What is democracy?

With C. Douglis Lummis I share in the call for a “rectification of names.” As Lummis puts it “Democracy was once a word of the people, a critical word, a revolutionary word. It has been stolen by those who would rule over the people, to add legitimacy to their rule. It is time to take it back.” For Lummis this means “identifying and junking twisted and hypocritical uses” of the phrase. I agree that it is important to confront those who would claim democracy in the name of free markets, (neo)liberal individualism, and consumer choice. Still, I am less motivated to police the boundaries of what constitutes an authentic form of democracy from its bastardized versions. What’s more, I am uninterested in the qualifier radical, which seems so often to adjectivally accompany democracy wherever its etymological meaning gets deployed on the left. For me, democracy needs no qualifier, it simply is radical (democracy goes to the root) from the start. Following Wolin, I see democracy as momentary, constituted in and as struggle, embracing a wide range of fleeting forms. Democracy is a self-consuming artifact, or at least threatens to be. There is promise in this plight: democracy as form of self-rule and freedom that seeks to reject all efforts to ground itself in something outside of itself. And I agree with Laclau and Mouffe in viewing political identity as multifariously rooted in these struggles, articulated at contingent sites of conflict and contestation. Ranciere is right to theorize these as forms of subjectification, not impositions of already recognized social identities, but introductions of new voices that are at once expressive and disruptive.

But there is also more. Democracy isn't just about popular authorization, reciprocal dependency, participatory equality, and conflicting interests. It is also about the deeply historical and epistemic contexts within which these struggles are situated. Democracy may depend on being brought to life, again and again, by insurgent, inventive subalterns. But it also depends on those groups embarking on political projects that surpass extant political topographies.