Amerika

Generally speaking, the “days of” something are reserved for categories or groups that are oppressed or in need of recognition so as not to be forgotten or rendered invisible. Thus, certain dates in the calendar serve as occasions to think, rethink, and reflect on the subject in question (the “celebrated” or, in cases of bitter irony, the “nothing to celebrate”) and how it exists in a kind of danger of extinction in the face of the world’s indifference.

Just a few days ago, on September 15, the world “celebrated” the International Day of Democracy — a date that passed almost entirely unnoticed, probably because democracy itself now passes unnoticed. What is endlessly trumpeted and endlessly repeated tends, by sheer force of repetition, to become normalized into irrelevance. We shall not see barbecues in honor and memory of Karl Popper; at best, there will be a Google doodle or a note issued by some foundation that owes both its existence (and its funding, since researchers too must eat) to the meme of democracy.

The times when society was systematically indoctrinated — capillarily so, trickling down from institutions to the very last level of society, including children and pets — into believing in the unquestionable quality of democracy as summum bonum are steadily (and likely irreversibly) receding. In their place, new forms of popular representation are emerging, forms that are more gratifying to the collective appetite. The masses, fatigued by the electoral pornography of representative democracy, now demand the great match in which “the people” themselves appear as protagonists in the battle for the future. They wish to seize the helm of the ship, even if doing so requires hammering the rudder until it points in the desired direction.

In recent years we have seen the growing trend of demanding — through hashtags and social media campaigns — the resignation of leaders and presidents on grounds of physical or mental health, whether such grounds are verified or not. These ailments, it is argued, render the individual unfit for the office of governance. This is curious, and revealing of the minds behind the fabrication of political memes and ideas-forces today, for the emphasis is placed not on programs of government (most of which collapse into fragments within the first days of a new administration), but on the physical and psychological condition of the ruler. In this new meaning of democracy, the programs themselves scarcely matter: what matters are their reflections — their tangible manifestations — which are inseparable from the bodies of those who embody them. According to this logic, a leader is unfit to govern less because of the objective inviability of his program than because of the maladies of his body.

Like a drug that demands ever-greater doses to produce perceptible effects in the body of the addict, democracy today no longer oscillates between the sanitized decaf of the political center and the sweet intoxication of demagogy. It oscillates, instead, between moderate populism and the raw and unvarnished kind. Yet this nitrification of democracy into populism is not an alien graft but the child of democracy’s own hermeneutics. The positioning of myths has collapsed (and been re-signified), while the passions of the masses press forward and trample on the dying myths. These myths, rather than perishing outright, linger in a kind of eternal contemplation before the onslaught of impulses from every conceivable direction. The lack of civic education –that is, the absence of state indoctrination concerning the distribution of power and the functioning of institutions — has permitted the proliferation of alternate, divergent, even antagonistic forms of education. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari (1980), from their “bodies without organs”¹ a battle is waged from the molecular to the molar (shaping morality itself in the process). For at the coagulum of politics — the last distillate of dissimulated violence — multitudes of subjects, dispositifs, and agencements had to intervene. For a populist ruler to exist today, there had to be a long prior process of civic erosion and institutional undermining that fertilized the soil for options that once belonged to the margins or to oblivion itself.

Thus, republican virtues now rest as pseudo-corpses adorning the political-cultural stage of the West, like mummified monks dwelling among the living: a reminder of a virtuous past to some, a forgettable irrelevance to others. For those “good old days” are recalled as an era of submission, pusillanimity, and low citizen participation in decision-making. And so it is not without reason that democracy has its own “day,” lodged in the curious pantheon alongside International Whale Day, International Cheeseburger Day, and International Friendship Day.

¹ “At any rate, you have one (or several). It’s not so much that it preexists or comes ready-made, although in certain respects it is preexistent. At any rate, you make one, you can’t desire without making one. And it awaits you; it is an inevitable exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long as you don’t. This is not assuring, because you can botch it. Or it can be terrifying, and lead you to your death. It is nondesire as well as desire. It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it. . . .” (Deleuze & Guattari. 1980. Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 : Mille Plateaux.)

Tags: democracy, leftism, liberalism, schizophrenia