This post might read in a slightly jumbled way, but I needed to get some thoughts down and out there in order to try and make sense of them in my own head. I’ve been struggling the last few weeks to resolve a number of difficult conceptual issues the first chapter of my thesis resulted in. In particular, while I want to argue that radical democracy is best understood as a form of insurrectionary anarchism, I needed a more thoroughgoing conceptualisation of democracy in order to tie things together. But I think I’ve found a way to harmonise the various elements.
Carl Schmitt and Chantal Mouffe seem to largely agree on the definition of democracy as the identity of the ruler and the ruled. This identity consists in some form of substantive homogeneity or equality. But what Ranciere seems to add to this definition is precisely the inability to demonstrate the legitimacy of any ‘ruler’ over the ‘ruled’ which grounds democracy as a practice of becoming-equal, demonstrating equality as a practical political act of dissent. The previous definition – politics as an art of governing, of government – presupposes both ‘a mass to be managed and those who have the capacity to do it.’ Democracy, for Ranciere, “signals the radical absence of a common corporeality and of legitimate authority.” (Source) Part of the problem with any representative system (or ‘police order’), for Ranciere, is its inability to truly represent the social whole; there is always a ‘part which has no-part’, and which will (ideally) demonstrate its equality through acts of dissent.
Taking this on board, the argument I want to run can actually proceed quite smoothly. We can return to Deleuze and William E. Connolly with his emphasis on pluralism-as-process (not a static state of affairs), and instead think towards becoming-democratic-becoming-equal as an inherently insurrectionary act. If any ‘police order’ will necessarily fail to deliver on the promise of equality, then destroy police orders. In a certain sense, to engage in this radical political praxis is already to undergo a certain process of subjectivation as part of a collective political agency; it’s a veritable becoming-democratic-becoming-equal, coextensive and overlapping in the process itself.
And then the argument carries towards its natural conclusion in the central role of revolt and insurrection in an ongoing practice of becoming-democratic-becoming-equal (yes I need to find a more concise way of condensing these concepts!), through the concept of destitutive power (drawn from Tiqqun and Agamben) forming a natural conceptual link here.
Still much more to work on and iron out but I’m feeling a bit better now about where this project is going. Deleuze and Guattari will still play an important role here, but I think I need them to take a slight step back for this project to really cohere. Still rather daunting. Writing the first chapter wasn’t nearly as challenging as this is! Just got to buckle in I suppose.
Destratified 