Everyday democracy

The good ship Demos was relaunched on Wednesday night, or at least it had a new lick of paint, with the publication of 'Everyday Democracy'. The paper is well worth reading, and captures the character of British democracy very well. I wanted to ask a question at the launch event, but didn't get my chance, which was just as well because I really wanted to whitter on about language and power.

Demos's argument is that "rather than clinging to a tattered model of constitutional democracy whose purchase on our lives is reducing daily, we should be investing in the evolution of new democratic institutions and practices which, in conjunction with revived constitutions, can underpin sustainable, self-organising societies". There's an aporia here [don't click on that link, incidentally - wikipedia is talking out of its emergent arse] in that the essay can't seem to decide whether institutions are or aren't the answer. The problem Demos has is that it wants to reorient politics around anti-political practises; to reframe power relations without hierachy; to codify practises in ways that don't render them rigid. Hence it wants rules that don't govern, chaos that is ordered and so on.

The point about language and power is this:

• 'Localism' is a word only used by people who live in London
• 'Viral' is a word used by someone who wants to sell you something
• 'Identity' is a word used by someone who wants to scan your irises and keep them in a massive database.

And if you use 'democracy' in the sense of the triumph of plurality over unity (as Demos implicitly does, in a sort of anti-Platonist fashion) you will inevitably tie yourselves in the same linguistic knots. Language itself mitigates against certain concepts, because language is a top-down project, that fails in its efforts to grasp plurality. This is the "tyranny of the concept" (if Adorno didn't say that, then he could easily have done), that it doesn't permit internal rebellion.

Democracy makes greater sense as the legitimisation of unity or centralism, rather than as the dissintegration of it. Precisely because politics is doomed to hierachy, and language is doomed to false unities, we need representative mechanisms that can draw on the ambiguity of pluralism. But these will inevitably snuff ambiguity out as soon as they start to do or say anything, and it is better that this is accepted at the outset than denied using 'bottom-up' language that ends up in performative contradictions. In fairness to the essay, it ends up talking about what Demos is engaged in actively, rather than what it is saying - but then why codify this into the written word at all? "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should remain silent" and all that.

Comments

[David Lee]

I think you've made some excellent points here Will, (which actually cut to the heart of some of wider problems of applying 'open source' models to political processes). Language is indeed a mechanism of power: as Foucault reminds us, power is organised and constituted around discursive regimes of meaning, which tend to work in subjectivising ways. So the new discourse that Demos is engaged in producing, which stresses dis-organisation, flat hierarchies, plurality, and concepts such as 'open source democracy' will inevitably work to produce new forms of subjectivity that will reproduce power and hierarchy along certain lines. If power cannot be avoided in this sense, as every act of naming is in some ways an act of power, of imposing meaning, I think it is also important to remember that language is fundamentally always slippery, meaning impossible to pin down. So the new discourse which you refer to, around localism, viral messages and so forth does not reformulate society along deterministic lines - rather we are agents of interpretation who can actively resist dominant conceptual formulations.

Your posting about language and power in regard to this Demos essay is important because it works to denaturalise the new discourse that you detect within this text, to expose its constructed nature. As Barthes argues, the 'healthy' sign is one that draws attention to its own arbitrariness, to its constructed, artificial nature. Terry Eagleton writes: 'signs which pass themselves off as natural, which offer themselves as the only conceivable way of viewing the world, are by that token authoritarian and ideological'.

Perhaps post-structuralism (if you can bear me mentioning it...) teaches us that the 'tyranny of the concept' that you suggest 'doesn't permit internal rebellion', is perhaps not as all powerful as you suggest. Any concept is an arbitrary attempt to impose a meaning, or the signified, by means of the infinite interplay of signifiers. Language isn't stable, and so any concept's 'tyranny' is finite as other meanings emerge from different readings of the text.