Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism - Softcover

Gilbert, Jeremy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745325319 ISBN 13: 9780745325316

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2013

Synopsis

Common Ground explores the philosophical relationship between collectivity, individuality, affect and agency in the neoliberal era. Jeremy Gilbert argues that individualism is forced upon us by neoliberal culture, fatally limiting our capacity to escape the current crisis of democratic politics.

The book asks how forces and ideas opposed to neoliberal hegemony, and to the individualist tradition in Western thought, might serve to protect some form of communality, and how far we must accept assumptions about the nature of individuality and collectivity which are the legacy of an elitist tradition. Along the way it examines different ideas and practices of collectivity, from conservative notions of hierarchical and patriarchal communities to the politics of ‘horizontality’ and ‘the commons’ which are at the heart of radical movements today.

Exploring this fundamental faultline in contemporary political struggle, Common Ground proposes a radically non-individualist mode of imagining social life, collective creativity and democratic possibility.

About this title

About the Author

Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London and editor of the journal New Formations. He is the co-author of Discographies: Dance, Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound (2002) and the author of Anti-capitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics (2008).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Common Ground

Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism

By Jeremy Gilbert

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2014 Jeremy Gilbert
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2531-6

Contents

Acknowledgements, vi, 
Preface, viii, 
1. Postmodernity and the Crisis of Democracy, 1, 
2. A War of All Against All: Neoliberal Hegemony and Competitive Individualism, 29, 
3. Leviathan Logics: Group Psychology from Hobbes to Laclau, 49, 
4. The State of Community Opened: Multitude and Multiplicity, 69, 
5. The Non-Fascist Crowd: Individuation and Infinite Relationality, 99, 
6. Feeling Together: Affect, Identity and the Politics of the Common, 143, 
7. On the Impossibility of Making Decisions: Affect, Agency and the Democratic Sublime, 172, 
8. Conclusions, 210, 
Notes, 217, 
References, 230, 
Index, 249, 

CHAPTER 1

Postmodernity and the Crisis of Democracy

Post-Democracy

Democracy was first widely diagnosed as being 'in crisis' in the 1970s, by analysts from both Left and Right (Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki 1975, Hall 1978). Several decades later, few of the symptoms of that crisis – a proliferation of competing social demands, a fragmentation of public and political culture, a growing distrust of government – seem to have been cured (Hay 2007). Today we live in a post-democratic age.

Using a term coined by Jacques Rancière, Colin Crouch (2004) argues that since the early 1970s we have entered an era of 'post-democracy', in which the key institutions of democratic representation do not function in even the minimal fashion that they did during the middle decades of the twentieth century, and in which elections become increasingly empty procedures, offering publics the opportunity formally to validate programmes whose contents they have virtually no control over, and which differ little between competing parties. Crouch argues that the 'democratic moment' of the highly developed capitalist countries occurred in the middle decades of the twentieth century. By contrast,

the idea of post-democracy helps us to describe situations when boredom, frustration and disillusion have settled in after a democratic moment; when powerful minority interests have become far more active than the mass of ordinary people in making the political system work for them; where political elites have learned to manage and manipulate popular demands; where people have to be persuaded to vote by top-down publicity campaigns. (Crouch 2004: 19–20)

Crouch's analysis here and throughout this work points to a number of salient aspects of the post-democratic situation. Most importantly, he indicates that while the general liberalisation of advanced capitalist societies may well have expanded the personal freedom of their citizens and allowed many new sets of demands to emerge, this does not necessarily lead to a democratisation of those societies in any meaningful sense, insofar as those demands are certainly not given equal chances to be met or even to be realised as actual political projects. In fact, as he argues very persuasively, the proliferation of demands, positions and identities characteristic of complex capitalist societies, the fact that particular persons and communities may find their interests overlapping and conflicting with those of others in often unpredictable ways, makes it increasingly difficult for coherent yet clearly antagonistic communities of interest to emerge; given that existing 'democratic' systems of government are almost exclusively designed to facilitate the representation of interests in such terms, by dividing the political spectrum into clearly defined 'parties', it is perhaps not surprising that citizens and politicians experience them as increasingly frustrating and unsatisfactory. To put this in slightly different terms: in a world of multiple, fragmented sets of demands and values, it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine a situation in which the majority of members of a given society can agree on a whole package of measures to be enacted over a four- or five-year period, without any further consultation. The result is that political leaders increasingly see and present themselves not as democratic representatives of their electors' views, but as professional delegates who are to be entrusted with the job of government on the basis of their competence or likability. In such a context, the decisions of governments and politicians are influenced in part by their perceptions of voters' wishes (which may be elicited casually or formally, through mechanisms such as polls or focus groups, or may be purely based on prejudice and supposition), but very much by pressure from various lobbies. It is absolutely unsurprising under such circumstances that the most persuasive lobbies should prove to be the best resourced: those representing the interests of the wealthiest groups, individuals and institutions.

The Demand for Democracy

The other key indicator of the crisis of representative democracy is the increasing frequency with which demands for far more radical, participatory2 and effective democratic forms inform emergent political movements and their organisational practice. The campaigns against neoliberal trade policies in the 1990s whose most famous manifestation was the 'battle in Seattle' in 1999 (Thomas 2000) arguably found their culmination in the first World Social Forum in 2001 (Gilbert 2008b, Sen and Waterman 2012). The first WSF was held in the Brazilian city of Porto Allegre, internationally famous at the time principally for the innovative 'participatory budgeting' process instituted by the municipal government (led by the Partito dos Trabalhadores or PT – the Workers' Party), which enabled key budgeting decisions to be taken by a rolling process of federated open local meetings. The practice of participatory forms of democracy designed to promote 'horizontal' rather than 'vertical' relations between group members became one of the characteristic features of the anti-capitalist movement at this time, while calls for more participatory forms of democracy were heard quite loudly during the French presidential election of 2007 (Crépon and Stiegler 2007). In the wake of the economic crisis which began in 2008, explicit critiques of the nonrepresentative nature of the political class were central to the discourse of Spanish protesters – the so-called indignados (Hancox 2012) – and of Greek campaigners against the austerity programme imposed by European Union. This list could be extended, but the implication is clear: demands for more radical forms of democracy have been made with increasing explicitness, articulacy and frequency in recent years. It would be a mistake to see something wholly new in this development. It is worth remembering, for example, that the model of Soviet democracy was originally conceived as a far more participatory and accountable form than traditional parliamentary representation; but it is just as significant to note the extent to which this objective dropped out of the programmes of much of the labour and socialist movements over the course of the twentieth century (Sassoon 1996: 60–82). It resurfaced again to some extent in the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Miller 1987, Polletta 2002), but was never widely perceived or treated as a serious significant goal. Its explicit re-emergence in recent times is therefore surely a key indicator of the crisis of representative democracy.

A final point worth noting here is the extent to which, at least since the 1980s, various commentators have speculated upon the democratic possibilities which might be enabled by the apparent emergence of a new socio-technical paradigm, associated with the development of cybernetic technologies, computer networks and sophisticated telecommunications. What Castells calls 'the network society' (Castells 1996), characterised by the proliferation of 'rhizomatic' forms and relationships (Deleuze and Guattari 1988), would seem almost self-evidently to facilitate a significant increase in human beings' capacity for inclusive collective decision making, as various cyber-utopians have pointed out over the years (Rheingold 2002, Shirky 2009), just as social media massively facilitate certain kinds of autonomous collective self-organisation. Why shouldn't the Internet be used to facilitate mass exercises in public deliberation and decision making over government policy? The fact that no significant steps have been taken anywhere to realise these possibilities does not negate them as possibilities, but the contrast is striking between a system of representative democracy which is failed and failing, and an emergent techno-social paradigm which is widely accepted as a defining force in world politics and culture, and which would seem to provide the basis for a possible alternative. The difficulty of bringing these ideas into mainstream political discourse, despite their self-evident logic, is itself the ultimate symbol of democracy's general institutional crisis.

The emergence of the network paradigm cannot be understood simply as a phenomenon in its own right however. In fact it can only be properly understood by considering the much wider context of which it is an integral part. This context is the general set of social, technological, cultural, economic and political changes which commentators have tried to designate with the term 'postmodernity'.

Post-Fordism and Postmodernity

In his analysis of 'post-democracy', Crouch makes clear that changes to the global and local organisation of capitalism are fundamental to the shift which he describes, although he does not dwell in detail upon all of the mechanisms which connect the one to the other. At the same time, he makes only cursory reference to the idea of postmodernity, the term which has been most widely used by theorists of the contemporary who have tried to link transformations in the organisation of capitalism with very large-scale cultural, social and institutional shifts. This isn't a criticism of Crouch, but it does leave open an important avenue of inquiry, because his analysis overlaps in very interesting ways with some of the most influential among such analyses of shifts in the organisation of capitalism and their cultural consequences, particularly those coming from Anglo-American Marxism. While Frederic Jameson's account of 'postmodernism' as 'the cultural logic of late capitalism' (1991) is probably the best known representative of this genre, it is David Harvey's seminal The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) which offers the most coherent account of the emergence of the 'postmodern' condition as symptomatic of the broad shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. Harvey's account, which itself pays little attention to issues of formal and electoral politics, dovetails perfectly with Crouch's.

Harvey's book provides one of the most lucid descriptions of the shift from 'Fordism' to 'post-Fordism.' The former term refers to the convergence of new forms of managerial discipline and industrial technology which made possible the implementation of the assembly line and the intensive 8-hour day in Ford's Detroit factory in the 1920s, subsequently providing a model for all forms of commercial and governmental institution; the emergence of a form of capitalism dependent upon large-scale domestic consumption, which required action by both governments and employers to maintain employment and wage levels, including the 'social wage' provided in the form of entitlements to public services; the forms of highly regulated working, social and family life associated with the strictly gendered division of labour in advanced industrial communities; the broader emergence of 'mass culture' in the age of highly homogenised consumer goods and highly-centralised media. 'Post-Fordism' by contrast refers to the shift towards 'flexible specialisation' after the 1960s as companies compete for ever more specialised market niches, often disaggregating into networks of producers and suppliers operating only on short-terms contracts as they seek to maximise their responsiveness to micro-fluctuations in consumer demand (fluctuations which a whole industry of designers and advertisers works to exacerbate); the consequent disaggregation of communities held together by common patterns of work and leisure into looser networks and micro-cultures; the general shift from a manufacturing-led economy to a service and retail-led economy. Harvey very persuasively links these changes to the general process of cultural fragmentation which is often described in terms of 'postmodernism' or 'postmodernity'.

The philosopher who did most to popularise the idea of the 'postmodern' is Jean-François Lyotard, particularly with his classic essay The Postmodern Condition (1984). What Lyotard is fundamentally concerned with in this work is the changing status of knowledge in what would later be called a 'knowledge economy' (Leadbeater 1999). Lyotard's starting question concerns the likely impact of 'computerisation' on ideas of truth and veracity, and is oriented principally towards the question of what it is that makes knowledge socially legitimate. Observing in 1978 both that 'knowledge' – software, design, patents – is becoming the key driving force in capitalist accumulation, and that the production of knowledge is itself increasingly subject to the process of commodification, Lyotard predicts that the consequence is likely to be a major shift in attitudes to knowledge and its value. In particular, Lyotard sees a decline in the prestige and potency of 'narrative' forms of knowledge which legitimate truth by reference to an over-arching story about the world, in favour of a pragmatic approach to knowledge which values 'truths' or fragments of knowledge solely on the basis of what instrumental or commercial effects they can produce.

Although it is possible to translate Lyotard's ideas, or something very like them, into a sort of benign cosmopolitan liberal relativism (for example, Rorty 1989), Lyotard himself was never merely sanguine about its consequences, and in particular he made a set of pessimistic yet astonishingly accurate predictions about the likely consequences for institutions of formal education. While schools and universities have traditionally legitimated themselves and the knowledge that they offer to students with reference to narratives of some kind – be they the grand narrative of the Western tradition to which education is supposed to offer access, or emancipatory narratives derived from the Enlightenment's claim to remove the veils of ignorance and superstition – since the 1970s they have come under increasing pressure from students, parents, governments, media and corporations to legitimate their activities in wholly instrumental terms, offering knowledge to students and the wider society which is judged worthwhile solely in terms of its capacity to generate value by rendering students 'employable' and by producing new knowledge which has immediate commercial value. This, for Lyotard, is absolutely symptomatic of 'the postmodern condition'.

It is never entirely clear whether Lyotard thinks that this situation is welcome or simply irreversible, although his tone tends to suggest the latter. He certainly offers little comfort to the reader who might hope that a revival of conventional democratic politics could be a possible response. Lyotard understands a key feature of the postmodern culture, which follows logically from the decline of narrative knowledge, to be the impossibility of understanding societies as totalities. The plurality of inconsistent and non-commensurate 'language games' within which individuals and groups now participate renders impossible any such conception. For Lyotard, there is simply no common point of reference between the various 'language games' of science, politics, education, the arts, and so on, in which we all participate every day, and hence there is no political 'metalanguage' in which it would be possible to make overarching collective decisions about the general direction of social change.

It should now be easy to see how this narrative maps onto Crouch's, and enables us to deepen and extend it considerably. The party political systems of representative democracy which were consolidated in the mid-twentieth century absolutely depended upon the wide-ranging legitimacy of narrative forms of knowledge for their efficacy; communism, fascism, socialism, liberalism and conservative nationalism all offered their partisans a clear sense of their place in the world, of the coherence of their interests, and of what it would mean politically for those interests to be realised. The postmodern condition does not make it easy for such coherences to emerge, and tends to promote a much more fragmented, localised, 'pragmatic' approach to the resolution of social problems. Under such circumstances, politicians tend to present themselves not so much as the representatives of a coherent body of ideas and goals, but as competent technocrats whose role is to commission solutions to discrete problems from appropriate 'experts'. The possibility of large numbers of people coming together in some form to make collective decisions about major issues – of 'democracy', in other words – is clearly undermined in the process.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745325319
• ISBN 13: 9780745325316
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272