Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Death Drive of the Republic

In the imaginary, democracy poses the possibility of a return to the original (apolitical) condition of human existence: a world without signification, a world without politics, a world where the natural unity of the people guarantees political harmony. For example, people do not identify with democracy out of some hope that it will temper or humble their own identity/perspective: the allure of the democratic is that it offers the possibility of the projection of the self into a kind of universal, the ultimate form of self-affirmation. This is what explains the allure of democracy rhetorically, at least for both E. Burke and Arendt in On Revolution.

The messy world of the symbolic, the compromise formation that testifies to the utopic position of the imaginary, emerges as the other side of the logic of self-projection that drives the rhetorical appeal of democracy: the pluralistic and difference riven conception of "the people" that functions as a universal to gain adherence also stands in for "persons". Nothing new here: this is a fancy way of describing the Platonic charge of demophobia, although we might say in addition to the Platonic worry that "the people" might run roughshod over truth, there is an additional issue built in at the simplest level of identification: the existence of the other "selves" which goad one initially to attempt to project the self as a universal that founds the political, not only frustrates that full realization of identity is simultaneously threatens the self with the secret truth that the self is never so whole as it seems (again, basic Lacan).

Now so long as what frustrates the full achievement of a pure people as sovereign is a split within "the people", you get your purges and your scapegoating and your democratic what-have-you, following Arendt, K. Burke, Stavrakakis, etc. Each attempt, once more, to purify the people struggles to identify the conditions of its own failure in anything other than a kind of bizarre inductive: we elevated "the people" to the position of power, problems persist, we must have picked the wrong "people". In this case it seems clear that we can dredge up the old familiar Copjec discussion: "the people" are being taken in for their failure to live up to their ideal image.

Alternately, we'd like it if "the people" could be appreciated as they are, what they are, in and of themselves. So it becomes a question of how we produce a kind of political "sense" or "atmosphere" or "mood" or "affect" that positions democratic subjects with a kind of skepticism not towards "actually existing" democracy but instead to its authorizing imaginary force. This is extremely difficult: as said earlier, few if any modes of identification operate by behaving skeptically and cynically towards the self, authorized as they are typically by a differential equation premised on exceptionalism.

So it seems like the genius of republican representation (and the further checks and balances in the American system of separation of powers) is that it provides a possible mechanism to produce skepticism towards any set of government actions as not being properly representative of the people: this makes a good deal of sense if your concern is with too much government power (like a bunch of Lockeans skeptical of the Hobbesian Leviathan sick of paying taxes to the King, or if you're a Jew who just escaped the state-run genocide of your people in Europe, like Hannah Arendt).

However, under the conditions of late capitalism, this virtue becomes a vice. To the extent that a pervasive skepticism of the people is built in to the structural political system, it reduces our capacity to understand popular demands as strongly authorized, demanding instead a kind of suspicion to these claims. So to the extent that the symbolic space of America is less and less tolerant of the welfare state, this reflects not only the neoliberal belief that governmental functions should be outsourced to private agents, but also the general fear that the government's actions are not what the people want. The republican theories behind American political institutionalism are built for an era where state power is the ultimate threat, and does not envision a world where the asymetrical aggregation of private property threatens the well being of the population.

So to the extent that democratic theory envisages a return to the original conditions of existence, those that are pre-political or pre-social, how does it compulsively repeat attempts to return to these origins? It seems like in a weird way the prepolitical character of democracy's offer of a pure people parallels capitalism's offer of a level playing field: both offer the annihilation of difference if you will only take one deshistoricizing pill. If the move towards a full "people" is desire, and if the drives are what break up that move (in this case republican institutions), then constitutive rhetorics demonstrate a kind of repetition compulsion in gesturing to a total and complete people that can never be completed. But instead of allowing us to locate this difference within the people deductively (compare this to the inductively violent result of the French Revolution), republican institutions locate this split not within the people but in the act of translating the popular will into political institutions themselves. Now so long as you have what Arendt calls the "revolutionary spirit", that is, a radical committment to the idea that every beginning can be a completely new beginning, this is perhaps not such a problem: institutions can be made again, and made in ways that their lack of selfsameness with previously existing institutions does not doom them to a failure by comparison. But when the totality of "the people" is regularly interrupted by institutions (and indeed, "the people" are constituted against the government in the style of contemporary conservative suspicion of governmental action), it seems that the repetition compulsion to summon "the people", if it is indeed an urge to return "to an earlier state of things", is nothing more than a reminder that the people are not the government.

7 comments:

  1. Hey, friend. If you don't want comments, please let me know. I'm going to assume you do, and so I'm going to respond to you as I wish people would to me. That means skeptical and with questions, premised by the reminder that I think you are really smart and awesome. ^_^

    1) The imaginary holds out the utopia of democracy as apolitical - for Arendt? That sounds off, but I could be wrong I guess. The idea of an "origin" of "political harmony" sounds more like the Das Ding (a function of the real) of the collective psyche than it sounds like the utopia of the imaginary. Following Lacan, the imaginary would be an idealized form of what is encountered in the symbolic. A great deal depends on *exactly how you are defining democracy, then. Are you defining it as a practice? A system of governance? A theory of ethical relations? It's slippery at best in this entry - functioning as all these and more at various times. The imaginary would idealize a version of each of these from the symbolic...and would that idealization be "apolitical"?

    2)"In this case it seems clear that we can dredge up the old familiar Copjec discussion: "the people" are being taken in for their failure to live up to their ideal image." What discussion is this? Sorry - do you reference this in another blog entry that I haven't read? I'm not getting the reference on face.

    3) This "projection of the self" stuff - Can you clarify for me the relationship you understand between the individual psyche and the collective ("the people")? Is it an additive/summative relation (self + self + self)? I tend operate out of the vocabulary of "nation" and treat it as fractal projection of individual psychic processes. I don't run through identification as a result - hence, my unfamiliarity in the next question.

    4) Running this through (Burkean I assume) identification - this creates a particular concept of the people that is substantive (i.e. consubstantial). They share a recognition of characteristics one to another. But you also say people "identify with democracy". Is this a different kind of identification? Is it, too, consubstantial? What is the shared substance of a self and a ?system? ?practice? or whatever democracy "is"?

    5) So, you wish to "fight" the imaginary, not the symbolic? You know, then, that we will be going different places. ^_^

    6) "If the move towards a full "people" is desire, and if the drives are what break up that move (in this case republican institutions), then constitutive rhetorics demonstrate a kind of repetition compulsion in gesturing to a total and complete people that can never be completed." I need you to back way up and slow way down. I'm not sure you've got desire figured out here - it's its own complicated thing - and can you call republic institutions a drive? Whoa. Repetition compulsion I'm way closer to be ready for, but it needs the front end worked out.

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  2. I guess I have a simple question. You say, "In the imaginary, democracy poses the possibility of a return to the original (apolitical) condition of human existence: a world without signification, a world without politics, a world where the natural unity of the people guarantees political harmony. For example, people do not identify with democracy out of some hope that it will temper or humble their own identity/perspective: the allure of the democratic is that it offers the possibility of the projection of the self into a kind of universal, the ultimate form of self-affirmation."

    Why is this the allure of democracy? Why must one value democracy for consensus, for a universal people, for the self as the people? I think many views of democracy, including our founders and Arendt to name a couple, is for an agonistic democracy, for a democracy that recognizes and values difference? And isn't Copjec and other critiques about FASCISM being this dream of unity, of the pure will of the people represented in the one body of mein Fuhrer? Why does democracy have to be a utopian dream? Why can't it be an anti-utopia, a recognition of the impossibility of unity, of a single voice, of a world without politics? Democracy seems to insist on the universality of politics, the impossibility to escape it. Seems like a huge assumption to me.

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  3. @Meryl: When I speak of identification with democracy, I'm not thinking about democracy as we theorize it. I'm thinking about the effects the diachronically situated signifier "democracy", and its companion notions like "the people" and "the general will" have on subjects. So its certainly not what democracy means to Arendt, you are right about that.

    I think the projection of a harmonious beginning is a retroactive projection of the imaginary. The Real is the guarantee that the symbolic and imaginary are not coterminous. I'm using mostly Lacan from "The Function and Field of Language in Psychoanalysis" for this.

    I think we understand the same thing re: the self. The self exists only as a retroactive projection of it never having existed in the first place--the lure of democracy is the promise of the projection of the self as the voice of politics, but the non-totality of the self, much as it scares the self into the repeated assertion of the self's own agency, also authorizes the production of a political discourse that hysterically exists upon *this* self's extreme importance--hence the linkage to demophobia.

    The Copjec note is mostly for my benefit: think of "the people" as a stand in for a true people that fail to live up to their ideal, vs. the people as the successfully sublimated object elevated to the status of The Thing, and you'll see what I'm getting at.

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  4. Shared "substance" of democracy is the real rub--this is much like defining the content of Mouffe's "shared space" in TDP. I think the shared substance of democracy could be something like a collective belief in/belonging to the project of incompleteness. I think something like that authorizes a good deal of the radical democratic political theory we love (and certainly the Burkean turn to the comic within the field). The identification "with democracy" is shorthand for: the self-sabotaging attempt to identify through "the people", with the attendant trading of anxieties for a sense of self-satisfaction.

    The symbolic and imaginary are mutually constituting, no? Its like L and M say in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: the ontic content, when it changes, can rewrite the ontological plane as well. It is probably not a two way street, but to the extent that one is invested in mapping the imaginary as it must be for the symbolic to cohere, I think its two sides of the same coin.

    Still thinking the last bit through as well (Beyond the Pleasure Principle--woah) but I think this will suffice for now as a thumbnail: take a Habermasian consensus position about democracy. Such a position posits a return to an original state (that has never really existed, cue melancholia) of apolitical consensus. Such a need is what pushes subjects towards identification consubstantiality (desire). Drive is what breaks up the approach to the object. We might argue that the tradition of popular sovereignty locates the drive in the split between "the people" and "the government" (this is antagonistic rather than agonistic), but in reality within a system of popular sovereignty the drive is actually located interior to "the people" themselves--hence the repeated misidentification of "the people" during the French Revolution, and the purges. A Republican system locates two splits: one between "the people" and the government, and one within the people themselves, a Madisonian fear of the tyranny of the majority, if you will. So in the latter account, the fact that "the people' is an incomplete and asymptotic ideal is managed by the Symbolic generated by institutions. In conclusion: institutions of representation, because they are designed to account for failure, break the cycle of repetition compulsion proposed by consensus democratic theorists, by short-circuiting the attempts to return to an apolitical system that never has been. They do this by pointing to incompeteness as the condition of possibility of politics, rather than investing in a fantasy of totality.

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  5. @Eric: I think you're totally right. I am thinking about democracy the word and the concept for the ways in which they structure broader public discourses. I think if subjects invested in democracy for the reasons you describe we'd be dealing with a much different (perhaps more progressive) political plane, but I am also suspicious that the mode of identification with democracy you describe is widely practiced. Were that it was.

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  6. "Drive is what breaks up the approach to the object." It's in this that I'm having trouble with the republican institution bit, I think. It is the *object that "brakes and breaks up" the (death) drive. The encounter of the real within object "stalls" the symbolic that idealized into the imaginative the unattainable imago. It provokes a hurricane of affective energy as the psyche must re-orient/reroute the direct access it had been seeking toward its own unique annihilation. Are republican *institutions an object, then? Because I am really not understanding them as a "drive." "Republicanism", are you suggesting, names a collective "death drive"? If so, how does this square with Pocock's discussion of republicanism's main concern being the creation of ways to make institutions withstand chaos, to live past human life span? That would seem to describe a working *against annihilation.

    Also, could you clarify your understanding of "need" vs. "desire"? You seem to equate the two, and both with "drive." I am not sure you can/should play loose with these.

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  7. Need: how the imaginary must be so that the symbolic coheres
    Desire: force that impels the move to the object, probably in this case the gap between the people as such and the people as objet a

    qua Republicanism and death drive: while I am working some from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I can't shake that Copjec move that argues that the drive is not all about death. The unfragmented "death drive" is the political death formulated by consensus democracy, the repetition of a gesture of return to a pre-political state. So yes I think you're right: Republicanism is not the death drive, but does name the inevitability (rather than undesirability) of "the people" not being coterminous with the government. I think the object is "the people" and republicanism the rock upon which the attempt at political euthanasia of consensus democracy falters. So popular sovereignty=death drive, republicanism=fractured drives. Its in this way that one might think of a productive marraige between Arendt on immortality and Pocock on republicanism, if that makes sense. Thanks for helping me clarify a lot of this stuff.

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