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Ever
since its inception in ancient Greece, democracy has permanently
been subject to suspicion. So much so that there are good
grounds to assume that raising suspicion is what is immanent
to the inner workings of democracy itself and that it is,
and this is what my argument here shall be, the virtue of
democracy to raise and not to dispel suspicion. My argument
shall also be that it is this excessive ability of democracy
to unsettle the order of things that is being transgressed
in contemporary liberal-parliamentary regimes.
In Aristotle's account of the forms of government, democracy
- rule of the people - ranked suspiciously, almost indistinctively
close to its negative form of ochlocracy. The incontrollable
political affects and appetites of the governed who are
also governing made no guarantees that the government had
the idea of what a good life, as purpose to all things political,
might be. Unless the political rule was with the virtuous
few, endowed with the privilege of spare time they could
dedicate to producing knowledge of what a good life might
be, there could be no good government at all. But more to
the point, what constituted a good government was the association
of knowledge and a form of life, ability of passing an informed
decision on what life in body politic should be.
And this is where the notion of democracy in Aristotle's
account unveils itself to be more than a mere ignorance,
a lack of knowledge. Dissociation of knowledge and form
of life that democracy was being made suspect for turns
out implicitly to be a critique of a privilege granted to
a particular form of life - that of Greek aristocratic men
- to reproduce itself as normative knowledge and ultimately
as political life. A critique of the ability to decide upon
life and to decide upon it from a position available only
to some, where life itself becomes subsumed to external
considerations producing exclusions and reproducing inequalities
in life itself. And this dissociation of knowledge and life,
limitation on ability to decide upon life, is what remains
at the core of democracy until the present day.
The unguaranteed wisdom of the governing and the incontrollable
affects of the governed secure democracy's immanent interpellative
claim to change the order of things. Not democracy as a
form of rule in contemporary liberal-parliamentary regimes,
but democracy as irruption of the claim to equality into
the oligarchical production of inequalities in those regimes.
Democracy, in the succinct words of Jacques Rancičre (La
haine de la democratie, Fabrique, 2005), "as equality of
inequality".
To come to the point, democratic political dispositive is
thus premised on the withdrawal from the political decision
making of those aspects that enable equal liberty to deliberate,
on the prohibition of decisions on its conditions of possibility.
If procedure is to be democratic, no decision can be made
privileging ones over others. Democratic politics rests
on the withdrawal of life from deciding power.
Yet, the history of regimes referred to as democratic has
been the history of failures to abstract from decisions
on conditions of possibility in political dealings. It has
witnessed over and over again the irruptions of life into
the political arena and extension of political power to
where it can not have power without ceasing to be what it
is. Thus the ruling were made subject to suspicion of corruption,
the ruled were made subject to suspicion of the rule of
the mob. Corrupt politicians and popular sentiments.
Regardless of the withdrawal at the heart of the democratic
dispositive, life was however always targeted for reinsertion
into the political system of power. The first such modern
system of reinsertion developed in the 18th and 19th centuries
with the liberal economies, which, as Foucault described
in his lectures at the Collčge de France starting from 1979,
marked the shift from sovereign disposition over life (and
death) to the governmentality regime of improvement of life.
Along with other systems of reinsertion that developed at
the time, such as disciplinary institutions and humanities,
the science of government over life or governmentality developed
via the economic system of provisioning and fulfilling the
needs. The emerging modern biopower took control over life
by resigning the decision making power over life to self-regulatory
mechanisms of the free market and later also to optimizations
of the welfare system.
DemoKino demonstrates how this tendency of resigning life
to self-regulatory control has in the biopolitical regime
of present-day global economy been taken to its paroxysm
and how underlying complexity transgresses the interruptive
claim of democracy to equal inequality, leaving it in a
deadlock where there's nothing it can do. While the science
of government in the teachings of economic globalism instructs
the governing executives of the world that the only remaining
option is to optimize to capital flows and flights, where
there's nothing for legislating powers left to pass decision
upon except to accept the dismantling of the welfare system
and surrender of life to a mere pursuit for profit and to
proletarization, the ability of the governed to invoke democratic
irruption has been reduced to mediatized opinion on overcomplex
issues of life. Life has nowadays become unwithdrawable
from the political arena and contemporary biopower has,
with the closed-circuit system opinion guided politics,
authorized everyone to pass decisions over matters of life.
Democratic withdrawal of life from the arena of political
decisions is thus precluded and transgressed. Everyone is
included in decision making and yet everyone is excluded
from withdrawing and abstracting to a universalist position.
And this is what constitutes the absolute inclusion of contemporary
biopolitical racism.
But, if the history of subtractive assemblies of political
representation has always also been the crisis of assemblies
facing up with more than they can decide upon -- the matters
life; if life always tends to become reinscribed into politics,
we will ultimately maybe have to pay heed to Bruno Latour's
proposition that what remains is to pursue a history of
assemblies of things that dissemble and ways to dissemble
- a new democracy for humans and non-humans, for the living
and non-living.
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