Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics

Perhaps the most dificult instance of the contemporary problem of left victory] though, is left enthusiasm for democracy, as I explore in chapter 3· The aggressive war waged in Iraq has been fought in the name of democracy, seemingly taking left desire for democratic governance at its word: You want democracy ? This is what democracy looks like!

Not Post-Political

"When one's opponent takes over one's position, one is confronted with its realization, with its repercussions. This is what niany of us don't like; this is what we want to avoid. So we say, "No! That's not it," but because our enemy has taken over our language, our ideals, we^'ve lost a capacity to say what we want, even to know what we want. We can't even dream something else. Zizek writes: "In a radical revolution, people not only have to 'realize their old ( emancipatory, etc.) dreams'; rather, they have to reinvent their very modes of dreaming:'18

Such a reinvention is an enormous, perhaps impossible task. It's not furthered, though, by the diagnosis of "depoliticization;' a diagnosis offered by political theorists the increased currency of which calls out for critique. If depoliticization means ·anything, it is the retreat into co_�ardice, the retroactive determination of victory as defeat because of the left's fundamental inability to accept responsibility for power and to undertake the dificult task of reinventing our modes of dreaming. Depoliticization is a fantaSYJ an excuse whereby the left says "We know colective action is possible theoretically] but we don't believe we exist:' The \_term marks the gap between the commitment to common approaches to systemic problems constitutive of left thought for over two centuries and the isolating individualism of consumption and entertainment-driven communicative capitalism. '}:he very diagnosis of depoliticization functions fetishistically to prevent the left from confronting the truth of its victory.

This view of depoliticization as an excuse or fetish covering over a failure of responsibility, however, is not widely shared. On the contrary, Q.epoliticization and the correlative notions of post-politics, dedemocratization, and postdemocracy are ofered as terms for designating what is specifically new in the current political,.economic condition. Over the past decades, a number of political theorists have attempted to analyze the contemporary conjuncture as post-political or postdemocratic.19 Reversing the terms of the "end of ideology" thesis ofered by neoconservative (Francis Fukuyama) and "third way" (Anthony Giddens) thinkers, these theorists critically redescribe the orientation toward consensus, administration, and technocracy lauded as benefits of the post- Cold War age. Several aspects of this redescription stand out, namely, the primacy of the economy, the individual, and the police.

10

INTRODUCTION

The current conjucture is post-political, the argument goes, because the spread and intensification of neoliberal economic policies have subjected states to the demands of corporations and the seemingly inevitable logic of the market. To the extent that state authority is increasingly less able to constrain corporate power, politics matters less. This inability of democratic politic.s to produce viable solutions to. social and economic problems, moreover, resonates with the celebration of the individual in communicative capitalism. The individualization of politics into commodifiable "lifestyles" and opinions subsumes politics into consumption. That consumer choices may have\_ a politics-fair trade, green, vegan, woman-owned-morphs into the sense that politics is nothing but consumer choices, that is, individuated responses to individuated needs. Zygmunt Bauman makes the point well:

being an individual de jure means having no one to blame for one's own misery, seeking causes of one's own defeats nowhere except in one's own indolence and sloth, and looking for no other remedies other than trying harder and harder stil . . . . With eyes focused on one's own performance and thus diverted from the social space where the contradictions of individual existence are collectively produced, men and women are naturally tempted to reduce the complexity of their predicament. Not that they find ''biographic solutions" onerous and cumbersome: there are, simply, no "biographic solutions to systemic contradictions;' and so the dearth of solutions at their disposal needs to be compensated for by imaginary ones .... There is therefore a demand for individual pegs on which frightened individuals can collectively hang their individual fears, if only for a brief m.oment.20

With politics seemingly reduced to consumer choice, government similarly contracts, now concerning itself with traumatized victims. Its role is less to ensure public goods and solve collective problems than to address the personal issues of subjects. Accordingly, polsters assess individual preference and satisfaction, as if the polled were the same as the politicized people. Finally, insofar as the economy alone cannot fulfill al the functions of government, one element of the state rises to the fore-security. Thus, accompanying diminished political influence on economic and social policy is the intensification and extension of the state as an agency of surveillance and control.

INTRODUCTION

1.1

The neoliberal capitalist economy, the fragile, consuming individual, and the surveilg, controlling state are aspects of the diagnosis of depoliticization well worth emphasizing. Yet post.:politics, depoliticization, and de-democratization are inadequate to the task of theorizing this conjuncture. The claim that states are decreasing in signifcance and impact because of the compulsions of the market ignores the millions of dolars regularly spent in political campaigns. Business and market interests as well as corporate and financial elites expend vast amounts of time and money on elections, candidates, lobbyists, and lawmakers in order to produce and direct a political climate that suits their interests. Capitalizing on left critiques of regulation and retreats from the state, neoliberals move right in, deploying state power to further their interests. Similarly, social conservatives in the United States persistently fight across a broad spectrum of political fronts-including local school boards, statewide ballot initiatives, judicial appointments, and mobilizations to amend the Constitution. The left-wing lament regarding post-politics not only �:werlooks the reality of politics on the ground but it cedes in ac;lvance key terrains of activism and struggle. Not recognizing these politicized sites as politicized .sites, it fails to counter conservative initiatives with a coherent alternative.

Claims for post-politics are childishly petulant. Leftists assume that our lack of good political ideas means the end of politics as such. If the game isn't played on our terms, we aren't going to play at al. We aren't even going to rec gnize that a game is being played. To this extent, the claim for post-politics erases its own standpoint of enunciation. "Why refer to a formation as post-political if one does not have political grounds for doing so? If one already has such gr^�unds, then how exactly is the situation postpolitical? If one lacks them, then what is the purpose of the claim if not to draw attention to or figure this lack? Figuring a lack may be the strongest contribution of the rhetoric of depoliticization, one to which we on the left should attend, and one which makes debates among political theorists important for leftists looking to reinvent our modes of dreaming. It makes sense, then, to consider these debates in some detail.

12

INTRODUCTION

Accounts of post-politics tend to slip between two. diferent positions: post-politics as an ideal of consensus, inclusion, and administration that must be rejected and post-politics as a description of the contemporary exclusion or foreclosure of the political. Chantal .Moufe and Jacques Ranciere hold versions of the former view, Zizek takes the latter, and Wendy Brown specifies this latter point in terms of de-democratization.

Moufe is the most compelling and precise as she takes aim at third way politics, the liberalism of John Rawls, and the deliberative democracy of Jirgen Habermas. Arguing that these approaches "negate the inherently conflictual nature of modern pluralism;' she concludes, "They are unable to recognize that bringing a deliberation to a dose always results from a decision which excludes other possibilities and for which one should never refuse to bear responsibility by invoking the commands of general rules or principles:'21 Consensus-based ideals. fail to acknowledge that politics is necessarily divisive. A decision for one course rather than another excludes some possibilties and positions. Part of the challenge of politics is taking responsibility for such exclusion.

Key to the strength of Moufe's argument is her careful use of Carl Schmitt's critique of liberal parliamentarianism. Schmitt argues that liberalism seeks to evade the core political opposition between friend and enemy, attempting instead "to tie the political to the ethical and subjugate it to economics:'22 Yet the political cannot be avoided, and attempts to submerge or eface it as intellectual deliberation or market competition result only in the displacement of the intensity characteristic of the political to another, potentially even more violent, realm. In Schmitt's words, "The political can derive its energy from the most varied human endeavors, from the religious, economic, moral and other antitheses. It does not describe its own substance, but only the intensity of an association or dissociation of human beings whose motives can be religious, national (in the ethnic or cultural sense), economic, or of another kind and can efect at diferent times diferent coalitions and separations:'23 The political marks the intensity of a relation, an intensity that characterizes the antagonism constitutive of society (around which society forms).

Moufe's emphasis on the unavoidability of antagonism and division indicates a weak point in Ranciere's discussion of post-politics (and postdemocracy, since for him democracy and politics are interchangeable). "While attuned to the ways contemporary practices of counting opinions and managing preferences presume community and disavow political conflict and division, Ranciere tends to write as if the disappearance of politics were possible, as if the evacuation of politics from the social were a characteristic of the current conjuncture. 24 For example, he argues that today "the identification between democracy and the legitimate state is used to produce a regime of the community's identity as itself, to make politics evaporate under a concept of law that identifies it with the spirit of the community:'25 Ranciere is right to emphasize the convergence between presumptions of democracy and of legitimacy. But he is wrong to imply the existence of a string of identifying moves that turn politics into law and law into unified community. In the United States, at least, law is the site of open and avowed political conflict that undermines even the fiction of community, a conflict that brings to the fore the relations of power and privilege already (and necessarily) inscribed in law. Ranciere's claim that "the state today legitimizes itselfby declaring that politics is impossible" simply does not apply to the United States post-September 11.26 From the firing of the attorneys in the civil rights division of the Justice Department, to the manipulations of law undertaken in the justification of torture, to the abolition of habeas corpus in the Military C�mmissions Act, to the employment of presidential signing statements designed to undermine the laws they ostensibly endorse, law remains a highly cont�ntious political site, indeed, the site of a counterrevolution endeavoring to install the vision of a unitary chief executive above the law.

INTRODUCTION

13

Zizek's account of post-politics grows out of his reading of Ranciere.2'\* Thus, he too oscilates between post-politics as the risky ideal behind the neoliberal third way, liberal multiculturalism, and the therapeutic administrativ� state and post-political as a description of today's "liberaldemocratic global capitalist regime:'28 Although Zizek's position is weakest when he uses the term "post-political" descriptively, his explanation is nonetheless insightful: what makes the contemporary setting post-political is the exclusion of the possibility of politicization. Zizek's point here is that politicization entails raising the particular to the level of the universal. A specific crime, issue, or event comes to stand for something more than itsel£ Rather than a singular problem to be resolved, it indicates a series of problems confronting the system as a whole.29 It is the symptomal point of antagonism in a given constellation. For example, the civil rights movem.ent in the United States was not about the dificulties facing this or that particular person. It was a movement to change basic social practices, institutions, and regimes of visibility so as to guarantee African Americans basic rights as equal citizens. A more recent example can be found in Democrats' attempts to politicize the Bush administration's leaking of the identity of CIA agent ·valerie Plame so that it would appear not simply as the matter of a singular leak but as harassment of Plame' s husband, Joseph Wilson, for his criticism of the Bush administration for using information that it knew to be false to increase fear that Iraq had a viable nuclear weapons program. The Democratic strategy was to make this event stand in for a widespread and deliberate plan to deceive the U.S. public into supporting aggressive war against Iraq. '"What post-politics tends to prevent;' ^Zizek explains, "is precisely t�s metaphoric universalization of particular demands: post-politics mobilizes the vast apparatus of experts, social workers, and so on, to .reduce the overall demand (complaint) of a particular group to just this demand, with its particular content:'30 As the Plame example indicates, politicization does occur today. The right did it particularly well when they presented liberals, feminists, gays, and A1 Gore as standing in for the larger crime of contemporary selfishness, prurience, weakness, decadence, and general un-Americanism.

14

INTRODUCTION

^Zizek attributes contemporary post-politics to "the depoliticization of economics, to the common acceptance of Capital and market mechanisms as neutral tools I procedures to be exploited:'31 Taken as a broad description of U.S. politics, this argument is unconvincing: jobs, deficits, surpluses, taxes, inflation, interest rates, out-sourcing, the strength of the dollar, trade imbalances, consumer spending, subprime mortgages, bubbles, and budgets are key terms in the contemporary political lexicon. The economy appears as the site of politics, its most fundamental concern. ^Zizek's point, then, is better read as a critique of the left-the real political problem today is that the left accepts capitalism. The left is caught in a post-political situation because it has conceded to the right on the terrain of the economy: it has surrendered the state to neoliberal interests. Present leftists rarely view capitalism and its efects as evil (and part of Reagan's genius as president, as I explore in chapter $^ { 4 , }$ is his redirection of the language of evil away from capitalism). Instead, most view the problem as the state. "Depoliticized" thus well describes the contemporary left's inability to raise particular claims to the level of the universal, to present issues or problems as standing for something beyond themselves. The academic and typing left prides itself on just this unwilingness, an unwillingness to say "we" out of a reluctance to speak for another as well as an unwilgness to signify or name a problem, to take it out of its immediate context and re-present it as uriiversal.

INTRODUCTION

15

Vhile Zizek's version of post-politics is helpful in identifying the failure of the contemporary left, it is wrong as a general point. In the United States, the right actively politicizes school curricula, climate science, stem cell research, Christmas, the judiciary, marriage, adoption, punishment, and the family. Every issue is made to stand for something beyond itself, an indication of weakness or resolve, a sign of support for us or them. Conservatives are not seeking individualized, therapeutic, or administrative answers. They want the intervention of law. They raise their claims to the status of a universal. They appeal to values of chastity, decency, piety, unity, order, and civility as universally valid principles and ideals. Neoliberals similarly argue in terms of universals. Their claim is that the market is the best way to arrange production, distribution, and consump" tion, not that it is the best way only for the privileged and wealthy. Here again, the not�on of depoliticization fails to click on the imbrications of capitalism and democracy, the injunctions and failures to enjoy, and the intertwinings of certainty and skepticism charact�ristic of the current conjuncture. A premise of this book is that a political theory informed by recent work in psychoanalysis (primarily Zizek's Lacanian Marxism) is one way to access these sites and contribute to the project of politicizing the left.32

To be sure, the American left is not completely without vision. It uni.; formly asserts the primacy of democracy (which I critique in chapter 3) and less uruiormly but equaly unfortunately advocates generosity and responsiveness (which I critique in chapter s).33 Left enthusiasm for democracy leads me to Wendy Brown's analysis of contemporary U.S. politics in terms of de-democratization. In a rich discussion of the convergence of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, she highlights de-democratization as its central force and threat. The details of Brown's analysis are evocative, but her overall account is unpersuasive because it both presumes a prior democracy, a previous acceptance and practice of democracy that is now unraveling, and neglects the hegemony of democratic rhetoric today. Democracy has long been a contested category in U.S. politics, subordinated to individual and states' rights, valued less than elites' property and privilege, and easily pushed aside in times of war, cold and otherwise. Anxieties over the tyranny of the majority, the great unwashed, immigrants, Catholics, workers, women, blacks, and the young have infused the American system since its inception. The combination of civil rights, students, and new social movements in the 196os with rapid expansion in communications media enabling people to register their opinions, contact representatives, and organize gatherings and protests has, contra Brown, realized democratic aspirations to a previously unimaginable degree. Even as banal a statistic as voter turnout supports my claim that the current conjuncture is not well conceptualized with the notion of de-democratization: the turnout of the voting age population in the United States in the 2004 election was the highest it has been since 1968.34 To this extent, the presidential election of 2oo8 was less an exception than a trend, one marked as much by participation as it was by spending: the candidate who spends the most wins.

16

INTRODUCTION

Expansions in networked communications .media reinforce the hegemony of democratic rhetoric. Far from de-democratized, the contemporary ideological formation of communicative capitalism fetishizes speech, opinion, arid participation. It embeds us in a mindset wherein the number of friends one has on Facebook or MySpace, the number of page-hits one gets on one's blog, and the number of videos featured on one's You Tube channel are the key markers of success, and details such as duration, depth of commitment, corporate and financial influence, access to structures of decision-making, and the narrowing of political struggle to the standards of do-it-yourself entertainment culture become the boring preoccupations of baby-boomers stuck in the past. Chapter 1 details how communicative capitalism materializes and repurposes democratic ideals and aspirations in ways that strengthen and support globalized neoliberalism. The proliferation, distribution, acceleration, and intensification of communicative access and opportunity produce a deadlocked democracy incapable of serving as a form for progressive political and economic change. So the problem isn't democratization. It's the left's failure to think beyond democracy and defend a vision of equality and solidarity, its unwillingness to reinvent its modes of dreaming.

INTRODUCTION

17

When democracy appears as both the condition of politics and the solution to the political condition, neoliberalism can't appear as the violence it is. Yet under communicative capitalism, this is precisely what has occurred. Right and left share the same rhetoric of democracy, a rhetoric merging ethics and economics, discussion and competition so that each is a version of the other. In the absence of distinctions, conviction is indistinguishable from knowledge and certainty triumphs over evidence. (Can we ever really know the truth ? What is verification, anyway?) So preemptive war is fought in the name of spreading democracy even as critics of the same war use the same terms to voice, to imagine, their opposition. The contemporary left is in a position of true victory, of victory in defeat. Our enemy speaks our language. And because our enemy has adopted our language, our ideals, we lack the ability to say what we want. Our present values thus become horrifc realizations of their opposites, entrapping us in psychotic politics.

18

INTRODUCTION

lthough mainstream media in the United States supported the Bush administration in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, critical assessments of the government's justifications for war circulated throughout global capitalism's communications networks. Alternative media, independent media, and non-U.S. media provided thoughtful reports, insightful comentary, and critical evaluations of the ''evidence" of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They highlighted the falsity and venality of the administration's articulation of the attacks of September 11 with Iraq, its elision of Osama bin Laden into Saddam Hussein as public enemy number one. Amy Goodman's syndicated radio program Democracy Now regularly broadcast shows intensely opposed to the militarism and unilateralism of the Bush administration's national security policy. The Nation magazine ofered detailed and nuanced critiques of the justifications ofered for attacking Iraq-particularly those cloaked in humanitarian good wil. Antiwar activists working to supply citizens with opportunities to make their opposition known circulated lists of congressional phone and fax numbers via email. On websites, they posted petitions and announcements for marches, protests, and direct-action training sessions. As the administration's preparations for a seemingly inevitable war proceeded, thousands of antiwar bloggers commented on each step, citing other media to support their positions. True, the mainstream news media failed to cover demonstrations such as the protest in September 2002 by 4oo,ooo people in London or march on

1

Technology

T H E P R O M I S ES O ^F C OM M U N I C AT I VE CAPI TA L I S M