamental lack or absence in the social order. It protects a fantasy of unity or wholeness, compensating in advance for this impossibility. Technologies are invested with hopes and dreams, with aspirations to something better. A technological fetish is at work when one disavows the lack or antagonism rupturing (yet producing) the social by advocating a particular technological fix. The ‘fix’ lets us think that all we need is to extend a particular technology and then we will have a democratic or reconciled social order. Gamson’s account of gay websites illustrates this fetish function. Gamson argues that in the US, the Internet has been a major force in transforming ‘gay and lesbian media from organizations answering at least partly to geographical and political communities into businesses answering primarily to advertisers and investors’ (Gamson 2003, 260). He focuses on gay portals and their promises to offer safe and friendly spaces for the gay community. What he notes, however, is the way that these safe gay spaces now function primarily ‘to deliver a market share to corporations.’ As he explains, ‘community needs are conflated with consumption desires, and community equated with market’ (Gamson 2003, 270–71). Qua fetish, the portal is a screen upon which fantasies of connection can be projected. These fantasies displace attention from their commercial context. In communicative capitalism, the technological fetish has three primary modes of operation: condensation, displacement, and denial. Condensation occurs when technology fetishism reduces the complexities of politics—of organisation, struggle, duration, decisiveness, division, representation,

66 Jodi Dean

et cetera—to one thing, one problem to be solved and one technological solution. For example, democracy might be treated as a singular problem of information: people don’t have the information they need to participate effectively.20 Bingo! Information technologies intervene to provide people with information.This sort of strategy, however, occludes the problems of organising and political will. For example, as Mary Graham explains in her study of the politics of disclosure in chemical emissions, food labelling, and medical error policy, transparency started to function as a regulatory mechanism precisely at a time when legislative action seemed impossible. Agreeing that people had a right to know, politicians could argue for warning labels and more data while avoiding hard or unpopular decisions. Corporations could comply—and find ways to use their reports to improve their market position. ‘Companies often lobbied for national disclosure requirements,’ Graham writes. ‘They did so,’ she continues, because they believed that disclosure could reduce the chances of tougher regulation, eliminate the threat of multiple state requirements, or improve competitive advantage. . . . Likewise, large food processing companies and most trade associations supported national nutritional labeling as an alternative to multiple state requirements and new regulations, or to a crackdown on health claims. Some also expected competitive gain from labeling as consumers, armed with accurate information, increased demand for authentically healthful productions. (Graham 2002, 140) Additional examples of condensation appear when theorists and activists emphasise singular websites, blogs, and events. Such spikes in the media sphere may well seem impressive, but they conform to the dictates of broadcast media spectacle, momentary eruptions that anchor people to their screens, calling upon them to register their opinions, to contribute. They don’t provide alternative practices of collective engagement, challenge corporate ownership of the telecommunications infrastructure, or redirect financial flows towards the most disadvantaged. The second mode of operation of the technological fetish is displacement. A tendency among some political and new media theorists is to displace politics onto the activities of everyday or ordinary people, as if academics, activists, and politicians were somehow extraordinary. What everyday people do in their everyday lives is supposed to overflow with political activity: conflicts, negotiations, interpretations, resistances, collusions, cabals, transgressions, and resignifications. The Internet—as well as cell phones, beepers, and other communications devices (though, weirdly, not the regular old telephone, likely because of its confinement in domestic and office space)—is teeming with politics. To put up a website, to deface a website, to redirect hits to other sites, to deny access to a website, and to link to a website are construed as real political actions. Bloggers and blogging

Technology 67

allegedly reactivate politics, operating as forces reshaping politics and journalism, despite the continued role of the mainstream media even for bloggers and the continued domination of large-scale financial interests in electoral politics. The emphasis on networked communication strategies displaces political energy from the hard work of organizing and struggle. It also remains oddly one-sided, conveniently forgetting both the larger media environment of these activities, as if there were not left print publications and had not been for years, and the political setting of networked communications; the Republican party as well as all sorts of other conservative organisations and lobbyists use the Internet just as much, if not more, than progressive groups. Writing on Many-2-Many, a group weblog on social software, Clay Shirkey uses a similar argument to explain Howard Dean’s poor showing in the Iowa caucuses following what appeared to be his remarkable successes on the Internet during the 2000 presidential campaign. Shirkey writes, [w]e know well from past attempts to use social software to organise groups for political change that it is hard, very hard, because participation in online communities often provides a sense of satisfaction that actually dampens a willingness to interact with the real world. When you’re communing with like-minded souls, you feel [emphasis in original] like you’re accomplishing something by arguing out the smallest details of your perfect future world, while the imperfect and actual world takes no notice, as is its custom. There are many reasons for this, but the main one seems to be that the pleasures of life online are precisely the way they provide a respite from the vagaries of the real world. Both the way the online environment flattens interaction and the way everything gets arranged for the convenience of the user makes the threshold between talking about changing the world and changing the world even steeper than usual. (Shirkey 2004) Interacting with others online feels good. It feels like action, like one is doing something, like one is making a difference. One might argue on a blog for hours on end, failing to convince another person of a single point and still feeling efficacious and involved. But this feeling is unconnected from any larger collective practice that might actually effect change. My point is not that web-based activities are trivial or that social software is useless.The Internet is an important medium for connecting and communicating, and the Dean campaign was innovative in its use of social software to build a vital, supportive movement around Dean’s candidacy. But media pleasures should not displace our attention from the ways that political change demands much, much more than networked communication and the ways intense mediality provides barriers to action on the ground (it’s hard to find time to go door to door when

68 Jodi Dean

one blogs twenty hours a day). As the Dean campaign also demonstrates, without organised and sustained action, without building relationships with caucus attendees in Iowa, say, Internet politics remain precisely that—a politics of and through new media, and that’s all. The last operation of the technological fetish follows from and is enabled by the previous two: denial. The political purchase of the technological fetish is presumed in advance; it is immediate, understood. File-sharing is political. A website is political. Blogging is political. This assertion of immediacy, however, is an energetic form of denial. The presumption that a left politics necessarily attaches to a technological fix denies what the media activist or technology enthusiast already knows to be the case—that democracy in practice is the rule of the wealthy, the protection of a governmental elite who serves their interests, and the constant chatter and opining of everyone else in the circuits of communicative capitalism. In his 1927 account of fetishism, Freud describes how the young boy’s belief in the fetish enables him to retain and give up this belief at the same time. He can know his belief that his mother has a penis is false, but continue to believe it nevertheless—this is what the fetish allows him to do. Crucial to Freud’s account is the reason for the boy’s underlying attachment to his false belief—fear of castration. If he accepts what he knows, the boy must acknowledge castration, and this is what he cannot bear. He would rather retain the fiction of a mother with a penis than acknowledge a world of lack or accept the possibility of his own dependence or diminishment. The power of the technological fetish operates in a similar fashion. A condition of possibility for asserting the immediately progressive political character of something—web-radio or open-source software, say—is a prior exclusion of knowledge of its antagonistic conditions of emergence, its embeddedness within the brutalities of global capitalism, its dependence for existence on systemic violence and nationalised and racialised divisions. Advocating the extension of information and communication technologies accepts and denies these conditions at the same time. Even as the proliferation of communication technologies serves neoliberal financialisation, accelerating the speed of monetary transactions and consolidating networks of privilege, the left advocate of participation, deliberation, and fundamental rights to communication can—and must—energetically deny this context. Why would leftists promise that the technologies could fix democracy if democracy was not broken, if it was not failing as a political form? And if democracy’s underlying brokenness is the problem, the actual condition for the advocate’s emphasis on communication and technology, why isn’t this fundamental lack or failure the central matter at hand? Communicative capitalism thrives on the fetishistic denial of democracy’s failure, its inability to secure justice, equity, or solidarity even as it enables millions to access information and make their opinions known.

Technology 69

The Fantasy of Wholeness: A Global Zero Institution Communicative capitalism relies on the fantasy of abundance accompanying the reformatting of messages as contributions and the fantasy of participation accompanying technology fetishism. These fantasies give people the sense that our actions online are politically significant, that they make a difference. A fantasy of wholeness further animates networked communications. This fantasy furthers our sense that our contributions to circulating content matter by locating them in the most significant of possible spaces—the global. But the world does not serve as a space for communicative capitalism analogous to the one the nation provided for industrial capitalism. On the contrary, the space of communicative capitalism is the Internet. Networked communications materialise specific fantasies of unity and wholeness as the global. These fantasies in turn secure networked transactions as the Real of global capitalism. The concept of the ‘zero institution’ helps explain the way the Internet functions as the key space for imagining the global.21 (Žižek 2001, 221–23). A zero institution is an empty signifier. It has no determinate meaning but instead signifies the presence of meaning. It is an institution with no positive function. All it does is signify institutionality as such (as opposed to chaos, say). As originally developed by Claude Levi-Straus, the concept of the zero institution accounts for the way people with radically different descriptions of their collectivity nevertheless understand themselves as members of the same tribe. Žižek adds to the Levi-Straussian idea insight into how both the nation and sexual difference function as zero institutions.The nation designates the unity of society in the face of radical antagonism, the irreconcilable division and struggle between classes. Sexual difference, in contrast, suggests difference as such, a zero-level of absolute difference that will always be filled in and over-determined by contextually given differences. In light of the nation’s failing capacity to stand symbolically for institutionality, the Internet has emerged as the zero institution of communicative capitalism. It enables myriad constituencies to understand themselves as part of the same global structure even as they radically disagree, fail to co-link, and inhabit fragmented and disconnected network spaces. The Internet is not a wide-open space with nodes and links to nodes distributed in random fashion such that any one site is as likely to get hits as any other site. This open, smooth, virtual world of endless and equal opportunity is a fantasy (and not simply because some countries censor and block). Barabási’s research on directedness in scale-free networks demonstrates that the World Wide Web is broken into four major ‘continents’ with their own navigational requirements (Barabási 2003, 161–78). Following links on one continent may never bring a user to another continent; likewise, following links in one direction does not mean that a user can retrace these links back to her or his starting point. Despite the fact that its very architecture (like that of all directed networks) entails fragmentation into separate spaces, the Internet presents itself as

70 Jodi Dean

the unity and fullness of the global. Here, through our communicative interactions, the global is imagined and realised. The Internet thus functions as a particularly powerful zero institution precisely because it is animated by the fantasy of global unity. The Internet provides an imaginary site of action and belonging. Celebrated for its freedoms and lack of boundaries, this imagined totality serves as a kind of presencing of the global. On the one hand, the Internet imagines, stages, and enacts the ‘global’ of global capitalism. But on the other, this global is nothing like the ‘world’—as if such an entity were possible, as if one could designate an objective reality undisturbed by the external perspective observing it or a fully consistent essential totality unruptured by antagonism (cf. Žižek 2002, 181). The oscillations in the 1990s debate over the character of the Internet can clarify this point. In the debate, Internet users appeared either as engaged citizens eager to participate in electronic town halls and regularly communicate with their elected representatives, or they appeared as web-surfing waste-of-lives in dark, dirty rooms downloading porn, betting on obscure Internet stocks, or collecting evidence of the US government’s work with extraterrestrials at Area 51. In other versions of this same matrix, users were either innocent children or dreadful war-game-playing teenage boys. Good interactions were on Amazon. Bad interactions were underground and involved drugs, kiddie porn, LSD, and plutonium. These familiar oscillations remind us that the Internet has always been particular, and struggles over its regulation have been struggles over what kind of particularity would and should be installed. Rather than far-reaching, engaging, and accessible, the Internet has been constituted in and through conflict over specific practices and subjectivities. Not everything goes. We might even say that those who want to clean up the Internet, who want to get rid of or zone the porn and the gambling, who want to centralise, rationalise, and organise commercial transactions in ways more beneficial to established corporations than to mom-and-pop shops, express as a difference on the Internet what is actually the starker difference between societies traversed and mediated through electronic communications and financial networks and those reliant more on social, interpersonal, and extralegal networks. As Ernesto Laclau argues, the division between the social and the nonsocial, or between society and what is other to it, external and threatening, can only be expressed as a difference internal to society (Laclau 1996, 38). If capital today traverses the globe, how can the difference between us and them be expressed? The oscillations in the Internet debates depict a difference between those who are sexualised, undisciplined, violent, irrational, lazy, excessive, and extreme and those who are civilised, mainstream, hardworking, balanced, and normal. Put in the terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the other on the Internet is the Real other—not the other I imagine as like me and not the symbolic other to be recognised and respected through abstract norms and rights. Efforts to clean up the Internet target more than gambling and porn;

Technology 71

they involve the image of the global.Whatever disrupts the fantasy of unity on the Internet cannot be part of the global. The particularity of the fantasies of the global animating the Internet is striking. Richard Rogers’s research on linking practices on the World Wide Web brings out the pervasive localism and provincialism. In his account of the Dutch food safety debate, Rogers observes ‘little in the way of “web dialogue” or linkage outside of small Dutch “food movement’’’ (Rogers 2002). Critics of partisan bloggers as well as of the sheltered world of AOL click on a similar problem—the way the world on the Internet shrinks into a very specific image of the global (Patelis 2004). How would English-speaking American high school students on Facebook or southern mommies uploading photos of their scrapbook pages come into contact with sites providing Koranic instruction to modern Muslims—even if there were no language problems? And, why would they bother? Why should they? As a number of commentators have worried for a while now, opportunities to customise the news and announcements one reads—not to mention the already undigestible amount of information available on topics in which one is deeply interested—contribute to the segmentation and isolation of users within bubbles of views and opinions with which they already agree.22 Segmentation and isolation are neither new nor unique to the Internet, but they run counter to the fantasy of the global on which communicative capitalism relies. The particularity of these fantasies of the global is important because this is the global networked communications produce. Our networked interactions produce our specific worlds as the global of global capitalism.They create the expectations and effects of communicative capitalism, expectations and effects that necessarily vary with the setting. Because the global is whatever specific communities or exchanges imagine it to be, anything outside the experience or comprehension of these communities either does not exist or is an inhuman, otherworldly alien threat that must be annihilated. If everything is out there on the Internet, anything I fail to encounter—or can’t imagine encountering—isn’t simply excluded (everything is already there), it is foreclosed. Admitting or accessing what is foreclosed destroys the very order constituted through foreclosure.Thus, the imagined unity of the global, a fantasy filled in by the particularities of specific contexts, is one without fundamental conflict.23 Circulating content can’t effect change in this sort of world—it is already complete. The only alternative is the Real that ruptures my world, that is to say, the evil Other with whom I cannot imagine sharing a world, the one I must eradicate. The very fantasy of a global that makes my networked interactions vital and important results in a world closed to politics and threatened by evil.

Conclusion A Lacanian commonplace is that a letter always arrives at its destination. What does this mean with respect to networked communications? It means that a

72 Jodi Dean

letter, a message, in communicative capitalism is not really sent. There is no response because there is no arrival. There is just the contribution to circulating content. Many readers will likely disagree.24 Some might bring up the successes of MoveOn. From its early push to have Congress censure Bill Clinton and ‘move on’ to its efforts to organise its millions of members in opposition to the US invasion of Iraq, MoveOn has become a presence in mainstream American politics. In addition to circulating petitions and arranging emails and faxes to members of Congress, one of MoveOn’s best actions was a virtual sit-in: over 200,000 of us called in to Washington, DC, at scheduled times on the same day, shutting down phone lines into the Capital for hours. In early 2004, MoveOn sponsored an ad contest: the winning ad would be shown during the Super Bowl football game. The ad was great—but CBS refused to broadcast it. Far from being evidence against my argument, MoveOn exemplifies technology fetishism and confirms my account of the reduction and capture of political energies into contributions to communicative capitalism’s circuits of information and entertainment. MoveOn’s campaigns director, Eli Pariser, says that the organisation is ‘opt-in, it’s decentralised, you do it from your home’ (Boyd 2003, 14). No one has to remain committed or be bothered with boring meetings. All one has to do is contribute—an opinion, a signature, or money. Andrew Boyd, in a positive appraisal of the group, writes, MoveOn’s strength lies . . . in providing a home for busy people who may not want to be a part of a chapter-based organization with regular meetings . . . By combining a nimble entrepreneurial style with a strong ethic of listening to its members—via online postings and straw polls—MoveOn has built a responsive, populist and relatively democratic virtual community. (Boyd 2003, 16) Busy people can think they are active—the technology will act for them, alleviating their guilt while assuring them that nothing will change too much. The virtual community won’t place too many (actually any) demands on them. Its democracy is the democracy of communicative capitalism—opinions will circulate, views will be expressed, information will be accessed. By sending an email, signing a petition, responding to an article on a blog, people can feel political. And that feeling feeds communicative capitalism insofar as it leaves behind the time-consuming, incremental, and risky efforts of politics. MoveOn likes to emphasise that it abstains from ideology, from division. While this postideological gesture is disingenuous—MoveOn’s politics are clearly progressive, anti-war, left-democratic—the emphasis on a nonposition is symptomatic of precisely that denial of the trauma of contemporary left politics that the technological fetish covers over: it is a refusal to offer a vision of collectivity, to stand for a solidarity premised not on individual particularities and desires (which is no

Technology 73

solidarity at all) but on the painstaking and organised struggle for reclaiming the state as a force to be used against neoliberalism and its corporate beneficiaries. One might find better reasons to disagree with me when one focuses on the role of the Internet in mass mobilisations, in connecting activists from all over the world, and in providing an independent media source. The February 15, 2003, mobilisation of ten million people worldwide to protest the Bush administration’s push for war against Iraq is perhaps the most striking example, but one might also mention MoveOn’s March 16 candlelight vigil, an action involving over a million people in 130 countries. Such uses of the Internet are vitally important for political activists—especially given the increasingly all-pervasive reach of corporatecontrolled media. But these examples fail to address the question of whether such instances of intense social meaning drive larger organisational efforts and contribute to the formation of political solidarities with more duration. At the end of the first decade of the new millennium, there is little evidence that they do. On the contrary, left activists seem ever more drawn to spectacular events that raise awareness, momentarily, but do little in the way of building the institutions necessary to sustain a new political order. Networked communication technologies materialise democracy as a political form that formats political energies as communicative engagements. Valued as the key to political inclusion and democratic participation, new media technologies strengthen the hold of neoliberalism and the privilege of the top 1 percent of people on the planet. At the same time, globally networked communications remain the very tools and terrains of struggle, making political change more difficult—and more necessary—than ever before.

Notes 1 See Dean, 2002 and 2004. 2 I set out the notion of ideology in Dean 2002. 3 Colin Crouch (2004) identifies similar processes in Europe (primarily Italy and the Netherlands) and Great Britain. 4 See Eva Illouz’s (2007) discussion of the insertion of ‘communication’ as a therapeutic ideal in the heart of corporate culture. 5 My account of antagonism draws from Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek. For a more thorough elaboration, see Dean 2006. 6 For a discussion of the role of speed under neoliberalism, see John Armitage and Joanne Roberts 2002, 43–54. 7 Actually, one doesn’t need to be optimistic or pessimistic to emphasise abundance. Critical analysts of the Internet observe that, contrary to capitalism’s supposition that scarcity determines value, the value of the Internet is premised on abundance. Mark Poster writes, ‘With the Internet, as with other networked media, a counterposition is installed in which a communication has greater value the more individuals it reaches, the more it multiplies itself, the more common or universal it is’ (2001, 46). Poster also points out that television advertising is an exception to the idea of scarcity—a television program is more valuable (and hence ad time more expensive) the more popular it is. Contemporary public relations and advertising practices rely on intensifying and

74 Jodi Dean

8

9

10 11

12

13 14

expanding brand presence. And here they reassemble other modes of functioning in the capitalist market—the establishment of ubiquity rather than scarcity (McDonald’s and Coke come to mind). So rather than indicating that abundance is what makes networked communications so seemingly transformative of capitalist laws of supply and demand, Poster’s point reminds us of the limits of those laws—not everything follows that logic, ideas and practices (those connected with public health or religious faith, say) perhaps least of all. For an alternative approach to surplus, one that views scarcity as an ideological delusion, see Wark 2004. A thorough historical analysis of the contribution would spell out the steps involved in the uncoupling of messages from responses. Such an analysis would draw out the ways that responses to the broadly cast messages of television programmes were configured as attention and measured in terms of ratings. Nielsen families, in other words, responded for the rest of us.Yet as work in cultural studies, media, and communications has repeatedly emphasised, ratings are not responses and provide little insight into the actual responses of viewers. These actual responses, we can say, are uncoupled from the broadcast message and incorporated into other circuits of communication. This is one of my primary disagreements with Guy Debord. In addition to relying on a notion of spectacle more suited to mass than personal media, he views the spectacle as supported by an underlying secrecy. See Debord 1998. For example, the conservative CATO Institute held a conference in 2004 titled ‘The Republican Revolution Ten Years Later: Smaller Government or Business as Usual?’ Describing the failure of mainstream feminism to fight for welfare guarantees for poor mothers, Gwendolyn Mink writes, ‘A white and middle-class solipsism enforced a general feminist silence about the stakes of welfare provisions for poor women, and that silence gave permission to policy-makers to treat punitive welfare reform as a no-lose situation. Welfare reform did not bear directly on the lives of most white middle-class feminists, and so they did not mobilise their networks and raise their voices as they have in defending abortion rights or protesting domestic violence’ (1998, 7). American leftists were not wrong in their critique of the welfare state. Historically, its minimal provisions, trapped within states’ discretionary powers, were highly moralistic, biased towards the deserving poor, a category which excluded unwed, non-white mothers. The struggle to establish that welfare benefits were owed to poor women— and that states could not impose eligibility restrictions—was a long one, fought through the courts (and sometimes though direct action) by groups united into the National Welfare Rights Organization. In fact, it had been in place barely 30 years when Clinton ended even that minimal entitlement to economic assistance. Among the key texts in political theory representative of this shift are Laclau and Mouffe (1984) and Cohen (1987). For a recent version of this retreat from the state, see Critchley 2007. Critchley writes, ‘I think politics should be conceived at a distance from the state’ (112). Thus, it should come as no surprise that Critchley celebrates the humorous approaches of some contemporary anarchists: ‘Groups like Pink Bloc or Billionaires for Bush are performing their powerlessness in the face of power in a profoundly powerful way’ (124). This mindset clearly exemplifies the contemporary failure of the left—a failure to take responsibility for power, in fact, a celebration of powerlessness. It also misreads the performance of the Billionaires in particular: participants dress as the very rich and carry signs such as ‘More Blood for Oil’ and ‘Save our Gated Communities’ in order to take the system at its word; they occupy the position of enunciation of the privileged, thereby making it visible as such. For a discussion of ‘taking the system at its word,’ see Žižek 1993, 237.

Technology 75

15 For a longer discussion, see Dean 2002. 16 Focusing on Stewart Brand, Fred Turner gives a detailed account of this process in From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006). He writes, ‘As they turned away from agonistic politics and towards technology, consciousness, and entrepreneurship as the principle of a new society, the communards of the 1960s developed a utopia vision that was in many ways quite congenial to the insurgent Republicans of the 1990s’ (8). 17 These bills made explicit a convergence of democracy and capitalism. As the 1996 bill affirmed, ‘the market will drive both the Internet and the information highway’ (DyerWitheford 1999, 34–35). 18 For example, Cass R. Sunstein looks to blogs, wikis, and open-source software projects as ‘important supplements to, or substitutes for, ordinary deliberation’ (2006, 148). 19 The answer to Mark Poster’s question ‘Can capitalism still justify itself when the consumer is already a producer?’ is thus yes; capitalism has always relied on extracting value from and through consumption. See Poster 2001, 48. 20 Sunstein condenses deliberation into a simple matter of information in Infotopia. 21 I draw from Žižek’s elucidation of a concept introduced by Claude Levi-Straus. See Žižek 2001, 221–23. 22 See, for example, Sunstein 2007. 23 Wark’s vision of two great hostile classes of hackers and vectoralists is an important exception to this tendency. See Wark 2004. 24 For example, see Kahn and Kellner 2005.

Bibliography Armitage, John, and Joanne Roberts. 2002. ‘Chronotopia.’ In Living with Cyberspace: Technology and Society in the 21st Century, 43–54. London: Continuum. Barabási, Albert-László. 2003. Linked. New York: Plume. Boyd, Andrew. 2003. ‘The Web Rewires the Movement.’ The Nation (August 4): 14. Cohen, Jean L. 1987. Class and Civil Society: The Limits of Marxian Critical Theory. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Critchley, Simon. 2007. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso. Crouch, Colin. 2004. Post-Democracy. London: Polity. Dean, Jodi. 2002. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalises on Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dean, Jodi. 2004. ‘The Networked Empire: Communicative Capitalism and the Hope for Politics.’ In Empire Strikes Back: Reading Hardt and Negri, edited by Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean, 265–88. New York: Routledge. Dean, Jodi. 2006. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. Debord. Guy. 1998. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London: Verso. Dyer-Witheford, Nick. 1999. Cyber-Marx. Champagne: University of Illinois Press. Dyer-Witheford, Nick. 2002. ‘E-Capital and the Many-Headed Hydra.’ In Critical Perspectives on the Internet, edited by Greg Elmer, 129–64. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Dyson, Esther. 1998. ‘The End of the Official Story,’ Brill’s Content (July/August): 50–51. Frank, Thomas. 2000. One Market under God. New York: Doubleday. Galloway, Alexander R. 2004. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

76 Jodi Dean

Gamson, Joshua. 2003. ‘Gay Media, Inc.: Media Structures, the New Gay Conglomerates, and Collective Sexual Identities.’ In Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, edited by Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers, 255–78. New York: Routledge. Graham, Mary. 2002. Democracy by Disclosure: The Rise of Technopopulism. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Kahn, Richard, and Douglas Kellner. 2005. ‘Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical/Reconstructive Approach.’ Cultural Politics 1 (1): 7–100. Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I, Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Illouz, Eva. 2007. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. London: Polity. Laclau, Ernesto. 1996. Emancipations. London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1984. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Matic, Veran, and Drazen Pantic. (1999). ‘War of Words.’ The Nation (November 29). http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=19991129&s=matic. Poster, Mark. 2001. What’s the Matter with the Internet? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mink, Gwendolyn. 1998. Welfare’s End. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Patelis, Korinna. 2004. ‘E-Mediation by America Online.’ In Preferred Placement: Knowledge Politics on the Web, edited by Richard Rogers, 49–64. Maastrict: Jan van Eyck Academie. Perelman, Michael. 2007. The Confiscation of American Prosperity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rogers, Richard. 2002. ‘The Issue Has Left the Building.’ Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Association of Internet Researchers, Maastricht, Netherlands, October 13–16. Sassen, Saskia. 1996. Losing Control? New York: Columbia University Press. Shirkey, Clay. 2004. ‘Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Campaign?’ Many-2-Many. Posted January 26. Accessed April 28, 2007. http://www.corante.com/many/ archives/2004/01/26/is_social_software_bad_for_the_dean_campaign.php. Sunstein, Cass R. 2006. Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2007. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Turner, Fred. 2006. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wark, McKenzie. 2004. The Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. ———. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. ———. 2001. Enjoy Your Symptom! New York: Routledge. ———. 2002. ‘Afterward: Lenin’s Choice.’ In Revolution at the Gates Selected: Writings of Lenin from 1917, 165–336. London: Verso.

4 UNGOVERNABILITY Claus Offe

Republished and revised from Claus Offe, ‘Ungovernability,’ in Fragile Stabilität – stabilie Fragilität, edited by Stephan A. Jansen, Eckhard Schröter, and Nico Stehr (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2013), 77–87.

Stateness and Governing Capacity Max Weber has famously refused to define the state by anything like its substantive purpose or mission. Instead, and given the virtually endless plurality of purposes that the holders of state power have pursued in history, the state can only be defined, Weber thought, in instrumental terms, namely, as the supreme powerholder that enjoys the monopoly of physical force over a territorially circumscribed population. The state, that is to say, cannot be understood by its ends, only by its means. A state performs as a state if it is unrivalled by internal or external forces that can effectively challenge its monopoly in the use of means of coercion. The state must thus be defined in negative terms: by the absence of effective competing holders of coercive means of control. The argument that I shall pursue in this theoretical essay is that this conceptualization of the state is overly parsimonious. In order for the state to be a state, it is not sufficient that its organs (the police, the military, the courts, the prisons) are capable to effectively neutralise rival pretenders to coercive power. In addition, it must be capable to ‘do’ something, namely ‘govern.’ Being able to govern means to perform collectively binding decisions effectively designed and implemented to protect and promote, through an ongoing production of policies, societal conditions and processes (such as law and order, economic growth, property relations, the ultimate authority of the will of God or the ruling party, particular notions of social justice and social progress, et cetera) that rulers deem worth protecting and

78 Claus Offe

promoting. In fact, states defend and sustain their Weberian coercive monopoly through their governing in ways that preclude the rise of rival pretenders to coercive power. In states that are incapable of governing, the decline and eventual absence of their governing capacity puts them at risk of losing their coercive monopoly—their very quality of stateness in the Weberian sense. Both the quality of stateness as monopoly-of-coercion and the quality of stateness as governing capacity are relational categories. To preserve and consolidate their monopoly of (‘legitimate’) violence, the holders of state power must be able to prevail over contending forces such as insurgent mass movements, private armies conducting civil war, the defection of parts of the military which then engage in armed domestic struggle, terrorist groups, armed drug cartels, separatist groups threatening the integrity of territory and population, foreign states occupying parts of a state’s territory, and other poderes fácticos aiming at undermining the loyalty and allegiance of populations to the state. The failure of the state to prevent the formation of such groups, or at least to maintain the upper hand over such forces once they have emerged, can result in the ruin of stateness, or failed states (Bates 2008). Analogously, a state’s governing capacity, defined as its ability to address staterecognised issues and challenges through policies and implement them through binding decision-making and implementation of decisions, is also of a relational nature. Here, the question is, can the state mobilise the requisite political resources (institutional, fiscal, political, administrative, et cetera) to overrule forces, be they internal or external, who oppose and obstruct its policies and sabotage their formation and implementation? If the answer to this question turns out to be no (as it is likely to do, for instance, when creditors can impose austerity policies upon indebted states), we may speak of a failure of governance, or of a condition of ungovernability. Under conditions of ungovernability, the state may well be able to monopolistically practice coercion but is largely incapacitated as an agent of protection, as the holders of state power are manifestly incapable to equip themselves with the resources and arrive at decisions that are required to cope with issues, challenges, and crises which, at the same time, state actors cannot afford to ignore, to deny, or to put off their agenda. They may even be aware, while they manifestly lack the resources that are required to address a problem at hand, that it is quite irrational to delay policy action, as the magnitude of the problem-to-be addressed underlies a logic of exponential growth. That is to say, if you do not act ‘now,’ prospects for acting at a later point grow predictably and discouragingly more expensive in terms of the political resources needed. The phenomenon of ungovernability is a self-exacerbating one. Nicolaus Stern has argued to that effect in his largely undisputed ‘Review on the Economics of Climate Change’ (2006). Yet as we lack even those resources that would be needed to act ‘now,’ there appears to be no choice but to wait until the available governing capacity has become even less adequate than it is today relative to the size of challenges that need to be faced.

Ungovernability 79

Problems of stateness are typically caused by underground contenders for coercive powers, while problems of governability are caused by insufficient political resources in the face of perfectly above-ground ‘veto actors.’ Yet exacerbating problems of ungovernability can feed back into problems of stateness. If anything, governments’ often desperate search for enhanced governing capacity (as in the current Eurozone debt crisis) leads political elites to seek solutions at the supranational level—solutions which thus are bound to undercut the sovereignty of states. Or the sovereignty of states which are seen to be incapable of promoting and protecting fundamental interests of their populations are being challenged from within, namely, through militant extra-institutional action of forces which question the legitimacy and integrity of their state and regime, as was the case in 2012–2013 in both Greece and Egypt.

What Causes the Condition of Ungovernability? Ungovernability is a concept that has been used to describe conditions of institutional insufficiency with the potential of political crisis which, in its turn, opens opportunities for subsequent institutional change. The condition of ungovernability results from institution allowing for (or being, at any event, incapable to prevent) the rise of problems and conflicts that these very same institutions later turn out to be incapable of processing in any orderly and routinised ways, such as in models of endogenous demand overload. To be sure, the question of whether and when a state has become ungovernable involves a normative component.This component serves to define the border between ‘adequate/tolerable’ and fully ‘insufficient’ levels of the capacity of a system of political institutions to govern. Typically, however, the location of this border is rather uncontroversial. If states are chronically paralyzed in their ability to make and enforce laws, provide basic services, or resolve major conflicts through adequate institutional means, most people, including state actors themselves, are likely to agree that a condition of defective governing capacity is present which must be healed through institutional reform aiming at the recovery of ‘adequate’ governing powers. Ungovernability is a peculiar concept in that it has been used both by academic political sociologists and by journalists and politicians; it has played a role in New Left as well as neoconservative discourses. Symptomatically, the term became somewhat popular among all of those user communities in the context of the seventies (cf. Fluno 1971 as one of the earliest uses of the concept), both in the English-speaking world and on the European continent. The historical situation in which it was born is the end of the post–World War II ‘golden age’ or trente glorieuse era of welfare capitalism and the experience of its built-in assumptions becoming questioned and widely considered invalid. Doubts were raised by events such as the publication of the Limits to Growth study of the Club of Rome (Meadows et al. 1972), the first oil price shock in 1973, the ensuing increase of levels of unemployment throughout the OECD world, double-digit

80 Claus Offe

rates of inflation following the oil price shocks both in 1973 and 1979 in key countries of the OECD world, the cultural repercussions of the protest movements of the sixties, the cultural change towards ‘post-materialist’ values (Inglehart 1977) that were perceived to exacerbate the ‘cultural contradictions of capitalism’ (Bell 1978), the de facto defeat of the US in the Vietnam war (1975), levels of strike activities in the period between 1968 and 1978 throughout the industrialised world that were unprecedented since World War II and which in Great Britain culminated in the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1978–1979, emerging indicators of an accelerating ‘fiscal crisis of the state’ (O’Connor 1973), the incipient end of the Continental social democratic reform euphoria (as foreshadowed by the resignation of German chancellor Willy Brandt in 1974), and ultimately the rise of Thatcherism and the hegemony of the neoliberal doctrine as a right-wing response to these challenges of ungovernability (1979).

‘Ungovernability’ and the Left/Right Political Code The diagnosis of ungovernability is always linked to a recommended remedial response: Facing the spectre of ungovernability, governments must rebuild institutional arrangements and change their programmatic agendas and aspirations so as to no longer give rise to demands or aspire to govern things (such as the business cycle and levels of employment) that are deemed to be beyond the reach of political rule anyway. The neoliberal reflex is to push problems that presumably cannot be resolved through state action anyway (or, if resolved, only with alleged undesirable side effects) off the agenda of public policy. Albert Hirschman (1991) has analysed the ‘reactionary rhetoric’ accompanying such retreats with great lucidity. Motivating such moves away from presumed ‘unrealistic’ policy ambitions (such as approximating ‘full’ employment) is the fear that failing to do so would involve the risk of the state’s loss of authority: what cannot be accomplished anyway should not be attempted in the first place, as otherwise the state’s actual powerlessness will be exposed. This is the conservative version. But the opposite conclusion, a social democratic one, does also make sense: facing problems of insufficient governability, the state must proactively enhance the institutional structures and political resources that governments have at their disposal, thus restoring and safeguarding their credibility, authority, and capacity to intervene (Offe 1984). The remedies suggested do not follow analytically from the experience of cases of ungovernability per se, but from the political preferences of its observer and his or her confidence in the possibility of political intervention. The first time the term ungovernability (Unregierbarkeit) popped up at the level of party politics in Germany was probably when the incumbent Social Democratic prime minister of the German Land of North Rhine-Westphalia, Heinz Kühn, warned in his 1975 campaign that the Federal Republic would be rendered ‘ungovernable’ should the Christian Democratic opposition win the federal elections, implying that German trade unions would engage in

Ungovernability 81

extra-institutional militancy which only the taming and accommodating force of a Social Democratic government could dissuade them from considering. In analytical terms, the problem boils down to the question of whether the demands of unions are to be moderated through cooperative moves of social democratic governments in terms of fiscal and social policies—or whether they are rather to be confronted and sanctioned by a switch of central banks to tough monetarist supply side policies and governments’ shedding of their responsibility for maintaining ‘full’ employment (Scharpf 1987). The same year—1975—saw the publication of a ‘Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission’ (Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki, 1975), with the essay of Samuel Huntington on the US having become the most influential chapter of the book. His diagnosis, which more than 35 years later can be read as one of the founding documents of neoconservative policy restraint that opened the floodgates of neoliberal economic nonintervention, was straightforward. The authority of the democratic state is being challenged by an egalitarian and redistributionist ‘demand overload’ and the ‘revolution of rising expectations’ which are the residue of the ‘participatory revolution’ (or ‘democratic surge’) of the sixties and gave rise to ‘the pressures of newly active groups.’ These groups demanded the ‘expansion of nondefense activities of government,’ such as education and social security. This expansion fuels a fiscal crisis—a crisis that ‘Marxists mistakenly attribute to capitalist economics [while it is] in fact a product of democratic politics’ (73). The surge of participatory egalitarianism, moreover, has helped to discredit ‘governmental authority’ and legitimate status privileges based upon ‘expertise, hierarchy, and wealth.’ Thus ‘the vitality of democracy in the 1960s . . . produced problems for the governability of democracy in the 1970s’ (76) and, in conjunction with ‘dispatriating’ forces in the media, deprived governments (and ‘institutional leadership’ in general) of ‘trust’ and ‘confidence,’ prompting the author to wonder, ‘Does anybody govern?’ (92). The prevailing ‘democratic distemper’ forces governments to expand spending while at the same time decreasing its authority, thus undercutting its ability ‘to impose on its people the sacrifices which may be necessary’ (105). Governability has come to suffer from an excessive ‘vitality of democracy’ and the ensuing ‘demand overload’; hence the need to restore a balance between the two by enforcing ‘potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy’ (115). Otherwise, democracy gives rise to forces with which democratic governments are ill equipped to cope—a quintessential case of institutional insufficiency. While the author’s political allusions and proposed remedies remain controversial, the analytical structure of the argument is in no way tied to a particular set of neoconservative concerns. That structure can be summarised as follows: A set of political institutions gives rise to forces and demands which cannot be adequately processed, channelled, or managed within the confines of those institutions. Ungovernability is a feature not of situations and events in which it just becomes manifest itself. Rather, it is a feature of institutional arrangements (in Huntington’s

82 Claus Offe

reading, ‘democracy’) that are inherently and demonstrably incapable of coping with events and situations which they, on the other hand, cannot prevent from actually happening. Ungovernability, more precisely, is a condition that obtains when conflicting institutional actors perceive incentives and opportunities (the ‘logic of the situation’) in such a way that they do not develop an interest in the cooperative solution to conflict. The intellectual appeal of this pattern of argument consists precisely in the fact that the rise of disruptive forces is not seen as contingent and external, but can be systematically attributed to exactly those institutional arrangements whose deficiencies (their loss of control, or governing capacity) are then exposed as a consequence of those endogenous disruptive forces. The ‘demand overload’ that governments suffer from can be shown to be an institutionally induced and licensed—hence, in effect, a self-inflicted—overload. Ungovernability is the result of institutions overburdening themselves by triggering strategic action with which they are ill prepared to cope. Moreover, the strength and dynamics of these disruptive forces do not allow for a smooth or spontaneous restoration of governability (for example, through the imposition of ‘limits to . . . political democracy’ à la Huntington). Instead, what is called for are acts of major institutional restructuring, after the completion of which ungovernability will be seen in future retrospect as a ‘temporary phase . . . in the career of a political system’ (Rose 1979, 351, my emphasis). But the condition of governability, too, can be conceived as something ‘temporary’ and inherently fragile, as emerging configurations of socio-economic and political forces can disrupt the everprecarious institutional balance between the set of problems that are being generated and those that can at all be effectively processed within the confines of these arrangements (Streeck 2009). Almost needless to say, Huntington was empirically wrong in attributing the crisis of democracy to excessive demands of new and traditional leftists forces; rather, and as we see in retrospect, investors have become more demanding in terms of tax exemptions and other favourable investment conditions granted to them by the state, while union density, strike activity, and socialist components of social democratic platforms have declined everywhere. If an argument along these lines (endogeneity, disruptiveness, overburdened institutions, institutional restructuration) can be made (and, nota bene, empirically substantiated!) we may speak of a ‘strong,’ ‘pure,’ or ideal-typical case of ungovernability; it is analogous to the Marxian notion of the ‘anarchy’ of the capitalist mode of production—an anarchy that is both unleashed and licensed by political institutions and a source of stress that these institutions are incapable of coping with. Such an ideal-typical construct allows for actually observed cases of political crises and state malfunctioning to be assessed as to their proximity or distance to the ‘pure’ case. It allows us to ask and answer questions like these: To what extent were the consequences of Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans in August 2005 (1,800 people dead, one million homeless, $81 billion in damage) due to an ‘external’ (meteorological) event, and to what extent can they be attributed to a failure of governance (inadequate repair of levees, deficiencies of sheltering and

Ungovernability 83

evacuation plans, chaotic emergency management, the reliance on martial law, and so forth)? To what extent can the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s be attributed to the inherent weaknesses, asymmetries, and tensions within the institutional system of Yugoslav (or, for that matter, Czechoslovak and perhaps at some point Belgian or British) federalism? What causes the failure of ‘failed states’—the intensity of centrifugal ethnic mobilisation or the structural vulnerability of state institutions that are dominated by corrupt tribal elites incapable and unwilling to provide basic protection and security to large parts of their populations? To what extent is the financial market crisis of 2008, with its vast negative repercussions on state budgets, growth, and labour markets, a matter of some (exogenous) irrational interaction of market agents, and to what extent is it due to (endogenous) patterns of inattentive governance and regulatory failure that have allowed for, licensed, and even encouraged those agents and their strategies? In all these instances of temporary ungovernability, the situation can be framed in terms of ‘external shocks.’ Yet it can also be framed in terms of institutional failures and the absence of appropriate shock absorbers in the machinery of government. To be sure, there are also conceivable cases where it seems less plausible to ‘endogenise,’ in an institutionalist perspective, the factors that disrupt consent and deprive governments of their authority and capacity to act effectively. Among these, the secularization hypothesis has been linked to ungovernability, the argument being that ‘unraveling a traditional nexus of social, political, and religious attitudes and institutions . . . unleashes . . . individual behavior from old constraints and thereby endangers social stability’ and governability (Berger 1987, 109; cf. Böckenförde 1976).

Ungovernability and State Failure The concept of ungovernability is most often employed when governments’ institutional insufficiency becomes manifest relative to specific challenges that can be neither prevented nor coped with through available institutional mechanisms of governance.This condition can be distinguished from an even more extreme condition of absolute state failure, or the breakdown of basic state capacities due to the state’s monopoly of coercive powers being broken by violent contenders (which may include defectors from military and other elites of a failed state). This is by no means a condition that afflicts underdeveloped post-colonial polities alone. State capacity can be diminished to critical levels by deep subnationalist divisions, a polarised and centrifugal party system leading to chronic political stalemate, pervasive corruption in the public sector, the inability to enforce the state’s monopoly of violence against domestic paramilitary forces, or inadequate institutional devices to manage succession crises. These conditions imply that states are not just vulnerable relative to specific challenges, but are unable to perform basic state functions, such as authoritatively deciding on and effectively enforcing collectively binding legal rules and providing fundamental levels of physical and

84 Claus Offe

socioeconomic security to citizens—the condition of ‘state failure’ discussed at the beginning of this essay. Institutional patterns of government can involve the risk that states fail in space. Spatially failing states are those that do not manage to exercise effective state authority over the entire (nominal) state territory, with the spatial gaps in state control being under the de facto control of warlords, tribal rulers, armed gangs, drug cartels, separatist ethnic and religious movements, or guerrilla forces. Examples of states that are unable to enforce even their own territorial integrity range from Somalia to Indonesia, Sri Lanka to Colombia, and arguably include even Israel (Failed States Index 2008). In these cases, part of the territory and hence of the population is beyond the reach of whatever the central government has to offer in terms of protection, legal order, and services. While most cases belonging to this category are territories that still suffer from the weaknesses of post-colonial statehood, the rich democracies of the OECD world seem to be more likely to suffer from their inability to take effective control over even their short- to medium-term future; they suffer from institutional myopia, or governability deficiencies in time. They are institutionally incapacitated, that is, to respond to clearly and largely uncontroversially foreseen challenges (for example, income distribution; labour market developments; demographic, educational, or climate-related challenges) as early and effectively as would be mandated by the risks involved and by considerations of cost efficiency. We may speak of a temporal crowding-out effect governing the agendas of liberal democracies: current concerns of current elites and nonelites dominate over medium-term issues because long-term sustainability is hard to establish as a priority when what counts (according to the given framework of political institutions) are the preferences of voters presently alive, as well as short-lived coalitions of political forces which strive to win the next elections rather than promoting societal investments that (hopefully) bear fruit after decades. Liberal democracies do have very scarce means to commit themselves to stay a course. To paraphrase Jon Elster, they are unable to make themselves unable to act opportunistically. In his brilliant analytical narrative of the policies and policy failures that led to September 15, 2008 (the breakdown of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing banking crisis in the US and beyond), Richard Posner (2010) has offered compelling evidence of how endogenous ungovernability came about: a set of interacting economic and financial developments veered out of control because policymakers had positively allowed them to do so.That is to say, they could have decided to intervene in time to stop the unfolding cataclysmic dynamics, yet they decided not to do so. In Posner’s words, ‘the government has stumbled again . . . and in ways and for reasons that raise the question whether the American political system can preserve the nation’s prosperity. Whether America is governable . . . has been brought into question’ (6). This system allows political leaders to refrain from taking preventative measures and adopting proactive policies if they see such inaction as serving their momentary political interests. Greenspan ‘thought bubbles should

Ungovernability 85

be allowed to expand and burst and then the Federal Reserve would wake up, step in, and limit . . . the effects of the bubble’s bursting. . . .—which we have discovered it cannot do. It was like saying the government should do nothing to prevent an epidemic, just swing into action after the epidemic hits’ (36). In other contexts, such behaviour would come under accusations of criminal neglect. Finally, we can speak of ungovernability in terms of substantive policy areas and issues which have (perhaps irreversibly) escaped from the reach of (national) governments. Issue-specific losses of governmental control result from either of two seemingly opposite trajectories, privatization and supranational interdependency (‘globalization’); they add up to the escape of an increasing number of issues and challenges from the realm of what is at all manageable by conventional forms of government and public authority, with the resulting gap being filled, if often only rhetorically, with foggy notions of ‘governance’ that somehow involve both state and nonstate actors (Offe 2008). As governments in the OECD world have massively responded, since the 1980s, to symptoms of fiscal crisis and budgetary ‘demand overload’ by moves to privatise all kinds of ‘network industries’ (of water, energy, financial markets, transportation, communication, and electronic media) as well as social services, public administration, and social security, they have deprived themselves deliberately, in the name of enhancing a doctrinaire notion of ‘efficiency’ and ‘freedom of choice,’ of some of their institutional capacity to make political decisions on these goods and services, as well as their quality and distribution (except for residual regulatory competencies that tend to pale in many instances under the impact of ‘regulatory regime competition’; Streeck 2009, ch. 5). Under the spell of a hegemonic neoliberal ideology, states seem to have incapacitated, disempowered, and impoverished their own capacity for proactive intervention and regulation, thus leaving it to supranational agencies to restore, if all goes well, some measure of governing capacity and governability. The other direction in which states have allowed important matters of political decision-making to escape from their reach of rule is commonly referred to as ‘globalization.’ Here, the familiar finding is that not states, but only transnational alliances of states or supranational organizations, can define and enforce regulatory standards (concerning, for example, the Internet, migration, or the operation of financial markets), which, however, often turn out to be unfeasible due to individual states’ obstruction of what one might call ‘requisite’ governability. The viability and robustness of states, I have tried to show, is not assured if states are capable to prevail over (external or internal) agents that challenge their monopoly of force. In fact, that may be the smaller problem, one that is rather rarely encountered in advanced capitalist democracies—although the dynamics of conflict unfolding in Ukraine and Israel in the spring and summer of 2014 can be considered to be cases in point. The more serious type of challenges that states face is their failure, deriving from their institutional deficiencies, to cope with socio-economic problems in the emergence of which states, through their

86 Claus Offe

action or inaction, can be shown to have been causal and thus complicit. This is the nature of governance problems affecting the EU, its Eurozone, and much of the OECD world. In the last case, we speak of ungovernability, or a state’s selfinflicted incapacity to govern, that is, to maintain or restore conditions that largely conform to prevailing standards of ‘social order.’

Bibliography Bates, Robert H. 2008. ‘State Failure,’ Annual Review of Political Science 11: 1–12. Bell, Daniel. 1978. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Berger, Suzanne. 1987. ‘Religious Transformation and the Future of Politics.’ In Changing Boundaries of the Political, edited by Charles S. Maier, 107–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Böckenförde, Ernst Wolfgang. 1976. Staat, Gesellschaft, Freiheit: Studien zur Staatstheorie und zum Verfassungsrecht. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Crozier, Michel J., Samuel P. Huntington, and Joho Watanuki. 1975. The Crisis of Democracy. New York: NYUP. Failed State Index. 2008. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4350& page=1. Fluno, Robert Y. 1971.‘The Floundering Leviathan: Pluralism in an Age of Ungovernability.’ Political Research Quarterly 24 (3): 560–66. Hirschman, Albert O. 1991. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Inglehart, Ronald F. 1977. The Silent Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. 1972. The Limits of Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe. O’Connor, James. 1973. The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Martin’s. Offe, Claus. 1984. ‘Ungovernability: On the Renaissance of Conservative Theories of Crisis.’ In Observation on ‘The Spiritual Situation of the Age,’ edited by Jürgen Habermas, 67–88. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Offe, Claus. 2008. ‘Governance: “An Empty Signifier.”’ Constellations 16 (4): 550–62. Posner, Richard A. 2010. The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rose, Richard. 1979. ‘Ungovernability: Is There Fire behind the Smoke?’ Political Studies 27 (3): 351–70. Scharpf, Fritz W. 1987. Sozialdemokratische Krisenpolitik in Europa. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Stern, Nicholas. 2006. The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Streeck, Wolfgang. 2009. Re-forming Capitalism: Institutional Change in the German Political Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART II

Modes of Democratic Politics

7KLVSDJHLQWHQWLRQDOO\OHIWEODQN

5 DEMOCRACY, LAW, AND GLOBAL FINANCE A Legal and Institutional Perspective Tamara Lothian

Introduction: Finance and the Progressive Imagination Finance has become more a problem than a solution to what the world most wants: socially inclusive growth. It has become a source of crises that threaten the development of the real economy. It has escaped accountability to democratic institutions and often helped, instead, to influence and corrupt them. Its potential to contribute to broad-based opportunity-expanding growth has been largely and massively squandered. In this piece and in a developing body of writing, I seek to understand not only how this failure manifests itself in some of the major countries and regions of the world, but also how it can be corrected. One of the positive programmatic outcomes should be a toolbox of legal-institutional arrangements to use in organising finance in the service of socially inclusive growth. These innovations do not amount to a confining, universal blueprint. They are nevertheless applicable, with suitable adjustments, to a wide range of contemporary economies. Moreover, we can develop them with conceptual and institutional materials that are already at hand, in contemporary experience. To identify these resources for legal and institutional innovation through comparative analysis thus forms another goal of the intellectual agenda. My method of analysis gives pride of place to institutional alternatives and innovations, expressed in the detailed materials of law. It is comparative law turned into a practice of micro-institutional analysis.We expand our sense of institutional alternatives as we begin to grasp the institutional variations already at hand. From small variations, we may begin to imagine larger variations, informed and inspired by a progressive programmatic imagination. The intellectual and policy response to the crisis in its American and European epicentres has almost entirely suppressed discussion of two themes of immense

90 Tamara Lothian

importance: the link between redistribution and recovery and the connection of finance to the real economy. In the face of regressive redistribution, mass consumption came to rely increasingly on an extraordinary expansion of household debt (made possible in part by overvaluation of the housing stock as collateral).1 Finance increased its size (as a proportion of GDP and as a drain on talent) while weakening rather than strengthening its service to the productive agenda of society (Greenwood and Scharfstein 2013; Philippon and Reshef 2013). My analysis recovers these suppressed themes, in part by relating them to a third theme: the deficit of democratic accountability that lies at the root of many of these problems. Instead of being made accountable to democratic institutions, finance in the most advanced economies has gained inordinate political influence and become the star example of ‘capture’ of government by powerful private interests. Corruption becomes then simply the most salient aspect of a whole system of collusion that undermines the vitality of democratic institutions, even as it squanders the potential for reform presented by the crisis.2 Such an account places familiar issues of corruption in a broader and more revealing, institutional context. It suggests both how and why transparency and accountability of finance within the economy require changes beyond the economy: in the constitutional organisation of the state and in the legal organisation of the surrounding society.3

The Approach to Law and Finance This project builds on earlier work in which I develop a new perspective on law and finance in the context of a broader view of the relation of finance to the real economy. Five ideas are central to this conception. These ideas may be summarised in the following manner: 1.

2. 3. 4.

The market economy does not have a single natural and necessary legalinstitutional form. The form it now takes in the rich North Atlantic economies is inadequate to ensure the achievement of the widely professed goal of socially inclusive growth except when and where this goal has been accomplished by a long prior history of efforts to broaden economic and educational opportunity (for example, the pre-history of Scandinavian social democracy). The institutional reorganisation of finance and of its relation to the real economy should be understood as part of the larger project of reimagining and remaking the market economy. Under present arrangements, finance readily becomes the master rather than the servant of the real economy and lays itself open to recurrent booms and busts. The present arrangements can be reformed in ways that more effectively put finance at the service of the productive agenda of society. The regulation of finance can and should be designed as an initial move in such an institutional reshaping.

Democracy, Law, and Global Finance 91

5.

Neoclassical and Keynesian conceptions are inadequate guides to the execution of this task. We can find in law and legal thought many of the intellectual and practical tools that we need. The reason is straightforward. The ways of organising a market economy now on offer in the world exist as a legal repertory; the detailed institutional alternatives exist as legal alternatives. Thus, the expansion of the repertory must take the form of institutional alternatives that are alternatives expressed in law. Existing and historical variations in the organisation of the market economy, and in the relation of finance to the real economy in particular, provide possible points of departure for the design and construction of the kinds of arrangements we need to secure socially inclusive growth.

Structure and Democracy: The Theoretical Horizon The basic thesis explored in this essay is the centrality of structure and structural variation. By structure, I mean the basic arrangements and ideas that shape different areas of social organisation. By structural alternatives, I mean largely institutional alternatives and alternative ways of thinking about institutions. The idea of structure in social life has traditionally been associated with the idea of a blueprint, either a universal or local blueprint. But this association is unnecessary. Structural alternatives do not come as prepackaged sets of ideas and arrangements. Programmatic thinking does not involve predefining all possible worlds and trajectories of reform. What matters is the direction and the first steps, given the material at hand. My working assumption is that the relevant legal-institutional structure needs to be depicted at a much greater level of detail or concreteness than that associated with the traditional ideological debate.4 At this level, it ceases to appear as a recurrent and indivisible type, which conforms to certain laws of change and has a preset institutional content.5 A structure, in the sense assumed in this essay, can exert a decisive influence and be recalcitrant to change and nevertheless represent a hodgepodge, capable of being explained only in the light of its particular history, full of accident and suppressed transformative opportunity. Two main corollaries flow from this idea. The first corollary is that structural understanding and reform is path dependent. It depends on the existing repertory of institutional ideas already established, either in our own experience or in experience known to us, whether through contemporary or historical knowledge. These materials serve as points of departure for the development of programmatic proposals.The repertory of institutional alternatives develops through recombination and analogical extension. The second corollary is that there needs to be a method, a practice or a process by which to experimentally advance and reconstruct such alternatives, given the absence of a blueprint. That method is democracy.6

92 Tamara Lothian

From here, my argument advances in three simple steps: (1) a conception of the larger intellectual and practical issues at stake; (2) an analysis of two different experiences of financial crisis, regulation and reform, from the standpoint of the conception and agenda outlined above; and (3) a working out of the implications of this conception and this analysis for the issue of financial regulation.

Part 1: Elements of a Conception Finance is important, above all, because it represents the economic surplus used to build the future. Under present arrangements, this task is carried out imperfectly. There has been an enormous increase in financial activity in recent years. Yet little of this financial activity has contributed to the process of long-term savings, investment, and growth. In advanced and developing countries, the vast bulk of productive investment still comes from retained earnings of firms. Traditional banks and securities markets continue to play an important role in the channelling of savings to firms and households. But the bulk of this external finance has had little or nothing to do with funding of resources for long-term investment.7 For a while, at least, it was possible to believe that this vast increase in financial activity helped to create the conditions for growth and increasing prosperity. Yet the financial crisis of 2007–2009 would reveal that few, if any, of the new modern markets had, in fact, functioned according to plan. Financial innovations would lead to concentration rather than diffusion of risk; privatisation and deregulation would lead to involution rather than growth; and the policies and arrangements used by governments to stabilise and promote development would have only limited effect.This third point would be the most damning: growth and development claims associated with the universal project of the time—opening and integration of markets through a process of globalisation and deregulation—had led to asset booms and busts, rather than any increase in the economy’s long-term growth potential.8 Two main views have informed the intellectual and policy response to the crisis. According to the dominant, neoclassical view, the problem lay in a series of localised market imperfections and in the failure of equally localised regulatory responses to these localised market imperfections. By redressing these localised market and regulatory failures, we can make private returns converge into social returns. According to this view, there was and is no systemic problem in the regulation of finance or in the organisation of its relation to the real economy, only an ill-advised and long-standing relaxation of regulatory vigilance, particularly with respect to new markets in financial derivatives and to the shadow banking sector that proliferated alongside the standard, regulated banks.9 According to the second, ‘Keynes-Minsky’ view, financial markets, and markets in general, were vulnerable to cycles of euphoria and despondency. There was a permanent danger that the oscillations of financial markets would amplify, rather

Democracy, Law, and Global Finance 93

than attenuate, the instability of the real economy. In this respect, the KeynesMinsky position continued and magnified the psychological, anti-institutional bias of Anglo-American political economy. The task of regulation, according to this view, is to provide buffers and counterweights to dangerous disturbances of the financial markets, the better to attenuate cycles that we cannot hope to fully suppress or avoid because they are rooted in the bearing of certain psychological constraints on the workings of any market economy.10 This piece takes a different view. I advance two ideas. The first idea is that the relation of finance to the real economy can and should be reshaped. The second idea is that the regulation of finance can and should be a first step towards reorganisation of finance and the institutional structure of the financial system. To appreciate the nature and significance of this alternative view—and the way it differs from the prevailing view and the prescription that view implies— consider its implications for the debate about regulation. According to the standard, neoclassical approach to regulatory policy in general and regulation of finance in particular, the aim of regulation is simply to redress the effects of localised market imperfections, the better to make private returns converge into social returns to economic activity (Stigler 1971). According to the second, Keynes-Minsky view, the problem is less one of localised market imperfections and constraints and instead a problem of the inherent tendency of the money economy to amplify cycles of despondency and euphoria. In this view, the role of the state is to build buffers and safeguards against the inherent instability of modern, market-oriented financial systems and the economies they are meant to serve (Papadimitriou and Wray 2010). Excluded from these ways of thinking about finance and its regulation is the idea that there can be alternative ways of organising the relation between finance and the real economy, as an initial step towards reorganising the market economy as a whole. By contrast, the view defended here begins and ends with a very different understanding of the central problem of finance. According to the alternative view, a financial crisis can never be fully explained in terms made popular by modern finance, that is, as the result of a localised market imperfection or a localised failure in the regulatory response to a localised market failure. These are the terms provided by modern economics and finance theory. They are omnipresent and still in charge.Yet they are incapable of explaining the central facts of financial crises in the modern era. The severity and course of financial crises are always shaped by their institutional settings.We should not think of this setting as ‘given’ or fully determined by an abstract ‘institutional conception,’ for example, the regulated market economy or financial system.The arrangements governing the relation between finance and the real economy can take radically different directions. In some of these directions, the arrangements loosen the link between finance and the real economy. In other directions, the arrangements tighten this relation (Lothian 2012a, 2012c).

94 Tamara Lothian

The present arrangements governing the relation of finance and the real economy produce a result that is only apparently paradoxical. Finance remains relatively indifferent to the real economy in good times; the vast amount of capital assembled in all the capital markets in all the major economies of the world bears an oblique relation to the financing of productive activity.Yet major disturbances do arise within finance. They arise all the more readily because the ties of finance to the real economy remain so loose, not just because of the swings of euphoria and despondency, nor just because of the localised market and regulatory failures that have attracted so much attention. When they do arise, they can wreak havoc, as we have recently seen. A key distinction presupposed by these claims is the contrast between financial hypertrophy and financial deepening. By financial deepening, I mean the increase of the service that finance renders to the expansion of productive output and the enhancement of productivity. By financial hypertrophy, I mean the expansion of the size of the financial industry, as a proportion of national income or profits as well as a magnet for talent, without a corresponding reinforcement of support for the expansion of output and the enhancement of productivity. The concept of financial hypertrophy, as I propose to use it, is therefore parasitic on the concept of financial deepening. Financial hypertrophy is the expansion of finance without financial deepening.11 This distinction would have limited significance if it merely described a psychological condition. But it is not a psychological condition. Whether and to what extent any given financial regime contributes to financial deepening or financial hypertrophy depends on the institutional setting. It is the setting that determines the balance between financial hypertrophy and financial deepening. The point may be generalised. Keynes helped develop the idea that there are multiple, market-based equilibriums, some of them compatible with massive unemployment of resources (especially labour or employment). He also had an interest in the content and effect of institutional arrangements in particular areas of the market economy, including the stock market (Keynes 1991 [1936]). Remarkably, however, neither he nor his successors connected the two themes. His interest in institutions and institutional alternatives was not generalised as a basis for thinking about the multiple equilibriums. As a result, mainstream thinking today would have little to say about the distinctive character of the US arrangements, or the contribution of these arrangements to the boom–bust cycle of debt-fuelled asset speculation and collapse that would characterise both the subprime crisis in the US (2007–2009) and the sovereign debt and banking crisis in Europe.12 This is the distinctive contribution I hope to make here. I do not reject the conventional understanding of the causal background to the crisis or the kinds of policies and arrangements that would be most useful in addressing the defects of the present order. I argue, however, that these arguments and ideas provide

Democracy, Law, and Global Finance 95

an inadequate basis on which to understand the content and course of the crisis and the contribution of historically specific policies and arrangements to the crisis.

Part 2: Theme and Variation: A Schematic ComparativeHistorical Contextualisation of the Theoretical Argument The best way both to develop and to support the way of thinking outlined in the first part of this essay is to suggest how it can inform a comparative-historical understanding of the transformation of finance in a number of contexts since the great world economic crisis of the 1930s. I develop my argument through a comparison of two different sets of experiences of financial crisis, regulation and reform. I begin by presenting a schematic view of the genealogy of the crisis in the American setting. A central idea in my account is that the hollowing out of the New Deal arrangements in the closing decades of the twentieth century, to the benefit of speculative finance and of the interests associated with it, produced a regime that was neither the social democratic framework of the twentieth century nor a coherent alternative to it. It was a hodgepodge created by a circumstantial evisceration of the New Deal regime (Lothian 2012a, 2012b). I then compare the American experience with a very different institutional approach to the organisation of finance and financial regulation. I consider the situation of Brazil and the BRICs today under the aegis of a contemporary model of state capitalism.The relative success of the BRIC economies in weathering the global crisis of the past few years has sometimes been used to suggest that we do not need to look for an alternative approach to the management of finance and to its relation to the real economy. I argue here that the experience of the BRIC economies, although it provides lessons of great value, supplies no such alternative worthy of imitation.

Genealogy of the Crisis in the American Setting: Hollowing Out of the New Deal Financial Reforms to the Benefit of Speculative Finance When the financial crisis broke out in America in 2007, the institutional setting in which finance operated had degenerated into a ramshackle construction. (A similar evolution or involution took place in many of the other rich industrial democracies.) The New Deal arrangements for the governance of finance had been partly but not completely bent and gutted. They had been hollowed out, unevenly and discontinuously, in response to an alliance of powerful interests and ideas. The interests were chiefly those of high finance. The more high finance succeeded in getting its way, the larger it grew and the weaker its links to the system

96 Tamara Lothian

of production became. It gained a degree of influence over government that led one mainstream economist to describe this influence as a coup d’état (Johnson 2009). The interests of high finance could not have made so powerful a dent on the New Deal regime for the governance of finance had they not been able to count on the support of prestigious economic ideas. Rational expectations doctrine, the efficient market hypothesis, and real business cycle theory represented extreme, but influential, examples of an approach to theory and policy that derided the efficacy of many forms of financial regulation, including the forms to which the New Deal had given prominence, and that attacked the case for the para-statal entities—the GSEs—that the New Deal had crafted. We cannot understand the influence exercised by these putatively ‘free market’ ideas unless we appreciate what they shared in common with the two major theoretical traditions in modern economics: the neoclassical and the Keynesian. What they shared with them was the conviction that problems arise from localised market failures and from localised failures in the regulatory response to such localised market failures. There are no systemic alternatives; that is, there are no alternative sets of institutional arrangements, detailed in law, for shaping the service that finance can render to production and, more generally, no alternative ways of organising, in institutional detail, a market economy. I develop my argument in this piece from a perspective contradicting this key and almost universally shared assumption, although I contradict it here in a way that remains fragmentary and half-explicit and goes only so far as my thesis and topic require. The outcome of this loose but powerful alliance between financial interests and economic ideas was not, however, the total overthrow of the New Deal system in finance. It was its partial evisceration and its juxtaposition with policies, practices, and institutions that ran in a direction opposite to the goals of the New Dealers.What resulted was not the replacement of one system by another; it was a gingerbread construction, a crazy quilt of compromise and concession. There was nevertheless a method to this madness. The doctrinal and institutional disharmonies that ensued from this ‘bricolage’ enabled finance to grow in a fashion that weakened its links to production and to the productive agenda of society rather than strengthening them. In the analytic categories central to this piece, financial hypertrophy came to prevail over financial deepening.  Each of the points I single out for attention in the next few pages represents a part of the road to the triumph of the former over the latter (Lothian 2012a;Wilmarth 2002). If the foreground theme of this institutional genealogy is the partial hollowing out of the New Deal framework, as a major source of our present predicament, the background theme is the interpretation of the goals and nature of that framework. It is a concern of more than antiquarian interest. We cannot and should not seek to simply repeat or reinstate the work of the Rooseveltian reformers (or of their European counterparts). We must nevertheless learn from what they achieved as well as from what they failed to accomplish.

Democracy, Law, and Global Finance 97

The New Deal Approach and Its Consequences The New Deal, it has often been remarked, went through an evolution: it began as one project, or array of projects, and ended as another.We must understand this shift in order to appreciate its financial reforms. The early New Deal was characterised by bold albeit often half-baked institutional experiments in the reshaping of the market economy. Some of these experiments looked in the direction of corporatism, or of managed competition, pinning their hopes on new forms of coordination between governments and firms. Others used public works—like the Hoover dam under the authority of the TVA—to find new ways to broaden economic opportunity. They amounted to projects of social, not just physical, engineering (Kennedy 1999; Russell 2008; Rauchway 2008). Almost all these experiments were struck down, politically or constitutionally, before they had a chance to either succeed or fail on their own merits. After their repudiation, the New Deal came to settle on a narrower focus of economic security and mass consumption. That was the orientation that became ‘normalised’ after World War II. The transformation of the New Deal agenda was not completed, however, before the astonishing and misunderstood interlude of the war economy. Under the provocation of a life-and-death threat to the country, the forced, large-scale mobilisation of resources was combined with institutional experiments, even bolder and certainly more sustained than those that had been tried out, halfheartedly, in the early New Deal. However, the resulting innovations remained quarantined, as if pertinent only to the special circumstances of a nation at war. Two features of this evolution deserve emphasis if we are to correctly understand both the nature and the limits of what the New Deal achieved in the domain of the governance of finance. First, the concern with economic insecurity resulted in the new system of federal deposit insurance and in the crystalline distinction (later to be attacked by the hollowers out) between governmentally insured deposit taking and proprietary trading in the finance industry. The savings of the individual were not to be placed at risk—at least not at uninsured risk—by bankers’ bets. Second, the combination of a commitment to economic security with a commitment to the popularisation of consumption opportunities prompted the New Dealers to go further in the reorganisation of the housing market than in their reform of any other aspect of the American economy. Finance was mobilised in the service of a chance for the working family to own a family home. One of the few institutional innovations of the New Deal to survive—the public-private GSEs (Fannie Mae first among them)—survived as instruments of this policy, until they were much later diverted to the service of speculative finance. Two limitations of this achievement immediately stand out. The first limitation is that at no point did the New Deal advance towards institutional innovations designed to make finance more serviceable to production and to ensure the ascendancy of financial deepening over financial hypertrophy. The second

98 Tamara Lothian

limitation is that where the New Deal reforms went deepest—in the housing market and in the redesign of its legal-institutional framework—they went deep narrowly. The sector-specific character of the legal and institutional arrangements made them appear to be, and to be in fact, exceptions rather than instances of a broader institutional logic, depriving them of practical and doctrinal supports and rendering them susceptible to reversal or perversion. The purpose of this commentary on the background theme of the nature and limits of the New Deal program in finance is to state at the outset that this institutional genealogy should not be read as a lament over a lost paradise. The New Deal framework fails to provide a model for today. It was not good enough then, and it is certainly not good enough now. However, we cannot grasp our opportunities, of insight and of reform, without understanding both its accomplishments and its failures. With these observations in mind, I now turn to my highly selective institutional genealogy: the analysis of certain changes that weakened the New Deal framework, the better to sacrifice financial deepening to financial hypertrophy.

Hollowing Out of the New Deal Reforms Beginning in the decade of the 1970s, the legal framework for the regulation of finance was progressively eviscerated. At the same time, increasing inequality in income and wealth would lead policy-makers to rely on monetary ease and credit expansion as a surrogate for a strategy of socially inclusive growth and redistribution.13 Neither of these tendencies was insuperable. They formed no part of a systemic assault—or systemic alternative to the social democratic settlement of the post-war era. The effect was substantial nonetheless. Financial deepening had in effect been sacrificed to financial hypertrophy. Four key developments would contribute to this result.

Privatisation of the GSEs and of the Secondary Mortgage Market A first development was the hijacking of the mortgage market and its New Deal institutions and arrangements by speculative, private finance. This development took place in two steps. The first step consisted in the restructuring of the federally sponsored mortgage agencies and the introduction of securitisation for GSEsponsored mortgage pools. The second step involved the development of ‘private-label securitisation,’ that is, a parallel system for the origination, pooling, and securitisation of residential mortgages that failed to meet the standards established in the GSE segment of the market (hence the name ‘subprime’ mortgage market). It is commonplace today to treat the outcome of this process as the natural and necessary counterpart to increasing complexity and sophistication. But

Democracy, Law, and Global Finance 99

this interpretation is clearly wrong. Even the slightest scratching of the historical record is enough to suggest the complex and contradictory process involved in the move from state-sponsored securitisation to the highly speculative and, at times, even fraudulent process of private label securitisation—which would be applied to great effect in the development of the subprime mortgage market. The movement to privatise securitisation fatally weakened the New Deal regime in the very sector—the housing market—in which it had advanced furthest in the attempt to combine its devotion to economic security for the individual with its interest in the expansion of his or her opportunities to consume. The GSEs were eventually transformed into instruments of speculative finance, as the secondary, asset-based mortgage market turned into the largest free-floating pool of resources on which the bankers could draw to keep doubling their bets and expanding the market for profitable (and unprofitable) trading opportunities.

The Rise of Shadow Banking A corollary to the privatisation of securitisation was the rise of shadow banking. This point is often overlooked, but it is of the utmost importance. In the US setting, the hollowing out of the New Deal arrangements in the area of mortgage finance would provide the context and occasion for the vast expansion of shadow banking. Shadow banking would, in turn, provide a stimulus for the hypertrophy of finance in the area of housing and mortgage finance. Two major developments stand out: The first development was the emergence of new money and funding markets beyond the traditional banking system. Examples include money market mutual funds, tri-party repo, and asset-backed commercial paper. The second development was the proliferation of non-bank financial intermediaries (‘nbfi ’), free from the New Deal regulatory restrictions but nonetheless supported in many ways by monetary and regulatory authorities. In the US setting, finance companies, conduits, and special purpose vehicles would come to define the new ‘shadow banking’ system. But they were not alone. Together with leading broker/dealers and investment banks, the new intermediaries in the shadow banking system would come to dominate US credit markets. The assumption of many traditional banking functions by the shadow banks illustrates two connected themes.The first, relatively more superficial theme is the damage done by the main strategy for the regulation of finance in the second half of the twentieth century: regulatory dualism, with its contrast between a thickly and a thinly regulated sector of finance. Regulatory dualism was advanced on the grounds that the high-net-worth individuals and financial professionals who populated what was to be the thinly regulated sector did not require a heavyhanded paternalism. However, the practical result was to make it possible, in the thinly regulated sector, to repackage—and to implement under different form— everything prohibited in the thickly regulated sector.The shadow banking system served this purpose.

100 Tamara Lothian

The second theme was the sacrifice of financial deepening to financial hypertrophy: size without productive function. The central point of shadow banking was always to expand the opportunity to profit from financial trades. It was never to enhance the funding of productive activity. Imagine a legal test—simple in conception, although difficult in application—that would forbid or burden (with regulatory restraints and tax burdens) all financial transactions not plausibly useful to the expansion of GDP or to the enhancement of productivity in the economy. Under such a test, the vast majority of the transactions in which the shadow banking system has specialised would be outlawed or discouraged.

Creation of Institutional Links Connecting Shadow Banking to the Traditional Banking System Neither the hollowing out of the New Deal framework nor the rise of shadow banking would have, without more, created the conditions for the crisis of 2008. The amplification of the crisis, from a breakdown in the tiny subprime mortgage market to the breakdown in global markets, was made possible by the rationalisation and extension of a generalised system of regulatory dualism from the 1970s on.14 We can understand this part of the historical trajectory as the combination of three simple steps (Lothian 2012a): (1) elimination of regulatory restrictions on bank activities and affiliations, (2) creation of new legal and institutional vehicles designed to facilitate the extension of credit from the traditional to the shadow banking sector, and (3) rationalisation and integration of the new shadow banking sector into a generalised system of regulatory dualism. Nothing is more revealing of the dependence of finance on its institutional setting that this last, extraordinary development. It is commonplace to consider the rise and fall of the New Deal reforms as a natural and necessary process, responding to changing circumstances and the imperatives of objective, economic constraint. But nothing could be further from the truth. The liberalisation of the rules governing bank activities and affiliations, together with the creation of a new legal vehicle—the complex, multipurpose bank holding company—to rationalise and integrate commercial banking into the new system of market-oriented financial activity, would create the conditions for a shift in the balance between financial deepening and financial hypertrophy without rival in the world. It would be wrong to treat these developments as the natural unfolding of a higher logic or rationality. At each step along the way, both in the design and in the defence of the emerging pattern of finance, government took the lead. As the functional separation broke down, monetary and regulatory authorities crafted new forms of monetary and fiscal policy—to strengthen and support the financial sector, which would increasingly be seen as an entity in itself, rather than

Democracy, Law, and Global Finance 101

the servant of society or the public interest. The process culminated in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the enactment of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, sanctioning the connection and providing, through the device of the new bank holding company charter, a formal way to integrate and cross-subsidise all financial activities. The point is simple and telling. The extraordinary scope and scale of the worldwide financial crisis was not—as so many have argued—the natural result of globalisation or financial innovation in the banking sector. Nor are we able to understand the content and course of the crisis merely by reference to the inherent tendencies of modern financial markets. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the US government undertook a series of bold initiatives to construct the emerging order in local and global markets. It is difficult to underestimate the contribution of this set of policies and arrangements to the phenomenon of leverage, instability, and speculative risktaking within the US banking system. Just as the crisis of 2007–2009 was primarily a First World banking crisis, so the standardisation and integration of the shadow and formal banking systems would create a series of amplification or transmission devices—for speculative risk-taking and leverage in the US and global banking system.

Monetary Ease and Credit Expansion as a Surrogate Strategy for Socially Inclusive Growth To understand the developments enumerated in the previous three elements of this schematic genealogy, it is necessary to place them in a broader context. The most important aspect of this context is that the US failed to establish a viable strategy of broad-based, socially inclusive economic growth. It stopped producing enough of the goods and services that the rest of the world wanted (Duncan 2009). Rather than confronting this problem, however, it tried to make up the shortfall through a debt-driven expansion of consumption, made possible by foreign money (the foreign capital inflows as the inverse to the ballooning trade deficit) and accommodating monetary policy (including the creation of paper money). It was like throwing kerosene on the flame. The hypertrophic financial system, already increasingly decoupled from the real economy by the hollowing out of the New Deal arrangements, now found almost unlimited opportunities in circumstances of massive consumption-oriented liquidity and diminished regulatory vigilance. The diminished regulatory vigilance helps explain the immediate triggers of the crisis. However, it is a mistake to suppose that the triggers had a causal efficacy independent of these deeper background factors. In particular, many have argued that the crisis had localised and shallow causes—for example, failures of judgment and regulation in the repo markets

102 Tamara Lothian

for certain classes of asset-backed securities. The fact that the sudden and massive expansion of trading in such securities was almost exactly paralleled by a similar expansion in the oldest and most conventional forms of finance (such as commercial paper) shows that these explanations are false. The key to an understanding of the crisis lies in the interaction between the attempt to make up, through debt-sustained consumption, paper money expansion, and global structural imbalances, for the absence of a feasible strategy of economic growth on one side, and the institutional changes, listed under the previous three headings of the genealogy that took the country towards financial hypertrophy rather than financial deepening, on the other. The interpretation of the genealogy of the crisis that I have just stated contrasts with many familiar and influential understandings of its causes in several ways. The conventional view has resulted in a conception of the genealogy of the crisis that combines two elements: (a) a very general element, such as the view that financial crises are simply part of the natural scheme of things, or a permanent and recurring feature of a modern, market-oriented economy, and (b) a very concrete element, that is, in each crisis, there is a set of relatively accidental and narrowly focused triggers of the crisis. For example, an analyst might emphasise the sudden shift in perceptions of risk spurred by the decline in the housing market in 2007, or the failure of Lehman Brothers of September 2008, or any other market or regulatory failure revealed, in hindsight, by the collapse of financial markets in the US and around the world. By contrast, in the account sketched here, the key factors leading up to the crisis are neither just accidental triggers nor elements in a recurrent pattern of financial crisis and reform. Instead, the centre of gravity is at an intermediate level, emphasising the decisive influence of institutional arrangements that may either tighten or loosen the link between savings and productive investment. And it is at this intermediate level that law is decisive, because the arrangements are products of law. The argument may be formulated in different terms. On the view presented here, the nature and significance of the crisis cannot be understood merely by appealing to the supposed regularities inherent in an abstract conception of the market economy or financial system. Instead, policies and arrangements of the kind summarised in the brief list above become pivotal at each stage in the analysis: both in the diagnosis of the structural and institutional factors leading up to the financial crisis and in the design and development of an appropriate project of reform. This schematic genealogy directs our attention to the interplay between a momentous legal-institutional transformation and a doomed effort to use debtdriven consumption and easy money as a substitute for a productivist strategy: a trajectory of broad-based economic growth. I speak to the content of this missing strategy in Part 3 of this article.

Democracy, Law, and Global Finance 103

The BRIC Alternative: An Effective but Costly Shortcut to National Power and Prosperity without a Deepening of Democracy or the Development of Inclusive Growth Consider next a contrasting example of institutional experimentation and reform. I refer here to the BRIC alternative, as it has developed in recent years. The following discussion of the BRICs, with special focus on Brazil, has a simple point. The BRIC countries were relatively successful in using state capitalism and export-led growth to mitigate the effects of the worldwide financial and economic crisis of recent years. China and Brazil, in particular, used governmentally controlled banks to maintain credit flows and to keep production on a forced march. Brazil exported natural resources and commodities, increasingly to China as well as other markets. And China transformed such resources and commodities into manufactured goods exported to the rest of the world (Lothian 2012c; Lothian and Unger 2011). The combination of state capitalism and export-led growth failed, however, to result in a model worthy of imitation in the rest of the world. It averted economic ruin without achieving necessary economic transformation. It failed to deepen the internal market and to democratise access to productive resources and opportunities. It amounted to a shortcut, or even to an evasion, rather than to a solution. State finance was used to benefit government-controlled enterprises in China and a handful of big private businesses in Brazil. Democratisation of the market economy, capable of giving practical content to the ideal of socially inclusive growth, would have required much more by way of reshaping the relation of finance to the real economy as well as the relation of governments to the mass of small- and medium-size businesses that remained the most important—and the most neglected—part of these economies.

The False Alternative of the Brazilian and BRIC Experience of State Capitalism and Export-Led Growth To understand the true significance of the BRIC experience, we must examine in greater detail two sets of arrangements at the heart of their relative success. For this purpose, I take Brazil as the chief focus: free of some of the complications that attend the experience of its much larger BRIC equivalents, its experience enables us directly to grasp something unexpected (Banerjee and Vashisht 2010; World Economic Outlook 2013). A first major factor explaining the relative success of these economies is the use of governmentally controlled banks to ensure the continuation of credit flows. It is a great advantage to count such banks among the instruments of public policy. However, it is not as great an advance as genuine financial deepening would be: a tightening of the link between credit for producers, by enterprises in all sectors

104 Tamara Lothian

and of every scale. Better to decentralise and democratise the whole of finance than to use banks controlled by the state to make up for the deficiencies of an unreconstructed banking system. A second factor is relative autarky. Despite the vast changes of recent decades that have brought the large emerging economies into the global economy, they remain relatively autarkic. It is obviously true of Brazil; foreign trade is still less than 15 percent of GP. However, it is more surprisingly true even of China today; its exports are still under 30 percent of GDP, by comparison to roughly 50 percent for Germany. A paced and limited integration into the world economy, subordinated to the requirements of a national development strategy, is better than an unconditional integration. By an unconditional integration, I mean one that accepts the present allocation of comparative advantage among national economies as the basis for place in the world economy, and then goes on to subordinate national strategy to the constraints imposed by this global niche. However, the best is a movement that enhances integration but seeks to shape it in the service of a project designed to create new comparative advantages. The most effective way to create them is not to dogmatically choose sectors that are supposedly bearers of the future. It is to empower experimentalism: by establishing arrangements that broaden economic and educational opportunity; by giving small- and medium-size businesses access to forms of credit, technology, marketing, and knowledge normally reserved to big businesses; and by creating the means and the conditions for pluralism and experimentation in the institutional forms of the market economy. In no area has the contrast between the lesser evil and the greater good been more striking than with regard to finance itself. A simple reason why many of the large emerging economies did relatively better in the crisis than the advanced economies is that they had refused fully to open their capital accounts. In this way, they limited their vulnerability to the national effects of international financial turmoil. Consider, again, the case of Brazil. Brazil had generally followed the major Latin American economies in accepting what was in effect a functional equivalent to the gold standard. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, most of the Latin American republics accepted a constellation of policies and ideas yielding a similar effect: acquiescence in a low level of domestic savings and consequent dependence on foreign capital, including greater freedom for capital to enter and leave. The practical result was to make the national government relatively more dependent on international financial confidence. There was, however, an exception to this surrender to the functional equivalent of the gold standard, in the form of continuing limits to the openness of the capital account. These limits proved important in explaining the relative success of these emerging economies in resisting the effects of the crisis of the early twentieth century.

Democracy, Law, and Global Finance 105

Nevertheless, in accord with the spirit of my argument, closure to world finance is not as desirable as openness on the basis of financial deepening, a mobilisation of national resources, and an institutional broadening of economic and educational opportunity. Such a basis provides elements of a strong national project. The dangers of financial openness do not grow simply, as the conventional discourse assumes, in proportion to the avoidance of conditions that bring the national economy to its knees by making it dependent on foreign finance and financial confidence. We cannot find in the recent and relative success of the large emerging economies the lineaments of a programme of recovery and reconstruction of enduring and general interest. What we can find is a record of fragmentary insight and luck in the avoidance of disaster: a series of distant second-bests rather than the demarcation of a reliable path.

Part 3: A New direction for the Regulation of Finance This schematic comparative-historical discussion supports a number of propositions that develop and refine the theoretical view outlined at the beginning of the piece. First, the worldwide experience of the last eighty years discredits the view that there is a narrowing funnel of workable institutional arrangements for the organisation of finance and of its relation to the real economy. The twin imperatives of protecting national development from cycles of liquidity in the world economy and of using national finance to help spur the creation of new comparative advantage have fuelled successive waves of innovations in the institutional setting and set-up of finance. The modesty of many of these innovations is counterbalanced by their number: as limited as many of them may seem to be, they represent potential points of departure for more far-reaching innovations.15 Second, many of the most successful innovations have had the twofold effect of making national governments and economies less dependent on the interests and whims of international finance, thus enhancing national economic sovereignty, and of tightening linkages between finance and the real economy—financial deepening rather than financial hypertrophy (Lothian 2012c; Lothian 2011). Third, in the production of this double effect, a particular set of institutional devices has played a central but ambiguous role: the creation of public financial entities, such as the American GSEs or the Brazilian and Chinese development banks. On the one hand, they have represented a way to work against the current of national or global cycles and crises. On the other hand, they have sometimes seemed to exempt national governments and politics from the harder work of deepening finance by democratising it to a greater extent. Small business—the source of most of the product and of the vast majority of the jobs—has been shortchanged in relation to big business. The important programmatic and theoretical implication is that the reversal of this bias requires more than a reallocation

106 Tamara Lothian

of governmental resources or a reorientation of legal incentives and burdens: it requires bolder experimentation in the institutional forms of finance and, more generally, of the market economy than has yet taken place.16 Fourth, in each case, the failure to carry forward the project of democratic experimentalism would exact a terrible price: limiting the stock of available ideas and arrangements for deepening democracy and development everywhere else.

Conclusion In this article, I have developed an argument about democracy, law, and global finance from the limited but revealing standpoint of the financial crisis of 2007– 2009 and the continuing effort to respond to its consequences. More important to this argument than the particular ideas that I advance is the way of thinking about democracy, law, and global finance that these ideas are intended to exemplify. One aspect of this way of thinking is an approach to the legal and institutional setting of public policy as well as finance. It is common today to insist that we no longer believe in the existence of ‘systems.’Yet we remain inclined to imagine that the established institutional settlement is a system, with a logic all its own. According to our ideological and theoretical orientations, we may call this system capitalism or the regulated market economy or any other number of labels. In fact, for the most part in contemporary societies, the institutional settlement is not a system, in any recognisable sense of the term, and has no systemic logic (Lothian 2012c). Such a circumstance is not, with respect to finance or to any other area of social and economic life, exceptional. On the contrary, it is the normal situation. The approach to a rational scheme is the exceptional limiting case. In this piece, I have tried to explore some of the implications of this circumstance for the practice of explanation, criticism, and proposal. A second aspect of the way of thinking exemplified in this article is that it takes there to be an intimate relation between two goals that we often value but only rarely connect. The first goal is the one that I have called financial deepening: the organisation of finance so that it in fact does, or does better, what it is supposed to do: support the expansion of output and the enhancement of productivity in the real economy.The second goal is to organise the market economy so that it affords more people more access to more markets in more ways, and turns the broadening of opportunity and of inclusion into a driving force of economic growth. A third aspect of the way of thinking that this essay embodies is to identify in law and in legal thought an extraordinary storehouse of materials for the institutional imagination. By understanding the genealogy of our present institutional settlement, by recognising the hidden variations and contradictions that this nonsystem contains, and by enlisting some of them as material for the development of institutional alternatives, we discover and reaffirm our power to transform, from the bottom up and from the inside out.17

Democracy, Law, and Global Finance 107

Economics may take a long time to become, once again, what it once was: a discipline of the institutional imagination. Legal thought can become such a discipline right now. As an object of this work of insight and reform, finance, so widely feared for its manifest harms and so little understood for its potential benefits, is a good place to begin.

Notes 1 The use of credit as a surrogate for a real growth strategy has been criticised from different ideological perspectives. See, for example, Krippner 2011, Rajan 2010, and Turner 2014. 2 For explanations emphasising the problem of regulatory capture, see Johnson 2009, and Johnson and Qwak 2010. 3 See Lothian 2012a and references cited therein. 4 For a concrete illustration of this approach in the American setting, see Lothian 2010. 5 The approach to institutional innovation, transformation and structural change illustrated in this essay forms part of a larger movement of thought across the social sciences today. Examples include Blyth 2002, Hall and Soskice 2001, Rodrik 2007, Streek 2009, and Streek and Thelen 2005. 6 The conception of democracy as a practice of institutional experimentation is developed further below. See also Lothian 2010 and 2012a.The theme of ‘democratic experimentalism’ is given fullest expression in Unger 1998. See also Dorf and Sabel 1998. 7 See sources listed in notes 2 and 3 above. 8 The empirical evidence is reviewed in Rodrik 2011 and in Schularick and Taylor 2012. 9 The basic tenets of the neoclassical position are described in UK Financial Services Authority 2009 and in Schularick and Taylor 2009. 10 Classic treatments may be found in Minsky [1986] 2008 and in Kindleberger and Aliber 2005. 11 The concept of financial hypertrophy is closely related to the idea of financialisation, as developed, for example, in the work of post-Keynesians such as Epstein 2005, and Krippner 2011. 12 The financialisation of the American economy in the late 20th century permitted a progressive decoupling of finance from the productive agenda of society.This decoupling was powerfully assisted by two forces. One force was the preference for regulatory dualism, which allowed the emergence of the shadow banking system. The other force was the encouragement to expansion in household and corporate indebtedness as a surrogate for the redistribution of wealth and income in the maintenance of a high level of economic activity and a market in mass-consumption goods. Easy money policy and a tolerance for vast current account deficits operated as enabling conditions of these developments. 13 This section draws heavily on Lothian 2012a. See also Krippner 2011, Picketty and Saez 2003, Rajan 2010, Tarullo 2009 and Turner 2014. 14 The concept of regulatory dualism is developed in Lothian 2012a and 2012b. 15 Examples are provided in Rodrik 2003 and 2014, Streek 2009, and Streek and Thelen 2005. 16 On the role of state-owned enterprises in the BRIC economies, and on public-private partnerships in the liberal market economies, see Amsden 2001, Wade [1990] 2004, and Rodrik 2007. 17 See sources cited in notes 2 and 3 above.

108 Tamara Lothian

Bibliography Amsden, Alice H. 2001. The Rise of ‘The Rest’: Challenges to the West from the LateIndustrializing Economies. New York: Oxford University Press. Banerjee, Ritwik, and Pankaj Vashisht. 2010. ‘The Financial Crisis: Impact on BRIC and Policy Response.’ MPRA Paper No. 38812. Accessed November 5, 2014. http:// mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/38812/. Blyth, Mark. 2002. Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dorf, Michael C., and Charles F. Sabel. 1998. ‘A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism.’ 98 Colum. L. Rev. 267. Duncan, Richard. 2009. The Corruption of Capitalism. Hong Kong: CLSA Books. Epstein, Gerald A., ed. 2005. Financialization and the World Economy. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Greenwood, Robin, and David Scharfstein. 2013. ‘The Growth of Finance.’ Journal of Economic Perspectives 27 (2): 3–28. Hall, Peter A., and David Soskice, eds. 2001. Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. New York: Oxford University Press. Johnson, Simon. 2009. ‘A Quiet Coup.’ The Atlantic Monthly. Accessed November 6, 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/307364/. Johnson, Simon, and James Kwak. 2010. 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. New York: Pantheon Books. Kennedy, David M. 1999. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. New York: Oxford University Press. Keynes, John M. [1936] 1991. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. New York: Harvest/Harcourt. Kindleberger, C. P., and R. Aliber, R. 2005. Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. John Wiley & Sons. Krippner, Greta R. 2011. Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lothian, Tamara. 2010. ‘The Past and Future of American Finance: American Experimentalism without American Exceptionalism.’ Journal of Globalization and Development 1 (2). ———. 2011. Rethinking Finance through Law: A Theoretical Perspective. Columbia Law and Economics Working Paper No. 412. ———. 2012a. American Finance and American Democracy: Towards an Institutionalist ‘Law and Economics.’ Columbia Law and Economics Working Paper No. 418. ———. 2012b. ‘Beyond Macroprudential Regulation: Three Ways of Thinking about Financial Crisis, Regulation and Reform.’ Global Policy 3 (4), November. ———. 2012c. Law and Finance in the Context of Crisis: The Imperative of Structural Vision. Columbia Law and Economics Working Paper No. 433. Lothian, Tamara, and Roberto Unger. 2011. Crisis, Slump, Superstition and Recovery: Thinking and Acting Beyond Vulgar Keynesianism. Columbia Law and Economics Working Paper No. 394. Minsky, Hyman P. [1986] 2008. Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Papadimitriou, Dimitri B., and Larry Randall Wray, eds. 2010. The Elgar Companion to Hyman Minsky. Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

Democracy, Law, and Global Finance 109

Philippon, Thomas, and Ariell Reshef. 2013. ‘An International Look at the Growth of Modern Finance.’ Journal of Economic Perspectives 27 (2): 73–96. Picketty, Thomas, and Emmanuel Saez. 2003. ‘Income Inequality in the United States. 1913–1998.’ Quarterly Journal of Economics 118 (1). Rajan, Raghuram G. 2010. Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rauchway, Eric. 2008. The Great Depression and the New Deal. New York: Oxford University Press. Rodrik, Dani. 2014. ‘When Ideas Trump Interests: Preferences, Worldviews, and Policy Innovations.’ Journal of Economic Perspectives 28 (1). Rodrik, Dani. 2011. The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy. New York: W. W. Norton. ———. 2007. One Economics: Globalization, Institutions and Economic Growth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———, ed. 2003. In Search of Prosperity: Analytic Narratives on Economic Growth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Russell, Ellen D. 2008. New Deal Banking Reforms and Keynesian Welfare State Capitalism. New York: Routledge. Schularick, Moritz, and Alan M. Taylor. 2012. ‘Credit Booms Gone Bust: Monetary Policy, Leveraged Cycles and Financial Crises 1870 to 2008.’ American Economic Review 102 (2). Stigler, George J. 1971. ‘The Theory of Economic Regulation.’ Bell Journal of Economics and Management. Streek, Wolfgang. 2009. ‘Institutions in History: Bringing Capitalism Back In.’ MaxPlanck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung Discussion Paper 09/8. Streek, Wolfgang, and Kathleen Thelen, eds. 2005. Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies. New York: Oxford University Press. Tarullo, Daniel K. 2009. ‘Financial Regulation: Past and Present.’ Speech at the Money Marketeers of New York University, New York, November 9. Turner, Adair. 2014. ‘Too Much of the Wrong Sort of Capital Flow.’ Conference on Capital Account Management and Macro-Prudential Regulation for Financial Stability and Growth, Reserve Bank of India, New Delhi. UK Financial Services Authority. 2009. The Turner Review: A Regulatory Response to the Global Banking Crisis. Accessed November 6, 2014. http://www.fsa.gov.uk/pubs/ other/turner_review.pdf. Unger, Roberto M. 1998. Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative. New York: Verso. Wade, Robert. [1990] 2004. Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wilmarth, Arthur E., Jr. 2002. ‘The Transformation of the U.S. Financial Services Industry, 1975–2000: Competition, Consolidation, and Increased Risks.’ University of Illinois Law Review, 215. World Economic Outlook. 2013. Transitions and Tensions. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund.

6 DEMOCRACY AND THE ABSOLUTE POWER OF DISEMBEDDED FINANCIAL MARKETS Alessandro Ferrara

Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-andhalf affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place. —F. D. Roosevelt, Address at the Philadelphia Democratic Convention, June 27, 1936 Keynes’s great contribution was to save capitalism from the capitalists: if they had had their way, they would have imposed policies that weakened the economy and undermined political support for capitalism. The regulations and reform adopted in the aftermath of the Great Depression worked. Capitalism took on a more human face, and market economies became more stable. But these lessons were forgotten. Thatcher and Reagan ushered in a new era of deregulation, growing inequality and weakening social protection. We are now seeing the consequences, and not just in greater instability. Keynes’s insights are needed now if we’re to save capitalism once again from the capitalists. —J. E. Stiglitz, ‘The Non-existent Hand’

Democracy finds itself at a crossroads. Paradoxically, at the historical juncture when it has become the only form of legitimate government for over half of humanity, democracy is traversed—in those places where it has existed for longer—by disquieting processes of de-democratisation or re-elitisation, falls prey to waves of populism and disaffection, and in any event is forced to operate under adverse social, cultural, and economic conditions. In fact, democracy, as any other political system, functions within a larger historical context, which may be variously propitious or inhospitable. The soil

Democracy and Disembedded Markets 111

where the democratic plant is to grow in the twenty-first century has become incomparably more polluted and unfavourable than at any time in the recent past. Some of these inhospitable conditions for democracy include the extension of modern electorates (which favours so-called ‘rational ignorance’ and the perception of the irrelevance of one’s vote), unprecedented institutional complexity, the anonymous quality of the communication processes underlying the formation of the democratic political will, the stratification of citizenship, the acceleration of social life, the rise of supranational forms of governance, the impact of the extensive use of opinion polls on the system of check and balances, and the endemic hyperpluralism of contemporary constituencies.1 In this paper I will be concerned only with the economic aspects of the historical context within which contemporary democracies are called upon to function. In the first section, these aspects will be briefly reconstructed in light of current economic literature. In the second section, the political philosophical implications of the new economic predicament will be explored. Finally, in the third section, some tentative reflections on possible ways of coping with these implications will be explored.

From a Post-industrial Economy to Disembedded Financial Markets Among all the conditions that raise severe challenges for democracy, and indirectly also for any theoretical reflection on democracy, the single most threatening one is perhaps the transformation of the capitalist economy which has been unfolding now for over three decades, since the beginning of the 1980s. The gist of this transformation consists of the transition from a democratic society pivoting, during the first half of the twentieth century, around a manufacturing-based capitalist economy and later (as of mid-century in the US, but later for other democracies) around a post-industrial economy, that is, an economy where more than 50 percent of the labour force is employed in the tertiary sector, to a twenty-first-century society where financial capital invested in disembedded, and largely virtualised markets, predominates. During this momentous transformation (1980–2010), whose inception can be dated back to the two elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and their applying the neoliberal doctrines of the monetarist Chicago school of economics, a number of new phenomena have appeared that have become salient and do have a bearing on the prospect for democracy. First, the value of labour has constantly been diminishing in the West, and this process, linked in turn both with technical rationalisation and with the geopolitical availability of a global labour market, exerts a societal impact that goes well beyond industrial relations or even the whole of the economic sphere.2 We are probably witnessing the terminal decline of employed labour qua generator of wealth and social prestige also in the tertiary sector, among white collars.

112 Alessandro Ferrara

Not only does the great manufacturing industry undergo a steady decline— paradoxically, Detroit has been brought to her knees by Wall Street and not by unionised labour—but, more generally, the prevailing of financial capital in the economy tilts the scales in favour of capital and rent while mercilessly reducing the income, the relative wealth, the purchasing power, and consequently also the political influence of the employed middle class. The reflection of this development on the electoral prospect for the parties that historically have represented labour has been massive: such parties have either undergone successful mutations or have generally suffered a more or less severe downsizing. Second, wage labour becomes flexible, precarious, less well paid, subcontracted, and outsourced; it also loses its traditional form of representation: it becomes increasingly deunionised and loses the capacity to attract consensus on its requests. The income of high-prestige managers, top professionals, and stars in the arts, in show business and in sports reaches spectacular levels incomparable to the everyday reality of the rest of the working people.3 As the social movements claiming to represent ‘the 99%’ (Indignados, Occupy Wall Street) testify, inequality has never been so rampant in a democratic society. Third, starting in the 1980s, finance has appeared to be more capable of generating wealth than manufacture in general or even the tertiary sector, and its instruments have become ever more ‘virtual,’ disjoined from all measurable and material benchmark in the ‘real world.’ Business cycles have been replaced by bubbles and their bursting: first the bubble of the dot.coms and then the housing bubble, fuelled by the crisis of securitised subprime mortgages. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hilferding famously depicted the function of finance as that of helping industrial capitalism (of the kind Marx had in mind) to get the surplus-value-creating production process under way. He wrote, [m]oney does not bear a label announcing it as capital.What makes it capital is the fact that it is intended for conversion into the elements of productive capital. Otherwise it is only money and can only fulfill money functions, as a means of circulation or payment. (Hilferding 1981, 69) Slightly over a century has elapsed and this statement sounds almost prehistorical. We find ourselves way past the predicted transformation of nineteenth-century ruthlessly competitive capitalism into the tendentially monopolistic, financebacked capitalism of mass consumption and imperialistic tendencies of the twentieth century. Contemporary capitalism, if that name can still be used, has acquired altogether different semblances. For at least three decades finance has produced profit no longer through facilitating investment in production or services, but through speculation on markets which are global, are disembedded from any national or regional or industry context, and have become increasingly virtual.4 The speculative market for derivatives, and the under-controlled securitisation

Democracy and Disembedded Markets 113

of debt and mortgages, has created a volatile market based on information asymmetries, on a systematic disincentive for renegotiation, and ultimately on lack of transparency (Stiglitz 2010b, 22). Indeed, the less transparent securitised assets are, the more successfully they can be placed on the market. In this process, a crucial role has been played by rating agencies, who, like medieval alchemists trying to convert vile metals into gold, have transformed BBB products into AAA ones, inducing cautious and usually risk-averting pension funds to invest in them (Caprio 2010, 54). Fourth, in the wake of the epoch-marking victory of neoliberalism in the 1980s, lobby-sponsored legislation led to the repeal, in 1999 in the US, of the Glass-Steagall Act, which for more than half a century—since its enactment in 1933—had stabilised the banking system and kept speculative risk-taking under control and at acceptable levels, by way of mandating the strict separation of commercial and investment banks.5 Subsequent to this major step in deregulation, banks invested their customers’ money, often through unprecedented levels of leverage, into securitised products and derivatives which proved volatile and toxic in the end, with little awareness of who the ones affected by the bursting of the bubbles would be. After the ensuing crisis in 2008 erupted, triggered by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, and during the recession that ensued, the bail-out policies of the Federal Reserve Bank and of the Paulson plan (during the Bush presidency) and then the Geithner plan (during the Obama presidency) proved the axiom that the safest insurance policy for a bank is to be ‘too big to fail.’ This encouraged further risk-taking on the part of economic actors who possessed, or deluded themselves to believe they possessed, the necessary size to impose a bail-out in the case of a negative outcome.6 The practice of the bailout in fact shifted the costs of failed investments and inconsiderate risk-taking onto the taxpayer, and unburdened those responsible for it, resulting in further encouragement of the practice of speculative investment in volatile purely financial markets. Fifth, markets have become virtual. The size of the global market—measured as the aggregate value of all the equities and derivatives being exchanged—far exceeds any material counterpart represented by these products, such as material assets, real estate, commodities, or credit entitlements. According to the latest statistical report by the Bank of International Settlements, the total aggregate nominal value of the ‘over-the-counter’ derivatives available on the markets totalled $693 trillion at end-June 2013, a mass of money having no relation to the total GNP not only of the major national economies but also of the entire global economy (Bank of International Settlements 2013, 3). Derivatives have famously been called ‘weapons of mass destruction’ by Warren Buffett. As he put it, the derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle . . . Central banks and governments have so far found no effective way to control, or even monitor, the risks posed by these contracts. In my view, derivatives are financial

114 Alessandro Ferrara

weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal. (Berkshire Hathaway 2002, 15) Yet the transformation does not consist solely in the triple disembedding of twenty-first-century finance-driven neoliberal capitalism from (a) territorially based resources and manufacturing processes, (b) corporate social responsibility towards locally situated stakeholders, and (c) tangible and verifiable fundamentals linked with the value of commodities, assets, stocks, market shares, et cetera. All of these three moments of disembedding have undoubtedly occurred, up to the point that the value of the equities of a firm now appears to be a function of the expected capital gain that they can generate in the short run. In 2004, on the Italian stock exchange of Milan, within the space of a few months, Fiat’s equities oscillated between 5 and 14 euros, depending only on their perceived potential for short-term growth, while obviously the aggregate value of Fiat’s liquid capital, stocked products, production plants, and real estate remained more or less constant. Paraphrasing Charles H. Cooley, the great social theorist and associate of George Herbert Mead, one could say that the value of a share in today’s stock exchange market is the fantasy that people make of the potential growth of its value. Not accidentally, some momentous turns in the stock market are explained as the ‘sentiment’ turning positive or negative. Sixth, the sea-change that we witness goes far beyond these three moments of disembedding of the financial markets from ‘the real economy.’ It involves a more radical turning of the historical tables. Rent and rent-seeking, which Marxian and other modernistic theories used to associate with a premodern past, has regained centre-stage. Money is made more efficiently through money than through investing in manufacture; property is made through property. Industrial agriculture, large-scale manufacture, and the selling of standardised services cannot generate the skyrocketing profits of speculative trading on currencies, equities, derivatives, futures. Ultimate evidence for this observation is provided by the phenomenon of the so-called ‘jobless recovery’: while the financial quasi-meltdown of 2008 is a memory of the past for Wall Street, the ‘real economy’ plods on and is nowhere near regaining full employment figures, restoring the standard of living and purchasing power of wages and salaries, restoring the prices of houses back to where they were before the crisis, or restoring demand back to where it was before 2008. Rent has, once again, become so fundamental that economists sensitive to the political implications of economic processes speak of rent-seeking as a crucial motive that inspires corporate lobbying and interferes with democratic legislation. Stiglitz writes, [t]he magnitude of ‘rent seeking’ in our economy, while hard to quantify, is clearly enormous . . . The financial industry, which now largely functions as a market in speculation rather than a tool for promoting true economic

Democracy and Disembedded Markets 115

productivity, is the rent-seeking sector par excellence. Rent seeking goes beyond speculation. The financial sector also gets rents out of its domination of the means of payment—the exorbitant credit- and debit-card fees and also the less well-known fees charged to merchants and passed on, eventually, to consumers. (Stiglitz 2012, 24) It is not difficult to detect here, at the complex intersection of these factors, a tremendously inhospitable condition that contemporary democracies have to face and that raises a formidable challenge if we consider that it is only since the era of the New Deal, not even a century ago, that a democratic government has managed to curb the classical capitalist cycle of expansion and recession.This new challenge is compounded by a crucial difference that separates the Rooseveltian context from ours. Roosevelt faced an economic crisis that originated at home and could be solved at home, through appropriate legislation by Congress, supported by a large popular consensus. President Obama and those who will come after him face economic crises that may originate from the bursting of Wall Street–generated bubbles, but whose solution no longer depends solely on congressional legislation (in support of which no large prevailing consensus is in sight anyway) and requires international cooperation—something that an administration can only plead for but not impose. In a globalised economy, the collapse of the euro in the wake of a possible default of one or more medium-sized countries could drag the whole world economy into a depression of catastrophic magnitude, but the measures necessary to avoid such an outcome lie beyond the legislative reach of one parliament and the executive action of one government alone, even of the most powerful.

The Resurgence of Absolute Power: A PoliticalPhilosophical Analysis Recent history has been generous on irony.The ‘withering away of the State,’ once heralded by communist internationalism, seems to proceed from global capitalism, while the Marxian prophecy of the decline of the profit rate comes to fruition through the displacement of industrial capitalism by the resurgence of rent. The aspect with which I will be concerned in this section, however, is not purely economic, but located at the interface of economy and politics.The ultimate irony of contemporary history is the inversion of roles brought about by the resurgence of (financial) rent and the virtualisation of the economy. The markets, once limited and subjected to the absolute power of kings, now wield an absolute power over the democratic polities that long ago defeated the absolute power of kings. Democracy cannot be reclaimed for democratic constituencies unless we gain an understanding of the new configuration of power that has grown under our eyes over the past three decades. The gist of what has been occurring, when

116 Alessandro Ferrara

construed through the lens of political philosophy, is the formation of a new form of absolute power in the midst of democratic polities dedicated to the values of freedom and equality and of the rule of law. Absolute power is not intended as a metaphor. I use the term in the technical sense of designating an actor who can influence the lives of all other actors while not being subject to the law. One may object that ‘markets’ are not subjects, but collections of interacting individuals: they are a shorthand notation for what goes on in millions of interactions. However, such abstract quality is also typical of absolute sovereignty as theorised by Hobbes: the sovereign can be an individual, a small group of oligarchs, or even a larger assembly; what defines its absoluteness is its being the source of legitimacy and rightness as well as of the law. The sovereign’s actions cannot be deemed unjust for the simple reason that no standard of justice can be established independently of the sovereign’s authority. Furthermore, one could object that the expression ‘not Subject to the Civill Lawes’ (Hobbes [1651] 1968, 313) cannot apply to market actors constantly immersed in a thick web of regulatory provisions, some of which are of statutory form, whereas many others are just guidelines, regulations, or benchmarks issued by agencies, domestic and international, that may not be in a position to legislate in the way parliaments do but who certainly constrain the conduct of market actors. It must be observed however, that the developments cursorily described above have resulted in the creation of ambiguous forms of subjectivity that escape full democratic accountability and that will need further investigation from the perspective of the political—not simply economic—implications of their influence. This is the case with crypto-actors such as rating agencies, purportedly analysing economic processes and the reliability of economic as well as institutional actors, when in fact they often influence the success or failure of the conduct they are pretending to observe. This is the case with pseudo-economic actors such as sovereign funds, purporting to orient their action to the maximisation of returns for their investments but in fact often pursuing political goals. Furthermore, it must be observed that while subjection to law certainly binds singular actors within the market, the law itself—especially if we consider statutory law, made in parliaments formed in elections influenced by corporate contributions and media—is often drafted in anticipation of what the global market will ‘like’ and is ‘willing’ to accept. In this last sense, markets influence law-making more than the law influences markets; therein lies the late-modern absoluteness of their power. The positive response of financial markets—again, a shorthand for the millions of individuals who are willing or unwilling to buy government bonds, to invest in equities or derivatives, to trade in or out of the currency of a given country— often functions as an additional, extra-democratic but not less necessary, confirmation of the legitimacy of the governmental policies of a democratic country. In an ironic return of the ambiguous relations that parliaments had with kings before the rise of liberal constitutionalism, in the twenty-first century governmental policies and parliamentary law-making are often aimed at wooing the approval of

Democracy and Disembedded Markets 117

the markets, or at least at staving off their disapproval. The irony is all the bitterer as this happens in the context of a democratic process where the key to electoral survival has become the ability of one party or coalition to handle the country’s economic prospect in such a way as to ensure prosperity or, again, to at least stave off financial downturns and outright crises. The simile has more facets to it. Just as absolute monarchs could ignore and reject parliamentary law-making, and ultimately dissolve or convene parliaments—as the long history of tensions between the Stuart monarchy and the Westminster parliament of the first half of the seventeenth century illustrates—so today markets, through their negative response, have the power to deny legitimacy to democratic law-making by way of providing or denying the crucial prosperity dimension around which the democratic electoral contest is fought. Seven governments of European countries have been brought down by the pressure of the markets in the wake of the 2008 crisis: in March 2009, premier José Socrates of Portugal; in July 2011, the widely acclaimed Zapatero government in Spain, the Papandreou government in Greece, and the republican Irish government headed by Brian Cowen; and in January 2009, Prime Minister Haarde of Iceland, who resigned following two weeks of protest against his government’s response to the financial crisis, and then the Berlusconi government in Italy and the Godmanis government in Latvia. Another feature of absolute power is that the power holder cannot be held wrong or brought to judgment about the rightness of his action and his abiding by the founding covenant: there can be no judge settling the controversy (Hobbes [1651] 1968, 230). Similarly markets, qua anonymous networks of interrelated individual responses to investment opportunities, cannot be held accountable for being in any sense ‘wrong’ or be brought to court for compensation for the damages and torts they produce. Democratic law-making can be disapproved of by financial markets, which is why those seven European governments were brought down, but democratic legislative assemblies cannot disapprove of the market responses, which exert the same potentially devastating yet unquestionable impact that natural forces such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis exert. Finally, absolute power is intrinsically arbitrary, not amenable to rules. Again, drawing on Hobbes’s Leviathan, we could say that to bind the exercise of power to rules and guidelines means to relocate effective and real sovereignty to the rule-giver (Hobbes [1651] 1968, 246). Absolute sovereignty can only mean to rule according to one’s unfettered will. Similarly, there are no negotiations that democratic legislatures can conduct with markets, no compromise, no give and take, no legislative concession that can be offered in view of a favourable return on the part of financial markets: markets—in their plural manifestations as the decisions on the part of hedge funds, rating agencies, currency traders, managers of sovereign funds, investment banks, and individual investors—either like or dislike some provision or policy set under way by a democratically elected legislative or executive. They cannot be forced to observe the terms of any deal: they may instantly pulverise the prospect of any policy which democratically elected governments

118 Alessandro Ferrara

try to implement, or they may reward with prosperity the policies that are to their liking, instantly making or breaking the electoral fortunes of the political parties and movements that support such policies. It lies beyond the scope of this paper to address the question of why this predicament has come about. Have contemporary democracies handed their public autonomy—at least insofar as the legislative and the executive branches of power are concerned—over to a plurality of figures acting on the global financial market? Has this transfer of power occurred because of the central role played by prosperity among public values? Or have our democratic publics been less watchful than they should have been and, like apprentice sorcerers, evoked economic forces that in three decades have taken over and wrought their power to self-rule away? Interesting though these questions undoubtedly are, I will set them aside in order to address, in the third section, the possible remedies that democracy can resort to in adapting to a soil where these pathogenic elements cannot be wished away.

The Survival of Democracy: Taming the New Absolute Power of Disembedded Financial Markets Modern constitutional democracy, born out of the successful confrontation with the absolute power of the European monarchs of ‘divine right,’ has also survived the challenge of the nearly absolute power of the rampant competitive capitalism of manufacturing, transportation, and colonial conquest. The problem we face in the twenty-first century is that none of the solutions that worked in the first two cases—the constitutionalisation of rights, the separation of powers, budget laws, regular elections, the Glass-Steagall Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, minimum wage, social security, et cetera—has any grip on the kind of power exerted by disembedded financial markets. In this section I will discuss some tentative ideas not from the angle of a political economist but from the perspective of a political philosopher—more specifically, from the angle of a Rawlsian political philosophy aimed at envisaging a ‘realistic utopia’ (Rawls 1999, 5–6) and dedicated to ‘probing the limits of practicable political possibility’ (Rawls 2007, 10–11). The general idea is that global financial markets are vulnerable to the matrix of incentives and disincentives rooted in the law, at the global and the domestic level, and that law-making is still in the hands of legislating institutions influenced by public opinion. The key to democratic resilience is thus to be sought in the public sphere of contemporary societies and in the possibility of building—perhaps also through the rebalancing effect of the new social media—a consensus around a few fundamental instruments of resistance to be set in place via the legislative process and to be watched after by an independent judiciary. One example of how this circuit can be effective is obviously offered by environment-protecting legislation; regulations that impose additional productive costs would never have been stimulated by the supply side

Democracy and Disembedded Markets 119

of the market unless a powerful change in public opinion had induced investors and entrepreneurs to compete also in those terms and encouraged legislators to impose standards for environment-friendly production. To anticipate, the political containment of the absolute power of financial markets can be envisaged in terms of five principles of democratic re-embedment, some entirely within reach, some ‘realistically utopian,’ to use Rawls’s formula: (a) the revitalisation of the principle of separation of saving and venture capital; (b) the principle of tax-payers’ ‘temporary takeover’ of banking institutions in distress; (c) the principle of democratic ‘trickle-up’ as opposed to neoliberal trickledown; (d) the principle of individual accountability for the aggregate effects of one’s economic actions and the creation of state-run insurance plans, mandatory for all individual investors; and (e) the principle of full accountability of rating agencies for the effects of their judgments.These five principles of democratic reembedment are in turn responsive to, or instantiations of, two values that undergird any contemporary democratic polity, namely the value of transparency and the value of accountability. 1.

Transparency and accountability were at the basis of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and were somehow betrayed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act. Following the 1929 crash, 20 percent of American banks went into bankruptcy. The GlassSteagall Act, voted in 1933 after a great banking panic, in Section 20 prohibited the underwriting of securities on the part of commercial banks either directly or indirectly via affiliate subsidiary firms and brokering agencies. At the same time, a special fund (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC) was created, out of resources of the banks, to insure deposits. The speculative activity mostly blamed for the 1929 crash was to be confined only to investment banks. The Glass-Steagall Act clearly was responsive to both the idea of transparency (that is, letting every customer of a bank know what use his or her savings are put to) and accountability (that is, holding every banking institution fully accountable for the use of the funds entrusted to it). This responsiveness to democratic values began to diminish with time, especially when lobbying pressure for modifying, if not repealing, the law began in the 1960s and 1970s. In the mid-1980s, the Federal Reserve Board, in its capacity as an institution entrusted with regulating the banking system, reinterpreted one of the clauses of Section 20 as allowing commercial banks to underwrite securities, provided that such activity would not exceed 5 percent of their total gross revenues. The kind of investment activities allowed was further expanded in 1989 under the chairmanship of Alan Greenspan, and so was the threshold, which was raised to 10 percent. In 1996, that threshold was further raised to 25 percent, and the kinds of activities permitted further expanded to include banking by insurance and brokerage firms and the other way around. Then, in 1999, Section 20 of the Glass-Steagall

120 Alessandro Ferrara

2.

Act was finally repealed by Congress after two decades of failed attempts. Nine years later, the disaster of Lehman Brothers and the bursting of the bubble of subprime mortgages unleashed the most severe recession (a 2.2% contraction of the GNP in the US) since the days of the Great Depression. Legislative measures taken in response to that crisis—for example, the DoddFrank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 under the Obama Presidency7—have not changed the fundamentals: the four largest banks in the US are still 30 percent larger than they were in 2008 and the five largest banks hold more than half the total banking assets in the country (Warren 2013). Because since 2008 no substantial progress has been made to eliminate the ‘too big to fail’ problem, and because the mass of potentially high-risk securities and derivatives has not diminished while the intricacies of participation in one another’s ventures is submitted to little control, the task of bringing transparency and accountability to the financial industry is largely still before democratic constituencies around the world in the form of some real restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act. The re-embedment of the financial markets simply begins with an act of separation that redifferentiates saving or commercial banking institutions from investment ones. It may seem that measures of this kind are not likely to arouse any enthusiasm on the part of grassroots movements, let alone mobilise their participation and protest. They may even seem elusive, a technocratic solution beyond the reach of the average citizen. In fact, they were perfectly comprehensible when they were part of the New Deal package of legislative measures through which Roosevelt ended the Great Depression, and there is no reason why the sophisticated publics of the knowledge society should fail to grasp their urgency when the technicalities are duly connected to the democratic values of transparency and accountability. Nor is there any reason why oppositional movements such as Occupy and the Indignados should not try to go beyond expressive protest and develop a programmatic focus.8 The second principle of democratic re-embedment addresses the unfortunate cases when preventive measures like the separation of commercial and investment banks has not worked, ill-advised risk-taking has occurred, and some banking institution is on the verge of bankruptcy, with vast systemic consequences. Up to now, the standard practice has been to bail out banks in distress, that is, for the government to funnel funds drawn from the general fiscal revenues of the state into their budgets. Such was the idea underlying Paulson’s Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008,9 a $700 billion bail-out plan, and Geithner’s Public-Private Investment Program in 2009. Drawing on the ideas of economists such as Krugman and Roubini, a major redirection of this policy is fundamental for the purpose of reclaiming democracy. Not only the ideal of accountability but even a basic notion of fairness requires that the risks of financial speculation be evenly distributed: those who gather the benefits of successful bets should also bear the costs

Democracy and Disembedded Markets 121

3.

4.

of unsuccessful ones. When unsuccessful operations have systemic consequences that affect everybody else, fairness requires us to remedy those consequences, not by rewarding those who made the mistake, but by acquiring the property of the banking institutions that are receiving support. The fair counterpart of bail-out plans is the temporary nationalisation of the banks that receive the funds. Without (at least temporary) government takeover, bail-out plans are gifts that, ironically, distort the market by rewarding inefficient investors. Along with the ‘too big to fail’ policies, the ‘heads banks win, tails tax-payers lose’ policies must come to an end if financial markets are to be re-embedded within the scope and functioning of a democratic society.10 The previous two principles of democratic re-embedment will not suffice, however, in effectively curbing the absolute power of markets that are legibus soluti in the sense of influencing the law-making that regulates them, unless a third and more radical principle is embraced by democratic polities in their response to economic crises—namely, the principle of trickle-up. The ‘end of ideology’ in Western post-industrial societies was perhaps all too hurriedly proclaimed by Daniel Bell in the 1960s (Bell 1965) and, in a different vocabulary, repeated by Lyotard (1984) as the thesis of the end of grand narratives. In retrospect, both were wrong. Throughout the 1980s and all the way to the present, neoliberalism has been successful first in establishing and then in infusing economic policies with the ideology of ‘trickle-down,’ namely, the idea that by helping the affluent and the economically powerful and by allowing inequality to grow, in the end the lot of the less well off will be improved as well. Increased opportunities, profits, and income would ‘inevitably’ trickle down. The bail-out plans of the last decade have followed this myth in a scaled-down and reversed way: by rescuing financial institutions from bankruptcy, also the fortunes of those who entrusted their savings, pensions, and income to their ill-conceived risk-taking would be protected. Instead, as the case of Greece shows, that expectation is simply unwarranted. Democratic lawmakers, policy-makers, and social movements who want to reclaim democracy from the power of the markets need instead to start from the opposite idea: when directly benefiting from governmental relief, people in severe financial distress—for example, homeowners unable to pay their mortgages—can certainly be expected to use what they receive for paying back their debts. Indirectly, then, relief funds trickle up to financial institutions (see Etzioni 2008). The trickling up of relief funds may be more likely to take place than the virtually nonexistent trickling down that neoliberal ideology has imposed as the terrain for current democratic electoral politics. Trickle-up, or the idea of relieving the worst off first, will have to be taken on as a general principle for the economic policies of a democracy that wishes to curb the absolute power of disembedded financial markets. Individual citizens cannot be considered only addressees of financial relief in times of economic distress. They must also be required to pay the cost

122 Alessandro Ferrara

5.

of cleaning after the social mess created by their financial risk-taking. That financial relief, in fact, is usually drawn from tax-payers’ money, and the set of tax-paying citizens and the set of citizens who invest in the financial market do not coincide. Even trickle-up policies that complement the government’s temporary takeover of insolvent financial institutions need to be in turn complemented by a fairness-restoring principle that redistributes the costs of bail-out policies. It would be unfair for these costs to be shouldered by tax-payers who do not invest and therefore have no access to the benefits of successful investments. The present insurance scheme of FDIC is funded by the banking industry itself but obviously is not sufficient for bailing out the largest financial institutions in times of crisis, if bail-out plans at the expense of the tax-payer have to be devised. Thus a democratic polity that wishes to contain the power of finance must imagine some additional funding source for the insurance plan. The same principle should apply here that led lawmakers to make an insurance plan mandatory for every car owner: it simply is not in the public interest to leave that decision up to the individual owner, who may be inclined to take risks beyond the limits of his or her solvency. Similarly, the systemic damage of aggregate financial decisions may be so devastating and destabilising for democracy that, in the name of the principle of individual accountability, investors can legitimately be required to underwrite mandatory insurance plans on top of the usual insurance plans funded by the banking industry in order to remedy ill-conceived risk-taking without aggravating the noninvesting rest of the citizenry. Finally, the principle of accountability must be fully extended to financial prime movers such as rating agencies. Standard & Poor’s, Fitch, and Moody’s, among others, are peculiar actors. They purport to sell on the market their capacity for independent and reliable assessment of the prospects of all sorts of institutions, from banks to governments, and of all sorts of financial products, but in fact they often affect the reality they claim to analyse. Whether they are observers who create the effects that actors produce or actors pretending to be observers is often hard to tell. Standard & Poor’s famously downgraded the US ‘sovereign credit rating’ in April 2011—a not uncontroversial decision, given that the other agencies didn’t find this necessary. Also, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Spain in October 2012, threatened to downgrade the economic and especially the debt policies of several EU countries, and bashed the so-called ‘Eurobonds,’ yet to be issued and backed up by BCE, as ‘trash’ before they existed—an assessment which can hardly be listed as an observation. The authors of one of the best academic studies addressing ‘bias in sovereign credit rating,’ by looking at nine main agencies operating in six different countries, state in their conclusions, [w]hile most of the variation in ratings is explained by the economic and political fundamentals of rated countries, the results suggest that sovereign

Democracy and Disembedded Markets 123

ratings in fact exhibit a bias.We find that the average agency assigns a rating to its home country that is almost one point higher than justified by how it assesses other sovereigns . . . While there is no robust empirical support for the claim that geopolitical ties between home and sovereign play a significant role in rating outcomes, countries that are culturally closer receive a better treatment. The larger the linguistic differences between home and sovereign, i.e. the more unfamiliar a language, the lower the assigned rating. We conclude that the home bias is mainly the result of economic interests and culture, not geopolitical motives. (Fuchs and Gehring 2013, 36) Similarly, ESMA (the agency responsible for the registration and supervision of credit rating agencies in the EU) has recently raised questions about the conflict of interest that potentially often affects members of the rating team, the influence from the communication department of the rating agencies concerning the timing of the publication, and above all the issue of confidentiality and undue disclosure of yet-unpublished rating materials (ESMA 2013, 7–12). Reclaiming democracy for democratic publics requires that these actors be accountable for the quality of their assessments by standards of strict independence and reliability. Up to six months before its bankruptcy, Lehman Brothers could still showcase Standard & Poor’s AAA. Some countries’ economic performance has proven the agencies’ downgrading wrong or at least ill founded. As a result of somehow inadequate ratings, democratic governments are forced to adopt—out of fear of worse economic consequences—spending reduction policies that result in higher unemployment, diminish standards of health care and education, and impose severe hardships on millions of people. Democracy is incompatible with impunity, and impunity is the prime feature of absolute power. The reclaiming of democracy for democratic citizenry begins with holding these rating agencies accountable, for example, through government-sponsored class-actions, possibly combined with punitive damages, aimed at compensating those citizens who have been unduly damaged by ‘subprime ratings’ that fall under the standards of independence and reliability. These five principles, responsive to the values of transparency and accountability, jointly taken can contribute to reclaiming the core idea of democracy— namely, the idea of being subject only to laws somehow authored by oneself—in a historical context where an unprecedented form of absolute power, vested in a plurality of actors (large banking institutions ‘too big to fail,’ large hedge funds, rating agencies, and sovereign funds, grouped together under the metaphor of ‘disembedded financial markets’), has emerged and has proven impermeable to classical ways of curbing past forms of absolute power. Trampled upon by neoliberal governments, transparency and accountability are values that have become more and more salient to the democracies of the twenty-first century; they enable the public to align the operation of institutions

124 Alessandro Ferrara

with the overarching idea of being somehow the author of the normativity that one is bound by. Political judgment is the instrument through which such alignment can be effected, in the service of preserving the openness of democratic politics and its intrinsic antagonism to all forms of absolute power, including that of disembedded financial markets.

Notes 1 I have discussed these conditions in Ferrara (2014, 6–12) and then have focused on possible strategies for dealing with hyperpluralism (Ferrara, 2014, 67–141), understood as the presence within the same political space of subcultures rooted in comprehensive conceptions that are only partially reasonable and whose members only partially accept the burdens of judgment and endorse only a subset of the constitutional essentials. 2 An indicator of this general trend is the systematic decline of the labour share in favour of capital share over the last few decades in all economies, a decline that reaches beyond 10 percent in Finland, Austria, Germany, Sweden, and New Zealand and has a peak of 15 percent in Ireland, as attested by the International Labor Office (2010, 27). For a similar analysis, see also International Monetary Fund 2007, 174. 3 On the growth and social impact of inequality, see Stiglitz 2012. 4 In photographing the situation of the beginning of the twenty-first century, Stiglitz estimated that 40 percent of all profits in the US come from finance (Stiglitz 2010, 20). 5 On November 12, 1999, Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (or the Financial Services Modernization Act), formally repealing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933—which, as Stiglitz puts it, had ‘served the country and the world well, presiding over an unprecedented period of stability and growth’ (Stiglitz 2010b, 76). 6 On this point, see Stiglitz (2010b, 24–25). 7 See Preamble to HR4173, accessed April 1, 2014, at http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/ BILLS-111hr4173ih/pdf/BILLS-111hr4173ih.pdf. 8 See Fraser 2013, 121. 9 See Division A of Pub. L. 110–343, 122 Stat. 3765, enacted October 3, 2008. 10 See Krugman 2009, and Roubini’s interview on ‘Nationalize the Banks’ in Varadarajan 2009.

Bibliography Bank of International Settlements. 2013. Statistical Release: OTC Derivatives Statistics at End-June 2013. Basel, Switzerland: Author. Bell, Daniel. 1965. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Rev. ed. New York: Free Press. Berkshire Hathaway. 2002. Annual Report for 2002. Accessed December 28, 2013. www. berkshirehathaway.com/2002ar/2002ar.pdf. Caprio, Gerard, Jr. 2010. ‘Sub-Prime Finance: Yes, We’re still in Kansas.’ In Time for a Visible Hand: Lessons from the 2008 World Financial Crisis, edited by S. Griffith-Jones, J. A. Ocampo, and J. E. Stiglitz, 50–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Etzioni, A. 2008. ‘Bail out the People.’ Huffington Post, September 23, 2008. Accessed November 5. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amitai-etzioni/bailout-the-people_b_ 128595.html.

Democracy and Disembedded Markets 125

European Securities and Markets Authority. 2013. Credit Rating Agencies Sovereign Ratings Investigation. Accessed June 11, 2014. http://www.esma.europa.eu/page/ CRA-documents. Ferrara, Alessandro. 2014. The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, Nancy. 2013. ‘A Triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi.’ New Left Review 81: 119–32. Fuchs, Andreas, and Kai Gehring. 2013. The Home Bias in Sovereign Rating. Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics, Discussion Series Papers No. 552. Hilferding, Rudolf. 1981. Finance Capital. A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (1910). Edited and with an introduction by T. Bottomore. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hobbes, Thomas. [1651] 1968. Leviathan. Edited and with an introduction by C. B. Macpherson. London: Penguin. International Labor Office. 2010. Global Wage Report. Geneva. International Monetary Fund. 2007. World Economic Outlook: Spillovers and Cycles in the Global Economy. Washington, DC. Lyotard, J.-F. 1984. The Post-modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Krugman, P. 2009. ‘Nationalize the Banks.’ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February. 24. Rawls, J. 1999. The Law of Peoples, with ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited.’ Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. 2007. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. Edited by S. Freeman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2010a. ‘The Non-Existent Hand.’ London Review of Books 32 (8), April. Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2010b. ‘The Financial Crisis of 2007–08 and Its Macroeconomic Consequences.’ In Time for a Visible Hand: Lessons from the 2008 World Financial Crisis. Edited by S. Griffith-Jones, J. A. Ocampo, and J. E. Stiglitz, 19–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2012. The Price of Inequality. New York: Norton. Varadarajan, T. 2009. ‘“Nationalize” the Banks: Interview with Nouriel Roubini.’ The Wall Street Journal, February 21. Warren Sen. ‘Address to Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institute, Washington.’ 2013, November 12. Accessed November 5, 2014. http://www.warren. senate.gov/files/documents/AFR%20Roosevelt%20Institute%20Speech%202013-1112.pdf.

7 SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN THE DELIBERATIVE ECONOMY Arjun Appadurai

Why Make This Journey? The evidence we have so far—and our general intuitions about the conditions of poverty worldwide—together suggest that the efforts of the poor to change their conditions through processes of democratic deliberation have frequently failed. This seems to hold both for the history of pro-poor legislation in the last century and in the data on small-scale deliberative institutions in practice. There are two ways to understand these failures. One is the view that deliberation is in principle the wrong place to invest our hopes, since all deliberative process are embedded in, defined, and constrained by macro-logics of power, law, and market which do not yield to deliberative interventions. The other is to argue that there is a way to redesign the conditions of deliberation so as to produce more successes than failures on a case-by-case basis and so as to allow a gradual aggregation of successful outcomes for pro-poor policies, allocations, or preferences to emerge. The latter seems to be a Sisyphean labour, given that we have had almost a half-century of efforts of this type in many parts of the less developed democratic world. This paper proposes a modified version of the second strategy, which is to look at the nature of the failures themselves as a route to incremental success in changing the contextual conditions that currently militate against the voices of the poor. This strategy requires a detour into some technical regions of the philosophy of language, and so a plea for the patience of the reader is in order. What follows amounts to an argument that we can learn from failure, since failure is not always what it appears to be. This paper is my entry point into a study of the ecology of failure in contemporary societies that are differentially affected by globalisation. My long-term aim is not to provide an objective, technocratic, or context-free account of failure in human social life. It is, as befits an anthropologist, a study of the discourses,

Deliberative Economy 127

meanings, and narratives that surround failure. Globalisation, among other things, involves the global circulation of key terms, standards, and ideologies of failure, as in the matter of failed states, failed markets, failed technologies, failed diplomacy, and failed social movements. Specific societies, however, do not simply accept and apply such globally circulating standards. They bring to them their own understandings of the meanings, symptoms, and effects of failure. Thus actual discourses of failure are in fact complex negotiated crystallisations of global and local discourses of failure. By looking closely at failure in the context of a particular group of urban activists, I hope to open up this discursive dynamic to closer study. In my previous work on this movement, I have made an argument about “the capacity to aspire” as a navigational capacity whose maldistribution is both a symptom and a catalyst of redistributive failure. In this paper, I wish to show how a better understanding of the gaps between understandings of failure among global and local players can assist us in promoting ‘voice’ among the poor and marginalised populations of the world.

The Problem of Deliberation There is a general consensus among theorists of democracy (that is, Western democracy) that deliberation is preferable to aggregation as a model for shaping group preferences in democratic practice (Elster 1998; Gutmann and Thompson 2004). It has also been observed that deliberation may alter individual preferences, thus providing some compatibility between these two modalities of participation. The paucity of detailed descriptions of sustained deliberation, in spite of some superb exceptions (Baiocchi 2005; Barron, Diprose, and Woolcock 2011; Mansbridge 1980; Rao and Sanyal 2009), gives us the opportunity to consider what might be gained by close examinations of deliberative failure and, more particularly, what we might learn about the subaltern struggle for voice by so doing. There is considerable evidence that in those large-scale democracies where poverty remains a massive problem, the public sphere in the Habermasian sense is very limited. In India, for example, the vast majority of the voting population does not share anything resembling substantive equality with the relatively small minority who controls major allocative decisions, both in the structure of government and in the market. Women, lower castes, and religious/cultural minorities constitute a disproportionately large part of those who fall below the poverty line, and these are all groups who have been shown to be silent, occluded, or excluded in most contexts of formal public deliberation. The following objection might be raised to such a sharp formulation.There are a large variety of fora in which subaltern populations have been engaged in the last fifty years in India. Shadow publics, counter-publics, partial publics, and aspirational publics are certainly a major feature of India’s story in the second half of the century. The poor show a remarkable commitment to electoral politics (Banerjee 2011), and they have lent their strengths to a vast variety of grassroots efforts

128 Arjun Appadurai

to combat domestic abuse, alcoholism, environmental depredation, economic discrimination, financial exclusion, and many other inequities (Batliwala and Brown 2006). I have myself found evidence of remarkable forms of ‘deep democracy’ among India’s urban poor (Appadurai 2002), which I have taken to be part of the effort of marginal populations to develop their ‘capacity to aspire’ (2004). Nonetheless, I believe that the conditions for free, egalitarian, transparent, and consequential participation have largely posed an uphill struggle for India’s poor, as well as their counterparts in many other parts of the world. This view is not intended to be a dismissal of the many forms of agrarian resistance, protest, mobilisation, and ‘voice’ that have characterised India’s marginalised populations not only in recent decades but also in the colonial period and even before. In this sense, the subaltern has always spoken. My case is a somewhat narrower one, namely, that the conditions in which voice, opinion, aspiration, and participation are extended to marginal groups have generally been adverse, unfair, and unfavourable. These conditions have produced many deliberative failures and disappointments. And my main interest is to study these failures more closely, for they may be sources of a more optimistic reading of the conditions under which voice is gained by people who have been disfavoured in its distribution. In general, the factors that militate against the ability of the poor to effectively exercise voice in democratic decision-making processes are those of ‘elite capture,’ patronage politics, low literacy, and poor information availability as well as corruption, intimidation, and coercion. Against this discouraging picture, there is some evidence from India of the deep attachment of the poorest of the poor to electoral politics (Banerjee 2011); of the value of public performances in the political sphere to the development of the ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai 2004); and of the benefits of the progress, in places, of the idea of ‘the right to information’ for the rural poor, and their lively engagement in debates about ‘the right to employment.’ Nonetheless, it is not self-evident that the promotion of deliberative opportunities for the poor is a goal worthy of endorsement, refinement, and further institutionalisation. What we therefore need is to build a prior case for why deliberation has the potential to make a difference in changing the ‘terms of recognition’ for the poor in the context of development.This case needs to be normative as well as practical.

The Problem of Context The primary obstacles to the realisation of the normative ideals of the deliberative approach to democratic participation frequently lie in the context—that is, the context of relevant factors outside the deliberative frame. Such contextual factors include the nature of extra-deliberative politics, such as the dependence of participants in the frame on more powerful players for resources in structures of inequality, power, and patronage outside the frame; the limited access

Deliberative Economy 129

of many poor people to vital facts that bear on matters outside the frame; the macro-structure of distribution, in which actual exchange of views between participants in these deliberations is less relevant than the power of a single key player (frequently representing the state), who is the primary addressee of all arguments and claims; and the general unresponsiveness of factors outside the frame of deliberation (such as caste, class, and gender in India) to the outcomes of deliberation within the frame. These considerations overwhelmingly support the view that internal processes within most relevant deliberative frames (such as village panchayats in India) are adversely context driven and are rarely context-changing or context-shaping events. Before we can consider how to alter this state of affairs in the interests of more inclusive development, we need to pay closer attention to the idea of context itself. There has been some degree of self-conscious reflection among anthropologists and linguists in recent times about the idea of context (Coleman and Collins 2006; Dilley 1999; Duranti and Goodwin 1992; Kopytko 2003). The late Wittgenstein’s writings on language-in-use and language games did much to detach the idea of linguistic meaning from its semantic field alone and launched a deep interest in language pragmatics, in the tradition of Grice, Austin, Searle, and others working in the broadly Wittgensteinian tradition. It may seem farfetched to look deeply into the idea of ‘context’ in linguistic and philosophical discussions for help in the analysis of deliberation and development, but it is not. Context is today a default concept in virtually all those social science fields that are sensitive to the ‘frame’ in which any action, cultural pattern, or institutional form may be located. Most commentators attribute the concept of framing to the work of Erving Goffman and point especially to his 1974 book Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Goffman used the idea of frames to label ‘schemata of interpretation’ that allow individuals or groups ‘to locate, perceive, identify, and label’ events and occurrences, thus rendering meaning, organising experiences, and guiding actions. The idea of context is part of the common sense of social science.Yet it is usually used uncritically. A more reflective and less commonsensical use of the idea of context is needed for a process such as deliberation, which, by definition, points to a space or site of discourse which is separated from the ordinary course of life. It is even more relevant to the analysis of poverty, equality, and participation, in which poor people are frequently marginalised by not intra-frame, but extra-frame factors of the sort we have already discussed. From the philosopher’s point of view, the frustration with the idea of context is captured by Kopytko (2003): The scope of interactional context is indefinite and infinite because each context is embedded in its own context that is embedded in its context and so on; in consequence, the situation of infinite contextual regress follows.

130 Arjun Appadurai

Although for researchers this question remains a philosophical quandary, for language users it is much less so, because, after all, they are capable of communicating effectively most of the time. This frustration about context, the sense that it is an infinitely regressive Chinese box, with no limit, has been noticed by others (Cicourel 1992; Culler 1981). In Jonathan Culler’s epigram, ‘meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless’ (Culler 1981, 23). Culler makes this remark in a careful argument on behalf of Derrida, who was attacked by John Searle for his critique of Austin’s famous discussion of how performatives are to be properly distinguished from constatives. This debate, which seems somewhat distant from the problems of deliberation, exclusion, and poverty, is in fact quite relevant, insofar as it refers to those speech acts that, which are neither true nor false, produce effects by virtue of conforming to a set of conventions which surround them (in some sort of context) but cannot be read from the words themselves. A famous Austinian example of a performative is the statement of the judge in the context of a marriage in the form ‘I now pronounce you man and wife,’ which takes effect—acquires illocutionary force—due to its contextual compliance with a series of conventions, such as the legal power of the judge to perform such an action, the serious intentions of the man and woman before him, the nonexistence of other similar prior unions for the two of them, et cetera. Austin’s idea of illocutionary force has been the subject of much contention in the years since his original formulations, but it is invariably taken to refer to the force attaching to certain kinds of speech acts which cannot be reduced to their referential or truth value. Illocutionary force is what characterises certain speech acts whose intention is to produce certain effects having not to do with the words that are used, but with their conventional and contextual understanding by those who are in the relevant context or frame of the utterance. Most deliberative contexts in which issues of development, equality, and voice are played out in the real world involve conventional ways of speaking intended to produce certain effects on the allocation of public resources—often resources in the hands of the (near or distant) developmental state. Those who are marginal in the distribution of both material and symbolic resources in real-world situations—where deliberative procedures are part of the politics of resource allocation—are almost always at a disadvantage in what we might call the political economy of felicity (in Austin’s sense). By felicity, Austin meant to indicate that set of contextual preconditions that made it possible for a speech act, such as a performative, to have illocutionary or perlocutionary force, in other words, for it to do something rather than simply to say something.1 The Habermasian model of rational discourse, which is the normative condition for the exchange of views in the public sphere—his equivalent of the imagined space of deliberative discourse—presumes free actors who are in formally equal positions with respect to the matters at issue. In other words, the

Deliberative Economy 131

Habermasian speaker participates in deliberation with other equals. This equality is both the formal prerequisite and the (deepened) substantive outcome of rational deliberation in the Habermasian public sphere. The problematic of global development is precisely the radical absence of these conditions, both in regard to the material disposition of resources among speakers and in regard to the prior disposition of the ‘terms of recognition’ (Appadurai 2004). In terms of the discursive and material conditions of radical inequality which are the defining characteristic of those situations that we are here most concerned with, it may be argued that the problem of the political economy of felicity (namely, that feature of the conventions defining the probability that a particular’s speaker’s performative argument about some change in the current disposition of resources will succeed as a performative) is that it will never favour the poor until the very context of conventions about felicity is changed. In short, how can we produce conditions that favour the possibility that the public arguments, claims, requests, and demands of the poor will have performative purchase? This amounts to increasing the probability that they will be able to change the context rather than merely to comply with it. In other words, under what conditions can the conventions surrounding felicity be so framed as to encourage context change rather than mere context compliance or context legibility? Put yet another way, how can we pursue the objective of producing conditions in which the felicity of certain requests or demands consists not of their relative compliance with the conventions that define the relevant context but of their potential to change the conditions which define the context?

Failed Performatives The evidence we have so far on the speech forms deployed by the poor and the disadvantaged in contexts of public deliberation over resource allocations in the context of development is that they are frequently in the form of requests, one of the important forms that the performative speech act can take. Furthermore, the statements contributed to by women, marginal social groups, and the poor are often failed performatives, that is, they are speech acts that fail to have the effects they seek on their addresses, whether we take these addresses to be all the members of these fora or just the key actors who make the final allocative decisions that are the subject of the request. While it is not my aim to make an informed contribution to the technical debates among linguists and philosophers about what we can learn from failed performatives, I would like to observe that what is most interesting about the failure of requests by the poor in public deliberations to change the current disposition of resources is not that they happen (contingently, statistically, and post facto) to fail in most instances, but rather that they appear to be (generally) doomed to fail because of the political economy of the felicity conditions of these statements in their specific contexts. Let me explain this important step in my argument.

132 Arjun Appadurai

The development of the idea of the ‘failed performative’ is part of an important line of argument about Austin’s ideas (Felman [1983] 2003; Butler 1990, 2004; Medina 2006). This tradition of work seeks to uncover in the space of ‘failure’ also the logic of irony, subversion, resistance, and creativity. Judith Butler’s work is perhaps the best known of these efforts and is based in a form of radical constructivism especially developed in the context of gender and queer theory and derived in part from the work of Jacques Lacan. This constructivism is used to make the argument that apparently biological forms, such as the gendered body, are in fact embodied constructions produced by the culturally normative repetitions of certain performative actions. Since these performatives rely on established heteronormative conventions, in Butler’s argument, they produce installed, gendered bodies that are the product of pre-existing scripts which have been already been rehearsed. The possibility of failure in performatives is taken up by Butler and is understood as the ‘political promise of the performative.’ Her argument is that the performative needs its conventional power, and thus convention itself has to be reiterated, and in this reiteration it can be expropriated by the unauthorised usage and thus create new possible futures. She cites Rosa Parks as an example: When Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, she had no prior right to do so guaranteed by any . . . conventions of the South. And yet, in laying claim to the right for which she had no prior authorization, she endowed a certain authority on the act, and began the insurrectionary process of overthrowing those established codes of legitimacy. The question of the infelicitous utterance (the misfire) is also taken up by Shoshana Felman when she states that infelicity, or failure, is not for Austin an accident of the performative, it is inherent in it, essential to it. In other words . . . Austin conceives of failure not as external but as internal to the promise, as what actually constitutes it. (Felman [1983] 2003) I would suggest that the approach to the ‘constitutive failure’ at the heart of Austin’s idea of the performative which is shared by Felman and Butler is the most fruitful for our purposes in imagining the apparently hopeless efforts of the poor to gain voice in public deliberative forums. Notice that for Felman, the possibility of performative failure is inherent to all performatives, it is their structural Achilles’ heel. Butler picks up on this idea and notices that conventions need to be reiterated in order to retain their power as conventions, but this reiteration opens the door to ‘misfires,’ to irony, to subversion, and to change. In her later work on queer politics, Butler also shows that reiteration is the route by which marginal or subaltern discourses uttered in semipublic (alternative) settings such as night

Deliberative Economy 133

clubs, private homes, and so forth, can slowly inch their way into the public sphere, where they can become the basis (retrospectively) for the sort of identity declaration which constitutes ‘coming out’ at the level of the queer individual and a transformation of the public sphere at the level of the category of queer people in a particular society or polity. In short, today’s performative failure can be part of the basis for tomorrow’s performative success, since all social conventions require iteration and repeat performance for their ongoing force and credibility. Here it is important to make a few distinctions and qualifications. Not all performative failures are alike. And not all such failures have the capacity to ignite a productive deliberative chain (a concept I discuss in the following section). For one thing, there are performative contexts which are structurally illegitimate: one example is to be found in forced or staged contexts, such as meetings between cynical outside commercial interests and community leaders, in which there is every reason to doubt that the meeting is any more than a charade. The other is when the state, in an effort to propitiate an independent donor, stages a local deliberative event, sparking hopes for state responsiveness as soon as the project cycle is over. Failures in such contexts can reinforce cynicism, apathy, and even ‘exit,’ in Albert Hirschman’s sense of the term. Arguably, this sort of failure is more the rule than the exception in societies of deep structural inequality. What is of greater interest are those failures that are generative of further efforts to create voice, thus producing something like an energy-producing performative chain. Unlike a nuclear reaction, however, this sort of performative chain can be gradual, discontinuous, and spread out over months and years, rather than over seconds and minutes. Its social life is hard to predict, but it is possible to make some characterisations of this sort of event post facto. It is this generative type of ‘failed performative’ that has the greatest potential for an optimistic view of the voice of the poor in public deliberative forums in democratic societies. It is evident that many statements by the poor, taken by themselves in single contexts, have no positive effects and may be considered failures. But as they are repeated, rehearsed, and reiterated, does their failure contain the seeds of performative success? Here I switch into the ethnographic mode and present some vignettes from my fieldwork over the last ten years with a global network of activist slum dwellers, spread across more than thirty countries, with especially strong foci in India and South Africa. The purpose of this ethnographic exercise is to establish a preliminary method for identifying those performative actions, chains, and contexts which do appear to change the context by generating fissile energies, which other performative interventions by the poor fail to do.

Nothing Succeeds Like Failure I have described in two previous essays (Appadurai 2002, 2004) my experiences with members of the Slum/Shackdwellers International (SDI), a global network of activists, scholars, and urban slum-dwellers working for secure tenure, economic

134 Arjun Appadurai

rights, relocation, and rehabilitation as well as savings, credit, and sanitation initiatives, all on behalf of the poorest of the urban poor in more than thirty countries, mostly in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. I have worked with members of this network, primarily in India and in South Africa, for about a decade to better understand, interpret, and represent to the scholarly and policy communities their vision, strategy, and politics, which have evolved over almost two decades of learning, networking, and advocacy on behalf of the urban poor. I offer the following vignettes to illustrate my sense of how failures in the sphere of public deliberation may open the space for success in conditions of extreme adversity, of global pressure to adjust and adapt, and of unusual pressures both to react to crisis and to wait patiently for significant change in the material conditions of member communities. During this period, I have spent time with members of this network at various levels and contexts, ranging from housing exhibitions, political negotiations, meetings, conferences, and public rallies and performances in Mumbai, New York, Manila, Durban, Vancouver, Cape Town, the Hague, London, and Johannesburg. These events have included discussions with urban planners; strategic discussions with community members and leaders; consultancy roles with funders, lenders, and scholars; and interventions with planners, politicians, and ministers concerned with housing in South Africa, the Philippines, and India. One strand that has been a consistent feature of my encounters with the slum communities which are ‘federated’ to form the global network is the theme of singing and dance as critical elements of their gatherings, both small and large. This contribution to the repertoire of the SDI comes mostly from the poor SDI women, who come from various settlements in the poorest parts of South Africa, including Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, as well as from many more remote communities.When members of these communities visit India, for example, they often build relations with their poor friends (both men and women) in Indian slums. I was witness to one such encounter, early in my experience with the SDI, in the flat of a close friend of mine, Sundar Burra, who first introduced me to SDI. It was sometime in the year 1998. The occasion was a learningoriented visit by approximately a dozen poor slum women from Cape Town to Mumbai. It was their first visit to India. They were in the middle-class apartment of my friend, himself at that time in transition from a civil service career to a full-time engagement with SDI. There were also about a dozen women in the apartment from the core women’s group that formed the base of the network in India, the Mahila Milan, about which I have written elsewhere. In addition, there was a small group of young, shy women from Nepal (mostly from Kathmandu) who belonged to a federation of the homeless. The language gaps were considerable, and English was a very loose contact language among the three groups. The Mumbai women had come together for a meeting related to their savings activities and were relaxing after a business session. The Nepali women were exploring

Deliberative Economy 135

Mumbai for the first time and were awed by the women from Cape Town. Before long, and without any alcohol in play, the conversations became raucous and the Cape Town women were on their feet, dancing and encouraging the Indian and Nepali women to dance and sing along with them. The Indian women, some of whom were tough (ex) sex-workers from one of Mumbai’s roughest neighbourhoods, were nevertheless at first constrained by their codes of public decorum, and by the fact that they were in a relatively luxurious Mumbai apartment with visitors and friends from overseas, such as me. But their tendency towards the ribald and the raucous soon got the better of them, and they joined in with a little bit of singing and dancing themselves. This was a tricky moment, because for the Mumbai women from the Nagpada slums, dancing is associated with the profession of sex-work (at least in its rosier images), and the presence of a few males in the room (several known to them, as well as a few others, including me), gave the scene some of the risqué ambience of the mujra.2 The Nepali women, who were on average much younger than their Indian and South African colleagues, were the most shy about joining in or contributing something from their own musical or dance repertoires. But they were clearly amused, shocked, intrigued, and delighted to be in this milieu of female solidarity, ribaldry, and bodily exchange. This was surely a Butlerian moment! I witnessed many such occasions over the next ten years or so, and it is possible to see a process at work here. In 2001, I was in a major rally organised by the local African federation of the SDI in a shack community on the outskirts of Durban called Piesang River.The occasion was part of a major regional and national effort to convene and mobilise thousands of shack-dwellers tied to the Federation for a major public rally in Durban that I also attended. The Piesang River gathering was on the home turf of some of the Federation’s most active men and women leaders, several of who lived in Piesang River.The highlight was a visit to the then community by the then South African minister for housing. Here is a description of the event from the website of a sister organisation of the SDI, the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights: Over 10 000 members of the South African Homeless People’s Federation and allied organizations descended on King’s Park Sports Complex in Durban on Sunday, October 1st, for the Southern African launch of the UNCHS Campaign for Secure Tenure. Exceeding all expectations of the organisers, grassroots savings groups from all of South Africa’s provinces traveled to the event in nearly 100 buses and dozens of minibus taxis. Joining them were delegations from urban poor Federations in Zimbabwe, Namibia, India, and the Philippines. The Filipino government also sent its housing minister. A. Jockin and Jesse Robredo, recipients of the prestigious 2000 Magsaysay Award, were also in attendance. Also represented were international development organizations such as the UNCHS, World Bank, and several bilateral development

136 Arjun Appadurai

agencies. On hand to greet the visitors were politicians and officials from Durban, kwaZulu-Natal province, and the South African government. South African Housing Minister Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele was keynote speaker. Mthembi-Mahanyele captured the spirit of the carnival-like event by saying that South Africa’s housing drive had been made possible by ‘the partnership formed between the government and her people’. She went on to say that ‘most of these (People’s Housing Process) initiatives were led by women groups within the South African Homeless People’s Federation’. An important goal of the UNCHS campaign is to gain concrete government support for secure tenure for the poor. Mthembi-Mahanyele took up the challenge: ‘On June of this year, the Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister announced in Parliament that government will transfer ownership of 15 million hectares of land in the next five years to the poor’. Rose Molokoane, National Chairperson of the SAHPF indicated that the Federation and allied groups would immediately begin work to prepare to participate in this programme. ‘Without land our people are dying a natural death. We have thousands of members all over South Africa who are willing and able to use secure tenure to build themselves and the country’. This description mentions the carnival-like spirit of the event, and indeed, singing and dance were a major part of the celebrations. Young male children performed Zulu dances in full martial attire, women and men sang the great national anthem (‘Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika’), and there were numerous spontaneous breaks into singing and dancing among the audience. Later, the minister paid a visit to the Piesang River community, and there she was enveloped in a massive display of SDI community-based discourse, speeches, exhortations, promises, requests, and commands (a veritable feast of Austinian performatives!) addressed to each other and to the visitors from India, Bangkok, the Philippines, England, and the US. Many of the speakers were at their inspired best, combining oratory in Zulu and English with exhortatory speeches, breaks into dance, and playful ribaldry. The most important thing about this extraordinary event was that the minister, Mthembe-Mahanyele herself, was drawn into the spirit of this carnivalesque feast of performatives and was rendered both a subject and an object of the performative utterances about the importance of secure housing for the shack-dwellers of her country. Also in 2001, an extraordinary event occurred in New York, when members of the SDI attended the UN General Assembly on Habitat and succeeded in getting permission to build a model house as well as a set of toilets in the main lobby of the UN in New York. When the secretary-general paid an unplanned

Deliberative Economy 137

visit to see these ‘unofficial exhibits’ in the lobby of the UN, there was once again a performative carnival, where the secretary-general and Anna Tibaijouka, the executive director of UNCHS, were both encompassed by a delighted group of slum activists and found themselves in a spontaneous scene of singing, dancing, and cheering which performed the aspirational presence of the poor in the hallowed lobby of the UN. Much more could be said about this series of events in the period from 1998 to 2001, which was my most active period of conversation, travel, and participation with the members of the SDI in India and beyond. For my purposes in this paper, I want to make the following interpretive points. The three events/occasions I have described are just a few among myriad occasions of gathering, speech-making, mobilisation, celebration, and public performance by members of the SDI network at numerous scales, ranging from homes to UN conferences; in numerous moods, ranging from pessimism to hope; in numerous milieus, ranging from hospitable to hostile; and with a large variety of outsiders in their presence, including bankers, funders, scholars, consultants, donors, ministers, and ordinary passers-by. So they are a small cross-section of a constant stream of quasi-public performativity for these communities and their leaders. These occasions may, in isolation and confined to their most immediate context, be considered failed performatives, or as containing many failed performatives: requests ignored, promises unkept, contracts broken, by a variety of powerful individuals and institutions in relation to the poor men and women of the SDI. But in the decade or more that I have been observing these events, and noticing their performative qualities,3 they reveal a certain logic of cumulation, context building, and altered subjectivity. This logic needs to be precisely characterised. I referred earlier to the ‘political economy of felicity’ and to the important difference between context legibility (which is equivalent to felicity) and change in the effect of speech acts on their contexts. The statements of the poor appear too often to be unable to change their contexts, and since those contexts are already tailored so as to deny or diminish their voices, the process of context change is important to identify. In the work of Shoshana Felman and Judith Butler, which I have already referred to, there is a sense that the possibility of failure is inherent to the nature of performatives (hence the term ‘constitutive failure’), but through reiteration, rehearsal, and repetition certain apparent performative failures can lay the grounds, or incrementally ‘change the frame,’ for later speech acts, thus creating a terrain which can be retroactively mobilised so as to create a performative chain,4 which yields success out of a string of apparent failures. The retroactive nature of this process is important, for various efforts to claim felicity (such as public statements, requests or demands by poor, marginal and/or excluded groups) can seem to fail as performatives in their own context but can be mobilised retroactively to produce a successful performative.

138 Arjun Appadurai

The extended vignette I presented above, in which members of slum federations within the SDI, especially the women in them, mobilise singing and dance in contexts of quasi-public or public performances, can be seen as this sort of retroactive performative chain, in which the bodily performances wherein various speech acts are embodied and embedded are rehearsals of an ongoing strategy for binding the addressee to respect a claim, honour a request, or fulfil a promise issuing from the poor speaker. The public performance of a spontaneous dance in the lobby of the United Nations creates a permanently recorded media moment in which Kofi Annan can be said to have legitimated and even ‘inaugurated’ an exhibition of a model house and toilet complex in the belly of his own UN building. This constitutes a public promise by Kofi Annan, which will never be subject to the full test of whether it was a success or a failure. In fact, the monumental Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of the UN, which were the centrepiece of Annan’s vision, were noteworthy for including at least one major leader of SDI, Sheela Patel of India, in their deliberations in early years of the millennium. This spontaneous, ad hoc, and risky effort to beard the secretary-general in his own den, by means of an adroitly staged public performance of speech, song, and dance, could not have occurred without a long and varied prior set of rehearsals in which other addressees, visitors, friends, and potential benefactors had been drawn into similar carnivalesque public promissory performances, any of which might be designated in isolation as a ‘failed’ performative. From this point of view, the predicament of those without voice in public forums, or those who seem doomed to produce failed performatives due to the complete rigidity of the adversarial context, are obliged to cast many performative seeds on the ground, so as to ‘mark the territory’5 of their aspirations.These markings, which are the traces of what appear to be failed performatives, constitute a bodily archive of actions, affects, memories, and desires which can be mobilised by the right emergent conjuncture of contextual conditions to yield a performative claim that may be less easy to ignore. What is important here is that from one performative context to another, of a particular sort, there is a chain of resemblances which might be called ‘polythetic’ (Needham 1975), in which any two proximate events or experiments may resemble each other closely, but commonalities are not found across the entire chain. Such polythetic classes (which also contain what Wittgenstein famously called ‘family resemblances’) are generated by active and steady production of failed performatives, which alter the context incrementally so that the political economy of felicity begins to shift in favour of the poor in the forums of public deliberation. Insofar as these performative chains appear in deliberative contexts, we can regard them as producing deliberative chains.6 I use the term ‘deliberative chains’ to refer to links between deliberative contexts that are not based in the similarity of successive contexts, but in the similarity (polythetic and incremental) between failed performatives, each of which lays some of the grounds for the next rehearsal but any of which has the potential to

Deliberative Economy 139

have a frame-changing (or context-changing) effect because of the mobilised history of (apparent) prior failures. Not all performative failures produce deliberative chains, and the SDI examples allow me to identify what distinguishes what we might call ‘true failures’ from ‘apparent failures,’ the latter being those that have the potential to create deliberative chains. The situations in which these generative failures occur appear to have three important characteristics: 1.

2.

3.

In these instances, members of elite groups are brought into contexts controlled by the marginal or excluded population, whether these are community celebrations, political rallies, social gatherings, or official ceremonies. In some cases, the context itself may be ‘neutral’ or even adversarial to the interests of the poor, but they are able to effect some sort of transformation in it (as in the lobby of the UN building) to render the space, even if temporarily, their own. We might identify this factor as involving the importance of hosting the performative context rather than being a guest in it. The second criterion, which follows logically from the first, is for the subaltern group to control the idiom of the performative context, as with the deliberate use of song, dance, and other forms of community practice and discourse, to define the tone, affective state, and ethos of the event, within which bold performative events have the maximum chance of being felicitous and effective. The third criterion is a certain form of ‘elite capture,’ not in the standard negative sense of this term, but in the sense that these events often involve surrounding targeted members of the decision-making classes with others who have previously been partly or completely converted to the democratic cause in question. In almost all the major events hosted by the SDI, major politicians and policy-makers are surrounded by other members of various elites who come from their own offices, corporations, or communities but have already signed on to the cause of the urban poor. Their very presence increases the comfort level for all actors, thus enhancing the sense of trust, intimacy, and sincerity attached to these contexts.

We need more empirical studies to better understand the critical differences between truly failed performatives and those with the potential for a chain reaction in the future, so that we might refine this preliminary typology of what constitutes success as the potential product of a chain of deliberative failures.

Deliberative Chains and the Capacity to Aspire In a 2004 essay that outlines a broad approach to the challenges of poverty reduction, I proposed that aspiration is a cultural and navigational capacity whose deliberate enhancement will positively affect the ‘terms of recognition’ (Appadurai 2004). In proposing this approach, I was partly motivated by the interest in

140 Arjun Appadurai

opening a new platform for combining ‘recognition-centred’ approaches with ‘redistribution-centred’ approaches to inequality and poverty. In that context, I pointed out the ways in which certain public fora for speech, debate, and persuasion offered occasion for poor slum-dwellers to experiment with binding politicians and bureaucrats to make positive commitments to the urban homeless. At that time, I had not looked more closely at the challenges of the conditions in which the poor are at a disadvantage in most deliberative contexts involving those in positions of greater power and privilege, nor had I seen that the conditions of success and failure for the performative speech acts of the poor were not well understood. At this stage, it might be useful to ask how the kind of context that I have sought to identify—one in which failed performatives nevertheless have longterm potential for producing a generative deliberative chain—can be contrasted with some better-known examples of deliberative success, such as the participatory budgeting model generated first in Porto Allegre (Brazil) and the process of political decentralisation that has been followed, with significant success, in Kerala (India). The latter are planned processes of participatory deliberation, and their success is tied up with a number of special prior conditions, including remarkable commitments on the part of city authorities in Brazil and remarkable rates of adult literacy in Kerala. More important, these cases are cases of deliberative success in top-down efforts, and are thus not characterised by the importance of performative actions and efforts on the part of the poor. The latter have been my main concern in this paper because they contain elements of surprise, of success engendered by apparent failure. These two kinds of example, the bottom-up style and the top-down style, may need to be examined and harvested together, in order for some of the predictability, protocol, and transparency of the top-down process to be combined with the spontaneity, the cultural resonance, and the subaltern spirit of the latter, which are crucial to building the capacity to aspire. Such an exchange of properties between different sorts of context might greatly increase the potential of deliberative contexts in unequal societies to expand the number, variety, and power of various emergent public spheres in the future drama of development. In light of these arguments about frames, contexts, failed performatives, and the profile of those deliberative chains which can produce success out of a prior context of apparent failures, I am now in a better position to suggest why we should encourage the participation of the poor in those forms of deliberative process that have one or more of the characteristics I have identified. Even failed performatives in such deliberative contexts can change the climate and the context in which the poor are able to develop their voices as a part of deliberative democratic forums, through the gradual change of contexts that the chain of performative failures may enable. If this argument is found valid in the treatment of more data from developmental sites in which deliberative contexts are studied over time, we could add the following maxim to the inventory of ways in which

Deliberative Economy 141

the capacity to aspire might be strengthened: let a thousand failures bloom and the successes will take care of themselves!

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Biju Rao and Patrick Heller for inviting me to a World Bank conference in 2011, for which I wrote an earlier draft of this essay. Their critical comments on that draft significantly helped to clarify and strengthen the argument. I am also grateful to all the other participants at the conference for their comments, especially to Anis Dani, Peter Evans, Jane Mansbridge, and Michael Woolcock. Biju Rao has been a long-term interlocutor on these issues, and this paper is a further testimony to our shared interests and conversations. Gabika Bockaj and Benjamin Lee also offered close readings and excellent suggestions for strengthening this essay. I shared a recent version of this argument with an audience at the India Institute of King’s College in London, where I also received rich comments and criticisms.

Notes 1 The debates over the status of Austin’s distinctions between performatives and constatives, the very heart of his theory of speech acts, have been the subject of a deep and ongoing set of debates which have included thinkers as varied as Emile Benvensite, John Searle, and Jacques Derrida, all of whom were concerned about how to understand the distinctions between meaning and force in the social life of language, and more recently Judith Butler, Michel Callon, and others who have debated the nature of financial markets and instruments. For a fascinating contribution to these debates, see Felman [1983] 2003. I am grateful to my colleague Benjamin Lee (The New School) for many enlightening conversations and writings about this tradition (see Lee 1997). 2 The term mujra refers to the stylised dance forms which accompany courtesanal cultures in North India but have come to be the model for certain production numbers (also called ‘item’ numbers in Bollywood parlance), both in the films and in cabarets, clubs, and so forth, in which a woman dances for a largely male audience with the subtext of subsequent paid sexual availability to the most generous patron. 3 It is interesting to note that a core term for the organisers and activists of the SDI network is the term ‘ritual,’ which they use deliberately to emphasise their wish to create routines and precedents out of experiments and interventions. The creation and refinement of rituals (of enumeration, of savings, of house-building, and the like) is part of the conscious politics of this movement, and reflects the understanding that rituals are not museums of habit but stages for social innovation, something about which professional social scientists have been much less clear. 4 I owe this term to José Medina (2006), who uses it to describe just this sort of unpredictable—but plausible—chain of connections between performatives from different contexts, which can help to produce what he calls felicitous subjects—as well as felicitous statements—out of what were previously infelicitous ones. 5 I owe the image of ‘marking the territory’ to a recent conversation with Benjamin Lee. 6 In using the term ‘deliberative chain,’ I mean to link up the sense of the ‘performative chain’ as identified by José Medina in his interesting contribution to the study of the

142 Arjun Appadurai

failed performative (2006) to the growing literature on the ‘commodity chain’ in economics and anthropology to capture the global itineraries of common as well as unusual commodities.

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. 2002. Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics. Public Culture, Duke University Press. ———. 2004. ‘The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition.’ In Culture and Public Action, edited by Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Baiocchi, Gianpaolo. 2005. Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Banerjee, Mukulika. 2011. Elections as Communitas. Social Research: India’s World 78 (1). Barron, Patrick, Rachael Diprose, and Michael J. V. Woolcock. 2011. Contesting Development: Participatory Projects and Local Conflict Dynamics in Indonesia. Yale Agrarian Studies Series. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Batliwala, Srilatha, and L. David Brown. 2006. Transnational Civil Society: An Introduction. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. ———. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cicourel, Aaron. 1992. ‘The Interpretation of Communicative Contexts: Examples from Medical Encounters.’ In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon: Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language, Vol. 11, edited by Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coleman, Simon, and Peter Collins. 2006. Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology. A.S.A. monographs. Vol. 42. Oxford: Berg. Culler, Jonathan D. 1981. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dilley, Roy. 1999. The Problem of Context. Methodology and History in Anthropology, vol. 4. New York: Berghahn Books. Duranti, Alessandro, and Charles Goodwin. 1992. Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language, vol. 11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elster, Jon. 1998. Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge Studies in the Theory of Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Felman, Shoshana. [1983] 2003. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J.  L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Meridian, Crossing Aesthetics [Scandale du corps parlant]. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis F. Thompson. 2004. Why Deliberative Democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kopytko, Roman. 2003. ‘What Is Wrong with Modern Accounts of Context in Linguistics?’ Views: Vienna Working English Papers 12 (1): 45–60. Lee, Benjamin. 1997. Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Deliberative Economy 143

Mansbridge, Jane J. 1980. Beyond Adversary Democracy. New York: Basic Books. Medina, José. 2006. Speaking from Elsewhere: A new Contextualist Perspective on Meaning, Identity, and Discursive Agency. Albany: SUNY Press. Needham, Rodney. 1975. Polythetic Classification: Convergence and Consequence. Man, New Series, 10 (3). Rao, Vijayendra, and Paromita Sanyal. 2009. Dignity through Discourse: Poverty and the Culture of Deliberation in Indian Village Democracies. World Bank Development Research Group, Poverty Team.

8 THE PROMISE OF GLOBAL TRANSPARENCY Between Information and Emancipation Matthew Fluck

Introduction Few words in the contemporary political lexicon hold so much promise as ‘transparency.’ The promise is that of political by means of epistemic empowerment; access to information appears to offer the public a route to the inner workings of institutions and structures of governance and thereby to power. The pursuit of transparency has been taken up with enthusiasm by civil society actors in the hope that the provision of information will transform the relationship between institutions and citizens. Progress appears to be occurring; promises of greater transparency abound in the statements of corporations, governments, and intergovernmental organisations seeking to demonstrate their responsiveness and accountability. Transparency is, moreover, no longer something granted to citizens by governments but something which they have the technological means to independently pursue. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising to find activists and writers who herald an ‘Age of Transparency’ (Sifry 2011). Against this backdrop, international politics appears to be especially opaque and therefore particularly in need of transparency. Secrecy has long been identified as a source of amorality and violence in the international sphere. A more recent concern is that the increasing influence of international institutions and transnational regimes governing everything from finance to atomic energy has not been matched by transnational structures of accountability. It is no surprise, then, that many of the more radical and prominent efforts to pursue transparency—such as Wikileaks’ leaking of US State Department cables—have focused on the international sphere. It is at this level that the pursuit of transparency might appear to promise most—more peaceful international relations and the empowerment of citizens in relation to structures of global governance. The emancipatory promise

Promise of Global Transparency 145

of transparency is that knowledge of international institutions and systems, along with access to the information upon which they depend, will allow those whose lives they currently govern to better understand them, hold them to account, and better control them, thereby becoming a critical transnational public. The Wikileaks website describes this emancipatory goal in rather more dramatic terms, as that of enabling ordinary people to ‘create their own history.’ This essay asks whether transparency can live up to these expectations. It seeks to clarify the ideals and practices involved in the pursuit of transparency and to explore their implications. Such an exercise is necessarily limited in scope and its conclusions less ‘policy relevant’ than many discussions of transparency. However, given the widespread and often unreflective faith in transparency as a source of political progress and popular empowerment, the exercise is an important one. It reveals that there is reason to approach transparency with caution. Whilst much about the notion is superficially appealing, it potentially does as much to aid the technical goals of more effective and efficient governance as it does the emancipatory ones of giving a greater number of people more influence over global systems and institutions which shape the world in which they live. More specifically, the hope that access to information will provide the means of empowering a transnational public is misplaced, reflecting the mistaken belief that global power structures necessarily rely on secrecy.The assumption that international politics is inherently opaque obscures the ways in which both the interactions of states and more recent structures of global governance have relied on the controlled circulation of information. The pursuit of transparency does not necessarily empower citizens in relation to such structures, since their success has depended less on withholding information than on constructing an environment in which such circulation can occur. Many institutions have less interest in keeping citizens in the dark than in individuals being the sorts of actors who are, where necessary, reducible to objects of knowledge (data) or calculating consumers of information. The systematised pursuit of transparency as information is a problematic basis for popular empowerment in any general sense because, focusing on access to knowledge of a predetermined kind, it implicitly accepts the basic epistemic-social assumptions involved in this reductive process. A global public formed through the pursuit of such knowledge would not be in a position to challenge the prevailing structures of power, but would instead represent their extension. An alternative understanding of transparency gives a better idea of its emancipatory potential. In this view, the promise of transparency rests on the hope for ways of knowing which might give individuals the space to judge the structures, which govern their lives and therefore the opportunity to change them. The goal is not simply access to or control of pre-existing data, but rather the public interpretation of information and collective assessment of the goals which institutions pursue and the norms they promote. This view—‘transparency as publicity’— has existed for as long as ‘transparency as information’ and is often implicit in

146 Matthew Fluck

claims about the importance of public access to information. Failure to achieve significant progress in this second area explains the enduring appeal of ‘transparency’ and the persistent lack of trust in governments even as they make more information publically available (O’Neill 2006). It helps to flesh out accounts of the empowerment that is often hoped for by those calling for and pursuing transparency. In particular, it shows that the struggles involved should be understood as struggles over the quality of knowledge as well as its availability. However, this emancipatory transparency cannot be uncovered fully formed or free from difficulties. The form of transnational publicity in question remains a promise rather than a presently existing resource, and the identification of the promise does not demonstrate that it will be easy to achieve. The chapter proceeds by identifying key elements of transparency discourse, considering the conditions in which they have emerged and been pursued. Part 1 starts by identifying an early manifestation of transparency discourse in the work of Jeremy Bentham, who made some of the earliest calls for greater international transparency. Three key assumptions are apparent in Bentham’s work: the centrality of information to rational political interaction, the association of wider access to information with technical success (that is, increased effectiveness and efficiency), and the association of wider access to information with normative progress or emancipation (that is, liberty and justice). The influence of these assumptions is traced through modern theories and practices of international relations. The story that emerges is one in which the connection between information and technical success is increasingly emphasised at the expense of popular empowerment. Despite—or more accurately because of—the apparent opacity of international politics, transparency has been discussed at some length by theorists of international relations, especially in relation to interstate power politics and the functioning of international ‘regimes.’ However, there has generally been little concern with popular empowerment in such discussions; the focus has been on the circulation of information in pursuit of technical success by actors in particular spheres such as security, environmental protection, or arms control. Significantly, this ‘transparency as information’ view is also to be found in international practice, where it has helped to constitute current structures of global governance whilst doing little to empower those whose lives they shape. Part 2 considers how the emancipatory promise of transparency might be salvaged. The obvious answer is that the systems described in Part 1 are closed to the public and therefore not truly transparent; empowerment will occur as true transparency is achieved and information is made publically available. However, such a view rests on the questionable assumption that knowledge is essentially a matter of rational actors providing, withholding, and calculating with information. The result is a problematic account of knowledge and the public sphere, which ignores the processes through which actors and information are created. It also ignores the political and social changes which have occurred since the ideal

Promise of Global Transparency 147

of transparency first emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, a time when access to information had truly revolutionary implications. It is in response to these difficulties that the advantages of ‘transparency as publicity’ are apparent. This aspect of transparency is apparent in Bentham’s work but, it is argued, is most clearly reflected in Kant’s ‘transcendental formula of public right,’ which states that ‘all actions affecting the rights of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is incompatible with their being made public’ (Kant 1970, 126). Such an account of transparency, in terms of public critical reflection and interpretation rather than individualistic data consumption, can help us to understand the emancipatory promise of transparency. However, it remains a promise rather than a reality, and the chapter concludes by highlighting the danger that identification of formal or empirical preconditions of global publicity leads back towards rather than away from the sorts of problems identified with ‘transparency as information.’

Technical Transparency and International Politics International politics appears to be distinguished by its opacity. Whereas in the domestic politics of liberal democracies information is increasingly widely available to ordinary citizens, the international appears to have remained, to a great extent, the realm of arcana imperii—secrets or mysteries of state. This has been an enduring source of frustration for various political theorists, reformists, and revolutionaries. The contours of modern transparency discourse are already apparent in the work of Jeremy Bentham, who first applied the term ‘transparency’ to politics (Hood 2006, 9). For Bentham, this goal was as desirable in the international as in the domestic sphere. Transparency, an ‘inspective architecture,’ could replace the administration of oaths as the basis for honesty in politics (Hood 2006, 10). In international politics this would bring an end to recurrent conflict, since the transparency of foreign policy to the public would provide a check on the tendency of ministers to ‘play at hazard with their fellows abroad, staking our lives and fortunes upon the throw’ (Bentham 1838–1843b). For Bentham, ‘secresy in the operations of the foreign department’ was ‘altogether useless, and equally repugnant to the interests of liberty and to those of peace.’ The idea that transparency is at once useful (in contrast with secrecy’s uselessness) and a source of emancipation (that is, liberty) remains at the heart of modern accounts. In addition to these two characteristics, according to Bentham, war and injustice are not unavoidable features of international politics but are partly the result of a lack of information, the provision of which might lead to a more just and peaceful state of affairs: [i]t is from ignorance and weakness that men deviate from the path of rectitude, more frequently than from selfishness and malevolence. This is

148 Matthew Fluck

fortunate; for the power of information and reason, over error and ignorance is much greater and much surer than that of exhortation, and all the modes of rhetoric, over selfishness and malevolence. (Bentham 1838–1843b) Along with the confluence of technical and emancipatory concerns, this vision of smoother, information-based political interaction has remained at the centre of modern transparency discourse.That the idea that secrecy was a source of war and corruption remained influential is apparent in the statements and writings of two men central in shaping the international relations of their age: Leon Trotsky and Woodrow Wilson. In 1917, before releasing details of secret negotiations between the tsarist government and European powers, Trotsky stated that ‘the abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy’ (Trotsky 1917). A few years earlier,Wilson had declared that ‘government should be all outside and no inside,’ and in 1918 the first of his ‘Fourteen Points’ called for ‘[o]pen covenants of peace openly arrived, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view’ (quoted in Hood 2006, 11). In the most obvious respects, however, calls for transparency in international politics met with little success. The USSR was ruled by the secret police, not the people. Wilsonian ‘idealism’ was proven to be disastrously naïve by the rise of militarism and fascism in the 1930s, the Second World War, and the superpower rivalry of the Cold War, developments which supposedly reflect the persistence of power politics and the need for state secrecy (Carr 2001). In fact, even Wilson had maintained the need for secret diplomatic conversations at Versailles (Hood 2006, 12). However, whilst the relative lack of information available to national or global publics (considered in the following section) cannot be denied, and as Wilson’s apparently contradictory position suggests, the story of international politics and transparency is more complex than that of an opaque realm either awaiting or resisting illumination. The story is at least partly that of theorists’ and practitioners’ increasing concern, already apparent in Bentham’s work, with the circulation of information and the widespread perception that the interests and behaviour of international actors can be conceived of in terms of their access to that information. Despite the promise of empowerment which accompanies talk of transparency, it is the connection between the ‘politics as information’ assumption and the pursuit of technical success which has dominated in international theory and practice. Transparency is not primarily understood as a source of emancipation external to international politics but as the label for extensive availability of information to the actors (often, but not necessarily, states) in a given system. Transparency is one point on a spectrum of possible states of information availability that runs all the way to total secrecy (Florini 2002, 13). Whether they are states, individuals, institutions, or corporations, actors are understood as rational

Promise of Global Transparency 149

information consumers and political systems in terms of the circulation of information. The assumption, which usually accompanies transparency discourse, that the beneficiaries of transparency are the public is almost entirely absent from postwar international relations. In some respects, this reflects the shortcomings of a discipline in which domestic politics and the progressive goals which might be pursued there are banished from the realm of ‘high politics’ (see, for example, Waltz 1959, 1979). At the same time, however, it demonstrates the extent to which, even as faith in its emancipatory powers increases, the pursuit of transparency might be more closely connected to the constitution of actors as rational information consumers than to popular empowerment. This section explores this technical (as opposed to ‘emancipatory’) transparency. Part 2 reconsiders the ways in which transparency might relate to the ‘public’ and in which it might still be said to be ‘emancipatory.’ International relations (IR) theorists have long emphasised the significance of the lack of information available to states in the international system. Realist IR scholars have argued that international politics is characterised by a ‘security dilemma’ which depends partly on ‘the extent to which uncertainty and incomplete information produce misperception of intentions’ (Herz, 1950; Kapchan and Kapchan 1991, 133). Since there is no other guarantor of their security in the anarchical international system, states must ensure their own security by accumulating power.1 This accumulation of power for defensive reasons is interpreted as a threat by others, who cannot determine whether the move is defensive or offensive and therefore ‘prepare for the worst.’ The vicious circle in which defensive actions are assumed to be offensive spins on, since, in the competitive world of international relations, complete security is never possible (Herz 1950, 157). Transparency is significant because, if the defensive intentions behind the accumulation of power can be illuminated, states need no longer assume the worst and the security dilemma might be mitigated (Finel and Lord, 2002, 143). It involves the availability of information necessary for actors to act successfully within the international system, in which success is equated with security. In the words of Ronald B. Mitchell, transparency describes the availability of information about potential adversaries’ capabilities and intentions. If information about potential adversaries is easy to obtain, then the world is said to be transparent. If information is difficult to acquire, the world is less transparent (or opaque) . . . The more transparency there is, the better a state can assess the threats it faces.The less transparency there is, the harder it is for a state to assess threats. (Mitchell 1998, 110) From this perspective, transparency has been especially important in the emergence of security cooperation, helping to increase confidence by reducing the possibilities for ‘cheating’ (Jervis 2002, 46). For example, some scholars have

150 Matthew Fluck

considered the role of transparency in the peace which accompanied the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century (Lindley 2003). Frequent communication and increased openness between the European powers allowed for more peaceful interaction and a more stable international system (Lindley 2003). In the twentieth century, transparency was important in arms control agreements, which involved various ‘verification’ measures to ensure compliance. International transparency has even been characterised as arms control’s contribution to international politics (Florini 1997, 51). In this view, transparency is not only useful to individual states, but also ensures the smooth functioning of the systems in which they interact, in this case the system of states (Lindley 2003, 228). Transparency does not necessarily lead to peace, however, since states might be confused by an excess of information, leading to miscalculation (Finel and Lord 2002; Schultz, 2002, 60). It has been suggested that this is a particular problem in relations with democratic states, where discussion of intentions is relatively open and visible to outsiders (Finel and Lord, 2002). Similar problems have been noted in domestic politics, where ‘naked transparency’ or straightforward openness does little to improve the quality of the political system, since the volume of information will likely be too great for most citizens to deal with or too complex for anyone other than experts to interpret (Fung, Graham, and Weil, 2007; Fung 2013). In response to such concerns, Archon Fung has argued that what matters is that actors have access to relevant, easily understandable information (Fung 2013). This ‘targeted transparency’ is defined in relation to certain objectives; individuals have information about matters affecting them in their capacity as consumers of certain goods or as recipients of certain government services (Fung et al. 2007; Fung 2013). The notion of targeted transparency captures the way in which, in any politically meaningful sense, transparency cannot be a matter of the availability of information in general but only of useful information tailored to particular roles and interests, which it helps to define. Implicit awareness of this wider point is reflected in IR discussions of transparency, where it is generally understood as ‘the availability of regime relevant information’ rather than simple openness (Mitchell 1998, 182). Thus, the transparency considered by many IR scholars lies in the relationship between states as members of particular systems or regimes, rather than in relation to other goals that they might have or to their citizens. Insofar as transparency has a function beyond serving the interests of individual states, it is that of ensuring the smooth functioning of the interstate system. Greater transparency does not it itself, therefore, radically transform the international system, and it is not necessarily aimed at improving accountability. Rather, transparency can serve the limited role of helping the systems through which states interact to function more effectively by making intentions and capabilities more apparent (Lindley 2003). It would be a mistake, however, to assume that there is nothing ‘progressive’ about international transparency or that its international role is confined to interstate politics. Increasingly, ‘centralized control systems’ of the kind which have

Promise of Global Transparency 151

characterised modern sovereign states are not capable of dealing with complex economic, environmental, and security issues (Florini 1997, 52). The result is tension between the more traditional interest of states in security, which requires that information be very tightly controlled and transparency limited and highly targeted (but not absent), and those of other spheres of activity—economic and scientific, for example—where the interests involved are served by more extensive transparency to a greater range of actors, in some instances including citizens. Under such conditions, the international politics of knowledge is better understood in terms of the practices of global governance, which have emerged to address complex transnational tasks. From this perspective, the international system is less state-centric, less opaque, and apparently more open to change. Even for states, transparency is a useful general tool with which to approach an increasingly complex international system (Florini 2002, 25–26). As the number of requirements states must meet multiplies and as their complexity increases, the task of monitoring and enforcing compliance becomes increasingly arduous. Transparency allows for much greater efficiency; powerful states can simply enforce transparency rather than engaging in the far more difficult task of enforcing compliance across national borders in specific areas (25–26). However, the development of structures of global governance has been closely linked to the emergence of transnational institutions and regimes—sets of rules and norms enabling cooperation in a particular policy area (Mitchell 1998, 181). Regimes, or the states of which they consist, ‘must either have or create information about the activities they seek to regulate and the impact of those activities on the ultimate goal of the regime’ (183). The importance of international transparency increased with the proliferation of international regimes in the late twentieth century. Initially, the primary concern was with arms control regimes, but financial, human rights, and environment regimes are now central to the international system. For example, since the end of the Cold War, increased interdependence, the liberalisation of the global economy, and concomitant reduction in the economic role of states has led to a relative decline in the desirability of secrecy and covert behaviour and a rise in the importance of shared knowledge and readily available financial information to a range of relevant actors (Wang and Rosenau 2001, 30). This has provided part of the context for the emergence of organisations such as Transparency International (30). Such regimes undermine, to some extent, the traditional international role of states. The transparency they involve is not targeted at traditional statist security concerns but towards policy areas and goals which are not easily confined within borders.2 This increases the significance of a range of international non-state actors, especially technical experts and inter- and non-governmental organisations. The characterisation of transparency as the availability of relevant information to the actors in a particular system remains central to many theorisations of global governance. For example, discussing environmental regimes, Mitchell states that

152 Matthew Fluck

transparency is manipulable via the regime’s information system—the actors, rules, and processes by which the regime collects, analyses, and disseminates information. The information systems consist of ‘inputs’ related to reporting on, monitoring, and verifying behavior and the state of the environment as well as ‘outputs’ related to aggregating, processing, evaluating, publicising, and responding to this information. (Mitchell 1998, 183) Thus, whilst the structures of global governance are more open and more complex than those of the interstate model, transparency is still frequently understood as involving a particular form of technical knowledge ‘targeted’ towards particular goals and roles. The information concerned is often highly technical and is created by and for the use of those occupying key roles in a given sphere of activity. The concept of ‘transparency’ is a key element in an account of politics as information-based interaction. The emphasis on transparency as a route to effective global governance, and more generally to technical success, is not confined to international theory. The model of human activity in which, whatever their role, actors are rational information consumers and political practice involves the circulation of relevant information reflects a widespread and resilient set of ideals and practices.That the promise of transparency has partly been that of information-based technical efficiency and that theoretical statements about transparency’s value cannot be easily severed from the pursuit of technical success in practice are already apparent in the case of Bentham. Whilst Bentham was concerned with the normative-emancipatory goals of liberty and the rule of law, his vision of transparency was also closely linked to his proposals for a new, rational approach to institutional design in the form of his infamous Panopticon (Bentham, 1838–1843a). As Michel Foucault famously argued, these designs reflect the emergence of new forms of social power in which the creation, control, and circulation of information enhance the efficiency with which power can be exercised (Foucault 1977). The social context for Bentham’s interest in transparency was the development of new, more efficient architectures of governance based on technical knowledge and new forms of subjectivity (Foucault 1977). The same combination of an emphasis on the political importance of information with a practical technical interest in efficient and effective interaction in a particular sphere is apparent in twenty-first century world politics. For example, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has stated that fiscal transparency—defined as the clarity, reliability, frequency, timeliness, and relevance of public fiscal reporting and the openness to the public of the government’s fiscal policy-making process—is a critical element of effective fiscal management. Fiscal transparency helps ensure that governments’ economic decisions are informed by a shared and accurate assessment of the current fiscal position, the costs and benefits of any policy changes, and the potential risks to the fiscal outlook. Fiscal transparency also provides

Promise of Global Transparency 153

legislatures, markets, and citizens with the information they need to make efficient financial decisions and to hold governments to account for their fiscal performance and their utilization of public resources. Finally, fiscal transparency facilitates international surveillance of fiscal developments and helps mitigate the transmission of fiscal spillovers between countries. (IMF 2012) Transparency is presented here as a matter of the circulation of relevant information in pursuit of efficiency, efficacy, and stability, in this case in the global financial system. All the relevant actors, whether they are institutions or individuals, are presented as providers or consumers of information which they use to make ‘efficient’ decisions and to monitor the performance of others. This dimension of transparency—publicity as a route to technical efficiency—is already apparent in Bentham’s Panopticon letters, where the prison is open to the public, which can therefore monitor the performance of the management (Bentham 1838–1843). Such statements promote ideals which enable practices such as the creation of information—in this case the conversion of economic interaction, material objects, and individuals into financial data—and the extension of their reach and influence into new areas—through IMF structural adjustment programmes, for example. Thus, in the international sphere, we find that the concept of transparency is tied to the controlled circulation of targeted information, which aids the decision-making of rational actors in specific spheres of activity. The pursuit of transparency depends on several simultaneously operating idealisations—of actors as the recipients and utilizers of information, of knowledge as the possession of information, of politics as the circulation of information. These are analytical devices with which scholars have sought to understand the international system, but they are also elements in the practical pursuit of effective governance. As a result, whilst, as shall be argued below, the assumptions accompanying the ‘transparency as information’ view are flawed, it is not entirely false—such assumptions are partly constitutive of contemporary global governance. By examining IR theories which ignore the connection generally assumed to exist between transparency and popular empowerment, it is possible to see that transparency’s international political role might be as much to ensure the smooth running and extension of existing structures as to empower citizens in relation to them. Belief in the transformative power of information for international politics certainly motivated early transparency discourse, but the idea that it might empower citizens has had surprisingly little role in discussions or pursuit of transparency in international politics.

Emancipatory Transparency Despite the technical character of many academic and institutional accounts of international transparency, the promise of empowerment and emancipation still accompanies the concept. However, once it is recognised that there is

154 Matthew Fluck

nothing inherently emancipatory about access to information, the task for those who believe that this promise might be redeemed is no longer to simply call for greater levels of transparency, but to try to identify the specifically emancipatory transparency which would empower citizens in relation to structures of governance. In this section it will be argued that this is no easy task. More specifically, the pursuit of transparency is best seen in terms of an ongoing struggle over the quality of knowledge which began with the Enlightenment, rather than simply for popular access to a greater quantity of information. This is, in part, a struggle about the nature of publicity, which has significant implications for the putative transnational public sphere (Fraser 2007). At first glance, the means by which emancipatory transparency might be salvaged seem straightforward: it simply involves granting the public access to the information circulating in the sorts of systems described above, thereby increasing accountability and reducing the ‘distance’ between the two. It might be a mistake to characterise international politics as entirely opaque, but this is a goal which has yet to be achieved; relations between citizens on the one hand and states, international institutions, and corporations on the other have been far from transparent in this way. In the context of widespread and growing belief in the importance of information in all spheres of activity and increasing domestic ‘freedom of information’ measures, restricted public access to information concerning international politics disempowers the majority of the world’s population in a manner which is increasingly hard to justify. This is the context for the frustrations which have driven recent acts of whistle-blowing and mass online leaking of diplomatic, business, or security documents. Overcoming this specific opacity would, it seems, give citizens a new level of influence over international institutions and practices which currently govern their lives. Access to information would help to create a critical global public. The emphasis on public scrutiny dominates transparency discourse and, as we have already seen, the question of technical success has not been pursued without any reference to the accountability of politicians and bureaucrats to the public. The idea that the public would ensure responsible behaviour was at the heart of Bentham’s calls for international transparency. Calls for open diplomacy more generally have not, of course, simply aimed at establishing a more efficient system of power balancing between states but rather at allowing publics, who were assumed to have every interest in avoiding war, to monitor and discipline their leaders. And whilst organisations such as the IMF might value efficiency, they still emphasise the importance of citizens’ holding governments and institutions to account. It would also be a mistake to suggest that the control and creation of information has lain exclusively in the hands of technocrats. For example, in the case of human rights regimes, it often fell to civil society organisations to uncover and provide information and to work with states and intergovernmental organisations to systematise transparency (Sikkink 1993, 422). A more spectacular example of

Promise of Global Transparency 155

global civil society control of information lies in the way in which Wikileaks has ‘tapped-in’ to the information systems of governments and private companies such as Stratfor. Moreover, because effective action in one sphere often depends on activity in another, such ‘tapping in’ can create ‘shortcuts’ across spheres. For example, flight information used by European air traffic control and gained through freedom of information requests has helped activists and academics to understand the CIA practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’ (Rendition Project n.d.). There seems, then, to be room for a global public of individuals and civil society organisations, whose ability to hold states and international institutions to account lies in access to information. One view is that global civil society might appropriate information from current systems and institutions in a process of ‘devolution’ (Florini 2002, 26).Transparency might thereby provide ‘the basis for a highly democratic, albeit nonelectoral, system of transnational governance based on the growing strength of global civil society’ (27). The basic assumption that access to information gives individuals access to the inner workings of political and economic practices, and thereby empowers them, is certainly warranted in relation to specific goals such as addressing corruption or revealing human rights abuses. However, the assumption that global access to information would be politically empowering in the more general sense of sustaining a global public sphere is problematic. The difficulty is that, as we have seen, even at a domestic level it is not clear that ‘naked transparency’ is empowering (Fung 2013). It is also far from clear that it improves the quality of political interaction. Onora O’Neill has pointed out that increased openness in the United Kingdom has not increased trust in government (O’Neill 2006, 75). Lawrence Lessig makes a similar point regarding the US, suggesting that improperly contextualised or interpreted information risks generating a distorted and pessimistic public understanding of US politics (Lessig 2009). The problem is partly the illusory promise of immediacy which accompanies transparency. Although transparency promises the removal of barriers concealing the secret workings of world politics, as suggested above, the information revealed has been created by and for experts pursuing technical goals in a specific sphere. It is always already socially mediated, reflecting specific socially defined goals, identities, and relationships. Where transparency is extended to the public, most citizens receive information which has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and repackaged by journalists, campaigners, or experts (O’Neill 2006). This is as true of radical transparency as of recent developments in ‘open government.’ For example, in the case of US State Department cables leaked to Wikileaks, the latter did not initially ‘data dump’ but worked with several news organisations and itself took on an editorial function (Leigh and Harding 2011). ‘Naked’ international transparency—nontargeted availability of information concerning the interactions of governments and the work of international organisations—would not in itself prove empowering, but rather baffling or overwhelming.

156 Matthew Fluck

Concerns about the limited use of naked transparency motivated Fung to formulate the notion of targeted transparency described above. He argues that there is a close link between targeted transparency and democratic politics (Fung 2013). Only targeted transparency could prove politically empowering. In this view, the issue for a global public would not be the availability of information in general, but the provision of understandable information about practices and institutions which impact the lives of ordinary citizens (Fung 2013). Individuals would have access to clear and relevant information about political and economic institutions and practices which might have an impact on them. The cumulative effect of such access would then be one of political empowerment. Whilst the idea of targeted transparency captures something of the unavoidably mediated and contextual nature of the knowledge gained through transparency, it retains the focus on transparency as information and with it a problematic set of epistemological and political assumptions. As argued above, it would be a mistake to simply dismiss this image of transparency and the ideals and assumptions accompanying it, since they are at least partly constitutive of global political reality. However, in epistemological terms, the account of knowledge implicit in this position is misleading, promoting the mistaken idea that information is detachable from social interaction and that knowledge is a process of ‘transferring content’ (O’Neill 2006, 81). In fact, information is created and becomes significant only with the emergence of particular kinds of institution. Its transmission requires that a specific set of identities, roles, and forms of interaction be developed and maintained. Thus, information, transmission, and consumption are not fundamental to knowledge as such but are (and could only be) elements within a historically and socially specific kind of knowledge. The philosophical shortcomings of such a position are not without political implications. Ironically, the emphasis on access to information serves to depoliticise knowledge. Firstly, elevation of the ideal of access to information places those pursuing emancipation and empowerment on the home turf of technical interests, which are given free rein to define the sort of knowledge which shapes the public sphere. Moreover, where the goal of knowledge is technical success rather than political insight and empowerment, no amount of the information produced is on its own sufficient to reveal the political and social struggle which created and sustains this ground—it is qualitatively unsuited to the task. To this extent, following Judith Butler, we might ask what transparency keeps ‘obscure’ (Butler 1999, Preface). The emphasis on information not only serves to conceal existing global power structures; it also helps to maintain them. The circulation of information is presented as the solution to disempowerment which it is at least partly responsible for producing. The previous section suggests that the political problem is not only, or even primarily, that systems of global governance are opaque but rather that the forms of epistemic practice they involve—the creation of systems through which information can circulate between rational actors in a controlled

Promise of Global Transparency 157

manner—reduce political interaction to a form of formalistic management. As is apparent in Bentham’s Panopticon proposals and the IMF’s transparency statement, the public sphere risks being reduced to an element in the processes of surveillance required by such management. The sense of disempowerment and alienation from structures and institutions which transparency promises to address is a product of this form of activity as much as of restricted access to information. The promise of empowerment associated with access to information belies the real compulsion which such systems can present. The hope that a global devolution of information might provide the basis for a new form of world politics is therefore misplaced, and its pursuit risks not strengthening but undermining or weakening any embryonic transnational public sphere. One response to such difficulties is to abandon the concept of transparency altogether, replacing it with alternatives such as ‘accountability’ (Sasaki 2013). Such an approach might be of some benefit, but it risks obscuring the extent to which existing structures and institutions are constituted partly through the epistemic practices and ideals described here. It also gives the impression that epistemic stances are simply a matter of theoretical choice. Whatever its shortcomings, the term ‘transparency’ stands in a web of ideals and practices which help to constitute international politics as it currently occurs, and the fact is that people do find the ideal appealing. It is better to avoid the assumption that a simple change of terminology can extract us from this web. The advantage of the concept of transparency, and the promise that it represents, lies in its recognition of the relationship between knowledge, practice, and power. This recognition is prior to the pursuit of any particular form of knowledge. The task facing transparency activists is that of redefining the politics of knowledge by reconfiguring this relationship, thereby freeing citizens from the current constraints. What is needed is a qualitative shift in epistemic practice. In fact, the promise of transparency has never been simply that of more extensive access to information; accompanying this specific ideal has been the broader promise of a new form of knowledge and space for interpretation which might provide the foundation for a critical public. Insofar as it represented a qualitative shift in political interaction, a politics based on information once looked to be the means to make good on this more fundamental promise. At the time Bentham was writing, and for long afterwards, the politics of knowledge governed by an ‘esoteric rationale’ according to which knowledge was the possession of the sovereign, who was the sole manifestation of ‘publicity’ (Bok 1982, 172). Francis Bacon, for example, claimed that some government secrets were so because they were ‘not fit to utter’ (172). Habermas cites Frederich II of Prussia’s declaration that ‘a private person has no right to pass public and even disapproving judgment . . . on sovereigns and courts . . . or to publish in print pertinent reports that he manages to obtain.’ A ‘private person’ was forbidden from doing so since he or she would, as a result of his or her social station, inevitably lack ‘complete knowledge of the circumstances and motives’ (Habermas 1989, 25). Under

158 Matthew Fluck

these circumstances, the increasing availability of information was genuinely emancipatory and represented a qualitative political shift to a new form of critical publicity. Such esoteric justifications for secrets of state might appear to be prevalent in international politics today, but they have been increasingly combined with a different politics of knowledge according to which information is, at least in principle, available to all relevant actors. In this new world, the latter can in principle be any citizen of the state in question. Thus, even previously top secret documents are eventually released to the public, albeit after several decades.3 Even where secrecy is ruthlessly defended, secret information circulates to vast numbers of relevant actors. For example, approximately five million individuals—government employees and private contractors—have access to secret or top secret documents in the US (Office of the Director of National Intelligence 2013). As the previous section demonstrates, the ideal of the controlled circulation of information contained the seeds of a new form of power and has long been appropriated by forces in international politics which, if not regressive, reflect little interest in empowering ordinary citizens. Whilst it is the circulation of information which has dominated international theory and practice, there is another image of transparency and its connection to publicity, involving a different set of ideals, through which it might be possible to salvage transparency’s promise of a new way of knowing. Such a vision can be found in the work of Bentham’s contemporary, Immanuel Kant, whose ‘transcendental formula of public right’ states that ‘all actions affecting the rights of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is incompatible with their being made public’ (Kant 1970, 126). This points to a form of ‘transparency as publicity’ rather than ‘transparency as information’ in which the rules according to which society is governed and the ends in pursuit of which action takes place are subjected to ‘the critical judgement of a public making use of its reason’ (Habermas 1989, 24). Such a view reflects recognition of the importance of interpretation and promotes an alternative form of mediation involving all citizens. In this view, transparency is not simply a matter of the availability of pre-existing information to rational actors, but also of the openness about motivations, interests, and goals necessary for the assessment of the purposes which knowledge and action serve. Such an account of transparency’s promise gives us a fuller picture of the goals of transparency movements. Such movements are not simply engaged in the pursuit of data, but in challenging accounts of events, triggering public debates, and promoting new norms (Sikkink 1993). Certainly access to information or the revelation of practices which had previously been denied or concealed is vital. In many cases, this will make it hard or impossible to continue with the practices in question, particularly those which are corrupt or illegal. However, for reasons outlined above, the broader goals of empowering individuals in relation to international political or economic systems require more than this. The wider goal

Promise of Global Transparency 159

is that governments and other institutions no longer shape the world according to pre-existing templates which, whatever the level of ‘transparency as information’ they can accommodate, are protected from critical scrutiny. Rather, citizens should be able to arrive at their own evaluation. Although not adequate on its own, this would open the way to a more responsive politics by removing the air of necessity which accompanies the prevailing structures of global governance. This creative, interpretive aspect of the promise of transparency is appealing in the international context of the highly restricted control of knowledge and remote and unresponsive institutions, and seems increasingly realistic with the apparent emergence of the space within which to build new forms of political interaction. The resources available for those wishing to engage in the sort of rational communication in question appear to be increasingly available. After all, the Internet does not simply provide a means of receiving information, but for sharing and collectively interpreting it. This is an important vision, but it would be a mistake to assume that ‘transparency as publicity’ is currently much more than a promise. Reflection on the promise of transparency gives us an idea of what it might involve, but this is only a suggestion.There is good reason for such caution. No attempt to definitively outline the basis upon which publicity can be pursued could entirely extract itself from the prevailing epistemic-political configuration, which is increasingly defined by ideals and practices associated with ‘transparency as information.’ The danger is that action based on the belief in readily available means with which to pursue the promise of transparency strengthens rather than challenges the structures which threaten to undermine it.This process has already occurred in the case of transparency as information—the challenge to the esoteric rationale is now an element in the management of global finance. However, the danger is also apparent in attempts to ground publicity on an alternative form of knowledge. For example, in Habermas’s account of the ideals involved in communicative interaction, the formalistic tendencies which characterise the modern ‘system’ he seeks to defend against—a form of instrumental activity akin to that outlined in the first part of this chapter—re-emerge under the guise of rational, unhindered public argumentation (Bernstein 1995, 106). More specifically, Habermas’s suggestion such that interaction might involve nothing but the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ can be traced to the same attitude which would strip life of all that would interfere with the reduction of individuals and objects to ‘information’ (105). As Habermas himself pointed out in his early work on the subject, Western public spheres have been penetrated by the goals of the market and the state, the pursuit of which are closely linked to the politics of knowledge outlined in the first part of this chapter (Habermas, 1989). Indeed, this process partly accounts for the ambiguous character of transparency outlined here; the promise of critical knowledge and the space for new interpretations and practices it requires are appropriated by technical interests. Under these conditions, institutional declarations of transparency generate a veneer of empowerment whilst the

160 Matthew Fluck

practical pursuit of transparency all too often furthers the penetration of technical practice into as yet unconquered areas. Certainly, communication via the Internet promises interaction rather than mass cultural consumption. However, it remains prey to the same formalising market tendencies which Habermas identifies in older forms of mass media. Transnational publicity is not, then, simply a pre-existing resource which can be chosen over technical forms of interaction. Indeed, if anything, the embryonic transnational public is all the more vulnerable, since it lacks both a wellestablished citizenry and a clearly defined target for public critique of the kind historically represented by national governments (Fraser 2007, 7). In the absence of such foundations, and if seen as a ready-made model for action rather than as a promise of something, the nature of which is not yet fully apparent, transparency as publicity risks being all the more reliant on practices and identities better suited to the pursuit of technical transparency. It is, therefore, at the global level that it is necessary to hold most tightly to the promise of transparency rather than seeking to achieve it by turning to the technical practices through which it is routinely pursued and through which it has attained the status of a modern article of faith.

Conclusion For all its promise, it is necessary to approach transparency with caution. Whilst we should be sensitive to the hopes associated with the concept, we should also be conscious of its practical function, which has been in part to smooth the operation of the very structures in response to which it has been seized upon. Access to information is extremely important in undermining the abuse and corruption which thrives on secrecy, but it is no longer a route to the fundamentally new form of politics required if citizens are to be genuinely empowered in relation to current forms of global governance. It only seems to provide one if we accept as exhaustive the implicit model according to which knowledge is equated with the circulation of information. As we have seen, acceptance of this model is not only a theoretical matter, but also a practical step which helps to maintain and extend current structures of governance. In this technical form, transparency obscures the extent to which knowledge is socially mediated and helps to reduce politics to the exchange of information necessary for effective and efficient management. To this extent, the pursuit of transparency can reflect resignation or capitulation to the sources of disempowerment. Identification of the extent of the challenge faced by those hoping to redeem the emancipatory promise of transparency should not be mistaken for pessimism, however. None of the above suggests that the pursuit of transparency is futile or that it has not led to genuine achievements in overcoming corruption, human rights abuses, or political domination. Rather, it reveals that the promise of transparency lies not in freeing up pre-existing information or in any ready-made

Promise of Global Transparency 161

global public sphere but in the widespread, albeit implicit, recognition that new ways of knowing, in which interpretation and creativity would not be squeezed out by the pursuit of technical control, might be possible.The pursuit of transparency reflects the belief that knowledge is not a gift bestowed upon citizens by the institutions which govern them, but might involve the pursuit of genuinely new forms of global interaction and organisation.

Notes 1 The Hobbesian assumption that a guarantor is necessary for the rule of law has been widely challenged in international relations (Bull, 1995;Wendt, 1992). 2 This is not to say that states have no interest in transparency in other capacities. For example, the 2013 G8 summit in Lough Erne, Scotland, focused on global financial transparency partly in relation to effective taxation. 3 Recent examples include documents relating to British colonial forces, torture of civilians in Kenya, and the CIA’s role in the removal of Mossadegh in Iran.

Bibliography Bentham, Jeremy. 1838–1843a. ‘Panopticon; or, the Inspection-House.’ In The Works of Jeremy Bentham, edited by John Bowring. Edinburgh: William Tait. Accessed November 3, 2012. http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show. php%3Ftitle=1925&chapter=116372&layout=html&Itemid=27. Bentham, Jeremy. 1838–1843b. ‘A Plan for a Universal and Perpetual Peace.’ In The Works of Jeremy Bentham, edited by John Bowring. Edinburgh: William Tait. Accessed November 3, 2012. http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1921/114303 on 2013-12-16. Bernstein, J. M. 1995. Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory. London: Routledge. Bok, Siselia. 1982. Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation. New York: Pantheon. Bull, Hedley. 1995. The Anarchical Society. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble, 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Carr, E. H. 2001. The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Finel, Bernard I., and Kristin M. Lord. 2002. ‘The Surprising Logic of Transparency.’ In Power and Conflict in the Age of Transparency, edited by Bernard I. Finel and Kristin M. Lord, 137–180. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Florini, Ann. 1997. ‘A New Role for Transparency.’ Contemporary Security Policy 18 (2): 51–72. ———. 2002. ‘The End of Secrecy.’ In Power and Conflict in the Age of Transparency, edited by Bernard I. Finel and Kristin M. Lord, 13–28. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin. Fraser, Nancy. 2007. ‘Transnationalising the Public Sphere.’ Theory, Culture, Society 24 (4): 7–30. Fung, Archon. 2013. ‘Infotopia: Unleashing the Democratic Power of Transparency.’ Politics and Society 41 (2): 183–212. Fung, Archon, Mary Graham, and David Weil. 2007. Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Translated by Thomas Burger. London: Polity.

162 Matthew Fluck

Herz, John. 1950. ‘Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma.’ World Politics 2 (2): 157–80. Hood, Christopher. 2006. ‘Transparency in Historical Perspective.’ In Transparency: the Key to Better Governance?, edited by Christopher Hood and David Heald, 3–23. Oxford: Oxford University Press. International Monetary Fund. 2012. ‘Fiscal Transparency, Accountability, and Risk.’ Accessed November 5. http://www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2012/080712.pdf. Jervis, Robert. 2002. ‘From Balance to Concert: A Study of International Security Cooperation.’ In Power and Conflict in the Age of Transparency, edited by Bernard I. Finel and Kristin M. Lord, 29–56. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kant, Immanuel. 1970. ‘Perpetual Peace.’ In Kant’s Political Writings, translated and edited by Hans Reiss, 93–130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kupchan, Charles A., and Clifford A. Kupchan. 1991. ‘Concerts, Collective Security, and the Future of Europe.’ International Security 16 (1): 114–61. Leigh, David, and Luke Harding. 2011. Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. London: Guardian Books. Lessig, Lawrence. 2009. ‘Against Transparency.’ The New Republic, October 9. Accessed November 3, 2012. http://www.law.utah.edu/wp-content/uploads/WeekOneLessig.pdf. Lindley, Dan. 2003. ‘Avoiding Tragedy in Power Politics: The Concert of Europe, Transparency and Crisis Management.’ Security Studies 13 (2): 195–229. Mitchell, Roland B. 1998. ‘ Sources of Transparency: Information Systems in International Regimes.’ International Studies Quarterly 42: 109–30. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 2013. 2012 Report on Security Clearance Determinations. Accessed February 20, 2014. https://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/intel/ clear-2012.pdf. O’Neill, Onora. 2006. ‘Transparency and the Ethics of Communication.’ In Transparency: the Key to Better Governance?, edited by Christopher Hood and David Heald, 75–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rendition Project. n.d. ‘Flight Data.’ Accessed January 10, 2014. http://www. therenditionproject.org.uk/documents/flight-data.html. Sasaki, David. 2013. ‘Beyond Technology for Transparency.’ Accessed January 12, 2013. http://davidsasaki.name/2013/01/beyond-technology-for-transparency/. Schultz, Kenneth A. 2002. ‘Domestic Political Competition and Transparency in International Crises: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.’ In Power and Conflict in the Age of Transparency, edited by Bernard I. Finel and Kristen M. Lord, 57–82. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sifry, Micah. 2011. WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. London: Yale University Press. Sikkink, Kathryn. 1993. ‘Human Rights, Principled Issue-Networks, and Sovereignty in Latin America.’ International Organization 47(3): 411–41. Trotsky, Leon. 1917. ‘Statement on the Publication of the Secret Treaties.’ Accessed November 5, 2014. https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/foreignrelations/1917/November/22.htm. Waltz, Kenneth. 1959. Man, the State and War. Columbia: Columbia University Press. ———. 1979. Theory of International Politics. Waveland, IL: Waveland Press. Wang, Hongying, and James Rosenau. 2001. ‘Transparency International and Corruption as an Issue of Global Governance.’ Global Governance 7: 25–49. Wendt, Alexander. 1992. ‘Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics.’ International Organization 46 (2): 391–425.

PART III

Democratic Critique

7KLVSDJHLQWHQWLRQDOO\OHIWEODQN

9 NEOLIBERALISM, THE STREET, AND THE FORUM Noëlle McAfee

My Greek Uncle Rathos spent two months living in the dark. In September 2011, in response to pressure from its European creditors, the Greek government imposed a new property tax to be paid via electric utility bills.1 A construction contractor hit hard by the financial crisis, my uncle couldn’t make those tax payments, and so his electricity was cut off. Reportedly, 350,000 other households suffered the same fate (Keep Talking Greece 2013).This was just one in a series of austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other lenders to deal with the supposed debt crisis: namely, that Greece’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product was too high.2 But rather than find ways to pump up Greece’s economy and thus its GDP, the IMF and Eurozone leaders have focused on bringing down its debt. Austerity measures towards this end have included wage cuts and layoffs of civil service workers, reduced job security and severance pay for private sector workers, reduced benefits, and imposed budget cuts, all of which have exacerbated unemployment levels that, as of this writing, are about 27 percent overall and 60 percent for those under twenty-five (Kitsantonis 2013). Additionally Greece was called on to engage in ‘structural change,’ that is, to make its economy more conducive to market processes via methods such as privatisation.3 There is no alternative, the people are told: you have to get your house in order, and the only way to do this is to increase taxes, privatise government agencies, and cut government spending. ‘There is no alternative,’ a favourite phrase of Maggie Thatcher’s when she deregulated and privatised Great Britain’s economy, now has its own acronym, TINA. And it is the iron logic guiding fiscal public policies ever since Maggie Thatcher’s day, our neoliberal era. But of course there are alternatives. For one, rather than try to wrest from a struggling economy every euro that could go to lowering its debt, efforts could be made to build the economy. The bigger the GDP, the lower the debt-to-GDP

166 Noëlle McAfee

ratio. But this Keynesian way of thinking is passé. The current thinking calls for no thinking at all. Why think over vexed and fraught and divisive issues when we can simply invoke an economic truism: bring down government spending and let markets flourish? That is the mantra of neoliberalism. But whatever the mantra or truism—previous eras and societies each had their favourites, including the Keynesian one itself—whenever one is invoked and discussion is ended, we are in the midst of an ‘anti-political’ era, a bad place for a polity (or union of polities, such as the EU) that considers itself democratic; yet this is where we are now.4 And that is the problem this chapter addresses. I do this by leaning hard on what the word politics actually means, which I will explain shortly, and by rethinking the relationship between three somewhat idealised (by me, for the purpose of this chapter) realms of contemporary political communities: the neoliberal political halls of state, the people on the streets (‘the social’ or social movements), and the people in deliberative political forums (‘the political,’ which could include both elected officials who dare to think and citizens who want to think through the difficulties too, that is, to engage in the political). Hence the title: neoliberalism, the street, and the forum. The major philosopher I engage here is Hannah Arendt. Perhaps no other thinker has conceptualised the political so robustly yet in the process so demeaned what social movements do. Here I engage her thinking and try to think with her and beyond her to show that the relationship between the social and political is not oppositional but complementary, and that together they can powerfully counter neoliberalism’s anti-politics. Establishing the right complementarity between contestation and deliberation is crucial for finding a path out of the gridlock of the politics of ‘no alternative.’ I proceed as follows: first, I say a bit more about neoliberalism’s anti-politics; second, I consider the tensions between the social and the political; third, I reconsider what political deliberation is; fourth, I give a brief account of the political writ large; and fifth, I close with a section on what the social activist contributes to politics: the challenge to think about what we are doing.

Neoliberalism’s Anti-politics In the years between the Great Depression and the late 1970s, ‘we were all Keynesians’ and it was common practice in developed countries to regulate business and trade, from the US Glass-Steagall Act that separated banking from venture capital to the trade barriers that benefited domestic products and labour (see ‘The Economy: We Are All Keynesians Now’ 1965). But Margaret Thatcher helped put an end to all that, privatising the public sector, dismantling regulations, and lowering trade barriers. Leaders of other countries (from the US to China to Argentina) followed suit. Today, supposedly, we are, if not all neoliberals, definitely either suffering or benefiting from neoliberalism. Those at the very upper echelons of the income distribution keep getting richer while the poor are as poor

Neoliberalism, the Street, and the Forum 167

as ever (R. A., J. S., and L. P.). The financial collapse of 2008 managed to further transfer funds from the very poor and the middle class to the ultra-rich. As David Harvey puts it, neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. (Harvey 2005, 18 of 710) Neoliberalism is both a set of ideas and a practice, the first pristine, if heartless, and the second pragmatically sullied.5 Ideally, according to neoliberalism, markets should function without government interference, but in practice markets fail and governments come to the rescue—not so much to save the citizenry but to save the bankers and chieftains of business.6 During the post-Depression era of regulation, economies the world over were relatively stable, and so neoliberals began arguing that crises were behind us and it was time to deregulate and unfetter the market (Stiglitz 2010). But it was the regulations that led to stability, as Stiglitz notes, and without them the world has experienced one economic crisis after another.7 Nonetheless, neoliberalism has become hegemonic. World leaders, rather than wrestle with these problems on their own terms, defer to neoliberal measures as technocratic solutions to social and economic problems. For example, European leaders have insisted on austerity measures to deal with the economic crises in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, despite evidence that austerity measures only aggravate matters—and that the problems were effects of neoliberalist policies (Herndon, Ash, and Pollin 2013). Worse, these decisions were not made through the democratic process afforded by the European Union, that is, in the European Parliament, but rather behind closed doors by a few select heads of state. Rather than be led by public will formed in a democratic process, they invoked technocratic market solutions. Commenting on this development, Jürgen Habermas told a reporter, ‘For the first time in the history of the EU, we are actually experiencing a dismantling of democracy’ (Diez 2011). Neoliberalism depoliticises. As Benjamin Barber clearly explains, politics is the practice of a collectivity deciding what to do in the midst of uncertainty and disagreement (Barber 1984). Politics engages that uncertainty; it takes seriously that people have different points of view and values and concerns. Democratic politics tries to find a way for all those affected to come to some kind of agreement about what ought to be done in the midst of all this uncertainty and disagreement. But neoliberalism denies any uncertainty. It offers up a seeming truth: that unfettered markets create more prosperity for all. So when political leaders turn to neoliberal ‘solutions’ rather than admit to uncertainty and the need for public deliberation

168 Noëlle McAfee

and choice, in the rich Aristotelian sense,8 they are depoliticising these very political matters. Not only are neoliberal policies often unsound and antidemocratic, they are blind and deaf to the suffering of those they harm. And the parties that created the problems are often rewarded while the innocent suffer. Moreover, neoliberal policies reaffirm the status quo, and the presuppositions of neoliberalism go unexamined. Those in power come to take it as ‘natural’ and ‘just the way it is’ and, because they are largely personally unaffected, they cannot see what is amiss with the dominant order. But those adversely affected can see the harm firsthand, especially once they have joined together with others likewise affected. Enrique Dussel describes the process by which those who are victims of a dominant system can become critically conscious of its failings and able to imagine new alternatives (Dussel 2008, 2013). These victims become socio-historical actors able to articulate and chart a new direction. But because what they are calling for can sound so alien and unnatural to the norms of the dominant order, they can be dismissed as irrational, strident, or even dangerous. In another idiom, we can call these critical communities of victims protesters, dissidents, activists, and social movements. They are the people of Occupy Wall Street and Puerta del Sol. They are the ‘Dreamers’ in the United States, young undocumented immigrants who dared to march in public. They are the advocates for the plight of women, gays, transgender people, animals, ecosystems, and others. If they manage to capture the public imagination, they can put new items on the public agenda, which may then be taken up by a political process that will then deliberate on a much wider and far-reaching range of alternatives than it would have otherwise. As a result, policies that might have been previously barely thinkable by the body politic can become a reality. A perfect example is the movement in the US for marriage equality. Social movements have made great strides in many countries. But as neoliberalism escapes national borders, as it becomes globalised, the challenges multiply. Increasingly, there are fewer ways for political processes, including both social movements and deliberative bodies, to hold globalised neoliberal forces accountable. Moreover, there is much tension between social movements and deliberative bodies, with the latter accusing the former of being uncivil and the former accusing the latter of being beholden to the dominant order. The remainder of this chapter offers a way out of this impasse.

Tensions between the Social and the Political At the outset of this book, the editors write that, ‘while the streets have seen the most intensive social mobilisation of the past decades, nothing meaningful follows in policy.’ This may seem paradoxical at first. In the past decade, millions have taken to the streets the world over in protest of one thing or another. Are these demonstrations political? In one sense, surely: demonstrators are expressing

Neoliberalism, the Street, and the Forum 169

hopes for decisions and actions to be taken in one direction or another. But in another sense, they are not: politics is collective choice, not merely expressions of preference, however strongly expressed, over what should be done (McAfee 2013). But the point the editors were making was not about social movements but about the realm in which ‘judgment and responsibility, . . . imagination and change’ take place, that is, the space for political deliberation and action. And in a robust democracy, it would begin at the local, ward level and bubble all the way up to representative assemblies. Clearly Angela Merkel and other world leaders are not engaged in anything like this kind of political imaginative action, as they are captives of the neoliberal dogma of unavoidable ‘structural change.’ I will broaden the frame of politics shortly to identify how social movements fit into the political, but for now I want to focus very specifically on the meaning of what is quintessentially political. For Arendt, the political has the following features: (1) Human beings distinguish themselves (become a ‘who’ and not just a ‘what’) through their speech and action in the company of others, others who may record these words and deeds to save them from futility. (2) Political actions create something new, and no one can predict what they will trigger. (3) When people in all their plurality come together in the space of appearance, a form of power emerges, not strength and certainly not violence, but a power potential that can be used toward world-disclosing and world-building activities. ‘Power is actualised only where word and deed have not parted company,’ Arendt writes, ‘where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities’ (Arendt 1958, 200). (4) And a fourth point, less explicit in any single text of Arendt’s but drawn from the whole, is that politics calls for ‘thinking without banisters,’ that is, without appealing to any given truth or foundation. (This is what is problematic in the transideological policy consensus of neoliberal structural reforms, that is, labour and product market liberalisation and deregulation.) And it really calls for thinking, as in the two-in-one activity when I question what I am thinking one moment and then turn it around and think about it from another side. Nothing can be taken as a given, as ‘just the way it is.’ In collectively fashioning our world with others, there are no antecedent metaphysical or even technical truths to lean on. We are left with wooing the consent of others on the basis only of how compelling our vision might be.9 So politics for Arendt is a communicative process of thinking and deciding and creating new realities.10 So the very essence of politics is, as Aristotle, Arendt, and many others have noted, deciding what ought to be done on matters of common concern in the midst of uncertainty and disagreement. ‘A political question thus takes the form,’ as Benjamin Barber put it in 1984, ‘What shall we do when something has to be done that affects us all, we wish to be reasonable, yet we disagree on means and ends and are without independent grounds for making the choice?’ (120–21). Barber points out that the heart of politics is deciding what action to take ‘under

170 Noëlle McAfee

the worst possible circumstances, when the grounds of choice are not given a priori or by fiat or by pure knowledge’ (120–21). That is, politics is the practice of deciding what to do when we have no basis for agreement. Echoing Arendt, Barber writes, ‘To be political is thus to be free with a vengeance—to be free in the unwelcome sense of being without guiding standards or determining norms yet under an ineluctable pressure to act.’ Without a standard and in the midst of a plurality of points of view, politics is the practice of wooing the consent of others, of debating and deliberating, weighing and choosing, imagining and constituting new futures. For Arendt, politics is decidedly not about exercising coercion or violence to get one’s way. Rather it is about exercising public freedom in concert with others to decide the future. It will also involve (to draw in some of Arendt’s later work on judgment) appreciating others’ different perspectives and trying to offer directions that people with these other points of view would agree to in order to successfully woo their consent. For Arendt, then, all real politics is participatory and deliberative. In short, it squares very nicely with theories of deliberative democracy, which describe how people collectively work through their differences to decide what to do. A problem in Hannah Arendt’s theory of politics emerges, though, when she tries to clarify its meaning by contrasting it to the private and to the social (Arendt 1958). The private, taking place in the household, is, she argues, the space for attending to bodily needs and the reproduction of life.The public space of appearance, namely the city, is for her where politics takes place, that is, the speech and action through which things will be decided. Over time, the economic, reproductive activity that had occurred in the household moved out into society, into guilds, factories, and other visible spaces. But not everyone’s needs were met, and eventually the wretched poor would make their demands (Arendt 1963, 109–13). Today we would call these demands social justice claims and consider them to be political demands. But Arendt drew a bright line between questions of need and matters of politics, often in ways that are quite shocking and problematic (for example, her opposition to forced desegregation). Hence it is more difficult to tie together what Arendt meant by the social and social movements today. But I will try. For Arendt, the rise of the social was the process whereby things that had been hidden in the household—intimacy, labour, and work, that is, all reproductive and productive life—seeped into visible society and started eroding both the private and public life (Arendt 1958, 45). The ‘life process itself ’ has over the past few centuries ‘been channeled into the public real’ so that most people are now seen in terms of what they do for a living rather than how they distinguish themselves as citizens (Arendt 1958, 45–47). Or they come into the public square beseeching others to attend to their bodily needs. The social, Arendt worries, with its attention to the mere reproduction and production of life, has eclipsed the political. The social’s focus on mere life aims for liberation from deprivation, whereas the political aims for collective participation in creating something new.

Neoliberalism, the Street, and the Forum 171

Arendt’s point is partially true. Many social movements are focused on equal access to the necessities of the ‘life process itself,’ including movements against poverty and for fair housing, nutrition, clean water, and so forth. Other movements are for something ‘higher’ than that, especially those movements aimed at political freedom, the right to vote, the right to be treated with dignity. Unfortunately, Arendt did not appreciate how much ‘mere life’ was fundamental and certainly a precondition for being a citizen. Nor did she anticipate how neoliberalism’s austerity measures—including cutting off people’s electricity in the dead of winter—would threaten life itself. On this point, the contemporary Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel rightly argues that life is the foundation for any kind of politics, and the deprivation of life is what often kick-starts political engagement and any real social transformation (Dussel 2008, 2013). Moreover, Arendt’s bright line between the social and the political misses the connection between the two. Richard Bernstein notes that Arendt ‘does not do justice to the fact that every revolutionary movement in the modern age has begun with a growing sense of some grave social injustice, with the demand for what she calls liberation’ (Bernstein 1986, 255). Nonetheless, I think the Arendtian point to hang on to is that, to be political, social justice claims are not only about the maintenance and reproduction of life itself but also about having standing in a community to help shape that community’s future. We can disagree with Arendt about whether or not social justice claims are political, but I think we should agree with her that these do not exhaust the meaning of politics. There is more to politics than attending to needs. Another distinction between the social and political is important: where the political is deliberative, the social is not, at least not in broad strokes. Social movements—whether the malheureux of the French Revolution which Arendt denounces or demonstrators on the streets outside World Trade Organization meetings—in general are very suspicious of deliberative decision-making.11 This is not to say that they do not value deliberation within their own movements— Occupy Wall Street was known for its wide-ranging and long discussions. Rather, they act and demonstrate in opposition to some aspect of the prevailing system; they are rarely interested in deliberating with representatives of the system—though they might agree to meet to convey their ‘demands.’ Social movements are sometimes the flip side of neoliberalism. Each side will have its pet solution and resist any call for wrestling politically—as defined above—with the matter. Many social movements square with interest group politics, which sees politics largely as a zero-sum game with parties fighting over scarce resources and action being largely strategic and communication rhetorical. With that kind of political imaginary, activists in social movements would think political deliberation to be foolish. Deliberative theory arose as an alternative to that mindset (Barker, McAfee, and McIvor 2012, 4–8) and tried to create an imaginary of politics as legitimate collective choice. Where interest group politics is a naked

172 Noëlle McAfee

clash of power, most deliberative theorists hope for something closer to Arendt’s account of the political. Whether there can be any kind of complementary relationship between the street and the forum depends a great deal on how political deliberation is understood. There are a number of approaches, from the strictly rationalist one that focuses on reason-giving to those that are more open to emotion, narrative, and plurality of perspectives. The reason-giving approach is better known and draws the following sharp distinctions about what counts as deliberative:12 •

• • • •

Rhetoric vs. Reason. Where movements and interest groups use language strategically to manipulate audiences, deliberative bodies should aim for the ‘unforced force of the better argument.’ Passion vs. Being Objective. People are mobilised by their emotions and passions, but deliberation calls for a cool, detached approach to public matters. Uncivil vs. Civil. Where the activist is strident and disrespectful of public order, the deliberator is respectful of other reasonable points of view. Particular vs. Universal. Activists aim to improve their own lot, while deliberation calls for arriving at policies that would benefit all. Dissensus vs. Consensus. Those who are serious about deliberation are more hopeful about the possibility of coming to some mutual agreement.

It would seem, then, that these two approaches to politics are at loggerheads. But this is only the case if we adopt a very narrow understanding of what political deliberation is. There is an alternative account that I find both more plausible and promising, which I turn to now.

Political Deliberation: Reason-Giving or Choicework? The philosophical literature on deliberative democracy is vast, but there are two constants throughout virtually all of it. First is the idea that a collectivity of free and equal citizens can and should address together political questions of the form, ‘What ought we to do?’ As Habermas puts it, this question arises ‘when certain problems that must be managed cooperatively impose themselves or when action conflicts requiring consensual solutions crop up’ (Habermas 1996, 158). Second is the idea that deliberation on such questions is first and foremost a cognitive enterprise in which participants engage in the back-and-forth of reason-giving. As James Bohman writes in a recent essay, at the core of deliberative democracy, in any of its forms, is the idea that deliberation essentially involves publicly giving reasons to justify decisions, policies or laws, all of which are the means by which citizens constitute and regulate their common life together. (Bohman 2009, 28)

Neoliberalism, the Street, and the Forum 173

Or, as Habermas writes, ‘Handling these questions in a rational way demands an opinion- and will-formation that leads to justified decisions about the pursuit of collective goals and the normative regulation of life in common’ (Habermas 1996, 158). I share the first idea: that deliberative democracy focuses on collectively addressing questions of what should be done. But I depart considerably from the second view—that deliberation is primarily a cognitive process of justification via reason-giving, or that we must ‘handle’ these questions ‘in a rational way.’ I disagree because I think cognition is only a small part of what goes on in deliberative practice. I see deliberation as a means of inquiry and integration: by inquiry I mean starting with uncertainty and actively trying to gauge what road is better, and by integration I mean appreciating the plurality of views in the room and trying to fashion them together in something like Kant and Arendt’s enlarged mentality. The reason-giving focus misses what is central to making difficult choices both personally and politically. No doubt there are moments in a deliberative process when deliberators will offer reasons in support of their views, but these are just moments in a process whose character is fundamentally different. Choice and will formation are not simply cognitive matters. Certainly, reasons enter in, but more central are matters of purpose, value, identity, and aspiration; these are deeply affective, and the process of choosing is not done until we have come out the other side, reconciled and willing to go down one life path rather than another. While it may be possible for people to deliberate dispassionately, rationally, and coolly in an attempt to reach universally acceptable norms and policies, it is hardly necessary for them to do so. Based on my own experience of observing and convening many deliberative forums, the political aim of deliberation is to achieve a shared sense of what ought to be done (see McAfee 2004, 2008, 2013).Therefore, it is important for deliberators to work through the costs and consequences of various courses of action. But this notion is nearly entirely absent from any of the deliberative theory literature in the Habermasian and Rawlsian veins. In that literature, the focus is on reasoned argumentation among free and equal citizens who are motivated to reach a rational consensus (Cohen 1999, 74–75). Some theorists would bar the door against anyone coming in with any airs or gripes (e.g., Gutmann and Thompson 1996).That would effectively exclude half the citizenry. A key difference between the reason-focused deliberations imagined by theorists and the ones I have observed (especially those of the National Issues Forums; see NIFI.org) is that the latter are led by moderators trained in the process of ‘choicework,’ a term coined by Kettering Foundation president David Mathews, who had been in conversation with the public opinion researcher Daniel Yankelovich about developments in more participatory democracy.13 In an earlier version of the six democratic practices described below, Yankelovich identifies three stages: (1) consciousness raising, (2) working through, and (3) resolution (Yankelovich 1991, 63–65). The first is the early stage of people giving problems a name and making them meaningful; the second is the deliberative process of

174 Noëlle McAfee

deciding what ought to be done about the problem; and the third is the process of coming to a public judgment and will on the matter.Yankelovich specifically uses the psychoanalytic language of ‘working through’ to make sense of what happens in deliberation when people are wrestling with choices, values, and trade-offs. ‘When people are caught in cross pressures, before they can resolve them it is necessary to struggle with the conflicts and ambivalences and defenses they arouse’ (Yankelovich 1991, 64). Choicework is the process of moving from initial and often erratic public opinion to more reflective and often stable public judgment. As an opinion researcher,Yankelovich had seen how it could take decades for the public to go through this process. Holding public fora that ‘force a choice’ is a way to condense this process and move the public along. Any path taken means that another will not be. In choosing, we have to deal with consequences and mourn the losses of what we choose not to pursue. This is a truly difficult and momentous aspect of choice. To appreciate it, one needs to recognise that much political choice is not simply a choice between what one group wants versus what another wants. Often any one of us has to choose because we cannot have it all, no matter how much we want to.We have to decide, and going through the process of decision involves mourning the path not taken. Any community that is undergoing a difficult choice is dealing with deep questions of identity. It is when we—individuals, communities, peoples—are undergoing difficult choices that we find that what is difficult is at bottom a question of what kind of people we want to be. The question of immigration simmering in the US is fundamentally a question about what kind of nation the US should be, in terms of ethnicity, generosity, cohesiveness, openness, and all. Ultimately, whether on the immigration debate or on school policies, in our difficult choices we are shaping the contours of our common world. As I discuss elsewhere, this is a deeply affective process (McAfee 2013). It calls for understanding others’ points of view, which invites participants to talk about their own stories and how they came to hold their views. It also involves understanding what is at issue in the issue they are addressing, that is, how they are personally connected to it and what is at stake for them. These can be emotionally charged deliberations. What keeps them civil is not that people are being polite to each other (though that’s a nice thing) but that they are oriented to things having to do with civic—that is, public—life. So even angry protesters can be considered civil. Even without strong dichotomies between the social and the political, the differences between social movements and deliberative bodies are real, with the first being oriented more to social and political criticism and raising public awareness of a problem and the second being oriented more to deliberatively choosing what to do. But even as different as they are, the differences are not necessarily oppositional. As I will show in the remainder of this chapter, the relationship can be complementary: each is an important moment in a larger democratic political process that is able to effectively challenge the technocratic politics of ‘no alternative.’

Neoliberalism, the Street, and the Forum 175

The Political Writ Large The more that elected officials defer to market solutions, the more important it is for the public sphere to become political—political in the sense of identifying what the important challenges are, deliberating and deciding what ought to be done in the midst of uncertainty and plurality of views, and developing public judgment and will about matters of common concern. Absent such public will, leaders can continue their neoliberal policies unchallenged, their legitimacy unquestioned. The divergence between public will and elite decision-making leads to legitimation crises that demand resolution. In this light, it is, I think, important to see the specific functions that social movements and deliberative public bodies can play as part of a robust public political process that can counter the depoliticising actions of government leaders. By seeing the difference between them, it is possible to see how they perform distinct functions in a larger political process. Moreover, we should see these different functions taking place as different moments, and any one of us can shift from one function to another, from mobilising to deliberating to organising. The Kettering Foundation (KF) has identified six ‘democratic practices’ that citizens should engage in for democracy to ‘work as it should.’14 These nicely delineate the various moments of democratic public work.The following description of these steps is KF’s language: 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

Naming problems  to reflect the things people consider valuable and hold dear, not expert information alone. Framing issues for decision-making that not only takes into account what people value but also fairly lays out all the major options for acting—that is, with full recognition of the advantages and disadvantages of each option. Making decisions deliberatively to move opinions from first impressions to more shared and reflective judgment. Identifying and committing civic resources, assets that often go unrecognised and unused. Organising civic actions so they complement one another, which makes the whole of people’s efforts more than the sum of the parts. Learning together all along the way to keep up civic momentum.15

KF sees these all as practices that a deliberative public can engage in. I want to show that there is also an important role for social movements.The first two practices are matters of identifying what a problem is and how we might think of it. Often the task falls on social movements to raise awareness of a problem and show how it is a problem (Habermas 1996).The third, deliberating, is a matter for deliberative publics, and it can take place informally throughout society (Mansbridge 2012,Young 2012) as well as in more formal town meetings. Practice four (identifying and committing civic resources) picks up on Arendt’s notion of public

176 Noëlle McAfee

generative power, that when people come together they can create new potential. Also they can see how to make use of something that has previously gone fallow. Both social movements and deliberative bodies play a role here. Practice five is the step to action, often decentred and uncoordinated but complementary. (A nice example is the farm-to-table movement, with farmers, merchants, chefs, and consumers finding ways to create more sustainable food economies.) And the sixth step, learning, is about remaining open to judging how it all went and what could be done differently going forward. (This is the antithesis of any ‘best practices’ model.) These practices don’t necessarily occur in any linear fashion. Moreover, they are iterative. A first pass through a problem may turn up new unforeseen consequences and problems. This is what is so important about the sixth stage of learning, which I think resonates a bit more clearly in an Arendtian frame, especially her ideas of thinking and judging (Arendt 1978). Learning is a process of critically reflecting on a state of affairs, internally and collectively practicing the twoin-one back-and-forth of considering and reconsidering our thoughts about matters, being open to seeing something differently, and not reifying some practice or institutions as ‘just the way it is.’ Learning, then, loops back into renaming and reframing problems. The policies that a deliberative process may have resulted in may bring about unforeseen consequences that a social movement then names and begins to frame. These six practices focus on what publics can do, including both social movements and deliberative publics, but they also point to the legitimacy question I mentioned above. If the public in its informal deliberations (what Mansbridge calls ‘everyday talk’) begins to develop public judgment and will X, but elected officials are operating on notion Y, then the government’s legitimacy comes under question. For ultimately the power and authority of any state in the modern era derives from public will. When the state becomes oblivious to its real source of authority, then it loses its legitimacy and risks becoming corrupt (Dussel 2008).

Thinking What We Are Doing In closing, I deepen the discussion of how social movements can productively challenge and engage deliberative publics and then how these deliberative publics can do their work more expansively. In a 2001 essay, Iris Marion Young pushed back against the ideals of deliberative democratic theory to show some of the virtues of the nondeliberative social activist. In the essay, ‘Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy,’ Young put a hypothetical social activist in conversation with a deliberative democrat to show how their ‘prescriptions for good citizenship’ clash: As I construe her character, the deliberative democrat claims that parties to political conflict ought to deliberate with one another and through

Neoliberalism, the Street, and the Forum 177

reasonable argument try to come to an agreement on policy satisfactory to all. The activist is suspicious of exhortations to deliberate because he believes that in the real world of politics, where structural inequalities influence both procedures and outcomes, democratic processes that appear to conform to norms of deliberation are usually biased toward more powerful agents. The activist thus recommends that those who care about promoting greater justice should engage primarily in critical oppositional activity, rather than attempt to come to agreement with those who support or benefit from existing power structures. (Young 2001, 671) Earlier in this chapter I broadened the narrow view of deliberation as ‘reasonable argument,’ to include emotions and attachments. But still the social activist will likely bristle at the call to sit down and talk. There are a number of worries that the activist will have: • • • •

that not all affected will be included or represented in the discussion, especially those most harmed by the prevailing political order; that the norms of deliberative discussion favour those who are most articulate and educated; that ‘existing social and economic structures have set unacceptable constraints on the terms of deliberation and its agenda’ (Young 2001, 682); that the prevailing ‘common sense’ may be systematically distorted by ideology or hegemonic norms, constraining participants’ social imagination over what alternatives are possible (Young 2001, 685–87).

The first two of these can be handled pretty well. Informally, those who convene deliberative fora can make a concerted effort to get representatives of all affected into the room, perhaps by starting with the questions, ‘Who else needs to be here? Why aren’t they here?’ More formally, those who convene deliberative fora that make explicit claims to represent the populace, such as Deliberative Polling, can and do use the tools of random sampling to include a cross-section that represents all. The second concern can be addressed by having (1) experienced moderators and (2) a broad understanding of deliberation as choicework that welcomes multiple forms of deliberation, as I discussed earlier. The third and fourth concerns are more substantial and, in fact, true. As someone who has been involved in framing issues for public discussion, I can attest to the constraints that existing social and economic structures set on the range of choices put forward.This isn’t simply bad faith on the part of the issue framers; it’s a matter of meeting the public where it is, giving people a familiar place to start. And this leads straight into the fourth worry, that the prevailing common sense renders some alternatives invisible. By ‘naturalising’ the way things are, cultural hegemony or ideology makes it nearly impossible to see how things might be otherwise.

178 Noëlle McAfee

It is here that social movements have work to do. As Young writes, because he suspects some agreements of making unjust power relations, the activist believes it is important to continue to challenge these discourses and the deliberative processes that rely on them, and often he must do so by nondiscursive means—pictures, song, poetic imagery, and expressions of mockery and longing performed in rowdy and even playful ways aimed not at commanding assent but disturbing complacency. One of the activist’s goals is to make us wonder about what we are doing, to rupture a stream of thought, rather than to weave an argument. (Young 2001, 687) The last line of this quote echoes Hannah Arendt’s admonishment to ‘think what we are doing.’ It is for lack of such thinking that injustice and evil arise. We need to think so that we don’t take ‘the way things are’ as natural and immutable; but because we are often caught up, we fail to think. Social movements can help us think what we are doing. This is why the ideas of a social movement that seemed radical and outlandish years ago can seem commonplace today. If successful, they rupture hegemonic ways of thinking and put previously unimagined issues on the public agenda. They can identify problems and frame new alternatives, just as the abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights movements have done, and as Dreamers and gay marriage activists are doing today. The role, then, of public deliberation is to seriously consider and include these new alternative frameworks in deliberations. This can allow for a political process that can see beyond what is and imagine things different. As neoliberalism becomes globalised and world leaders abandon the political, it is ever more important for transnational public spheres to harness both the counter-hegemonic power of social movements and the power of deliberative publics to do the work of working through a wide range of possible direction, weigh the costs and consequences in a deeply engaged way, come to public judgment, and develop public will that can hold even the most remote leaders accountable. In sum, I have argued that social movements are centrally involved in the democratic practices of a larger political process. This schema of democratic politics writ large suggests that many of the oppositional dichotomies between social activism and public deliberation are wrong, including many of the adjectives used to describe each side (for example, reasonable versus emotional). It is important to appreciate how the power of the dominant order, no matter how democratically achieved, needs to be regularly assessed by a public sphere robust through both its mobilising and organising. Only in this way can the creative political potentials of deliberative and contestatory practices pose a serious challenge to the iron reason of the hegemonic TINA logic.

Neoliberalism, the Street, and the Forum 179

Notes 1 As the Wall Street Journal reported on December 21, 2013, ‘in September 2011, after facing a budget shortfall just months after receiving its first bailout from international creditors, Greece imposed a real estate tax that it placed on electricity bills and is collected by the country’s power company. Known as the haratsi, the tax has become one of the most unpopular measures Greece has undertaken in its bid to improve its fiscal health. Greece is now replacing this tax with a new one, which effectively shifts the tax burden onto the assets of tax payers rather than just assessing the income of those possessing the property. The law has been given the nod by the country’s international creditors, its euro zone partners and the International Monetary Fund, who are demanding that Greece moves ahead with a series of structural reforms to keep funding lines open to its EUR240 billion rescue package’ (Stamouli 2013). 2 According to Trading Economics (n.d.), Greece’s ratio topped out at 170.3. Japan’s ratio is now 211, but no one seems to be rushing to impose austerity on Japan. Germany’s ratio is about 80 percent and the US’s is 102 percent. 3 For a discussion of structural change, see International Monetary Fund 2013. 4 This isn’t just a European phenomenon. David Brooks (2012) notes the same about the United States, that the old policies of investing in the economy are outmoded and that structural change is on the horizon. 5 This distinction between ideal and sullied neoliberalism may map onto Albena Azmanova’s between the Stepmother and the Daddy State (Azmanova 2010, 397). Briefly she charts the following stages of capitalism: (1) nineteenth-century entrepreneurial capitalism, (2) organised capitalism that emerged in the 1930s with regulations and policies aimed at economic growth, (3) the emergence of neoliberal ‘disorganised’ capitalism which coincided with post-industrial knowledge economies, and (4) what she sees as an emerging stage of reorganised capitalism triggered by the need to attend to the consequences of globalisation, namely the emergence of winners and losers. The state overseeing stage 2 capitalism, also known as regulatory and the welfare state, she calls the Nanny state; disorganised neoliberal stage 3 has a Stepmother state, and stage 4 a Daddy state. I’d say that as soon as deregulation began, Daddy has been waiting in the wings to bail out capital when it fails (for example, is ‘too big to fail’). Neoliberals demonise the state (as a stepmother) when it threatens to regulate, but then turn to Daddy as soon as they need to be rescued. These are not two separate stages but two oscillating moments within a neoliberal era, though it is true that social justice claims in response to neoliberal globalisation are still developing. 6 Both David Harvey and the Nobel prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz point out this hypocrisy. See Harvey 2005 and Stiglitz 2010. 7 In the US alone we can count the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the housing bust of 2006–2012, the dot.com bust of the 1990s, and the recession of 2008. 8 As Aristotle noted, we do not deliberate about what is the case; we deliberate about what we might bring about: ‘What we do deliberate about are things that are in our power and can be realised in action,’ about things that are inexact and whose outcomes are unpredictable, about matters of action rather than matters of science. And ‘when great issues are at stake, we distrust our own abilities as insufficient to decide the matter and call in others to join us in our deliberations’(1980, 1111a32, 1112b3–10). Ultimately, ‘the object of deliberation and the object of choice are identical,’ because what we are doing in our deliberation is trying to decide what to do. Aristotle went

180 Noëlle McAfee

9

10

11

12 13

14

15

to great pains to make sure his students understood that deliberation is not aimed at matters of fact but is aimed at indeterminate matters of choice and action. This is a lesson missed by those who may think of deliberation as ascertaining moral truth. We deliberate about what we should do, and on questions of great consequence, we bring others—different others—into our deliberations so that we have a better chance of making a better choice that will work for the community as a whole. I am pulling together Arendt’s theory of judgment with her concepts of speech and action, plurality, and the space of appearance. See Arendt 1958, Arendt 1963, and Villa 1996. This kind of politics shows up in self-organising communities around the world, including empowered participatory governance projects from Porto Alegre, Brazil, to Kerala, India (Fung and Wright, 2003). Another example is the organising work of the Industrial Areas Foundation in the US, especially in Texas and the Southwest (Warren 2001). All work to create horizontal webs of power, to develop and harness citizen knowledge and perspective, and to increase the agency of all those in the community so that the community itself decides in what direction to move. So rather than be directed—or mobilised—from without, they are organised and directed from within. Because they are focused on using their own wisdom and agency to improve their communities, they create a new kind of relationship with their elected officials. Rather than going to them to beseech, they approach them more as partners and equals in changing their communities. Even the ‘poorest of the poor’ victims become sociohistorical actors. Speaking of the malheureux, Arendt writes, ‘For the masses, once they had discovered that a constitution was not a panacea for poverty, turned against the Constituent Assembly as they had turned against the Court of Louis XVI, and they saw in the deliberations of the delegates no less a play of make-believe, hypocrisy, and bad faith, than in the cabals of the monarch’ (Arendt 1963, 109–10). For criticisms of this view, see McAfee 2004 and 2008. In the late 1970s, Proposition 13 was placed on the California ballot to severely cut back on property taxes and funding of public services. The proposition passed, and California’s public infrastructure has suffered ever since.Yankelovich and Mathews worried that this instance of direct democracy would undermine grassroots democracy itself, so they started working together on ways to develop more reflective public judgments rather than the knee-jerk reactions at the ballot box. I use the term ‘citizen’ loosely to mean all who are part of a political community, whether or not they are formal citizens. The Kettering Foundation is an operating foundation based in Dayton, Ohio, that has been involved for 30 years in understanding citizen public deliberation, well before ‘deliberative democracy’ became a staple of political philosophy. It has focused on local deliberations on national issues, teaming with Public Agenda in New York to write ‘issue books’ for public deliberation. Their guiding notion is that public deliberation is primarily a process of ‘choice work’ (working through the loss that any direction entails) rather than reason-giving (though in the course of deliberation sometimes reasons will be exchanged.) I have been an associate of the Kettering Foundation for twenty-five years and have been using that experience to develop an alternative to the dominant model of deliberative democracy. See McAfee 2008. See the KF website on democratic practices at http://kettering.org/what-we-study/ democratic-practices/. See also Mathews 2014, 119–25.

Neoliberalism, the Street, and the Forum 181

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1963. On Revolution. New York: Penguin Books. ———. 1978. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Aristotle. 1980. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Martin Ostwald. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Azmanova, Albena. 2010. ‘Capitalism Reorganized: Social Justice after Neo-liberalism.’ Constellations 17 (3): 390–406. Barber, Benjamin. 1984. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California. Barker, Derek W. M., Noëlle McAfee, and David W. McIvor. 2012. ‘Introduction.’ In Democratizing Deliberation: A Political Theory Anthology, edited by Derek W. M. Barker, Noëlle McAfee, and David W. McIvor, 1–17. Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation Press. Bernstein, Richard J. 1986. Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bohman, James. 2009. ‘Epistemic Value and Deliberative Democracy.’ The Good Society 18 (2), 28–34. Brooks, David. 2012. ‘The Structural Revolution.’ The New York Times, May 7. Accessed November 13, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/opinion/brooks-thestructural-revolution.html. Cohen, Joshua. 1999. ‘Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy.’ In Deliberative Democracy, edited by James Bohman and William Rehg, 67–92. Cambridge: MIT Press. Diez, Georg. 2011. ‘Habermas, the Last European: A Philosopher’s Mission to Save the EU.’ Spiegel Online International. Accessed January 19, 2014. http://www.spiegel.de/ international/europe/habermas-the-last-european-a-philosopher-s-mission-to-savethe-eu-a-799237.html. Dussel, Enrique. 2008. Twenty Theses on Politics. Translated by George Ciccariello-Maher. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2013. Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion. Translated by Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Pérez Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson MakdonadoTorres. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ‘The Economy: We Are All Keynesians Now.’ 1965. Time Magazine, December 31. Accessed February 22, 2014. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,842353,00.html. Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 1996. Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge: MIT Press. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. London: Oxford University Press. iBooks edition. Herndon, Thomas, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin. 2013. ‘Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff.’ Accessed January 19, 2014. http://www.peri.umass.edu/236/hash/31e2ff374b6377b2ddec04de aa6388b1/publication/566/. International Monetary Fund. 2013. ‘Economic Structural Change Vital to Successful Development.’ Accessed February 22, 2014. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/ survey/so/2013/INT062813A.htm.

182 Noëlle McAfee

Keep Talking Greece. 2013. ‘350k Greek Households without Electricity Thanks to Property Tax.’ Keep Talking Greece (blog), November 13. Accessed February 25, 2014. http://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2013/11/13/350k-greek-households-withoutelectricity-thanks-to-property-tax/. Kitsantonis, Niki. 2013. ‘Greece Approves New Austerity Measures.’ The New York Times, July 18. Accessed February 25, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/world/ europe/greece-approves-new-austerity-measures.html. Mansbridge, Jane. 2012. ‘Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System.’ In Democratizing Deliberation: A Political Theory Anthology, edited by Derek W. M. Barker, Noëlle McAfee, and David W. McIvor, 85–112. Dayton, OH; Kettering Foundation Press. Mathews, David. 2014. The Ecology of Democracy: Finding Ways to Have a Stronger Hand in Shaping Our Future. Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation Press. McAfee, Noëlle. 2004. ‘Three Models of Democratic Deliberation.’ Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18 (1): 44–59. ———. 2008. Democracy and the Political Unconscious. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2013. ‘The Affective Dimensions of Public Will.’ Kettering Review 31 (1): 47–53. Morrell, Michael E. 2010. Empathy and Democracy: Feeling, Thinking, and Deliberation. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. Neblo, Michael. 2005. ‘Impassioned Democracy: The Role of Emotion in Deliberative Theory.’ Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, New Orleans, January 5–8. R. A., J. S., and L. P. 2013. ‘The Rich Get Richer.’ The Economist, September 12. Accessed November 13, 2014. http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/09/ daily-chart-8. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, John. 1985. ‘Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical.’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (3): 223–51. ———. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1999. The Law of the Peoples with ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Staley, Oliver. 2013. ‘Unemployed Greeks Reconnect as Underground Electricians Defy Law.’ Bloomberg, December 5. Accessed February 25, 2014. http://www.bloomberg. com/news/2013-12-05/unemployed-greeks-reconnect-as-underground-electriciansdefy-law.html. Stamouli, Nektaria. 2013. ‘Greece Passes New Property-Tax Legislation.’ The MarketPlace (blog), The Wall Street Journal, December 21. Accessed February 25, 2014. http://www. marketwatch.com/story/greece-passes-new-property-tax-legislation-2013-12-21. Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2010. Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy. New York: W. W. Norton. Trading Economics. n.d. ‘Country List Government Debt to GDP.’ Accessed February 25, 2014. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/country-list/government-debt-to-gdp. Villa, Dana. 1996. Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Warren, Mark R. 2001. Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revise American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Yankelovich, Daniel. 1991. Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Neoliberalism, the Street, and the Forum 183

Young, Iris Marion. 1997. ‘Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy.’ In Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy, 60–74. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2001. ‘Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy.’ Political Theory 29 (5): 670–90. ———. 2012. ‘De-centering Deliberative Democracy.’ In Democratizing Deliberation: A Political Theory Anthology, edited by Derek W. M. Barker, Noëlle McAfee, and David W. McIvor, 113–25. Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation Press.

10 FOUNDING POLITICAL CRITIQUE IN A POST-POLITICAL WORLD Towards a Renewal of Utopian Energies Nikolas Kompridis

We are living in the midst of a triumphant but not entirely secure neoliberal order. Yet this order has become so entrenched since its emergence in the 1970s that it seems unassailable. Its global dominance is in no small part due to the success with which it has displaced politics and democracy, at the same time as it has brought into being so-called post-political and post-democratic forms of governance. This understanding of our current circumstances has become commonplace among political theorists and social scientists, especially among theorists of radical democracy. A primary preoccupation of these post-political and post-democratic forms of governance is the management of various kinds of crises, crises that are treated as external threats requiring specific interventions proposed and guided by experts, experts who are themselves one of the instrumentalities of neoliberal forms of governance. Crises are not the occasions for collective, democratic reflection on what has gone wrong, on how things might be done differently, occasions to think more deeply about what kinds of institutions, and what kind of future, we want. Rather, crises are managed and massaged, reducing the risk of any concerted challenge to the neoliberal order, thereby preserving everything essential to its maintenance. Indeed, crises serve as self-justifying reassertions of neoliberal forms of governance, providing ample opportunity to impose policy interventions that produce further depoliticising and de-democratising effects. Crises—both real and artificially created crises—thus become occasions for the imposition and consolidation of neoliberal policies that successfully manage domination through change, as Luc Boltanski’s work has carefully illuminated. [T]he systems that ensure domination are not geared to slowing down change or incorporating it in such a form that it can be denied as such.

Founding Political Critique 185

On the contrary, they are based on the argument of constant change, while arrogating to themselves the privilege of interpreting it, thereby providing themselves with the possibility of propelling it in a direction favourable to the preservation of existing asymmetries and forms of exploitation. (Boltanski 2011, 136) The widespread sense of loss of meaningful political agency along with the contraction of vibrant public spaces in which to challenge and change existing forms of governance has produced bewilderment and despair. There is plenty of change in a neoliberal order. Change isn’t the problem. Things are changing constantly, and it is through constant, unsettling change that this order reproduces its structure of domination and power. The problem is how to make sense of things in a new way so as to make room for change that does not disempower and consolidate domination, and it is really a question for us that we have not had to pose before: What kind of change does that? What kind of change should our politics aim for if change itself has become a medium of domination? Is it enough to produce more rupture and discontinuities in the existing order, when the existing order is itself predicated on the incessant production and management of rupture and discontinuities? Until very recently, our most esteemed critical vocabularies valorised rupture and discontinuity, making rupture and discontinuity, deconstruction and transgression, the goal of critique, the goal of unmasking the existing structures of power and domination. In this paper, I want to respond to the current historical conjuncture by posing the question of critique, politically. In what sense can critique be political? Put a little less vaguely and abstractly, what distinctly political role should critique play? Can critique be a medium of democratic politics? Moreover, can it be a nonsectarian medium of democratic politics in the increasingly pluralistic and deeply diverse societies within which democratic politics must operate? What form would it have to assume to play that role? What kind of medium would it be were it a medium of democratic politics? Some might find these questions redundant, their author unintelligibly obtuse. After all, don’t we already know the political role of critique? Is it not, and has it not always been, to expose illusions and ideologies, to unmask untruths and various forms of domination and power? Surely, this already is the political form of critique. What more is there to say, other than to redouble our efforts, and to intensify and multiply the occasions for critique? Well, my question is not about critique in this sense, nor about politics in this sense. I am asking whether critique can play a political role in the context of democratic politics, where the goal is not to unmask what is, but to make possible what might be. Put another way, the political question of critique concerns the public role of critique—more precisely, its public-constituting role: constituting a (new) public around a shared set of concerns or projects. My question, then,

186 Nikolas Kompridis

is the following: If democratic politics were a politics of building new kinds of relationships, new kinds of institutions, and the conditions for a different kind of democracy—an open and inclusive democracy under conditions of pluralism and deep diversity—what would critique have to be like to be a medium of democratic politics? In response to this question, I want to point towards another picture of critique, another practice of critique, the practice of critique as the disclosure of alternative possibilities, and to frame this practice as a public, political practice, the goal of which departs from the projects of critique construed as projects of unmasking or of discursive justification. What I have in mind involves a ‘fusion of horizons,’ fusing Arendt’s idea of revolution as a practice of ‘founding anew and building up’ (rather than of ‘rebellion and tearing things down’) with Gadamer’s idea of interpretation as a practice that establishes the possibility of a relationship with others—the possibility of a relationship of mutual learning, and, sometimes, of mutual transformation (Arendt 1990, 234; Gadamer 1989; Kompridis 2011). I do not believe that political theory has ever given sufficient thought to the possibility of a distinctively political from of critique—of critique as both a public and public-creating medium of democratic politics. I do not have the space here to give a full account of why this might be so, but it may be enough for the time being to say that part of the reason might lie in the grip that our existing picture of critique has on our understanding of its possibilities. In what follows, then, I will do just that, opening up the intellectual space to consider another possibility for the practice of critique distinct from unmasking and discursive justification.1

The Exhaustion of Critique? In his much-discussed renewal of the question,‘What is Enlightenment?,’ Michel Foucault characterised critique as ‘the handbook of reason that has grown up in Enlightenment,’ and Enlightenment as ‘the age of critique’ (Foucault 1984, 38). Of course, there’s nothing new in Foucault’s characterisation; it was just the most recent iteration of the characterisation given by Kant in the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: ‘[Our] age is the proper age of critique, and to critique everything must submit’ (Unser Zeitalter ist das eigentliche Zeitalter der Kritik, der sich alles unterwerfen muss; Kant 1997, 100–1, translation amended). Enlightenment is identified as the age of critique, the age in which critique has come of age, the age that has become receptive to critique.Whether Kant was right to describe his age or we are right to describe our age as the age of critique, remains an open question. Has critique really come of age? Is our age, our time, properly the age receptive to critique? Foucault’s text does not address these questions, not even indirectly. But these are not questions that we can ignore if we are to think anew the question of critique and its relation to our time in general and to politics in particular.

Founding Political Critique 187

That Foucault felt compelled to take up this question once more, the question of critique and of its ‘proper’ relation to its time, was partly a function of the specific time—the early 1980s—in which Foucault’s reflections were written, during which time the modernity debates had begun to rage vociferously and inconclusively throughout the academic high culture of the West. But it was also a function of Foucault’s essentially Kantian conception of critique, his Nietzschean restatement of it notwithstanding. For as Foucault put it in The Order of Things, the space opened up by Kantian critique, or the Kantian characterisation of critique, is the space in which we still think (Foucault 1994, 384). Two decades later, in a historical context in which it was not Enlightenment or modernity but democracy that had come into question, Jacques Derrida stated the relationship between critique and democracy in the same terms as Kant and Foucault had stated the relationship between critique and Enlightenment. It’s a rather straightforward substitution, since the concepts of Enlightenment and democracy imply, if not mirror, one another. So it comes as no surprise that Derrida’s account of this relationship reproduces Kant’s account as well, making critique a matter of publicity, a party to public processes of reflection and contestation in which everything in principle can be subjected to critique. Democracy is the only system, the only constitutional paradigm, in which, in principle, one has or assumes the right to criticise everything publicly, including the idea of democracy, its concept, its history, and its name. Including the idea of the constitutional paradigm and the absolute authority of law. (Derrida 2005, 87) So far as the concept of critique is concerned, however, not much has changed since Kant. While it is the case that critique thereafter developed in extremely sceptical directions, not much of anything has changed in the concept of critique. Bereft of Kant’s confidence in ‘universal laws of reason,’ critique nonetheless remained consistent with its Enlightenment concept, never more so than when it was (and is) deployed with the most sceptical intentions and implications. For it is indeed the underlying assumption of this concept of critique that absolutely nothing can evade suspicion—not just ‘religion in its holiness’ or ‘legislation in its majesty’ (Kant 1997, 101). Everything must submit to critique. The radical critique of reason, contrary to Habermas’s well-known argument in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, was logically consistent with the Enlightenment concept of critique, including all of its sceptical implications. The radical autonomy of critique was already implicit in its concept. Indeed, not just its radical autonomy, but its absolute sovereignty. As Reinhard Koselleck showed in Critique and Crisis, published more than a half-century ago, the Enlightenment concept of critique as an unrestrictable, radically autonomous practice of unmasking supplanted the sovereignty of the king with the sovereignty of the critic:

188 Nikolas Kompridis

‘Pushing critique to its limits, the critic saw himself as the King of Kings, the true sovereign’ (Koselleck 1988, 119, translation amended). That this might lead to ‘self-delusion’ and to an uncritical concept of critique is a danger that Koselleck did not fail to note.That it might be a herald of critique’s immaturity, of its having failed to come of age, is a thought now worthy of our most meticulous scrutiny. The times in which we live might be calling for a different concept of critique than the concept of critique as relentless and limitless unmasking. Indeed, it might be the case that the ‘proper age of critique,’ the age that has become receptive to critique, has yet to arrive. It will certainly not arrive so long as we are unable to think of critique in altogether different terms, and unable to practice it differently. The idea that everything must submit to critique has such a hold on our conception of critique (and its possibilities) that we find it difficult, very difficult, indeed, to imagine any other. A picture has bewitched us, as Wittgenstein would say—a picture of critique as the practice to which everything must submit, and as the practice through which submission is achieved. The German verb sich unterwerfen, employed by Kant in his characterisation of critique’s relation to its ‘objects,’ means to submit to something or someone. The noun form, Unterwerfung, means subjugation. In contemporary theorising, critique has been and continues to be identified with a form of interrogation, the consequences of which naturally lead to the submission and subjugation of the ‘objects’ of critique. Long after 9/11 and the proliferation of techniques of ‘enhanced interrogation,’ supposedly highly selfconscious critics nonetheless continue to employ, casually, carelessly, and without any self-consciousness, the language of interrogation, identifying interrogation as the critical gesture, nonpareil. The ‘democracy to come,’ as Derrida conceives it, calls for ‘a militant and interminable political critique,’ which functions as a ‘weapon aimed at the enemies of democracy’ (Derrida 2005, 86). But do we really want to think of critique in these questionable, but long unquestioned, terms? Do we really want to think of critique ‘as a weapon aimed at the enemies of democracy’? Should we really be endorsing the idea of a critique as a weapon, in the first place, functioning in politics as a weapon of mass interrogation? What kind of politics would that give us? It is hard to imagine that it would be a democratic politics, a form of politics that we could endorse on the basis of democratic ideals. The possibility that any attempt to identify the ‘enemies of democracy’ would be politically disastrous for democracy is so high as to be a near certainty. Can the critic of democracy be its enemy? How so? If nothing and no one is above suspicion, if everything, including the idea of democracy is criticisable, can there even be, strictly speaking, an enemy of democracy? The enemy of democracy would have to be everyone and no one at all. Does this not indicate that there is something profoundly the matter with this way of conceiving of critique? Does this not indicate that this is a conceptually exhausted idea of critique? In an essay published in 2004, ‘Has Critique Run out of Steam?,’ the iconoclastic Bruno Latour found himself asking this very question. He came to wonder

Founding Political Critique 189

whether iconoclasm has become meaningless, the practice of unmasking merely ‘mechanical,’ and the self-understanding of critics as trained combatants entirely inappropriate to our current historical circumstances. Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectuals? Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction? More iconoclasm to iconoclasm? What has become of the critical spirit? Has it run out of steam? . . . Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them? (Latour 2004, 225) As I have argued for some time now, the practice of unmasking critique presupposes an ontology of disengagement, an ontology that allows the critic to be safely insulated from the object of criticism, untouchable and therefore untouched by its ideological effects (Kompridis 2000; Kompridis 2006, 245–80). The object of critique stands at his disposal, makes itself available to his unmasking purposes. Resistance is useless; talking back is pointless. Under the withering interrogatory gaze of the critic, the object cannot but betray itself; delivering its previously hidden untruth to its ruthless and relentless interrogator. This practice of ‘ruthless critique,’ as some have proudly called it (Wang 1996, 15), has been uncritically practiced throughout the late twentieth century, having become the dominant paradigm of critique in the humanities and social sciences. And, as Latour is not the first or only one to point out (Kompridis, 2000; Kompridis, 2003, 178), it is a practice of critique that has become ‘mechanical,’ a gesture repeated over and over again with highly predictable outcomes. Perhaps, in light of the morally obscene images of really ruthless methods of interrogation that have become so very commonplace in the early twenty-first century, we might now be more ready than before to relinquish our attachment to the practice of critique as ‘ruthless critique,’ and examine more conscientiously the ethico-political as well as epistemic implications of the stance we assume towards the ‘objects’ of our knowledge. We might now wish to be considerably more circumspect about identifying critique with the practice of ‘interrogation,’ more able to see how it reflects the violence and violation inherent in critique construed and practiced as ruthless unmasking. Consider what would happen were we to make the relation between the unmasking critic and his submissive objects of critique paradigmatic for the relation between citizens of democratic society. Obviously, this would not be a relation based on equality, and certainly not a relation that could constitute a democratic form of life in any meaningful sense of democratic. If the ethical and political relation between the unmasking critic and his or her submissive objects is indeed the antithesis of the ethical and political relation that enables and constitutes democratic relations between fellow citizens, it is just as obvious that it

190 Nikolas Kompridis

is a model of critique that cannot function as a medium of democratic politics. A model of critique that presupposes and reproduces an undemocratic relation between itself and its objects cannot and should not be a model of critique to which we remain attached and committed if we are attached and committed to democratic politics. We need a different model of critique, establishing a very different kind of relation to its ‘objects,’ be those objects human or nonhuman subjects, be they persons or things. What we need is a practice of critique that facilitates a wholly different set of normative relationships between human and nonhuman others, and between persons and things: normative relationships that constitute a different relationship to the world, a world which we must care for—now more than ever—if there is to be a world at all. Arendt’s claim that in politics it is the world that is at stake is truer today than before, because the world’s fragility and vulnerability is greater than ever before (Arendt 1993, 156). And for that reason alone we need to think of critique differently, practice it differently, less destructively, less carelessly, which is why Latour’s suggestive sketch for a different practice of critique, and different role for the critic, is highly congenial from Arendt’s perspective and my own. The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution. (Latour 2004, 246) What we now do as ‘critics’ departs from past practice. The practice of critique changes from debunking and deconstructing to assembling and gathering, creating public spaces for assemblies and gatherings, changing the nature of those public spaces, and making critique, and the practices of critique, a matter of caring for the world, of receptively attuning ourselves to the needs of an increasingly fragile and vulnerable human and nonhuman reality, within which we all stand in relations of mutual dependence.

The Time of Critique/Democracy’s Time For the moment I will leave to the side further development of this alternative picture of critique in order to incorporate into that development, first, the way in which critique’s relation to its own time has been understood, and second, the way that relation is transposed onto the relation between democracy and the future, the expectant time of democracy. Referring once more to the

Founding Political Critique 191

writings of Foucault and Derrida, I want to bring out the normative dimensions of these relations to time through which both critique and democracy derive their orientation. For Foucault, the key feature of Kant’s reflections on the question ‘What is Enlightenment?,’ the feature around which his own reflections circle, is the question that the present poses to us: ‘What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?’ (Foucault 1984, 34). This question is inextricably linked to the state of our self-imposed and self-incurred ‘immaturity’—that is, to coming to see that state as self-imposed or self-incurred, a state for which we are responsible: Thus Enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which [we] participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally. [Human beings] are at once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary actors. (Foucault 1984, 35) The critical and reflective relation to the present presupposes or necessitates a critical relation to ourselves, from which relation the possibility of a ‘way out’ (Ausgang) of our state of immaturity might appear. If, unlike Kant, we regard the state of ‘immaturity’ as a permanent standing threat, rather than as a stage through which we pass once and for all, then the critical and reflective relation to ourselves is a permanent necessity, an endless task, which involves finding ever new ways to keep the ‘way out’ open. Foucault finds in ‘Kant’s reflection on “today” as difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task . . . the outline of what one might call an attitude of modernity’ (Foucault 1984, 38). It is above all the temporality of modernity—its particular relation to time, rather than its status as a distinct historical period, that Foucault singles out. Drawing on the Baudelairian idea of modernity as involving a particularly intense attunement to the present, in particular to what is fleeting and ephemeral, further outlines the ethical and political significance of the present: ‘the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is’ (Foucault 1984, 41). Turning critique towards the present, defining itself through a critical relation to its own time, allows us to undertake a critical ontology of ourselves . . . conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them. (Foucault 1984, 50)

192 Nikolas Kompridis

But it is not entirely clear whether Foucault imagines this ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ as an essentially philosophical undertaking, a philosophical way of life, or as an essential feature of democratic politics. It is probably the case that for Foucault it is both a philosophical way of life and a form of democratic politics. However, it would seem to be more of the former than the latter by virtue of the limits Foucault sets on the kind of politics that follows from a critical ontology of our selves. Foucault rejects ‘all projects that claim to be global and radical,’ for ‘we know from experience’ that any large-scale utopian project that seeks to realise ‘another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions’ (Foucault 1984, 46). Critique, as Foucault conceives it, must remain sceptical of any and all utopian orientations, regardless if they are ‘programs for a new man’ or something less grandiose. It is a present-oriented concept of critique that is anti-utopian, paradoxically so, I will soon argue, permitting only a sceptical micropolitics. By contrast, Derrida’s idea of democracy is radically future oriented, but, as it turns out, it is just as sceptically anti-utopian. It is an idea of democracy that is indexed to the ‘impossible possibility’ of any fulfilled future expectations, a democracy ‘to-come’ as Derrida put it, that serves as the normative standpoint for a permanent critique of the present. The ‘democracy to-come’ stands necessarily in a critical and sceptical relation to the present. There can be no bridge from anything in the present to the ‘democracy to-come’ in the future; rather than a plenipotentiary of future possibilities, the present can offer only the misleading illusion that the democracy to come has arrived, or can arrive, even if only in partial, incomplete, or ephemeral form: The democracy to-come . . . protests against all naiveté and political abuse, every rhetoric that would present any present or existing democracy, as a de facto democracy, what remains inadequate to the democratic demand . . . The to-come not only points to a promise but suggests that democracy will never exist, in the sense of a present existence: not because it will always be deferred but because it will always remain aporetic in its structure. (Derrida 2005, 86) Thus, the future radically displaces the present.What manifests itself in the present, ‘in the sense of a present existence,’ doesn’t count and can’t count as that which might serve as a bridge to what may be, or is ‘to come.’ To serve the democracy to-come, critique, ‘militant and interminable political critique’ must unmask the inadequacy of any instantiations of democracy in the present. Even if you are a friend of democracy, you will be an unwitting enemy of the democracy tocome each and every time you point to the utopian promise of any existing trace of democracy. The present is irretrievably fallen, which is why the future must remain radically, incommensurably, other to the present. If the future is to remain an open horizon of possibility, it must be permanently unapproachable,

Founding Political Critique 193

an ‘impossible possibility’ purified of any present whose partial fulfilment or realisation it could come to be.2 Derrida’s conception of democracy is thus simultaneously messianic and anti-utopian. It proscribes graven images of the future that prefigure any future fulfilment of their contents just as ferociously as the Old Testament prophets proscribed graven images of God. The relation between present actuality and future possibility is one of radical incommensurability, necessarily and aporetically so. By contrast, Benjamin’s messianism, unlike Derrida’s, does not permanently displace the messianic moment from the present; on the contrary, the messianic is a permanent possibility of the present—any present. The ‘time of the now’ (die Jetztzeit) is ‘shot through with chips of Messianic time’ (Benjamin 1969). Not an ‘impossible possibility’; merely an improbable one. ‘For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter’ (Benjamin 1969, 263). Benjamin’s messianism preserves, however tenuously, the utopian possibilities of the present, and the connection between messianism and utopian politics. If Foucault’s anti-utopian scepticism cuts off the present from the future, Derrida’s cuts off the future from the present. Their anti-utopian scepticism is in tune with the general anti-utopianism of the age, where the only kind of utopia we can trust is a ‘safe utopia’ (Moyn 2010). It may be time for us to outgrow our anti-utopian scepticism, and to see that it is entwined with, and is the consequence of, an exhausted model of critique that is no longer capable of responding to the challenges of the age. We need something to take the place of ‘those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them.’

The Exhaustion of Utopian Energies? Since the 1970s, the links between utopian thought and democratic politics have been broken. We are living in an age that has been averse to reforging those links. Given the experiences of the twentieth century, and the various dehumanising ‘programs for a new man,’ this aversion is understandable. But what happens to democratic politics when it is not guided by utopian thought? What becomes of us as political agents when we are unable to articulate a different vision of things, disclosing possibilities that could not previously appear, possibilities that can appear as genuine alternatives to the present order of things? Do we not already know the answer to that question? Is this answer not a telling statement about our present circumstances? Is this not why our critical gestures have become so ‘mechanical’? According to the editors, this volume is intended as an urgent critical response to the current historical conjuncture, which they have described as a time when the ‘time for judgment and responsibility, for imagination and change—that is, the time for politics—seems to have passed.’ Their Zeitdiagnose resonates with many others, current and from the recent past. They can together be glossed as speaking

194 Nikolas Kompridis

to the widespread feeling that our sense of political possibility seems exhausted, and that what we are being called to do as critical theorists, who keep one eye on the present and one eye on the future, is to reanimate our sense of political possibility. But how do we do that, when the sense of exhaustion to which we are responding is not due just to a loss of confidence in politics, particularly the institutions of representative democracy, but also to a loss of confidence in our political imaginary, on the very sources of meaning and normativity on which we must draw to make sense of things, and to think of things as other than they are? Already in the 1980s, amidst the nascent emergence of the present neoliberal order, Jürgen Habermas articulated, with an almost uncanny prescience, a remarkable and momentous shift in the ‘time-consciousness’ of modernity: Today, it seems as though utopian energies have been used up, as if they have retreated from historical thought. The horizon of the future has contracted and has changed both the Zeitgeist and politics in fundamental ways. The future is negatively cathected . . . The responses of the intellectuals reflect as much bewilderment as those of the politicians . . . The situation may be objectively obscure. Obscurity is nonetheless also a function of a society’s assessment of its own readiness to take action. What is at stake is Western culture’s confidence in itself. (Habermas 1989, 50–51) Habermas nonetheless underestimated the phenomenon he so acutely perceived. He took the exhaustion of utopian energies to be more specific, its implications restricted to the end of a particular utopia, the ‘utopian idea of a society based on social labor’ (Habermas 1989, 53). With hindsight we can see what he did not see. The thesis of the exhaustion of utopian energies does not pertain only to the exhaustion of a particular utopia, crystallised in the welfare state project, but to the exhaustion of the power of our utopian imaginaries to ‘project future possibilities for a collectively better and less endangered way of life’ (Habermas 1989, 53). The exhaustion of utopian energies first thematised by Habermas now feels like something much greater, something much harder to overcome,‘the exhaustion,’ as Stanley Cavell put it, ‘of the sense of human possibility’ (Cavell 2006, 27). In a pair of successive books published in the first decade of this century, Wendy Brown twice registered this same sense of overwhelming bewilderment, loss of agency, and disorientation: On a daily basis we live the paradox that the most rapid-paced epoch in human history harbors a future that is both radically uncertain and profoundly beyond the grasp of the inhabitants of the present. Moving at such speed without any sense of control or predictability, we greet both past and future with bewilderment and anxiety. As a consequence, we inheritors of a radically disenchanted universe feel a greater political impotence than

Founding Political Critique 195

humans may have ever felt before, even as we occupy a global order more saturated by human power than ever before. (Brown 2001, 139) It has become a commonplace to describe our time as pounded by undemocratic historical forces yet lacking a forward movement. This makes the weight of the present very heavy: all mass, no velocity. Or, in the terms of late modern speediness . . . all speed, no direction. If this heaviness mixed with speediness were analogised to a mental state, the diagnosis would be profound depressive anxiety . . . a truly terrible state: you cannot move because of the bleakness but you cannot rest because of the anxiety; you can neither seize life nor escape it, neither live nor die. (Brown 2005, 10–11) ‘Modernity’ in its most recent, ruthlessly globalised manifestation has come to mean a civilisation that is in perpetual, enduring, and potentially unendurable, crisis. Even before the so-called financial crisis of 2008, whose destructive effects continue to wreak havoc on the lives of those most affected, John Berger captured better than anyone I know the lived experience of this historical moment. People everywhere, under very different conditions, are asking themselves: Where are we? The question is historical not geographical.What are we living through? Where are we being taken? What have we lost? How to continue without a plausible vision of the future? Why have we lost any view of what is beyond a lifetime? The well-heeled experts answer: Globalization. Postmodernism. Communications Revolution. Economic Liberalism. The terms are tautological and evasive. To the anguished question of Where are we? The experts murmur: Nowhere. Might it not be better to see and declare that we are living through the most tyrannical—because the most pervasive—chaos that has ever existed? (Berger 2003, 13) There is not much that is different in what Berger says about our crisis-riddled condition from what has been said by some of our most astute critical theorists and diagnosticians. They are all registering the profoundly disturbing sense that the future has in some sense been foreclosed.We face a future that is no longer receptive to projections of human possibilities, other than those incarnated in visions of catastrophe of one kind or another. As a consequence, the future can no longer function as a possible source of orientation, meaningfully guiding our actions in the present. But Berger adds something that is missing from other such time-diagnostic pronouncements, and that is the identification of the tyrannous nature of the chaos we daily endure, specifying, thereby, the new form of domination—domination

196 Nikolas Kompridis

through change—also identified (with social-scientific tools) by Luc Boltanski and his collaborators. [We] can identify effects of domination of a different kind, compatible with the requirements of a democratic-capitalist society . . . a form of domination . . . exercised via the intermediary of change . . . (Boltanski 2011, 127) These systems do not operate by seeking to curb change so as to maintain some orthodoxy at any price, as in so-called ‘totalitarian’ societies. On the contrary, they intervene by promoting, managing, and orientating change . . . (Boltanski 2011, 129) These new systems and the ‘experts’ that operate them are today’s ‘architects of the future,’ but they are not the kind of architects Nietzsche had in mind in his second ‘untimely meditation.’ The future they make possible is a future without futurity, a future that forecloses itself. If, as Boltanski concludes, ‘it is the closure of reality on itself that discourages critique’ (Boltanski 2011, 156), critique must play a new role, not the role of unmasking a closed reality, but of disclosing alternative possibilities that reopen the future, or resist its foreclosure. Obviously, these would have to be possibilities that would bring about change that is not tyrannous, change that enables the restoration of agency and hope. But, to ask again the question I posed at the beginning, what kind of change is that? We cannot simply implore ourselves to change the world as Marx once did in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. Change has itself become the problem—a source of oppression and a vehicle of domination. We don’t need more change, but rather, a change in the matter of change, a change in what matters.

The Utopian (World-Disclosing) Role of Critique One kind of change that we can do without is instrumental change, or instrumentalised change. That is precisely the kind of change with which negative utopian projects have become inseparably associated. Every instrumental intervention that seeks to bring about change carries the risk that it will simply reproduce existing patterns of domination through change, even when that is not the intention of the change. Utopian politics cannot be based on ‘blueprint’ utopias. Blueprint utopias are also future foreclosing projects, closing off the future to any other possibilities. But we are not limited intellectually and politically to the much criticised ‘blueprint’ model, or to traditional conceptions of utopia that consist of fully determinate and totalising projections. Utopian thought and politics is prefigurative and partial, keeping the future open to other ways of carrying forward our form of life, keeping it from being

Founding Political Critique 197

foreclosed by TINA-like formulations of our possibilities, and by powerful but not always accessible background understandings that frame our possibilities in ways we are only dimly aware of most of the time.3 This is why it is better to think of utopian thought and politics as an attitude and ethos, an orientation to things that seeks out the utopian moments of the present, the undisclosed possibilities that lie as yet unarticulated, precisely the attitude and ethos crucially missing from Foucault’s unduly sceptical ‘critical ontology of ourselves.’4 These utopian moments are placeholders of the ‘more than,’ the ineliminable ‘more than,’ holding temporarily, ephemerally, in place, what Ernst Bloch referred to as ‘the NotYet-Conscious, Not-Yet Become.’ As he wrote in The Principle of Hope, ‘the world is full of propensity towards something, tendency towards something, latency of something, and this intended something means fulfillment of the intending. It means a world which is more adequate for us, without degrading suffering, anxiety, self-alienation, nothingness’ (Bloch 1995, 18). There are diverse forms of utopia, and diverse forms of utopian longing, each harbouring ‘the dreams of a better life,’ as Bloch showed in his monumental The Principle of Hope. All utopias are indexed to the historical moment in which they are imagined and made manifest—a ‘here and now’—which at the same time point beyond themselves to a possibly redemptive ‘there and then.’ All democratic politics is necessarily utopian politics; it remains a democratic politics only to the extent that it does not abandon or lose its utopian democratic dimension.5 Derrida was right to think of democracy in terms of the ‘to come,’ for it is indeed and always will be ‘to come.’ There will always be a democraticpolitical ‘more than,’ an inexhaustible, normative surplus of meaning and possibilities; but pace Derrida, that ‘more than’ is not only a ‘more than’ that is to come; it is also an actual ‘here and now,’ however fragmentary, partial, and impermanent it may be in its ‘here and now-ness.’ There is a whole radical democratic dimension of utopian politics that manifests itself in various contemporary social movements and in alternative everyday practices. Although they manifest their utopian dimension in partial, incomplete, unfinalisable ways, they nonetheless have actionguiding, future-opening effects, not unambiguous, to be sure, but not ‘utopian’ in the pejorative sense, either. In these movements or uprisings, the actual present and possible future are entangled with one another, the former manifesting, here and now, a practice or activity that could be at home, that could create a home, in a world to come. Consider the manner in which UC Davis students protested the infamous use of pepper spray on peaceful protesters during an Occupy movement demonstration, part of a general pattern involving an excessive and violent use of force against Occupy protesters. Remaining consistent with their stated commitment to nonviolent protest, hundreds of students, seated on the ground, lined the sidewalks between which the beleaguered chancellor of UC Davis, Linda B. Katehi, had to walk to a waiting vehicle after leaving a press conference. The students remained absolutely silent. Not a word was spoken. No ‘criticism’

198 Nikolas Kompridis

made. And yet no more powerful critique could have been made than this quiet, gentle call to become answerable for her actions (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8775ZmNGFY8). Katehi had to look into the faces of students, who, rather than posing a threat to her safety or to the safety of the university community, enjoined her to reflect on her excessively reactive stance towards their peaceful protests. Their silence, their lack of malice or resentment or desire to avenge the harm done to their fellow students and protesters, disarmed Katehi, literally and metaphorically, forcing her to become more reflective and more receptive than she would have otherwise been. In response to the question posed by one of the reporters following behind, ‘Chancellor, do you still feel threatened by the students?,’ Katehi had to say, ‘No, no. I never felt threatened.’ This admission, given freely, rather than compelled by ‘ruthless critique,’ empties any justification Katehi offered or could offer for her violence-fostering response to the students. In other words, this admission, call it an acknowledgement, came about nonviolently, noncoercively. Moreover, this act of critique was not the work of an individual critic, soloistically and virtuousically unmasking the ‘object’ of his critique, while simultaneously privileging his epistemological standpoint, uncritically, and undemocratically.This was a public and collaborative act of critique. Public, not just because it took place out in the open, but also because it constituted a public, not just a public composed of the students but one that encompassed Katehi, the university administration, and all of us ‘witnessing’ without immediately comprehending either the nature or the significance of this act. This act of critique is not associated with, nor does it valorise, the work or activity of ‘the critic’ (as Latour’s proposal continues to do), the virtuoso critic, whether that ‘critic’ debunks or assembles, lifts the rug from underneath naïve believers or offers public arenas in which participants can gather. The act of critique is itself the work of democratic politics, the work of cooperatively working together to create and sustain democratic political relationships within democratic political spaces that keep the future open for democratic forms of life. One could say that this ‘silent’ critique creates its own conditions of receptivity. The ‘object of critique’ (in the person of Katehi) was not turned into a mere object, on which the critic imposes his critical apparatus and its unmasking mechanisms. ‘It’ was not rendered a mute object, able to speak only if and when its speech is selfbetraying, and self-unmasking. There is no asymmetrical, epistemologically selfprivileging relation between the critic and the object of critique. Katehi is thus not rendered voiceless by the act of critique (as the object of unmasking critique always is); she is presented with the possibility of speaking in another voice, regardless of whether she does so. The democratic space of possibility created by this act of critique is one that she is invited to occupy, to occupy not as an ‘object’ but as a political subject. Most certainly, she is not being ‘invited’ to justify her actions, as though the students were exercising their ‘right to justification,’ demanding

Founding Political Critique 199

publicly assessable and criticisable reasons for the actions she has taken. There is much more at stake than a demand for public justification.The students are calling for something much more, and manifesting that ‘more’ at the same time. This was a distinctively political act of critique in my sense because it was seeking a certain kind of change through the medium of critique, calling not only for a change in relationship but also in the political conditions of relationship, and calling for such change while instancing its possibility in a receptive relation to the ‘object’ of critique. For us, as for Katehi, the silent protesters ‘manifested for the other another way’ (Cavell 1988, 31), not only actualising in this utopian manifestation a nonviolent form of critique, but also establishing a relationship with others—in this case, the possibility of a very different kind of relationship, promising and enacting a form of political equality, which, of course, Katehi found threatening, but not for the same reasons or in the same way she previously found the Occupy protest threatening. For in this case, the relationship that was being offered, as a gift, one might say, was both ‘here and now’ and pointing to a relationship in a better world to come. Here was a calling for a ‘democracy to-come’ in an act of critique in which the ‘democracy to-come’ is not perpetually aporetic, but rather is, at one and the same time, both actual, if ephemerally so, and possible, a promise of what can be, what can become anew, every day. That Katehi (and the Katehis of this world) was not ready fully to receive this gift, and by receiving it, to hold herself receptively answerable to it, in no way weakens the power of this nonviolent critique, but rather makes it exemplary, powerfully exemplary, for it manifests a practice of critique that is indeed about ‘founding and building up’ rather than of ‘rebellion, and tearing down.’ It is a promissory practice, a practice of critique that is offered as a promise of a future to come, a future-opening practice in which there is not just more mechanical repetition of violence-enacting critique, but rather the manifestation of critique as a receptivity-enacting, possibility-disclosing practice.6 Of course, this is just one act, one utopian gesture. We should neither expect nor make too much of such gestures. It will take many such exemplary acts to make a difference. We will require a whole repertoire of them. But that still won’t be enough. We will need multiple and diverse repertoires, and only a critical mass of such repertoires will be capable of changing the world noninstrumentally by changing the processes of change as well. But we have to begin with the first steps. One must travel a long way to arrive at a goal that can never be reached, once and for all. But the momentum of those first steps can nonetheless bring forth a new world, when they become many, many steps taken together, in concert with multiple and diverse others.7 I have no reason to believe that the conditions for utopian thinking and utopian politics are more hospitable today than in the 1970s, when the signs of the exhaustion first appeared. Indeed, it could be argued that contemporary conditions are even more inhospitable, because we live in an even more sceptical and more distrustful age. On the other hand, the need for a renewal of utopian political

200 Nikolas Kompridis

energies has never been more urgent, and therefore the time for it, paradoxically, could not be more propitious.That critique might change itself to meet the needs of the age is no more and no less utopian, no more and no less necessary.

Notes 1 Here I will be concerned primarily with the limitations of critique as a practice of unmasking. In a future publication (‘Critique and Critical Theory’), I will take up the limitations of critique as a practice of discursive justification, as developed by Habermas and some of his followers, especially Rainer Forst. 2 Foucault found something essential to his critical ethos in Baudelaire’s idea of modernity—namely, that ‘you must not despise the present’ (Foucault 1984, 40). Derrida, by contrast, maintains a completely sceptical attitude: the present has nothing to offer except another occasion for vigilant critical suspicion. 3 Which is why I argue so insistently for the ‘reflective disclosure’ of those background understandings, or background ontologies, in Critique and Disclosure. 4 This is the attitude and ethos crucially missing from Foucault’s unduly sceptical ‘critical ontology of ourselves.’ 5 For an illuminating discussion of this point, see Haro and Coles 2014. 6 For my more elaborate and systematic account of receptivity, which supports some of the claims made in this section but which I do not have space to go into here, see Kompridis 2006, 199–223; Kompridis 2009, 2011, 2013. 7 I am taking some liberty here in glossing the motto of the 15M movement: ‘Vamos lentos porque vamos lejos.’ I am grateful to Pablo Ouziel for drawing my attention to the work of the 15M, not just its motto, but also the utopian democratic politics underlying it.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1990. On Revolution. New York: Penguin. ———. 1993. Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken. Berger, John. 2003. ‘Where are We?’ Harper’s Magazine, March. Accessed November 13, 2014. http://harpers.org/archive/2003/03/where-are-we/. Bloch, Ernst. 1995. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boltanski, Luc. 2011. On Critique. A Sociology of Emancipation. Translated by Gregory Elliott. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, Wendy. 2001. Politics out of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2005. Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1988. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2006. ‘The Future of Possibility.’ In Philosophical Romanticism, edited by Nikolas Kompridis. New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Rogues. Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale-Anne Prault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon.

Founding Political Critique 201

———. 1994. The Order of Things. New York: Routledge. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. 2nd Rev. ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall. New York: Crossroad. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The New Conservatism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haro, Lia, and Romand Coles. 2014. ‘Journeys to Farther Shores: Intersecting Movements of Poetics, Politics, and Theory beyond Utopia.’ In The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, edited by Nikolas Kompridis. New York: Bloomsbury. Kant, Immanuel. 1997. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kompridis, Nikolas. 2000. ‘Reorienting Critique: From Ironist Theory to Transformative Practice.’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 26 (4): 23–47. ———. 2003. ‘Amidst the Plurality of Voices: Philosophy of Music after Adorno.’ Angelaki: A Journal of Theoretical Humanities 8 (3): 167–80. ———. 2006. Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2009. ‘Romanticism.’ In Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, edited by Richard Eldridge, 247–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2011. ‘Receptivity, Possibility and Democratic Politics.’ Ethics and Global Politics 4 (4): 255–72. ———. 2013. ‘Recognition and Receptivity: Forms of Normative Response in the Lives of the Animals We Are.’ New Literary History 44 (1): 1–24. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1988. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. ‘Has Critique Run out of Steam?’ Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–48. Moyn, Samuel. 2010. The Last Utopia. Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wang, Orrin. 1996. Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory. Baltimore. Johns Hopkins University Press.

11 FROM THE ASSEMBLY TO THE AGORA Nonlinear Politics and the Politicisation of Everyday Life David Chandler

Introduction Democracy has historically been bound to the problematic of constituting a collective public will above the plurality of competing private interests within the social sphere. In liberal modernity, this collective democratic will was constituted through the establishment of a public sphere of formal equality before the law and at the ballot box and through civic freedoms—of the press, speech, association, and the like.This struggle, between the civic aspiration for the development of the collective good and the threat to the collectivity posed by the corruption of private interests and power, seems to have become much less central to democratic theory. Today, democracy works on a different problematic, not that of manufacturing a single collective will—separate to and distinct from the private wills of groups and individuals—but the problematic of legitimising rule through bringing democracy down to the societal level of plural and individuated ‘everyday life.’ The demand for democracy today is that of unbounding or freeing democracy from its liberal limits. Democracy as a form of liberal rule depended upon linear and reductionist understandings of policy-making, based upon mechanist ontologies of a world amenable to cause-and-effect understandings. In which case, political attention was based upon the representative legitimacy of the policy-makers, seen to rule through sovereign forms of state power. Nonlinear and system-thinking approaches (whether advocated by new institutionalist, neoliberal, or more radical post-structuralist or new materialist authors) problematise these ontological assumptions, placing the emphasis not on the constitution of sovereign power but on the constitutive power of societal interactions, understood to be increasingly central to the outcomes of policy-making (see, for example, North 1999;

From the Assembly to the Agora 203

DeLanda 2006; de Certeau 1988). These approaches suggest that the liberal modernist framing of the state as a monolithic or homogenous actor ruling over and directing a pluralised public of citizens no longer operates, at either the level of ontological description or of normative legitimisation, in today’s polity. The liberal hierarchical binary of the state as rule or command, by virtue of its collectively constituted authority, vis-à-vis the public as ruled, by virtue of its constitutive plurality, cannot seemingly be maintained in a world where the representational authority of constituted power no longer seems able to direct, control, or contain the constitutive power of the public. As debates about the rise of neoliberal discourse (Harvey 2005; Crouch 2011) or the end of ‘Left and Right’ (Giddens 1994; Beck 1997) or globalisation and complexity (Rosenau and Czempiel 1992; Cerny 2010) appear to testify, there seems to be a disconnection between the liberal understanding of the formal constitutive power of the public through the process of representation and the informal or social constitutive power of the public, which seems in excess of the limits and constraints of the formal representative sphere (Hardt and Negri 2006; Virno 2004). It is increasingly held that, in a ‘nonlinear’ world, the public must be understood as self-constituting through everyday decision-making and interaction. The democratic state thereby no longer stands above or separate to society but works to facilitate a more responsible or reflexive operation of plural and differentiated private judgements in relation to behavioural choices (see for example, Lash 2002; Latour 2004; Dallmayr 2010; Connolly 2011; Giddens 1994; Beck 1997; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002). This chapter seeks to draw out how both the processes of democracy and the space(s) in which it is held to operate have been transformed and pluralised. In particular, it focuses on the development of the analytical framings of nonlinearity as a response to the perceived problems of democratic representation in a world of increasing complexity and the breakdown of traditional, linear, state–society relations. In this discussion, the limits of democratic will formation no longer constrain the growth of democracy but rather facilitate it, extending democracy into the ‘everyday’ and the ‘politics’ of ‘life’ itself (see further Michel Foucault’s juxtaposition of sovereign power vis-à-vis biopower, Foucault 1981, 135–45; see also Foucault 2003, 239–63; 2008). The analytical framing of ‘nonlinear’ approaches, bringing democracy down to the level of everyday life, will be heuristically drawn out through engaging with their first major treatments in liberal theorising, in the work of Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, and Friedrich Hayek. In doing so, the radical claims made on behalf of current nonlinear critiques of rationalist assumptions and of the public/private divide will be implicitly challenged. In these frameworks, the personal becomes political, but not in the sense of the early feminist movement’s understanding that ‘personal problems are political problems’ (Hanisch 1969). The ‘personal is political’ was a radical call to see how politics percolated down to shape the everyday experiences (the ‘personal problems’) of individuals. In representing

204 David Chandler

personal problems as not individual but as collective political problems, these feminists aspired to politicise women towards greater public political engagement. However, in ‘nonlinear’ complex and emergent understandings, which seek to extend the spaces and processes of democracy, the opposite relationship is in play: individuals and communities are to be empowered to reflexively work on their personal choices and practices in order to effect political change as it emerges from below. ‘Political problems’ are thereby ‘depoliticised’ and represented as ‘personal problems’ of disempowerment, which can be dealt with by empowering individuals and communities and enabling them to be aware of their agential embeddedness in the production and reproduction of multiple and complex sets of material and cognitive relations (see further, Chandler 2013a; 2013b; see also Byrne and Callaghan 2014; Smith and Jenks 2006; Room 2011). The democratisation of ‘everyday life’ understands that political subjects are embedded in differentiated, plural, and overlapping social and cognitive communities. It is important that in this framing, the social sphere is understood as distinct both from the contractual relations of the market and from the formal public sphere. In representing political problems as ‘personal’ or social products, leading Foucauldian sociologists Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose have noted that individuals are governed ‘neither as isolated atoms of classical political economy’—that is, as interest-bearing subjects—‘nor as citizens of society’—as rights-bearing subjects—‘but as members of heterogeneous communities of allegiance, as community emerges as a new way of conceptualising and administering moral relations among persons’ (Miller and Rose 2008, 25). In this framing, democracy can be promulgated without the assumptions of universality, rationality, and autonomy presumed in the discourses of modern liberalism. Governing authority no longer becomes exercised in the old way, as intervention and regulation from above society, in the form of liberal government on behalf of, or over, the social whole. Rather, new forms of governance appear as ways of democratising society itself through ‘empowering’ or ‘capability-building’ the citizen, enabling political subjects to take societal responsibility upon themselves and their communities. Miller and Rose are entirely correct in noting that this ‘ethical a priori of active citizens in an active society is perhaps the most fundamental, and most generalizable, characteristic of these new rationalities of government’ (2008, 215). Mitchell Dean concurs that the task of government today lies precisely in the management and regulation of, or inculcation of, the agency of the governed (Dean 2010, 196–97). The modern state does not withdraw from society and leave rational and autonomous subjects to their own devices; rather, it is discursively constructed as an active and facilitating state—acting through society from below, rather than from above. In our complex and globalised world, reflexivity demands that the democratic society is self-constituting without the guidance or direction of a collective will. Self-rule today is not a matter of a return to understandings of ‘direct democracy’ at the level of the workplace or the local community. Democracy is

From the Assembly to the Agora 205

increasingly a question of private or individual cognitive and social capacity rather than political or public representation. The problematic of individual reflexivity is one in which the collective will emerges interactively through the plural operation of democracy in society itself. In this process, the relationship of the public to the formal political sphere is inversed; rather than deliberative reason and representation constituting the public as a collective body, the plural public of the social sphere is enabled and empowered in their ‘everyday’ decision-making capacity as democracy devolves down to the level of the private individual. As the UK Royal Society for the Arts ‘Social Brain’ project suggests, responding to the problems of the nonlinear world is not a matter for government regulation but a concern of individuals as the key decision-makers. The problems of complexity mean that citizens need to be able to reflexively respond to externalities autonomously and responsibly (Grist 2009, 16). In today’s world, governments and international institutions lead the call for more democracy or for the democratisation of areas of social life. The call for more democracy tends to put the emphasis on society rather than the state, and demands for democracy relate to social responsibilities and responsivities rather than to making the government more accountable to the people. A good example is the UK government’s experimentation with ‘Big Society’ in which social problems are addressed through the extension of democracy, empowering active and responsive citizenship, particularly in addressing environmental, social, and health problems (Big Society 2012). Democracy, we are continually informed, is much more than voting in elections; it is about the public and individuals and their behaviour and understanding on an ‘everyday’ level. It is the limited capacity of states to cohere policy-making on the basis of a ‘general will’ that is reflected in understandings of democracy as a societal process. This support for the extension of democracy into the social and informal sphere marks out the nonlinear understanding of democracy from the legacy of the linear paradigm of both the premodern and modern world. Nonlinear understandings do not operate on the basis of constitutional or institutional solutions to the problem of democracy or the problem of collective will formation. Rather than making constitutional distributions of rights or the checks of legislation or judicial frameworks the solution, democracy as societal reflexivity works in a different register, on the problematic of the legitimating power of plural and shifting publics as they constitute themselves in the social or private sphere. Rather than starting with constitutional order and rights subjects, nonlinear approaches start with the problematic of the social production of reflexive autonomous subjects. This chapter attempts to demarcate this linear or liberal approach from that of nonlinear approaches, firstly through drawing out the centrality of the separation between the public and the private sphere in liberal modernist frameworks. The following sections then consider the development of nonlinear analytical framings. Emphasis is placed on the influential role of Walter Lippmann’s sceptical problematic of complexity and nonlinearity in the 1920s and on the complementary

206 David Chandler

ideas of ‘emergence’ stemming from the application of Darwinian evolutionary psychology. It is suggested that nonlinear approaches and the shift in understanding of the role and location of the public are then formulated in analogous ways both by pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and neoliberal ideologue Friedrich Hayek. In this framework, democracy becomes a mode of being or behaving, thus no longer operating through the constitution of a formal public sphere but rather through the facilitation of private choice-making and personal and community modes of self-government.

Democratic Reason Engagement in the collective deliberation of democratic reasoning has been understood, from the Enlightenment theorists to the present, as the highest exercise of freedom. From Rousseau onwards, the ‘general will’ was seen to be capable of emerging above corrupting private interests on the basis of the formal constitution of a public as the source of political legitimacy (Rousseau 1998). Social contract theory established the rational autonomous subject at the heart of the modern liberal democratic doctrine, and Immanuel Kant provided probably its most articulate defence. For Kant, the democratic space for individual freedom and autonomy was that of the public realm, where individuals could act as universal rational subjects in relation to other equally rational beings. It was only in the public sphere that individuals were held to be freed from relationships of obedience and authority, which dominated the private sphere of work (hierarchy of management), or of specialist needs (doctors, financial advisers, and so forth). The collective will could only emerge as a product of the exercise of public reasoning, through free and active engagement in discussion and debate in the public sphere (Kant 1991). The Enlightenment drew heavily upon classical understandings of the constitution of a democratic collective will through public political discourse, whereby citizens had not just a right but a duty of participation. It was the public sphere of the assembly ‘in which the free existence of a free citizen manifested itself,’ separate from the inequalities and dependencies of economic and social existence (Foucault 2011, 34; see also Arendt 1998; Samons 2004). Today, few theorists maintain the importance of such a division, understanding a formal realm of democratic discourse as artificially separated from private interests operating in the societal sphere of interaction, although this legacy can be seen in Habermasian theories of dialogic reasoning and communicative rationality (Habermas 1986; see also Disch 1997, 152) and in deliberative approaches (Elster 1998; Gutmann and Thompson 2004; Dryzek 2012; Fishkin 2011). It is important to emphasise that the critique of the formation of a democratic will is today not couched in elitist terms, as a critique of democracy, but in support of the extension of democracy to the social sphere through the inculcation of personal reflexivity. The discourse of nonlinearity thereby moves beyond

From the Assembly to the Agora 207

the Platonic ‘reversal,’ which forms the basis of traditional conservative thought, suggesting that democracy would merely result in mob-rule and the corruption of power (Plato 2007; see also Foucault 2010, 224; 2011, 61). It also moves beyond the ‘Aristotelian hesitation,’ whereby democracy was defended not on the basis of the constitution of a collective will but on the basis of limiting and altering power and thereby negatively restraining private interests (Aristotle 1992; Foucault 2011, 46). The legacy of Aristotelian approaches to democracy can be seen today, for example, in John Keane’s conception of ‘monitory democracy.’ Here, the role of citizens is not that of public decision-making but of maintaining checks on executive rule, with the use of new communication technologies enabling citizens ‘in big and complex societies’ to scrutinise the workings of power (2011, 214; see also 2009). Keane criticises contemporary advocates of ‘deep’ or ‘direct’ democracy, like Fung and Wright (2003), who argue that what counts is ‘the commitment and capacities of ordinary people to make sensible decisions through reasoned deliberation and empowered because they attempt to tie action to discussion’ (2011, 219). As we shall see below, for nonlinear approaches, representation and the control over government is no longer the central concern; rather, it is social processes and interactions that are at the centre of analysis. In the sections which follow, I seek to draw out the development of today’s democratic understandings of the need for a reflexive citizenry, locating the power of self-government not in the formal public sphere but in the social sphere. Crucial to this analytical framing is the scepticism of linear reasoning found in both the pragmatic approach of John Dewey and the neoliberal approach of Friedrich Hayek. Both these understandings challenged the linear and rationalist assumptions of liberal democratic theory, which as Koopman notes, even today, ‘is still excessively enamoured of state-based rationality’ (2009).

Dewey, Hayek, and Nonlinear Reasoning While the Platonic ‘reversal’ and the Aristotelian ‘hesitation’ established the basis for the linear problematic of democracy and reason in modern liberal thinking— making institutionalist frameworks, through which representation could be channelled, key—the nonlinear paradigm of democracy and representation operates on a different basis. Following Lippmann (1993), the Deweyan and Hayekian ‘inversion’ argued that no coherent democratic will could be formed because the evolutionary nature of society and its interrelational organic complexity meant social outcomes were emergent and could not be known, predicted, or controlled. In this framing, the problem of democratic rule was no longer the formal or constitutional relationship between the elite and the mass but the informal norms, habits, and cognitive understandings of social interaction, which were understood to need to become increasingly reflexive, open, and adaptable. (This approach was further developed in the new institutionalist economic understanding of the

208 David Chandler

evolutionary paths of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ societies; see, for example, North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009.) Dewey and Hayek shared an understanding that reflective or deliberative democratic reasoning in the public sphere could not constitute a collective democratic will, but that a different, and nonlinear, form of adaptive, reflexive, experiential reasoning could be inculcated in the societal sphere of practical engagement with problems and, through individual choice-making, imbricated within spontaneously evolving feedback loops. Awareness and reflection upon the relational embeddedness of the individual enabled a new set of democratic capacities to be developed, premised upon understanding the practices of everyday life as constitutive of the world rather than the processes of formal representation and government policy-making, based upon reductionist and rationalist assumptions of the pursuit of interests. Democracy could be inculcated in ‘everyday life,’ in families, communities, and associative attachments, where local experiential knowledge was always superior to the distant dictates of majoritarian rule. Whereas linear reasoning operated on the fiction that a unitary public will could be constructed in the political sphere, nonlinear reasoning sought to enable the empowerment of a plurality of publics in the societal sphere. Both Dewey and Hayek are understood to be liberal thinkers, usually construed as being from very different (if not opposite) ends of the liberal spectrum—one a progressive anti-market educationalist, the other a neoliberal free market advocate, until recently neglected by left-leaning democratic theorists (see Gamble 1996); however, more recent work has highlighted shared aspects between the two thinkers (for example, Ralston 2012; Mulligan 2006), and the University of Oregon philosopher Colin Koopman has explicitly argued that now ‘the time is ripe for Deweyans to take another look at Hayek’ (2009). One of the key distinctions was that Dewey, the ‘social reformer,’ sought to move beyond the public/private divide, while Hayek, the ‘neoliberal,’ was often read as being a staunch defender of the public/private dichotomy, with freedom of the private sphere safeguarded through restrictions on the reach of governmental power. However, their distinct normative stances should not be allowed to obscure their very similar ontological framings of the democracy problematic. What was key to both their work was their scepticism with regard to linear, rationalist approaches to the formation of democratic reason and preference for nonlinear societal responses. For pragmatist theory and for Hayek, liberal rationalist approaches failed to grasp the nonlinear nature of human affairs. For both theorists, rationalism was critiqued from two directions: firstly, they critiqued the Cartesian subject, viewing thought as secondary to and entirely imbricated with being in the world; secondly, they understood the world of human affairs as complex and transitory, not amenable to central direction or planning. They both thereby shared evolutionary or emergent understanding of politics, which today reflect well the political sensitivities of our understandings of living in a

From the Assembly to the Agora 209

nonlinear world, in which traditional frameworks of democracy and representation no longer seem to fit. As Hodgson points out, both Dewey and Hayek were strongly influenced by Darwinist understandings and were resolute in their hostility to behaviourist approaches (2006). Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection was understood to fundamentally challenge religious ideas of the uniqueness of man (the human/nature divide) and the Cartesian dualism of thought and being (see the excellent treatment in Rogers 2012). The application of Darwinism to theories of the mind led to the development of evolutionary or emergent understandings, whereby thought and reason were understood to evolve from inherited and acquired predispositions. William James, the founding father of pragmatist philosophy, distinguished instincts as phylogenetic (inherited) and habits as ontogenetic (acquired or learned), both of which preceded and shaped reason and understanding (1957). In this framing, the unconscious mental processes provided the platform for the more highly developed conscious processes; the past, both genetically and environmentally, therefore heavily weighed upon the present. In this way, both the classical liberal modernist understanding of the autonomous rational subject and the radical social science view that consciousness is determined by underlying structures, with subjects being merely the bearers or intermediaries of their social relations, were rejected (see further, for contrasting views, Althusser and Balibar 2009; Latour 2007). The removal of both Cartesian rationalism and determining social structures was vital for the shifting articulation of democracy away from the emphasis on the public political realm. How subjects responded to changes or crises was therefore neither a matter of autonomous rationalist reflection nor a matter of government engineering (ensuring that the right stimulus or incentive would elicit the desired behaviour). Subjects were innately ‘political’ in the sense of being self-directed decision-makers; however, the frameworks through which those decisions were made owed much to both evolutionary psychology and to societal habits and norms (in a phenomenological framework similar to that of Edmund Husserl, 1970). For both Hayek and Dewey, reasoning was not something separate from experience and social practice; reasoning was not a rationalist reflection upon the world but a response to the world based on associational norms and experiences. Dewey was particularly forward looking in his critique of the liberal ‘individualistic’ mythology of man as an autonomous rational subject, which he saw as a contingent and post-hoc justification for the American and French Revolutions, dependent on Newtonian metaphysics and its import into economic laissez-faire understandings (1927, 84–92; see also Dewey 2008). As Dewey wrote, . . . singular beings in their singularity think, want and decide, what they think and strive for, the content of their beliefs and intentions is a subjectmatter provided by association. Thus man is not merely de facto associated,

210 David Chandler

but he becomes a social animal in the make-up of his ideas, sentiments and deliberate behaviour. What he believes, hopes for and aims at is the outcome of association and intercourse. (1927, 25) Although Hayek was often mistakenly understood to be an advocate of rationalist individualism, his advocacy of the free market was not based upon the reasoning autonomy of the subject but, in fact, upon a critique of the classical rationalist assumptions of homo economicus. For Hayek, like Dewey, human reasoning was merely a phenomenological product of ‘interpretations’ based upon inherited and learned experiences that mediated between the experience and the response. For Hayek, ‘we cannot hope to account for observed behaviour without reconstructing the “intervening processes in the brain’’’ (1952, 44). Hayek turned to psychology to explain how internal differentiations facilitated varying responses to events or crises, particularly to those that were unfamiliar or unexpected. According to Hayek, brains were complex, integrated networks, but they were also malleable and capable of adaptive change, depending upon the extent to which ‘phylogenetic,’ inherited patterns and connections, and ‘ontogenetic’ aspects, acquired by the individual during the course of his or her lifetime, interacted (1952, 80–81). Hayek’s work on the psychology of the brain focused on how human responses were shaped through resilience and adaption in ways that were little different from those of any other living organism: The continued existence of those complex structures which we call organisms is made possible by their capacity of responding to certain external influences by such changes in their structure or activity as are required to maintain or restore the balance necessary for their persistence. (1952, 82) Individuals, especially more complex organisms like humans, would respond differently to external stimuli in ways that enabled them to react differently. Often these reflexive differences would not be intentional but arbitrary or accidental. The key point for Hayek was that differential experiences and reactions necessarily resulted from the innate practical experiential differences of individuals and the complex interaction between their ‘milieu intérieur’ (internal, mental environment) and their external, societal environments (1952, 109). This evolutionary or emergent understanding of reflexive subjectivity was to map well onto current understandings of the problem of governing complexity (see further, Chandler 2013a). Hayekian and Deweyan perspectives understood reasoning and intentionality as existing neither independently of, nor prior to, social engagement but as emerging through social processes; reason thereby developed adaptively. Instead of understanding reason as a reflection or representation of reality in thought, Dewey

From the Assembly to the Agora 211

argued that reasoning was a product of the ongoing practical interaction of subjects with their environment (2007, 21). Reasoning was therefore not ‘deliberative’ or ‘rationalist’ but an acquired capacity to respond and to adapt to the world. For Hayek, too, it was implicit or tacit knowledge, which was key to reflexivity and to the construction of decentralised and efficient complex orders (Ralston 2012). For both authors, there were no dualist understandings of subject–object relations at either the individual or state level. Neither individuals nor states were seen to be autonomous goal- or target-setters, engaged in means–ends instrumentalism. Both therefore argued against foundationalist understandings and understood democracy as a process of societal experimentation and adaptive learning. The two key aspects of this anti-rationalist understanding (drawn out well in Koopman 2009) are those of process and plurality. There was no single universal or rational order, neither that constituted by the objective structures of the world (which we can only partially perceive through our limited practical experiences and desires) nor that imposed by some Cartesian rationality (as our subjective understandings and desires are similarly shaped by our societal associations, customs, and habits). Reason was thereby an evolutionary process of plural experiences and understandings; reason, like society, was a self-organising and emergent social product. There was no possibility of going beyond this to some monistic view of knowledge, somehow standing outside and independently of our social attachments. The human world was one of complex social interactions with contingent and emergent outcomes beyond human reasoning or control from above. For Hayek, the most adapted and complex social, legal, and political institutions resulted from human action not from human design: they were self-organised or emergent. These societal institutions therefore were not established on the basis of instrumental rationalism and lacked any ultimate end or purpose; evolving through social practice as a framework of often tacit rules and customary norms, shaping the citizen’s habitual and unreflective practices. Of course, for Hayek, the most important of these institutions was the market, which, following Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand,’ was held to regulate the complex transactions of society much more efficiently than any government could do through planning. The operation of the market—as allocator of goods and services and the provider of symbolic guides (prices) for decision-making—was seen to be the key institution through which individuals were able to make executive decisions and choices and through this to constitute an emergent institutional order. Of course, it could be argued that Hayek overstated the divide between the rationality of the market and the irrational ‘fatal conceit’ of government regulation (1991). However, the alternative to the failings of market rationality from the Deweyan pragmatist perspective would not be that of state intervention, but the highlighting that market rationality is itself determined by society’s democratic ethical commitments. As Koopman argues (2009), through democratic ethical reasoning, society could ensure that markets worked more efficiently, for example, through ethical consumption raising the demand for organic, locally sourced,

212 David Chandler

labour-friendly, fair-trade products. The critique of market rationality did not necessarily lead to a state-based solution but, logically, to a society-based solution. For Dewey, as for Hayek, states, with their means–ends considerations and limited knowledge, were powerless before the real sphere of democratic reason: society. It is increasingly from within this framework of social, intersubjective, moral, and ethical development that democracy is understood to be furthered today.

After Representation Dewey and Hayek both prefigured the ‘life politics’ of postmodernity through their emphasis on societal interaction and the process of reflexive decision-making in the ‘everyday.’ It is important to highlight that the critique of political rationalism inevitably meant that the political subject was embodied in social and environmental attachments, and it is at this level that democratic reflexivity needs to operate: upon democracy as an ethic or way of life. Democracy cannot be a product of rationalist deliberation, as if thought were somehow distinct from practice; if it is to mean anything, it has to enable society to be responsive to contingencies arising from human association. Both Dewey and Hayek speak to us today because of the different register of their sensitivity to the problems of politics. These are not those of individual or collective rights or of needs and desires, as in rationalist discourses, but the unintended problems of association (which differ according to the complexity of each society across time and space; Dewey 1927, 33). This associational power is self-generated, emergent, unintended, and unknown except for its consequences, which can be traced back and understood (Dewey 1927, 32, 106). The problems for both thinkers did not involve the formal politics of representation but the social understandings and reflexivity elicited from the contingent and unintentional effects of association. The problem was one of emergent social reasoning, not rationalist ‘political’ reasoning. Politics was therefore a process of responding to concerns regarding these externalities, which constituted pluralist publics with a stake in their resolution (1927, 73). This complexity, driven by technological change, was described well by Dewey: Indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting behaviour call a public into existence having a common interest in controlling these consequences. But the machine age has so enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified and complicated the scope of the indirect consequences, have formed such immense and consolidated unions in action, on an impersonal rather than a community basis, that the resultant public cannot identify and distinguish itself. (1927, 126) For Dewey, like Giddens (2002), it was a ‘runaway world,’ whereby ‘man has suffered the impact of an enormously enlarged control of physical energies without

From the Assembly to the Agora 213

any corresponding ability to control himself and his own affairs’ (1927, 175). Once this control could no longer be regained through the construction of a state-based deliberative public, the only solution was that of the construction of a pluralised public, reflexive about its associative connections and ‘responsive to the complex and world-wide scene in which it is enmeshed’ (1927, 216). This public was not formally politically constituted and thus operated on both local and global levels—‘while local, it will not be isolated’ (216). The solution to the runaway world of extended associational powers was not that of state regulation or formal representation, but that of developing interactive social responsibilities. If anything, Dewey could be read as arguing that the separation of the public sphere from the social one was the key barrier to unleashing social reasoning— the real intelligence which was already embedded in social interaction and could not be articulated as long as it was forced to take artificial political forms. Social interactive ties made conscious and reflective could then provide real democratic reasoning (1927, 219). It is here that the ‘life politics’ of Giddens (1994) and Beck (1997) or the actor-network theorising of Latour (2007) can be seen to provide models for resilience as a framework for governing in a nonlinear world. For both Dewey and Hayek, the sphere of reason was not located in the artificial public realm of government and representation but in the private and informal realm of societal interaction.Yet neither of these thinkers advocated the freedom of the private and informal realm on the basis of reason as rationalist knowledge, but rather they did so on the basis of the contingency of understanding and the need to inculcate adaptive learning. Both considered how adaptive learning could be facilitated by governing institutions, rather than considering the state as an executive, decision-making actor. For Dewey, ‘the regulations and laws of the state are . . . misconceived when they are viewed as commands,’ as if the state directly represented the Rousseauian ‘general will’ (1927, 54–55) and there were no politically constituted subject capable of directing and controlling society: Rules of law are in fact the institutions of conditions under which persons make their arrangements with one another. They are the structures which canalize action; they are active forces only as are the banks which confine the flow of a stream, and are commands only in the sense in which banks command the current. (Dewey 1927, 54) Dewey and Hayek (1960) both understood the modern state to be an enabling state rather than a directing or decision-making state, through the preference for constitutive rules rather than regulatory ones (Dewey 1927, 54; Hayek 1982, 169–95; see also Rawls 1955; Searle 1969). What the state enabled was social reasoning: the true democratic reason. In this emergent and evolutionary understanding, states played a role analogous to that of custom or habit, providing the framework for decision-making in the informal, private, sphere but not dictating

214 David Chandler

it, enabling social experimentation and adaptation to take place in the social sphere. The meaning of democracy was transformed from the representation and contestation of views and preferences in the deliberative public sphere to democracy as a mode of being or a mode of life: democracy as adaptive learning in the societal sphere.

Conclusion The work of Dewey and Hayek prefigured the post-1990 understandings of how politics and democracy needed to be reworked in the post-political age, after the perceived decline of the linear politics of Left and Right, which had shaped liberal modernity since the French Revolution. What is particularly important to note is that, in nonlinear understandings, power is located not at the level of the state but at the level of society itself. It is this shift that enables a new type of political solution to problems, not addressed to the question of institutional mechanisms of representation at the state level but to problems as they are democratically reframed at the societal level. In traditional liberal rationalist frameworks, the problem of state policy-making was understood to be the limited capacity of the public to understand (or to be interested in) the complexity of government policy-making and therefore to hold government properly to account as representing the public will—this is the traditional Aristotelian view, replicated at some points (more negatively) by Walter Lippmann in the Phantom Public and engaged with anew (more positively) in John Keane’s advocacy of ‘monitory democracy.’ In Aristotelian framings of the problem, the solution was that of reworking public accountability at a smaller community level of decentralised power, making mechanisms of accountability more simplified or transparent or increasing the educational or informational knowledge of the public. All these responses presupposed traditional state-based rationalist understandings and operated around the problematic of representation with the growth of political communities and the complexity of government. Institutional changes were envisaged, or the public were to be educated or empowered, in order for the mechanisms of representation to work more efficiently, for the liberal promise of government as representing the ‘will of the people’ to be reaffirmed. As long as we lived in the world of political contestation—of Left and Right— with state power at the centre of political life and contested by (at least two) rival ideological understandings, given shape and coherence by political party organisation and social contestation, the problem of representation was at the centre of democratic theorising. Today, we no longer live in such a world, and with the decline of state-based understandings of politics, we have seen a revival of evolutionary, emergent, and nonlinear understandings, which no longer have the problematic of representation at their heart. When government authorities and policy think tanks talk of giving ‘power to the people’ today, they do not necessarily discuss ways of developing more efficient mechanisms of representation.

From the Assembly to the Agora 215

Democratic politics in a nonlinear age is less concerned with representation than with the development of social reasoning. The ‘power’ which ‘the people’ are seen to require today is social empowerment: the power to take reasoned and responsive decisions in their everyday lives. This is evidenced across the board of policy understandings in both domestic and international politics, where even human rights-based approaches focus upon transforming individuals and communities rather than enabling formal legal and political representative claims. This requirement for both individuals and communities to have the capacity to think autonomously and responsively in a world of change and of complexity is often discussed in terms of the inculcation of resilience. In this framing, there is no limit to the extension of democracy through societal capacity-building, the ‘powering’ of communities, or the empowerment of decision-making individuals. Once the problematic of constituting the public will is seen to be the responsibility of the pluralised public itself, in its continual emergence, we are all enjoined to the democratic task of working on ourselves and reflecting upon our own attachments and responsibilities to those around us. The personal is indeed political, once democracy is freed from its formal bounds of representation.

Bibliography Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. 2009. Reading Capital. London: Verso. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. 2nd Rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle. 1992. The Politics. London: Penguin. Beck, Ulrich. 1997. The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. 2002. Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences. London: SAGE. Big Society. 2012. ‘Powering’ Big Society. Accessed November 29, 2012. http://www. thebigsociety.co.uk/projects/powering/. Byrne, David, and Gill Callaghan. 2014. Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: The State of the Art. Abingdon: Routledge. Cerny, Philip. 2010. Rethinking World Politics: A Theory of Transnational Neopluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chandler, David. 2013a. ‘Resilience and the Autotelic Subject: Towards a Critique of the Societalization of Security.’ International Political Sociology 7 (2): 210–26. Chandler, David. 2013b. ‘ “Human-Centred” Development? Rethinking “Freedom” and “Agency” in Discourses of International Development.’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42 (1): 3–23. Connolly, William E. 2011. A World of Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Crouch, Colin. 2011. The Strange Non-death of Neo-liberalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dallmayr, Fred. 2010. The Promise of Democracy: Political Agency and Transformation. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Dean, Mitchell. 2010. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. 2nd ed. London: SAGE. de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

216 David Chandler

DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum. Dewey, John. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. New York: Swallow Press. ———. 2007. Democracy and Education. Teddington, UK: Echo Library. ———. 2008. The Quest for Certainty: The Later Works of John Dewey. Vol. 4, 1929. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Disch, Lisa. 1997. ‘Please Sit Down, but Don’t Make Yourself at Home: Arendtian “Visiting” and the Prefigurative Politics of Consciousness-Raising.’ In Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, edited by Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, 132–65. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dryzek, John. 2012. Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elster, Jon, ed. 1998. Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fishkin, James. 2011. When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fung, Archon, and Eric Olin Wright. 2003. ‘Thinking About Empowered Participatory Governance.’ In Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance, edited by Archon Fung and Eric Olin Wright, 3–42. London: Verso. Giddens, Anthony. 1994. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 2004. Why Deliberative Democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hodgson, Geoffrey M. 2006. ‘Instinct and Habit before Reason: Comparing the Views of John Dewey, Friedrich Hayek and Thorstein Veblen.’ Advances in Austrian Economics 9: 109–43. Foucault, Michel. 1981. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. London: Penguin. ———. 2003. ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. London: Allen Lane. ———. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Basingstoke: Palgrave. ———. 2010. The Government of the Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982– 1983. Basingstoke: Palgrave. ———. 2011. The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Gamble, Andrew. 1996. ‘Hayek and the Left.’ Political Quarterly 67 (1): 46–53. Giddens, Anthony. 1994. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2002. Runaway World: How Globalisation Is Reshaping Our Lives. London: Profile Books. Grist, Matthew. 2009. Changing the Subject: How New Ways of Thinking about Human Behaviour Might Change Politics, Policy and Practice. London: RSA. Habermas, Jürgen. 1986. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Cambridge: Polity. Hanisch, Carol. 1969. ‘The Personal Is Political.’ Accessed November 29, 2012. http:// www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2006. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Penguin Books. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

From the Assembly to the Agora 217

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1952. The Sensory Order: An Enquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul. ———. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty London: Routledge. ———. 1982. Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy. London: Routledge. ———. 1991. The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. James, William. 1957. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover. Kant, Immanuel. 1991. ‘An Answer to the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?’’’ In Kant: Political Writings, 54–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keane, John. 2009. The Life and Death of Democracy. London: Simon & Schuster. ———. 2011.‘Monitory Democracy.’ In The Future of Representative Democracy, edited by Sonia Alonso, John Keane, and Wolfgang Merkel, 212–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koopman, Colin. 2009. ‘Morals and Markets: Liberal Democracy through Dewey and Hayek.’ Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 23 (3): 151–79. Lash, Scott. 2002. ‘Forward: Individualization in a Non-linear Mode.’ In Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences, edited by Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, vii–xiii. London: SAGE. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lippmann, Walter. 1993. The Phantom Public. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Miller, Peter, and Nikolas Rose. 2008. Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Cambridge: Polity. Mulligan, R. 2006. ‘John Dewey’s Ways of Knowing and the Radical Subjectivism of the Austrian School.’ Education and Culture 22 (2): 61–82. North, Douglass C. 1999. ‘Dealing with a Non-ergodic World: Institutional Economics, Property Rights, and the Global Environment.’ Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum 10 (1): 1–12. North, Douglass C., John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato. 2007. The Republic. London: Penguin. Ralston, Shane J. 2012. ‘Dewey and Hayek on Democratic Experimentalism.’ Social Science Research Network working paper, April 5. Accessed November 12, 2014. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2035112. Rawls, John. 1955. ‘Two Concepts of Rules.’ Philosophical Review 64 (1): 3–32. Rogers, Melvin. 2012. The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press. Room, Graham. 2011. Complexity, Institutions and Public Policy: Agile Decision-Making in a Turbulent World. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Rosenau, James N., and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, eds. 1992. Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1998. The Social Contract. Ware: Wordsworth.

218 David Chandler

Samons, Loren J. 2004. What’s Wrong with Democracy? From Athenian Practice to American Worship. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, John, and Chris Jenks. 2006. Qualitative Complexity: Ecology, Cognitive Processes and the Re-emergence of Structures in Post-humanist Social Theory. Abingdon: Routledge. Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. New York: Semiotext(e).

CONTRIBUTORS

Albena Azmanova is Reader in Social and Political Theory at the University of

Kent, where she directs the postgraduate program in international political economy. Her publications span topics ranging from democratic transition and consolidation and theories of justice and judgment to deliberative democracy, European integration, and critique of the political economy of globally integrated capitalism. Her most recent book, The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment (2012), articulates an agonistic model of public deliberations. Her recent work on the metamorphosis of capitalism aims at bringing the critique of political economy back into critical social theory. Arjun Appadurai is Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication

at New York University. He is also Tata Chair Professor in the Tata Institute for the Social Sciences (Mumbai, India) and Senior Research Partner in the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Cultural Diversity in Gottingen (Germany). He is the author of numerous books and articles on globalisation, media, and urbanisation. His most recent book is The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2013). Keith Breen is a Senior Lecturer in Political and Social Theory in the School of

Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s University, Belfast. He has published articles on the philosophy of work and political ethics in a number of journals, including Contemporary Political Theory, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Res Publica, The European Legacy, and New Political Economy. He is the author of Under Weber’s Shadow: Modernity, Subjectivity and Politics in Habermas, Arendt and MacIntyre (Ashgate 2012) and the co-editor of After the Nation? Critical Reflections on Nationalism and Postnationalism (Palgrave 2010) and of Freedom and Domination: Exploring Republican Freedom (Taylor and Francis forthcoming).

220 Contributors

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations and Research Director

of the Centre for the Study of Democracy in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster. He has written widely on the themes of democracy and the rise of non-linearity. He is the author of a number of monographs, including Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-Building (Pluto, 2006); Constructing Global Civil Society: Morality and Power in International Relations (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004, 2005); From Kosovo to Kabul (and Beyond): Human Rights and International Intervention (Pluto, 2002, 2006); and Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton (Pluto, 1999, 2000). David Chandler is the co-editor of the new Routledge book series Advances in Democratic Theory. Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges

and Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including The Communist Horizon (Verso 2012), Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke University Press 2009), Zizek’s Politics (Routledge 2006), Reformatting Politics (Routledge 2006; coedited with Jon Anderson and Geert Lovink), Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (Routledge 2004; coedited with Paul A. Passavant), Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalises on Democracy (Cornell UP 2002), Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Cornell UP 1998), Solidarity of Strangers (University of California Press 1996), and Cultural Studies and Political Theory (Cornell UP, 2000). Alessandro Ferrara is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome

‘Tor Vergata’ and President of the Italian Association for Political Philosophy. Recently he published The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (Columbia University Press 2008). He is also the author of Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity (Routledge 1998) and Justice and Judgment: The Rise and the Prospect of the Judgment Model in Contemporary Political Philosophy (SAGE 1999). He has a new volume in press: The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism (Cambridge University Press 2014). Matthew Fluck is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics and

International Relations at the University of Westminster. He studied at the Universities of Oxford and Warwick before receiving his PhD in International Relations from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 2010. His research concerns the relationship between knowledge, practice, and international politics. Recent works have examined the international implications of Theodor Adorno’s account of communication and the role played by conceptions of truth in international relations theory. Nikolas Kompridis is Professorial Fellow in Philosophy and Political Thought

at the University of Western Sydney as well as the  Research Coordinator and Project Leader at the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (MIT Press 2006), Philosophical Romanticism (Routledge

Contributors 221

2006), and The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought (Bloomsbury Academic 2013), and is currently writing two new books, one on public reason and practices of freedom and the other on receptivity and critique. He has published widely on diverse topics in political philosophy, critical theory, and romanticism in journals such as Political Theory, New Literary History, European Journal of Political Theory, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, as well as in edited volumes such as Habermas: A Critical Reader (1999), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (2009), and The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Thought (2014). Tamara Lothian is currently a Senior Visiting Scholar at the Center on

Globalization and Sustainable Development, Earth Institute, Columbia University. In this capacity, Ms. Lothian directs a research project in the area of sovereignty, law, and global finance. This project explores, in comparative legal and institutional detail, ways of organising finance, democracy, and inclusive growth in different regions of the world as well as in the organisation of the global economy. In addition to her affiliation with the Earth Institute, Ms. Lothian is currently Senior Advisor to the global law firm White & Case, Visiting Professor of Law and Research Fellow at Fundação Getulio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro, and Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School. Ms. Lothian spent the first part of her career in international finance and the second part in academic work and advisory work for governments and financial firms. The central theme of her recent academic work has been the development of ideas about finance and financial reform in the US and in the global economy. Ms. Lothian is a graduate of Brown University (BA in economics and philosophy) and Harvard Law School (JD). Noëlle McAfee is Professor of Philosophy at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. She specialises in social and political philosophy and feminist theory. She received her PhD in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin in 1998 with a dissertation on democratic agency in critical theory and French feminism. Her writings include Democracy and the Political Unconscious (Columbia 2008); Julia Kristeva (Routledge 2003); Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (Cornell 2000); and numerous articles and book chapters. Her co-edited volumes include a special issue of the philosophy journal Hypatia on feminist engagements in democratic theory and an edited volume titled Democratising Deliberation: A Political Theory Anthology (Kettering 2012). She is also co-chair of the Public Philosophy Network and the associate editor of the Kettering Review. She has been an associate of the Kettering Foundation for over 20 years and has also worked on projects funded by the Ford and MacArthur foundations. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Democracy Otherwise. Mihaela Mihai is the 50th Anniversary Lecturer in Politics at the University of York. Her research interests cut across political theory, political science, and law. More precisely, she is interested in the affective dimension of politics, political judgment, transitional justice, historical injustice, and the politics of memory. Her work has been published in Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Theory,

222 Contributors

European Journal of Political Theory, Ratio Juris, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, and others. She is the co-editor, with Mathias Thaler, of The Uses and Abuses of Political Apologies (Palgrave, 2014). Claus Offe teaches political sociology at the Hertie School of Governance. He

completed his PhD at the University of Frankfurt and his habilitation at the University of Konstanz. In Germany, he has held chairs for political science and political sociology at the Universities of Bielefeld (1975–1989) and Bremen (1989–1995) as well as at the Humboldt University of Berlin (1995–2005). He has worked as fellow and visiting professor at, among others, the Institutes for Advanced Study in Stanford, Princeton, and the Australian National University as well as Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the New School University, New York. Paulina Tambakaki is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the Centre for

the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. She is co-editor of the Routledge book series Advances in Democratic Theory, and she works in the areas of citizenship, agonism, and representative democracy. Her publications include a book titled Human Rights, or Citizenship? (Birkbeck Law Press 2010) and several articles in the journals Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Parallax, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, and Citizenship Studies. Paulina is currently working on a book on agonism and democratic theory, and in 2014 she guest-edited a special issue of Parallax on agonism and the politics of passion.

INDEX

absolute sovereignty 116, 117 accountability 119–20; individual 119, 121–2; rating agencies 119, 122–3; transparency and 154, 157 action: communicative 37–8, 56, 60; instrumental 37–8; labour, work and 35–7; civic actions 175–6 adaptive learning 210–11, 213–14 adversarialism 24, 27–8 agency 204–5 agonism 7, 17–33; crisis, contestation and radical politics 25–30; and representative democracy 21–5 Annan, K. 137, 138 antagonism 54 anti-politics, neoliberalism’s 166–8 anti-utopian scepticism 192–3 Appadurai, A. 139–40 Apple 63–4 Arendt, H. 6, 166, 186, 190; social– political relationship 169–71, 178; working life 34–5, 35–7, 38–40 Argentina 44–7 Aristotle 179–80, 207 Asian Coalition for Housing Rights 135–6 aspiration, capacity for 128, 139–41 Assange, J. 10 assembly teams, autonomous 44, 46–7 austerity 2; measures 165 Austin, J.L. 130 autarky, relative 104

automotive industry 43–4, 46–7 Azmanova, A. 179 Bacon, F. 157 bail-out plans 113, 120–1 banking: separation of commercial and investment banking 101, 113, 119–20; shadow 99–101; see also finance Barabási, A.-L. 57–9, 69 Barber, B. 167, 169–70 Bell, D. 121 Benjamin, W. 193 Bentham, J. 146, 147–8, 152, 153 Berger, J. 195–6 Berlusconi government 117 Bernstein, R. 171 ‘Big Society’ 205 Bloch, E. 197 Bohman, J. 172 Boltanski, L. 184–5, 196 Boyd, A. 72 Brand, S. 63 Braverman, H. 40–1 Brazil 95, 103–5, 140 BRIC countries 95, 103–5 Brown, W. 194–5 bubbles 55, 112 Buffett, W. 113–14 Burra, S. 134 Bush administration 50–1, 55, 73 Butler, J. 132–3, 137

224 Index

capacity: to aspire 128, 139–41; individual 204–5 Cape Town slum women 134–5 capitalism: communicative see communicative capitalism; see neoliberalism, stages of 179; change 184–5; domination through 195–6; instrumental 196; structural 165 China 103, 104 circulation: of content 51–2; of secret information 158 citizenship, active 204–5, mature 42 claims-making 20, 28–30, 31 coercion, monopoly of 77–8 Cohen, J. 42 Cole, G.D.H. 41–2 collective will 202, 205, 206, 207–8 communal integration policies 45, 47 communicative action 37–8, 56, 60 communicative capitalism 8, 50–76 communicative interaction 159 communism 18–19 Connolly, W. 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 consciousness raising 173–4 constructivism 132 consumption: debt-sustained 101–2; as production 64–5 contestation 21; crisis, radical politics and 25–30 cooperatives 44–7 corporatism 97 counter-hegemony 19, 27–8 Cowen government 117 credit expansion 101–2 crises 6, 184; contestation, radical politics and 25–30; crisis of representative democracy 1–2, 17–33; economic 115; financial see financial crises; fiscal 81; of 2008 9–10, 83, 84–5, 92–3, 94, 95–102, 113, 117, 120 Critchley, S. 74 critical ontology 191–2 critique 7, 11–12, 190–3; as assembling/ gathering 190; exhaustion of 186–90; founding political critique 11, 184–201; utopian role of 196–200; as weapon 188–9; world-disclosing role of 196–200 Culler, J. 130 Darwin, C. 209 Dean, H. 67 Dean, M. 204

Deleuze, G. 24 Deleuze-influenced theorists 19–20 deliberation 10–11, 128–31, 179–80; choicework 173–4; context 10, 128–31; failed performatives 131–9; in poor democracies 10, 126–43; problem of 127–8; reason-giving approach to 172–3; social movements challenging and engaging 176–8; social–political tensions 171–4, 175, 176–8 deliberative: chains 138–9; demand overload 81–2 democracy: crisis of representative 1–2, 17–33; future 192–3, 197, 199; renewal of 7, 9–10; vocal 4–5 Democracy Now 50 democratic re-embedment, principles of 119–24 denial 65, 68 depoliticisation 167–8 deregulation 62, 113 derivatives 113–14 Derrida, J. 130, 187, 188, 192–3, 197 division of labour 40–1, 42 Dewey, J. 207–14 disclosure 66 displacement 65, 66–8 distributed networks 59 domination, through change 195–6 dot.com bubble 55 Durban public rally 135–6 Dussel, E. 168, 171 Dyer-Witheford, N. 64 economic associations 42 economic crises 115 economic globalisation 53–4 economic sphere 36–7, 39 economies of solidarity 45, 47 economy: market 90–1, 105; post-industrial 111 elections 4, 13 elite capture 139 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act 2008 120 empowerment 204; social 215; transparency and 144–5, 146–7, 153–60 empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores 44–7 endogenous disruptive forces 81–2 endogenous ungovernability 84–5 Enlightenment 186–7, 191, 206 environment-protecting legislation 118–19 environmental regimes 151–2

Index 225

European Union (EU) 167 everyday life, politicisation of 202–18 evolutionary theory 209 exchange value 56–7 experts, relativisation of 2, 3–4 export-led growth 103–5 failed performatives 131–3; generative 133–9 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) 119, 122 Federal Reserve Board 119 Felman, S. 132, 137 feminism 203–4 fetishism, technology 59–68 Fiat 114 file-sharing 64, 65 finance: democracy, law and global finance 9–10, 89–109; global 9–10, 89–109; and the progressive imagination 89–90; speculative 95–102, 112–13 financial crisis 93; deepening 94, 96, 98, 105, 106; hypertrophy 94, 96, 98–102, 105; markets, disembedded 9, 110–25; openness 104–5 Financial Services Modernization Act 1999 (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) 101, 119 Foucault, M. 152, 186–7, 191–2 framing 129, 175 Frank, T. 52 Frederich II of Prussia 157 Free Net 64 freedom 24–5; and working life 7–8, 34–49 Freud, S. 61, 68 Fuchs, A. 122–3 Fung, A. 150, 156, 207 Gadamer, H.-G. 186 Galloway, A.R. 59 Gamson, J. 65 Gehring, K. 122–3 general will 202, 205, 206, 207–8 Germany 80–1 Gingrich, N. 64 Glass-Steagall Act 1933 119–20; repeal of 101, 113, 119–20 global civil society 155 globalisation 85, 126–7; economic 53–4 Godmani’s government 117 Goffman, E. 129 Goodman, A. 50

Gore, A. 64 Gould, C. 41 governance; global 151–2; post-democratic 184; post-political 184; governing capacity 77–9; see also ungovernability Graham, M. 66 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act 1999 101, 119 Greece 165, 179 Green, J. 4–5 Greenspan, A. 84–5, 119 GSEs 97; privatisation of 98–9 Haarde government 117 Habermas, J. 130–1, 157, 159–60, 167, 172, 173; communicative action 37–8, 56; utopian energies 194; working life 34–5, 37–40 Harvey, D. 53–4, 61–2, 167 Hayek, F.A. 207–14 Hilferding, R. 112 Hirschman, A. 80 Hobbes, T. 116, 117 Honig, B. 21 housing market 97, 98–9 hubs 57–9 Huntington, S. 81 Hurricane Katrina 82–3 iconoclasm 189 identification, moment of 29 identity politics 61–2 ideology 57 illocutionary force 130 imagination 2, 4; progressive 89–90; institutional 106–7 India 127–8, 140; visit of Cape Town slum women 134–5 individual accountability 119, 121–2 inequality 112 information, transparency as 10, 144–5, 146–7, 147–58, 159 institutional imagination 106–7 institutions: deficiencies and ungovernability 81–2; democracy, law and global finance 9–10, 89–109; of representation 7, 17–33 instrumental action 37–8 instrumental change 196 interest group politics 171–2 international cooperation 115 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 152–3, 165

226 Index

international politics 10, 144–62 international regimes 151 Internet 8, 50–76; global zero institution 69–71; politics 66–8; scale-free network 58–9 interpretation 186 Iraq, invasion of 50–1, 55, 73 irony 115 isolation 71 issue-based politics 29 James, W. 209 jobless recovery 114 Kant, I. 147, 158, 186, 187, 188, 191, 206 Katehi, L.B. 197–9 Keane, J. 207 Kerala, India 140 Keynes, J.M. 94, 110 Keynes–Minsky view 92–3 Keynesianism 165–6 Kettering Foundation 175, 180 Koopman, C. 208, 211–12 Kopytko, R. 129–30 Koselleck, R. 187–8 Kühn, H. 80 labour: decline of value 111–12; detailed division of 40–1, 42; and interaction 37–8; social 37; work, action and 35–7 Lacan, J. 133 Laclau, E. 28, 70 Laclau/Mouffe-influenced theorists 19–20 Latin America 104; see also Brazil Latour, B. 188–9, 190 law 9–10, 89–109 learning 175–6; adaptive 210–11, 213–14 left, the: left/right political code 80–3; role of in the collapse of the welfare state 61–3 Lehman Brothers 113, 123 Lessig, L. 155 Levi-Strauss, C. 69 lifeworld rationalisation 38 localism 71 Lyotard, J.-F. 121 Madison, J. 5 Mahila Milan 134 Manning, B. 10 Many-2-Many 67 March 16 candlelit vigil 73

markets: absolute power 9, 110–25; society and 211–12; see also market economy Marx, K. 37, 196 Mathews, D. 173 messianism 193 militant extra-institutional action 79 Mill, J.S. 41–2 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 138 Miller, P. 204 Mink, G. 74 Mitchell, R.B. 149, 151–2 model house and toilet complex 136–7, 138 modernity 191; liberal 202 Molokoane, R. 136 monetary ease 101–2 monopoly of coercion 77 –8 mortgages 98–9, 112 Mouffe, C. 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27–8, 31–2 MoveOn 72–3 Mthembi-Mahanyele, S. 136 multiple equilibriums 94 naming problems 175 Napster 64, 65 Nation, The 50 National Issues Forums 173 Nelson, T. 63 neoliberalism 11, 53–4, 111, 165–83; American left’s acceptance of inevitability of 63; anti-politics 166–8; Argentina 44; and crises 184–5; financial deregulation 62, 113; hegemony of 25–6, 27, 31, 85; institutions of representation complicit in 18; removing problems from the policy agenda 80; tensions between the social and political 168–78; trickle-down 121; and the welfare state 62 network politics 18 networked communications technologies 8, 50–76 New Deal 97–8, 115, 120 New Deal financial reforms 95–102; hollowing out of 98–102 non-bank financial intermediaries 99 nonlinearity 11–12, 202–18; democratic reason 206–7; Dewey, Hayek and nonlinear reasoning 207–14; social reasoning 204–5, 211–14, 215 nonmeaningful work 40–1

Index 227

Occupy demo at UC Davis 197–9 Occupy Wall Street 171 ocular democracy 4–5 O’Neill, O. 155 Panopticon 152, 153 Papandreou government 117 Pareto, V. 58 Pariser, E. 72 Parks, R. 132 participation, fantasy of 59–68 participatory budgeting model 140 participatory deliberation 140 Patel, S. 138 peer-to-peer file-sharing 64, 65 People’s Computer Company 63 Perelman, M. 62 performative chain 137–8, 141 performatives 130; failed 131–9 personal is political 203–4 Piesang River gathering 135–6 Platonic ‘reversal’ 207 plebiscitary model 5 pluralisation 24 plurality 211 political sphere 36–7, 39 politicisation of everyday life 202–18 politics, essence of 169 populist parties 6 Porto Allegre, Brazil 140 Posner, R. 84–5 Poster, M. 73 post-politics 2 poverty 10, 126–43 power: accumulation of 149; disempowerment 204; see also empowerment; of markets 9, 110–25; practices: democratic 175–6; of democratic renewal 7, 9–10 preferential attachment 58–9 private-label securitisation 98–9 private property 64–5 private/public divide 170, 208 privatisation 85, 98–9 progressive imagination 89–90 property tax 165, 179 pseudo-economic actors 116 psychological-support argument 42 public financial entities 105 Public-Private Investment Program 120 publicity, transparency as 10, 145–6, 147, 158–60

radical politics 19–20; crisis, contestation and 25–30 Radio B92 54 Rancière, J. 1 rating agencies 113; accountability 119, 122–3 rational discourse 130–1 Rawls, J. 118 Reagan, R. 111 real networks 58–9 reason-giving 172–3 reasoning: democratic 206–7; nonlinear 207–12; social 204–5, 211–14, 215 receptivity 198–9 reflective judgment 6 reflective production system 43–4 reflexive citizenry 206–12 registration effect 59–60 regulation of finance 90, 93, 105–6 regulatory dualism 99, 100 reiteration 132–3 rent-seeking 114–15 representation 202–3; problem of 214 representative democracy, crisis of 1–2, 17–33; institutions of representation 7, 17–33 resilience 213, 215 resolution 173–4 revolution 186 rhizomes 59 right/left political code 80–3 right to politics 2; elements 2–4 rituals 141 Rogers, R. 71 Roosevelt, F.D. 110, 115, 120 Rose, N. 204 Rousseau, J.-J. 206 Royal Society for the Arts ‘Social Brain’ project 205 Sassen, S. 53–4 Saward, M. 28–9, 30 scale-free networks 58–9 Schwartz, A. 41 Searle, J. 130 secondary mortgage market 98–9 secularization hypothesis 83 securitisation 98–9, 112–13 security cooperation 149–50 security dilemma 149 segmentation 71 self-development 40, 41 self-organising communities 180

228 Index

separation of saving and venture capital 101, 113, 119–20 Serbia 54 shadow banking: links to traditional banking system 100–1; rise of 99–100 Shirkey, C. 67 Slum/Shackdwellers International (SDI) 133–7, 138, 139, 141 Snowden, E. 10 social conservatives 62 social contract theory 206 social justice claims 170–1 social labour 37 social movements 168–78 social–political tensions 168–78 social reasoning 204–5, 211–14, 215 social theory: traditional 5, 13; critical 13 socially inclusive growth 101–2 society 211–12 Socrates government 117 solidarity: economies of 45, 47; failure of 61–3 sovereignty 187–8; absolute 116, 117 speech acts 130; see also performatives staged/forced contexts 133 Standard & Poor’s 122 state: American left’s withdrawal from 63, 74; enabling state 213–14; facilitating state 204–5; failed 78, 83; stateness and governing capacity 77–9; ungovernability 8, 77–86 state-controlled banks 103–4 state failure 78, 83, 84; ungovernability and 83–6 Stern Review 78 Stiglitz, J.E. 110, 114–15, 167 stock market value 114 street mobilisation 1–2 structure: and democracy 91–2; structural change 165 student demonstration 11, 197–9 subjugation 188 submission 188 subprime mortgages 98–9, 112 supranationalism 79 Sweden 43–4, 46–7 Swedish Metal Workers’ Union 43 systemic rationalisation 38

Thatcher, M. 111, 165, 166 ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA) 2, 165 Tibaijouka, A. 137 Tocqueville, A. de 5–6 trade unions 80–1 transparency 10, 119, 144–62; emancipatory 144–5, 146–7, 153–60; and empowerment 144–5, 146–7, 153–60; fiscal 152–3; as information 10, 144–5, 146–7, 147–58, 159; as publicity 10, 145–6, 147, 158–60; technical 146, 147–53 Transparency International 151 trickle-down 121 trickle-up 119, 121 Trotsky, L. 148 Tully, J. 20, 21, 22, 24–5, 26, 27, 31–2 Turner, F. 75

technocracy 37, 40 technological determinism 37 technology 8, 50–76 technology fetishism 59–68

value of work 35–9 virtual sphere 8, 50–76 vita activa (active life) 35–7 Volvo 43–4, 46–7

UC Davis Occupy demo 11, 197–9 Uddevalla assembly plant 43–4, 46–7 UNCHS Campaign for Secure Tenure 135–6 ungovernability 8, 77–86; causes of the condition of 79–80; and the left/right political code 80–3; and state failure 83–6 United Kingdom (UK) 205 United Nations (UN) lobby in New York 136–7, 138 United States of America (USA) 54; disconnect between circulation of content and official politics 52; financial crisis of 2008 84–5, 94, 95–102, 113, 120; Huntington’s essay on governability 81; invasion of Iraq 50–1, 55, 73; legislation driven by promises of participation 64; New Deal 97–8, 115, 120; New Deal financial reforms 95–102; role of the left in the collapse of the welfare state 61–3; separation of saving and venture capital 101, 113, 119–20 use value 56–7 utopia: utopian thinking 11, 193–200; exhaustion of utopian energies 193–6; utopian role of critique 196–200; see also anti-utopian scepticism

Index 229

Weber, M. 77 welfare state, collapse of 61–3 whistle-blowing 10, 144–5, 155 wholeness, fantasy of 69–71 Wikileaks 144, 145, 155 Wilson, W. 148 Wittgenstein, L. 129 worker-recuperated enterprises 44–7 working life 7–8, 34–49; devaluing 35–9; freedom and meaningful work 39–42; reclaiming 42–7 workplace democratisation 39–47; Argentina’s worker-recuperated

enterprises 44–7; Volvo and the Uddevalla assembly plant 43–4, 46–7 Wright, E.O. 207 Yankelovich, D. 173–4 Young, I.M. 176–7, 178 Yugoslavia, disintegration of 83 Zapatero government 117 zero institution 69–71 Zizek, S. 60, 69