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Saturday, April 28, 2007
Plato and Derrida on Democracy: States of Desire
(cross-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
In a recent post at the Lacanian blog Larval Subjects, the eponymous author (we’ll call him LS) writes:
Is it truly possible, I wonder, to ever desire the difference of the Other, or is this simply impressive sounding talk?
I was reminded of a marvelous paraphrase of The Republic, from Jacques Derrida’s book on democratic states, Rogues:
[In a democracy one finds] all sorts of people, a greater variety than anywhere else. Whence the multicolored beauty of democracy. Plato insists as much on the beauty as on the medley of colors. Democracy seems—and this is its appearing, if not its appearance and its simulacrum—the most beautiful, the most seductive of constitutions. Its beauty resembles that of a multi- and brightly colored garment. The seduction matters here; it provokes; it is provocative in this “milieu” of sexual difference, where roués and voyous roam about. (26)
In his own roundabout fashion, Derrida follows Plato’s example, but inverts him: Derrida will desire the presence of rogues and vagabonds, will insist roguishly on seduction and shiftlessness, and will hint at debaucheries and even at insurrections. All of which confirms, for us, that democracy is, in LS’s apt phrase, a process of desiring the difference of the Other.
I wonder whether it is reasonable to establish a democracy on these grounds; or whether, in fact, democracy is a best understood as a matter of indifference.
In order to understand this question of desire, it is crucial to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary states. If a poor person goes hungry, we assume, and rightly so, that they are involuntarily hungry, and that something should be done to either feed them or teach them to fish. If, on the other hand, a person is fasting, we assume that they are acting of their own free will, and do not try to compel them to eat.
The question of what is voluntary, and what is not, is a question about free will, and the limits of free will. (For example, we routinely treat the mentally disabled, and the very young, as though they did not possess free will, and this seems to be justified.) I cannot hope to answer that question here, and in fact do not need to do so.
Instead, let’s focus on that enormous field of thoughts, actions, and subjectivities which are assumed to be free. It is ridiculous to expect us to desire what Derrida calls the milieu of difference. The phrase calls up, as Derrida himself notes, a “bazaar” (26) in which other human beings serve as consumer goods, as spectacles for our entertainment.
However, in order for another person to become visible to us, thus catalyzing our desire, they must be comprehensible in some way. We become an audience for them, and audiences get very upset when difference is threatened by self-difference; that is, when a celebrity, ethnic group, friend, or lover acts in a fashion inconsistent with our expectations. Even when we expect someone to be different from ourselves, as most celebrities are different, we don’t like it when they change. Hence the outpouring of basically aggressive “concern” for Britney Spears when she had her highly publicized breakdowns, and the imperialisms of representation that characterize what Edward Said called “Orientalism.”
Furthermore, it is foolish and intellectually dishonest to enter into conversations hampered by some arbitrary marker of irreducible difference. People with strong beliefs, be they religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or political, have an interest in promoting their beliefs, and this is as it should be. There’s no good reason to expect a devout Christian to want somebody else to remain a Buddhist in the same way that he or she wants to be saved, and wants to save others. Even environments that seem most pluralistic, such as classroom discussions about the meaning of a text, are underwritten by an extensive and mutual set of rules—usually, in this case, about what kind of supporting evidence is required to justify a reading. Difference seems to constantly transcend itself towards identity: group identity, family bonds, even personal identity. Every promise and every acceptance of duty determinately negates difference.
Thus one discovers, at the heart of the democratic principle, not the spectacle of seductive differences, but rather the matter of indifference, as the phrase is used in everyday conversation. It does not mean insensibility, or a lack of interest in what other people volunteer. It is simply a limit placed on what concerns me. I cease expecting others to be fully transparent to me, and I cease to expect them to create environments in which my beliefs predominate. This is the essence of the right to privacy, of toleration, and of the fair exercise of authority.
Comments
The “multiplicity” of democracy is like the infinity of possible sentences in a natural language. In both cases, the apparent profusion of options is made possible by a radical abstraction that assassinates nearly all the possibilities in advance. The difference is that cultural forms like myths, roles, or political positions are the survivors of a continual pruning process superimposed on the combinatoric of language.
Thing is, individual human minds don’t have remotely enough processing power to deal with a real world. We’re stuck with playing with age-appropriate toys, which, one hopes, have been carefully child proofed. Mutual intelligibilty and cooperation, indeed, even meaningful conflict, require the standardization of parts or, at least, the shared belief that the parts have been standardized. Complex and multi-colored as our world appears, it is actually a desert, a clearing created by destroying an enormous number of trees. The natural proportion between kinds and instances has been inverted so that one encounters multiple copies of the same sorts of things even though there are infinitely more kinds than things.
Joseph, I fail to see how democracy as a political system is in any way about difference. Simply put, democracy is merely a way of governing through popular vote. A democracy could be ultimately fascistic: the majority votes to establish one religious system or one set of ideas and principles that can be taught in schools. That’s still a democracy, provided that free, populars elections are allowed.
So there’s no necessary connection between, on the one hand, certain attitudes toward difference and identity, and on the other, democracy. Much of what you’re describing sounds more like an equation between market capitalism and pluralism, and there I think we do see an ideological linkage. As Negri and Hardt describe quite well in *Empire*, the more identity categories an economic system can produce, the more “individual” types of product can be sold to consolidate that sense of identity: here’s soap, here’s soap for men, here’s soap for women, here’s soap for metrosexuals, here’s soap for manly men, here’s soap for environmentalists, here’s soap for wealthy liberals who think they’re environmentalists, here’s soap for children, here’s soap for ‘tweens, here’s soap for players, here’s soap for nappy-haired hos, and so on.
Democratic governance can just as easily negate as respect difference, and it can just as easily negate difference brutally as respect it racistly. Let’s remember that the Bill of Rights protects us *against* democracy, rather than protecting democracy against the people.
A lot of what people refer to as “democracy” is worthwhile, the protection of minorities, for example. In current usage, however, it has next to nothing to do with “governing through popular vote.” The current regime would hardly put up with an Iraqi government that reflected the wishes of the majority of the Iraqis, for example; and the American political system is also carefully designed to thwart the Will of the People. Truly democratic political institutions are indeed scary so it is not irrational to oppose them. It is hypocritical to claim that what we do support is democracy in any but a Breshnevian sense.
Luther,
You raise an interesting question: why, if democracy means simply “the government of the people,” do Derrida and Plato associate it with difference? The answer has to be something besides Jeffersonian democracy, since the association stretches back to the Greek republics.
Derrida describes democracies as the only kinds of states with an interest in their own “autoimmunity”: that is, the only states interested in protecting debate, dissent, and factional disputes.
The OED defines democracy as “Government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised either directly by them (as in the small republics of antiquity) or by officers elected by them. In mod. use often more vaguely denoting a social state in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or privilege.”
The key phrase here is the assertion that “sovereign power resides in the people as a whole.” In order for a democracy to proceed by majority rule, the minority has to accept the provisional victory of the majority. A minority is always required to legitimate the victory of the majority. Thus, anything that leads to the erasure of the minority, such as a dogmatic educational system, de-legitimizes the State and makes it more vulnerable, rather than less. The martyrdom of Socrates is a good example.
So the logic of equal and inalienable rights develops immanently from the reliance of democracies on the free contestation of the many by the few. The idea of a Bill of Rights, protecting the individual against the abuse of majority rule, is democratic to the core.
In addition, the government of the people transforms the government into an exceptional activity—people convening in assembly, or leaving work to vote—that abstracts them from their lives. This too impels the people to establish separations between matters of private dispute, such as religious belief, and matters of universal practical concern.
I agree that the forces of market capitalism have exploited identity categories to sell products; however, Plato was already writing about the bazaar of democracy long before anything like modern markets existed. The desire to make a spectacle out of other human beings, or even to want to become such a spectacle for others by making one’s identity famous, bears a relation to the economy of the present, but also goes back to the first articulations of subject and object.
Jim, I just can’t make these statements quite hang together. In your first comment, you seem to be opposing the abstract nature of democratic participation. It is difficult for me to grasp what kind of state of nature ("natural proportion") you envision reversing the assassinations and condescensions and environmental depredations of democracy.
In your second comment, you seem to be dealing more concretely with the anti-democratic strains in American society. Quite right: my original post was meant as an intervention, too.
My first comment was admittedly a bit oracular--not for nothing was I called Heraclitus of Aphasia in grad school. I wasn’t complaining about drastic elimination of possibilities that defines civilization; I was pointing out its inevitability. Foucault makes exactly the same point in the Archaelogy of Knowledge. Even if it were my insight, I wouldn’t consider it particularly briliant, just true.
Meanwhile, bitching about the misuse of the word democracy, which really ought to appear as Democracy™,really is a political statement. We don’t have to misuse the word.
I fail to see how democracy as a political system is in any way about difference. Simply put, democracy is merely a way of governing through popular vote. A democracy could be ultimately fascistic: the majority votes to establish one religious system or one set of ideas and principles that can be taught in schools. That’s still a democracy, provided that free, populars elections are allowed.
In addition to Jospeh Kugelmass’s excellent point about the necessity of a minority, it might also help if we can recognise that the practices of “government” are not limited solely to the sphere of what we might think of as “parliamentary representation”. If the work of government is understood much more broadly — in the sense of wherever conduct is being directed and wherever responsibility for conduct is being granted or decided (I’m thinking along the lines of a certain reading of Foucault’s work on “governmentality") — then the “sphere” of democracy extends well beyond the limits of a particular system of representative government.
The shorthand way into the idea, of course, is through the notion of social democracy as distinct from parliamentary or formal democracy. But that’s only a provisional starting point for making sense of how Derrida (though not only him) seeks to situate democracy — or, more precisely, the idea of a democracy as always to come — in relation to the question of difference and, especially (although, it’s the same question really), of justice.
Dear Joseph,
A couple of responses to your remarks:
“So the logic of equal and inalienable rights develops immanently from the reliance of democracies on the free contestation of the many by the few. The idea of a Bill of Rights, protecting the individual against the abuse of majority rule, is democratic to the core.”
This logic is not necessarily, in my view, immanent to democracy, but harmonizes far more closely with the Hobbesian desire to prevent society from being engulfed in civil strife. Liberal ethics tells us that it is moral to respect the opinions and beliefs of others. A Hobbesian perspective tells us that people come to respect each other’s opinions out of the fear that insulting or ridiculing them will lead to violence. Thus, tolerance need not have anything to do with morality or ethics, simply the desire to live one’s life peacefully. Indeed, morality often conflicts with the desire to live one’s life peacefully.
It could be that Derrida and his disciples wish to put a happy ethico-democratic face upon this unpleasant Hobbesian reality.
“In addition, the government of the people transforms the government into an exceptional activity—people convening in assembly, or leaving work to vote—that abstracts them from their lives. This too impels the people to establish separations between matters of private dispute, such as religious belief, and matters of universal practical concern.”
Again, such pluralism can be regarded as highly conservative, being based upon the fear of people following their own principles too consistently. Not that conservatism is in itself always bad or intolerant, but it muddles things to deny that co-existence demands difficult compromises, including in areas of morality.
Against Derrida’s idea of the “democracy to come”: Plato’s idea of, if not democracy to come—but what comes of democracy—is tyranny. Tyranny arises out of the very separations and suspensions of judgment and standards within democratic society. The people are no longer able to distinguish between good and bad, live wholly according to immediate impulses and selfish concerns, and forget the distinction between necessary and unnecessary desires. The general lack of restraint leads to the emergence and release of insatiable desires, including the desire to become a god. No progressivism there, to be contrasted with Derrida’s Pelagian discourse of “infinite justice” and “democracy to come.”
Hi Peter, glad to see you commenting at the Valve.
Hi John, I’ve been checking out the site more regularly these days. Just got back from giving a paper on neo-Hobbesianism (in particular Alain Joxe and John Gray) at the American Comp Lit Association in Puebla.
As for the post opened up on the subject of democracy, I agree with Luther that the Bill of Rights protects us from democracy, rather than promoting it. As for the auto-immunity of democratic government - is it based upon practicality or upon principle? Do democracies protect dissent because they realize that it is in their long-term interest to do so (which really means that their long-term interest consists in keeping dissent in a weak and diluted condition), or do they defend the speech of their opponents for moral reasons?
Peter,
I second John’s comment, this is delightful food for thought.
The Bill of Rights, and related liberal guarantees of protection for individuals and minorities, does not help to prevent civil strife. Quite the contrary: freedom of speech and association promote dissent, because it is easier for groups of people to organize. While basic liberal freedoms may help verbal disputes to predominate over military ones, they also pretty much ensure a continual power struggle.
You claim that the abstractions of the democratic process protect against people following their own principles too consistently. This suggests that they go against their own principles when they participate in their government. Let’s bear in mind that practices and principles are not identical; I am perfectly capable of practicing a religion without subscribing to an evangelical principle.
Democracy hardly creates hubris and libido, as Plato understands those things; it merely fails to restrain them in the lesser sort of person, victims of Plato’s foundational myth of metals. I can hardly imagine justifying Plato’s oligarchy of philosopher-kings on the grounds of avoiding tyranny. Furthermore, I would be ashamed to define, for another person, what sorts of desires they can and must surrender.
Your second comment raises a new question:
Do democracies protect dissent because they realize that it is in their long-term interest to do so (which really means that their long-term interest consists in keeping dissent in a weak and diluted condition), or do they defend the speech of their opponents for moral reasons?
Dissent, in a democracy, is neither weak nor diluted. All other things being equal, it simply isn’t bloody.
The choice here between self-preservation and ethical responsibility is foreign to the real workings of a democracy, because such states treat the preservation of the whole self of each subject as their ethical foundation. In a monarchy, by contrast, the glory of the sovereign is the most important obligation; in a religious state, the practice of the faith.
Thanks for your replies, Joseph, which are both enjoyable and provocative for me to chew over. You raise some vital points in challenging my line of argumentation, which has the effect of forcing me to take a somewhat different tack…
My objection to the multitudinous flourishing of whatever desires in democracy has to do with the likelihood that such a condition undermines the desire for peace. In my view, one of the enduring problems of democracy is its tendency to underestimate the importance of this singular desire which is absolutely necessary if most of the other desires are to find expression in non-violent ways.
It is difficult to square the perspective that democracy is about unconstrained variety of desires with the understanding that human beings as autonomous subjects oscillate restlessly between the desire for peace and the pursuit of power (Reinhart Koselleck). The pursuit of power, or embrace of tyranny, can also be understood as the desire to alleviate one’s boredom. Derrida’s choice of words is revealing - “beauty” and “seduction” - what do these terms designate but the (highly undemocratic) desire for admiration, for being recognized as superior to others, and for exploiting the wills of those less capable or less aggressive?
As for the desires which people should and must surrender, I have no qualms about saying that people should be ashamed of their desire to dominate or exploit their fellows. Machiavelli once distinguished the few from the many on the basis that the aristocrats wish to oppress others whereas the multitude simply wish not to be oppressed. The desire not to be oppressed is, in my view, ineluctably undercut by the flourishing of all desires.
Well said. The approach you have taken in this comment puts us both on the other side of the fence from Derrida.
I think Derrida gives us a good reading of Plato here, but I agree with you that his valorization of seduction and desire as political entities is a misstep. He is merely inverting Plato, such that the Platonic account of democratic desire still functions. That’s why I responded,
I wonder whether it is reasonable to establish a democracy on these grounds; or whether, in fact, democracy is a best understood as a matter of indifference.
It’s not necessary to make any a priori assumptions about human nature to speak to the political consequences of desire. In Derrida’s imagined city, with respectable folk in the center and roués loafing about the margins, there is a continual oscillation between desiring peace, and the extroverted, libidinal impulse to exceed the peace. The low haunts, antagonized by the good neighborhoods, reflect and perpetuate that unstable divide.
In response, I try to understand democracy as a phenomenon of introverted desire: not solipsism, but the localizing of desire within the private sphere. Thus, the localization of affection, seduction, evangelizing, moralizing.
Instead of unconstraint, I was writing towards a particular kind of limit:
It is simply a limit placed on what concerns me. I cease expecting others to be fully transparent to me, and I cease to expect them to create environments in which my beliefs predominate.