Dancing Toward Democracy— struggle for the present

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Before I continue, I want to first dislodge a couple of very common notions, which may have occurred to the reader. The first is that what one finds in places like Kyoto, Japan are vestiges of authentically old communities that must today compete with very modern public sphere formations. Quite the contrary. Public spheres and local communities in many places (including Kyoto) must today be equally considered as local outcomes of available modernities. They are each constructed in and through institutional measures and modalities that are themselves the products of recent articulations. This is much less a battle between “the now” and “the past,” and much more a contest for the present.

Still, communities and public spheres are not equally “modern” in the sense that they may not share the modern impulse toward institutional reflexivity. The use of authoritarian control practices within some communities limits reflexivity and reform. And so, while a “public sphere” is a hallmark of a modernizing society, the articulation of ethnic communal identities can also resemble a “return to the past”, a revitalization of pre-modern practices and associations. But this return is mostly accomplished (to whatever degree it is successful) through modern agencies and instrumentalities.

It is in part due to the presence of a public sphere that an actual return to the past is now structurally impossible—unless the public sphere is itself appropriated as a primordial communal space. Even then, as with the Nazi colonization of the German public sphere in the 1930s, the use of modern media and institutional logics undermines the goal of reauthenticating some pre-modern social order. And so even the most traditional communal organization cannot escape the modern practical logics (such as those of global markets) that inform the ways in which all organizations are now formed. This brings me to my second point.

“...In investigating democratization in these spheres it is worth keeping in mind the conventional association of democracy with deliberative assemblies; but it is the aspect of being open to deliberation, rather than where it occurs, which is most important. This is why I speak of democratization as the (actual and potential) extension of dialogic democracy—a situation where there is developed autonomy of communication, and where such communication forms a dialogue by means of which policies and activities are shaped”
(Giddens 1994, 115).

The second notion I want to displace is the one that points to the public sphere as, at certain times and places, being in danger of being misappropriated by the presence of ethnic communities and their “special” interests. This is certainly possible (as Nazi Germany reminds us), but we also have to look the other direction: at the way the public sphere intrudes into communities. Here I am saying mainly that we can locate a modernizing process within the interaction between public spheres and ethnic (and other) communities, and that this interaction works generally toward a penetration of the community by processes acquired from the public sphere, rather than the other way around.

While we need a public sphere that cannot be colonized by any one community, we should recognize and find some agreement on the consequences that a public sphere has over the interests of ethnic or religious communities. I want to introduce a term here: the “active public sphere.” Instead of viewing the discursive space of the public sphere as a place where opinions gather like flamingos on the Etosha Pan (or like flies on spam [author’s note: these analogies were first written very late at night: and were left here for your amusement]), we need to consider a public sphere where opinions arrive, are discussed, and are worked into the precursors for policy decisions. We need to look at the public sphere as a frame that adds significance to expressions, and as a game where hidden meanings are exposed.

In his notion of a “dialogic democracy” Giddens promotes the idea that democracy is not well represented by looking primarily at “deliberative bodies” but rather needs to occur through “the spread of social reflexivity as a condition both of day-to-day activities and the persistence of larger forms of collective organization” (1994, 115). He goes on to distinguish his notion of dialogue from Habermas’s “ideal speech situation.” He concludes his description of this dialogue by promoting the idea of mutual tolerance instead of consensus as the desired outcome. I will be applying Giddens’s notion of a dialogic democracy with particular attention to the intersection between performance, identity, active trust, festival events (and their organization), community formation, and the public sphere.

“Doubtless it is better to be tolerated than to be killed, as Pasolini was. But it would be better still to make reference to one's marked particularities without being specified thereby as less than public. As the bourgeois public sphere paraded the spectacle of its disincorporation, it brought into being this minoritizing logic of domination”
(Warner 1993, 240).

Where Giddens is pointing to the need to avoid a univocal outcome to a dialogic process, I can agree fully that tolerance is beneficial, but I would take the idea of “tolerance” far beyond its “threshold” level (i.e., being aware of difference and deciding not to react unfavorably to this) to a point where the differences that are found in and that emerge through this dialogue are desired outcomes. This need to go beyond liberal tolerance is also central to what Dean (1996) has called “reflective solidarity”:

“...many people would probably accept the idea that contemporary, pluralist democracies should aim toward including the excluded and enabling persons and communities to develop their differing life plans and express their cultural values, provided that these plans and values incorporate a respect for those who do not share them. In this regard, some might say that reflective solidarity seems like another term for liberal tolerance. However, although reflective solidarity and liberal toleration are clearly on the same side of the fence, both rejecting positions that seek to establish one particular notion of the good as valid for everyone, reflective solidarity resists claiming neutrality, arguing instead for accountability. For instance, liberals might urge us to tolerate abortion and sodomy. But this “us” is predetermined. It explicitly positions those who perform or require abortion and those who practice “sodomy” outside the boundaries of “our” community. Moreover, such an appeal to toleration denies “our” accountability toward those others outside our boundaries. It suggests that so long as we do not deny the right of women to have an abortion or the right of homosexuals to engage in particular acts, we have fulfilled our obligations as citizens. Finally, liberal tolerance seems to adopt a just-add-it-on perspective toward inclusion. In other words, by denying our responsibility to displace those crystallizations of meaning constructing women and homosexuals as “other,” it fails to examine the oppositional and exclusionary interpretations of rights as they have become embedded in our legal system. The difference between reflective solidarity and liberal toleration, then, is essentially one of attitude—reflective solidarity replaces complacency with critique and engagement” (178).

Solidarity is negotiated within a civil crowd by an open armed acceptance of difference, but not as something other people are, and “that’s OK”, but as who we are and where we are going together—and different. In the process, difference is not elided.

The public sphere is too often seen as a place where differences—of opinion, desire, and taste—are arbitrated to the point where difference is itself dissolved away to produce a synthetic agreement. Novelty is incorporated into the center of aesthetic judgement by fitting into its pre-existing expectations (which means that only the forms of “novelty” that already fit this judgement are allowed). For example, “outsider art” produced by artists with no connection to cultural institutions becomes the latest artistic commodity by being framed and shown in the most prestigious galleries.

The normalization of difference is not unusual to the (bourgeois) public sphere, the assimilation of outside influences has occurred in every cultural group. This is precisely the point here: assimilation is a pre-modern practice that modern institutions have not sufficiently interrogated, until recently.

Part of the reflexivity of late modernity is a reflection on difference and plurality, often presented as “multiculturalism” or “personal choice.” This discourse produces a different notion of difference in the public sphere, one that promotes the experience of difference qua difference, and looks to maintain difference in the outcome of any dialogue.

This discourse is performed today by counter-public groups, such as gay and lesbian activist organizations, and it claims that difference itself is a desired quality in the public sphere. Within this notion of the public sphere, the experience of difference must lead to an appreciation for difference as an aesthetic feature of and as a formative contour for participation in the public sphere. One outcome is a cultural “miscegenation” that will replace those forms of difference (gender, race, age) currently used as modes of domination, while opening up to the creation of new differences. Difference will be dislodged from its inherited position and become available to expressive intervention.

“Each separate sphere of modernist identity politics has typically mobilized its version of radical subjectivity around a fundamentally epistemologic critique of the binary ordering of difference that is particular to it: capital/ labour, self/other, subject/object, colonizer/colonized, white/black, man/woman, majority/minority, heterosexual/homosexual”
(Soja and Hooper 1993, 185-186).

At this point, a dialogue can begin to support individual singularities—differences at the level of the individual body—a perspective that allows individuals to escape a politics of identity that necessarily ties them to a communal group. At this individuated level, dialogic democracy can focus on other identity issues, such as consumerism and workplace concerns. And at this level the binary differences of gender, class, and race become liable to a general critique of exclusion based on any putative “difference.” As it turns out, we are nowhere as different and not anywhere as similar as these “group imaginations” would have us believe.

But what is an active public sphere? Fraser (1992) uses the term “strong” public sphere to indicate public spheres within governments (such as parliaments). Strong public spheres produce decisions rather than simply generate opinions. An active public sphere is the extra-governmental correlate to the strong public sphere within the government. An active public sphere is where civil society operates as an external check on governmental and market institutions. This is where guarantees of speech and assembly are exercised and where dialogic democracy (outside of government) is performed.

However, an active public sphere is also active internally. At its most democratic limit permits no exclusive enclaves, no a priori group memberships into its internal debate. And so it displaces traditionalistic communal imaginations and interests, and inserts those of individuals¹.

Like a festival, the active public sphere is expensive. It is shaped by thousands of individuals providing a voluntary commitment of time, labor, and resources. The individuals and groups that in aggregate activate the public sphere do so with an aim to oversee the decisions and decision-making process of representative bodies in governments at all levels. Toward this aim they monitor government and market organizations and they interrogate the discussions happening within ministries and parliaments. The result, if this is successful, is a type of mirror government.

Today it is almost as difficult to underestimate the role of mass media in the active public sphere as it is to imagine how today’s transnational mass media corporations can be expected to “live up to the public trust”—this situation is compounded in nation-states (such as Japan) where mass media is state-operated or under state “administrative guidance”. When the Yomiuri Television crew came to watch the Madang play practice the producer’s concern was that this story would not be seen as “newsworthy” on its own. He needed an angle, he figured, if he was to sell this one to his boss. I could see the bitter anger of the madang organizers, and I offered to refuse to cooperate. But more than they despised this lack of respect for their work, they needed to use television to show a wider audience what the madang was about.

I would submit that there can be no strong public sphere within government unless this reflects the active public sphere outside of government. The latter is a social/discursive arena that contributes to the governance of the society by articulating opinions as potential public decisions. The use of the initiative process to pass laws or to recall politicians is a good example of an active public sphere². Here is where public sphere and civil society notions become interlaced. Civil society, yes, but not communalist social groups, for as Alexander Kluge noted, public spheres must not be communally based. The public sphere cannot be some underlying traditional community in modernist dress.

anti-communities

Community formation and public sphere participation are mutually incompatible at their ideal limits, because of conflicting demands for exclusivity and inclusivity. Communities link their members through exclusive affective ties to imagined commonalties, such as religious belief, heredity, or place of origin. However, public spheres are not (or should not be) communally based—this is the first lesson of 1933.

An arena of democratic participation within the modern nation-state, the public sphere resists appropriation by any “private” interests, whether by the marketplace or by governmental organizations, or, in fact, by any one community: as long as the interests of which are defined as exclusive. As an actual or discursive “space” the public sphere links its participants through a mutual desire for access, that is, for publicity.

Public spheres require that individual participants retain a sense of individual choice, that they act independently of other corporate interests. And so, the extent to which individuals are able to “look beyond” the interests of the groups with which they feel a shared commonalty, is precisely the extent to which their participation in the public sphere is legitimated as an expression of “public” sentiment.

¹The question about individualism and democracy (a question that is mostly raised by government mouthpieces as a complaint over the imposition of a “Western” democratic ideology on an non-Western social order that has no history of, nor desire for, individual freedom if this means the freedom to be disobedient to superiors) is usually poorly considered. Individualism is not the issue at all. What is at issue particularly in a dialogic democracy is the question: who gets to speak? Democracy requires collective, voluntary participation by individuals as individuals with the interests of the collective firmly in mind. “Non-Western” (or Confucian or some other, national version) democratic theory is usually a blind for paternalism, for the delegation of public expression to those who are older, “better born,” and more masculine than anyone most people around here know.

²And then we can also say that the active public sphere relies as well on the more general public sphere as an arena for information exchange, dialogue, and opinion building. Japan is notoriously weak in all aspects of public sphere formation, mostly because this has been colonized by government ministerial and corporate PR interests.