Plato and Derrida on Democracy: States of Desire
(x-posted to The Valve)
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.
Joe – I liked this a great deal:
In a sense, your point touches on the issue of how we should understand the core, not so much of democracy, but of liberalism (that set of principles that tempers and bounds the reach of majority rule) – which could be characterised in terms of a collective commitment to the practice of mutual indifference, at least in relation to acts of formal constraint that are mediated by state power.
The question that then arises is whether such an ideal is limited by its traditional focus on state power. Much liberal thought focusses on the dangers of the concentration of power in the state – the sorts of identity politics movements you mention above were, among many other things, attempts to point to the existence of other origin points for constraint in “civil society”. It’s quite possible that the political goals of some of these movements might have been poorly articulated – that a universal appreciation for “difference” per se should not have been the desired goal – and yet there may still have been some kind of rational core to this contestation, in the sense of drawing attention to questions of how one might think about origin points for forms of constraint being generated outside the state…
Apologies that this comment is so disfocussed – I think these are interesting and important issues, but am a bit groggy today, and not doing them justice…
“The question that then arises is whether such an ideal is limited by its traditional focus on state power.”
As someone who argues with U.S. libertarians a good deal (not to be confused with European libertarian anarcho-socialism, which has a very different meaning), I’d say that this shift of this traditional focus has already been made through the first half of the 20th century, with only the libertarians fighting a rear-guard action against it. There’s a lot of current “liberal” law which only makes sense as attempts to limit private, corporate power and the power of majority groups, as well as more generally to raise the floor on the amount of power held by the worst-off individuals. If the primary issue for liberalism is taken to be the balancing of power against power so that no one source of it can dominate society, the discovery that there is more than state power to be concerned with seems to have already been made.
NP, if I’m understanding you right, I think my apparent emphasis on state power is, as you suggest, only a model for a more general kind of liberal restraint. (Over at the Valve, I’ve been articulating what I understand to be the relationship between democracy and liberalism, in response to a comment by Luther Blissett.)
As I was writing the post, and particularly when I reached the end, I was thinking primarily of two kinds of concernment. First, the religious or cultural “way of life” that is understood to require the suppression of difference in order to survive. Second, invasions of privacy by employers, parents, or other authority figures in the private sphere. As much as liberal democracies tend to surpass themselves locally by mutual consent, their spirit is also frequently violated by abuses of power that don’t come directly from the State.
Rich – I don’t disagree, and wasn’t intending to comment on liberalism generally, but only to respond to a (fairly minor) element in Joe’s post: that the ideals he ends up with can more accurately be described as liberal, than as democratic; and that some of the movements he criticises for their focus on “difference” may have had a “rational core” – the very same rational core, in fact, that you’re pointing out in your response to me, which is the need to deal with concentrations of power outside the state. The difficulty, in terms of the ideal that Joe suggests, is that it is generally a bit easier to figure out what “indifference” means, in relation to an entity like a state, than what it means in civil society – so the issue is intrinsically complex.
But I’ll have to apologise as, although the broader issues you raise are interesting to me, I’m going to have to beg tiredness – I won’t be able to discuss these issues as they would deserve right now – a statement that I realise is not terribly useful or productive for the discussion :-)
Joe – yes: what I was trying (groggily) to do was to suggest that some of the movements that you criticise, may have had a rational core of sorts (whether this was the core they would themselves put forward or not), so that the move required is, in a sense, “dialectical”: how do we take a set of ideals that had originated in a particular conception of the state, and respond to the historical insight that the focus on the state was not fully adequate – but to this in such a way that we might still be able to appropriate (as it seemed you had suggested in your post) some of the potentials of the earlier “liberal” ideals, but in a transformed context.
Apologies that I’m not addressing this well at all – I should ban myself from commenting when I’m this exhausted – you’ve just raised an issue in which I have a keen interest, so I decided to mutter about it a bit… ;-)
P.S. I don’t suppose I could convince you to turn off the “feature” that turns emoticons into those illustrated smiley things?
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