Critique & Humanism | 38 | 2012 | Rethinking Democracy. Power and Resistance

 

Issue editors: Dimitar Vatsov, Boyan Znepolski
Issue: 1, 2012, pp. 328, ISSN: 0861-1718

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Potentiality, exploitation and resistance of the body-subjects. For a persistent transformation

Boyan Manchev

New Bulgarian University, Sofia

b_manchev@yahoo.com

 

The article focuses on the actual structural transformation of the forms of political subjectivation through the prism of one of the central concepts of contemporary radical philosophy, inherited by Michel Foucault, the concept of biopolitical. The main question of the article – the question of the possibility of resistance of political subjects in the actual transformed condition – is formulated on the basis of the reinterpretation of Foucault’s concept (and of its interpretation by Paolo Virno in particular), in accordance with the hypothesis of its structural determination from the Aristotelian concept of dunamis and its millenary conceptual trajectory.

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Emancipation games in international relations

Hristo Gyoshev

New Bulgarian University, Sofia

gyoshe@gmail.com

 

In this paper I try to identify the basic problems depriving the notion of universal moral neutrality of its expected potential for normative impartiality in recent debates on IR. My main thesis is that, paradoxically, neutrality diminishes along with the assertion of certain normative values as a framework independent from the very process of political interaction. This reverse relation is the result of contradictory meanings of the morally significant notions of power, emancipation, and normative mediation in the field of IR. In the sake of a viable concept of neutrality these notions should be given more minimalistic philosophical interpretation than contemporary notion of human rights admits. That invites us to rethink neutrality. I propose that this can be done by a tool-framework analysis, which postulates that any set of normative values can function as a framework and at the same time as a tool of interaction, thus allowing us to estimate the impact of the value framework on the whole process of interaction. I oppose this kind of analysis to philosophical approaches which assert normative mediation as equivalent to ‘autonomy’, thus resting – even in the attempt for deep contextualization of universal normative notions – on particular value ontology, and not estimating therefore the essential impact of the framework upon the structuring of political interactions. Basic concepts of the tool-framework analysis are neutrality equilibrium (expressed by the reverse proportion of interest-driven and interest-neutral political actions and dispositions); relative identities (as opposed to global identities) and the drama triangle (originally invented by transactional analyst Stephen Karpman for the description of complex personal power relations as part of Eric Berne’s game analysis). I then use this apparatus to analyze what I name ’emancipation games’: conflicting normative claims based on the notions of autonomy, emancipation, and normative mediation in a normative framework defined by contradictory Westphalian and Human rights imperatives. Finally, the hope is expressed that recurrent game patterns and their explication could lead in the long run to a shared normative language and thus to a common normative environment.

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The psychic life of power. Introduction

Judith Butler

University of California, Berkeley

jb_crittheory@berkeley.edu

 

A Bulgarian translation of the “Introduction” of Judith Butler’s book The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997). The copyrights are kindly granted by the author.

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Critique and power: On the privileged power position of the social critic today

Dimitar Vatsov

New Bulgarian University, Sofia

dvatsov@gmail.com

 

The paper attempts to sketch an ideal typology of social critique today, after its “turn” onto interactive premises. The main question is: if the social critic is always involved into reciprocal interaction how could s/he preserve critical distance and normatively privileged judging position over the interaction? Rereading the results of the collective project Challenges to Representative Democracy Today, three normative scenarios of contemporary critique are outlined: 1. A particular hermeneutic approach which presupposes that the critic looses her/his privileged critical point and becomes accoucheur in the articulations of the critical impulses of everyday practices (on the example of the “pragmatist sociology” of Luc Boltanski); 2. A particular normativist approach which presupposes that the very interaction has its authentic normative form which allows us to describe social pathologies as deviations from this form (on the examples of Habermas’ “communicative rationality” and Honneth’s “recognition paradigm”); 3. A particular negatively radicalized critical approach which presupposes that every form of institutionalization is a form of domination which has to be subverted through radical – revolutionary or parodying – deconstruction (on the examples of Negri and Butler). All these approaches overlook one specifi c and inescapable power aspect of social critique: namely, the aspect of self-privileging which is immanent to the very act of taking possession of a concrete judging position. This positive powerful gesture could be understood through the general concept of hegemony of Laclau and Mouffe where the resistances in some hegemonic relation take the form of counter-hegemonic projects (which are also hegemonic and powerful). Nevertheless, the agonistic model here is revisited with the emphasis being placed not on “the people” as an abstract empty space of resistances (Laclau’s approach) but on “the individual”, “family” and “community” as local or micro- hegemonic forms of life. These more concrete “small subjects of the political” should be critically rethought and preserved as barriers against the degeneration of the macro-hegemonic chains of equivalences – rightist or leftist – into abstract ideologies. By reframing the project of radical democracy in non-dogmatic liberal terms, an idea of “affirmative citizenship” is outlined.

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Democracy down! Long live the people! (The people as a critical idea in contemporary radical political philosophy)

Boyan Znepolski

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

boyanzep@gmail.com

 

The article aims to study the usages of the “people” as a critical idea in the texts of three contemporary radical political philosophers: Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou and Ernesto Laclau. The author’s purpose is not so much to point out the divergences between them, rather it is to grasp a common trend imposing the figure of the “people” as a subject of the political and as a source of a desired, but hardly representable social change. The appeal to a historical rupture, unsupported by any utopia, could be considered as a double crisis – of the institutions of liberal democracy, as well as of the critical imagination itself.

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Мarketing democracy

Todor Hristov

Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

todor_hristov@gbg.bg

 

The paper presents the fi ndings of a study of electoral databases. Electoral databases as Voter Vault or Vote Builder have played a crucial role in the 2004 and 2008 United States presidential elections, and will probably increase their impact in the future. The paper will claim that electoral databases are accountable as a symptom of the emergence of a new governmental rationality brought about by the transposition of marketing technologies to politics. In order to substantiate that claim, I am trying to demonstrate that marketing rationality enables the use of biopolitical technologies on targets smaller, more unstable and more dispersed than population. I believe that this individualization of biopolitics is able to produce a particular regime of governmentality capable of appropriating concepts as ‘people’ and ‘practices of self’, on which critical theorists often tend to rely in their emancipatory visions. The paper offers as well a discussion on the applicability of electoral databases and microtargeting in Bulgarian politics.

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Passions and democracy: On the role of emotions in the new media constellation

Ivaylo Ditchev

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

ivayloditchev@gmail.com

 

The paper argues for the social constructedness of emotions, more particularly in the new media environment characterized by the overproduction of information. The typology of mass-produced emotions will be reduced to three fi gures that will permit to analyze the phenomenon from different perspectives: the secret, the body, the image. I dwell on the rising speed of the emotions, their instability, and their capacity toparticipate to different, often contradictory personal and political constellations. Finally I will try to refl ect on the challenges of an emotion-dominated democracy today.

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The wedding of workfare and prisonfare revisited

Interview with Loic Wacquant by Karen J. Winkler and Volker Eick

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The care of the self and the critique of the present

Milena Iakimova

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

milena_i@mail.orbitel.bg

 

The paper tries to push further the refl ection inspired by Amy Allen’s conceptual suggestion that Foucault’s notion of the care of the self might take the contemporary social critique out of the aporia of the subject, that care of the self enables us to jump beyond the power relations that make us “who we are”. The reflection goes along the lines of a pragmatist reading of Foucault’s later works on what he named “technologies of the self”. Developing this pragmatist line of critical reading of Foucault through the lens of Dewey’s and Mead’s elaborations on the interactive constitution of the self, the relative weakness of the “care of the self” as a conceptual hope for social critique today is demonstrated. But what is more important, the practices of the self as withdrawal from the political – the form that the idea of the “care of the self” practically takes in contemporary societies and especially in certain social movements – is shown to be well suited to certain forms of domination. Then the point is made that critical thinking is uncritically taking a non-questioned concept of domination as its main adversary which is diminishing the strength of critique itself.

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Figures of the people in Foucault – the people as an object of power

Momchil Hristov

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

momchilhrist@yahoo.com

 

The concept of “the people” is accompanied by a constant polemics vis-à-vis the genesis, the structure and the real dimensions of its supposed referent. The standard deconstruction-oriented critique of “the people” focuses mostly on the constructed character of this figure, and at the same time omits its status of “reality”. A symptomatic reading of some texts by Michel Foucault, which has as a starting point his analytical uses of “the people” (and the related “plebs”, “popular classes”, “population”), demonstrates a different way of seeing, which focuses on the multiplicity, the heterogeneity and the constant mobility of the reality called “the people”, as well as on the inevitable interrelation and confrontation of power relations and resistances which both generate “the people” and keep it in a permanent movement and displacement towards itself. The implicit ambition of such a reading is to show that this type of analyses could inform us better about the concrete functioning of “the people” than a critique that sees in it nothing more than a fiction of a definite political imaginary.

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Reflexive sociology as an investment in the scientific field struggles (towards the critique of reflexive reason)

Svetla Marinova

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

svetla_marrinova@yahoo.com

 

As the title suggests this is a critical paper, or rather represents a critique of Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology understood as a practice of sociological auto-analysis of the researcher, of the position s/he is in, of the self-evidences produced by this position. What is to be demonstrated is that the reflexive turn of the instruments of the sociological type of analysis toward the preconditions of their application is not free from power interests, that is, from interests in establishing and occupying privileged positions. Being produced by the power structures of a scientific field – the main thesis of the paper states – the practice of reflexive sociology generates political effects which, unless being reflected, may bring about the instrumentalization of that very practice for exercising symbolic power into the scientific field. Proving this thesis goes along the lines of an immanent critique exerted in the mode of confronting chief theoretical instruments of Bourdieu’s sociology and most of all his theory of practice as a critique of intellectualism and his theory of the intellectual field as a main instrument of sociological self-reflection.

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Subject and power: The problem of critical action in Bourdieu and Foucault

Lea Vajsova

New Bulgarian University, Sofia

lea_vajsova@abv.bg

 

The paper traces one of the central questions of contemporary critical philosophy and social theory – the relation between power and subject. “Power” is thought as an element of social relations, as capacity of discourses to codify social fields and positions from outside but in the same time as immanent and transformative force that rearranges and changes the social positions, performing power tactics of resistance within the power formed field. The same two-dimensional aspect is presented with respect to the “subject”: on the one hand, the subject is always already subjected, since the subject position is always codified by external power relations. But, on the other hand, “the practices of the self” demonstrate transformative and in this sense affirmative power that rearranges the already subjected power positions. The analysis is derived from the Pierre Bourdieu’s “reflexive sociology” and from multidimensional studies of Michel Foucault. Other important theories are also those of Judith Butler and Dimitar Vatsov.

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Ambiguity and the limits of notation

Adam B. Seligman

Boston University, Boston

seligman@bu.edu

 

How can we order the world while accepting its enduring ambiguities? This paper suggests a new approach to the problem of ambiguity and social order, which goes beyond the default modern position of ‘notation’ (resort to rules and categories to disambiguate). It argues that alternative, more particularistic modes of dealing with ambiguity through ritual and shared experience better attune to contemporary problems of living with difference and calls on us to heed the particular, the contingent and experienced as opposed to the abstract, general and disembodied. Only in this way can new forms of empathy emerge congruent with the deeply plural nature of our present experience. While we cannot avoid the ambiguities inherent to the categories through which we construct our world, I argue here the need to reconceptualize the ways in which we think about boundaries – not just the solid line of notation, but also the permeable membrane of ritualization and the fractal complexity of shared experience.

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Logic of reaffirmation and the retreat of the political

Darin Tenev

Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia

dari5da@hotmail.com

 

The paper is based on the hypothesis that politics emerge when a decision has to be made regarding the common, and every decision on the common simultaneously decides collaterally (in an implicit way, or according to the logical operator eo ipso) what are the boundaries and limits of the common (notwithstanding whether it confirms them, changes them, or cancels them). Thus the question arises what is the specificity of this particular type of acts of reaffirmation, where the reaffirmation is a secondary act to another, explicit and central act of affirmation. This particular reaffirmation veils itself as an act, while at the same time actually maintaining (or, to put it more correctly, incessantly creating) the horizon within whose limits the very act of decision on the common is realized. What is characteristic of such an act of reaffirmation is that it presupposes a convention, in the sense that a move is made within a coordination game, where the player has to make guesses what the other players’ moves would be, and it is this convention that allows the act to be conceived as a “re-”affirmation. One of the theses in the paper is that in a situation of crisis such collateral, eo ipso reaffirmation becomes more and more problematical. However, affirmation as reaffirmation of the convention on the limits of the common, by the very fact that it conceals itself as an independent act (or as an act in general), discloses itself in its concealment to be a political action, that retreats as political, and as an action at the same time. And as long as it is this action that every time makes possible the concrete limits of the political, it enacts a retreat of the political “itself”, leaving politics confront the risks of a double disappearing: a) either everything becomes political; b) or the political is restricted to a particular domain and thus becomes a problem of expertise.

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