In Search for the Demos: Absence, Spatiality and Specters in Contemporary Democratic Theory
“What is happening today? What is happening now? And what is this now within which all of us find ourselves; and who defines the moment at which I am writing?” – Michel Foucault. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”
The precise demarcation of what or who constitutes the demos has always been a difficult and contentious task among democratic theorists of various historical eras and political persuasions. It seems that among political theorists, there has been no proper appreciation, much less, celebration of the demos as the constitutive component of theorizing democracy. And yet, it also seems that any clear articulation and realization of the demos in democracy presents dangerous ethical dilemmas, including the illusions of communitarian theorists to have discovered the essence and authentic practice of collective life, the reduction of minimalist, liberal democratic theorists of collectivities into consuming actors or targets for rationalization, and the transmogrification of deliberative theorists of democratic passion into a rational exchange of persuasions. Surely, the legitimacy crisis of the dominant paradigms of democratization and democratic theory owed in part to the contextual changes and challenges attending the present stage of modernity has been renewing speculative faculties and demanding alternative conceptualizations, fertilizing the imagination so that politics can be brought back again. Still, the demos has remained an enigma, a phantasmic specter haunting the theoretical landscape of contemporary democratic theory: its presence validated only by its very absence.
If a fully realized demos is an impossible ideal for contemporary democratic theorists (Mouffe 1992, 13-14), what then is the purpose of our striving to make political life more democratic? What is the meaning of democratic participation at all if it cannot achieve democracy nonetheless? Will this ethos, rather than energize citizenship actually reinforce political skepticism and cynicism and instead of stimulating action lead to a withdrawal from a life of engaged citizenship? In a more dramatic vein, Wendy Brown asks: “So, what, finally, is the point of the democratic moment other than the production of the moment itself? What is the value of the materialization of the democratic political under conditions in which this materialization is rare, ephemeral, constantly imperiled, and walled around by its perduring opposite?” (2007).
In this paper, I attempt to respond to these questions by reversing the task of any introductory discussion of democracy: instead of asking, what democracy means, I think that is more proper and productive to ask whether democracy still means anything at all for us moderns who live in a present defined by democracy’s absence? This means, extending the Socratic commitment to knowing that we do not know into the sphere of democratic theory – knowing that we do not know the demos. Let me clarify, however, that this does not entail a lowering of expectations or a modest understanding of democracy in the way the prevailing tradition has severely depleted political substance from the discourse of democracy. By transforming the present debate on democracy into a highly personal question of meaning rather than what it means, I think democratic theory can avoid the modern trap of technologizing and sublimating democratic participation into a matter of rational choice or (re)distributive teleologies, and deal with democracy in its constitutive aspect. I share here, therefore, with Wayne Gabardi’s (2001) charge that contemporary democratic theorists must be less concerned with theorizing models of democracy than with mapping out power struggles and strategies of political resistance and mobilization. Such an ethic, I suppose is less an escape into the realm of aesthetics or individual stylistics in the Foucauldian sense, than an antagonistic disavowal of the present order but still an ambiguous arrival that looks more like an eternal departure.
By interrogating what democracy means for us, rather than being entangled in the frustrating enterprise of defining democracy, I think that finally and at last, we lovers of democracy, can realize our situatedness in ideological political projects and thus be sensitive to our own political projects. Thus, rather than transcending our embeddedness in games of power and ideology, the theoretico-practical task becomes our re-inscription into such and such relations of power. This, I think, is the point we have to learn from Nietzschean and Foucauldian genealogy – the re-interpretation of our present vis-à-vis our realization of complicity in the continuities and discontinuities that link us to the past (Brown 2001). Brown writes: “The quintessentially political question – the question that is both politically relevant and politically responsible – is not, ‘what do you believe in?’ but ‘what is to be done given a certain ensemble of political values, given a certain set of hopes or aims, and given who and where we are in history and culture?” (ibid, 94). Here, the task is not so much to contest narratives of the present as to trace the forms of thinking that render these narratives legitimate. This entails a reconfiguration of the postmodern preoccupation with dislodging metanarratives from their privileged position to intervening in the processes of their legitimization.
It is in this light that I propose and defend an ethic of democratic absence and its spectral presence and construct politics within this spatiality as a sustaining political imaginary that binds democratic theory and prevents its free fall into the double trap of complicity and disengagement. It seems to me that contemporary democratic theorists must not just theorize democracy as an absence but move a step forward by democratizing this absence through theoretical interventions. This means, taking the spatiality of absence as a ground for developing democratic visions while retaining the spectral character of these strategic interventions. Thus, the demos which is the constitutive force behind democracy must be made to dwell in this space of absence and its ambiguity.
I develop this argument by highlighting first the conditions that manifest democracy’s absence in contemporary social life. Second, I revisit the way theorists are increasingly deploying absence as a metaphor for critically challenging the triumphalist narratives of modern liberal democracy yet simultaneously point to the dangers of this dwelling in darkness. Third, I examine the role of the absence metaphor in the geneaological method of Nietzsche and Foucault, and fourth, I link this genealogical tradition to recent developments in global politics where ambiguous politics can play a significant constituting role for political organization and mobilization.
Resisting the Urge to Normalize
Perhaps it will not be much of a controversy if I claim that the Post-World War II context and the radically rupturing experience with the totalitarian governments of the first few decades of the 20th century produced in their wake a primal fear of any form of political vision aside from liberalism among many academics and policymakers (Isaac 1999, 26). Slavoj Zizek writes “democracy means avoiding the ‘‘totalitarian’’ extreme; it is defined as a permanent struggle against the ‘‘totalitarian’’ temptation to close the gap, to (pretend
to) act on behalf of the Thing Itself” (2004, 505). Thus, from democracy being a largely unpopular form of regime, the 1950s took and defended it as the last bastion of hope for humanity’s survival – only democracy provided the institutional guarantees to prevent the rise of another Hitler or another Stalin (Warren 2002, 677). While totalitarianism has undoubtedly produced injustices to a great magnitude, its portrayal as the great evil to be avoided at all cost has led to a normalized democratic struggle with minimal reflexivity and self-criticism. But I think the more dangerous trajectory that arose out of these conditions is that the concept of democracy was made to fit an existing political paradigm that excluded a variety of political strategies from the political terrain, including subversive forms of civic participation and populist movements defending democratic ideals (Isaac 1999). The features of this paradigm according to Isaac, include: 1) the exclusivity of democratic politics in the operations of the state; 2) the centrality of representation to politics; 3) the preeminence of electoral processes among properly democratic activities; and 4) the universality of the liberal system of rights (1999, 29-30).
What marks the theorization of democracy according to the above enumerated terrain is the unfortunate “colonization of the demos by the domus” (Gabardi 2001). I shall call this the “urge to normalize” political relations informing much of the theoretical commitments of modern democratic theory. Sheldon Wolin (Brown 2007) calls this, “liberalism’s legalistic and policy orientation -- its production of citizen virtue as rule-abiding, and its production of political culture as constitution-bound” that hinders the emergence and cultivation of a political way of life. Instead, Wolin, following Spinoza’s notion that democracy is intrinsically anti-principle and anti-form, points to revolutionary activities as the rare moments of authentic democratic politics.
Significantly missing in the ascendant paradigm of democracy is a confrontation of political power and how the exercise and practice of such power simultaneously goes beyond the formal apparatus of state institutions (Foucault’s notion of governmentality) and reinforces the institutional power of the state precisely because even non-state sources of power are transmitted, or at least, intertwined with the activities of the state (both Foucault’s sovereign-juridical state and Wolin’s neo-Weberian, capitalist-facilitating state). Brown points to two tendencies in liberalism which obscure the operation of power while at the same time concentrating power in locations that are rendered unassailable by political agents. The first according to Brown, using Wolin’s critique of Locke, is the deceptive language by which liberalism portrays its engagement with power: “Presenting itself as concerned primarily with limiting power and rendering it accountable” while really concentrating power in the purportedly privileged, rational and neutral “federative and prerogative dimensions of the state”. The second is in the Rawlsian insistence on the use of public reason and extreme individuality which for Brown: “delegitimates "strong feelings" and "zealous aspirations," sentiments most likely to issue from those historically excluded or frustrated, and which portend a grasp for power that itself heralds a potential episode of democracy” and “defeats the prospect of power sharing from the outset, cultivating, as it does, subjects oriented to individual satisfaction rather than joint deliberation or action.” Both I think are especially notable for politics in the post-colonial third world where institutional responses to the crisis of democracy remain the privileged and favorite target of political mobilization and organization. Elsewhere, Wendy Brown wonderfully captures the problem with political liberalism: its insistence that once the problem of distribution is solved, then the issue of power is settled.
Romand Coles (2005) issues a similarly scathing critique of liberal democracy. Allow me to quote extensively some of his beautifully phrased words:
By offering a vision of politics with a vitiated sense of political contestation and engagement, political liberalism articulates a position from which democratic political power is difficult to sustain or cultivate. By marginalizing as it does political contestations inspired by visions of flourishing, it drains sources of political motivation, vision, and creativity in ways that would put undue pressure on resistance and emergent alternatives. By morally excluding comprehensive doctrines that exceed public reason from political life while tacitly packing in its own vision of coexistence as relatively uncontestable, political liberalism cultivates an immodesty – and sometimes even arrogance – that forments resentment (xxi).
It is thus unsurprising that modern liberal democracies today are plagued by a crisis of legitimacy or a crisis of confidence resulting from the comfortable position it has been resting on for the past decades. The proper way to treat the crisis of liberal democracy then, is not to take it lightly as “normal science” in the Kuhnian sense, but as serious anomalies that make the paradigm unworkable already and on the brink of a paradigm shift, something which Jeffrey Isaac’s metaphor “democracy in dark times” evocatively captures. The lesson therefore is to move from interventions at the policy level to interventions that are properly political, that is to insist that the prevailing discourse of democracy has been a political project established and conceptualized at a specific time and space and directed towards the legitimization of one order over another.
I suppose that it is only in this light that we are able to resist the “urge to normalize” politics and avoid the trap of transforming political issues into policy issues rather than directly confronting them in a properly political way. Norberto Bobbio’s (Warren 2002) list of deficiencies characteristic of most modern liberal democracies, which I quote at length here, represents a movement towards this way of thinking:
- The ideal of popular sovereignty, based on a contract among sovereign individuals, has proven to be modeled on the unified sovereignty of the prince. In modern pluralist societies, the people do not constitute an agent in the manner of a sovereign. Instead, rule is an effect of conflict and cooperation among groups. In short, popular sovereignty is an incoherent concept.
- Representation has turned out not to reflect the interests and opinions of individuals collectively but rather organized group interests. "Democracy" has come to mean procedures that enable agreements among large organizations, in effect cutting the link between individuals and democratic self-government.
- Democracies have failed to eliminate oligarchic power. The only difference between an aristocracy and democracy is that in the former, "elites impose themselves" and in the latter, "elites propose themselves.”
- Democracies have failed to expand the spaces within which decisions are made democratically, especially within the "two great blocs of power in developed societies"-big business and bureaucracy.
- Democracies have not eliminated those "invisible powers" within bureaucracies-cabi- nets, security forces, and private organizations that escape public accountability.
- Democracies promised to educate individuals for citizenship. Today's democracies, how- ever, are populated by citizens who are apathetic about politics and institutions that pro- vide few if any opportunities for education through participation.
These features are further exacerbated by discursive rationalities that underpin them, including: the increasing role of technology and its requirements for expertise which make it less likely that citizens can have the knowledge to participate in collective decisions; the establishment of bureaucracies to deliver demanded services, but the growth of bureaucratic machinery limits the scope of democracy; and the inability of democracy to meet demands which generate ungovernable situations, especially when encumbered by inefficient democratic procedures and only serve to make undemocratic responses unproblematic.
Isaac’s (1998) portrayal is more arresting:
This is the reality of liberal democracy at the dawn of the twenty-first century: governmental gridlock. Ineffective public policy. Declining faith in political institutions. A growing appeal of right wing populism and antiliberal sentiments. These are the results of a political system that rests on a lack of direct participation and civic initiative, supports manifold forms of social inequality and corporate economic privilege, and thrives on the energies of a class of political entrepreneurs who mobilize extraordinary financial resources and propaganda machines to manipulate a largely passive and disempowered electorate.
While these depictions of the crisis of modern democracies do represent advancements in reflexively thinking about our present political preoccupations, they are still restrained by the consuming desire to normalize democratic participation – marked by a rather excessive celebration of human agency and autonomy. This is manifest in contemporary rearticulations of a new landscape from where more robust forms of political participation can emerge. I will not of course deny that indeed democratic activism is undergoing renewal, thanks to more critical appreciation of globalization and the new world order. However, I think that it pays to consider as well that these are not empty and floating signifiers but are themselves politically formed. Indeed, the relationship between emerging forms of robust democracy and the reconfigured terrain of global and domestic politics must be seen in a dialectical understanding of political power.
But let me first discuss what some authors present as challenges to the normalcy of liberal democratic politics. First, the globalization of world politics has been opening new avenues for participation as a result of the nation-state’s inability to contain and address public issues and challenges. With the nation-state no longer possessing the esteemed signifier for power, Warren argues that new global publics are waging their struggles elsewhere and re-channeling political flows. Second, the differentiation of societies in advanced capitalist countries which aggravate problems of coordination and increase zones of political conflict as a result of starkly differing demands of state logic and market rationality. While most third world countries do not have the same level of differentiation, they are nonetheless subjected to the same ethic by international financial institutions whose conditionalities include the same projects. Thus, I think the crisis is even more stark in third world situations than in highly advanced societies. Third, patterns of social relations representing high modernity are also making efforts for socio-political organization and mobilization more complex, allowing them to engage and pit traditional sources of political authority against each other. Lastly, increasing complex connectivity is leading to growing reflexivity among democratizing agents:
The process induces individuals to discover and think about how their social locations interact with their race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, pro- fessions, regional attachments, and lifestyles. Insofar as this pluralism of identities is not merely a matter of interesting difference, it is the result of raised consciousness of differential distributions of risks-injustices, if you will.36 The political consequences are ambiguous. On one hand, the increased reflexivity provoked by these circumstances provides the space for ethical growth in politics.37 Only reflexively conscious individuals can ask the politi- cal questions (as Max Weber put them), "What should we do?" and "How should we live?" In this sense, politics permeates individuation as never before, as feminists noted two decades ago with the slogan "The personal is political." On the other hand, the presence of choice can also increase the temptations of countermodern reaction, as suggested by the rise of religious fundamentalism in the United States and elsewhere, as well as the resurgence of right-wing nationalisms in Europe (Warren 2002, 686).
I fully agree with the above-mentioned changes in the landscape of democracy. But I think such theorizing must also come with a caveat. I feel that a misleading way of appreciating these changes comes from the position that, radical forms of democratic activity are just reactions to their context. This position simply treats new forms of democratic activism as some advancement or progression of the liberal model whose ontological basis we have already revealed to be problematic. This form of reasoning strips new progressive politics of its potential to disturb existing rationalities. Instead, a properly dialectical reading of the relationship between new forms of democratic activism and the altered landscape of global politics should highlight how the discursive understanding of global politics as a changed terrain can only be made possible through a dialogical engagement with theoretical strains of democracy conceived beyond the institutional and power-ridden vision of liberalism. The re-appreciation of globalization as creating new modalities and spaces of political struggle surely did not come automatically in the development of the globalization discourse. It required Foucauldian, even Arendtian interventions to resituate the debate from distributional questions of whether globalization is doing more benefit or more harm or whether the state is eroding or simply being extended. Of course, theory does not operate in a vacuum. But this is precisely what such adage means for me: each theoretical vision projects and constitutes its own political reality, including the possible transgression of the very same political vision.
Democracy’s Dark Night or Democracy as a Dark Knight?
The only way, it seems to me, for democratic theory not to fall into the fallacious progressive argument that the next stage in historical development always represent progress is to treat the darkness of our undemocratic present as the constitutive principle of democracy. Romand Coles (2005, xi) writes, “democracy has never been a safe, transparent possession rather, it has been a practice largely in search of itself, struggling beyond pasts and presents in which it was unrealized (both for many people and across many domains of life) and in the face of futures threatening to retrench its achievements and aspirations. Democracy happens primarily as a generative activity in which people seek to reinvent it in challenges and contestations concerning the question of what it might become. Democracy is democratization.” The only democratic practices that Coles defends therefore are those types cognizant that once they have brought to life democracy historically and materially, “democracy was, is, and will be significantly beyond democracy as ‘we’ ‘know’ it in its dominant forms” (ibid) requiring an unceasing struggle to rearticulate history and in the process become deeply receptive to the ambiguities and unanticipated outcomes of their own actions and the meaning that the future will bear upon them. Hence, for Coles, the properly democratic ethic is one that realizes that one does know democracy too well (xii).
For sure, Coles is not insinuating that we cannot know democracy at all. The difference, however, between this type of giving meaning to our democratic actions – calling them democratic – in a partial, episodic kind of a way and the one that definitively divines the discovery of complete or consolidated democracy is its engendering of an agonistic space where political agents who claim to be defending democracy accept not just the plurality of democratic practices, but the unresolvable tension that is generated out of groups involved in a passionate and principled pursuit of enacting a better type of democratic society. Liberal democracy, and to some extent, deliberative democracy foreclose this possibility because they treat the “others” of institutionalized democracy not as competitors towards the realization of democratic fullness but as enemies to be destroyed and colonized. Coles beautifully puts it this way: “this recognition that our own finite efforts unwittingly engender damage better enables insurgent democrats to infuse their judgment and action with a greater degree of suppleness, receptivity, and open-endedness” (xii).
Coles calls this ethic as “tension-dwelling” which he develops by suggesting two interesting tropes: traditio and nepantla. Traditio according to Coles, lies at the very heart of conceptualizing tradition: the imperative to hand and pass on yet the indeterminacy of the success of full transmission. While our notion of tradition is couched in highly privatizing imageries – tradition as an imposition, as a rule over a ruled – organized around the idea of household management, Coles retrieves the distinctively public nature of tradition which for the Greeks and the Romans is quite commonsensical, by taking the imperative to “pass on” as its constitutive component. To “pass on” tradition according to Coles does not just mean to bestow, it also means, the inverse, to refuse, making tradition inherently laden with the tension of human agency and autonomy. Nepantla or “borderland living” evokes a similar meaning. Referring to the work of Gloria Anzaldua – “a borderland Chicana, feminist, and lesbian with roots in the struggles of farmworkers”, Coles invites democratic theorists “to work history (in this way) in an effort to creatively forge better modes of coexistence while resisting those tendencies and forces that would congeal into a new, tensionless, unreceptive totality” (xv). Traditio and nepantla represent for Coles, the provisional key to appreciating the teleological and ateleological demands of democratic political action. Teleological, referring to the direct aims of democratic activities – struggles against oppression, injustices, inequality – and ateleological to the self-disclosing, identity-revealing but indeterminate attributes of political action. This is precious theorizing for me, because for the longest time, I have been personally struggling with the relevance of ateleological politics in contexts beset by pressing problems that demand some form of finite resolution. Reading Coles, allowed me to properly situate political struggles in our third world setting that demand immediate attention: the finite resolutions often achieved by these struggles possess the possibility to challenge dominant discourses that would treat them rather as managerial, administrative or policy concerns.
Wendy Brown’s Sheldon Wolin hangover is thus explainable. According to Brown, Wolin advocates the development of democratic practices at spatially local and temporally episodic levels. For Wolin, whatever their intrinsic worth, such practices and spaces are obviously no match for -- not even a significant challenge to -- powers that are deployed centrally and continuously, powers that have historically unparalleled wealth, capacities of destruction, and technologies of administration at their disposal. So Wolin presents us with a scene of hegemonic, dispersed state and capitalist domination, and proposes counter-practices that offer, at best, episodic and partial experiences with powers whose production and circulation citizens will never control. Brown’s Wolin is a dark thinker who refuses “to be distracted or bought off from the largeness of the task of formulating democracy in theory and practice… to cede to the difficulty of the times… to be cheered” (Brown 2007). For Wolin, democracy is not a form of government, but a “mode of being that is conditioned by bitter experience, doomed to succeed only temporarily, but is a recurrent possibility as long as the memory of the political survives” (Gabardi 2002, 564). Brown compares Wolin’s attitude to democracy with a quote from Hamlet’s lament of despair: To die, to sleep, per chance, to dream: ay, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come... in order “to depict (that) the promise of democracy reminds us that the cultivation of democratic experience in darkly undemocratic times will not vanquish the darkness. And it is this very reckoning with the generic difficulty of democracy, and with the particular darkness of our times, counterposed to the cheeriness and sanguinity of liberalism, that I have not "gotten over" and that perversely, may be Wolin's most important legacy for democratic theory.” What I am drawn to here is the cathartic language and proximity to tragedy that Wolin qua Brown inscribes democratic theorizing.
One is reminded here of Michel Foucault’s retrieval of the ancient ethics of the care of the self and its realization in the Greek practice of parrhesia – an agonistic telling of the truth which is performative, indeterminate and open to the tragic consequences of a theory that locates the meaning of a self-disclosure not in the self but in the receptive circumstances where such disclosure is played out. Gabardi (2002, 563-67), situates parrhesiastic activity within the Foucauldian nexus of transgression (specific acts or a series of experiments that expose the boundaries of our culture, which are also the boundaries of our reality. To transgress the limits imposed upon us by contemporary governance is to engage in acts that test its boundaries), the pursuit of self care (which implies a critical re-evaluation of those identities and self presentations produced for us so that we can assume our proper social and political roles), and performative action (a public demonstration or act of revolt that is expressive and aesthetic, more disclosive and agonistic than intentional and emancipatory). Basically, I think that the crucial lesson to be learned from Foucault’s retrieval of this ethic, which may also be embodied and present in emancipatory democratic projects, is the emphasis on the indeterminate, even tragic consequences of truth-telling: “the speaker risked humiliation, fines, ostracism, and in some cases death” resulting from the direct moral confrontation with elites and/or mass publics which carries with it an unpredictable reaction, because it places one on the public stage, a stage where the course of future events could not be determined. Socrates who was the ultimate gadfly endured this, something which I think Plato completely misunderstood.
Genealogy as Reality Check and Not Knowing Who We Are
Indeed there are reasons to celebrate even in the darkness of our present. Yet, how do we assure ourselves that we are remain on track? How do we make sense of our strivings and our attempts to rearticulate our political experiences without slipping into esoteric projects that reify rather than challenge antidemocratic forces and tendencies? While in the initial writing of this paper, I thought I could offer some response to these questions without turning the question on its head again. I was mistaken. My initial hunch was that the Foucauldian strategy of genealogic historical criticism could offer some recluse, a form of theoretical justification, or at least, a methodological ground through which we can hold on to in the dark winter (or perhaps more appropriate for us, the boundless aridity of the desert). This passage from Wendy Brown and many others in the chapter “Genealogical Politics” is enough to make one realize that even genealogy must be stripped of any determinacy and stability: “Though genealogy may be saturated with political interests, though it is deployed to replace, ‘laws of history’ with exposures of mechanisms of power and relations of force, though it is carried out in the name of denaturalizing the present in order to highlight its malleability, genealogy neither prescribes political positions nor specifies desirable futures” (Brown 2001, 109).
What promise then, does genealogy offer for democratic theorists and activists? What benefit can engaged political actors derive from this method of inquiry when it cannot even be argued that radical political commitments are the direct results of genealogical reasoning? According to Brown, this aspect of genealogical politics – without no necessary political entailments – “is often considered a failing when viewed from a perspective in which legitimate political positions must flow directly from the endpoint of objective or systematic political critiques” (ibid, 119). Herein, I think lays the radically disturbing potential of genealogic exercises: its narrative of critique refuses the scientific, objective and systematic type that flow from the project of modernity and the Enlightenment; its privileged components instead are contingency, desire, attachment, judgment and alliance (ibid).
The very heart of genealogy is a reversal of the progressive account of history where each stage of historical development (Kantian, Hegelian and even Marxist) represents and embodies a bounded rationality that moves towards its complete fulfillment . Basically, progressive accounts of history argue that we can only get better in the future. This entails an objectivization of our present as closed even as this present is yet to reveal itself completely, a determinacy of the future even as this future is virtually unknown. In contrast, the genealogical project is a descent into a future and a present constructed as an abysmal vertigo: “more than a particular subject of knowledge is transformed by the genealogical inquiry; the knower too, is cast into unfamiliarity with her- or himself” (ibid, 97). Thus, I think, the end result of genealogy resembles the end result of Socratic philosophy: “I know that I don’t know” but also “I don’t even know myself, anymore.” Brown enumerates three steps in genealogical inquiry following Nietzsche’s writings: 1) challenging everyday values assumed to be unchallengeable: “whatever has been accepted as factual, as beyond all question will now be considered dubious, as a possible fiction”; 2) reversals as a form of questioning and as a hypothetical response to those questions; 3) intervening against progressive accounts of historical development, and therefore opening possible ways through which history can be rearticulated.
The goal of genealogy, according to Wendy Brown is “an understanding of the historical composition of our being” (108). Two strategies underpin this historical investigation: first, treating historical inquiry not as a search for origins of the present in the past, but an analysis of how the present has already been in the movement of the past. Second, an analysis of historical development situated in what Nietzsche and Foucault call “a non-place” or a “pure distance”. Such an analytical commitment casts historical narratives and progress not as culminations but as episodes that arose out of “the hazardous play of dominations”: “Genealogy promises dirty histories, histories of power and subjection, histories of bids for hegemony waged, won or vanquished – the endlessly repeated play of dominations rather than histories of reason, meaning or higher purposes” (104). Thus for the genealogist, the central preoccupation is, “what might have been.”
Obviously, what this does is politicize history, or rather, to treat history and our historicity as totally political moments where bids for hegemonic recognition are the only ones taken to be real. Its refusal to prescribe a political project, a specific program of action to be taken, unfreezes antipolitical moments from closed conditions of possibilities. It does not mean that genealogy should prevent us from committing to highly political forms of rationality and programatics. Foucault himself was involved in various political attachments. I think what Wendy Brown is arguing in the essay, is that we must not expect genealogy to
Leaving the Demos in the Dark? Or the Return of the Phantom Menace?
The demos never really appears in contemporary, even radical democratic theory. But what to make of it? Zizek’s critique of the Foucauldian account of subjectivization, which claims that the modern subject created by disciplinary power is not really the constituted subjectivity of knowledge-power but rather the excess of that subjectivity – “Production
(the fourth term in the matrix of discourses) does not stand for the result of the discursive operation, but rather for its ‘‘indivisible remainder,’’ for the excess that resists being included in the discursive network—that is, for what the discourse itself produces as the foreign body in its very heart” – offers an interesting site for a defending the subjection of the demos in the dark. It interrogates the heart of both progressive and genealogical politics. For Zizek, the fetishization of the demos in contemporary democratic theory must be apprehended and confronted. If the demos is an empty signifier, then its very darkness it must dwell in its emptiness, floating in its own darkness.
