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title: "Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics"
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# Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics
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The criminal is the other side of the consumer I criminal doublet. David Garland �escribes in detail the decline of the rehabilitative ideal in penai policy over the past thirty years. He explains: "Crime has been redramatized. The stock welfarist image of the delinquent as a disadvantaged, deserving, subject of need has now al but disappeared. Instead, the images conjured up to accompany new legislation tend to be stereotypical depictions of unruly youth, dangerous predators, and incorrigible career criminals. Accompanying these projected images, and in rhetorical response to them, the new discourse of crime policy consistently invokes an angry public, tired of living in fear, demanding strong measures of punishment and protection:'60 AB Garland makes clear, criminals today figure as strange attractors in revenge fantasies. They stand in for the inexplicable, the unpredictable. AB sites of loss, they embody and occlude neoliberal ideology's inability to account for, to alow for, loss and losers. Free-trade fantasy necessarily recuperates loss in a narrative of gain-everybody wins. Losses in the Real, Real losses, don't fit. They are overwhelming, excessive. The criminal is the imaginary figure covering over and sustaining this excess of loss. His monstrosity marks the horror of losing, our inability to account for inevitable contingencies. The neoliberal criminal, then, is outside the domain of calculable risk: we can never be insured against the loss he inflicts upon us. The logic, as Passavant points out, is one of zero tolerance.61 No risk is acceptable; any risk is monstrous, unbearable.
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During the era of the welfare state, criminology viewed crime in the context of functioning institutions, in terms, that is, of proper education, family socialization, and job opportunities.62 According to the mainstream criminological discourse of the period, the criminal was a deviant, one who deviated from social expectations. In Garland's words, crime signified "an under-achieving socialization process" and could thus be remedied by state intervention in specific domains (15). The discourse of contemporary criminolog)lj however, difers. It views crime as routine. Crimes are the responses of normal individuals to available choices and incentives. Criminals follow market incentives just like everybody else. J3ecause crime can erupt anywhere, any time, the proper response is preemptive-get them before they can get you. Preemption takes a variety of forms, including zoning, surveillance, and an increase in the severity of penalties for repeat ofenders. The goal is protecting the public, ensuring its safetyj preventing the impossible. Appropriate measures k7ep us away from them. The daily business of the community has to be secured against the criminal disruption.
Corresponding to this shift from deviant to norm is a change in the focus of criminological concern. Welfare state criminology emphasized the criminal, bringing all the disciplines to bear in understanding him and his crime. In contrast, the society of control emphasizes the victim. "Victim impact statements," Garland writes, "are introduced to court in order to individualize the impact of the crime, to show how the ofence afected this particular victim, in all her particularity) in all her human specificity" (179 ) . AB a result, the ofender is rendered "more and more a projected image" ( 179). The criminal, in other words, is less a person than the image standing in for a horrifying, unbearable, contingent event. Injustice is what happens to the victim; the victim is the one unjustly deprived of opportunity, life, enjoyment. The criminal is imagined as the monstrous instrument of deprivation.
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More can be and has been said about the criminal as an imaginary figure. Scholars attend to the proliferation of crime dramas on television, the spectacle of criminality that drives local news, and the rhetoric empowering appeals to strict sentencing and the death penalty. "What my analysis of fantasy in neoliberal ideology adds is insight into the way the criminal is a strange attractor for displaced arixeties around the brutality of the neoliberal economy. Criminals seem particularly horrifying figures precisely because they are figures for the Real of loss. The more anxious and desperate economic conditions become, that is, the more false and fragile the fantasy of free trade is experienced as being, the more mon� strous and deadly become those imagined as criminals in our midst and the more they wil have to pay since no one else can. As Jonathan Simon notes, ''The notion of retribution as an abstract requirement of justice is giving way to the ability of specifc individuals to obtain satisfaction from cruelty:'63 The satisfaction one gets from the sufering of another, as we learn from Nietzsche, is then ·perhaps the greatest enjoyment one can expect (which may explain the lack of an outcry in the United States after the publication and circulation of the photos of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib-apparently, Americans were glad to se� that Iraqi prisoners were being tortured; apparently, Americans enjoyed the photos).
Against Identity
N eo liberalism is an economic and political program benefiting the top 1 percent ?f the world's population as it sends bilions into poverty. Forced upon many, it is chosen and embraced by some, particularly those privi:. leged in the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union. Thus, neoliberalism also functions as an ideological formation ofering a specific arrangement of enjoyment. The fantasy of free trade is a key aspect of this arrangement-neoliberalism promises that everyone wil win. It also inte:. grates its losses and failures into this arrangement as intensifications of the promised enjoyment-whether as stolen or excessive, enjoyment is still p ossible.
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Yet neoliberal ideology relies on more than fantasy. It involves a restructuring of political possibility. Neoliberalism. eliminates the symbolic identities made available under Keynesianism, providing instead a multiplicity of fluid and adaptable imaginary identities that converge around the strange attractors of the consumer and the criminal. 'Whereas the welfare state enabled the construction of political identities as sites for oppositional redeployment, neoliberal ideology forecloses such opposition in advance. Under the conditions of the decline of symbolic eficiency, identities are too fleeting and unstable to serve as sites of politicization.64 In the rapidly shifting media environments of communicative capitalism or in the complexities of urban war zones, identifications morph and mutate so rapidly as to be politically inconsequential. Likewise · insofar as brands themselves provide sites of identification that mobilize consumers, a focus on identity production as central to left political struggle afirms rather than contests corporate practice in a global neoliberal economy. How would climate change, for example, be rendered into the terms of political identity? Is it a matter oflifestyle? Ofbeing the sort of person who drives a Prius and carries an attractive nylon bag to the grocery store? Such a reduction to an imagined "green identity" formats climate change as an issue of individual consumer choice, as a fashionable cause. Not only does such formatting reinforce, yet again, the supposition that the free market, left on its own, wil find solutions to major problems but it is built on the exclusion of collective approaches to systemic problems.
The fantastic suppositions of neoliberal ideology have become part of the air we breathe, elements of our most fundamental assumptions about how the world works: everyone is an individual with a unique identityj the free market enables us to create apd dev�lop these unique identities; everybody wins; there is no alternative. Even leftists critical of big, bad corporations and the growing extremes of wealth and poverty find it extraordinarily dificult to think of alternatives to the present configuration of power. In part this is because we have been unable to give voice to values of collectivity, cooperation, solidarity, and equity strong enough to counter neoliberalism's free-trade fantasy. It is also because we can't imagine how we would realize, enact, bring about such a vision. Our very supposition of democracy, as the following chapter explores, entraps us in the inequalities of communicative capitalism. 65
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commonplace of media punditry in the twenty-first century terms of political parties, red states and blue states, support or opposition to U.S. militarism in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the ongoing culture war between the religious right and the secular left, the United States is depicted as a nation split in its fundamental ethico-political self-understanding.
This depiction is misleading. Each side of the divide appeals to democracy. The administration of George W Bush presented itself as actively engaged in bringing democracy to the Middle East and as encouraging countries throughout the world to strengthen their democratic institutions. To this extent, it repeated the rhetoric of the twentieth century's two world wars as well as its cold war, positioning itself and its allies as democracies and its enemies as, well, not democracies (as authoritarians, fascists, communists, terrorists, and, briefly, Islamo-fascists). The left, although seeriingly opposed to the Bush administration, also appealed to democracy as that which it wishes to restore, redeem, or reach. Since the left enabled the ideal of socialism to wither away with the Soviet state, what democracy might mean, or the range of possibilities democracy is meant to encompass, remains unclear, to say the least. The economic and social guarantees fundamental to social democracy and the welfare state don't feature prominently in most left discussions of democracy. More pronounced are themes of participation and deliberation, immanence and inclusion, ideals that are necessary but impossible, perpetually deferred, forever to come.
3
Democracy
A K N O T O F H O PE AND D E S PAIR
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-why does the left continue to appeal to democracy? Is democracy, as Slavoj Zizek asks, the ultimate horizon of political thought?1 Is reiterating the ideological message of communicative capitalism the best the left can do in the face of neoliberal hegemony and the collapse of socialism? Is democracy the fallback position for left politics, all that remains of our wounded and diminished political aspirations? Or does the hope its evocation promises mark instead a pervasive left despair?
Real existing constitutional democracies privilege the wealthy. AB they install, extend, and protect neoliberal capitalism, they exclude, exploit, and oppress the poor, all the while promising that everybody wins. The present value of democracy relies on positing crucial determinants of our lives and conditions outside the frame of contestation in a kind of"no-go zone: These suppositions regarding growth, investment, and profit are politically of-limits, so it's no wonder that the wealthy and privileged evoke democracy as a political ideal. It can't hurt them. The expansion and intensification of networked communications technologies that was supposed to enhance democratic participation integrates and consolidates communicative capitalism. Nevertheless, the left continues to present our political hopes as aspirations to democracy.
Despite democracy's inability to represent justice in the wake of political submission to a brutalized, financialized, pun;shing global market, left political and cultural theorists appeal to arrangements that can be filed in, substantialized, by fundamentalisms, nationalisms, populisms, and conservatisms diametrically opposed to social justice and economic equality. Caling for democracy, leftists fail to emphasize the divisions necessary for politics, divisions that should lead us to organize against the interests of corporations and their stockholders, against the values of fundamentalists and indiVidualists, and on behalf of collectivist arrangements designed to redistribute benefits and opportunities more equitably. With this plea, leftists proceed as if democracy were the solution to contemporary political problems rather than symptomatic of them, rather than the name of the impasse in which we find ourselves.
Concerned with how continued adherence to democracy absorbs and incorporates hope so as to lodge politics in a field of already given possibilities, I consider here three current invocations of democracy: democracy as radical ideal, democracy as political practice, and democracy as theoretical justification for rule. These three invocations are primary ways democracy is figured today. In appealing to democracy, left political theory remains trapped in the terms and suppositions conditioning these invocations, terms and suppositions that I analyze by drawing upon Zizek's elaboration ofLacan's four discourses.
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To the extent that the left-whether mainstream Democrats, deliberative democrats, radical democratic theorists and activists, or the typing left blogging and publishing in print media-accepts globalized neoliberal capitalism and acquiesces to a political arrangement inadequate to the task of responding to the gross inequality, immiseration, and violence this capitalism generates, it wil fail to provide a viable alternative politics. Accordingly, this chapter explores the limitation of democracy as a contemporary political ideal, demonstrating how this organizational form and polemical concept serves highly particular interests and stands in the way of universalization.2 It clicks on the links between contemporary theories of deliberative democracy (the most prominent democratic theories today) and the political arrangements of real existing democracy, arrangements that include activists and elected oficials. Vhile Hubertus Buchstein and Dirk Jorke present a persuasive account of the disconect between highly professionalized (and commodified) academic democratic theory and everyday references to and identifications with democracy, I highlight the overlap among these invocations of democracy, the coincidence between actual. and ideal participation that ultimately undermines dynamic, responsive, left politics.3
Theories of deliberative democracy tend to focus on the justification of democratic principles and practices. More than building models of democratic governance, th.�y provide grounds that support claims for the superiority of democracy over other political arrangements. These grounds, moreover, have an interesting status. They are raised both in academic and popular debate, or, more precisely, as both academic and popular debate. Theories of deliberative democracy prioritize not simply claims regarding deliberation but actual practices of deliberation. For democratic theorists, then, there is a necessary link between theories and practices, a necessary connection to real life. Practices are legitimately democratic not when their outcomes can be imagined as the result of deliberation but when the practices are actually deliberative. Legitimacy follows from realization, from deliberative practice. And for democratic theorists the opposite holds as well: deliberative and democratic are the standards themselves determining legitimacy.
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For example, crucial to Jirgen Habermas's account of universalization is the idea that normative claims to validity are actually debated, that the justification of norms requires and results from the actual discourses of actual people.4 With Habermas's emphasis on constitutional forms, on the one side, and the corresponding alliance between liberal and deliberative democrats, on the other, we have a contemporary theory that finds justi.; ficatory elements in real-life political practices. Rather than providing rational reconstructions of everyday practices, the contemporary theory of deliberative democracy uses everyday practices as justifications for the validity of deliberative procedures. 5 Both normative and descriptive accounts of democratic procedures thus play key roles in theorists' accounts of deliberative democracy.
As it occupies this in-between space, this space between facticity and validityj democratic theory presents ideals and aspirations as always already present possibilities. In so doing, it brings utopia inside, elimnating it as an external space of hope. Yet by internalizing the hope that things might be otherwise, democratic\_ theory destroys that hope: potential problems are solved in advance, through democratic channels. We already know how to get there. We already have the procedures. Anything else is mere tweaking. Despite all our problems with dem�cracy, democracy is the solution to all our problems.6 The idea that democracy marks an empty place where things can be otherwise, that democratic procedures incorporate already the keys to revising and reforming the practice of democracy, becomes the conviction that there is nothing but, no alternative to, democracy. To this extent, democratic theory presents democracy as realized, as adequate to its notion. If this is the case, the problem is in the notion.
University Discourse
We can go some way toward understanding the problem contained in the notion of deliberative democracy when we recognize how it has consolidated around ideas of argument and deliberation.7 Democracy is envisioned as the exchange of reasons by\_participants in a discussion characterized by equality; inclusivity, reciprocity, and transparency. Such discussion among equals, however, is dearly but one particular model of discourse, one sort of idealized discourse among other possible configurations. Why just one?8
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Lacanian psychoanalysis, especialy as elaborated by Zizek, ofers an account of four discourses, four diferent models of the social bond: discourses of the master, the hysteric, the university, and the analyst.9 Lacan developed these four discourses in part to account for diferences in the ways that discourses function, diferences in the kinds of social links they provide and the kinds of suppositions and requirements that structure them. In brie£ the four discourses are sets of formulae that distinguish between speaking and the place from which something is spoken. For example, my question "What are you doing?" cart be understood in a variety of ways, depending on my addressee as well as on what underlies or supports my asking of the question. If I ask my young daughter, "What are you doing?" I am likely speaking from a parental position. If I ask a political leader, ''What are you doing?" I may be challenging her authority; caling upon her to justify her policies and decisions. If I ask an associate in my laboratory, "What are you doing?" I may be speaking as a felow scientist engaged in the production of knowledge. Lacan formulates the diferences among these questions as diferent discourses, diferent ways that communi.cation establishes a social link. These three situations are examples of the discourse of the master, the discourse of the hysteric, and the discourse of the university.
I can also participate in discourse without saying anything at all: I can �ust sit there, mute and impassive. In this way, I confront the other as a kind of object or catalyst. She will likely project diferent sorts of knowledge, desires, and motives onto me. I can accept this projection and claim this knowledge, positioning myself perversely as the one who knows the real truth behind her words. Or I can remain impassive, challenging her to accept that there really is no secret truth for me to know, challenging her, in other words,- to accept responsibility for herself. This fourth situation, one in which an object is in the position of speaking agent, is the discourse of the pervert as wel as the discourse of the analyst.
The discourse of the master is the first ofLacan's four discourses or four accounts of the social link provided in communication. Its structure is rooted in the absolute authority of the master's word. The master's word is law-even if it seems unfair or crazy. So the master can say; "Do this" or "Do that;' "Pick that cotton;' "Kneel!" or "Go fight that battle !" Any of these injunctions is acceptable within the discourse of the master simply because the master said it. The second discourse, the hysteric's, takes form when the subject challenges the master's word. Read politically; this discourse follows a logic of "protest and resistance;' of demands that can never actually be met, that perpetually shift because they are never really about what is actually demanded.10 In the third discourse, the discourse of the university, knowledge occupies the position of speaking agent. Consequently, Zizek reads the political bond established by this discourse as the rule of experts.11 Finaly; he argues that the political bond proper to the discourse of the analyst is "radical-revolutionary politics:' Here, the excluded, symptomal point of the situation is the speaking position. The risks of such a political formation appear in the fact that this formula is also that of the perverse discourse. In the perverse discourse, the object that speaks positions itself as an instrument in behalf of the other, an instrument grounded in knowledge of what is best for the subject or other.
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