Preface to Political Participation Today

Meaningful political involvement demands that actors are able to make sense of their engagement and situate their actions within fields of contending social forces, interests and beliefs. This is especially imperative in politics where one’s intentions are inscribed in bids for power and domination in a context of uncertainty and unpredictability. In today’s paradigm of progressive politics, the urge to act and solve social problems is so pervasive that many political agents, rather than opening up spaces for political engagement and challenging what is given as the natural and only approach to a socio-political issue, are instead caught up in webs that reify and reproduce existing relations of power, and therefore foreclose the possibility of a space through which more plural struggles can be engendered.

There are of course many new opportunities for today’s citizenry to engage in political and public affairs, and indeed, many concrete and creative endeavors already underway. The recent stage of capitalist development facilitated by globalizing forces has surely opened up spaces through which political struggles can be waged. The declining capacity of the formal apparatuses of governance, mediated largely by an increasingly hollowing out nation-state has been marking new frontiers and heightening social and cultural conflicts which test and reveal the limits of conventional practices and ethos of progressive engagement. Yet, these ongoing re-articulations of socio-political involvement are also in danger of being too celebratory and cheerful. A peculiar strength (which, in my opinion, is also the greatest weakness and failure) of today’s renewed citizen involvement is the tendency to avoid directly confronting questions of power and domination by reframing political problems as social and cultural, and proposing responses that target policy and governance measures rather than highlighting the distinctly political responses needed to address inclusively and critically contemporary issues. This is markedly visible in the ability of certain progressive sectors to successfully mobilize and organize effectively around re-distributive social issues, output-driven activities and forms of solidarity that privilege suppressing political tensions and de-emphasizing the social antagonisms that arise from structures of injustice and patterns of oppression. In doing so, much of today’s progressive politics is unable to reflect upon itself and recognize its complicity in perpetuating first-order sources of disempowerment because of its compulsion to transcend political polarizations. Thus there seems to be a need to reveal the ideational, theoretical (even, ideological) persuasions that underpin much of today’s political organizing.

On the other hand, more radical interventions, including those that focus on postmodern critiques of progressivism and emphasize identity and self-constitution struggles, seem to be too privatizing and detached from relevant political activities. Because postmodern politics is theorized primarily as a personal activity, many have misinterpreted this as a private, individualistic and atomized endeavor, which leaves limited room for organizing and developing collectivities and forms of political solidarity. Postmodern political activism seem to be too scared of rendering metanarratives legitimate that it becomes frustratingly difficult for it to weave practices of identity-formation and self-care with stories and horizons that make communal life possible. It is of course true that these movements directly confront the issue of power by shifting the terrain of politics to a deeply visceral and bodily level, but it is also possible that by avoiding the public manifestations of political power they also foreclose the promise of ongoing and present preoccupations of extant progressive movements and institutional struggles.

The present terrain of political involvement is very fertile and holds great promise. One simply needs to raise the rising degree of political consciousness of most citizens today to one that is not only politically conscious but one that is more importantly conscious of its politics. The objective of our endeavors must then be very modest and quite simple, to ask the questions: “what are we doing?” and “to what direction are our actions leading us?” so that we can map out our political options in way they confront the question of power (and disempowerment) in a more critical and inclusive ethic. The present task then, seems to be to make present our present and in doing so, open it radically.

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?[1] 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 20^th 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[2] 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.[3] 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.

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[1] I owe this reversal to Hannah Arendt who in the essay “Introduction into Politics” asks, “the question confronting us nowadays is not what politics means but whether politics still has any meaning at all.” (Jerome Kohn, ed. The Promise of Politics, 2005)

[2] “Only 22 of the 154 countries existing in 1950 were democracies, encompassing 31 percent of the world's population. Today, 119 of the 192 existing countries count as democracies, encompassing 58.2 percent of the world's population. Eighty-five of these 119 also rank highly enough in protecting basic human rights and respecting the rule of law to count as liberal democracies” (Mark Warren, “What Can Democratic Participation Today?” Political Theory, 30 (5), October 2002, pp. 677-701

[3] The insistence that legal and constitutional procedures must solve the crisis of Arroyo’s legitimacy is a case in point. So is the present debate on the extension of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) representative of this way of thinking.

“Tell me who your enemies are, and I will tell you who you are”: A Response to Critics of the SJSA Guidelines on Communal Action

In the guise of being more politically expedient and effective, critics of the SJSA Guidelines for Communal Action have increasingly been relying on the demonization of differences that animate sources of political organizing and community-building in response to the present political crisis. Their vicious Manichean portrayal of the crisis – whether you’re against Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo or for her – closely resembles the foundational illusion of modernity’s “escape from immaturity” and perpetuates the violent destruction of particularly shared life-worlds in favor of transcendental and instrumental rationality: get Arroyo ousted now, no matter what it takes! Such basis for alliance fails to realize how much it drains politics out of the picture in the same way that Arroyo has been trying to sap the political out of the lives of Filipinos today. If politics, according to Hannah Arendt, is based on the fact of human plurality, then clearly, it is not what the SJSA critics are engendering, at least in the way they demand from the SJSA agreement with the position to call for Arroyo’s resignation, otherwise the Guidelines will lend more credibility to the Arroyo administration.

What is more obscene with their imperative is that it reduces the call for communal action to the atrophy of consensus instead of accenting and multiplying the rhizomatic depth of action and politics proper. It treats the political struggle as a mere rational calculation of interests than as a space where constitutive identities are disclosed and as such fails to engage in an encounter with the multiplicity of voices striving to be heard that precisely allow politics to exist.

In what follows, I would like to argue that the focus of much political rhetoric today on the need for consensus (including the SJSA Guidelines itself) must instead be organized around the differences of various political and social actors involved. It is in this regard that I defend the SJSA Guidelines: as an attempt to analyze the present positioning of social forces (highlighting their differences and disagreements) and to articulate principles with which its constituents can draw from. By treating the Guidelines in this manner and not as an attempt to provide a hegemonic leadership in the political crisis, I claim that it allows the emergence of what Friedrich Nietzsche calls a pathos of distance:

an attachment to that which differs from you growing out of glimmers of difference in you, an attachment that takes the form of forbearance in strife and generosity in interdependence rather than a quest to close up the distance between you through formation of a higher unity. … This ethos of agonistic respect amidst a world of dissonant interdependencies is crucial to the fabric of democratic politics: … it folds a pathos of distance into democratic relations of contestation, collaboration and hegemony.

Empty Consensus

First, I think that the reduction of social antagonisms into multiple interest groups engaging in peaceful contestation or building overlapping consensus is a dangerous myth that has to be dispelled in any attempt towards generating political activity: each political association necessarily establishes its own “truth regime”. This is why Thomas Kuhn was critical of the positivist view of scientific revolutions as the simple accumulation of data or theory and instead posited that interparadigmatic conversation between epistemic communities is naturally difficult. The insight, I believe, in Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, is its striking rejection of the atomist, self-pursuing model of individuals that positivism and modernity is hinged. Kuhnian scientific revolutions result instead out of the constitutive challenges that contest the validity of the truths upheld by scientific/epistemic communities. Thus, paradigm change is a result not of private and rational calculations of self-interest but from crisis situations that shake the problem solving world of scientific discovery. This theory of scientific change find resonance with Chantal Mouffe’s argument that: “The prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions, nor to relegate them to the private sphere in order to render rational consensus possible, but to mobilize these passions, and give them a democratic outlet” (1994, 109).

The illusion which SJSA critics would like us to believe is that the collective identities of social actors involved in addressing the present political crisis must be abandoned is strikingly similar to the Hobbesian defense of government and Arendt’s metaphorization of human necessity as anti-political. According to Arendt, the moment issues turn into questions of necessity, the political space ceases and the realm of freedom is colonized by the consuming realm of the social. Extending this assertion to a critique of the foundational moment of modern liberal politics, it may also be argued that the discursive characterization of ousting Arroyo as a necessity to which political actors must surrender their differences brings into mind the establishment of the leviathan monster Hobbes sought to justify as the panacea to the difficulty of self-governance and self-constitution. This is a chilling movement, not only because it leads to the totalization of the political project, but more importantly because it advances the suspension of particularly held subject positions in favor a rationally calculated maximization of a mythical universal goal. It is only acceptable under a theoretical abstraction that collective identities are constituted a priori and in private – that human plurality is a fixed reality that can be plotted in advance.

This leads me to a second point: political identities can only be political in the context of a horizon which simultaneously enacts a visible space of articulation and a limited terrain against which any radicalization or transgression can be possible. Even Marx, if I’m not wrong, never dismissed the lived-worlds of the proletariat or the bourgeoisie in his analysis of social transformation. But a retrieval of political interventionism must not proceed from the fantasies of a Lenninist vanguard army (which I am increasingly sensing SJSA critics are implicitly styling themselves) but in a Gramscian “politics of meaning” (Smith 1998, 63-65) – that is the identification of the “thinkable boundaries” of political mobilization. Here, I would like to think of the SJSA Guidelines as an exercise and at the same time a concrete material of conjectural politics: the “analysis of prevailing networks of power relations and political horizons” (1998, 65).

On the question of reflexivity

Let me anticipate a possible objection: might not the delineation of principles and the enumeration of action points produce an authoritarian structure in which other options are already inhibited from being considered? A quote from William Connolly may perhaps set the stage for a response to this objection:

A powerful identity will strive to constitute a range of differences as intrinsically evil, irrational, abnormal, mad, sick, primitive, monstrous, dangerous, or anarchical – as other. It does so in order to secure itself a intrinsically good, coherent, complete or rational and in order to protect itself from the other that would unravel its self-certainty and capacity for collective mobilization if it established it legitimacy. This constellation of constructed others now becomes both essential to the truth of powerful identity and a threat to it. The threat is posed not merely by actions the other might take to injure or defeat the true identity but by the very visibility of its mode of being as other. (Connolly 1991, 66 emphasis mine)

Connolly here, I believe points to the contradiction “closed” systems of self-signification and othering take upon itself once performed within a public space of visible appearances. Here, Connolly seems to resonate with Arendt’s concept of political activity as enacted within a world of appearances and identity as a public character. “Othering” and the construal of other options as evil or steps that a particular political group would be unwilling to take cannot therefore be taken as automatically foreclosing: othering is paradoxically essential and a threat to the process of self-disclosure. Othering then generates ambiguous results in the same way that action in Arendtian sense is always anarchic and disruptive. The implication for social movements and political mobilization therefore takes a normative slant: it will always almost be impossible for social movements and purveyors of political identities to take full charge of their actions. Thus, the process of self/political identity formation is always incomplete. But this does not mean that reflexivity is an automatic feature. On the contrary, as long as a political world is assured – that is the process of identity formation is played out in public through the faculty of speech/action – that is received by its constituted others in a spirit of adversarial struggle and not in a desire to consume it or deny the existence of political differences.

I think therefore that the responsibility in precluding the possibility of identity formation and political difference lies with those identified and constituted as others who are challenged to provide a space where adversarial positions can be taken and performed in agonistic dialogue. The moment adversaries refuse to acknowledge each other reciprocally, the world in-between them vanishes, politics is disavowed and the much feared dogmatism settles in. This is the danger which I think critics of the SJSA Guidelines are increasingly realizing in the way they have been responding to the Guidelines: refusing to acknowledge deep political differences, refusing to take the role of a visible other and adversary through which democratic solidarity can be built on.

Theses on Politics

1. The problem of government is not a problem of leadership or of institutions. The problem of government is that it seeks to solve the problem itself. When we ask ourselves, why the government is inefficient, we miss the entire point of asking. Why be governed?

2.The work of government is not to serve. In fact, when the government works, it stops serving. It becomes a machine of its own. The only way a government can serve is when it stops governing and people start governing each other.

3. Our present order is not properly ordered. The only proper order is dis-order: the acknowledgment that the properly ordered is always a product of an order itself. To dis-order is to reveal that there is nothing natural with order.

4. Unity means the loss of distinctions: the absorption of oneself into the other. Diversity means the tragic alienation of one from each other: the rule of all under the rule of none. These two must be avoided if we are to dwell with each other. Distance is the sine qua non of politics.

5. Truth does not give us anything to act upon. It is in fact a paralyzing event. The moment of truth is the moment of inactivity. Any appeal to truth is a disarming political tactic. The truth does not set us free; it is the recipe for indolence. But our understanding of freedom is unfree, so we seek the truth.

6. Servant leadership removes accountability. It is totalitarian. It effaces authority.

7. Saying something means doing something. Doing something means saying something. The injunction walk the talk takes walking to be without talking and talking without walking when in fact they constitute each other.

8. All politics is democratic. Nothing else is. The emancipation of man from politics is his emasculation from a democratic future and possibility.

9. Underlying the urge to know is an urge to control, to put an end to mystery, to stabilize. Yet knowledge is not always stable or subject to control. Knowing then is a mystery itself and is controlled by mystery.

A Manifesto Against Life Or A Call for Rebellion

To think of the Trillanes coup (in the loose sense of the term) last Thursday as a failure or as naïvete is once again to think within the limiting and restricting rationality of utility.

Last Thursday’s standoff showed that utilitarian reason gets us nowhere as it severely privatizes human capacity for collective action by plotting it within the calculus of means and ends.

If there was any failure in what occurred, it was the Filipino people’s failure to act for the sheer love of acting.

This is also the failure of progressivism and of groups brandishing a progressive outlook.

Many of them now retrospectively claim that had Trillanes and company made clear their objectives and aims they would have come to their defense.

But sheer human action cannot always be circumscribed within equations of means and ends. Instead, judgment of human action and reason should be based on whether such activity is an act of beginning.

The Greek word for action is archein – to begin. In Greek society, only free men can set out to begin. What distinguishes the freeman from the slave and the woman is that the slave is tied up to the natural process of labor while the woman to the reproduction of the conditions for the maintenance of the household. The freeman on the other hand can choose to lift himself out of these conditions and set out to begin adventures into the world. The philosopher Hannah Arendt has much to say about this.

I think it is in this light that we have to judge the Trillanes coup last Thursday. And I think that it is also in the same light that we have to evaluate what we have been doing so far.

A story in the Inquirer (Saturday, December 1, 2007) entitled: “What was Trillanes thinking” sums up the sentiments among progressive groups that were “surprised” and “caught off-guard” by the Trillanes coup.

Such statements, however, were no different from the military’s response: “We knew Trillanes and Co. were hatching something.”

They were both attempts to make sense of what was happening.

In different ways, to separate theoria from praxis.

To abstract an ontological truth from the truth revealed by political action.

Dinky Soliman’s question what was he up to? points to the sad reality of how bad we have lost our trust in the revelatory character of human activity.

It shows how unwilling we are now to subject ourselves in an exercise of thinking outside.

This inability to think from the standpoint of somebody else is what Arendt calls evil.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she writes:

(the) inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such . . . proof against reason and argument and information and insight of any kind

Trillanes would have only failed if our sole criteria for success is production and productivity.

That is if we replace action with fabrication. Acting with making.

Action is always prone to tragedy. In contrast, fabrication seeks to form the tragic into a manipulable product. To demarcate the boundaries and shape of existence.

Why did Trillanes succeed?

Because it was a tragic event, highlighting the futility of putting life (the mere life of the civilians and journalists in the middle of the crossfire) as the primary consideration of human action.

Because it showed how life, security, economy and private happiness undermine collective human activity.

State of Alertness

There’s something much more chilling than the grim images of the eight dead and 70 injured casualties in the early afternoon bombing at Glorietta Shopping Mall 2 in Makati City today. What scares me more is not another round of “terrorist” blast but the anticipated response from a highly insecure government nearing the tipping point of regime change. Already, authorities have raised police alert levels to the maximum and have instituted checkpoints in key entry and exit points to and from the metropolis. As usual, everyone from all sides of the political fence is calling for calm and sobriety, for facts not speculations, for data not imaginations. The narrative is all too familiar: this is not the time for politics. Rehabilitation, nation-building and national unity must order the day.

Clearly, politics together with the dead shoppers is the real victim of this tragedy.

Police Chief Avelino Razon claims they are on top of things and has called on everyone to go back to the normal course of daily life, albeit without Glorietta 2 for the time being. What Razon and other government officials are saying is this: there’s really nothing to be alert under this state of alertness.

Slavoj Zizek is surprisingly lucid on accounts of such kind and he warns: “when a state institution proclaims a state of emergency, it does so by definition as part of a desperate strategy to avoid the true state of emergency and return to the normal course of things.” States of emergency, then are not ad hoc responses or suspensions of the rule of law as Mark Neocleous notes. On the contrary, they are preemptive strikes to curb the full manifestation of crisis situations. Rather than suspension of the rule of law, states of emergencies constitute and allow the very operation of the law itself. And because the law has always been separated from politics in the liberal conception of things, states of emergency are uncontestable legal orders supported by the austere dichotomization between emergency and normalcy. At the end of the day, there is nothing problematic at all with the normal course of things.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo who embodies class convergence at the apex of state power stands to benefit the most. And why not? So far, Arroyo has not only been the queen of fraud and bribes, she has also been the empress of distraction – innovating all sorts of theatrical fireworks to reroute the energies of an already jaundiced citizenry.

The way the bombing is being treated by those claiming to be critical of her administration is equally myopic, however. If at all, sobriety and objectivity is the last response that should greet it. In fact, it is the one thing Arroyo and her entire class would have wanted to achieve: to drug the population with utter sentimentality to disarm them of the ability to judge what has happened with carefully formed individual judgments.

The Glorietta 2 bombing shook the political landscape violently. It exposed the cracks and heightened the contradictions of our increasingly mall-like structured State. Because it claimed the lives of potential citizens it must be condemned. But because it served to highlight the futility of life-as-it-is and offered an opportunity to understand the great irony of state-declared states of emergency by highlighting that a state of emergency and the normal course of things are not really different, it must be celebrated.

Bringing Politics Back In

If there’s one great danger the Philippines faces now, it’s not that too much politics is going on but that too little of it is actually present. From the President, her opponents, political commentators, down to the average citizen and the working classes everyone seems to be afflicted with an infectious itch to scratch politics away the moment it makes its presence felt. It is a fatal allergy – one that numbs the senses and inhibits one’s capacity for judgment, although, even this has become an undesired endeavor as well, it seems. The symptoms are difficult to recognize because the endless, at times irritating appeals to objective facts and accurate, unopinionated observations provide easy and quick medication. Interestingly, death certificates are also fact-obsessed: time of death up to the last second, cause of death in the most accurate prognosis. This is the danger of too little politics: the elevation to the highest pedestal of life and death in their barest, naked fact.

But it is a widely unrecognized danger because danger itself has become endangered. The dangerous does not have any hold on our imagination anymore because even it has become safe. Come to think of it, there are no more genuinely dangerous spaces nowadays really. Even the mountains and the oceans have lost their capacity to make us tremble in danger. That’s why politics because it is dangerous to life-itself has come to be tamed; is seen to be in need of taming. But politics, because it is unencumbered action has a propensity to be tragic and to result in tragedy. What is happening in the Philippines (and elsewhere) is how one political philosopher beautifully put – a tragedy of tragedy. We have become beings no longer fascinated by the spontaneity of action. In fact, i think there is a spreading (and alarming) desire for numbness. No longer laziness, but numbness. We want everything planned, collectivized, organized and compartmentalized. Like the laws of the market, we want everything predictable, governed by the invisible hand which will manage, harmonize and govern our self-interests. And because we have demonized tragedy, we no longer recognize its spectral presence among us.

Why are we afraid of politics? This I guess is the most important question crying out for an answer. And the question behind it is a more fundamental human question: why are we afraid of fear? Two years ago, during a Simbang Gabi Mass Fr. Luis David, SJ lamented after reading the Christmas story of the angels coming to the shepherds that we modern men have forgotten what it feels like to shudder, to tremble, to fear. I don’t think he meant that the human experience of God and the economy of salvation be situated in a scheme of fear. Fr. David is no Sister Mary Thomas. What he meant was that the experience of trembling is an experience that makes us aware of our own bodies – joints clacking, skin tightening, jaws crackling, goosebumps erupting. Fear/danger jolts us from merely existing. It heightens us, arouses us, and discombobulates us. Modern man – certain and comfortable in the methodology of his rationality – finds it difficult to tremble.

Ironically, the demise of politics in the Philippines is being heralded not just by those who overtly loathe it. In fact, those who claim to be political messiahs and political know-it-alls (the “development” trinity of NGOs-POs, the academe, and utopian journalists) are equally guilty of purging politics by locking it up and suffocating it in holocaust like proportions using the language of reform, which can only mean the eradication of everything that is unique to politics.

Up until the Florentine Renaissance writer, Niccolo Machiavelli, politics was conceived as a unique sphere whose boundaries are set by the laws and conventions of a community. The rise of totalitarian movements in the wake of modernity’s birth wrecked havoc on these boundaries in its quest for life where nothing is impossible. But as the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, once the impossible became possible “it became the unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not revenge, love could not endure, friendship could not forgive.– politicizing everything with the rise of totalitarian movements.” The language of political reform has this at its logical end.

Ruth Grant, a scholar on Machiavelli who wrote on the politics of hypocrisy captured it wonderfully when she claimed that to demand a politics that is pure and honest is no different from to wish for the annihilation of politics altogether. Politics – because it comes out in between human individuality and action – cannot be the stark, naked figure of man in the social contractual state of nature; as Arendt points out: man is apolitical by nature; politics is the relational space of men talking and acting. Politics , as such, is embedded in human passion and is by nature, violent. The so-called politics of reform suppresses violence and silences human passion, denying it of being included in the most human of all activities – political life. On the other hand, Grant’s (and Machiavelli’s) politics of hypocrisy gives politics a chance while at the same time recognizing the limits of what it can do. Pure truth is anti-political because it closes itself to contestation. Even Plato knew this.

The present administration is guilty of bastardizing this Machiavellian concept. Political commentators on the other hand are equally myopic by not reading Machiavelli and yet having the gall to call the Arroyo regime Machiavellian. Machiavelli was the most politically obsessed writer in the history of political thought. Arroyo is guilty of locking politics in the gas chamber. But so are those who claim to be the defenders of the country's national interest.


We must find a new word to describe what the (un)elected leaders of this country are doing, for surely, it is not politics.