1
Introduction wave of political protest that eventually toppled
1.1 Protest, Politics, and Anti-Politics
Beginning in December 2010 there was a remarkable wave of political protest that
eventually toppled four long-standing dictatorships. This movement, labelled the Arab
Spring by the media, would inspire the Occupy movement which began in the United
States and spread throughout Canada and many other parts of the world in 2011. These
two movements are significant as they were outbreaks of people organizing and acting
politically outside the realm of the state or administrative government. They point to a
desire for alternatives to these forms of government, but there is a lingering hostility
toward politics itself, prompting questions of what exactly politics entails. Given that
such movements rarely reach the level of influence that these two achieved, they provide
interesting examples which can help us question what it means to be political and where
politics takes place. Is politics something which can be understood on its own terms, or
can it be equated with the state, the exercise of authority, or the administration of
economics or ethics? Questions of what is political and what is not political, as well as
what is anti-political, can be broached in light of these movements which highlight both
the successes and failures of recent attempts to reinvigorate politics. Beyond these
questions, these movements are different from previous high-profile political outbursts in
the level of integration with recent developments in information and communications
technologies, most notably the internet. These movements provoke questions not only
about how politics can operate outside the state, but also how new modes of technology
provoke new forms of political practice and demand a re-theorization of how politics has
traditionally been understood.1
1 On Occupy, see for example: John Buell, “Occupy Wall Street’s Democratic Challenge,” Theory & Event
14, no. 4 (2011); Kevin M. DeLuca, Sean Lawson, and Ye Sun, “Occupy Wall Street on the Public Screens
of Social Media: The Many Framings of the Birth of a Protest Movement,” Communication, Culture &
Critique 5, no. 4 (2012): 483–509; Federico Campagna and Emanuele Campiglio, eds., What We Are
Fighting For: A Radical Collective Manifesto (London: Pluto Press, 2012); Jeffrey C Alexander,
Performative Revolution in Egypt: An Essay in Cultural Power (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011);
Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain, Democracy’s Fourth Wave?: Digital Media and the Arab
Spring (Oxford University Press, 2013); Vasileios Karagiannopoulos, “The Role of the Internet in Political
Struggles: Some Conclusions from Iran and Egypt,” New Political Science 34, no. 2 (2012): 151–71.
2
The Arab Spring was remarkable because to outside observers it seemed to come
out of nowhere. Tunisia and Egypt were countries with long standing single party
governments with technocratic aspirations in which left-wing oppositional groups had
been eradicated during the Cold War, leaving only religious groups, such as the Muslim
Brotherhood, as the only apparent alternative to the status quo. This is the first aspect of
how the Arab Spring was a thoroughly political act. It seemingly came from nowhere to
bring in sweeping changes. Politics at its core is not the art of the possible, as the quote
attributed to Otto Von Bismarck would have it, but the opposite, politics is “the art of the
impossible” as it enables the birth of the new out of what may seem to be a rigid and
unchangeable status quo. Six months before the events of the Arab Spring, anyone
predicting that popular protests completely unrelated to Islamism would sweep across the
region overthrowing longstanding dictatorships would have elicited looks of disbelief to
say the least. The same could be said about Occupy Wall Street in the United States,
which arose against the context of the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The original
grassroots response to the financial crisis came from the right-wing Tea Party movement,
which was demanding a further entrenchment of the neoliberal economic policies of
deregulation and financialization that led to the crisis in the first place, while the left
seemed at a complete loss. Then seemingly out of nowhere, the Occupy movement arose
and managed to make economic inequality a point of public discussion amid a global
push for austerity.
The exceptionality of political movements stems at least partially from the
difficulty of performing the elementary political gesture of universalizing the particular,
which translates a single instance or event of inequality into a catalyst for a larger
movement dedicated to equality in general. In Tunisia the public suicide of a fruit vendor
in protest of police harassment became a stand-in for every manner of complaint against
the regime and thus spearheaded a broad movement that quickly transcended the
particular concerns of street vendors or police corruption. As Jeffrey C. Alexander argues,
the Egyptian activists encouraged this kind of universality as they portrayed themselves
as a cross-section of the whole of Egyptian society without any one identity, instead
defining themselves simply as the people united against the regime of President Hosni
3
Mubarak. The activists of the Occupy movement accomplished a similar feat by positing
themselves as the 99% who were opposing the 1% wealthy elite. As Wendy Brown points
out, the movement successfully cut across identity issues which have traditionally
defined American politics, and took on a more universal character. These movements
occupied spaces without being the expression of a specific group, identity, or
particularity, but simply posited themselves as ‘the people’. The goal of these movements
was to bring about change on a level that was relevant to all, rather than simply
advocating for justice for a specific group.
While the energy of these movements captured worldwide attention for their
capacity to spur change, utilize new technologies, and spring up out of the blue, they
were also frustrating in their aftermath as they fizzled out and failed to bring forth a truly
different practice and thinking of politics that is always the promise of such movements.
The promise of newness in these movements, which Hannah Arendt called the political
capacity of natality, captures our attention precisely because in today’s post-political
environment there are so few avenues for people to engage with each other to bring about
something which is politically new. The excitement and frustration people felt with
regard to these movements related to the hope that the deadlock of post-political
representative democracy could be broken and something new could emerge.9
In the post-communist era, there is no overarching alternative to which political
uprisings gravitate toward. Theoretical frameworks for engaged political systems such as
the forms of participatory and council democracy that rose to prominence in the 1950s
and 1960s are today seen as good ideas which are unfortunately unworkable due to the
realities of globalization. Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that representative liberal capitalist
democracy represents the highest and final form of political development was
theoretically much maligned, but seems to continually reassert itself in practice as protest
movements fail to not only produce alternative arrangements, but seem to have serious
trouble even conceptualizing how an engaged politics would work on a scale beyond a
few people. Commenting in the context of the protests surrounding the European debt
crisis of 2011, Franco Bifo Berardi points out that
4
never in our life have we faced a situation so charged with revolutionary
opportunities. Never in our life have we been so impotent. Never have
intellectuals and militants been so silent, so unable to find a way to show a new
possible direction.12
Existing governmental forms seem so pervasive today that even in today’s popular
entertainment culture some sort of apocalypse seems to be a necessary precursor for
imagining a world with a different political arrangement. If it is easier to imagine the end
of the world than it is to imagine how we might move beyond the current institutional
framework, what does this tell us about how politics is popularly perceived?
Politics is increasingly viewed as something bad or problematic which is often
conceptualized as something to be done away with altogether, or as a necessary evil that
needs to be simply tolerated. The fact that the word politics is increasingly a synonym for
various sorts of underhanded behaviour and that to “label an activity or process ‘political’
is, it seems, invariably to deride and distance oneself from it,” demonstrates the poor
reputation politics currently suffers. Citing polling data from the post-Cold War period,
Hay goes on to point out that people increasingly believe that democracy is the best form
of government, but at the same time are less likely to believe it is a good system of
government. This increasing distaste for representative democracy coupled with the idea
that it is the best available form of government is symptomatic of the lack of ability to
conceptualize new ways of performing politics. It seems as though people are
increasingly giving up on the very idea of politics, which then feeds into the inability to
conceptualize political alternatives to the status quo as people seek exits from the
political rather than new ideas for how it might work.
Even among political activists involved in the protests in North Africa and the
Occupy movement, there was a strong anti-political undercurrent which worked to
undermine the potentially transformative impact of these movements. In the case of
Egypt many activists attempted to emphasize the idea that the revolution was not about
politics but instead about dignity and freedom, as if the way to exercise dignity and
freedom was not precisely through the political actions the activists were engaging in!
5
The continued attempt to deny the categorization of “political” by activists both in the
Arab Spring and Occupy movements is part of the reason why these movements had
trouble envisioning alternatives. If politics is something they were opposing with their
demonstrations, then what happens if their movement is successful and the current
regime is toppled? This problem became clear in Egypt as elections simply resulted in
replacing a non-elected repressive regime with an elected repressive regime, eventually
leading back to an equally heavy handed military government. In the case of Occupy,
there was a persistent anti-political sentiment which was best demonstrated by the focus
on creating harmonic mini-communities and the use of a consensus-based decision
making model which demonstrated an inward looking tendency of withdrawal from
larger society. Gude argues that this anti-political sentiment is precisely why Occupy
failed to generate the sweeping changes it sought, as activists simply wanted to sidestep
politics altogether by trying to do away with conflict and not bother considering how to
build an alternative to what they were protesting. In this sense the oft-repeated comment
that Occupy was a left-wing version of the Tea Party was more accurate than intended,
with both movements positioning politics as something to oppose and get away from.
Against this backdrop of excitement and disappointment with these political
outbursts a number of key questions can be projected. The first of which must be to ask
what do we mean by politics? Does politics have its own specific content, or is it merely
a function or means of something else, such as economics or ethics? Part of the confusion
over what politics entails stems from the fact that politics itself is a contested notion. In
many cases politics is simply used as another name for the state, but this is deeply
problematic as it implies that non-state activities cannot be political, as well as implying
that the state cannot act non-politically or even anti-politically. A second source of
confusion over what politics entails stems from the common sentiment that everything is
political. In its academic form, this notion stems from a Foucauldian view of power
relations penetrating every aspect of contemporary life. Any form of interaction not
conducted between absolute equals is viewed as political, which reduces the specificity
of politics into meaningless every day interactions. When one receives mail from a mail
carrier, is this really an instance of politics because the mail carrier has the authority
6
derived from the state to deliver mail while the recipient does not? As Jacques Rancière
argues, the claims to everything being political betray the reality that today almost
nothing is political, as we have lost the specificity of politics to the exercise of state
authority. If politics is equated with the exercise of authority and unequal power
relations, then it is no wonder that there is a strong anti-political current even among
political activists.
1.2 The Need to Reinvigorate Politics
To respond to these questions about the specificity and intent of politics in a positive way,
which casts politics as a good in itself rather than a problem to overcome, the theoretical
approach of Hannah Arendt will be relied upon. Arendt’s political theory is attractive
precisely because she views politics as beneficial in its own right, and not a mere means
to some other end. If the existing post-political deadlock is to be broken, activists in
movements such as Occupy and the Arab Spring need to seek to reinvigorate politics,
rather than escape it. In addition to drawing on Arendt’s theoretical framework for an
empowering rather than oppressing understanding of politics, there is a growing group of
contemporary thinkers who are seeking to reclaim politics as a specific and serious
activity. I will place these contemporary theorists in a supporting role to the central figure
of Arendt.
While it can be difficult to lump groups of diverse theorists together, thinkers
such as Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek, Chantal Mouffe, and interpreters of Alain Badiou
such as Sergei Prozorov have been actively attempting to reclaim politics as precisely
what is needed to bring change. This group of thinkers actively position themselves
against the reduction of politics to state-based administration common among
mainstream liberal and conservative thinkers as well as against the postmodern left who
dissolve the specificity of politics into the critique of differential power relations. Politics
as the state or politics as differential power relations ends up creating deeply anti-political
attitudes. For the neoliberal, politics as state administration oppresses the free market and
individual, and for the postmodern leftist, politics is an unequal power relation which
7
generates the oppression of minorities. In both cases, politics is positioned as a problem
to be overcome.
While Rancière, Žižek, and Mouffe are important contemporary figures because
they are shifting the conversation toward viewing politics as something worthwhile, the
work of Arendt on this measure stands above them all and often seems just as, if not
more, relevant to contemporary issues than the work of those alive today. After writing
On the Origins of Totalitarianism, a book with a pessimistic undertone that sees
totalitarian impulses seeping into all forms of government, Arendt witnessed the events
of the Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule in 1956 which spurred her to write The
Human Condition and The Promise of Politics.20 These two books are primarily
concerned with the value of politics and its ability to create something new in order to
break from even the most oppressive anti-political situation. Against the backdrop of
today’s general hostility to politics, Arendt stands out as a staunch defender of politics in
a way that demands contemporary attention.
Arendt’s reception in contemporary scholarship is varied and complex, reflective
of her own varied and complex thought. While there is a body of scholarship that focuses
on her defense of politics,21 Arendt is often invoked in ways that are antithetical to her
commitment to politics. As Kalyvas points out, there is a
trend in Arendt scholarship that is gradually moving away from the political
qualities of her writings. Today she is read more as a philosopher and a moral
thinker rather than as a political theorist concerned predominantly with the secular
realm of appearances.22
The recent edited collection on Arendt’s thought for the occasion of her 100th birthday
Thinking in Dark Times demonstrates this trend.23 The bulk of the essays in the book treat
Arendt’s thought outside of and even in some cases against her explicitly political
concerns. Theorists such as Seyla Benhabib interpret Arendt as an advocate of consensus
rather than as the staunch defender of agonistic politics she actually was.24 Such
interpretations spread and have led prominent proponents of agonistic politics, such as
Chantal Mouffe, to engage in polemics against Arendt as a supposed supporter of
8
eliminating political conflict.25 Badiou relies on the work of Myriam Revault d’Allonnes
for his interpretation of Arendt, which leads him to the rather far flung conclusion that
20 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973); Arendt,
The Human Condition; Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 2007).
21 Exemplary works of this nature include: Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the
Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt (Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 2009); Dana R. Villa, “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere.,” American Political
Science Review 86, no. 3 (1992): 712–21.
22 Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 188.
23 Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan, eds., Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on
Ethics and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
24 Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics
(Routledge, 1992).
25 Mouffe, On The Political, 9.
Arendt sought to eliminate politics in the name of ethics. Žižek and Rancière also engage
with Arendt only with respect to her definition of totalitarianism and concept of human
rights, again underscoring this trend where Arendt is recast as a moral philosopher,
despite her continued insistence that she was not a philosopher but in fact a political
theorist. These depictions of Arendt as hostile to the project of recovering politics by this
group of political theorists are all the more remarkable because of how much they share
with Arendt’s core project of asserting the value of politics. In reading these
contemporary thinkers as an extension of Arendt’s thoughts about the promise of politics,
I am seeking to reassert Arendt’s proper position as a political thinker and demonstrate
her sometimes obscured influence on these thinkers, while also using these contemporary
thinkers to make up for some of her limitations.
1.3 Only the Internet Can Save Us Now?
The framework of a reinvigorated and empowering politics derived from the above
theorists is not entirely novel and suffers from the common problem of how to actually
implement theoretical ideas. Attempting to reinvigorate politics and move to a different
model of political organization has always been fraught with difficulties and often these
theoretical frameworks for a better form of politics are written off as practically
unworkable, even if theoretically attractive. It is at this juncture at which the internet does
9
present something new which can open up political possibilities which were previously
thought to be closed. The internet is already transforming all aspects of life, and is
starting to have a political impact. The political movements of Occupy, Arab Spring, and
Anonymous are already pointing the way to how the internet can enable new forms of
political space and political being, but the true potential (and danger) of the internet lies
ahead. It is not a technological tool with a fixed essence, but something much more open
whose present and future is being shaped by human activity.
The internet will be presented as a response to the second part of the problem of
politics, which is the question of how to implement alternative theoretical visions. Even if
protest movements and theorists are able to come up with alternative visions of politics,
the problem of implementing a form of politics which enables meaningful participation
has continuously been dismissed as practically unworkable in all but micro-communities.
The familiar response to alternative visions of politics which are empowering rather than
alienating, which rest on participation rather than representation, and which embrace
conflictual debate and deliberation rather than structures of hierarchical command is that
they sound nice on paper but simply cannot work in practice due to the scale of modern
political entities. This argument seems to have become amplified in the era of
globalization, where problems such as climate change increasingly require a global scope
of politics which makes these alternative visions which require small scale groupings
seem even more of a relic of the past.
The advent of globalization in its various forms has led to a decline in democracy,
as truly global issues such as the environment, economics, and trade have become the
sites of secret negotiations by heads of states which leave the people who elected them
completely in the dark. While much of the discussion surrounding globalization focuses
on these sorts of international meetings involving elites which push people to the side,
the primary driver of globalization in all fields has been technology. The internet in
particular has completely changed everything about how people communicate with each
other in a way that can have radical consequences for how politics is conducted, making
the age of globalization rife with possibilities for politics and not just an era of declining
democracy. The internet is not simply a new form of communications media but is a new
10
form of space which is remarkable for its plasticity. New spaces can be created and
radically overhauled while old spaces disappear or fall out of use in a way that makes
offline space seem incredibly rigid by contrast. Today, one can make a publicly
accessible space dedicated to any purpose without having to physically occupy a piece of
land, which first requires changing its previous purpose. Websites as public spaces are
created from nothing and exist as a kind of parallel space that is today always with us at
the same time we are somewhere else in offline space. The way people can interact
online represents something unique in human history. Never before could anonymous
strangers on the other side of the world get together to discuss something without
knowing anything about the other person.
The internet is generating a wave of participatory culture in which people
increasingly expect not to be merely passive recipients but have the ability to participate
directly, form communities around, or have influence in the creation process of
everything from bicycles to video games. The ability to find groups of people with
similar interests (or complaints) as yourself on the internet is unprecedented, leading to
the globalization and interconnection of more people. This enhanced ability to create new
spaces which are inherently interactive have tremendous political potential that has yet to
be tapped. The internet stands today as the most definitive answer to the question of how
to put theories of participatory and engaged politics into practice because of its vast
potential to connect people in an interactive medium. Given that even in situations of
actual revolution, as was the case in Egypt in Tunisia, there was still an inability to
implement something different, the internet in many ways seems to be the only viable
avenue where implementing alternatives is even imaginable.
1.4 Digitizing the Political, Politicizing the Digital
Despite the immense possibility of the internet, there tends to be a persistent resistance to
it among political theorists. This resistance can come in the shape of simply ignoring the
impact of the internet or it can come from direct hostility towards it. A general trend
among academic political commentators who theorized the Arab Spring and Occupy in
explicitly political terms is that they fail to understand the dramatic impact of the internet
11
or simply dismiss it as yet another handy tool of protest. Most often though, political
theorists simply fail to mention or analyze the role the internet played in developing these
political movements at all. The lack of appreciation of the technological aspect of these
movements not only provides a limited theoretical understanding of them, but also misses
the opportunity to engage political theory with a relatively new phenomenon which is
quickly becoming ubiquitous. Political theorists need to seriously engage with the
internet in order to fully appreciate both its pitfalls and potential for a reinvigorated form
of politics. At the same time, those who do take the internet as a serious site of politics,
tend to more concerned with empirical rather than theoretical issues.
The journal Constellations, which has an international focus on critical and
democratic theory, has published a number of articles related to the Arab Spring,
including a special section in the June 2013 issue which included nine articles on the
Arab Spring. While many of these articles provide a serious take on the political aspect of
the Arab Spring, there is very little discussion of technology. Challand, for example,
presents an insightful analysis of the Arab Spring with respect to political subjectivity but
misses the opportunity to discuss issues surrounding online and offline subjectivity and
how the internet played a role in fostering the kind of political subjectivity he mentions.
In a similar vein, Tripp’s excellent analysis of the Arab Spring in terms of performative
power and use of theatrical metaphors lacked a crucial discussion of how the actors were
able to use the internet to project and extend their political stage beyond the immediate
confines of Tahrir Square.
The one article out of nine that does mention the role of the internet is quite
problematic. While Salvatore does focus on the internet, he claims that the role of
technology has been overblown and what really mattered for the protests was the creation
of “a new language of publicness” which was able to bring together diverse elements of
Egyptian society.31 Salvatore argues that the internet was merely a communications tool,
much like handing out flyers, and thus was useful in as much as it was able to mobilize
people on the web “to conquer real public space.” In this analysis the internet is just a
means of spreading a message, like a radio or telephone. He goes on to critique what he
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calls the “fantasy of Facebook revolt” and argues that what really mattered were the
bodies on the streets who were engaging in the public sphere. While the bodies in the
streets were obviously critical to the protest, he downplays the fact that these bodies were
there because they were organized online, had discussed the issues that drove them into
the streets online, and had connected with other activists online. Tufekci and Wilson for
instance found in a survey of protesters in Tahrir Square that internet and social media
use was a significant factor in how early in the timeline of events people joined the
protests. They also found that half of those who they surveyed at the physical protest site
stated that after they left the protest site they would go online for the purpose of
continuing their protest activities, either by sending around photos and accounts of the
day’s activities or discussing the protests with others. But for Salvatore and many other
communications theorists, the internet is not a multi-dimensional space, it is a flat tool for
transmitting messages, thus there can be no concept of an online public or political realm.
Writing in the influential online magazine Jadaliyya, Burris makes a similar claim
about the internet simply being nothing more than a communications tool, claiming that
“the old was traded in for the new, flyers and pamphlets replaced by texting and YouTube
videos, the bullhorn by the blog.”35 He then goes on to rightfully criticize some internet
enthusiasts as stating that these technologies were the sole cause of these revolutions, but
he goes too far in the other direction by writing the internet off as simply a
communications tool. In a more balanced critique of technological determinism,
Karagiannopoulos argues that while the internet clearly did not cause the protests in
Egypt, the internet still played an essential part in bringing people together so that they
could go out and protest on the street. Even in Karagiannopoulos’s more balanced
approach, however, the internet remains as solely a supplement to traditional offline
politics. What is needed is more consideration of how the internet can radically change
how we think about and do politics, rather than engaging in theorizing that neuters the
transformative capacity of the internet by making it subservient to dated and unworkable
offline models of politics.
In a special issue of the journal Theory & Event dedicated to the Occupy
movement, the role of the internet was mentioned only in passing and as something
13
seemingly unimportant. Wendy Brown for instance remarks on how the Occupy
movement was able to move beyond talk of mere interests and instead towards justice,
and how its slogan of the 99% against the 1% resonated with the American public. She
cites opinion polls pointing out that 62% of Americans were sympathetic towards the
Occupy movement and that even a third of the mega-rich 1% were sympathetic. What she
neglects to mention, however, is the role of the internet in allowing activists to promote
their causes without having to rely on negative framings typical of the mainstream media.
As DeLuca et al argue, the proliferation of online discussion and reports of Occupy were
able to counteract the initial mainstream media narrative of the movement as frivolous
and stillborn.
While Brown points out that Occupy was able to overcome traditional identity
issues in favour of a broad based agenda for economic justice, she fails to explain why,
and it is precisely here that the role of the internet and online subjectivity should be
raised. Much of the organizing and discussion surrounding the events of Occupy
happened online, where people are not easily identifiable. The mainstream media
struggled with this lack of identity as well, as they had difficulty trying to place Occupy
and simply repeated the injunction to know what their demands were. Online subjectivity,
with its anonymity, is disruptive of the process of depoliticization which involves
identification as a means of desubjectifying. Thus Occupy was not easily identified and
dismissed as labour unions, environmentalists, anarchists, or any other specific group, as
the theme of the 99% continued to retain traction. Introducing the internet and its unique
mode of political subjectivity as an explanatory factor helps to better understand the
success of Occupy as a more universal political movement.
These sorts of issues related to debates about the internet, which should be critical
to discussions surrounding Occupy, are noticeably missing from all the articles published
in this special issue of Theory & Event, which brought together many well-known
political theorists for comment. In addition to this journal issue, two book length works
on Occupy fail to appreciate and analyze the depths and impact of the internet on not just
the movement itself but on the future of any kind of participatory political alternative to
the status quo. The more journalistic Occupy Nation mentions the role of technology only
14
in passing, and the more academic What We Are Fighting For: A Radical Collective
Manifesto hardly mentions it at all, despite chapters delving into seemingly every other
aspect of what a radical political alternative might look like. What these examples point
to is the lack of imagination and theoretical reflection on the internet even among
theorists who are interested in understanding contemporary movements whose heavy
integration with the internet is already pointing to new directions of political practice.
The lack of engagement with the internet or general skepticism toward it is also
prominent among the group of theorists whom I draw on to sketch a picture of a
webenabled understanding of politics. This loose collection of theorists are significant, as
I pointed to earlier, in that they argue politics is valuable in itself outside of instrumental
concerns, and that their theories of politics seem to be amenable to an understanding of
politics that embraces the online component. Yet none of these theorists who are still
alive have much to say about the internet, even though their work seems so prone to such
theorizations.
Jacques Rancière has contributed to a renewed impetus to theorize politics in
contrast to state-based anti-politics and has written on a wide variety of topics in political
and aesthetic theory, but discussions of the internet in either context remain absent. The
only place Rancière seemingly mentions the capacity of the internet is in a 2006
interview with Eurozine, where he equates the internet with a large library that anyone
can walk into and surf around learning about diverse subjects in an egalitarian manner.
The internet in many ways would seem to offer a proliferation of avenues for Rancière to
explore, not just in terms of his pedagogy as he relates it to in the interview, but in terms
of politics and aesthetics as well. Even within the context of that one interview, the topic
is quickly changed to film and television from the internet, which Rancière goes on to
speak about in depth. Based on these comments he seems to understand the equalitarian
potential of the internet, but seems to find contemporary film a more interesting topic,
thus leaving an application of his ideas in terms of the internet to others.
Alain Badiou also has little time for the internet or questions of technology. In a
2002 lecture at the European Graduate School an audience member asked him to
15
comment on his theories in regard to the emerging technologies, likely referring to the
internet. Badiou responded by claiming that “technology is not a real concept, it's a
journalistic debate. It's not a serious question.” Badiou then went on to briefly elaborate
that technology is not a truth-process as it does not bring forth anything new, and “is
always a continuation, an application, a repetition.”43 Regardless of whether technology
introduces new truths, clearly it is not something that is wholly subordinate to other
concerns as Badiou would have it. Instead of simply dismissing the internet as derivative
of politics, a fuller understanding of how technology and politics interact is needed to
explain some of the peculiarities of the recent political movements mentioned here.
For Chantal Mouffe, one of the most influential theorists of agonistic politics, the
internet is not a topic she is eager to discuss, despite the fact that the internet would seem
to be a realm which facilitates the pluralistic clash of ideas which Mouffe advocates. In a
2010 interview with Barcelona Metropolis, she is asked about the internet and she
responds at first by pointing to the internet as a neutral territory which is not inherently
agonistic or consensual, but then goes on to say that people generally use the internet to
reinforce their own views, causing them to isolate themselves and never confront other
opinions. She goes on to state that she prefers a face-to-face form of contact because this
somehow leads to more contact with people who have different ideas. Instead of
dismissing the internet based on a rather questionable idea of what people use it for,
political theorists need to be exploring its capabilities and potentials. Work should be
done to figure out how to make online political sites that attract a plurality of opinions
rather than simply saying that people do not use it for this purpose.
Unlike with Rancière, Badiou, and Mouffe, for whom serious digging is required
to find even the briefest statement about the internet, Slavoj Žižek has commented on the
internet on many occasions and formats, from newspaper articles to book chapters. While
Žižek clearly finds the internet to be a topic worth discussing, he remains politically
suspicious of it. In 1997’s Plague of Fantasies he argues that on the internet we do not
know who we are really interacting with, and thus building political solidarity remains
illusory. He repeats a similar point in a 2006 article for the Guardian newspaper, in which
he critiques the shifting nature of online identity, claiming that online interaction papers
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over material disparities such as wealth or social position. This lack of knowledge of who
one is “actually” talking to online can lead to murderous violence according to
Žižek, as the lack of recognition of who we are talking to will lead to an objectification of
the actual person. If these dangers that Žižek points to are legitimate, then the more
interesting question is how political activists are adapting to deal with these issues and
how this might affect how politics is understood. Attempts to dismiss the internet seem
more like attempts to avoid understanding its interaction with politics, and make it more
difficult to explain the Arab Spring, or hacktivist movements such as Anonymous, in
terms of the theory of such political thinkers.
In addition to these theorists who are still alive and thus have had plenty of
opportunity to comment on the impact of the internet in relation to technology, there is
the figure of Arendt who certainly did not ignore the impact of modern technology. In
many ways Arendt had a more nuanced theory of technology than others influenced by
Heidegger, but she remained skeptical of its impact on politics. Rather than attribute any
kind of essential nature to technology, Arendt asks us to evaluate technologies based on
whether they help bring people together into a common world where politics is possible,
or if they alienate people from each other thus destroying the commonality necessary to
engage in politics.
In her considerations of space technology, in particular the launching of Sputnik,
Arendt is concerned that technology was fostering an anti-political rationality. World
alienation was already a problem, as mass society in the modern age and religion in the
middle ages had previously diminished the power of the public and common world, but
with space technology world alienation could be taken to a new level in which human
beings could now become alienated not just from each other but from the actual planet
itself. Arendt’s concern with space technology, which she traces back to the telescope, is
that it may enable us to find the Archimedean point that would not just completely
remove us from the world, but generate enough force to destroy all political power and
the common world it creates. The advancement of such technology worried Arendt
because in separating people it reduces the possibility of political speech, and
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increasingly privileges the non-political language of mathematical signs. If technology is
able to affect our speech to the point where we no longer communicate as human beings
about every day human affairs but only through the language of physics notation and
formulas, then technology will have destroyed the world and politics will no longer be
possible. While Arendt found the technologies of her day problematic, applying her own
criteria to the internet leads to less pessimism as the internet certainly has the capacity to
bring people together in speech and action and create a common world, as has been
demonstrated by the revolutions in North Africa and the Occupy movement’s reliance on
the web.
Against the statements of many of these political theorists who form the basis of
my understanding of politics, I will then argue that their theories are especially well
suited to be interpreted in digital terms. Arendt’s political realm as a web of relations
rather than a physical place for bodies seems especially well suited to be theorized in
terms of the internet. Žižek and Rancière’s political subject as involving a withdrawal
from identity describes the process of online political subjectivation nicely, despite
Žižek’s own statements to the contrary. The internet is increasingly being theorized in
terms of participation in areas outside of politics, thus making political participation a
natural next step. The internet enables the old democratic dream of mass participation for
the first time since the small city-states of antiquity. Despite Mouffe’s fears about the
internet lacking conflict, online political discussion forums are today far and away the
best place to find lively and disagreeable debate on political issues, making such forums
ripe to be theorized in terms of Mouffe’s agonistic politics.
In relying on these thinkers for the theoretical basis of my project, I am also
seeking to reinterpret their ideas to be more relevant in an increasingly digitized
environment, which political theory needs to take more seriously. If the internet is
abandoned by serious political thinkers as not having any political relevance, then a great
opportunity to reimagine and reinvigorate politics will be lost. As the reach and impact of
new technologies becomes more pervasive, these theorists are increasingly being seen as
presenting old ideas which are unworkable in a digital age. Alternatives to the status quo
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which want nothing to do with technology or have nothing to say about it come across as
anachronistic. In developing a vision of online politics informed by these thinkers, I
intend to salvage the validity of their thought by showing how it applies to contemporary
and future digital issues, as well as demonstrating how political theory still has relevance
in imagining alternate arrangements of society against the increasing currency of
technocratic solutions.
1.5 Understanding Politics through the Four Terrains of
Contestation
By drawing on this group of theorists who are united through the high esteem to which
they hold politics, I will develop the argument that a renewed sense of politics is what is
needed in order for these recent protest movements to begin to have success in not only
capturing the public’s imagination but developing workable alternatives to the status quo.
In order to develop an idea of what politics practically consists of, I develop the argument
that there are four terrains of contestation between politics and anti-politics, consisting of
the political realm, subjectivity, participation, and conflict. These four terrains provide
the evaluative criteria in order to determine how political a given situation is. Each of
these terrains can be configured in more or less political ways, and my argument will
focus on explicating how reinvigorating politics means pushing each of these terrains in a
more political direction. At the same time, these terrains can be reshaped when placed
online in ways that can foster radically new political configurations, while at the same
time states and corporations are actively engaging the internet to reinforce depoliticalized
configurations of these four terrains.
Arendt and the other theorists mentioned above are often taken to task for
defending highly abstract notions of the political without looking into the specific content
of politics. By focusing on the four terrains of contestation, I seek to avoid this charge by
placing the theory of politics directly alongside specific fields of political articulation. By
arguing in favour of the value of politics while pointing to clear terrains where the tug of
war between politicization and depoliticization is fought I hope to both recover politics as
something worth fighting for by activists seeking to challenge the status quo, while doing
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so in a way that is grounded and points to specific sites of engagement that can be the
focus of actions demanding more politics.
The goal of each chapter will be to show how configuring that terrain to be more
political is superior to it being less political and how the internet can make this happen.
Beginning with the terrain of the political realm, the question of where politics happens
will be addressed. The question of where politics can occur is perhaps the most visible
tension between politics and anti-politics. Given that politics by its nature involves other
people, there must be spaces where people can go to meet up with others for political
purposes. If politics is to retain its specificity and not be dissolved into everyday power
relations, there must be specific sites designated as political. Questions of who can enter
such sites arise, as well as their nature. I argue that politics requires a free space open to
all and that the activities that are possible within a political realm must be meaningful
and not simply a Habermasian public sphere, which I position as a weak alternative to an
Arendtian political realm. When one wishes to engage politically but no such space
exists, exclusion and alienation are the result. The value of having an open and accessible
political realm is that it provides a common political referent. The explicit aim of an
antipolitical configuration of the political realm is to keep it as an elite and exclusive
space closed to public access so that the agenda of governance can more easily be
controlled and managed.
Considering the terrain of public space in the online context, the work of
Habermasian influenced theorists such as Castells, Dahlberg, and Papacharissi, argue that
the internet can be a public sphere while more left-wing critics such as Jodi Dean argue
that the internet has already been captured by a new regime of capitalism.50 I insert
myself into this debate by arguing that the concept of the public sphere these thinkers
start from, either positively or critically, is deeply flawed and that reasserting an
Arendtian political realm is a much more interesting discussion in terms of the impact of
the internet. The web presents a unique possibility to establish a political realm in a space
that is open, accessible, and durable. If politics is to be anything other than elites
representing alienated people, the ability to overcome traditional constraints of time and
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space is essential, thus necessitating the use of the internet for the creation of new
political realms.
The second terrain, subjectivity, relates to those who enter the political realm and
asks what it means to be someone who acts politically. Subjectivity can be configured in
ways that allow people to “be” political and thus interact with others politically on an
equal playing field, or it can become the means for anti-political disqualification. I
present political subjectivity as an empty universal, which makes being political
inherently wrapped up with being among one’s equals. The goal of the political realm is
to produce a space where political subjects interact with each other on an equal basis,
even if outside of politics these people are subject to gross inequalities. This argument in
favour of political subjectivity as a form of manufactured equality runs counter to
antipolitical arguments from the right, which argue politics is a matter of possessing
50 Manuel Castells, “The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global
Governance,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616, no. 1 (2008): 78–
93; Lincoln Dahlberg, “Computer-Mediated Communication and The Public Sphere: A Critical Analysis,”
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 7, no. 1 (October 1, 2001); Zizi Papacharissi, “The Virtual
Sphere: The Internet as a Public Sphere,” New Media & Society 4, no. 1 (February 1, 2002): 9–27; Jodi
Dean, “Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere,” Constellations 10, no. 1 (2003): 95–112.
qualifications, and from those on the left who argue that politics is a matter of inherent
inequalities. When people enter the political realm as political subjects, they expect to be
treated equally and have their speech and action considered and judged in the same
manner as everyone else. Arguments about politics being a matter of inherent inequalities
or differences (whether these are viewed positively or negatively) erase the productive
character of political subjectivity as generative of equality in favour of the reproduction
of anti-political inequality.
On the terrain of online subjectivity the debates have been much less nuanced and
two sides critical of political subjectivity have emerged in a false contest against each
other. On the one side are those who dismiss the importance of human actors in politics
and declare political progress to be an expression of advancing technology. Cohen and
Dickinson have advanced this position in mainstream media outlets, while Gray and
Hughes take such a techno-centric approach largely devoid of politics in their booklength
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works. On the other side are those who argue that online subjectivity cannot be trusted
because it is anonymous or somehow inauthentic, thus making real political engagements
seem less real. Against these positions I assert the importance of human agency as
subjectivity and the ability the internet provides to manufacture a space of equality where
offline identities, which are the source of prejudice, can be more easily set aside. Online
political subjects can operate according to the ideal of pseudonymity and thus shield
themselves from the anti-political tactic of having their identities used as a means to
disqualify their political speech.
What these political subjects do in the political realm brings about questions
surrounding the terrain of participation. How much political participation is necessary for
a political realm to be considered meaningful and for a political subject to be satisfied?
Anti-political arguments position participation as a kind of necessary burden and reduce
it to an activity one performs dutifully every few years. On the contrary, I argue that
participation means the ability to have an active role in public affairs in terms of both
debate and decision making. Maximizing the ability to participate enhances political
capacity and is superior to the alternative which posits representation as a substitute for
participation.
On the issue of online participation there is an overwhelming body of scholarship
on the concept of e-government, in which the internet is used to enhance the delivery of
public services to citizens, but I argue that this concept of government remains a topdown
disempowering assertion of authority which is anti-political. I position my intervention
with respect to how the internet can help revive notions of participatory democracy and
make it realistically viable in a way that even theorists of participatory democracy, such
as Benjamin Barber, fail to fully understand. The terrain of participation is already being
dramatically reshaped by the internet as it promotes interactivity, but as of yet the spread
of interactive culture to politics has been slow. The ability to take part in debates and
decisions online can make political participation vastly easier and open participation up
to everyone, rather than just professional politicians.
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Finally the terrain of conflict is positioned as the fundamental driver for the need
for politics in the first place. Without conflict and disagreement over which course of
action to take on any given decision, there of course would be no need for politics.
Everyone would simply agree on what needed to be done and an administrator acting on
that consensus would simply enact those decisions. Politics, however, involves a plurality
of different actors, meaning that everyone looks at an issue from a different perspective
which naturally generates conflict. Politics exists to find a way to non-violently make
decisions on contested matters where there is no one true objective solution in a way that
allows everyone to express their dissenting point of view. If conflict is positioned as a
problem to overcome in the name of generating consensus, as anti-political arguments
put it, then this amounts to an argument against politics itself. While it may be
superficially appealing to posit an ideal situation where everyone might be able to agree
with a course of action, such appeals to consensus radically attack the ability to disagree
and express dissent, which for many people is the driving factor for wanting to get
politically involved in the first place. The assertion and acceptance of conflict is
preferable to consensus precisely because conflict is required to both have politics in the
first place and to live in a pluralistic society.
With respect to the nature of how conflict operates online, the internet’s impact is
perhaps the most mixed and hardest to judge. Davis argues that the internet intensifies
conflict to the point that it becomes nothing but trolling and having a reasonable political
debate is impossible. On a similar register, Smith makes the case for online discussion
forums as nothing but a playground for bullies, which end up pushing out real political
discussion. On the other side of this debate are those who argue that the internet enables
feedback bubbles and echo chambers making it so that our experience online can be so
customized that we never encounter conflicting opinions. All of these extremes are
certainly present online and need to be accounted for in constructing an online space
dedicated to politics. Taken as a whole though, the ability to more easily spread
dissenting opinions as well as directly debate and engage with those whom one disagrees
with are the strong points of a conflictual web. A measured approach needs to be taken
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where the realities of trolling and cyberbullying, as well as closed communities and
censorship, are balanced out by the need for dissent and disagreement in political circles.
1.6 Theorizing an Online Politics
In the chapters that follow I will develop the argument that Arendt and the group of
contemporary thinkers mentioned earlier can provide a theoretical ground for
understanding a technologically enabled politics. By developing the four terrains of
contestation, I make explicit what is meant by politics and how these terrains are being
shaped by the internet and how political activists can shape the internet to make these
terrains more amenable to the reinvigoration of politics. It is my contention that by
situating politics online, in the sense of building an online political realm which is
populated by subjects who participate in conflict-driven debates, discussions, and
decisions, the theories of participatory, egalitarian, and agonistic democracy can be
practically implemented online in a way that can reinvigorate the very notion of politics.
If the existing post-political deadlock is to be broken, it requires more than elaborating or
popularizing the theories of contemporary political thinkers, but a means of
implementing these theories in a fashion that is realistic and possible. My primary aim is
to demonstrate how the internet can enable repoliticization of the four terrains of
contestation between politics and anti-politics. In a time when the political realm is
considered an exclusive space divorced from everyday life, we can build an online
political realm that is readily accessible at all times. In the face of the state’s continuing
operations to place people in identity boxes which mark them as unqualified to take part
in politics, we can enter online spaces which disrupt identity and qualification in a radical
way. When participation in public affairs is deemed too complicated or impossible for the
average person, we can go online and engage and participate in unofficial forms of
politics at the same time as millions of other people. When consensus has become a
reigning idyll and dissent is seen not as the basis of politics but something disruptive of
it, the internet provides outlets for the expression and organization of such dissent and
conflicting opinions. Considered together, the internet must be theorized as not simply
something helpful or useful for a reinvigorated politics, but as the very vector of the
reinvigoration of politics.
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In order to make this argument, the next chapter will deal with the terrain of the
political realm, and what having a political realm entails and how placing it online can be
beneficial. Against anti-political attempts to deny the need for any defined political space
and against the weaker arguments in favour of a public sphere, I position the political
realm as necessary for the commonality of politics. In order to be political, we need a
protected space to exercise our political freedom in a positive sense. By placing such a
political realm online, as chapter three argues, it both enables easy access to such a realm
and generates debates about the political status of the body. I argue that politics is not a
collection of mute bodies but a network of relationships based on the ideas and actions of
people, so that what matters is not physical proximity but the capacity to engage with
others in such a way to allow the debate and action essential to politics to flourish. The
chapter goes on to contrast the anti-political social realm with the political realm in terms
of various websites and seeks to distinguish between hardware and software layers
online, thus presenting a case against essentialist arguments that the internet as a whole is
this or that way.
Having presented how a political realm should operate, I then move to the
question of what it means to be political within such a space. Chapter four takes as its
starting point the renewed interest in theorizing political subjectivity as universal and
places it in contrast to anti-political attempts to assert a positive identity as part of a
social whole as a way of negating the universal negativity of the political subject. Given
that such theories of subjectivity do not posit a set of universal values that an individual
must adhere to in order to become a political subject but in fact aim for a stripping away
of all such properties to ensure universality is empty, the way people interact in online
political discussion forums naturally lends itself to this political subjectivization process.
While many have taken issue with the idea of a disembodied online political subjectivity,
I argue that such disembodiment and pseudonymity are the greatest strengths of the
online political subject. Such a discussion of online subjectivity leads to questions about
Arendt’s concept of subjectivity as revealing oneself in the context of the harsh light of
the public sphere might operate in an online context.
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Having presented how to become a political subject within a political realm,
chapter five is concerned with the activities of these subjects in the political realm. My
argument is that participation is one of the most basic requirements for politics, as the
ability to speak and be heard and to take part in action is essential for any attractive
understanding of politics. Anti-political strategies seek to deflect participation away from
the political realm or minimize it to extreme infrequency such as through voting for
representatives. Participation in society is framed anti-politically as having a job and
paying taxes, which promotes a form of political passivity in favour of economic activity.
The internet presents a challenge to these anti-political models by making political
participation extremely accessible, and thus undermining the classic argument against
participatory democracy that there is not enough time or space for any but a select few to
take part in politics. At the same time, however, the participatory aspect of the web is
already being heavily harnessed for economic participation thus making the terrain of
participation, especially online, already quite contested.
The sixth chapter will engage with the terrain of conflict, which arises when
political subjects participate in speech and action inside a political realm. I argue that
conflict is an inevitable outcome of the basic fact of human plurality and that it is the
basic driver of politics. Conflict is valuable and inevitable, and having a political outlet
for conflict is necessary in order to prevent it from escalating into violence. In this
manner politics is a kind of “talking cure” for conflict that allows people to voice their
disagreements and try to persuade others of their opinion without having to result to
violent force. The internet presents an interesting dilemma for theorists of agonistic
politics, as on the one hand it can facilitate political conflict as it is much easier to not
only find people with other points of view but to disagree with them without any fear of
the disagreement turning violent, while, on the other hand the internet can facilitate forms
of non-political conflict by making rude behaviour towards other people easier to get
away with. Thus questions arise about whether the internet allows anyone to become
Socrates questioning the views of everyone else and making society better by causing
people to think about their own beliefs, or whether it turns everyone into the Socrates as
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seen by his accusers who was simply a social nuisance engaged in a primitive form of
trolling which seeks to cause annoyance and conflict without a higher purpose.
Chapter 2 — The Political Realm
2.1 Introduction
The question of where politics can take place, is in many ways, the core problem of
conceptualizing an internet enabled politics. Yet, before we can question whether politics
can be located online, there are questions and disputes over where it can be located
offline. Under the conditions of modern government, and within popular and mainstream
political science, the location of politics is generally considered to be the exclusive
domain of legislative or executive authority. Those who make up such an exclusive
understanding of the political realm are there because they meet a qualification, either of
being elected or appointed. Before we can even begin to question whether politics might
be able to be placed online, the question of whether or not politics can occur outside of
these limited and exclusive institutions of official government must be considered. The
first task consists in asking what exactly the political realm consists of, and asking how it
might function outside of the official spaces of governmental authority. The answer
consists of conceiving of a political realm as an open space of freedom and appearance
for all. While there have been many conceptualizations of such a political realm, and I
take Hannah Arendt’s depiction as a theoretical basis, the implementation of full-fledged
political realms of this nature have either fallen far short of the theory or have lived
extremely brief lives. The internet, however, presents a new hope for a robust political
realm as it involves a new kind of space that is less prone to both forceful dismissals by
those who wish to constrain politics, and lacks the physical obstacles that have
challenged previous attempts to build an offline political realm.
The significance of the problem of the political realm, or rather lack of one, is
perhaps best demonstrated by how the Occupy movement and the activists in Tunisia and
Egypt attempted to create their own spaces of political circulation. These spaces were
meant to not just communicate a message of opposition to the government, but to enable
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and put into practice an alternative arrangement which to some degrees was meant to
establish a political realm open to all. The fact that the most common and effective means
of protesting the state comes from establishing alternative political spaces speaks to the
frustration that people feel from being structurally excluded from the official realm of
government proceedings. These movements are particularly interesting examples
precisely because they used the internet to expand their temporary political realms
beyond the site of physical protests and out into the global cyberspace. It then became
possible to enter the political space of these protests without actually physically being in
New York, Cairo, or Tunis, demonstrating the potential of the internet as a site of politics
to truly open up the political realm to anyone who wishes to take part.
The importance of the political realm relates to its publicity, as politics is an
inherently collective affair. Without a recognized place to go to engage with other people
and perform politics, any attempt to act politically becomes futile and isolated. If one
wishes to have a political impact, performing isolated actions that affect no one else
simply fail to be of any political relevance. The need to theorize a political realm runs
against the idea that everything is political, an idea which would attempt to imbue
isolated personal acts with political significance. As Jodi Dean points out, ethical acts
restricted to the scope of the personal have no political impact, and as she succinctly puts
it, “Goldman-Sachs doesn’t care if you raise chickens in your backyard.” Making a
difference politically requires engaging with other people, and the general problem today
is that no such common place for politics exists, with the official spaces extremely
exclusive and limited to politicians, and the unofficial spaces fragmented and lacking in
publicity.
Given the importance of having a public place in which to engage in politics, the
next two chapters make the argument that a robust political realm, inspired by the work
of Arendt, is amenable to being placed online, and, as such, the political realm as both an
idea and practice can be rejuvenated. Online space can enable a more open political
realm, as it need not be constrained by the traditional impediments of physical space and
time, and thus can challenge arguments which seek to limit access to the political realm
for allegedly practical reasons. The internet as a space is inherently everywhere,
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especially with the continued proliferation of wireless and cellular networks, which can
make it practically available in a way that is impossible with offline space. Arendt’s
theorization of the political realm as a web of relations, as a realm of “whos” rather than
“whats,” and as not requiring a fixed physical space are interpreted as providing a
theoretical justification for performing politics online.
When it comes to placing notions of a strong political realm online, there is very
little scholarly literature that approaches this issue from a theoretical point of view. While
Saco’s 2002 book Cybering Democracy makes an admirable attempt to theorize online
space in terms of Arendt’s idea of the political realm, it is in many ways an outlier. In
fact, the bulk of scholarship that draws on Arendt or argues for a robust political realm
tends to be somewhat skeptical of the internet, as evidenced by the comments of
Benjamin Barber in relation to the internet and the work of Darin Barney who uses
Arendt to argue against a technological political realm. The majority of the scholarship
on the potential of the internet as a site for politics focuses on Habermasian influenced
concepts of a public sphere, which are prominent among communications theorists who
see the internet less as a space for political action and more of a medium of
communicating political views, opinions, and results. Scholars of deliberative democracy
have taken an early interest in the internet, with Dahlberg, Papacharissi, Bohman, and
Castells advocating the use of the web to rekindle the idea of public deliberation on
political matters. While the appreciation of the potential of the internet among this group
of theorists is commendable, the idea of a deliberative public sphere which they advance
is somewhat weak compared to the active and engaged political realm which I advocate.
In this sense this group of theorists represent both a source for interesting research on
online politics and a recurring foe against which I continually position my ideas, not just
in this chapter but in later ones as well.
In order to make the case for an online political realm, I first make a theoretical
argument in favour of the concept of a strong political realm and place it in contrast to
weaker versions of the public sphere as promoted by the advocates of deliberative
democracy. I argue that the political realm must be seen as a space of positive freedom,
and that conceptions of politics that cast it as merely a legal protection for negative
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liberties fail to provide any actual place in which to engage in political activities. The
political realm is also a space of appearance, a place where individuals can reveal
themselves publicly and leave a lasting impact, an idea that becomes complicated when
applied to the internet. In the context of the public realm as a web of relations, I next
propose a three layer model to depict the political realm as not simply a physical space
but as made up of a physical base, a set of rules or regulations that ensure the space is
constructed as political, and on top and most importantly, a layer of people who enter the
space to engage politically. In the following sections I then look into the issues of the
permanence and durability of the political realm, by looking at the debate between
Arendt, who argues that the political realm must be durable and permanent in order to
remember great deeds and for politics to have a lasting effect, and Jacques Rancière, who
argues that political realms are always temporary and protest-oriented. I conclude the first
the chapter by looking at Arendt’s concept of the social realm as an anti-political
replacement for both the political realm and the private realm, and arguing that the social
is the dominant form of contemporary life.
In chapter three I consider how the political realm as theorized in the second
chapter would operate online. I examine what advantages might be found by placing the
political realm online and what potential pitfalls it may encounter from its digitization.
The three layers of the political realm are transformed to the hardware, software, and
wetware of the internet, finding that the physical hardware of the internet is less of a
determining factor for political space as it was offline, and that the software layer online
is much more malleable than its offline equivalent of a constitution. I then look at issues
of durability and commonality online, as the digitization of politics is seen by some as
making politics more transitory and less solid, while others argue that the internet is too
fragmented and isolated to develop the needed publicity to make it into a proper political
realm. After addressing these arguments, I look at two dominant ways the internet gets
theorized as an extension of the social realm, leading to arguments that it is unsuitable for
a robust political realm. Finally, in the context of recent activist movements, the role of
social networks is investigated as a possible seed for future online political realms. Such
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social networking sites are ultimately found to be lacking due to their primary purpose as
social, which causes too many problems for their use as political networks.
2.2 Why A Political Realm?
The desire to act politically requires the presence of other people in order to be activated.
The political realm, as a general concept, is the place where people go to meet with
others who wish to engage in the activity of politics. Although this notion of the political
realm as the place where politics occurs may sound simplistic or even tautological, it
challenges recent claims that “everything is political,” which downplay not only the
uniqueness of political action, but also the necessity for a specifically defined political
space. Yet, this claim that everything is “political” threatens to dissolve politics into the
mundane routine of everyday life. Without access to a political realm, people are unable
to engage with each other, and political action becomes impossible. Politics is not about
routine and normalcy but is linked to the creation of the new. Political action, as Arendt
describes it, is boundless and breaks down barriers. Politics is linked to Arendt’s concept
of natality, which is the ability to create something new which was previously politically
unthinkable. Politics as the ability to create something new, rather than as rote
administration or statecraft, is increasingly being theorized if not in explicitly Arendtian
terms, then at least in the spirit she describes it.
The establishment of a political realm can both create stability and enhance the
capacity for change. Having a common stage for political speech and action can
“multiply the occasions to win ‘immortal fame,’ that is, to multiply the chances for
everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique
distinctness.”66 One can distinguish oneself through a great deed that ushers in significant
changes, or simply through the expression of one’s own opinions in public debate. The
ability to reveal ourselves as unique is a function of the plurality of politics which makes
the political realm inherently agonistic, as it provides a space to play out conflict in a
non-violent manner. In distinguishing ourselves, we reveal who we are, and thus the
political realm is also a space of appearance where we reveal our unique perspective to
others, meaning a political realm is needed to disclose our subjectivity to the world. The
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political realm is also a space of freedom where unique subjects can exercise their
positive freedom (as opposed to the passivity of negative liberty), which makes the
political realm the site of participation. Without a place to exercise the freedom to
participate and appear politically, politics itself becomes displaced, as it is inherently a
collective affair and cannot be performed by isolated individuals.
The primary need for a political realm lies in its commonality. Action in the
political sense involves other people, as to live outside of politics requires one to be
either a beast or a god, as Aristotle put it.67 The content of politics is the affairs of people
living together; an isolated person has no need for politics, because no conflicts of
opinion on the best course of action will arise. The political realm, however, is a world of
human creation and does not arise naturally just because people live in close proximity.
In this sense politics is not “natural,” as it does not simply occur automatically, but
requires conscious effort to build a realm where decisions can ideally be debated equally
by all. Structures of force which rely on the logic of command and obey, or those which
are modelled on the relation of the stronger to the weaker are not political and are not
necessarily even human.68 Hierarchies of natural ability or the force of the stronger are
Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2007); Žižek, The Ticklish Subject; Kalyvas, Democracy and the
Politics of the Extraordinary.
66 Arendt, The Human Condition, 197.
67 Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 25.
68 Arendt, The Human Condition, 22–23.
found throughout the animal world, but the construction of a world of equality is a
political and specifically human invention.
Against the naturalistic attempts to ground politics in the structure of the family,
Arendt emphasizes that the political realm provides a second public life beyond one’s
private family life. This is a point that both Arendt and Jacques Rancière emphasize, in
that the political realm in ancient Athens arose precisely from the reforms of Cleisthenes
which abolished the organized units based on kinship that had formed the pre-democracy
basis of Athenian government. Arendt’s focus on the political realm as an artificial
construction of human activity is supported by Rancière’s insistence that the political
realm must be invented by abolishing the natural divisions of family, tribe, or wealth in
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favour of wholly artificial divisions drawn by the people. Rancière even goes so far as to
argue that this is the defining characteristic of political democracy: that it “consists above
all in the act of revoking the law of birth and that of wealth; in affirming the pure
contingency whereby individuals and populations come to find themselves in this or that
place; in the attempt to build a common world on the basis of that sole contingency.”
The artificially constructed common world of the political realm depends on the
plurality of perspectives offered by those who take part. In both Arendt and Rancière’s
conceptions, there is no natural ground for anyone to claim rulership, thus decisions on
public affairs should remain open to anyone and everyone. The commonality of the
political realm is what guarantees the reality of the world, as despite the plurality of
different opinions, they are all focused on a common object. In this sense, the political
realm brings people together, but also separates them. When people come together to
engage in politics the content of their speech and action relates to the objects held in
common between them. Arendt describes the political realm as akin to a table: it provides
a common object which people gather around, but also provides a means of separation so
that the people are not directly exposed to each other. In a similar manner, Rancière
describes political being-together as a being-between, in that political action can happen
within the political realm, not only among those who view the same object from a
different perspective, but also between worlds. Those who are denied access to the
political realm can come together to open a dispute about the commonality of the
political realm itself. Given that such a concept of the political realm does not rely on the
foundational beliefs of god, superiority of birth, or money as the measure of all things,
there is no objective measure to appeal to in order to decide political matters. Politics
exists precisely because no objective measure can be appealed to in order to make
decisions. The constant offering of different opinions on controversial matters for which
there is no obvious single solution is what continues to guarantee the reality of the public
realm, a reality which cannot exist in private and requires other people for confirmation.
By having a collective place where people can go to publicly present their view of
the world to others, the political realm is common but also individualizing. To show who
one really is by presenting one’s unique perspective on the world allows the political
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actor to distinguish him or herself as a unique individual. Without the political realm as a
space of appearance which provides a space to excel and prove oneself as different from
others, we are thrown into a faceless mass. Too often the desire to distinguish oneself
turns into a futile attempt to accumulate wealth when the political realm is lacking, often
with harmful consequences for the public good as economic inequality becomes
valourized. To distinguish oneself as a unique individual requires a realm of equals, as
hierarchical structures exclude the majority from appearing politically, forcing them into
the shadows.
The political realm as a space where people can distinguish themselves means
that it is a space of conflict and dissensus, not only between each other and their
conflicting opinions but on a structural level, in terms of who gets to enter the political
realm, what their status is, and what topics can be discussed. In this sense, Rancière’s
notion of politics as disrupting the harmony of hierarchically assigned places
complements
Arendt’s concept of the political sphere. The political realm is never strictly separate or
disconnected from the private or social spheres, as the political realm will never be pure
in the sense that it has no exclusions. Issues and actors will inevitably need to initiate
political acts to overcome unjust barriers that prevent entrance into the political realm.
Arendt’s desire to keep politics pure and clearly separate from the other realms of life has
the tendency to depopulate “the political stage by sweeping aside its always-ambiguous
actors.” While Rancière overstates his case against Arendt by arguing that her desire for
political purity results in her concept of the political realm being nothing more than the
exercise of state power, Arendt’s concern is directed more toward what happens inside
the political realm than toward those who may need to act politically to overcome
unnecessary barriers. In her treatment of the poor with regards to the French Revolution
for example, she argues that the problem of poverty is simply non-political, and could not
be solved by the political “process of decision and persuasion.” As Bonnie Honig points
out, Arendt argues that the boundless nature of political action often surprised its actors,
opening the possibility that contemporary struggles related to who might be included
within the political realm might have surprised Arendt as well.
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By opening the boundaries of the political realm to dispute and dissensus, I do not
mean to challenge the distinctness of the necessity for politics to have its own space, but
only to express dissatisfaction with Arendt’s more limited notion of the political realm,
which would, for example, exclude economics as a political concern. In addition to a
common political realm where actors can distinguish themselves as unique individuals in
the Arendtian sense, there can be ad hoc political realms which open up sites of dissensus
in the Rancièrian sense. Rancière’s political realm arises in the gap between formal
declarations of rights and the polemic about their verification, and thus the political realm
for Rancière is a space of verifying and exercising the freedoms guaranteed by
constitutional frameworks. While, for Arendt, the political actor is already among his or
her peers and distinguishes him or herself with great speeches and deeds undertaken with
and against others, for Rancière the political actor distinguishes him or herself as a
unique individual by testing the ability to act as an Arendtian actor. If that ability cannot
be properly exercised, a dispute is opened which allows individuals to perform great
deeds in the form of testing and practicing a right which is formally guaranteed but not
being applied. In this sense, someone such as Rosa Parks would be the quintessential
Rancièrian political actor who distinguishes herself by testing and enacting equality. Both
of these aspects are essential to a proper conception of the political realm, and despite the
disagreement between Rancière and Arendt, I will continue to hold their concepts of the
political realm as complementary, as one requires the other to properly function.
The political realm as a site of dissensus and agonistic contest between
individuals attempting to distinguish themselves puts it at odds with the more
conventional and popular account of the public sphere developed by Jurgen Habermas.
Although Habermas draws some inspiration from Arendt, his version of the public sphere
posits it as a layer between the state and the private realm where individuals come
together to form consensus views, which are meant to rationalize the workings of the
government. From Arendt, Habermas takes the idea of the political realm as being about
the power of speech and action rather than the instrumental application of force, but
Habermas downplays the agonistic element in Arendt’s account of the political realm. As
a result, Habermas focuses on consensus, which paints the public sphere as less of a
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political realm, and more of a means of legitimizing representative government by
arguing that if the public has a means to deliberate and come to a consensus,
representatives will have to act in the public interest. Setting aside problems with the idea
of consensus (which will be dealt with in the chapter on conflict), this version of the
public sphere eliminates its essential political characteristics as being a space of dispute,
decision, appearance, and freedom. Instead the public realm is reduced to a
communicative tool through which people relay their moods and interests to the
authorities, leaving politics proper still out of the reach of the overwhelming majority.
In an attempt to rescue Habermas from himself, Nancy Fraser argues that rather
than having one big consensual public sphere, we should instead allow for multiple
subaltern publics. Her goal is to allow minority groups to gather together who otherwise
might be pushed outside of the public realm altogether through the imposition of
consensus. On the surface there is nothing wrong with multiple public spheres, as
different groups may set up different sites of protest outside of an official public sphere
for example, but if a political realm is going to be anything more than simply a tool to
communicate the desires of various publics to the rulers, it needs to be common and
universal. Without a single universal political realm, multiple public spheres would lose
their agonistic and pluralist aspect and devolve into interest or identity groups engaged in
interest lobbying. Fraser’s concept of multiple public spheres only works so long as these
remain devices of communication, as multiple overlapping political realms arriving at
decisions and acting on issues at the same time would only be redundant, as these
competing spheres would eventually come into conflict with each other, establishing a
common realm of dispute anyway.
Thanks in part to the popularity of Habermas’s account of the public sphere and
Habermasian inspired deliberative democracy, the idea of a public political realm has not
been without its critics. Especially among postmodernists such as Foucault, Lyotard, and
Deleuze, the idea of the public realm has been painted as an attempt to revive an archaic
notion, and is positioned as suffering from all the typical deficiencies of Enlightenment
political thought against which postmodernism reacts. As Dana Villa points out, however,
most of these critiques are aimed more toward Habermas’s public sphere and that
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Arendt’s concept of the political realm is actually sympathetic to many of these critiques.
Lyotard, for instance, sees Habermas’s goal of forming a rational general will as
normalizing and destructive of plurality, a concern voiced numerous times by Arendt in
her critique of consensus formation as flattening out of action into routine behaviour
which denies the basic human condition of plurality. A political realm in no way needs to
be, or ever should be, a matter of forming general wills, but in Lyotard’s critique of the
concept he ends up going too far the other way, throwing out the commonality and
universality that is necessarily part of the political realm, and thus destroys politics from
the other end. An Arendtian political realm, with corrections from Rancière, provides a
middle ground in which politics is both plural and involves unique individuals, while at
the same time maintains a common world where unique individuals act in concert and
discuss the world of things that lay between them. This version of the political realm
eliminates both the anti-political impulse to reduce politics to rigid governance, as well as
the anti-political attempt to deny that people with different backgrounds and opinions can
communicate politically.
2.3 The Political Realm as a Space of Freedom
Most modern political thought and practice in the liberal tradition tends to treat freedom
as something private and individual, leading to government being seen as a realm not of
politics but of necessary coercion from which individuals need freedom from. This
antipolitical attitude is the root of much of the common perception that politics is a realm
of oppression, dirty tricks, and underhanded activity whose scope must be limited in
order for individuals to be free. Hobbes is the origin of much of this tradition, in that he
reverses the ancient conception of freedom being located in the public political realm and
replaces it with a conception of negative liberty in the private realm which is ensured by
an all-powerful government able to keep everyone “in awe” and thus establish a
Weberian monopoly on the use of force. Locke then takes Hobbes’s model and argues
that private liberty requires not just protection against others, but protection against the
government itself and in the process throws out any concept of positive freedom in
favour of negative liberty.
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What these liberal conceptions of negative liberty miss is the necessity of having
a free space to exercise and test the positive and political aspects of freedom. As JeanLuc
Nancy argues in interpreting Arendt, before freedom can be considered an internal
disposition it requires an outward “free space of movements and meetings” in the
political sense. The issue of freedom of speech provides an example of how treating
freedom solely in terms of negative liberties has problematic political consequences.
Freedom of speech as a negative liberty simply means that one can make any comment
one wishes without having to worry about possible legal repercussions or government
censorship. Having the legal right to free speech, however, does not mean that one has
the ability to actually use that speech for what it was intended for, namely political
purposes. If no one hears what one has to say, as is often the case when we lack a proper
common political realm, then one’s speech is meaningless and inconsequential. Since
politics is inherently collective, speaking publicly without having anyone listen is not
very different from someone who lives in North Korea going out into an isolated forest
and telling a squirrel how much he or she dislikes Kim Jong-Un. What is needed is a
political realm where people gather so that the right to speak can be exercised and
practiced in a positive sense. This is one of the key aspects of a political realm that makes
the idea so meaningful: providing a space to exercise freedom in the positive sense.
Positive freedom is unlike negative liberty in that one cannot simply hold
freedom, like one can hold a right. Negative liberties are guarantees against others doing
something to you, and thus require no action on your part. Freedom by contrast is
associated with activity and thus has an ontological character. Thus when Arendt
describes the political realm as the space of freedom, it is the place where people can go
to exercise freedom and thus be free. By contrast, the negative liberty of the private realm
is not the same as being free in the positive sense, as negative liberties do not need to be
practiced and exercised. The private realm is thus the realm of life itself, which is
privative of freedom, yet at the same time is a space of liberty. So while it can seem like
Arendt sometimes paints the private realm in a poor light, it is utterly necessary for a
political realm as it is the space that guarantees our negative liberties and thus provides
safety against the unpredictability and boundless nature of the political realm. What the
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liberal tradition ignores is that positive freedom and negative liberty must go together, for
liberty without freedom is depoliticized bare life, and freedom without liberty can place
one’s private life in jeopardy.
The political realm as a space of freedom also means that it is a space of equality.
In so far as the political realm must always involve a plurality of actors, then freedom is
shared, making it “equal to equality.” The political realm as one of shared freedom is a
space where participants lack the qualification or authority to rule others, and at the same
time others lack the authority or qualification to rule over them.95 But this notion of the
political as a realm of freedom has come under critique from, most notably, Foucault and
his interpreters as it is argued that the pervasiveness of power relations means that there
can be no truly uncoerced realm of free speech and action. As Villa argues, however,
Foucault’s account of the rise of disciplinary power in the modern age and the state’s
increasing concern with population and the visibility of bodies mirrors Arendt’s depiction
of the rise of the social as undermining both the public and the private.97 Rancière as well
links his concept of the police, which is the anti-political order of state and capital, to
Foucault’s concept of biopower, but, like with Arendt, Rancière reserves the possibility
for outbreaks of politics to generate political realms and disrupt the disciplinary order of
biopower. So long as it is recognized that the political realm will always be subject to the
sorts of intrusions of anti-political inequality that Foucault analyzes, then the political
realm need not be dismissed entirely if a self-reflexive attitude can be maintained.
Equality and freedom must be continually practiced and tested to stave off such
intrusions.
A further question about the status of freedom in the political realm is raised by
Fraser who questions the link between economic and political freedom and equality.
Commenting on Habermas’s concept of the public realm, she argues that he simply
brackets away issues of economic inequality and unfreedom even though those
differences could affect the status of the speech situation, as someone from a lower class
may feel the need to unnecessarily defer to someone from the upper class, or that people
from lower classes may lack the proper access to the public realm in the first place. These
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are concerns which apply to the more robust concept of the political realm being
advanced here, and are a common point of critique against Arendt who saw the problem
of economic inequality as a thoroughly non-political issue. While the first response to
Fraser’s problematic would be to point to the internet as a technical solution, as will be
argued later, there is also something of a chicken and egg problem here. Fraser states that
some degree of economic equality is necessary in order to have a proper political realm,
but how does one achieve more economic equality if not through political action? In this
sense one could just as easily argue that economic equality requires some measure of
political freedom to begin with, as politically oppressed people certainly are not going to
be able to win economic advances without some measure of political power to begin
with. On this issue Arendt’s decoupling of political and economic equality is severely
problematic, as the two elements tend to be intertwined as more of one sets the stage for
more of the other, but, unlike Fraser’s claim, it is not evident that either economic or
political freedom is a prerequisite for the other, as they tend to operate in tandem.
2.4 The Political Realm as a Space of Appearance
One of the key differences between an Arendtian influenced political realm and a
Habermasian influenced public sphere is that the political realm is not merely about the
generation of consensus and legitimization but is a space where individuals can reveal
themselves as unique subjects. Although Habermas wants to argue against notions of
instrumental rationality, his public sphere still has somewhat of an instrumental character
in that its purpose is rationalizing the workings of the government through providing a
space where the public can develop opinions meant to inform the government, thus
leaving them feeling that the government is legitimate in that it listens to their concerns.
By contrast, the political realm has more of a process character in which the performance
of politics is an end in itself. In this way, the ability for people to enter the public realm
and differentiate themselves from others through political speech and action makes
having a political realm necessary in itself, regardless of the outcome of such speech and
action.
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Politics as a space of appearance is much like the performing arts in that it
requires publicity. A theatrical performance witnessed by no one leaves no impact on the
world, in the same way as someone giving a political speech which no one hears has no
effect. The political realm is both collectivizing and individualizing, it brings people
together into a common world but then allows each individual to display themselves as
unique.101 Although the world of the political realm is held in common, each of us looks
at it from our own subjective position, and thus speech and action are used to reveal
ourselves to others and also distinguish us from them. As Arendt notes, what appears in
public is not our “mere bodily existence” as physical objects, but our unique opinions and
perspectives. While the disclosure of the political subject relates to the world of objects
that are held in common, these common objects or political issues form a political realm
only insofar as they act as mediators of human action. When an issue such as the
distribution of wealth and the influence of financial corporations on the government
becomes a political issue, such as during the Occupy Wall Street movement, what matters
for the creation of a political realm is that these were issues which brought people
together (and separated them in disagreement) in political speech and action. The actual
location of Wall Street or Zuccotti Park did not create the political realm, but the actions
of the people who shared these places as sites of political concern and contention did.
The political realm is a kind of “in-betweeness” which is intangible but “no less
real than the world of things we visibly have in common.” The political realm need not
be an actual location where people can literally show their physical bodies, such as a
parliament or a protest site, but instead is a web of relations which
is no less bound to the objective world of things than speech is to the existence of
a living body, but the relationship is not like that of a façade or, in Marxian
terminology, of an essentially superfluous superstructure affixed to the useful
structure of the building itself.
Even though the space of appearance allows us to reveal ourselves in speech and action
through the creation of stories, relationships, and changes to the structure of society, the
political realm as an intangible connection between people is as real as any other aspect
of society. The intangibility of the political realm as a web of relationships means it is not
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tied to any specific location, and thus the common complaint that protesters need to run
for office if they want to engage in politics has no grounding, as clearly a protest can
become a temporary political realm in its construction of a web of relationships.
The political realm as a space of appearance can often take on a transitory quality
as it comes into being through the speech and action of people and, as a result, can
disappear with the dispersal of a people gathered collectively or with the halting of their
action. In this sense the political realm is a socially produced space in the way described
by Henri Lefebvre, as it is only ever the product of human action. The establishment of
official spaces of politics are then no guarantee that politics will in fact occur within
those spaces, as is evident in so much of the administrative aspect of modern government
which often take on an anti-political quality. Economist Alan S. Blinder is perhaps the
most honest representative of this position as he openly argues in favour of depoliticizing
parliaments and congresses in favour of more decision making authority for independent
technocratic and economically oriented bodies. For Blinder the goal is to maintain
official political spaces, but then completely strip them of any capacity to do anything
political by adopting the model of the independent central bank for more and more
aspects of public policy decisions.
The political realm as a space of appearance means it most often takes the form as
a disruption, or as a redistribution of the sensible as Rancière puts it. To appear and
reveal oneself as a unique subject means that the political realm as a space of appearance
is a space “to render visible what had not been, and to make heard as speakers those who
had been perceived as mere noisy animals.”109 In Rancière’s twist on the political as
appearance, it becomes a place where people can demonstrate and test their equality, to
show not only who they uniquely are by publicly arguing their positions, but to show that
they are in fact capable of speaking politically in the first place. Rancière once again
provides a useful addition to Arendt’s politics of appearance, as Rancière emphasizes the
political nature of the attempts of the excluded to appear as political beings in the first
place. While Arendt often takes exclusions as a simple fact, Rancière argues that
“politics is about the very existence of a common sphere, the rules of functioning of that
sphere, the count of the objects that belong to it and the subjects who are able to deal
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with it. Politics is about the configuration of the space of politics”.111 Before one can
reveal oneself as an individual and thus distinguish oneself from others by presenting
one’s unique opinions publicly, one must be able to win the ability to appear and be heard
in the first place.
2.5 The Web of Relations and the Three Layer Model of the
Political Realm
What sustains the reality and interconnectedness of the political realm is not bodies
assembled in a single place but the web of relations that is generated by political speech
and action. The political realm is generated from people coming together to speak and act
politically so that “its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no
matter where they happen to be.” Zuccotti Park became a political realm because people
used it as a meeting space to come together in political speech and action, even though
normally it is a rather bland concrete park with no political purpose. At the same time, an
officially designated political space in which people do not come together in speech and
action is not automatically political because it has been labelled as such. As Benhabib
argues, an Arendtian political realm “is not a space in any topographical or institutional
sense: a town hall or a city square where people do not ‘act in concert’ is not a public
space in this Arendtian sense.” The web of relations formed by people acting together
politically has the power to create political spaces.
Having a determined location where people can meet, as was the case with Tahrir
Square for the Egyptian activists during the Arab Spring or Zuccotti Park for Occupy
Wall Street, enables the concentration of energy needed for politics. While this location
need not be a literal physical location, as web sites function in a similar manner, it does
create boundaries so we know where to go to be political. Emphasizing the
unpredictability and boundlessness of political action, Arendt also argues in favour of the
importance of constitutions as providing the framework to establish a positive space of
freedom in the form of a political realm.115 The political realm can be described as having
three layers, with the action of the people on the top being the most important, followed
by a framework below of either formal law (such as in a constitution) or informal rules
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(which often determine how decisions are made during a protest), and finally at the
bottom layer a location where people go to act politically.
While Arendt emphasizes that the bottom two layers are not part of the action of
politics, they can be considered as constitutive of the political realm itself. Before politics
can happen, “a definite space had to be secured and a structure built where all subsequent
actions could take place, the space being the public realm of the polis and its structure the
law”. Thus the bottom two layers have a pre-political nature, but are still part of the
structure of the actual political realm. As Christian Volk points out, the law has the
quality of structuring the process of politics in a way that should facilitate the formation
of political relationships. Politics needs a human artifice to house it, as without this
common political realm, “human affairs would be as floating, as futile and vain, as the
wanderings of nomad tribes.” Even though Arendt is keen to emphasize that the political
realm is not a physical location but the organization of people acting together, as
demonstrated by her comment that it was not Athens but the Athenians who were the
polis, political action does need a common space, otherwise it devolves into the futile
attempts to engage in politics alone. By describing the political realm as having three
layers, it becomes apparent that a defined space, rules, and the activity of people are all
necessary. A space with no people cannot be political, just as a people with no place to
act politically will not be able to sustain their activity. At the same time, frameworks of
rules are required to keep politics bounded and ensure equality and freedom are
maintained.
2.6 Immortality and the Political Realm
The two base layers, which consist of a location and a framework of rules for conducting
politics, are not political in themselves but attempt to provide some stability,
commonality, and permanence to the realm of the political. Since the web of relations
established by collective action that constitutes the reality of the political realm is often
temporary and transitory, these two lower layers can help make politics more permanent
and its effects more durable. As a space of appearance where people can distinguish and
reveal who they really are, the political realm serves as a space where people can not
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only be recognized in their lifetime but into the future as well. The publicness of the
political realm was meant to protect against the futility of individual life in which one
simply lives and dies without the ability to leave some lasting trace of one’s existence on
the world.
The desire to leave behind a trace of one’s life amounts to an attempt to manufacture
some degree of immortality, which was to be guaranteed by the permanence of the
collective memory of the public realm. The political realm is the means by which people
can satisfy the desire to have their uniqueness recognized by others and to leave some
lasting trace on the world, things which are extremely difficult to do away from the
presence of others. By creating a permanent and durable public space for politics,
political speech and action would become deeds which affected everyone’s common
existence, and thus become real, memorable, and lasting.
Given the intangibility of political action and the web of relations they form
which constitute the most important layer of the political realm, there has been a
tendency for political spaces to be transitory, prompting the question of durability.
Temporary political spaces, such as Tahrir Square or Zuccotti Park, tend to pop up
sporadically but then fade out just as surprisingly as they came into existence. The
outburst of political power that overthrew the Egyptian dictator in 2011 and generated
intense spaces of politics both online and out in the street already seem to be actions from
a distant time as an election resulted in a win for Islamists who were subsequently
removed by the military. The same sort of fading of political energy occurred near the
end of the surge of protests from 1999 to 2001 surrounding the issue of the globalization
of neoliberal economics. While the protests in various cities around the world against the
World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund generated intense but
temporary political realms, they eventually lost their energy as activists tried and failed to
conceive of ways to transform their activism from a situation of transitive reaction to one
of more permanent pro-action.
These problems of how to transform vibrant but temporary political spaces into
something more lasting are not new, as they have been problems for every outbreak of
oppositional politics and every revolution throughout history. According to Arendt, the
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goal of revolution is to establish a new constitution which provides a lasting framework
of how politics is to be conducted. The problem is that there is a tendency in the
establishment of new constitutional orders to throw out any kind of concept of a positive
right to politics in favour of a framework of negative liberties which ends up reducing
politics to parliamentary democracy, destroying its radical capabilities. As some critics
have argued, this reversion to minimally political parliamentary democracy is the
inevitable outcome of Arendt’s constitutionalism, even if she herself found parliamentary
democracy problematic. This lack of political space open to the people was the
fundamental problem of the American constitution which Arendt otherwise admired and
which continues to be a problem in countries such as Egypt where an old regime was
overthrown and replaced with another form of governance which still negated the
political space of the people which had circulated during the revolution.
In contrast to Arendt, for Rancière the tension between the political realm as a
contingent construction of the people and the necessity of permanence to give political
action lasting effect and continuity is less of a problem. Rancière essentially agrees with
Arendt’s argument about the political need for a world based on common sense which
emphasizes a shared appearance and visibility, but differs in terms of the temporality of
political space. In Rancière’s view, politics primarily concerns attempts to rearrange and
redistribute this sensible world, thus making politics inherently aesthetic. In terms of the
political realm, what Rancière is saying is that politics is primarily concerned with
rearranging and disrupting established spaces, and, as such, politics takes on a character
of continuous aesthetic reordering and, therefore, tends to have a reactive character.
Politics is like remodelling a house, and involves moving furniture around and even
tearing down walls and adding additions, but in Rancière’s analysis, the house is always
owned by the anti-political established order, and the political activists doing the
remodelling are akin to renters acting without the landlord’s permission. The Arendtian
question of how to create political spaces that are not simply a matter of rearranging the
master’s house but which actually carve out a piece of that house to establish a newly
ordered permanent political realm is one which Rancière is not interested in, and this is a
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major weakness; the same weakness that has plagued political activists and
revolutionaries alike for centuries.
While I share Rancière’s skepticism of transformative utopian projects which only
seek to eliminate politics by positing the end of all conflict and disagreement, there is no
reason to be similarly skeptical of attempts to establish a more permanent common space
which is understood as political and can be a focal point for dissensus rather than utopian
forms of consensus. While the WTO and IMF protests of 1999 to 2001 certainly carved
out political spaces in a Rancièrian manner by transforming international meetings of
technocrats into a space of dissensus and disagreement, these activists eventually burned
out on the model of chasing around international finance meetings and, unable to find a
focal point for their newly activated political energies at home, the movement itself faded
away. While these activists certainly had other and wider interests outside of opposing the
WTO or IMF, they had trouble finding a place for their activism outside of the temporary
spaces of protest. The question was constantly asked within activist circles of how to
carry over the momentum and energy generated during a protest into an ongoing
movement for political change. After activists travelled home from a site of protest,
whether it was Seattle in 1999 or Quebec City in 2001, there was a sense of frustration
due to the lack of outlet to exercise their political energies and desire to get involved.
Viewing the political realm as a transitory and temporary phenomenon which
occasionally and spontaneously arises to effect a redistribution of the sensible is
fundamentally unsatisfying, even if it does result in positive changes. The protests in
Seattle were successful in that they transformed the WTO from an obscure international
organization into a matter of public debate and arguably pushed later developments in
which the WTO became more sensitive to environmental and ethical concerns. The
protests in Quebec City against the Free Trade Area of the Americas were successful in
raising vast public awareness and certainly contributed to the agreement being scrapped.
Yet even as these movements had a measure of success in bringing change, they still
suffered from what Arendt calls the “lost treasure of revolutionary periods”, in which
activists became empowered as individuals by participating in intense political activity
only to later become melancholic once the space for politics had faded away. There is a
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feeling that something profound is lost when temporary sites of politics disappear. In
critiquing Rancière’s definition of politics as redistribution and rearranging without
transcending the given order, Žižek argues that he remains within Lacan’s discourse of
the hysteric. While the hysteric is constantly questioning and challenging the authority of
the master, and thus is politically subversive, the hysteric remains within the limits of the
master’s authority and does not actually seek to transcend that authority. Hewlett levels a
similar critique at Rancière, arguing that since Rancière sees politics as always a reaction
against the status quo and can never become it, the failure of radical politics is built into
its very definition and no sustained political democracy is possible.
Herein lays the paradox of the political realm: as a creation of the energy and
vitality of people engaging in politics it tends to be temporary, as attempting to solidify
this produced space into something more permanent has a tendency to ossify it into an
empty institution devoid of the energy of the people. The bottom two layers of an actual
place and constitution become what people call politics, and consequently the action of
the people is lost. So either we can accept Rancière’s argument that the anti-political
police logic is the dominant norm, and politics is an exceptional occurrence of dissensus
which generates temporary heterotopias of alternate orderings which then lead to
rearrangements of policed space, or we can embrace the circular paradox and try to
establish some sort of political realm which has the character of institutional permanence
while being fully aware of the tendency for the bottom two layers to constrict and drain
away the energy of the people.
While there is no way to resolve the paradox completely, as permanent space will
always tend to ossify and become rigid as political energies cannot always be maintained,
viewing new political spaces as always open to contestation can be useful in dealing with
the paradox. We should aim to create political space with a lasting permanence but also
be open to the fact that this political space is not final and may very well depoliticize,
necessitating constant re-orderings and redistributions. While the walls of the polis did
not define Athenian politics, they did help the Athenians who were the content of politics
know where to go to be political. To avoid the problem of these walls getting thicker and
thicker with time, the boundlessness of political action should be emphasized, along with
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a self-reflexive attitude in which the boundaries of political space are just as much a
matter of political dispute as other non-boundary related issues that are usually deemed to
be the content of politics. A more permanent political realm must always be subject to
Rancièrian dissensus and reordering in an attempt to stave off the incremental creep of
rigidity.
2.7 The Social Realm
In arguing what a political realm entails and why it is needed, the implication is that such
a realm does not easily or obviously exist. As alluded to with reference to the protest
movements, examples of political realms have tended not to be durable or permanent but
sporadically and unexpectedly come into being against the normal state of affairs in
which there is very little that could be considered a political realm in the sense described
above. Arendt has a name for this situation which characterizes life in the modern liberal
democratic state: the social realm. In the modern era there is no longer much of a
distinction between public and private, and instead we have the realm of the social where
public and private “constantly flow into each other like waves”. In the modern social
realm, which devours both the political realm and the private realm, there is an inversion
effect at play. Everything that was once considered public, such as politics, is now
deemed private, and everything which was once considered private is now displayed
publicly. The results of this inversion are especially striking when considering the
internet, where governments presume they can spy on the private activities of everyone
yet call those who publicize government secrets “traitors”. The key difference between
the public and private realms, as opposed to the social realm, is the status of publicity and
privacy. The separation of the two realms means that some things should not be a matter
of public discussion and should be kept private, while others, in particular politics, cannot
exist privately and require a broad sense of publicity. Before moving on to discussing the
internet fully, I will briefly interrogate the idea of the social in order to fully elaborate
how it most accurately describes the current state of online space in the next chapter.
In a situation where the social realm has swallowed up the political realm, the
possibility for political action as a means to both distinguish oneself, engage with one’s
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equals, and be free, is greatly diminished. The social excludes action in favour of
behaviour, which normalizes people and equates individuals with their status, rank, or
categorized identity within society. In the social realm, action becomes a statistical
deviation through which large numbers eliminate the meaning and significance of rare
deeds. In politics, it is the statistical outliers consisting of great deeds which are most
interesting and relevant, whereas in statistical economics such outliers are thrown out as
irrelevant in favour of analyzing the everyday behaviour of consumers and taxpayers.
Especially in the neoliberal era, even elected officials for the most part attempt to avoid
any kind of grand acts in favour of the everyday activity of administration where the
highest goal is balancing the national budget rather than performing some great deed that
will immortalize them.
Given that the closing off of the political realm is a common theme in thinkers as
diverse as Arendt, Rancière, and Foucault, the anti-political character of the social realm
has a tendency to take on many different forms and employ different methods. Rancière
categorizes these forms of social anti-politics into three regime types: archipolitics,
parapolitics, and metapolitics. Archipolitics involves positing a community in which
everyone is assigned a specific place in order to ensure a harmonic society in which
politics is exclusively the domain of those who are assigned to that position. Political
space takes on a character of being a limited and exclusive container, in which only those
assigned to a given place are allowed within it. Plato’s myth of the three metals being
mixed into each class of people demonstrates the archipolitical conception of the social
realm, as the assigning of roles, statuses, and places is meant to be taken as natural.
Those mixed with gold are assigned to the place of philosophy and rulership, those mixed
with silver become the guardians of the city, and those mixed with iron and bronze
become the farmers, craftsmen, and merchants. Plato develops this myth in order to
naturalize and depoliticize the spatial arrangement of his city, thus if a farmer were to
stray from the space of farming and attempt to enter the space of rulership, that farmer
would be sewing disorder and committing a crime against nature. Plato’s entire
archipolitical spatial strategy relies on the virtue of sophrosyne: the art of minding one’s
own business. The archipolitical spatial strategy involves keeping people within their
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assigned place and rests on the presumption that people cannot take on multiple roles at
the same time, and to attempt to do so is inherently disruptive. Echoes of archipolitical
rejections of political activity are evident when protesters are labelled as disruptive
nuisances and told to get a job, with the implication being that they are straying out of
their assigned place in society and thus causing unnecessary discord.
Today, however, the primary anti-political regime type is parapolitics, which is
based on displacing political conflict onto the contest over the occupation of offices as in
representative democracy.136 In this sense rulership is still based on the model of force as
an acting on people from a distance, rather than the power of the people coming together
to act collectively, but there is now a rotation of people through those offices so that as
Aristotle put it, there is an alternation of “being ruled and ruling in turn.” There is still a
strict separation between the space of public affairs and the space of other activities, but
with parapolitics, people are not confined to given spaces but can enter the decision space
when it is their turn. The egalitarian presumption of parapolitics is that anyone can be a
ruler due to the alternation of the rulers and the ruled, which obscures its spatial strategy
of making the space of rulership distant and very small. This is evident in Aristotle who
states that the best form of democracy is one where the bulk of the people are farmers.
Unlike in a city, farmers are spread across the land and are distant from the centre of
authority, making it difficult for them to enter a political realm, even if they have the
theoretical right to do so. As Rancière puts it, parapolitics “is thus realized as the
distribution of bodies over a territory that keeps them apart from each other, leaving the
central space of politics to the ‘better off’ alone.” Parapolitics relies on the spatial
strategy of allowing citizens to theoretically occupy a limited official political realm by
allowing anyone to be elected to that space, but in practice makes the occupation of
offices available only to a select few who have the time and money to run.
In the modern state, which encompasses large areas of territory and huge
populations, the parapolitical argument on spatial distance is often cited as the primary
reason for representative government over any other form that is more inclusive and
participatory. Tocqueville sums up this parapolitical attitude well when he claims that the
viability of American democracy was a result of that country’s wide open spaces with
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few inhabitants. This notion of a rural farming democracy with people living too far
away to meet and engage in politics at first glance would seem to be in stark contrast to
urbanized modern capitalism. Even Marx and Engels praise capitalism for having
“greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and [having] thus
rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.” This kind of
agglomeration of people into cities, driven by industrialization, was believed by Marx
and Engels to set the stage for communism since it brought people together and allowed
for the possibility of forming political connections. Instead, however, people were pushed
together into societal masses in which we trip over each other without being able to
distinguish ourselves from anyone else.
Marxist metapolitics devalues the political realm into mere superstructure and as
something to be done away with by the progressive march of history. As Rancière argues,
“metapolitics is the discourse on the falseness of politics” in which “politics is the lie
about a reality that is called society.”142 If the social is the truth that politics seeks to
distort through ideology, then the specificity of politics is eliminated in favour of the
natural life process and once again public and private are inverted and flow into each
other, and a properly political realm is lost. The gap between the formal declaration of
equality and the lived experience of inequality are, in metapolitical terms, interpreted as
evidence of the falseness of politics. Whereas for politics proper, the internal division of
the people and the gaps between formal rights and practiced wrongs become the basis for
continued collective action. Like with archipolitics, there is a desire to purge the
agonistic element inherent in politics by eliminating the realm for politics altogether in
favour of a conception of the social realm where not only is the specificity of politics lost
in favour of wide scale impositions of consensus and economic administration, but our
privacy is sacrificed as well.
While usually the focus is on the social realm eroding the political realm, it eats
up the private realm as well. In doing so, our private place where we can hide from
others, away from the harsh light of the public is taken away, which in turn makes public
life shallower. This can be seen even with something as trivial as Hollywood celebrities,
as when they are constantly filmed by paparazzi their official public appearances seem
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hollow and uninteresting. The weight of celebrity depends on not being seen, so that
public appearances of celebrity are actually more meaningful. This is especially true for
politics, as for most people there are times when they simply want to do something else
away from their public political commitments. This is the problem of modern politicians
who, in the social realm, are not afforded privacy as their private endeavours are often
more of a public concern than their actual activities in parliament.
In many ways homelessness is the primary characteristic of the social realm.
There is both no place to go that is truly public and political, and yet also no place that is
truly hidden from the gaze of the social, especially in the era of the internet in which
every mundane detail of our lives is shared on social networks or is the possible object of
government spying. As Benhabib notes, the private realm should function as a shelter for
the body, so that when we do enter the political realm, our private person, identity, or
body are not threatened as a result of our public opinions. This does not mean that in the
political realm one must pretend to be neutral or ignore the fact that our private
experiences shape our political views, but simply that one’s private life and our body
need protection from the public so that one’s political opinions do not harm one’s private
life away from the public realm. In the social realm, private identities are flung into the
public and the result has been an influx of identity-based movements which at best
argued for inclusion into the social realm and at worse have attempted to exclude other
identities from the social whole. In this sense, the rise of depoliticized multiculturalism
and xenophobic outbreaks of violence which focus on private cultural, religious, or ethnic
identities are both symptoms of the social realm’s attack on privacy. The loss of privacy
that accompanies the lack of political space in the social realm is nowhere more apparent
than on the internet where the problem of the social is becoming more and more evident.
While the social realm has become dominant both offline and online, the capacity to
create new political spaces is not lost. As the examples from Egypt, Tunisia, and Occupy
demonstrate, activists are increasingly turning to the internet to create political realms
that have the capacity to resist both the ossification of official state politics and to some
extent even the creep of the social realm.
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2.8 Conclusion
The first criteria for evaluating how political a given situation is must be the terrain of
contestation over the nature of the political realm. Given that politics always occurs
among other people, those who desire to take part politically must have a designated
space where they can go to engage with others who seek to act politically as well. This
space need not be official, such as a parliament, but instead can arise wherever people
gather to act politically, such as at a protest. Within a political realm, freedom and
equality are constructed, tested, and exercised. Political freedom and equality are not
natural, but only come about through the collective action of people willing to fight for
them. By having a collective political realm, individuals can be recognized by others as
unique and can be remembered for having performed political acts. When the political
realm does not meet these criteria, then the given situation is less political than it could
be. If a political realm does not exist, or is so constrained that hardly anyone has access
to it, then the situation is hardly political at all. Anti-politics works to deny the creation of
new political spaces, through the ever present push by the police logic to clear away
protesters able to carve out even the most marginal political spaces, and through official
rules to ensure that official political spaces remain inaccessible to the broader public.
The next chapter will take this idea of the political realm as a space of
appearance, a place to exercise freedom, and as a place to construct equality, and place it
in an online context. Of particular importance will be adopting the three layer model of
the political realm to a virtual space, as this opens up a whole host of opportunities. The
paradox of the durability of the political realm will be revisited, as will the prominence of
the social realm on the internet.
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Chapter 3 — The Possibility and Potential of an Online
Political Realm
3.1 Introduction
Having outlined the criteria for a political realm, I turn now to the issue of how to put it
into practice using the internet. While I argued in the previous chapter for a conception of
the political realm that created equality and enabled people to exercise their freedom to
participate in politics, a common approach to the question of an online political realm is
to ask whether or not it could be a public sphere in the Habermasian sense, which as I
argued previously, is too weak of a conception of political space to enable a more robust
form of politics. Representative of this position is Manuel Castells’s argument that since
the public sphere is primarily communicative in nature, the internet’s ability to enhance
mass communication and deliberation is enabling a new and enhanced public sphere that
is now even transcending national boundaries. Those who argue against the idea of the
internet as a public sphere also overwhelmingly start with a Habermasian approach. Jodi
Dean argues that a Habermasian notion of a consensual public sphere is simply
inapplicable to the internet and that doing so results in an ideological argument in favour
of what she calls “communicative capitalism,” which places the public sphere at the
mercy of the infrastructure of a new form of digital globalized capital. Castells’ vision of
a networked global public sphere is merely communicational and fails to provide a
political alternative to the status quo of representative government, and in writing off the
internet as a political realm (including Arendt’s version), Dean undermines her own
argument in favour of networked neodemocracy by throwing out the vital concepts of
equality and transparency which are essential to the publicity of politics which she could
have found in an Arendtian version of the political realm. But what about a more robust
form of the public sphere derived from Arendt that was presented in the previous
chapter?
While both sides of the Habermasian public sphere debate with respect to the
internet have their merits and problems, certain websites currently do function as a kind
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of public space, albeit not necessarily in the way either side of the debate expects. Online
discussion sites rarely generate consensus that informs policy makers, while at the same
time it can hardly be reduced to the infrastructure of communicate capitalism. The fact
that political discussion is not time limited online makes furthering disagreements easier,
while anonymity makes expressing unpopular opinions more common. Contrary to the
Habermasian critics of an online public realm, the lack of opportunity for consensus
online is actually a feature that can make building an online political realm easier. We can
go online and talk about politics, but the inadequacies of the existing system are
replicated online in terms of alienating people from the actual system of government.
Thus the real question should not be about whether or not the internet currently is a
political realm but about the capacity for websites to be created which could become one.
In the rest of this chapter I argue that the internet certainly has this potential and
possibility to revive the idea of the political realm, while at the same time emphasizing
that this goal must be actively fought for and in no way will it simply be an outcome of
technological advance.
In considering the possibilities of the internet, it will become apparent that online
space may actually serve to create a superior version of the political realm due to the ease
through which the constraints which limit offline space may be overcome. Online space
operates in a way that can facilitate more inclusion and participation by moving beyond
the model of meeting in person in a limited space with a limited amount of time. Having
an online political realm can also make politics both more pervasive and less time
consuming, as one can visit a political website for five minutes at a time or for as many
hours as one wants. The openness of such potential online political spaces means that
new configurations of how politics is conducted can be created, as the old argument that
limitations on space and time necessitate electing representatives are no longer relevant
in the online realm. Placing the political realm online has the potential to reshape who
can participate in politics and in what way.
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3.2 The Space of Appearance and the Physical Body
What seems to be the biggest problem for postulating the possibility of an online political
realm is the issue of appearance. A common argument against online politics is that we
cannot really know who we are dealing with, which leads to issues of trust,
accountability, legitimacy, and solidarity. This line of argument leads to the question of
what exactly appears publicly when one enters the political realm? For a large number of
political theorists, including ones drawing on an Arendtian framework of the political
realm, what appears and is revealed in public is the body, and thus the idea of an online
political realm is simply a non-starter. Most of these arguments, however, rest on a
superficial reading of Arendt which ends up depoliticizing the political realm into a
function of the social, a move against which Arendt specifically warned.
In developing a theory of a strong political realm inspired by Arendt, Simon
Springer argues that, because political speech and action require public visibility,
“individuals must physically come together to occupy a common space.” He goes on to
argue that the political realm “is ideally a medium that allows for embodied
selfrepresentation.”154 He explicitly rules out the possibility of an online political realm,
saying it can only function in a Habermasian sense as a communications medium because
action in the Arendtian sense requires public visibility, which, according to Springer,
means that it must be physically embodied. The problem with this line of argument is that
what is revealed by political action is not the body, as it is not hidden to begin with.
Action and opinions, however, need to be revealed because they are not inherently
visible, and the manner through which political action is revealed is through the
circulation of speech and stories in public. Arendt speaks of the political realm as a web
of relations which are generated through action, making it non-material, in that it is not a
web of literal physical bodies, but a web of connections, relationships, and stories. A web
of physical bodies has no specifically political character to it, and is associated more with
the family, cultural, racial, or tribal unit, in which what connects people is literally their
bodies. Again, it was the abolition of familial and tribal ties in the reforms of Cleisthenes
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that brought about democracy in the first place and allowed people to enter a public
sphere not as mere physical objects, but as individuals.
Despite this inherently disembodied aspect of the political realm, there is a
contemporary unease with the idea of the body as unimportant for politics. Given the
relatively recent struggles against exclusions from the public realm because of one’s
racialized or sexualized body, it can seem as if the body is the very site of politics today.
As Andrea Slane points out, the body is also deeply embedded in contemporary notions
of democratic citizenship, which rely on the idea of one body granting one vote. To be a
citizen today is not to be a political actor or participant, but to be an officially recognized
body within a given geographic boundary. The fact that citizenship is determined not by
political participation but by being a body within a given space unnecessarily elevates the
body in political importance. The entire premise of representative government also relies
on the idea of political space as a collection of bodies in an exclusive space. Arguments
about the need for representation are usually premised on the idea that we cannot fit
everyone’s bodies into one political space, and thus we must send a select few to perform
politics on the behalf of the rest.
What the contemporary importance of the body points to, is the inversion of
public and private that happens in the social realm, which is today the governing norm.
The vast body of literature on biopolitics and the associated management of populations
and bodies in given spaces are expressions of an anti-political thrust meant to lock people
into their bodies as discriminatory and classificatory identities, thus disqualifying people
from the political realm on account of the body. As I will argue in the next chapter, what a
properly political form of subjectivity seeks to do is disidentify the body as a means of
political (dis)qualification. Thus when Mary Dietz writes that Arendt’s concept of action
is the “collective power of embodied persons made political”, she is positing the
appearance of the body publicly as political, when this is the entire argument Arendt
makes against the social as being destructive of politics. While Dietz is arguing that
Arendt is not the anti-feminist she has been made out to be because she argues for a
nongendered political realm, Arendt’s argument is not that bodies of any gender can
appear politically but rather that bodies are not what appear politically and thus the
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political realm is not gendered because it has no interest in bodies. As Diana Saco points
out, contrary to Dietz’s reading, Arendt explicitly opposes identity politics in favour of a
public of “whos” and not “whats”, and that too much emphasis on the body simply
generates points of exclusion and discrimination, especially for people with bodily
disabilities or those in minority positions.
What really matters for the political realm in terms of appearing and visibility is
the ability to make one’s opinions heard and for collective actions to have lasting impact.
The presence of the body is not necessary for any of this, as what distinguishes us from
others politically is not our bodies or faces, but our words and deeds, along with the
stories created by the actions in which we engage. What matters for the construction of a
political realm which allows us to appear is how well it is able to publicize speech and
action in order for the uniqueness of individual subjects to be widely recognized. The
arguments and opinions of individual people can more easily circulate in writing than in
literal speech, and as such, an online space that serves as a political realm can enable
more people to participate in a meaningful way that allows their opinions and ideas to
become visible. By contrast, to speak audibly with others drastically limits one’s potential
audience based not just on geography and time, but also based on who might actually be
willing to listen. By untying political speech from bodies, the political realm has the
potential to radically expand its scope in the same way that the printing press extended
the potential readership of literature.
The arguments in favour of embodied political action would have to go so far as
to discount any form of written communication as non-political, thus banishing not only
the bulk of political theory from having any actual political relevance but also excluding
the long history of political pamphleteering as non-political. If political action must be
embodied, then the scope of political communication is drastically narrowed to the point
where any claims to publicity tend to be lost as embodied speech and action can only
reach a very limited audience without some sort of technological extension that would
inherently disembody the actors. In this way, even offline political realms are never truly
embodied unless they consist of only a handful of people who have no interest in
communicating publicly. A political realm which is not public, however, is no longer
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political if it cannot serve as a space of appearance, equality, and freedom. As was argued
previously, politics cannot take place in isolation without turning into the anti-political
exercise of coercive force.
A second line of argument against the internet as a space where people can appear
politically has less to do with bodies and instead makes an argument that the internet
lacks publicity. Brook and Broal claim that computer-mediated interactions are less rich
and then go on to argue that they lack the required collectivity and publicity to be
political since using the internet places an individual alone in front of a screen. The idea
that one can be alone while interacting with others seems like an odd claim, and it is
doubtful they would make this same claim with regard to talking on the telephone, which
could also be claimed to be simply sitting alone with a piece of plastic held to one’s head.
Such claims expose a deeper problem where people unexperienced with online
communications think that they are alone and thus ignore the impact of their actions on
the other people they are interacting with. Just because we are not in the physical
presence of others when using a computer, does not mean are alone, as the ability to
connect and interact with others is the driving force of the popularity of the internet.
What Brook and Broal continually allude to in their arguments is their belief that
face to face communication is simply superior to computer mediated communication.
This belief is a common prejudice among critics of the internet. Darin Barney, for
example, argues that the internet is private in nature as it allows people to hide and
obscure their identity while still being able to interact socially, thus giving it an
antipolitical character, because no one ever has to reveal who they truly are. Chris Gray
argues that online communication is frankly unsettling and even upsetting because of the
lack of awareness of who the other person “really is”.162 There is an assumption at work
that either the face defines exactly who we are and without its visibility we are nothing,
or that what we reveal ourselves to be online simply cannot be trusted. Other than the
fairly obvious counter argument that clearly we can know more about who someone like
Nietzsche was by reading his books than by looking at pictures of his face, there is a
fundamental lack of understanding of how political communication functions at play in
these claims.
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As James Bohman argues, the claims to the superiority of face to face
communication rely on the presumption that political interaction is one to one. To talk
face to face with someone is to engage in a conversation with at best a few other people,
but the entire point of a political realm as public is to enable such speech to reach a wide
audience so that one’s uniqueness can appear to all. Face to face is probably a superior
means of social interaction, as when one is interacting with a friend, family member, or
love interest, facial expressions and visual cues can be extremely helpful. None of these
cues, however, are relevant to political communication which is by its nature many to
many rather than one to one. As Bohman goes on to point out, political speech is always
directed at an indefinite and even anonymous audience simply called the public, which
expects a response from any or many random persons in that public. Politics prior to the
internet was never face to face in the first place, and has always relied on some form of
technological innovation to transmit speech from one to many and many to one, whether
it was the natural architecture of the Pnyx hill in Athens that served as an amphitheatre to
carry the speech of one to the many, or the bullhorn or the printing press. The key
innovation of the internet is that it not only serves as an artificial means to augment
speech but can also serve as the infrastructure for a version of the political realm which
can drastically enhance the potential visibility of speech and action by providing a
common space that is much less exclusive and more publicly available than offline
equivalents such as a parliament or even a protest.
3.3 Ironipolitics and the Internet as Serious Space
Given that when we interact online our bodies are usually not immediately visible, online
space is a new experience of interaction which does mark it as different from traditional
forms of offline space. It is on this register that the internet often troubles people as its
difference can be seen as either threatening, or as a new target for anti-political attitudes
that can win favour when it seems like the argument against politics is aimed at a new
technology instead of the concept of a political realm itself. It is on this issue that many
critics of the potential of online political space are eager to point out that online activities
are either less real, not serious enough, or fundamentally disconnected from offline
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political space to have any serious political potential. Salvatore, for instance, speaks of
activists in Egypt moving from online organization to the “real world,” as if the internet
is some sort of lucid solipsistic dream where nothing is real and that the other people we
interact with are simply imaginary. The distinction between physical and virtual is not to
be confused with a distinction between real and fake, as we would not claim that our
bodies are real while our minds are fake. Just as an offline political realm has three layers
and cannot be reduced to its physical elements of walls or borders, online political space
comes about from the interactions of people and cannot be reduced to the physical
hardware and moving bits which constitute the physical infrastructure of the internet. The
attempt to cast online space as disconnected, unreal, or not serious is an explicitly anti-
political spatial strategy that has more to do with opposing politics than critiquing new
forms of technology. Following Rancière’s typology of anti-political regimes, the
attempts to devalue the seriousness of politics by demanding that it be approached with
ironic distance could form a fourth type of anti-political regime, which could be called
ironipolitics. Ironipolitics is rooted in the belief that the attempt to politically implement
grand ideological visions or narratives (such as establishing a political realm) leads to
totalitarian cruelty. Thus any political engagements must be primarily grounded in an
ethical concern for the difference of the Other, which results in a kind of relativism in
which one’s own beliefs are not to be taken too seriously for fear they might instigate a
conflict with another’s beliefs, setting up the possibility for a political disagreement or
dispute. Such political disagreements are seen as problematic, because decisions may
favour one side over another, and thus instigate a totalitarian elimination of difference.
One of the primary theorists of ironipolitics is Richard Rorty, whose underlying
concern is avoiding a repeat of totalitarian cruelty, which he views as stemming from too
much politics, rather than from the radical negation of politics which it actually was.
Rorty proposes a privatization of self-creation which amounts to depoliticizing public
political space by transferring any desire to self-create collectively and publicly to the
private realm. Politics then becomes a matter of irony, something not to be taken
seriously, because any attempts to advocate for one’s own “final vocabulary” over
someone else’s could escalate into a conflict that might generate cruelty and
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totalitarianism. Rorty advocates a hollowed out public space that amounts to nothing
more than a playful musing among private citizens who do not take their own political
opinions seriously, thus depoliticizing any public space which could become political.
As Barker puts it, Rorty’s fear of totalitarianism in the rear-view mirror rules out the
institutionalization of ideologies such as Stalinist communism and religious
fundamentalism, but it equally excludes participatory democracy, a thicker sense of
community, and social equality as serious political ideals. For Rorty, we self-create and
live full lives only in the individualistic private sphere, as any kind of collective action in
the public sphere ends up looking like a kind of proto-totalitarianism. Put in
Arendtian terms, what Rorty is actually up to is fully embracing the social realm’s
swallowing of the public and private.
For advocates of ironipolitics, politics itself is not a serious activity, and the
internet even less so. A common ironipolitical claim is that everyone on the internet is
simply pretending to be someone else; therefore the internet is more of a playground than
a space for politics. The internet is viewed as a realm of “mere appearance” not to be
taken too seriously, even though politics is entirely about issues of appearance, from
Arendt’s arguments about politics as a space where people can reveal themselves to each
other as unique individuals, to Rancière’s argument that politics is fundamentally about
how the sensible is distributed. The ironipolitical attitude in this respect is a rehash of
Plato’s cave, where political space online (and offline for that matter) is viewed as a
realm of false illusions masking the hidden truth. The argument that the internet is not a
serious place for politics would seem to imply the opposite of the ironipolitical attitude in
that the implication is that politics is actually serious and thus must be conducted only in
serious offline space. This, however, is part of the ironipolitical deferral, which Derrida’s
concept of democracy to come illustrates. Derrida’s “democracy to come” is what he
calls “a weapon aimed at the enemies of democracy” who use the word democracy to
describe the present situation despite it still lacking full equality, freedom, and rights for
all. Derrida goes on to point out that the “to come” part of his phrase “democracy to
come” implies that democracy is both a promise and something that will never exist.172
While Derrida means to use this idea of “democracy to come” as a way of critiquing
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existing states who call themselves democratic but could certainly do better, it has the
effect of providing a critique of political action as well. Existing political struggles must
be treated ironically as something that will not actually bring democracy, thus stripping
away the passionate attachment that is necessary to drive political action. Under this
rubric, the internet cannot usher in a substantial political realm (as it is always to come),
and thus the possibility of an online political realm is to be approached ironically.
In an attempt to remedy the ironipolitical attitude that the internet is fake, not
serious enough, or that it constitutes a radically disconnected world with no relevance to
offline space, Nathan Jurgenson presents the idea of augmented revolution to provide a
model of online and offline space as thoroughly interconnected. While I share
Jurgenson’s desire to posit online and offline as connected, he still essentially
subordinates the online aspect to being merely a supplement to the offline space. While
this model might apply to the Arab Spring and Occupy, where the offline actions were
most visible while online was more of a site of organization and speech, his model fails
to account for the specificity of a political movement such as Anonymous which used
offline protests merely as an affirmative supplement to their real actions which took place
online. Anonymous also provides an interesting example of the conflict between those
who wish to treat the internet as a serious political space and engage in political action
which extends and asserts equality, and those who wish to view the internet as a kind of
radically disconnected playground where what is done online has no offline
consequences.
Anonymous began on the message board 4chan and was, at first, thoroughly
nonserious in its stance toward the internet. Anonymous believed the internet was not a
serious place, that it had no connection to the “real world”, and that there were no offline
consequences for online actions. As such, they engaged primarily in message board raids,
chat room flooding, disruptions of social games and other behaviour which was
motivated by their desire for “lulz” (internet slang for laughs). As part of their general
desire to view the internet as a source of amusement, in 2008 a video was posted on
4chan of actor Tom Cruise discussing his love of Scientology. The video was meant only
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for people within Scientology, and the over the top performance and statements of Cruise
ended up as a source of amusement that made the Church of Scientology an object of
ridicule, not just on the somewhat obscure 4chan boards but across the internet as more
popular and mainstream websites reposted the video after seeing it on 4chan. As a result,
Scientology instigated legal action to have the video removed, drawing the ire of
Anonymous who initially viewed this action as an attempt to infringe not on their
political rights but as an attack on their ability to have fun and laugh at people.
As Scientology’s legal campaign grew, Anonymous started to take root and
organize a response to Scientology which began to take on a more serious political
character, as some Anons (the name for a member of Anonymous) encouraged the group
to view Scientology’s actions as a fundamental attack on online freedom of expression.
Anonymous initiated Project Chanology with a video declaring war on Scientology,
which was followed up by attacks on the Scientology website, pranks directed toward
prominent members, and manipulating Google search results so that the Scientology
website would be the top result on searches for “dangerous cult”. Anonymous, however,
did not fully take on a political character until they organized street protests in various
cities in the United States, Australia, Canada, and Europe outside of Scientology
Churches. As various activists associated with Anonymous attest to in interviews, before
the street protests there was still a sense that Anonymous was not really a movement and
may not have been more than a few people. When tens of thousands of people showed up
to protests around the world, it was like this was confirmation that Anonymous actually
did exist as a real entity.
The interesting thing to note here was that the bridging of offline and online
space, which resulted in the politicization of Anonymous and reversal of its ironipolitical
stance toward the internet, did not operate in the same way as the other internet-enabled
movements. Anonymous essentially showed up offline and confirmed to itself that this
was a real movement, then went back online to focus on hacktivism. For the Arab Spring
and Occupy, the protests were organized online and then became a matter of engaging in
political actions offline. After their Scientology protests, Anonymous went on to provide
technical support and services to activists in the Arab Spring and Occupy, and engaged in
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a number of hacking attempts in support of WikiLeaks, the Palestinians, and various
other political causes. During the Tunisian uprising for example, Anonymous hacked the
webpage of Tunisian Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi and developed software to
subvert government censorship. Anonymous would go on to attempt a denial of service
attack on the New York Stock Exchange’s servers to coincide with the Occupy Wall
Street protests, engage in attacks on websites related to the Israeli military after their
heavy handed operations in Gaza in 2012, and even work to expose a police cover up of a
rape by football players in Steubenville, Ohio. What these actions demonstrate is that
online political space itself is increasingly becoming more and more a site of political
action and not simply a realm where activists can debate issues and organize offline
protests as in Jurgenson’s augmented revolution model.
After Project Chanology, many Anons embraced Anonymous’s newfound interest
in serious political matters, while others argued that they were turning their back on fun
and that the internet should continue to be treated in an ironipolitical fashion. The
ironipolitical faction of Anonymous engaged in a number of hacking operations after
2008 which were meant to be purely for fun, and worked to discredit Anonymous as a
political movement. The most high profile hack was the 2008 defacement of the Epilepsy
Foundation’s webpage in which a flashing image meant to provoke a seizure replaced the
actual webpage. Given the anonymous nature of the movement, this action generated
immense amounts of internal strife as those associated with Project Chanology who were
attempting to make Anonymous into a hacktivist movement rather than merely high-tech
pranksters were strongly opposed to such mean-spirited and counterproductive actions.
Given the decentralized and anonymous nature of the movement, however, this
propolitical faction had no proper way of distancing itself from this attack or even
expelling those who carried it out in the name of Anonymous. As time has passed and
Anonymous has become more active in supporting other protest movements, the number
of these troll attacks has dramatically decreased, especially as numerous Anonymous
members were arrested and jailed in relation to these actions. The combination of the
success of Anonymous’s political actions and the realization that even non-serious
hacking meant for laughs was landing Anons in jail has led to the decline in the
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ironipolitical attitude in which the internet is viewed as a radically disconnected
nonserious space with no offline consequences. As the internet continues to become less
of a novelty, soon ironipolitical dismissals of online space will sound as unreasonable as
dismissing a phone call as “not real life” because it is not embodied or because it is
technologically mediated.
3.4 Hardware, Software, Wetware
Extending the three layer model of the political realm to the internet can enable a more
robust model of the online political realm that can enable it to be treated more seriously
by demonstrating how it is directly analogous to pre-internet political realms. The
physical space, or as Arendt called it, the walls of the polis, that simply provide the
physical location for people to gather in common is equivalent to the physical
infrastructure of the internet. Similar to pre-internet conceptions of the political realm,
the fibre optic cables, switches, and routers that form the physical hardware layer of the
internet no more determine whether the internet can be a political realm than the walls of
the ancient polis. The second layer of the constitution or framework of rules and
boundaries is equivalent to the software layer of the internet. Like a constitution, the
software layer has something of a pre-political character as someone needs to make a
website and program how it works before it can become part of the political realm.
Software, like constitutions, are rule based mechanisms meant to provide shape to a
shared space. The top layer of the pre-internet political realm, namely the people, could
in computer terms be called the wetware. Like in pre-internet space, the people or
wetware are clearly the most important element, as politics cannot exist without people
and the internet would be uninteresting if no one used it. While each layer depends on the
one below it, the entire structure is determined by the people at the top who rely on the
lower layers merely to collect them into a common space so that they can engage with
each other politically. Thus as Barney points out, when Arendt describes the polis as not a
physical location but as the space between people living together for the purpose of
political speech and action, she could have been describing the world wide web.
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By pointing to the online political realm as having the same three layer model as
pre-internet conceptions of the political realm, it helps to uncover arguments which
seemingly critique the technology of the internet as unsuitable for politics, but are really
critiques of the suitability of politics itself. Morozov for instance, makes the argument
that people mostly use the internet for thoroughly non-political purposes and spend most
of their time online looking at pictures of cats or pornography, and that therefore the
internet as a whole is not suitable for politics.182 Morozov completely discounts the
possibility of anything like the Arab Spring emerging from the internet, because he sees it
as a space hopelessly lost to trivial pursuits.183 The fact that most people use the internet
for shopping and entertainment does not make it a distraction from serious political
engagement any more than the fact that most people use offline space for the same
reasons make offline space a distraction from politics.
Chaves argues that because of the potential for state or corporate abuse at the
hardware layer of DNS routing, the internet cannot serve as a political realm. She makes
the mistake of attributing existing political configurations of internet backbone
management to the very essence of the technology. Such arguments come across as
inherently defeatist, as few would argue that because offline space is generally configured
in anti-political ways we should abandon the terrain altogether. Creating alternatives to
the status quo requires vision of what could be, rather than simply evaluating what is and
concluding that the status quo is not what we want it to be. A similar argument is made by
Robert McChesney who also conflates the hardware and software layers, leading to the
argument that the pervasiveness of advertising online makes the internet a problematic
space for political engagement. The fact that most websites are commercial in purpose
simply mirrors the fact that today almost all offline space is commercial and filled with
advertisements. While these are problems to be aware of and potential sites for online
activism, they do not amount to an argument against the possibility of a political realm
unless one accepts that the pervasiveness of neoliberal capitalism in offline space makes
alternative economic arrangements impossible as well.
What these arguments do is take examples from the software layer and confuse
them with the hardware layer, thus the internet as a physical infrastructure is given an
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unalterable essence of being an entertainment or commercial delivery mechanism based
on the current configuration of many websites at the software layer. But this is a wider
argument against politics in general disguised as a critique of technology, as one could
easily say that most people spend their free time in offline space going to shopping malls
and driving on highways, therefore offline space is unsuitable for politics because most
people do not use it for that purpose. It was precisely this anti-political attitude that
Occupy sought to challenge by taking over non-political spaces and declaring them as
sites of political contestation.
The top and middle layers which mark a space as political and provide the
framework for a political realm cannot be reduced to the physical layer without
rigidifying structures to the point where a protest or any other political act out of the
ordinary would be disqualified as political in the first place. What matters when
considering the internet is really the nature of web sites and how people use them, as in
the pre-internet political realm, the physical aspect is simply there. The internet without
the software layer of the world wide web, email, or online games would be an extremely
dull place, as its vitality is derived from what people do with it. The malleability of the
software layer is what gives the world wide web one of its primary advantages for
creating an online political realm. The pre-internet political realms have a tendency to
make the software layer of frameworks, constitutions, and informal rules invisible to the
point where they get identified with and reduced to the hardware layer, thus giving the
appearance that such rules and frameworks are literally set in stone, as politics is
associated with the physical structures of the hardware layer, such as a parliament
building. On the internet, web sites are more transparently malleable. They were created
by people and can be easily changed by people. Lawrence Lessig argues that software
code is the law of cyberspace and that its constitutional architecture is continually being
built by software developers. As Lessig goes on to argue, websites are not simply found
and assumed to have rules written in stone in the manner of an offline constitution, but
the software design is much more transparently a choice made by people, which can be
easily changed or rewritten entirely to create a new set of code which regulates a new
website. When a website serves as the middle layer of a framework for the political
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realm, politics can take on a more dynamic character. It could then be more apparent that
politics consists of the actions and relationships formed by those in the political realm,
rather than confusing politics with the space it takes place in.
3.5 The Durability and Commonality of a Potential Online World
One of the most important elements of a political realm is its commonality and collective
nature. The internet facilitates new forms of communication that mitigate the importance
of distance as a practical obstacle to the creation of a common political world. It is on this
point that Benjamin Barber’s warnings that the internet may have negative effects for
politics rely on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the internet. He gives
the example of students in one of his lectures who send instant messages back and forth
to each other without even looking at each other, despite the fact they are sitting within
eyeshot. He argues this is alienating and generates a sense of solitude and loneliness. In
fact what is happening is the opposite of what Barber thinks: these students are remaining
in constant close communication even at a time when they should be paying attention to
his lecture, and are thus finding new ways to remain connected. The pervasiveness of
online communication has reached a point where the most common popular trope is no
longer about the isolated individual sitting alone in front of a screen cut off from society,
but simply social fatigue, as people start to want to have time to themselves where they
are not constantly answering emails, instant messages, Facebook chats, tweets, and text
messages. With the early concerns about the internet being isolating and alienating giving
way to over-communication, the bigger question is whether all this communication can
bring people together to create a common political realm or whether it will simply
fragment the world into small bubbles of hypercommunication where people no longer
feel the need to engage with the larger public because they can establish such pervasive
connections within their social network.
Mirroring Fraser’s idea of multiple publics, Bohman argues that the internet is a
public of publics with a distributed structure rather than a centralized one, with the
implication that it does not matter if there is a single website that everyone goes to for
political debate. While there certainly can be a multitude of publics, those publics only
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become a political realm when they come into contact and conflict with each other. In
this sense, only temporary political realms could sporadically pop up when different
publics came into conflict, but as was argued earlier, there is something wholly
unsatisfying about politics as a temporary phenomenon. If the only established place to
argue our position and demand change is within a subpublic that we are already a part of
and which tends to agree with our position, then such speech is politically useless. The
fragmentation of existing political discussion sites into subsites based on a common
viewpoint is extremely common and also politically destructive. The ease through which
new sites can be created online is a double-edged sword that makes it both easier to
create common realms open to all, and to leave the common world and create one’s own
little realm where no opposing viewpoints can be heard. Due to the malleability of the
software layer, the internet can promote both immense commonality and has the potential
to create a political world which actually encompasses the physical Earth, while at the
same time can also facilitate fragmentation. As has been emphasized previously, the key
is the wetware layer, as people determine how the internet is used, rather than the
technology determining what is politically possible.
The malleability of the internet and the importance of human agency remains a
tough sell, however, especially on this issue of commonality and fragmentation. Barney
argues that the internet destroys the common world of things, built in an Arendtian sense
through work, in favour of fleeting consumability. But the internet is clearly part of this
world of things that form the common world and thus are the objects of dispute among
those who look at them from different perspectives. The hardware layer of the internet is
a literal physical thing, and the software layer enables anyone with even relatively basic
computer skills to create a visible object in the form of a website and to display it
publicly. These are tangible objects which can enable commonality around which
relationships can be built. The importance of these objects lays in the way that they both
bring us together and separate us. Any website that enables political debate does exactly
this, as it provides a common forum for everyone to argue their own position in a way
that a shopping mall, for instance, does not.
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Furthering his attempt to use Arendt to critique the internet’s suitability to be a
common world, Barney points to Arendt’s argument that the fabricated world must be
more stable and enduring than the individuals within it, thus guaranteeing that their
political deeds will have lasting effect and be remembered.191 Barney believes that the
internet lacks this durability because of its supposedly fluid and transient nature. While
websites certainly come and go, Barney ignores the fact that the internet also enables
forms of extreme memory and permanence. Everything online gets copied and backed up
as it circulates publicly, making it extremely difficult to get rid of something
embarrassing once it gets put online. This phenomenon has even spurred a number of
recent court rulings where Google has been ordered to remove links to certain material
that violates someone’s “right to be forgotten.” The internet cannot be both completely
consumable and without any memory, and at the same time so extremely permanent that
courts have to order the censorship of search results to allow people to hide their past. In
fact, one of the ultimate technological fantasies that shows up in everything from Ray
Kurzweil’s predictions to television shows such as Caprica and films such as
Transcendence, is the ability to harness the data storage and computing capacity of the
internet to upload someone’s consciousness so they can achieve literal immortality.
Against this background, it is clear that the internet is continuing to grow into a massive
collective memory for humanity, and thus can enable the kind of durability a political
realm requires in order to ensure that the uniqueness of people’s speech and action is
remembered.
3.6 Panoptic Surveillance and Anonymous Cowardice as two
paradigms of the Social
Often the political potential of online space is discussed in terms of two radically
different contrasts, both being negative and in complete contradiction to the other. In the
first instance, online space is posited as completely surveilled and simply an extension of
the Foucauldian paradigm of biopower onto the internet. In this depiction of online space
there is no room for politics. The internet is depicted as already captured and controlled
by the government, who have turned it into a massive virtual panopticon. Morozov
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argues that the internet is naturally panoptic and that it is therefore a dream come true for
authoritarian states and governments wanting to spy on their citizens. The conclusion
Morozov draws from this is that the internet is wholly unsuited for political activism.
Given the constant revelations about governments using the internet to spy on people, as
well as the pervasiveness of publicly shared information online, there is some truth to this
analysis, but it in no way constitutes the essence of the internet, as the competing
narrative is just as pervasive and also has some degree of truth to it.
The other model which attempts to describe the nature of the internet is one of
radical anonymity in which everyone is depicted as an anonymous coward hiding in the
shadows, making online space not suitable for the very public speech and action of
politics. While the total surveillance model treats the internet as too public, this model
views it as too private. The fact that these two competing models of online space are
prominent both in the academic and popular literature at the same time, despite being in
clear contradiction, points to Arendt’s concept of the social as a better explanation of
online space. The public and private flow into each other online to create an indiscernible
single sphere in which public and private are inverted and then absorbed into the social.
The interesting thing about Anonymous as a movement is that it seems to understand that
the social model of privatizing the public and publicizing the private is the primary way
in which cyberspace tends to operate, mirroring offline space, and that their actions often
involve attempts to reassert the public and the private against the social.
While Anonymous’ actions are hard to categorize on the whole, due to their often
contradictory nature arising out of the fact that anyone can claim to have hacked a
website in the name of Anonymous, by analyzing some of their more high profile actions
a pattern can be established in which it has a tendency toward attempting to undermine
the online production of the social realm. In response to Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal
refusing to allow donations through their services to WikiLeaks, Anonymous attempted a
distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on those company’s websites. This action
created the strange optics of an anonymous group engaging in hacktivism in support of
an organization trying to promote transparency. In this case it was operating in support of
the idea that government should be public rather than private, but they have also engaged
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in major operations meant to defend personal privacy. After the FBI shut down the file
hosting website Megaupload, Anonymous responded by stating that this was an attack on
people’s privacy and freedom. It engaged in large-scale DDoS attacks on the website of
the FBI, as well as on the sites of the copyright organizations MPAA and RIAA.
Anonymous’s actions against homophobia, such as targeting the Ugandan Prime
Minister’s website in response to a bill which punished homosexuality with the death
penalty and actions targeting the Westboro Baptist Church underscore Anonymous’s
desire to ensure that someone’s sexual orientation not be a matter of public persecution
but should be considered a private concern. At the same time, Anonymous was essential
in exposing a cover-up by the local authorities of a rape by members of a high school
football team in Steubenville Ohio, which eventually led to the prosecution of the
perpetrators. A pattern emerges in which Anonymous is attempting to assert that the
social web is unacceptable and that government should be public while individual
privacy should be protected. Anonymous is fundamentally anti-social as many critics
contend, however this should be taken not as an insult but as what makes the movement
an effective political force.
The actions of Anonymous demonstrate the poverty of the analyses provided by
both those claiming that the internet is an anonymous and therefore unaccountable space
unsuitable for political action and those who attempt to apply an old-fashioned
Foucauldian framework of surveillance and anti-political biopower to online space. As
Saco points out, while everyone else in the 60s and 70s was worried about computers
being mechanisms of centralized control and instrumental rationality, it was the early
hackers who began to embrace computers as having liberatory potential. Hacktivist
groups, such as Anonymous today and Cult of the Dead Cow in the 1980s and 90s, may
eventually come to be seen as the founders of online political space. The strength of the
hacktivist approach to online political space is that it recognizes online space is contested
and that for it to become political or for it to maintain our privacy, it must be actively
shaped as such. Considering that the advent of online space is presenting a number of
technological challenges to the status quo, political groups must actively embrace these
issues in order to catalyze their political potential. If they fail to do so, there is the risk
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that the state and capital will adapt and incorporate these technologies. Issues such as
state borders, citizenship, piracy, and cryptography introduce conflicts which generate
change, thus when online space is dismissed as the realm of anonymous cowards or as
simply a mechanism of state surveillance, the potential to shape the terrain of the internet
in political ways is simply surrendered to those seeking to impose antipolitical
configurations.
Despite all the talk of NSA surveillance and notions that everything we do online
is tracked by either government or corporations, the government remains somewhat
fearful of online space. Online activities which are illegal still face disproportionately
large prison sentences compared with the equivalent offline crime. For example one of
the non-anonymous members of Anonymous, Barrett Brown, is facing 100 years in
prison for three separate incidents: threatening an FBI officer in a YouTube video,
concealing evidence, and pasting a link in a chat room to documents stolen from
companies (obtained by Anonymous in hacking operations) that the American
government employs to spy on political activists. Out of these crimes, threatening an FBI
officer is obviously the most serious, but related cases of threats to an FBI agent resulted
in a dentist receiving an 18 month sentence and a man in Texas who threatened to blow
up an FBI building receiving a 42 month sentence.201 Another hacktivist associated with
Anonymous, Jeremy Hammond, faces a life sentence for his role in obtaining the
documents that Brown linked to and which Hammond posted to WikiLeaks. Other
leakers of secret government documents, such as whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and
Edward Snowden, face similar charges with Snowden wanted for espionage and facing a
possible 30 year jail sentence and Manning already sentenced to 35 years. What these
examples demonstrate is not just the social nature of governments which now believe
they have a right to operate in secret rather than in public, but the threat they perceive
from activists who are using the internet to expose the actions of the government to the
bright light of the public sphere. The active role taken by these leakers and hacktivists is
essential as they are promoting a different model of space for the internet, one which has
both public and private elements and thus can constitute a political realm, against the all-
consuming encroachment of the anti-political social model.
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3.7 Social Networks or Political Networks?
During the recent protest movements, Facebook and Twitter rose to prominence as
websites that were used heavily by activists. In the case of Egypt, a Facebook page called
“We are all Khaled Said” became a key political space which provided people with not
only uncensored news but the chance to discuss and debate issues with each other and to
make the connections which would translate into concerted street protests which
eventually brought down the government. The Facebook page was created by an
Egyptian Google executive to honour Khaled Said, who was tortured to death by
Egyptian police after he recorded a video which he posted online of Egyptian police
pocketing the spoils of a drug bust. The internet was crucial for both exposing police
corruption and translating this one instance of police brutality into a wider complaint
against the regime. As was noted in the first chapter, much was made of the fact that
activists were using social networks, so the question arises as to whether or not these
social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter, can be the basis of a new form of online
political realm. These spaces can be subject to Rancièrian temporary reorderings, but as a
model of a more permanent political space, their primary nature as social networks
precludes them from being a basis for more permanent forms of online political space.
Arendt’s depiction of the common world of political space arising from human
activity as a “web of relationships” is interesting in the context of social networks.
Arendt’s web of relationships seems to fit nicely with the currently popular social
network model which allows people to form links with others and then circulate stories
about themselves and others among their connected friends and followers. However, just
as politics does not automatically arise any time people live together, the existence of a
technological means to create a world wide web of relationships does not mean such a
web will be political. In the case of social networks, these are primarily, as the name
suggests, social and not political. The difference between social, public, and private is an
aspect of Arendt’s political theory that continues to retain importance. As pointed to
above, debates about the nature of the internet tend to focus on either the internet being
too public or too private, as evidenced by debates about whether what one posts on
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Facebook is public or private and in the debate surrounding government monitoring of
online activity. From an Arendtian point of view, these debates miss the point, as the old
divide between public and private no longer exists as they have fallen together into the
social.
The social realm destroys not just political space, but attacks the existence of the
private realm as well. The necessity of a private space outside the light of the public is
especially important for children, who “require the security of concealment in order to
mature undisturbed.” Social networking sites are precisely social spaces in that they
operate in a manner in which the private life process of a person is put in public view.
Even with security settings that may prevent public access, most people are less than
discriminating when it comes to who they add as “friends”, and thus a site like Facebook
takes on a character as less of a private space where friends share, and more of a
publicizing of the private. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg makes this ideology of the
social explicit in his arguments that the world is becoming more “public” and less private
and thus the incremental loss of privacy on Facebook simply matches the public zeitgeist.
Social networking sites can intensify the publication of the private as personal details
placed online can then circulate and become unduly public. Dean argues that this form of
undue publicity is the “ideology of technoculture” in that when one signs up for
Facebook one knows very well one is handing over a demographic profile which will be
used to sell advertising, but one simply does it anyway. The problem, however, is not
with publicity per se, as Dean would have it, but with the social inversions of public and
private that people begrudgingly put up with, either as a result of a lack of computer
literacy which leads to lax privacy settings, or simply as the price they have to pay in
order to be able to connect with friends on sites such as Facebook. The ideology of social
networks operates more along the lines of Arendt’s concept of the social, which should
not be surrendered as the nature of online interaction but fought in the manner of
Anonymous in order to restore privacy and create a political realm. This is a point which
Schwarz glosses over in her otherwise excellent Arendtian critique of social networks:
despite the problems with social networks, they constitute but one algorithmic form that
online interaction can take, and thus finding problems with social networks as a political
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model does not in any way diminish the capacity to build a political realm online in
another form. What is needed is a sorting out of privacy and publicity so that they apply
to appropriate activities.
The tendency of the social to destroy both public and private space make online
social spaces problematic as models for politics, despite the structure they share with the
political web of relationships. Any form of online political space which is going to strive
for any sense of permanence must aim to keep the space political and fight off the
counter-attack of the social. When a Facebook page is set up for a political purpose, there
is an underlying tendency for the space to revert back toward Facebook’s original social
nature. The people in the group will often add each other as friends, meaning more and
more of an overlap can occur between political and social as people begin to use what
was intended as a political page, to share personal announcements with the group, which
causes a blurring into the social. Such groups then have a tendency to devolve into social
communities where a strict group consensus forms and political disagreement is then
viewed as a form of anti-social behaviour and the space depoliticizes. Contrary to
Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion that social networking sites do not lead to political
activism (a claim he naively made prior to the Arab Spring and Occupy) because they do
not enable the strong ties needed to engage in serious politics, the problem with such
social networks is that the ties they establish become too personal and, beyond the initial
surge of enthusiasm for a political action, fail to establish a lasting political realm
because they tend toward the social and depoliticize.
While the anti-political tendency toward socializing a political space is
particularly problematic on social networking sites such as Facebook where the user’s
primary reason for visiting is social and not political, the encroachment of the social is
problematic in any form of political space. In the relative early days of widespread
internet adoption in the mid to late 1990s, public chat room services offered by AOL and
Yahoo provided political rooms where users could discuss political issues. The interesting
aspect of these early chat services was that they were unmoderated and uncensored, and
simply had broad topics which brought together people with a variety of opinions and
backgrounds. When these services became increasingly difficult to use as they were not
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updated as technology changed leading to unfixed security flaws, many of the users of
these political-based rooms switched to other services which were more usercentric. In
the case of the Yahoo political rooms which I frequented, its dissolution as a common
space due to technical issues led to people from those rooms creating their own chat and
message board sites in which only those whom they had become friends with were
invited. The effect of this loss of common political space led to a proliferation of social
spaces populated by people who mostly agreed with each other, leaving them with little
to discuss politically, thus establishing a community consensus in which political
disagreement became labelled as disruptive. What this example demonstrates is that
while the internet is rife with political possibility precisely because it is so easy to set up
new political spaces, there is a serious danger that these spaces become social if they are
not common and accessible to all.
The creation of an online political realm must work in the manner in which
Arendt described the walls of the Athenian polis, they did not determine that a space was
political, as that came from the actions of the people, but the walls did indicate a common
space where people could go to engage in political action. Dean’s critique of online
political activity as too dispersed and ultimately as talking with no one listening speaks to
this problem of a lack of common political space on the internet, but the fact that such a
common space does not currently exist does not mean it cannot exist. The problem of
online social space not being political is not a limitation of technology but is simply a
reflection of the predominant model of offline social space not being political either. But
unlike with offline space, online space is much easier to create, shape, and grow.
Facebook grew as a social space from the scope of one university campus to being
completely global in a matter of a few years. While the social network model is
problematic because of its social character, new models of online political space must be
created and globalized. Instead of a social network which is primarily centred on people’s
individual profile pages which are then linked to others as friends or followers, a political
web model might instead be focused on political issues which would then link people
together in discussion, debate, and decision over a given issue. People would follow
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topics and issues instead of each other, thus making the political web into a subjectifying
rather than identifying mechanism.
3.8 Conclusion
An Arendtian conception of the political realm, with allowances for Rancièrian
reorderings, provides a model of a public sphere that sets the stage for people to become
political subjects, participate in political debate and decision making, and play out their
disagreements and conflicts publicly. By placing the political realm online, the entire
structure of representative government can come into question as spaces can be created
that negate the need to send a limited number of representatives to a limited physical
space. The internet has elements of both extreme publicity and extreme privacy, which
mark it as social in character. To fend off the depoliticizing influence of the social,
activists must focus on ensuring that the privacy of individuals is protected online, while
continuing to push for the creation of political spaces which are open, transparent, and
accessible.
If space is socially produced, then political space can be produced online. In this manner
an online political realm can be superior to traditional pre-internet conceptions of a
political realm because it can be more inclusive and participatory, facilitate more robust
forms of political subjectivity, and ease the ability to assert conflict in the form of
disagreement and dissent. These three aspects of politics will be dealt with in the
following chapters and will provide the content for what happens within the online
political realm.
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Chapter 4 — Subjectivity
4.1 Introduction
The question of subjectivity is inherently linked to the question of the political realm. In order to
have a political realm, there must be people who enter that realm for the purpose of engaging in
politics. This chapter deals with this question of who the subject of politics might be. Is the
subject of politics the citizen, as Balibar advocates, or, as Derrida argues, have we moved past
the idea of subjectivity altogether? The citizen comes across as a relic of a previous age, as
politics has increasingly come to deal with global issues it is no longer limited in scope to
citizens of a state engaging with other citizens of that state. Today issues such as climate change
transcend national borders and problems related to migrant workers involve political action from
those who are explicitly not citizens. However, rather than abandon political subjectivity
altogether or try to refit it into outmoded clothes, what is needed is a version of the political
subject that is compatible with the internet age, in which the political realm may be wholly
unrelated to states, borders, or identities.
As the protest movements of Occupy, the Arab Spring, and even Anonymous
demonstrate, there is increasingly a push toward forms of political subjectivity that are both
universal and without specific qualifications. This renewal of subjectivity is significant because
oppositional movements after the decline of communism have tended to be identity based and
thus lacked the properly political universal dimension that would make these protests relevant to
everyone. Compared to even the alterglobalization protests, which presented itself as a coalition
of separate issues and identities, these contemporary movements posited a more robust form of
political subjectivity that was not amenable to capture and reformatting by the anti-political
regimes of state and economy. The concept of the political subject as an empty universal is
gaining ground not just practically but theoretically as well.
The political subject as an empty universal is significant, as it puts the emphasis on the
people as the centre of politics. By conceptualizing the political subject in such a way, it becomes
open to all and politics becomes relevant to all. An identity based movement is only relevant to
those within the identity, a citizen-based politics is only relevant to those who hold legal status
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within a specific state, and a subject based on Enlightenment ideals has too many positive
qualifications which have led to unjust exclusions in the past. The political subject as universal
means that the subject’s speech and action is relevant to all and is addressed to the public, while
its emptiness enables plurality, as there are no specific qualifications or positive attributes that
someone must have in order to become a subject. Such a conception of the political subject is
especially interesting in an online political realm where bodies, identities, and status
qualifications tend to be obscured, making online political interactions naturally suited to an
empty universal form of the political subject.
This new form of political subjectivity as practiced by Occupy, the Arab Spring, and
Anonymous and as theorized by Žižek, Rancière, and Badiou is uniquely suited to a politics that
is situated online. While I will draw on Žižek, Rancière, and Prozorov’s extrapolation of Badiou,
these thinkers have either little to say about the potential their theories could have in terms of the
internet, or are simply opposed to such theorizations. Their own statements, especially in the case
of Žižek, often lead to outright contradictions which demonstrate a lack of familiarity with the
technological aspects of the internet more than anything. In addition to arguing that these
theorists can provide a base for theorizing an online political subject, often over their own
objections, I also run up against a number of theorists who attempt to argue that political
subjectivity cannot operate online because of its disembodied nature. Gies, Gray, and Donath in
particular make arguments about politics being inherently wrapped up with bodily identity which
lead them to discount the idea of online subjectivity altogether.
A growing body of work on biopolitics would seem to support the importance of the body
for political subjectivity, but, as Rancière points out with respect to Foucault’s biopower, what
Foucault is describing is not politics but the suppression of politics. Whether biopolitics is
conceived negatively as a power over life, as with Agamben, or positively as a potential source of
political mobilization, as with Hard & Negri, it fails to not only explain the process of political
subjectivation online, but also offline, as in the case of the above mentioned protest movements.
As Arendt was keen to point out, entering the political realm and becoming a subject is meant to
be a liberating experience which enables one to no longer be identified by their private
attachments, be it religion, culture, or body, allowing one to enter a realm of constructed equality.
In this sense, forms of online subjectivity remind us of a way to escape the anti-political regime
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which remains concerned with managing, as Foucault described it, territories and populations. It
is precisely because governments continue to operate on biopolitical grounds that there are such
frequent clashes and disputes with respect to the online world. How does a government
concerned with managing populations and bodies within a given geographic territory deal with a
space that fundamentally does not respect geographical boundaries and enables individuals to
obscure their private identities? Online subjectivity in its bodilessness provides a way to resist
the dominant anti-political paradigm of biopolitics and thus should be embraced for its
disruptively political potential.
This chapter begins by placing the idea of the universal political subject in historical
contrast to the Enlightenment subject, which remains defective due to its positive qualifications.
The process of becoming a political subject is then outlined, starting with Žižek’s account of
subjectivity as first involving a withdrawal from identity. Once the political subject has cast off
particularities that make it unable to address the universal, it can then engage with the universal
of politics, in which matters of concern are matters that affect the whole community. Using
examples from Occupy and the Arab Spring, it is demonstrated how these movements engaged
with a form of universal empty subjectivity that made them thoroughly political, in that they
sought to challenge the existing distribution of the sensible, to use Rancière’s terminology, rather
than simply trying to integrate themselves into it without structurally changing anything.
By contrasting political subjectivation to anti-political identification, I then argue that
political subjectivity’s universal and empty aspects enable the equality needed to speak
politically, as well as providing the freedom to act and move politically within the political
realm. By contrast, the forces of anti-politics seek to identify people, put them in their place, and
prevent them from crossing boundaries or cutting through borders. When we consider the
political subject in an online context, it becomes even more powerful against the anti-political
forces of identification because the best online political discussion sites work by inherently
pseudononymizing users, forcing them to withdraw from identity and engage with others based
on their opinions and ideas, rather than on the grounds of identity, status, or class. Anti-political
attempts at identifying and disqualifying someone’s political speech online are much more
difficult, as it can be almost impossible to determine where someone’s place is, or where they
belong. Disidentified and pseudonymous online political subjectivity easily cuts through the
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discriminatory framework of identity, so long as online subjects are careful to protect their
privacy.
While I advocate for pseudonymous online political subjectivity, which protects the
private offline identity of users, a large body of thought argues that such a form of disembodied
subjectivity is dangerous. These arguments range from confusing offline politics and anti-politics
to the point where they demand that one must be placed, identified, and thus disqualified in order
to be a “political” subject, to arguments which confuse the hardware, software, and wetware
layers of the internet, leading to statements about the internet in general that actually only apply
to certain websites. Following Arendt, I argue that what must appear publicly in politics is not a
person’s body, but the contents of their mind. What matters for politics is not that we can see
whether a political subject is tall or short, man or woman, but what their opinions on political
issues are and what they plan to do about these opinions.
The obscuring of identity and body that can happen online often provokes questions of
anonymity and pseudonymity. Critics of online political subjectivity may be willing to accept
that we need not see someone’s body in order to listen to their words, but then the question of
anonymity comes up. How can political speech reveal unique individuals if it is detached from
bodily identities? Furthermore, does this strict separation of public and private identities lead to
unaccountability or other forms of poor behaviour? In considering these arguments I make the
case that the majority of interactions on political websites are not truly anonymous but are
pseudonymous, as they tend to be attached to a consistent username around which stories can be
developed which enable that person to display publicly who they truly are, without threatening
their private identity or making it into a matter of proclaimed privilege or disqualification. Given
these various considerations, it can be easier to go through the subjectivation process in the
context of an online political realm, as it can enable the courage that is necessary to take the risk
of speaking and acting politically by providing a shield for one’s private identity.
4.2 Political Subjectivity and the Emptiness of the Universal
On the surface there are similarities between the theory of the political subject I will advance
here and the Enlightenment liberal subject, or simply the citizen, on account of the emphasis on
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the universality of political subjectivity. The alleged universality of the modern liberal subject,
however, has come under attack from all quarters. As Vincent Descombes argues, an attack on
the illusion of subjectivity seemed to have been the primary preoccupation of French philosophy
in the second half of the 20th century, with both post-structuralists and Heideggerians seeking to
banish the spectre of Enlightenment subjectivity. Feminism has pointed out that the modern
liberal political subject was assumed to be a male, postcolonial studies has taught us that this
subject also was assumed to be white, and queer studies points out that it was assumed to be
heterosexual as well. The modern liberal subject has been widely exposed as not universal but a
particular identity which has attempted to elevate its particularity to a hegemonic status through
imperial impositions.
These are all valid critiques, but the reaction to the false universality of the modern liberal
subject has been to assert a plethora of particularities against it and emphasize difference over
universal equality. Political subjectivity is thrown out in favour of multiple or shifting identities
which assert their own particularity against another particularity which falsely claims to be
universal. If, however, the universality of the modern subject is exposed to be nothing more than
one particularity attempting to impose itself on all others, and is to be rejected as its various
critics argue, the assertion of other particularities is not a proper solution. As Prozorov points out,
“is not the problem with universalism precisely that the allegedly universal was in fact
particular?” The proliferation of identity politics, multiculturalism, and poststructuralist theories
of shifting and multiple identity are not a solution to the problem of the false universalism of the
modern liberal subject because they fail to solve the problem of fake universalism that they
rightfully questioned in the first place.
The root of the problem with the modern liberal political subject was that it attempted to
ground its universality on foundationalist principles. There would be appeals to God, nature, or
history as an attempt to justify filling in the universal with a specific particular. Such attempts to
ground the political community on solid foundations of an unquestionable and authoritative
basis, however, end up destroying plurality as those who do not agree with the grounding
principles are simply cast out of politics. As was argued in the previous chapter, the political
realm is a human creation that must be built, and thus it has no natural grounding. As Arendt
points out with respect to the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson perhaps
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had an inkling of the wholly constructed and contingent nature of the political realm when he
wrote “we hold these truths to be self-evident”, a clear contradiction as self-evident truth need
not be “held”, which implies the truths of American politics are actually a human construction.222
In this sense, what holds the political realm together is not that the individual subjects have
rationally come together to decide that based on a set of natural truths this is the way the
community must be governed, but instead through a recognition that the universal is groundless
and therefore empty.
The universality of the political subject stems from its emptiness, or, what we have in
common is nothing. Unlike the theorists of consensus or particularized identity who argue that
conflict leads to violence or totalitarian erasures of difference, having nothing in common does
not eliminate the potential for politics, but instead calls it into existence. In an Arendtian sense,
we build the common world simply to give ourselves an agonistic space to test out our subjective
opinions against those of others and to provide a political means to decide common matters
which have no objective answers. A politics which embraces the ability for each to try to
persuade the rest is a direct substitute for violent force, which imposes a single solution from
above. If the common world demanded the commonality of subjects, then universality would be
impossible precisely because to be the same as others demands that difference be excluded and
subjective plurality be erased. The Occupy movement serves as an excellent example of such
empty universal subjectivity as it could not be reduced to a singular identity or situation, and thus
was able to manifest itself in over 100 different countries.
Becoming a political subject means elevating oneself out of the particulars of identity and
into the realm of universal concern, where one can express one’s own opinion and respond to
others, marking one as a unique individual. The emptiness of the universal makes it accessible to
anyone who wishes to direct themselves toward the whole. It is on this measure that the theorists
of liberal multiculturalism, most prominently Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth, conflate political
subjectivity with a particular identity. Their arguments fail to have political consequence because
they look inwards rather than outwards, which leads to a denial of individuality as there is no
means for an individual to express their own subjective position and reveal themselves to
everyone else as a unique individual. Particular identities are what make us like everyone else, in
that to be identified as a Muslim, Korean, or lesbian is to be placed and categorized as not a
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unique individual but as part of a general group where all members have the same properties.
Political subjectivity moves outside of these particularities in that the political subject reveals
him or herself to be someone unique who is part of that unidentifiable part of society which
commonly takes the name of “the people”. The logic of the anti-political state is one of
identification, in which there can be no empty universal position that floats above the hierarchy
of ordered and identified parts and thus no critical debate about issues that affect everyone.
Subjectivity is an important terrain of contestation between politics and anti-politics as the
identification mechanism of keeping everyone in their assigned place is an attempt to foreclose
the emergence of political subjects and shut down the possibility of politics itself.
4.3 The Withdrawal from Identity
Against the recent push to do away with the political subject altogether, exemplified by 1991’s
Who Comes After the Subject, there has been a drive to reassert the importance of political
subjectivity in its universal form by a group of contemporary theorists ranging from those who
took their starting point with Althusser then turned against him (Rancière, Badiou, Laclau and
Mouffe), to others more influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis (Žižek, Zupančič, Stavrakakis).
While Arendt had no engagement with Althusser and certainly had little interest in
psychoanalysis, her focus on free and equal subjects striving for immortality within a political
realm which functions as a universal world without positive properties puts her thinking in line
with many of these thinkers, despite their often harsh critiques of her thought.
A common source among these contemporary theorists of the empty universal is Hegel,
and in particular Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel which revitalized French philosophy
after the First World War. In Kojève’s interpretation, the Hegelian subject is driven by the desire
to be recognized by others. Desire implies the presence of an absence in the form of a lack,
which leads the human subject to “negate given being” and thus attempt to change the world in
an attempt to satisfy the desire that is driven by the lack, which is a lack of recognition. Action in
a political sense has a negative and subtractive character before it can have a bigger political
impact. If one is simply satisfied with what is, then one does not act. Since the goal of these
actions is recognition, political subjectivity is necessarily universal, as to be recognized by one
person or even a thousand people is not satisfying if one can still face the discrimination and
disempowerment of a lack of recognition from others. Now Arendt is not a Hegelian, but she
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explains the function of political subjectivity in much the same way. She argues that what drives
people to enter the political realm and become political subjects is the desire to leave some
lasting trace on the world, and thus achieve a form of immortality. The great performative deeds
of speech and action which characterize politics can achieve immortality for the subject only in
so far as these deeds become universally known, leading the subject-actor to become universally
recognized.
But in order to be able to distinguish oneself amongst one’s equals in word and deed as
Arendt describes, first one must be recognized on a basic level as an equal capable of engaging
in political speech in the first place. It is in this sense that Kojève describes recognition as an
overcoming of oppression. For Rancière, it is this kind of striving to overcome wrong that drives
people toward political subjectivation, rather than an Arendtian sense of striving to leave a trace
and be remembered. When one realizes there is something wrong in the world, it motivates one
to act, which requires that one must first step out of one’s assigned place and role within society.
This means taking a risk to try to enact a change in the world which brings about more equality.
The political subjectivation process that seeks to bring about freedom and equality in the
Rancièrian sense is then a necessary prerequisite to acting as a subject in the Arendtian sense,
although the two forms of subjectivation are usually linked, as correcting a wrong brings about a
universal change in the world, thus winning the actors immortal fame in the process. Both of
these motivations to become a political subject based on recognition act as a corrective to
Kojève’s belief that once everyone was universally recognized, and thus free and equal, there
would be no more politics. Even if it were possible to purge all positive identifications and
(dis)qualifications from the political realm, something which is likely impossible, there would
still be the action of equals striving to distinguish themselves which would drive people to enter
the political realm.
Taking his starting point from Kojève’s claim that all political action begins with
negation, in many ways Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject is an interesting synthesis of much of the
contemporary political theory which seeks to reassert the importance of the political subject and
in particular its universality. Encompassing insights from Rancière, Badiou, Laclau, and Mouffe,
as read through his Hegelian-Lacanian perspective, Žižek posits subjectivity as a three step
process. First there is a withdrawal from the world, followed by a plunge into madness,
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eventually allowing an emergence from madness to create a symbolic universe. To put this
process of subjectivation in political terms, it means that to become a subject one must first
withdraw from one’s particular place in society, strip away all identification and classification
and thus negate given-being in Kojève’s terminology, which will then allow one to come back
into the shared and universal world of politics. As Žižek puts it,
you become ‘something’ (you are counted as a subject) only after going through the
zeropoint, after being deprived of all the ‘pathological’ (in the Kantian sense of empirical,
contingent) features that support your identity, and thus are reduced to ‘nothing’—‘a
Nothingness counted as Something’
In other words to become a political subject, or to reveal oneself as someone with political
substance (“something”), one must leave behind the particularities of identity that are used by the
anti-political order to categorize, place, count, and ultimately dismiss one as incapable of
political speech. By negating one’s given-being, or identity-place in the world, and embracing
one’s lack, one can then emerge to perform acts of universal significance that can both lead to
recognition and change the world. If one is satisfied by one’s particular place in the world, or
one’s own identity, one will not have the desire to act politically. The lack that drives the desire
to act will be filled, and the goal of such individuals will simply involve replicating the status
quo rather than taking the risk to disrupt their own satisfaction and bring about political change.
In virtually every protest movement that arises, there is a concerted attempt by the
apparatuses of anti-politics to identify the protesters in order to categorize and dismiss them as
simply concerned with their own identity interests with nothing relevant to say to everyone else.
In the Arab Spring there were continuous attempts to identity protesters as foreign disrupters who
should not be listened to, and in the context of Occupy the protesters were labelled and dismissed
as everything from hostile to America and thus not to be trusted, to disingenuous pawns of the
labour movement trying to distract the public from the failings of President Obama. Such
attempts to uncover a hidden particularity are meant to reveal the activists as self-interested
parties with nothing to say to the wider public. A prime example would be the 2013 protests in
New Brunswick against exploratory drilling for shale gas, commonly called fracking. While
these protests began as a grassroots coalition between environmentalists, people in rural areas
concerned about water quality, and aboriginal groups, the media was quick to identify and
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dismiss the protesters as merely an aboriginal complaint about land use, thus papering over the
water safety issue. Such a framing was meant to convince the average Canadian that these
protests were of no wider consequence since aboriginals are a small minority and a land claim
dispute does not affect the vast majority of Canadians. If the protests were instead framed as
about access to clean water and the potential for water pollution associated with side effects of
the fracking process, then this might have been an issue of universal significance which the
average person could have sympathized with. In order to become political subjects, individuals
must transcend their supporting private identities so that they can access the universal and speak
to it without being dismissed as partisans of a particular identity that has no commonality with
the rest of the people.
The key difference between this idea of subjectivity as a stripping away of particulars and
the old Enlightenment political subject of universal reason revolves around the difference
between adding and subtracting. Žižek likes to tell a joke to elaborate on his conception of
subjectivity about a worker who leaves a factory every day with an empty wheelbarrow who the
bosses believe is stealing from them. The bosses check the wheelbarrow every day but cannot
figure out what he is stealing because the wheelbarrow is always empty. But Žižek says this is
precisely the point of subjectivity, that it is empty, as the worker is stealing the wheelbarrows
themselves. This is what the old Enlightenment idea of political subjectivity misses; the fact that
subjectivity is empty and without specific properties is exactly what makes it universal, not the
ability to rationally come to a consensus on a set of values that must be universally true and
agreed on by all. To become a political subject involves emptying our wheelbarrows, not making
sure everyone has the same things in their wheelbarrows. While everyone having nothing can be
truly universal, a situation in which everyone’s wheelbarrows are filled exactly the same way is
virtually impossible. It is also why the anti-political order seems to be disproportionately
threatened by protests that advocate not for any one specific identity-cause, but operate in a
manner so that anyone can project whatever complaint they have onto the protest and thus join
in. The vexation of many commentators about what Occupy really was about relates to this
empty universality and the difficulty in trying to categorize, count, and place these people who
were making a general argument about corporate greed and government complacency, and not
making a specific identity claim about a certain group needing to be given a place within the
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whole. Identity claims are inherently static, as they seek to keep people in their place, while
political subjectivity posits an empty universality free from classification and open to all who are
willing to cast aside static placements and move among those who have no place or qualification.
Rancière calls this empty form of universal subjectivity the part with no part, or more
simply the people. The people are not a specific people, just an empty name that stands for the
universal nature, and at the same time, plurality of opinion contained within the people. Rancière
emphasizes the difference between the modern political subject which uses reason to arrive at a
shared set of values and his empty subjectivity by arguing that political subjectivation, and thus
politics itself, arises not from ties between individuals and the bonds of community but from the
opposite: politics arises out of a miscount of the parts of society. Against the social contract
theories which argue that political subjectivity arises from individuals coming together to place
their interests in common, political subjects come into being precisely when those who disagree
with the existing ordering of parts assert their own existence. In this sense, the political subject is
inherently conflictual but also needs no common interests or traits. To come together and place
interests in common relies on the idea that such individuals all have an agreement on what the
common interest is, and thus government becomes a juridical process of social administration.
The benefit of the empty subject is that such a subject need not join in some impossible and
mythical original consensus, preserving the plurality of opinion that is the basis of politics itself.
At the same time, the part with no part as universal and empty does not simply mean that
it is open to competing hegemonic projects which seek to fill the universal void with their own
particular project, as Laclau argues. In so far as the lack which characterizes the empty universal
gets filled with some positive project of hegemonic rulership, this amounts to the assertion of the
police logic and the temporary defeat of politics. Rancière’s suspicion of hegemonic projects,
including socialism or communism, leads him toward an oppositional stance which is able to
maintain a form of true universality which remains empty and without specific requirements. As
Prozorov puts it, “Rancière’s true universality is whatever does not fall under Laclau’s fake
universality.” Rancière leaves little possibility for politics to be “official”, but with an Arendtian
notion of politics which is fundamentally opposed to sovereignty, the sheer empty universality of
politics can be preserved at least in principle, as politics would never be socialist or capitalist or
fascist, but simply a procedure to debate, decide, and act on public affairs.
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4.4 The Scandal of Plurality
The plurality of political subjects has long been viewed as problematic by philosophers who have
sought to develop constrained systems whose aim is rigid stability. From Plato right up to
modern theories of consensus and communitarianism, the internal division of the people, what
Arendt calls the basic fact of human plurality which stems from the fact that every person is
different, has been viewed as a scandal to overcome instead of the “primary condition for the
exercise of politics.” Subjectivity in a political sense is, of course, subjective. Everyone is
different, yet politics is not simply a personal or private affair but is conducted publicly and has
universal significance. As Arendt explains it, the very reality of the common world of politics is
derived from the fact that people look at it from different perspectives and that there is no
objective measurement or tool which can be applied in order to decide public affairs. The
commonality of the world of human affairs stems from the diversity of subjects who share their
perspectives with others in a way in which, even though each subject has a different perspective,
each person is looking and talking about things and events that are of universal significance. The
only way to preserve the plurality of subjectivity is by leaving the universal empty. To fill the
universal is to introduce reasons to disqualify people as political subjects, and thus undermine its
plurality.
While the Arab Spring’s chants referencing the people or Occupy’s slogan invoking the
99% are excellent examples of a political subjectivity enabling internal plurality, there is still a
remnant of thought that claims to be oppositional or even leftist that would prefer a plurality of
identities to a plurality of different opinions as the basis of political subjectivity. While identity
politics is losing much of the popular currency it once had, as evidenced by these new protest
movements, theoretically there is still a strong current of thought in which the critique of the
Enlightenment-era modern political subject amounts to the assertion of identity against
subjectivity. In Jeffrey Popke’s attempt to come up with an explicitly post-structuralist form of
subjectivity he ends up directly conflating subjectivity with identity and, thus, unwittingly
becomes an ally of anti-politics by asserting the existence of multiple identities at the cost of any
form of universal subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic subject can be criticized in the
same manner, as their ideal subject would be a migrant worker with no job security constantly
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moving around desperately trying to find work. Such individuals are radically particularized and
destabilized to the point where not only are they fundamentally dissatisfied with their own
position and would certainly not wish to elevate it as a model for anyone, but they are also
completely outside of politics, as they are cast as purely economic actors who are thoroughly
excluded from any kind of universal political action that might change their situation. The
nomadic schizo-subject has more in common with Agamben’s homo sacer, who is reduced to
bare life and becomes the object of radically depoliticized biopower, than any form of political
subjectivity that might present a challenge to the status quo. The stripping of identity and
becoming nothing which kicks off the subjectivization process is not to be confused with a
stripping away of the ability to act politically and be reduced to a pure object of identity.
Agamben’s homo sacer, or those in the concentration camps of the Holocaust, were reduced to
pure identity and thus were the radical negation of political subjectivity as the State made it
unable to set aside their identity that precluded them from becoming unique political subjects and
marked them as objects to be acted on.
Many of these attempts to politicize identity as a substitute for political subjectivity have
ended up backfiring or have led to unintended consequences. The leftist politicization of
sexuality for example then turns into its opposite: the sexualization of politics. The private lives
of public figures, which for the most part have little impact on their jobs, have now become the
object of public scrutiny to the point where it is easier to remove a politician from office who has
an affair than one who pursues regressive anti-feminist policies. While issues of social inequality
can become the catalysts for political action, a point I will deal with later in the chapter,
advocating in favour of one’s own identity has an isolating and world-destroying effect which
prevents “the people” from forming as an empty part, and cuts off the individual’s access to this
empty universal. As Žižek argues in response to Wendy Brown, there is something fundamentally
liberating about experiencing one’s own culture as contingent, something that philosophers from
Descartes, with his self-doubt, to Spinoza, who lived between and outside both Christian and
Jewish culture, to Nietzsche’s renunciation of his Germanness and rather spurious claim to being
Polish, have understood. To move beyond the identity one is born into allows one to address the
world as a whole and as an equal to everyone else within the world, rather than as a prejudiced
advocate of a specific place or identity. In politics this means engaging in speech and action in
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order to reveal oneself as a unique individual, something which fails to happen if people let their
particular identity speak for them.
If the idea of universal political subjectivity is thrown out in favour of a multiplicity of
identities, then politics itself is thrown out, as identities do not need political speech to be
revealed. When movements to overcome exclusion based on identity change their position from
negating the oppressive effects of identity to promoting identity as a positive qualification, then
these movements end up reinscribing positive properties as a qualification for political being.
The problem of Enlightenment subjectivity, with its positive properties, is then only reproduced
by advocating in favour of minority identities that were traditionally overlooked. A politics of
identity eliminates individual uniqueness, and thus subjectivity itself, reinforcing the antipolitical
status quo in which the state polices populations. Plurality is impossible when group identity
becomes the determination of one’s political status. Even though many advocates of identity as a
substitution for subjectivity speak in favour of plurality, this becomes merely a plurality of
identities which leaves no room for individuals to freely reveal their own unique subjectivity and
consequently escape from the prejudicial effects of identity.
4.5 Protest and Subjectivity
Žižek’s argument that the subject’s withdrawal and stripping of identity is linked to madness has
political implications as well. He argues that the terror and upheaval of revolutions relates to this
stripping of previous identities and allows a new order to arise. While revolutions and protests
need not relive the terror in the same manner of the French Revolution, they do tend to have
similar processes that could be linked to the madness that accompanies a withdrawal of all
identity. In particular the black bloc protest technique, which first gained public notoriety in the
1999 Seattle WTO protests and has recently been adapted by Egyptian activists protesting the
Muslim Brotherhood, operates as a physical expression of the subjectivizing process of
withdrawal and stripping away of identity. In a black bloc, the protesters all wear similar black
clothes and masks as a means to obscure their own individual identities and express a kind of
collective solidarity with the other protesters. The fact that the black bloc technique is often
associated with more aggressive protest methods, such as direct confrontations with police and
property damage, mark it as both a stripping of identity and a kind of descent into necessary
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madness in order to eventually emerge to create a new universal order. In Egypt, black bloc
protesters were explicitly stripping themselves of Muslim identity and targeted the offices of the
Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist Freedom and Justice Party with arson attacks with the goal of
secularizing the government and making it responsive to the people in general, rather than just a
certain portion of the people who identify as Muslims.
The protest technique of obscuring identity is an essential aspect of the subjectivation
process. To put on a mask is not simply to prevent identification and possible arrest by the police,
but is to strip oneself of the particular elements that sustain a private identity which is the object
of classification, administration, and policing by the anti-political state and economic system.
Laws against concealing identity in a protest and media criticism of protesters as hiding when
they wear masks is a deeply anti-political ploy to cut off the subjectivization process at its very
beginning. If individuals can remain objects of identification, then their speech can be classified
and dismissed as politically irrelevant to the whole, and that threatening universality, known as
the people, can be prevented from forming. Interesting parallels also arise here with regard to the
debate about online anonymity, which put in the context of identity-concealing protests, clearly
becomes an issue not of technology but of the difference between political and anti-political
approaches. As I will argue in the next section, once one has stripped oneself of identity and
essentially become anonymous, one can then emerge as a member of the people and reveal
oneself to be a unique individual capable of political speech which addresses not simply one’s
own position in life, but matters pertaining to the universal world of politics.
4.6 The Emergence of the Universal
After the subject withdraws and strips away particular identities, the next step is emerging as a
member of the universal people. An act becomes political at the point when it is able to finish the
subject-formation process and elevate a specific claim into a universal stand-in for any and all
wrongs. When a particular demand or problem becomes a standing metaphor onto which
everyone can project one’s own individual demands and problems it becomes universalized and
thus politicized. A protest or complaint must move from being about something particular, which
only applies to a small segment of the population, into something that serves to represent all
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complaints and problems with the existing order, thus moving from the realm of the social to the
political. Politics is:
the art of the local and singular construction of cases of universality. Such construction is
only possible as long as the singularity of the wrong…is distinguished from the
particularization of right attributed to collectivities according to their identity.
What this means is that for a protest or complaint to be properly political, it must be addressed
the whole and be able to serve as a metaphor for all instances of injustice. If the protest or
complaint remains focused on incorporating an identity group into the whole, then it remains
within the realm of the social. If a protest requires a certain identity to take part, then it fails to be
political as it remains within the realm of social particularity.
“The people” who populate the political world have no positive identifications or
qualifications such as virtue or wealth, just the empty indicator of freedom. As Rancière puts it:
Whoever has no part—the poor of ancient times, the third estate, the modern proletariat—
cannot in fact have any part other than all or nothing…it is through the existence of this
part of those who have no part, of this nothing that is all, that the community exists as a
political community—that is, as divided by a fundamental dispute, by a dispute to do
with the counting of the community’s parts even more than of their “rights”. [emphasis
added]
The fact that becoming a political subject does not require one to have a certain set of beliefs,
qualifications, or a specific identity means that subjectivity strips away such things and one
becomes part of those with no part. The part with no part has no identity and thus is not assigned
a place in the hierarchically constructed order, yet it remains in existence floating alongside the
established order. The lack of identity or qualifications means that it can claim to be the whole
community--“the people”--precisely because it does not require any positive qualification. The
political subject as the part with no part differs in this sense from both the Enlightenment subject,
which had a single set of positive qualifications and identity traits which were falsely claimed to
be universal, and the postmodern subject which is based on a multitude of different sets of
positive identity qualifications.
An example of the subject-formation process which operated according to the logic of
taking a particular and universalizing it into a metaphor for all complaints against the regime
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occurred during the Arab Spring. In Tunisia the initial catalyst for the protests and revolution
came from a fruit vendor who, after facing police harassment and silence from authorities after
he tried to complain, set himself on fire in a dramatic act of desperate suicide. This fruit vendor,
Mohamed Bouazizi, had a specific complaint against a particular wrong, but the protests which
later arose were not focused on the specific situation of fruit vendors and their mistreatment by
police and the authorities. Instead Bouazizi became a metaphorical stand-in on to which
everyone was able to project their various problems and complaints with the Tunisian regime.
His treatment was elevated to a universal with which everyone could identify with, to the point
where (untrue) rumours were even spread that he possessed a university degree in computer
science but due to the government’s corruption and lack of economic prospects was forced to sell
fruit instead. In this way he became an emblem for the lower class, the middle class, and even
those wealthier Tunisians who identified with him as a business owner frustrated by corruption
and harassment from the authorities. The same type of metaphorical elevation happened in Egypt
where one of the primary websites used by activists was called “We Are all Khaled Said”,
invoking the idea that the mistreatment of one was the mistreatment of all. The success of the
Arab Spring relied precisely on this inherently political move of elevating a particular wrong into
an empty universal canvass onto which the people could project whatever complaints they had.
One could imagine that, if the protests remained firmly about the particular situation of Tunisia’s
fruit vendors, the government could have easily either dismissed the protests as irrelevant to the
wider Tunisian population or made some token move to marginally alleviate their situation and
assert the rights of fruit vendors and thus appease the protesters, preventing the mass
demonstrations that followed.
Given the recent history of North Africa and the Middle East, in which Islamism seemed
to be the only organized form of popular resistance to the left-over dictatorships of the days of
anti-colonial Arab nationalism, the stripping of specific identity to form a people is all the more
striking. Perhaps the most widely used slogan during the Arab Spring was “Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ
an-niẓām” which translates to “the people wants to bring down the regime.” As Uriel Abulof
points out, the inclusion of the term “the people” is of utmost importance because
in the two long centuries since Napoleon landed in Alexandria, the moral foundation of
modern politics--popular sovereignty--has been absent from the Arab Middle East. The
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Arab people became the object for colonizers, dictators and imams, with their call to
submission and arms. Never a subject for thought and action, the people lacked political
agency, powerless to forge a collective moral self, let alone a nation to demand
selfdetermination: the right to tell right from wrong in the public sphere.
By making the slogan specifically state that “the people” want to bring down the regime, and not
simply “down with the regime,” is to declare the existence of a form of universal subjectivity.
Furthermore, such a subjectivity had gone through the process of withdrawal and stripped itself
of particular aspects. Many reports cite the ease with which Coptics and Muslims put aside
religious differences to work together against the regime and how middle class professionals
fought street battles hand in hand with the poor, as their various reasons for protesting the
Egyptian dictatorship united them regardless of their private backgrounds.
This form of universal subjectivity differs from the way the Syrian Islamists view
themselves in the civil war that sprang out of the Arab Spring protests in that country. They
transformed the slogan of “the people wants to bring down the regime” to “al-Ummah turīd
khilāfah islāmiyyah” which translates to “the Ummah wants an Islamic caliphate”. For the Syrian
Islamists, it is not an empty universal people who want something but the ummah, which has a
connotation of a specifically identified group: a nation of Muslims. Furthermore, they do not
simply want the fall of the regime of President Bashir al-Assad but they specifically want an
Islamic Caliphate, which is a form of government for and by a particular identity in which others
would be excluded. While the Syrian uprising has its roots in the Arab Spring, the transformation
of the slogan demonstrates that the war in Syria is now of a fundamentally different character
than of the Arab Spring. The subjective emergence of an empty universal known simply as “the
people,” which was part of the reason the Arab Spring was such a unique event in the first place
has been lost to the championing of particular identities. By universalizing a particular, the
universal comes into effect not through subjects obtaining some supposedly neutral position but
through recognizing and elevating to universality a particular that is out of joint or structurally
excluded from the whole.257
The uniting factor of this universality comes from the fact that each subject recognizes
the inadequacy of any particular identity and thus throws his or her lot in with “the people” who
do not have a set of specific values to which one must adhere in order to become one of them. To
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be a part of the people who wants to bring down the regime meant being united with the other
people as part of a collective, yet at the same time the people make no identity demands of the
subjects, unlike the Syrian Islamists who demand a particular identity as a condition of
participation. While subjects withdraw from identity, they do not lose their subjective and
pluralistic opinions. In fact, it is precisely the stripping away of identity that allows each subject
to be both universal and unique. For the Syrian Islamists, to identify as a Muslim and be part of
their group means to also adhere to a set of dogmatic principles and values which are not open to
debate, thus erasing plurality. Thus to maintain identity is to allow oneself to become just like
everyone else, while the stripping away of identity allows the subject to reveal him or herself as a
unique individual, allowing plurality to flourish. Consequently, when Judith Butler critiques the
universal as a site of violent erasure, Žižek points out that this is not a critique of the universal
but precisely its benefit. The universal as a site of erasure enables one to move beyond the static
group constraints of cultural, bodily, or religious identification.
The universal as a site of violently erasing identity was the primary political move in
ancient Athens which allowed for the development of democracy in the first place. In the reforms
of Cleisthenes, ethnos was replaced by demos, where the ethnos is particular identity and the
demos is universal political subjectivity. Unfortunately, however, ethnos is becoming more
prominent today as wars break out over religious difference and multicultural society is
predicated on assigning each identity a particular place so that there is no universal part with no
part, but only a collection of well-ordered ethnic parts which come together to form a consensual
whole with no polemical remainder. Even worse is the assumption that such ethnic identities are
natural and inescapable, when in reality they are arbitrary to the point of bizarre. Many of the
supposedly inheritable ethnic identities today which people claim are passed from parent to child
are not even grounded in bodily traits or genetics, but in beliefs such as religion or nationality, so
that the only way to discover someone’s allegedly natural identity is to have them tell you.
Rancière links this strange elevation of beliefs to the level of ethnic identity to the seemingly
random categorization of animals in an ancient Chinese encyclopedia which is cited in a story by
Jorge Luis Borges. Does the division of people into ethnicities such as Muslim, female,
atheist, or immigrant not appear just as odd as dividing animals into categories such as those who
belong to the Emperor, those who have just broken a pitcher, or those who act like madmen?
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Too often these forms of naturalized identity are then used to disqualify the possibility for
political subjectivation. As Prozorov argues,
such familiar claims that e.g. equality is an impossibility in Islamic society or that
Russian culture is hostile to freedom would be utterly irrelevant even if they were true,
since world politics is not determined by any particular culture or tradition but is rather
made possible by a subtraction from it.
Such naturalization of cultural identity is inherently anti-political as it attempts to erase the
ability to act. As we have seen in everything from the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt to the
activism of the band Pussy Riot in Russia, political action and the generation of political subjects
is always possible everywhere, as the ability to say no is universal and requires no positive
identifications. Thus when cultural relativists claim that one cannot criticize oppression or
inequality in other cultures because of different practices, they are taking a strong stance against
the possibility for political subjects to emerge within those cultures who can make a declaration
that there is a wrong that must be negated, resulting in an anti-political attitude that ends up
siding with the authorities and against political activists.
What the institutions of anti-politics attempt to do through a process of identifying such
seemingly strange and arbitrary naturalized groups is to prevent “the possibility of a
‘metaphoric’ elevation of particular wrong into a stand-in for the universal ‘wrong’.” This is done
by deploying experts, social workers, and a discourse of tolerance to catalogue and identify the
specifics of the situation in order to provide some recourse. The possibility of subjectivation and
politicization are then precluded, yet the solutions provided are never quite satisfying and the
possibility of destructive violence when the political is foreclosed always remains latent. In this
sense, the assertion of a multiplicity of identities and a focus on cultural difference reinforces the
dominant anti-political ideology of globalized capitalism, which happily adapts to the
particularities of each culture, as this is more profitable than attempting to Americanize the
world. This critique of identification as an ordering of parts leads to Rancière’s arguments about
political subjectivity and police identification.
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4.7 Anti-Political Identification versus Political Subjectivation
Seeing as subjectivity is a terrain of contestation between politics and anti-politics, a more
precise elaboration of how identity is used by anti-politics to foreclose subjectivity is needed,
and on this I will draw on Rancière and place him in contrast to Althusser and Foucault. Part of
the recent impetus for rejecting notions of political subjectivity comes from the influential
accounts of Althusser and Foucault who treat the political subject not as a free actor but as
someone who is subjected to the state. For Althusser, the subject is interpellated by ideology, and
thus “the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the
commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection”. Foucault
and the theorists of governmentality, such as Nikolas Rose, extend the Althusserian idea so that
subjects are produced by the application of biopower through the management of populations in
prisons, clinics, schools, and virtually all aspect of life. Again, subjects are subjected and
produced by the government in order to assent to its structure. This is not subjectivity but
identity, and it relates not to politics but to what Rancière calls policing. A proper form of
subjectivity is not a positive placing in a specific world, as in Althusser and Foucault, but a
subtraction from it which enables access to the empty universal world. The problem with
Althusserian or Foucauldian accounts of subjectivity as identification is how to break out of this
subjection and act politically, a question that Foucault did turn to in later in life, but a question
which Rancière is much better equipped to deal with.
In Rancière’s terminology, politics is bound up with the police, where politics introduces
dissensus and disagreement and the role of the police is maintaining the existing consensual
distribution of the sensible. Policing the status quo consists of keeping all the multiple identities
that make up the social whole in their assigned places. The primary move of the anti-political
police is to deny the existence of the part with no part. The idea that the whole of the community
might be more than the sum of its parts, that individuals may transcend the boundaries of their
given social, economic, or political position is intolerable, as it opens up access to the universal
realm of politics to anyone. The key innovation of democracy is that politics is not simply a job,
or a specific role in society only open to those who are qualified, but that politics is universally
relevant, as its debates and decisions affect everyone. Politics requires no specific qualification
or identity to take part, and thus the part with no part are those who have no qualification,
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assigned place, or specific identity. The part with no part stake this lack of qualification to be
precisely what gives them the right to take part in public politics. It is precisely this
subjectivation process which removes assigned places and allows access to the universal that
anti-politics seeks to foreclose by asserting and policing identity and status.
While politics has been traditionally thought of as the set of procedures whereby the
aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, power is organized, places and roles are
distributed, and various systems are designed to legitimize these distributions are devised, these
functions are properly anti-political. Anti-politics distributes bodies into places, and then designs
systems to ensure that those bodies stay where they are put. A body is placed based on its
properties which constitute an identity, rather than on the subjectivity of the unique person who
inhabits the body. Thus “to put someone in his/her place” is a prime expression of antipolitics, as
it involves discovering someone’s identity and using it to dismiss a person’s claim to speak to the
universal of politics. Political activity threatens the anti-political counting of parts and
distributing of places by allowing individuals to move out of their assigned place and access the
political realm. So long as one has access to a political space which is universal in its lack of
required identity or qualifications to take part, one can become a political subject and be more
than whatever occupation, identity, or social position such a person is assigned to by the police.
The universality of politics and the shifting places of political subjects is viewed as a threat to
both the stability of the anti-political order and the elite-based mode of government that radically
alienates the vast majority from taking part in politics.
Like Žižek, Rancière makes an explicit link between political subjectivity and Cartesian
subjectivity. The Cartesian subject’s being is derived from its capacity to think, not from the
identity of its body, social position, or economic value. In this sense “any subjectification is a
disidentification, removal from the naturalness of a place, the opening up of a subject space
where anyone can be counted since it is the space where those of no account are counted”.
Rancière provides the example of the revolutionary Auguste Blanqui who was put on trial in
1832. The judge asked his profession and he simply replied “proletarian”, to which the judge
responded by claiming that is not a profession, which allowed Blanqui to make the political
claim that it is the profession of millions of people who live off their labour but are denied
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political rights. The judge is following the anti-political logic of identification, trying to identify
Blanqui and thus put him in his place as someone unqualified to take a political stand. Blanqui
on the other hand refuses to fall for the attempt at identification and instead simply posits himself
as a member of an identity-less collectivity that lacks any specific properties but is open to
anyone who claims their rights are being infringed upon by the current state of French
government. The vexation experienced by the judge at the declaration of proletarian as
profession relates to the fact that within politics subjects do not have consistent bodies. They are,
as Rancière calls them, “fluctuating performers”.272
Anti-political society can be thought of as an aggregation and collection of identities, in
which there is no real “majority”, just a lot of minorities who, once collated, form the whole. The
subjectivation process, which involves a stripping away of these assigned identities, is an
emancipation from the state of being a minority. It is on this account that defense of identity as
political yet again fails to be politically transformative and ends up having the anti-political
effect of keeping people in their places and cutting them off from political action. The goal of
political feminism for example must be to declassify and de-identify gender as a political
(dis)qualification. Those who attempt to assert the primacy of gender, even when meaning well,
by arguing in favour of electoral schemes which, for example, might provide a quota that
guarantees women will have half the seats in parliament, simply reduce a woman to her gender
identity. Any political argument about gender equality is then reduced to a matter of the
distribution and policing of the parts, thus foreclosing the emancipation from gender identity and
the move from member of identity group to political subject capable of revealing herself as a
unique individual who is not defined by her body or identity.
The subjectivation process of declassification, disidentification, and emergence from a
state of minority also speaks to the method of politics in its oppositional form. In so far as the
subject-formation process is political, it operates in a manner that seeks to affirm universal
equality rather than uncover more and more inequalities. Continuing to use feminism as an
example, the case of Jeanne Deroin is exemplary in demonstrating how the political
subjectivation process seeks to affirm universal equality and thus declassify identity as a
qualification or class that hinders political involvement. In 1849 Deroin presented herself as a
candidate for the national election, even though at the time it was illegal for a woman to take a
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seat in French parliament. She ran on the presumption that the universal equality guaranteed to
all in the French Constitution was not merely a lie meant to cover over the fact that equality was
only for a specific gender identity. Her action began with the assumption of equality and set
about to put that formal statement of equality to the test, knowing full well she was
demonstrating a contradiction between what the constitution said, and what was reality. In this
sense, she sought to emancipate herself from the minority position of “woman” by revealing
herself as a unique individual with her own opinions that made her worthy of taking part in the
universal discourse of politics through her act of running for office. Subjectivity is not merely a
demand on the other, but a proof to oneself that one is not limited by social, economic, cultural,
or bodily identity and that one is a unique individual capable of engaging with others as a
political subject. In this sense Deroin proved to herself, and everyone else, that through her
campaign she was the equal of the men running, and that therefore the wrong existed not in the
declaration of universal equality, but in the fact that this equality was not being put into practice.
This political method of affirming and asserting equality is in direct contrast to the
method of arguing that the contradiction between the formal equality of the constitution and what
is experienced proves that the claim to formal universal equality a lie. The latter method, which
has unfortunately been adopted by much of the Left as part of the general sentiment against
universal subjectivity, plays into the hands of the anti-political order by affirming difference and
inequality. If statements of universal equality are simply ideological lies, and the job of the Left
is to expose those lies, then there is no political action to be undertaken but simply a demand that
the forces of anti-politics be more efficient at parcelling up society based on identity. What
uncovering more and more inequalities as a political method amounts to, is a demand for more
surveillance, control, and policing. The part with no part, which is the basis of political
subjectivity, is denied as a possibility and the job of the activist becomes uncovering new forms
of inequality rather than generating more equality. It is on this register that the suspicion of
universality in favour of particular identity that has become fashionable on the Left makes it an
unwitting ally of the anti-politics of everything from Christian fundamentalists to marketing
campaigns which rely on selling niche products to specific identity groups.
In so far as the subject moves beyond identity, I do not wish to simply dismiss identity
issues as politically irrelevant. At the same time, the empty subject does not lose private identity
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altogether, but merely keeps it private so as to be able to speak universally without such private
attachments becoming grounds for disqualification. As was noted earlier, the emergence of the
universal quite often stems from taking a particular injustice as a metaphorical stand-in for all
injustices. Identity issues can be elevated to be metaphorical stand-ins, so long as those of the
specific identity in question are willing to allow their particular issue to move beyond their own
particular concerns. The early days of the gay rights movement provides a good example as one
of the most prominent slogans was “gay rights are human rights”, which explicitly attempted to
use the wrongs against gays and lesbians as a stand-in for any person who was being denied
basic human rights. In this sense, many identity issues are properly political in so far as they aim
for depoliticizing identity. While a political movement for depoliticization may sound
contradictory, there is also the paradoxical sounding anti-political move toward politicization.
Same-sex marriage and abortion are two examples of issues which should not be political
matters, as they are maters of basic individual rights and not of public concern. The movement to
depoliticize and, thus, keep these issues a matter of private choice is thoroughly political in so far
as it involves attempting to politically declassify women and gays as identity groups to be
publicly acted on. By contrast, when conservative groups try to make these issues a matter of
public concern, they often portray their moves as simply a matter of invoking a political debate,
but making identity into a matter of public concern is, as I have argued throughout this chapter, a
fundamental move of anti-politics meant to deny political subjectivity so that people can be
treated as homogenous groups to be parcelled and policed. If politics is thought of as a stage,
then in addition to the speech and action of those on it, politics also involves the boundary work
of debating who gets to be on the stage in the first place, as well as deciding what should and
should not be performed on the stage.
4.8 Political Subjectivity Online
In the previous chapter I argued that a political realm can be created on the internet, as political
space was a product of the actions and movements of people and thus not reducible to hardware.
The experience of activists in the Arab Spring, Occupy, and Anonymous movements testify to
the creation of online political space, which raises the question of online political subjectivity.
Does operating in an online political space change, alter, or reorient the political subjectivation
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process described in the first part of this chapter? What I argue is that the act of entering an
online political realm, even if it is just a discussion forum for politics, automatically pushes
people into the subjectivation process by stripping away their offline identity and throwing them
into the universal void of the internet. In this manner, the siting of politics in an online political
realm can be a tremendous aid for overcoming the many obstacles that prevent people from
activating their own political subjectivity.
If the first step of becoming a political subject is to strip away all forms of contingent
particular identity, going online to discuss politics operates in the same manner. Imagine a
scenario in which one finds a political discussion site on the internet for the first time. After
choosing a username, one joins in a debate by posting one’s first comment. This person enters the
discussion as someone who is completely unidentifiable and completely without properties that
others can recognize. The other people using the site see only a username and the comment that
was posted, meaning that the first time user has no identifiable particularities on which to be
judged or dismissed. Those who seek to engage with this first time commenter can only respond
to what the comment said, as they know nothing of their identity, class, status, or bodily traits
such as sex or skin colour. The simple act of going online and entering into a pseudonymous
space automatically strips away identities, as your body and social background are invisible to
the other commenters as a source of prejudice. The very nature of such online interactions forces
a subjectivation process, because nothing is visible except the story that is revealed through our
online speech. Online interactions within a website dedicated to political discussion are the
ultimate form of Cartesian subjectivity, as what we think and share with others is what defines us
to the others, not the sight of our bodies. Political disqualification based on prejudice is radically
subverted as there is simply no grounds on which to pre-judge someone and thus disqualify him
or her before he or she even have a chance to speak. Attempts to disqualify someone as incapable
of political speech in an online context then must always allow for at least some form of initial
speech and revealing of subjectivity. By contrast, in offline space one can see someone’s body
before they ever speak. Thus, prejudicial dismissals based on physical appearance can become
the grounds for disqualifying someone’s political speech before one can even make an initial
statement.
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Without prejudice to rely on as a means of disqualifying someone from political speech,
anti-political mechanisms based on disqualifying speech based on identity are disrupted. By
hiding these prejudices and protecting private identity through adopting a pseudonym, the
antipolitical identification process is already rendered less effective. People have already been
admitted into the political realm and attempts to dismiss their capacity to speak politically must
come after the fact. While pseudonymity may not entirely protect private identities from attacks
meant to disqualify one’s speech based on identity, as these identities may become apparent in
the context of longer discussions or may be purposely revealed by the speaker, at least the effect
of prejudice is severely limited. The fact that such attempts at disqualification must come after
one has already spoken as a political subject within a political realm marks a significant
advantage for online political speech over offline, as identificatory disqualification after one has
already entered the political realm as a political subject remain difficult online if one is careful to
keep their private identity hidden.
In existing online political forums, one inevitably encounters someone who disagrees
with what one says, but has no counter-argument and, instead, tries to shut down the debate by
using the anti-political method of attempting to identify, classify, and thus “put you in your
place”, a place where one is not qualified to speak politically. Such attempts can be easily
frustrated online by refusing to identify one’s particular characteristics. The attempt at
classificatory dismissal fails, as the person attempting the dismissal does not know where exactly
the other’s place is and thus does not know how to politically disqualify the other’s speech. This
works in stark contrast to an in-person political debate, where bodies are visible and prejudices
surrounding skin colour, sex, economic class, or cultural identity are much easier to spot and use
as classificatory ammunition, either through direct appearance or through some basic research
into that person’s private background, as public and private personas are usually directly
connected in offline politics. The act of going online can be emancipatory in itself, as a person’s
offline minority status can be obscured, allowing individuals to easily emerge from their minority
positions which are used to disqualify them from taking part in offline politics. When one’s
identity is the source of prejudice, to keep it hidden online makes revealing oneself as a unique
individual with unique thoughts and opinions much easier.
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Stromer-Galley and Wichowski point to the experience of many women in early political
chat rooms who found that not mentioning their sex allowed them to take part in discussions
without having to worry about harassment or disparaging comments painting them as unfit to
participate. The same authors also found that those who are reluctant to discuss political matters
offline, outside of their immediate circle of friends or family, were more willing to engage in
political discussion with strangers online.280 The fact that people have to hide something like
their sex, skin colour, or sexual orientation, because they are ammunition for antipolitical
attempts to disqualify their speech, demonstrates the pervasiveness of anti-political attitudes.
While simply hiding the point of discrimination will not end discrimination, it does force it to
become less personalized to the point of preventing someone from participating in a discussion.
The forced subjectivity of pseudonymous interaction can enable a more egalitarian form of
political discussion, as most people will simply assume that everyone else is like them, until they
are provided proof to the contrary. In this sense, if one goes to the various countryspecific Reddit
discussion forums with an ambiguous username and simply jumps into the conversation,
everyone else will simply assume one is from that country until provided with evidence to the
contrary. So long as a user does not volunteer this identity information, there tend to be few
discriminatory barriers to entry to such pseudonymous forums.
The erasure of identity that is experienced when entering an online political discussion
site does not, of course, mean that we lose our private identities altogether, but only that when
speaking politically we speak universally as someone with something to say to the all, rather than
as an undifferentiated member of an identity whose concerns are only related to that specific
group. By leaving these identifications in the private realm they fail to serve as disqualifiers of
political subjectivity. The withdrawal from identity that happens automatically when entering
online pseudonymous political spaces is not about full-on eliminating our private identities but as
experiencing them as wholly contingent, something which has been the basis of political
subjectivity since Cleisthenes. In this sense, revealing one’s identity online can be a form of
proving that this identity actually has no power to disqualify. When online discussions about
racism arise, someone may identify as a member of the target group for the sole purpose of
pointing out how that identity is completely contingent, as here they are speaking as a universal
subject against forms of racism and discrimination. By speaking as a political subject, it is
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proven that traditional identities which have been used to disqualify political speech are as
irrelevant to political speech as identities or quirks which have not been used to disqualify and
identify. Demonstrating the irrelevance of such identities causes them to lose their authority to
disqualify, and puts them in the same category as having a private identity as a stamp collector or
being left handed: categories which have no relevance to one’s ability to speak politically and
make universally relevant arguments.
Online political subjectivity as an empty universal must also be considered in terms of
the terrain of contestation between political subjectivity and anti-political identity. As with all the
four terrains which make up the understanding of politics advanced here, the terrain is
configured as a sliding scale where less qualifications to become a subject make it more political.
When considering such subjects in an online context, empirical qualifications related to access
and ability to use the internet remain a problem. While the digital divide is becoming less about
relative wealth and more about quality of internet access due to issues surrounding state
censorship and net neutrality, disqualifications still exist that can prevent those who wish to
engage online with others from doing so. At the same time, the universality of such subjects face
barriers in terms of language. In the context of an online forum, the very lack of ability to
prejudge someone because identity is hidden, can turn into a disqualification itself. Someone
who joins such a forum for the first time may face obstacles for being unknown and having no
commenting history. Although the internet can help overcome empirical obstacles to
subjectivization related to prejudice, it also introduces new obstacles and points of qualification
which must be sites of political dispute in themselves. The goal of each terrain is to make it more
political, while realizing that perfection or purity is likely an impossibility.
While some people may enter the online political realm and seek to fight off their own
subjectivity and reproduce their identity online, at least in an online context their identity does
not precede them. Someone who is part of an identity group who finds that group oppressive and
totalizing has the option of hiding that identity online, something which is not as easy offline.
Political emancipation means emerging from a minority and becoming part of the part with no
part, whose only qualification is that it has no qualifications whatsoever. Thus when the
advocates of online bodily identification argue that online activity quickly reproduces offline
identity, as one is often asked about private characteristics in the course of an online political
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debate, they miss the point that these are anti-political mechanisms which are meant to disqualify
and oppress. Gies tries to argue that these common tactics demonstrate that we find talking to
disidentified and disembodied actors as uncomfortable, but this is an attempt to naturalize a
depoliticized discourse that only makes sense outside of political discussions. One only cares
who one is talking to in a social context, a political statement is, by its nature, public and thus
addressed toward everyone. It matters little toward whom political speech is directed, given that
it is meant to be public. The lack of identity or body of those we engage with in a political
context simply does not matter unless we want to look for ways to attempt to place, categorize,
and identify our interlocutors as unqualified to take part in political discussion and thus deny
their own subjectivity and right to participate.
4.9 The Madness of Disembodied Online Interaction
Žižek relates the subject-formation process to a descent into madness before one emerges as a
universal subject, and for those who are used to having their particular identities bestow
privilege, interacting online can seem like madness. The suspicion that people seem to have
toward expressions of identity by others online is an entirely positive trait, as it helps reinforce
the egalitarian stripping away of identity, especially when someone proclaims an identity that is
meant to mark one as privileged. Even if someone really was a millionaire, no one online will
believe the claim, and thus any kind of political argument relying on the authority of class will
simply fall flat. To the millionaire who is used to privilege, especially if he or she is also used to
privilege in their face to face interactions from not just economic class but from gender and skin
colour as well, arguing about politics on the internet would very much seem like pure madness.
No one respects his or her identity and privilege claims, forcing the person claiming identity
privilege into a form of equality in which his or her thoughts and opinions must stand on their
own ground. In this context, the complaints made by some about the loss of identity online as
unsettling and problematic expose underlying hostilities to the egalitarian nature of political
subjectivity. Gray, for instance, is very insistent that online interactions are creepy and unsettling
because he does not know the true identity of who he is talking to and they do not know his true
identity. He then concludes that because of this lack of identity, the internet is therefore unsuited
for political discussion. The internet only seems like madness if one’s particular identity grants
offline privilege, but for an egalitarian politics such madness is politically necessary.
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Oddly enough, the uncertainty surrounding the true identity with whom we interact
online seems like a problem for Žižek. He has commented about the potential for violent
objectification of other people when we interact online due to not knowing their true identity.
If, however, we return to Žižek’s wheelbarrow joke, in which the wheelbarrow of subjectivity
needs to be emptied of identity before it can be filled up with substantial political content, here
we have Žižek claiming that in order to build political solidarity online we need to know what
identity was in the wheelbarrow before it was emptied out at the start of the subjectivation
process. The problem of treating people like objects and thus invoking the spectre of violence is
not some kind of inherent aspect of online interaction, but, as Žižek himself explains outside of
the context of the internet, is a result of the anti-political identification process which places
people into objective groups to be acted on, which denies their subjective individuality. The act
of going online empties our wheelbarrows out for us, making becoming a subject in the Žižekian
sense all the more easier, despite Žižek’s own seeming unease with the technology which leads
him into contradictory statements.
Similar to Žižek’s argument, Turkle claims that interacting online is depersonalizing and
therefore degrading. Not only is this untrue in general, as each webspace is different, but in a
political context depersonalization is beneficial. In any political discussion the goal should be to
evaluate the statements and arguments being made on their own merits, independently of the
identity of the person making the statements. The idea that the body needs to be visibly present in
order to prevent ethical degradation relies on the idea that bodies are not sites of Foucauldian
biopower but instead usher in ethical respect. By contrast, identity and the body are most often
sites of oppression which are overcome through political speech and action. If the body bestowed
ethical status, there would be no debates about the rights of those who are politically
disenfranchised, because as pure bodies they should be afforded the highest ethical status
according to Turkle’s argument. The ethical situation of stateless peoples demonstrates how this
argument is problematic, as such people are objects of sovereign authority which are reduced to a
status of bare life. Even more striking is the case of animals, who lacking any sort of ability to
transcend their bodies and assert themselves through political speech, are the extreme objects of
ethical degradation, demonstrating that a lack of ethical respect resulting in objectification is a
huge problem for those who cannot hide their bodily identities.
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4.10 Online Movements and the Expression of Universal Subjectivity
Enacting political subjectivity online can facilitate the emergence of the universal people which
has no particular properties. A good example is the hacker movement Anonymous, which
operates as an empty universal in which there is no qualification or identity required in order to
become part of it. In fact, the lack of qualifications, even when it comes to computer
programming skills, has led the American Department of Homeland Security to release a public
statement claiming that Anonymous has only “rudimentary” hacking skills, calling them “script
kiddies”, an insult used by programmers to imply someone can only use pre-made applications
and cannot actually program themselves. These attempts to paint Anonymous as unskilled or
lacking in qualifications entirely misses the point, as Anonymous prides itself on being open to
anyone and not being an elite group of programmers with exceptional computer skills, as with
some other hacking groups. In many ways this is what makes Anonymous so significant in terms
of hacker culture, in that it is perhaps the first group to move beyond the petty elitism of hacker
skills and actually become political by embracing openness. To become part of the empty
universal that is Anonymous, one must first become anonymous by stripping away one’s
particular identity. After which, one can then emerge to join with others to take part in a universal
movement which requires no qualifications. The fact that anyone with internet access can
download Anonymous’s distributed denial of service attack tool and use it to be part of a wider
online protest demonstrates the way the internet can facilitate such universal movements which
require no qualification, classification, or identity. This lack of qualification and identity within
Anonymous is also what makes governments so afraid of it, as it is extremely hard to identify,
classify, and therefore dismiss as merely a partisan advocate of some particular identity with no
political relevance to the whole.
The same sort of process at work with Anonymous, in which the internet facilitates both
an overcoming of individual particularities and the creation of empty universals, was at work
with the Occupy movement as well. Wendy Brown rightfully points out that Occupy Wall Street
was significant in that it rallied the 99% together based on claims surrounding public justice
rather than private injury (as with the Tea Party for example). What Brown does not highlight is
the fact that the Occupy movement had a significant online component as well, which facilitated
the disidentification process, allowing Occupy to be more than a collection of American, private
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taxpayers. Instead, it was able to grow into a universal movement that had something to say
about the state of the economy and government that was relevant to everyone not just within the
United States, but across the world. Despite this universalistic thrust within Occupy, as Brown
points out, the media still sought out personal stories of “hardship or calamity” in order to try to
personalize, identify, classify, and thus dismiss the universal political relevance of any given
subject’s speech as a particular complaint not relevant to anyone but that specific individual.
The internet can be immensely helpful in activating political subjectivity, especially as it
inherently undoes geographical, cultural, and bodily identifications which the state tends to rely
on in order to classify and disqualify individuals from political speech. As Stone points out,
disembodied subjectivity messes with whereness. In cyberspace you are everywhere and
somewhere and nowhere, but almost never here in the positivist sense. In the less-virtual
environments of everyday life, governmental and regulatory structures work to increase
the definition of whereness.
At the same time, however, the internet’s openness, in the form of the malleability of the
software layer, means that it can be adopted for anti-political purposes to reaffirm identity
against subjectivity. Dean argues that the internet is characterized by the sovereign reign of
“subjectless flows of communication” which become the infrastructure for a new model of
capitalism based on information exchange. On this register, she speaks about how certain
websites are becoming more and more tailored to individual users, to the point where a news site
might not show any news that a user might find upsetting or disagreeable, thus undermining
universality and actually isolating people in their particularities. What these examples point to is
not an argument against the internet as a realm of subjectivity but its open and contested nature.
In the same way that in-person public communication can be part of a political subjectformation
process or that it can be part of an identification and particularizing process, the internet’s
software layer cannot be reduced to its hardware. No doubt more identification and
particularizing methods will be developed for online use in order to make the internet seem less
and less of a public realm fit for the formation of political subjects, but these are precisely the
types of things which should be, and are, the topic of political debates and actions which
legitimately can lead to political subjectivity arising online. The fact the internet might be used
for anti-political purposes now is no reason to dismiss it so long as it still has the potential to be
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used for political purposes. The rest of this chapter will look at two recurring objections to online
subjectivity which deserve a more in-depth treatment, namely the objections surrounding the
anonymity and disembodied nature of online political subjectivity.
4.11 Disembodied Online Subjects
While I have argued that stripping away particular identities, especially those rooted in biology,
is necessary for the subject-formation process, a line of argument constantly arises when
speaking about online interactions that states that because these interactions with other people
are not embodied they are therefore not real or at least less valuable or authentic. Face to face
communication is claimed to be superior and even necessary for political interaction for a
number of rather flimsy reasons which I dealt with in the previous chapter. Many of these
arguments in favour of embodied subjectivity begin with the assumption that “in the physical
world there is an inherent unity to the self, for the body provides a compelling and convenient
definition of identity. The norm is: one body, one identity.” The body is then claimed to be a
“stabilizing anchor”, and thus when it is obscured online, we can lose our sense of self.294 This
assumption leads to two camps critical of online disembodiment: on one side are those who
accept online subjectivity as disembodied and then go on to argue this disqualifies it from being
authentically political, and on the other are those who attempt to salvage the possibility of online
politics by claiming that online subjectivity is actually embodied after all. But given that political
subjectivitation involves subtracting oneself from positive identifications, including those that
have been built up around the body (either as something oppressive or as a positive culture) both
of these camps fail to properly appreciate how a disembodied and de-identified online experience
can be extremely beneficial for the formation of political subjects and the sustainability of an
online political realm.
Representative of the critics of online disembodiment are Brook and Boal, who claim that
embodied face-to-face interactions “are inherently richer than mediated interactions.”
Statements like this are problematic, because not only is it not obvious that such interactions are
“richer,” but there is an implicit claim that embodied interaction is not mediated. Such claims
rely on a romanticized idea of social interaction in which looking into someone’s eyes during a
conversation creates a magical neural link which allows access to the other’s true thoughts. In
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reality all interactions are mediated, and face to face interactions are mediated by social customs,
the space in which such interaction takes place in, as well as the relationship, status, and position
of those interacting. The fact that interaction is mediated is not an issue in itself but how it is
mediated. If the interaction is mediated by the fact that one person is of a lower economic class
or perceived social status than the other, this can be problematic and cause one person to
unnecessarily defer to the other. Mediations like this are politically problematic whether they
occur in-person or through a computer. Furthermore, the claim that in-person interaction is richer
relies on the presumption of a certain personality type, as those with more extroverted
personalities find in person interaction easier, while those with more introverted personalities can
have a hard time expressing themselves in person and do better when they are provided with the
time to think that is afforded by computer-mediated conversation. For many people computer
mediated interaction feels richer because it is easier to communicate, especially for those with
physical disabilities,298 demonstrating that claims about an “inherent richness” to face to face
interaction, especially when speaking of political interaction, rely on a set of anti-technological
and personality type biases.
A further critique of disembodied interaction comes from Gray who claims that, because
citizenship is based on bodies within geographical boundaries, to be disembodied is to not be a
citizen and thus have no stake in politics. Gray’s statement that citizenship is embodied simply
demonstrates how citizenship has been depoliticized into a matter of where one is born, rather
than as a matter of taking part in politics. The goal of political subjectivation is precisely to make
one into more than one’s body in order to allow one’s unique individuality to shine through,
something that has nothing to do with birth or naturalization-based citizenship. Gray would also
go so far as to disqualify the hacktivism of movements like Anonymous as thoroughly
nonpolitical because they are not embodied. By this same line of reasoning, politics cannot be
conducted over the phone and the entire concept of representative government that Gray is a
strong advocate of, is illegitimate, because it rests on the presumption that a person’s opinions
can be separated from their physical bodies and represented by someone else.
The key to understanding online disembodied subjectivity is that when we use the
internet to discuss politics, we are primarily interacting with other people and not with a
computer, smartphone, or other web-enabled device. Critics of the idea of online disembodiment,
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such as Paul Dourish, make the mistake of extrapolating embodied interaction with the physical
objects of technology to social relations themselves. For human computer interaction researchers,
such as Dourish, the embodied relation with our interface device is of prime importance, but the
fact that we use a mouse or a keyboard to discuss politics with others online does not make those
interactions embodied. The embodied relation with the computer takes place in the private sphere
outside, and before, what is happening on the screen. In the context of a political discussion site,
others experience our own subjectivity as thoroughly disembodied, as all that is presented is a
username and written thoughts. The fact that we use our bodies to type on a keyboard while
sitting in front of a computer or thumb at a mobile phone while walking down the street does not
make the relation between those who are participating in the online political discussion
embodied.
While anyone who has been bumped into by someone walking down the street with their
head down, completely absorbed in what he or she is doing on their phone can attest to how
mobile computing devices are doing anything but increasing embodied presence, Jason Farman
makes the argument that such devices enable an interface between virtual and physical spaces
which does in fact promote embodiment. While much of Farman’s analysis of mobile interfaces
is interesting, he draws the wrong conclusion, in that such devices enhance our ability to escape
the body. The panic of being lost is an example of pure embodiment, as our mental map of where
we are fails and we are forced to rely on immediate physical surroundings which are unfamiliar.
The ability to pull out a phone with GPS and see where we are does not increase our embodiment
in physical space but enhances our disembodied sense of where we are and where we are going
on our abstract mental map, which can be represented as the little dot that shows our exact
location on a map displayed on a phone.
Politically speaking, the heavy use of mobile phones during the revolutions in Tunisia
and Egypt enabled precisely the mobile interface effect that Farman describes, but in a way that
enabled the political subjectivation process in a disembodied manner. A protester sending real
time updates to Twitter enabled a connection with the wider online audience which could reveal
that protester as a unique individual with a unique story, rather than as just another member of a
faceless mass of protesting bodies. Mobile computing is interesting politically in that it can
enable one to remain active in two spaces at once, rather than merely enhancing or augmenting
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one’s experience in physical space. One can then be riding the train to work, a part of one’s every
day routine and thoroughly unpolitical, while at the same time be using one’s phone to access an
online political realm, allowing one to be a political subject even when one’s body is busy with
thoroughly non-political matters. By separating political participation from physical presence,
politics can become more accessible, more pervasive, and easier to engage in. A politics of only
bodies in seats or streets is one which introduces needless limitations on the ability to become a
political subject.
Political subjectivity is about making the mind visible through the process of revealing
subjectivity, a task that requires speech (whether that speech is oral, written, or electronically
transmitted through fibre optic cables) and the construction of stories in order for it to be
revealed. The focus on embodiment, as was pointed to in the last chapter, is overtly anti-political,
as the body does not tell a story. It simply exists in its thereness, and to make political
judgements based on the body is to deny individuals their uniqueness. Saco makes a useful
contrast between political and anti-political forms of visibility by comparing Arendt and
Foucault. For Arendt, what must become visible is the content of the person’s mind, and this is
liberating and intensely political, while for Foucault what becomes visible is the body as it
becomes the object of surveillance and governmentality. In this sense, Foucault provides a
depiction of the anti-political process of identification in which individuals are treated as bodies
to be classified, counted, categorized, and treated as objects that are part of a population to be
acted on. Online subjectivity is politically beneficial precisely because it can allow us to escape
the anti-political regime of the management and surveillance of bodies in walled territories.
The arguments relating to whether the internet is either embodied or disembodied tend to
overwhelmingly commit the error of looking at one example from the software layer and then
claiming that this example represents the essence of the hardware. Gies, for example, tries to
argue that, with the proliferation of broadband internet and its capacity to enable forms of
communication such as video and voice, the old text-based internet is left behind, meaning that
the internet is now and will increasingly become embodied. The political consequences are then
that the disembodied subjectivity argued for here becomes as difficult online as it is offline.
Gies’s argument is problematic because he is referring to the internet as a whole. Like the
arguments of virtually every cybertheorist, from Turkle to Dean and from Stone to Gray, Gies
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fails to appreciate the complexity of cyberspace and the radically different forms of interaction
which are determined not by the hardware, but by the type of website. On a website like
Chatroulette, which is a video chat service which connects users at random, the relation with
others is pure embodiment in that most users either decide to hit next to talk to someone else or
initiate a conversation, based on the first few seconds of viewing the other user’s video and
therefore body. By contrast, a text-based discussion site such as Reddit with its large forums with
millions of users dedicated to world news, global politics, and the politics of various countries,
the relationship between users is radically disembodied, as there are strict rules against revealing
personal information. Clearly these two sites present radically different online experiences, as
one is primarily text based and the other is primarily video based. To claim that the internet in
general, meaning its hardware layer, inherently only produces one of these experiences is simply
wrong.
The rise and fall of chat rooms as one of the most popular webspaces is illustrative of this
point about different websites having different modes of interaction, some of which are
beneficial to the generation of political subjectivity, some of which are not. In the early period of
the internet, the email and text-based Usenet was the most popular site of political discussion.
With advances in technology, chat rooms quickly caught on as they allowed users to talk to each
other in real time, supplanting the popularity of Usenet. But with the spread of broadband
connections, increasingly these chat rooms added voice and then video options, enabling more
embodied interactions. It was precisely at this point, however, that chat rooms fell out of popular
favour as, in my experience, those who used chat rooms for social purposes migrated to social
networks which hosted a wider range of features which incorporated chat into them, and the
more politically oriented users migrated back to text-based forums that emulated the Usenet
format with its primacy of text. In the case of the Yahoo political chat rooms which I frequented,
the embodiment provided by voice and video chat fundamentally changed the nature of these
chat rooms from many to many examples of anarchic equality to more of a broadcast model
where the user who was currently transmitting speech or video would capture everyone’s
attention, with the result being a degradation in interaction as the communication format was
transformed into a series of disconnected embodied monologues. What this example
demonstrates, especially in light of the continued popularity of text-based forums such as Reddit,
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is that not only does political subjectivization thrive in disembodied environments, but that the
internet’s software layer remains malleable and that the hardware layer does not dictate the
software layer.
Counter to the intention of many of the critics of disembodied online subjectivity, their
defense of embodied subjectivity is often exactly what they claim is problematic about
disembodied subjectivity. Typical of this position are Beasley and Bacchi, who set out to theorize
an embodied model of citizenship that combines feminist scholarship on both citizenship and
bodies. They argue that the universal disembodied citizen of the Enlightenment was
exclusionary, as it was actually the elevation of one form of particular identity into a position of
hegemony. Their conclusion, however, is to come up with a plethora of different types of
embodied citizen subjects, from feminist citizens to disabled citizens. This additive notion fails
to generate political subjects, as it simply adds identity groups into the social whole, creating
more points of exclusion, identification, and disqualification. If women were left out of the old
male subject-citizen, the creation of a specifically female subject-citizen does not erase this
exclusion but raises the possibility for new exclusions, especially given how Beasley and Bacchi
define the body as the marker of such types of citizenship. What then qualifies as a women’s
body to be a female-subject-citizen? Rather than introducing new qualifications meant to include
more groups of people as possible political subjects, the proper solution, as was argued in the
first part of this chapter, is simply to negate any form of qualification whatsoever by positing
subjectivity as an empty universal. With the help of the internet, those with different bodies can
be treated equally precisely by obscuring the importance of the body. Beasley and Bacchi
specifically point to the creation of forms of citizenship for people with bodily disabilities, but
why bother with different classes of citizenship when one egalitarian version can be theorized
which negates the body as a disqualifier altogether? Some of the biggest advocates for an online
disembodied form of subjectivity are precisely people with disabilities, as they are able to
interact with others online in a disembodied fashion in which their bodily status as disabled is
irrelevant.
Contrary to advocates of embodied subjectivity, especially in the case of Beasley and
Bacchi, the body is not the site of politics but of its radical negation. By confusing politics with
its anti-political opposite, an embodied form of subjectivity simply locks the oppressed into their
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objective positions, preventing them from emancipating themselves from their identity or body
and becoming a political subject. The internet provides the opportunity to allow our speech to
reveal who we really are, rather than being stereotyped by our bodies or other forms of
nonpolitical group identity. Even if these sources of discrimination may become apparent to
others through our online speech, the fact that we must speak with others before these identities
have the chance to introduce points of disqualification and discrimination is a major advantage
over offline embodied subjectivity.
4.12 Anonymity and the Harsh Light of the Public Sphere
A corollary of the disembodied nature of online political subjectivity is its seeming anonymity.
The most common method of recognizing people in the offline world is through their bodies.
Thus if subjectivity reveals us as unique individuals, the argument goes that we need a face to
attach to the stories revealed by political speech and action in order for it to be remembered and
have impact. The idea of a body as identifier is problematic for a number of reasons, especially if
we consider identical twins who cannot be bodily distinguished. If one twin accomplishes some
great feat we do not simply ignore it or forget it because there is another person who looks
exactly like them. As Arendt argues, what is really needed to accompany political subjectivity is
a name rather than a body, as speech is attached to a “who” rather than a “what”. But even if it is
accepted that a body is not needed to be revealed in the subjectivation process, the question of
internet anonymity remains: how can one reveal oneself while at the same time being
anonymous?
For outspoken critics of the internet, such as Hubert Dreyfus, the supposed anonymity
and disembodied nature of not just online political discussion, but the internet in general, is
posited as an insurmountable obstacle to the revealing of an online political subjectivity. While
Dreyfus is another in a long list of thinkers who confuse the hardware and software layers,
leading to proclamations about the internet as a whole, as if all websites were exactly alike, his
bigger problem is attempting to link anonymity to a lack of commitment. He argues that online
anonymous interactions simply lack the passion necessary for politics due to anonymity and even
claims that on the internet “nothing matters enough that one would be willing to die for it.”312
Against the background of the internet-integrated revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt which
resulted in many deaths of protesters who were passionately engaged in a political cause they
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were willing to die for, this claim holds little weight, especially when linked to the question of
anonymity. As I argue in the chapter on conflict, the ability to protect one’s private identity
online by engaging politically through a pseudonym can enhance conflictual political
engagement as the lack of repercussions in one’s private life leads to people being more willing
to express dissent and unpopular opinions. Furthermore, groups such as Anonymous engage in
hacking operations online at great risk to their own freedom, as cybercrime continues to be
disproportionately punished. Dreyfus also argues that the internet’s anonymity empowers
“anonymous experts” to provide their opinions on anything from a position of “nowhere” thus
creating a levelling effect which erases all relevance and significance. Such hyperbole simply
uses the novelty of the technology as a means to launch into an attack on politics itself. The real
problem with online anonymity for Dreyfus is that of the political subject as an empty universal
whose only qualification to participate politically is that they have no qualification.
Returning to the bigger question of how one might reveal oneself as a unique subject in
the context of online anonymity, which seems to introduce a contradiction, requires returning to
the process of subjectivity and how it operates. The first step is the stripping of identity, which
makes the subject anonymous. However, the process does not end here, as many critics would
seem to imply. Stripping away particularities allows the subject to emerge on a universal level
and speak as an individual rather than as an object. In this sense, very little online speech and
interaction is truly anonymous, as people’s speech is associated with a consistent name. Even the
hacktivist movement Anonymous is not truly anonymous, as it operates under a collective
pseudonym which maintains a name allowing a political story surrounding their actions to
emerge. If the movement was truly anonymous, no one other than those directly involved would
have any idea who was performing the various online actions and any kind of political impact
would be lost, as there would be no public story to be told. When people go online and strip
away their identities, they are only briefly anonymous, as once they start to engage with others
they begin to reveal a subjective political narrative that is attached to a pseudonym. When one
signs up with a discussion site or chat room, one creates a new name to associate their speech
with, a name that comes to be associated with various opinions and actions.
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The construction of online subjectivity through the use of pseudonyms helps maintain a
public voice which, at the same time, protects private identity. Pseudonymous speech and action
has a long history, and is not simply an issue of online interaction. In the 19th century, female
authors often used pseudonyms in order to ensure their works would be evaluated based on their
merit and not on the gender of the authors. In periods of upheaval activists would often adopt
pseudonyms to protect their own private identities. Prior to the communist revolution in Russia
in 1917, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and Lev Davidovich Bronshtein adopted the pseudonyms of
Lenin and Trotsky to initially protect their private identities. Pseudonyms were pervasive during
the French resistance to Nazi occupation (Colonel Rèmy, Vercors), as well as during the
American Revolution and its aftermath, with examples of the pseudonym Publius used for the
publication of The Federalist Papers and Thomas Paine, who published a number of pamphlets
under the pseudonym “Common Sense”. To protect themselves from state persecution for
blasphemy, atheist critics of Islam have adopted pseudonyms when publishing books and writing
online. When dissent threatens the security of one’s body, then the ability to speak politically
requires mechanisms to hide bodily identity. Pseudonymity helps ensure that a wide range of
views can be expressed publicly by protecting those with outsider opinions from the tyranny of
the majority and from state repression. The ability to obscure one’s offline and private identity
when speaking politically online makes politics safer and more inclusive, as it takes a great deal
of courage to enter the public sphere and reveal oneself to the world. Arendt argues that courage
is the primary political virtue precisely because it is not easy to reveal oneself if what is being
revealed is disagreeable to what the majority thinks. Online politics can reduce the risk to the
body, and make political participation more accessible by disconnecting one’s public persona
from their private life. Doing so enables people to speak politically with less fear of negative
ramifications for one’s employment, safety, or social relations. For this reason, Facebook and
other social networking sites which tend to insist on real names are poorly suited to become the
seeds of an online political realm, while more pseudonymous sites like Reddit, which lack the
identifying aspects of having a profile with pictures and personal information, do present such a
nascent model of online political subjectivity.
Political and pseudonymous cyberspaces challenge the entire concept of a unitary and
true identity in their ability to split the public persona of political subjectivity from the private
persona. This ability to be two people at once disrupts the anti-political method of identification,
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surveillance, counting, and putting in place. Whether the anti-political state operates based on
Plato’s sophrosyne, in which people must mind their own business and stay in their assigned
place, or through a panoptic situation, as described by Foucault, which operates by making
bodies visible, the ability to create a second life which is split away from the body and its
associated classifications enables political speech and undermines anti-political devices. When it
is argued that online pseudonymity simply provides a cover for immoral and illegal behaviour
(not dissimilar to Plato’s story about the ring of Gyges), the point of pseudonymity and its
political implications is missed.319 Someone’s political speech, whether online or offline, reveals
who one is more than one’s bodily identity, and thus when people act crude and boorish online
they are revealing who they truly are, not becoming someone else because they think they can
get away with anything in online space. At the same time, so long as they act under pseudonyms,
their poor behaviour will follow them online and reveal them to everyone as a crude and boorish
individual. While online anonymity can certainly enable crime, this is not an argument against
online space per se, as all crime must be anonymous regardless of what kind of space it takes
place within. No one robs a bank wearing a shirt that displays one’s name and address.
The story that reveals us as unique subjects is not consciously created by us, even though
it arises out of our political speech and action. It is always hidden to us as it is dependent on how
other people interpret and perceive it. The stories that are generated through our online political
interactions are not the creation of an identity from scratch, as, try as we might to come across in
a certain way, the political subject that we reveal has an unconscious character. Thus, online
political subjectivity is not about crafting a new identity but about revealing our innermost
thoughts to others which constitute us as unique individuals. The increased ability to express our
own views within the context of a larger movement, such as within Occupy, is a positive
improvement over the totalizing movements of the past. Whether in the form of communist
parties requiring a certain ideological adherence or the identity social movements which erased
subjectivity in favour of identity, individuals were subsumed into a mass movement leaving little
room for individuals to reveals their own uniqueness.
As Bennet and Segerberg point out, the internet enables an individual to present one’s
own opinion to the world within the context of a political movement through the various aspects
of online interaction, whereas in the past someone marching in a labour rally might simply
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become a faceless communist subsumed by the overall ideology with no space to express one’s
own perspective. Prozorov provides an example of this sort of enabling of individual subjectivity
within a wider protest movement in the form of a picture of someone in Alaska that circulated on
the internet during the Occupy protests. He points to this picture of a person wrapped up in
winter clothes and barely visible in the arctic tundra with a sign saying “Occupy the tundra!” as
the ideal expression of the political subject in its empty universal form in the age of the internet.
Through the power of the internet, she was able to both adopt the Occupy movement to her own
context, and still participate in a mass movement despite the physical distance to the nearest
protest. The internet enabled her to take part in a protest and express a form of political
subjectivity in which identity did not matter and qualifications to take part were erased. Without
the internet, this political statement which both addressed the universal and revealed this one
person’s own subjective position, would have been an intensely private affair and would have
made no political impact.
4.13 Conclusion
The political subject formation process involves stripping away identity in order to enable the
formation of an empty universal in which political participation requires no status qualifications.
What political subjects have in common is literally nothing, which keeps the subject formation
process open and available to all. While identity concerns plague offline politics, such private
concerns can more easily be set aside online where such identities are less obvious when subjects
adopt pseudonyms and make an effort to keep these identities concealed. Online subjectivity and
its seemingly initial anonymity are then conducive to political subjectivity, as it lets one easily
begin the process of revealing oneself to others as a unique individual. The initial anonymity,
quickly replaced by pseudonymity, obscures the body and prevents the various bodily prejudices
such as racism or sexism from disqualifying someone’s speech before one ever has a chance to
speak. This, in turn, allows their speech to start from a clean slate, allowing the subject’s
opinions to speak for themselves, while at the same time protecting the publicly revealed
political subject’s body and private identity from attacks and discrimination based on these
revealed political opinions. As I will argue in the next two chapters, this political subject
operating within an online political realm can vastly improve political participation and the
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pluralistic conflict of opinions that form the content of political debate. The manner in which
online subjectivity facilitates political subjectivity means that not only can it not be claimed that
politics online is inferior or less real, but that an online politics may provide a number of key
advantages over offline politics. With the case of political subjectivity, accomplishing it online
makes the process easier, which can help enable reinvigorating the practice of the political.
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Chapter 5 — Participation
5.1 Introduction
In the last three chapters the concept of the political realm was established, which then led to
theorizing the nature of the political subjects who enter it. The next two chapters will deal with
the critical question of what these political subjects in an online political realm actually do. This
chapter will address the broader concept of political participation and what it entails, both at the
theoretical level and how it would operate online, while the next chapter will deal with the
conflict generated by such participation. While, on the surface, participation may seem like a
relatively uncontroversial issue, as it is the basis of the concept of democracy, deeper questions
lurk below this surface related to who gets to participate and in what capacity. The dominant
system of representative democracy seeks to constrain public participation to peripheral matters
related to selecting who gets sent to the legislature, which leaves the public outside of the
political realm by denying their participation in political debates and decisions. While theories of
more engaged forms of democratic participation have circulated as a theoretical alternative, there
has long been a dominant feeling that such schemes are unworkable except in small communities
with a very limited number of possible participants. Given that the internet has the capacity to
break down constraints on time and space that are usually cited as the primary obstacles to more
participatory forms of democracy, this chapter argues that the internet demands a theoretical
rethink of what forms of political participation may now be practically possible.
The protest movements of Occupy and the Arab Spring, like most protest movements
before them, demonstrate the continued significance of participation as a terrain of conflict
between politics and anti-politics, as these movements operated on a model of mass participation
in which anyone could simply join the protests and act in a political manner. While the idea of
mass participation in politics is not unique to protest movements, as elections rely on the same
principle, the protest movements do operate on a model of participation that is more meaningful
than simply casting a ballot. Even though protests can often be as infrequent as elections, they
demonstrate a latent possibility and desire for a more meaningful form of participation. It is this
desire to participate in the affairs of politics, to be able to enter the political realm and to reveal
oneself as a unique individual, which has driven much protest in the past. Yet, it is a desire that
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never seems to be sustained. The Arab Spring successfully topples dictators but dissipates into
military and Islamist-led governments. Occupy fades away, leaving its participants having made
a crucial point but no more able to participate in public affairs. It is at this point that the
significance of the internet for political participation cannot be underestimated. If the political
realm need not be a physical space, then the dispersion of a protest does not have to mean the
end of the opportunity to participate in an alternative political space, and an election need not be
the only time citizens are given the chance to have input into how the government operates.
Online political participation, however, has the potential to take many forms, and what
possible form it could or should take is one of the most contested debates in the scholarship on
web politics. This literature is dominated by the advocates of e-government, who seek to make
representative democracy more efficient by enabling government services to be more readily
accessible via the internet. Layne and Lee make the case for governments to essentially adopt an
e-commerce model, with the ultimate goal of government websites enabling “one stop shopping
for citizens.” Citizens are cast as passive taxpayers who simply are at the receiving end of
government, with no real ability to actually participate. Similarly, Reddick’s evaluation of citizen
interactions with e-government rests on assumptions that successful e-government enables both
information dissemination and transactions (such as paying taxes) online, both of which again
presume the citizen to be a passive recipient, rather than an active participant. Even in the
literature that looks at electoral campaigns and the internet, the focus is on how politicians and
political parties can use online tools to send their message to voters, again positioning voters as
consumers to be marketed to, rather than active participants.
By contrast, the growing body of literature around deliberative democracy that began to
emerge in the 1980s has been relatively quick to embrace the internet as a means to enable forms
of deliberative participation that go beyond ideas of internet users as passive recipients of
government. Castells, Dahlberg, and Papacharissi have argued that deliberative public spheres
can operate online in a way that can provide a forum in which political subjects are able to
deliberate with each other. Against the deliberative democrats, however, I seek to return to the
model of participatory democracy advanced by Arendt that was popular in the 1950s and 1960s,
but lost its currency in the 1980s as it came to be seen as unworkable, with deliberative
democracy becoming more prominent as it was seen as a more viable alternative. I seek to
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reopen the debate between deliberative and participatory democracy in the light of the
development of the internet, which I argue provides the opportunity to reposition participatory
democracy as practically workable. I argue that deliberative democracy has become less of a
realistic alternative to representative democracy in the internet era, and more of a means of
reinforcing existing representative structures.
While deliberative and participatory democrats might both agree that the internet can
enable more political participation, there are many critics who position the internet as a
dangerous diversion from political participation. Enthusiasts of the participatory culture of the
internet, such as Henry Jenkins, argue that the increased impetus on online participation in areas
as diverse as online video games and user-driven content generation websites such as YouTube
or Facebook, will lead to a push for increased participation in political matters.328 A growing
body of literature, however, is more skeptical of the participatory political potential of the web.
Morozov argues, in a manner reminiscent of the Frankfurt School’s critiques of popular culture,
that the internet is little more than a way to engage in trivial forms of entertainment and has no
capacity to be used for any progressive political projects. Jodi Dean argues that the participatory
culture of the internet is a new phase of capitalism that she describes as communicative in nature.
She makes the case that the ability to communicate politically by posting a blog entry about
one’s political opinions or making a Facebook status update about one’s stance on a political
issue only serve to capture and reformat the political energies and desires of potential subjects by
redirecting them away from meaningful collective movements and into isolated expressions of
talking into a void. These complaints lead to questions about the internet in general and whether
it can be so simply categorized and dismissed, despite its plethora of radically different websites,
uses, and functions. I seek to position my argument against the background of these three
positions which see the internet either as unsuitable for participation, only useful for deliberation,
or only as an endpoint from which people can receive government services.
In order to develop the idea that the internet can enhance the opportunities for political
participation, I first make the case for why representative government’s mechanisms for
participation are inadequate and actually seek to minimize participation to the lowest publicly
acceptable level, rather than start from the premise of participation as the basis of democracy. I
then address the problems with theories of deliberative and direct democracy and make the case
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that political participation is like being an actor on a stage who speaks and acts publicly. This
means participation involves both deliberation and decision, as one without the other is
inadequate and leads to either uninformed decisions or debates that serve only to inform those
vested with the actual authority to make decisions, rather than empowering political subjects. If
political participation can be described using the metaphor of acting on a stage, then this
provokes questions of the audience and what its status is. Traditionally, audiences have been seen
as passive spectators outside the realm of action, but, drawing on Rancière’s theory of the
emancipated spectator, I argue that the audience need not be looked upon negatively, as all
speech necessarily requires listeners. Listening and thinking about what others have to say
involves judgement, which Arendt describes as the most important faculty of the mind for
political matters.
Having established a general idea of what political participation should entail, I then turn
to the online context and re-address the above interpretations of participation in light of the
internet. I argue for a return to participatory democracy, as the internet enables it to overcome its
traditional obstacles of not having enough space to fit everyone into a single place and not
having enough time to allow everyone to speak. I then turn to two critical evaluations of the
possibility of more online political participation from two opposed perspectives. The elitist
argument argues that an online politics would enable too much participation from the
uninformed, resulting in a general decline in the quality of political discussion. This decline in
quality is theorized as turning people off politics and leading to demands for a return to
representative systems. On the flip side, I then evaluate the populist argument which claims that
opening up political participation to everyone via the internet would simply enable the creation
of a new elite, as those with expert knowledge or with the required free time would come to
dominate such online forums pushing out the average person from any meaningful participation.
While each of these arguments are rooted in actual experiences of existing nascent online
discussion forums, I argue that they both ultimately overstate their case and reveal deeper
antipolitical biases that predate the technology of the internet.
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5.2 Critiquing Representation
Unlike the word politics, the word democracy has an overall positive connotation to it. As Hay
points out, politics has come to have the meaning of government by deception and conjures up
negative feelings, while democracy is becoming more accepted as the best form of government.
Any meaningful definition of democracy that is to include all of its diverse and often radically
divergent forms must centre on the idea that it involves some form of citizen participation,
whether in the form of voting in elections, discussing issues in a public sphere, or direct
participation in decision making. In this manner, the idea of participation itself is not opposed by
anti-politics, as democracy is increasingly viewed as the only legitimate form of government.
The shape which participation takes, however, does stake out participation as a major terrain of
contestation between politics and anti-politics. Representative democracy, which has become the
global standard for legitimate government, is predicated on reducing mass participation to a very
minimum level, so that participation is pushed to the periphery either in the form of voting or
other activities related to elections, or in the occasional outburst of a protest. The opportunities to
participate remain few and far between.
The problems with representative government are not new, but its hegemonic ideological
position as the only legitimate form of government in popular discourse have made these
problems fade into the background, as alternatives are deemed either impractical or undesirable.
Even Thomas Jefferson, writing in the early days of representative democracy, feared that it
might turn into “elective despotism,” as the American constitution excluded the American people
from entering the political realm. Jefferson feared this exclusion of all but the representatives
would lead the American people to lose interest in public affairs, transforming the representatives
into rulers, and making politicians into wolves who act not at the behest of those who elected
them but according to their own interests. In many ways, Jefferson’s fears have come to pass, as
“Marx’s once-scandalous thesis that governments are simple business agents for international
capital is today obvious fact on which ‘liberals’ and ‘socialists’ agree.” As Rancière goes on to
argue, managing the economy is how governments claim legitimacy, when this used to be
considered a secret to obscure. Politicians not actually doing a proper job of representing the
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interests of those who elected them is, however, more of a problem with how representative
democracy functions in a practical sense, but there are much deeper theoretical problems with it.
The claim that democracy empowers the people so that governments act not on the model
of coercive force, such as in monarchy or despotism, but are organs of the people holds true,
essentially, only on election day. The ability to participate in choosing those who will go on to
have exclusive access to the space in which decisions get made is better than not having this
choice but still alienates virtually all citizens from the political realm. In this manner, the ability
to choose one’s boss is better than not having that ability, but it is clearly inferior to being able to
participate in the decision making process and, thus, not being subject to the decisions of others.
Representative government diminishes political space and provides no realm where people can
be seen in political action. This radical alienation from participating in the debates and decisions
that affect everyone leads to a reassertion of the difference between those who are ruled and
those who rule, which the anti-monarchic revolutions in France and the United States had sought
to undo. The ability to participate in politics is pushed outside of the realm of decision and, at
best, the people can debate and protest amongst themselves, but the decision making authority
rests solely in the hands of the elected officials.
Since direct participation is considered practically impossible by advocates of
representative democracy, the best a person can hope for is to be represented, but what does it
mean to be represented? If individuals are unique subjects, with unique opinions, how can one
person represent a plural group of political subjects, all of whom have different and possibly
conflicting opinions? Groups cannot form opinions because this would require everyone in the
group to think exactly alike, something which is impossible and undesirable. Furthermore, a
group cannot argue or debate, as this is only possible among individuals. What gets represented
instead, are the moods and interests of a group. As Arendt explains, voters then make their choice
according to their private lives and personal interests and act to try to influence the elected
official to act in accordance with one’s own interests, while at the same time every other person
is attempting to do the same. In this manner, Arendt likens voting to “the reckless coercion with
which a blackmailer forces his victim into obedience”, which in no way resembles the political
“power that arises out of joint action and joint deliberation.” Representation becomes, at best, the
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aggregation of moods and interests, and, at worst, the means by which the few are able to
legitimize their control of the public policy agenda.
Even as early as 1963, when Arendt wrote On Revolution, she speaks of “Madison
Avenue methods” being introduced into elections which transformed them into a relation
between buyer and seller, thus subsuming the political process into capitalist consumerism.
Elections have increasingly become less and less about policy differences and more about
marketing an image or brand to voters. With the rise of the Third Way and the general neoliberal
consensus, political parties have increasingly made election campaigns about the personal
suitability of candidates, rather than about giving voters a choice between opposed policy
directions. Even voting, the one official act of participation that is lauded as bestowing
democratic legitimacy, is then depoliticized as it becomes harder to use one’s vote to express a
political choice. Representative government acts as a hollowed out body without organs, in
which everyone claims fidelity to the idea that the people should participate in government, but
the actual avenues to do so are extremely limited and without real substance. By pushing people
outside of the political body by constraining political space, the organs of political participation
can still be claimed to be functional, but are made unavailable to the vast majority.
Rancière calls the anti-political mechanisms of representative democracy parapolitics, in
that it seeks to not outwardly eliminate participation and conflict but merely displace them into
other non-political realms. Parapolitical representative democracy “consists in redirecting the
feverish energy activated on the public stage toward other ends, in sending it on a search for
material prosperity, private happiness, and social bonds.” Notions of the public good are rendered
subservient to private wealth, and the people’s representatives become primarily concerned with
promoting private prosperity. Public citizens are then replaced with a collection of self-interested
private individuals only interested in their own wealth collection, a situation in which politics is
replaced with “collective housekeeping.” When the system is designed to valourize economic
participation and positions political participation as an unproductive distraction from economic
activity, it is hardly any wonder why official political participation rates are dropping.
The literature that seeks to find reasons why voter turnout numbers are at all-time lows
and why the average person seems disinterested in government fails to realize that these
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“problems” are directly generated by the nature of representative government itself, and not
simply a problem of personal attitudes. Hay calls this a demand side approach to the problem, as
it assumes there must be something wrong with citizens, rather than the system itself. Putnam
puts most of the blame for declining voter participation on a loss of a sense of civic duty which
relates to what he calls an overall decline in social capital. Norris points to the general increase in
education and sophistication of the average voter as leading to what she calls “critical
citizens” who are less likely to vote because of this critical disposition. Franklin argues that
voting is a habit, and that the general decline in voter participation rates began when the voting
age was lowered to 18. He goes on to argue that this younger demographic were less socially
engaged and thus less likely to vote anyway, which led to the habit of not voting. In each of these
arguments about why people are less likely to engage, there is almost no consideration of
structural and systemic factors, as all of the analysis is aimed at explaining individual behaviour
patterns. Democracy is cast as the ideal which politics subverts, when in reality the current mode
of representative democracy is undermining politics itself.
5.3 Beyond Representation: Political Participation and the Metaphor of
the Stage
The fundamental problem with representative democracy is that it excludes the people from
participating in both debate and decision on any given issue. There are examples, however, such
as in Switzerland and some individual American states, in which the people can vote directly in a
referendum and thus can participate directly in a decision. This form of direct or plebiscite
democracy is posited as a common alternative to representation but has serious flaws. The main
problem is that these opportunities to make decisions are provided without proper provisions for
debate. Thus a question is posed to people who are not given a proper opportunity to discuss and
debate it with others which would force them to consider a variety of perspectives which leads to
creating an informed opinion. In this sense, referendums often serve to support the authority of
the government and undermine change, especially if the referendum is framed as a yes or no
question where the options are simply status quo or some form of change. Uninformed people
who are simply presented a question on which they are expected to make a decision will have an
inherent bias against change when they do not understand what the change will mean. At the
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same time, referenda can be captured by a small motivated group when the issue is not
compelling enough to ensure high voter turnouts. There can also be problems related to issues of
minority rights. The classic example is women’s suffrage, which was delayed in Switzerland by
referenda until it was finally passed in 1971. A more recent example would be the 2008
California Proposition 8 ballot initiative which re-banned same-sex marriage.
If direct democracy is problematic because it results in decisions without debate, then
deliberative democracy, as outlined by numerous academics including Gutmann and
Thompson, Habermas, and Benhabib,355 seems like a more reasonable model of democracy as it
focuses on debate and deliberation. While positions vary within the broad umbrella of
deliberative democratic theory, the common focus is that there should be a robust public sphere
where people can go to deliberate on public affairs and thus create a more informed public
opinion. People will ideally not be making rash decisions which can be easily manipulated by
elites or the government, as their participation comes in the form of discussing and deliberating.
The major problem with deliberative democracy, especially in the version presented by Gutmann
and Thompson, is that it tends to still leave decision making in the hands of elected
representatives. These representatives are supposed to act based on the informed public opinion
generated through the deliberative process, but this is a crucial gap which leaves open the very
real possibility that the representatives will simply ignore public opinion, as decision making
authority ultimately rests with the representatives and not the public deliberators. The public
sphere remains something entirely outside of the official realm of state politics, and all the
participation in deliberation becomes more informative than decisive. Habermas positions
deliberative democracy as a middle ground between liberal democracy (defined as the collation
of private interests) and what he calls republican democracy, which is exemplified by Arendt’s
political theory. Even for Habermas deliberative democracy is positioned as weaker than an
Arendtian participatory democracy and, thus, explicitly limits the participatory role of the citizen
to the point where they are excluded from decisions.
Participation in politics must include both the means to participate in the opinion forming
mechanisms of debate and deliberation as well as participating in the decision making process.
Action without talk and talk without action are both problematic. Thus deliberative democracy
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and direct democracy are both inadequate on their own, as a properly participatory politics needs
mechanisms to facilitate all means of politics, including speech, action, listening, and protest.
When speaking of political participation theatrical metaphors are often invoked, from Arendt’s
claim that politics is “virtuosity of performance” to Rancière’s references to mise en scène and
the staging of politics. In this sense, a complete picture of political participation involves the
actors on the stage who undertake debate and decision, the audience who listens and judges what
happens on stage, and all of the off-stage drama that surrounds conflicts over who gets to be on
the stage and what their role is.
The most elementary aspect of political participation is the ability to speak one’s mind in
a meaningful way that is taken seriously and listened to by others. Anti-political prejudice treats
the people as a troublesome animal, capable of expressing pain and pleasure but not of engaging
in meaningful speech that can express opinions. Political science becomes the art of taming the
beast of public sentiment, an art that remains relevant even when people are able to elect
representatives and are guaranteed the right to freedom of speech. Thus before one can even
express an opinion on a political issue, speech becomes a terrain of contestation between politics
and anti-politics at the level of who is considered capable of speech, and who is simply making
the noises of pleasure or pain. Before an actor can speak to the audience, a stage must be
constructed which provides the opportunity for speech. Anti-politics denies such stages are
necessary because the masses do not speak, they only signal vague preferences which
representatives and economic experts can appease through top down policy decisions. No
country exemplifies this attitude today better than China, where the single party system of
government legitimizes itself by arguing that it is satisfying the population economically and
thus any claims by the people for political speech would only disrupt the economic development
process. Rancière points out that in the past governments would deny speech to the masses based
on the Platonic claim that the people were the stomach who needed to be guided by the head of
elite government, but today the governing head “is unable to distinguish itself from the
stomach,” and political speech and opinion is seen as unseemly even for politicians whose job
has now become economic administration.
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To set up a stage where people can speak and listen to each other rests on the starting
assumption that everyone is equal, making the division of society into ordered parts a subject of
dispute. Such a statement seems rather benign but underscores the radically different method of
politics and anti-politics. Most forms of anti-politics, even ones with benevolent or progressive
intent, are distributive in nature and, at best, seek to achieve equality as an outcome. This method
paints the individual as a passive recipient who can be satisfied by being handed his or her
allocated share. Such individuals can then be acted on as objects of administrative management,
parcelled into populations and identity groups who might need more or less. Even the most
progressive forms of distributive approaches to government remain anti-political, in that there
remains no avenue for the people to construct a stage where they can become actors who are
capable of speaking with others on an equal footing. The fact that each individual has a unique
opinion, given the basic fact of human plurality, makes a stage for people to express these
opinions publicly necessary. To presume that politics can be reduced to distributing and counting
shares is to deny plurality and subjectivity.
When politics begins with the presumption of equality, it enables political actors to
participate in verifying and testing this presumed equality. This means that political action will
seek to assert and extend this presumed equality against any and all material instances of
inequality. Arendt associates the movement of participating in political action with freedom, in
that she argues freedom appears only with the performance of politics, in the same manner that
the drama of a play only appears with its performance. Politics consists in speaking, acting,
listening, and creating relationships and associations, activities which leave behind no direct
material trace, unlike say an artist who creates a painting. In this sense politics is like other
performing arts which require a public space populated by others in order for the art to appear
and the virtuosity of the performers to be revealed. Public political space serves as a theatre
where people can act, which allows freedom, in the form of political participation, to appear and
be exercised.
The freedom of participating in political action relates to the capacity to begin something
new. If nothing ever changes, then there is no freedom and thus no capacity to act. Žižek argues
that the political act not only changes the symbolic space, but also disturbs the underlying
fantasy. In this sense, political action cannot merely be the administrative and legislative
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activities of modern parliaments, but must allow for the possibility of something truly new and
previously unthinkable to come to pass. Žižek’s conception of political action fits with Arendt’s
argument that natality is the central category of the political, as political action is the exercise of
freedom, and as such is the capacity to begin something new. This newness can seem utterly
improbable or even unthinkable before the political event, with the Arab Spring being an
example, and in this sense the natality of political action can change our underlying assumptions
about the world.
Political participation as the exercise of freedom and the capacity to initiate the new and
unexpected means it is a risky endeavour, which is part of the reason that philosophers have long
schemed to control and constrain politics. Given that politics is always conducted among others,
to exercise one’s freedom to set something new into motion is to take a risk because the beginner
can never know what the result will be, due to the intervention of other actors. Given the
plurality of people involved in any political act, the shape any action takes gets twisted and
turned by numerous people and groups, often leading to outcomes completely contrary to what
was originally intended. While the people in Egypt were successful in uniting to take down the
dictatorship, what came after was unpredictable and, for a good many of these activists, entirely
unwanted. The emergence of the military and Islamist groups after the successful removal of
Hosni Mubarak speaks to the risk and unpredictable nature of political action. Many conservative
commentators warned of these possible outcomes and declared that it was better to stick with
Mubarak as dictator than take the risk of removing him, expressing a fundamentally anti-political
outlook. All political action must embrace the risk and unpredictability of collective action,
because the only alternative is to close off the space of freedom and natality in favour of a
controlled and static regime which eliminates politics entirely.
If freedom and change are to be possible, the desire to substitute making for acting in the
public sphere must be resisted. Arendt states that “this attempt to replace acting with making is
manifest in the whole body of argument against ‘democracy,’ which, the more consistently and
better reasoned it is, will turn into an argument against the essentials of politics.” In place of
collective political action, which presumes the equality of actors and operates by exercising
freedom, the model of public affairs based on that of not the actor, dancer, or other performing
artist, but of the craftsperson is proposed. Politics is reduced to constructing blueprints which are
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meant to be constructed exactly according to design. Such a model of anti-politics replaces the
riskiness of political action with a command and obey structure of rulership, eliminating both
equality and freedom from the public realm. Today we have accepted this model of rulership and
consider it to be legitimate when the rulers are elected, but, as Arendt was always keen to repeat,
political freedom means the freedom to participate in politics, or it means nothing at all. To be an
actor on the participatory stage of politics means that one is able to debate with equals and to
participate in the decisions that affect the wellbeing of the political entity. Choosing one’s rulers
or executing their designs is hardly a substitute for meaningful participation. Deliberative
democracy and direct democracy both fail as participatory alternatives to representation as they
do not allow the citizen to participate fully as both decision maker and deliberator, leaving real
power outside of the reach of the citizens.
5.4 The Actor and the Audience
The previous section has emphasized participation in the form of speech and action and has
emphasized the role of the actor on the political stage, but to continue the theatrical metaphor, in
order to stage an action, there must be people watching in the audience. Political speech is
meaningless if no one hears it, and political action leaves no lasting impact if it is removed from
the public eye. A form of politics which is participatory in nature and operates in a similar
manner to a theatre can then be said to suffer from the paradox of the theatre. An audience is
needed in order to witness the action, while at the same time this audience has tended to be
viewed in a negative light, as spectating has traditionally been associated with passivity and
inaction, and thus considered to be the opposite of participation. What then is the status of those
who watch, in the context of a politics that puts such a heavy emphasis on participation and uses
theatrical metaphors?
The separation of those who act and those who spectate has led to two significant
political responses, albeit both somewhat communitarian in nature. The first response is the most
radical, as it rests on simply eliminating the political stage altogether in order to prevent the
internal division of the people into those who act and those who spectate. In Plato’s critique of
poetry, the theatre is a site of illusion and passivity which internally divides the community,
sewing disharmony and contradiction.370 In the Timaeus, Plato presents his alternative to the
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divided theatrical model of politics by presenting a model of community based on the orderly
movements of the planets. In this sense Plato eliminates the political stage where some act freely
and some spectate in favour of a
choreographic community, where no one remains a static spectator, where everyone must
move in accordance with the community rhythm fixed by mathematical proportion, even
if that requires getting old people reluctant to take part in the community dance drunk.
This choreographic model has been evident in various totalitarian regimes, from North Korea’s
mass games, in which over 100,000 people take part in a choreographed gymnastics routine to
the hypnotic marching in unison of military parades. By emphasizing collective movement in
unison, the harmony of the community can be asserted and there is no room for either the
freedom of political movement that goes against the grain or the ability for the spectator to
critically reflect on the action she or he witnesses.
Swinging the other way are those who wish to reinvent the political stage altogether,
rather than abolish it along the lines of Plato’s choreographed mass movement. In this sense,
there is an attempt to pull everyone into the action of the political drama, thus saving the ideal of
the political stage from the problem of the spectator. At its most basic level, this attitude is
apparent in the demands for people to vote in elections. The argument goes that if one does not
participate in the voting process, then one essentially gives up all claims to active citizenship and
must accept radical passivity. The popular version of this sentiment is the common saying that
“if you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain,” which is paradoxical in itself as it splits the
political speech of affirmation and dissent into two separate parts. Central to this argument is the
idea that, by voting for a politician, the spectators become part of the process and, thus, are
drawn into it as participants, removing the critical distance that may lead to questioning the
entire process itself. Even in a representative democracy where participation is constrained to
choosing a ruler every couple of years, there is a public demand that the separation between
spectator and actor be abolished. In a situation which thrives on public passivity, the dominant
ideology is that by going out and voting, the government that is chosen is legitimately made up
of the people, and is thus an organ of its wishes and desires. The ideology of representative
democracy can then claim there are no rulers and ruled, and no division between spectators and
actors.
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The demand for audience participation acts as a demand to suspend critical faculties, as
when a band that the audience is clearly not enjoying makes a point of trying to exhort the
audience members to dance or get involved in the performance. It comes across as an insecure
form of trying to prevent judgement. The attempt to eliminate spectators and their critical
distance is evident as well in communitarian attempts to posit community as an organizing
principle. To become part of the community and remove oneself from one’s critical distance from
it functions as an attempt to remove the possibility of an outside that can criticize, or as Rancière
calls it, a part with no part. Instead of either of these communitarian attempts to abolish the
division between spectator and actor, political emancipation can operate in the manner of an
emancipated theatre, where, rather than trying to eliminate the spectators, the boundaries
between those who look and those who act can be traversed.
The problem with the supposed paradox of the spectator lies in the idea that listening and
watching are passive and, therefore, not only the opposite of action but that acting and watching
are mutually exclusive. In reality, listening is part of the acting and speaking process, and the
difference between them is not as evident or even existent as the critics of the passive audience
think. Part of being a good speaker is being a good listener, and to be a good actor one must take
into consideration those with whom one is acting in concert. As Derek Barker argues, this is the
fundamental lesson of Sophocles’ Antigone. Speech and action in isolation are disastrous, and
being a good citizen means being willing to listen to and engage with others. Creon and Antigone
both speak and act without listening to the other, while Haemon listens to both and grows into a
mature citizen. Political speech as a series of disconnected monologues fails to have any impact
in the same way as attempting to start a revolution or protest in isolation from other people is
irrelevant. The collective and performative nature of politics demands that not just other actors
be included, but spectators as well. Spectators who observe, draw connections, make judgements
and develop their own interpretations from what they have seen.
The spectator, far from being removed from political participation, is the one who
engages in the most critical political faculty of all, namely judgement. The political spectator is
like the theatrical spectator, not someone sitting passive and agape before a spectacle who needs
to be motivated into action. Given that action is less common, watching should be conceived of
as our normal condition of being. We watch, we draw connections, and we judge. Given that so
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much of politics depends on the clash of different opinions and the presentation of unique
perspectives, the role of judging is all the more important. Every political decision involves the
presentation of multiple choices without any objectively true solution which could be discovered
through scientific principles. Politics is like one’s taste in music or film. It comes down to a
matter of subjective judgements. In this sense, the judgemental audience is at least as important a
form of political participation as the speeches and actions which happen on the stage of action. A
participatory politics open to everyone means that an actor must sit down and listen as a
spectator, and that there must be no barrier that prevents anyone in the audience from standing up
and getting onto the stage. The separation of spectator and actor are preserved, but there is no
rigid barrier preventing people from crossing from audience to actor and actor to audience. In
this manner, what must be eliminated is not the stage or the audience but the barrier that prevents
free movement between the two positions.
5.5 Participation in an Online Context
While theoretical arguments can be made in favour of the virtues of a more engaged mode of
political participation, the practice has always fallen short of the ideal, partly because of the
seeming unworkability of most forms of participatory politics. Models of participatory
democracy that refer back to the ancient Athenian example are deemed hopelessly utopian and
completely unworkable in the context of today’s vastly larger pool of citizens. This argument has
become commonplace in dismissing the practicality of participatory politics, even among
theorists who are otherwise sympathetic. The protests of the Arab Spring seemed to hit a similar
impasse, as once the unelected dictatorships were overthrown, representative democracy seemed
to be the only practical alternative. Even Arendt scholars routinely dismiss her arguments in
favour of council democracy as unworkable or utopian. Despite my enthusiasm for a more
participatory politics, these critiques of participatory democracy’s practicality are hard to escape.
The idea of meeting in councils only seems practical at the micro-level of neighbourhood
associations, but anything beyond that small scale would result in insurmountable obstacles in
terms of physical distance, space, and time. A form of politics where only ultra-local issues are at
stake, however, fails to provide the means for people to engage with the issues they care about.
Especially in the context of increasing globalization, restricting one’s political energies to micro-
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local issues seems like a failed attempt to return to some romanticized version of the pre-
industrial past.
The lack of clearly workable alternatives to representative democracy has led theorists
such as Rancière to simply posit politics as bound up with anti-politics, making political
participation only about dissent and protest. While these elements must be included in any kind
of theory of political participation, to dismiss the ability to take part in decision making is to
seriously circumscribe what politics means and what counts as political action. Rather than resort
to positing politics as purely oppositional, a new vision of practical participatory politics is
necessary, and it is precisely on this point where the internet has the capacity to reinvigorate
these debates. As was argued in the chapter on the political realm, concerns of physical distance
and time in an online context are not the overwhelming constraints they are in offline space,
which allows us to move beyond the primary and most valid criticism of participatory
democracy.
Most accounts of how the internet can be beneficial for politics focus on one of three
aspects that position the internet in a supporting role. For advocates of representative democracy
the internet becomes another form of communications tool in which candidates use social media
and set up websites in order to try to attract more votes. Typical of this approach is the edited
volume The Internet Election, which analyzes the 2004 United States Presidential election. The
internet is treated in terms of its ability to organize supporters and make fundraising efforts more
broad based and generally treats the internet as revolutionizing the campaigning process but
completely peripheral to the functioning of government. Even in the context of a comparative
study of the internet and national elections done in 2014, there is no mention of using the internet
to allow people to actually vote, thus keeping the internet at a safe distance from even the
selection of representatives. The second method positions the internet as the possible site of a
more engaged civic sphere in the Habermasian sense, in which people can deliberate on political
issues, and the consensus that results from these deliberations are then meant to guide the
decisions of elected leaders. While the deliberative position with respect to the internet is an
improvement on the representative position which places the internet on the periphery,
deliberative democrats such as Castells, Dahlberg, and Papacharissi tend to see the internet as a
place for a renewed sense of Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere, which although it provides
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more avenues for participating in debate and discussion, it still keeps the internet at arm’s length
from the actual mechanisms of government. The third model positions the internet as an
uncontrolled space of dissent which can formulate the creation of protest movements and help
strengthen alternative voices by not needing to rely on traditional forms of corporate-controlled
mass media to reach a broad audience.382 Like with the other two models of web-enabled
democracy, this one again positions the internet as a useful tool that operates outside of the
structures of government. While embracing aspects of these models can be useful in formulating
a more engaged politics, they essentially skirt the potentially radical impact the internet could
have for reinvigorating participatory politics.
Instead of positing the internet as a communications tool, alternative space, or useful
supplement, the real potential lies in placing the infrastructure of politics online. Instead of
accepting the idea that the government and the people must be completely separate entities, the
participatory model positions the people as the government in a properly democratic sense. If,
however, the stage of politics was not limited to a physical space where only a very select few
can actually participate and the audience has little opportunity for input, then the elimination of
the gulf between government and citizens could be possible. The only viable means of
implementing participatory politics is by placing the stage online. In this sense the internet would
alter everything about how politics is conducted, rather than being a mere supplement. People
would debate and argue with others online, not just as a means of aggregating interests or
creating public sentiments which representatives would act on, but enabling decisions to be made
on issues raised directly by the people, not in address to a separate ruling entity but to their
fellow citizens.
Placing the political stage online facilitates participation in politics in a number of ways.
If one of the most basic elements of political participation is the ability to speak, this capacity
becomes much easier online. As was outlined in the chapter on subjectivity, speaking online
provides a form of cover for one’s personal life, so that the risk of public engagement can be
reduced and the likelihood of having speech dismissed on the basis of what someone is, rather
than on what they have to say can be reduced. Online speech, in so far as it is actually writing,
can facilitate a deeper debate that moves beyond the “Madison Avenue” methods of electoral
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Radical Democracy and the Internet: Interrogating Theory and Practice, ed. Lincoln Dahlberg and Eugenia Siapera
(Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
382 Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, “New Media and Internet Activism: From the ‘Battle of Seattle’ to
Blogging,” New Media & Society 6, no. 1 (2004): 87–95; Howard and Hussain, Democracy’s Fourth Wave?.
campaigns by generating a more substantive focus on the actual issues facing the public. While it
is true that the internet can also allow people to publicly state whatever vapid sentiment happens
to flutter into their heads, setting up the technology to weed out such comments is not difficult
and would obviously be considered when constructing such an online space. Overall the level of
political discourse would likely elevate. Currently we have to listen to and consider every
thoughtless statement of an elected politician simply because they are the people with decision
making authority, while in a more egalitarian online context vapidity is much easier to ignore and
tends to be socially punished. Public speech with no content does not stir controversy or provoke
debate unless the one issuing such statements is in a position of authority.
Zelda Bronstein points to how taking part in political debate online is not just more
convenient but is also emotionally easier. Citing Walter Ong’s work on orality, she points to how
online debate is easier on the nerves because it lacks the element of “everyone looking at you at
once” that is the case with offline political speech. She also points to Ong’s work on how
intonation in speech can spur emotions and how certain personalities can dominate others.
Offline speeches to an audience are also given from a standing position, which is associated with
combativeness and is an aggressive posture, compared to debating online which is done from a
weakened seated position.385 While increasing ease of access, accessibility, and reducing the
emotional strain of political participation are, as I have argued, positive benefits of online
participation, Bronstein goes on to argue that these conveniences make political participation too
easy and that ease of use cheapens the importance of political participation.386 This argument is
related to the elitist argument that will be dealt with later on in this chapter but also relates to a
common complaint about slacktivism cheapening issues into clicking a like button or signing an
e-petition. Why, however, should political participation be inherently exhausting, emotionally
taxing, and all around difficult unless the goal is to constrain participation to only an aristocratic
few, whether they be dedicated activists or elected politicians? Bronstein then goes on to argue,
citing Turkle’s tired argument, that participating online isolates individuals and weakens ties
between people. Bronstein’s ideal of participation seems to involve small vanguards of dedicated
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activists rather than broad based movements or the ability for anyone and everyone to easily take
part in the political process. In this sense, Bronstein’s organizational structure for activists simply
mimics the structure of government that she seeks to oppose.
The strength of online participation is precisely the ease of access that critics such as
Bronstein do not like. It is simply easier, practically, to allow vast numbers of people to make
public statements at the same time, and much easier to read and consider vast numbers of
comments posted online than in any offline alternative. Talking verbally and listening aurally are
much more consuming of one’s attention in the way that reading and writing are not, meaning
that an online participatory politics would simply be less time-consuming in general, which
would facilitate more participation. Writing and reading also have the advantage over talking and
listening of being able to allow for more time to consider what one is writing, and to consider
what one is reading. In this sense it can moderate the impact of the angry person with the loud
voice demanding to be heard. One can imagine a public assembly where those who yell the
loudest become impossible to ignore, while those with calm and reasonable arguments do not get
a chance to speak. By placing such speech online and transforming it into written thoughts, the
volume of speech becomes much less important than the content. Writing in all capitals in an
attempt to convey anger simply does not have the same effect, and is more likely to lead to
ridicule than immediate or urgent consideration of what is being hastily conveyed.
Participating in politics online can also help lower the boundary between spectator and
actor. In-person debates take the form of one person speaking and everyone else listening, which
has the effect of clearly separating the spectator from the actor. In an online context, however,
there need not be an unsurmountable wall of separation between speakers and listeners, because
when reading people’s comments one can also comment and reply at the same time. There is no
need to take turns in a rigidly delineated manner between only spectating and only acting.
Spectators can more easily be empowered to engage in judgement, as mechanisms can be set up
where, upon reading a comment, a reader can click an agree or disagree button to register their
judgement without having to write out a comment outlining their own position. Given that most
people in online forums are “lurkers,” or people who often read but do not post to discussion
forums, to be able to share their judgement publicly without having to type out a comment is
empowering. Spectators can become the drivers of what issues are important in this way, as their
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quiet judgements will drive what issues get noticed and discussed. This is significant because in
an offline context it is usually only the actors who are willing to speak who drive the
conversation, as there is very little recourse for the spectator to push the conversation or debate
in another direction. Online participation can then greatly empower the spectator and, thus, make
the content of politics more reflective of what the average citizen is concerned with, rather than
being reflective only of what the most outspoken citizens wish to discuss.
It is important to blur the line between spectator and actor without actually abolishing it.
Some critics of participatory websites point to the fact that almost all content that is created on a
site such as Wikipedia for instance, is performed by a very select few, and most people simply
read the articles without ever editing them. Rather than trying to salvage the participatory aspect
by claiming that we need to change how we conceive of equality, as Polletta argues, we simply
need to realize that spectatorship is not “worse” than participation but tied to it. The fact that not
everyone edits Wikipedia does not make it less participatory or make it into some kind of new
structure of exclusionary elitism as some critics have claimed. If everyone was forced to write or
edit a Wikipedia article in order to read one, not only would readership vastly decline, but the
quality of content posted would also decline. Spectatorship and action go hand in hand and
require the other. The fact that some may not feel the need to act most of the time is not a
problem, especially in an online context where spectators can be emancipated in the way
described by Rancière.
By placing the activities of politics related to its communicative and decision making
aspects online, a whole host of new forms of participation open up. There are a plethora of
possibilities of how such a political stage could operate, as well as many possible different
implementations that could come about. Many existing websites provide nascent possibilities
which could serve as inspiration for the creation of an online political infrastructure. While social
media sites are problematic because of their social nature, one could imagine networks of people
connected not by social ties but around political issues. Instead of becoming friends with another
person, one could join an issue, immediately linking with other potential actors who could be
rallied to transform debates into actions that rearrange the world. Discussion forums such as
Reddit, which are driven by users submitting links which can be upvoted or downvoted based on
how interesting they are, could serve as a model for deciding which issues were of higher priority
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within a political community. The discussion aspect of sites like Reddit could also serve as the
basis for debate on popular issues, as it allows people to respond directly to others and upvote or
downvote individual comments.
While Reddit’s aim with the upvote and downvote system was to weed out and hide
irrelevant comments, in more politically oriented subforums, this system breaks. Unpopular
opinions get downvoted as a form of disagreement, which is politically problematic as the Reddit
comment algorithm automatically hides comments with a negative voting score. In a properly
political forum unpopular opinions need the same visibility as popular ones. Different methods
and algorithms would have to be developed which send not just the most popular opinions to the
top, but also the most unpopular, the most controversial, and the ones which provoked the most
replies. There are many examples of nascent possibilities that could be transformed to facilitate
politics, but too many critics of online participation simply look at the flaws, such as Reddit’s
downvote system hiding unpopular political opinions, and then deem the internet as a whole
unsuitable to politics. What is needed is some creative thinking about how the internet could be
used as a political stage, rather than dismissing it based on certain flawed websites which were
not meant to be used for political purposes in the first place.
Critics of “slacktivism”, such as Jodi Dean and Stuart Thomas, focus on the simplicity of
online petitions or liking causes on social media sites as the extent and horizon of online
participation and then go on to deem these to be a distraction from political action in the “real
world”. These critiques fail because they involve the implicit claim that the internet simply
cannot function as political space, and that therefore any kind of participation online must
necessarily be trivial. What is the difference, however, between claiming that clicking an online
petition does not really change anything and the argument that participating in a street protest
does not really change anything? Both rely on an antiquated notion of official political spaces,
which was critiqued in the second chapter, which views given spaces as having fixed essences
which cannot be reconfigured. The idea that the internet as space could be produced in a different
manner by the participation of people is simply not even considered, in the same way that
conservative critics of street protest claim that those activists are wasting their time because
nothing can change through this method.
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By contrast there is a growing body of scholarship which argues that even trivial online
political participation can open the door to more substantial forms of political participation, both
online and offline. Christensen finds that online engagement in political activities tended to
increase the desire for subjects to participate offline, and that there is no evidence to suggest that
slacktivism is replacing more substantial forms of political participation.394 In a thorough study
of online and offline political behaviour in the UK, Gibson et al. found that being older,
wealthier, male, and white were strong predicators of offline political activity, but that these same
groups were not strong predicators of online political activity, demonstrating the internet’s
capacity to overcome traditional barriers to participation.395 A study by Vissers and Stolle of
students at McGill found that political activity online and offline was positively correlated and
that those who engaged in Facebook slacktivism were no less likely to participate in other forms
of more substantial political engagement.396
Moving beyond concerns of clicktivism or slacktivism, Dean goes on to argue that the
internet does provide new avenues for participation but that these avenues have already been
Clicktivism: Jodi Dean on the Limits of Technology in the Occupy Movement,” Vice: Motherboard, November
2012, http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/beyond-clicktivism-jodi-dean-on-the-limits-of-technology-in-the-
occupymovement.
394 Henrik Serup Christensen, “Political Activities on the Internet: Slacktivism; or Political Participation by Other
Means?,” First Monday 16, no. 2 (2011).
395 Rachel K. Gibson, Wainer Lusoli, and Stephen Ward, “Online Participation in the UK: Testing a
‘Contextualised’ Model of Internet Effects,” The British Journal of Politics & International Relations 7, no. 4
(2005): 561–83.
396 Sara Vissers and Dietlind Stolle, “Spill-Over Effects Between Facebook and On/Offline Political Participation?
Evidence from a Two-Wave Panel Study,” Journal of Information Technology & Politics 11, no. 3 (2014): 259–75.
captured by anti-political forces. The most interesting sites on the internet are now driven by
user-generated content, as without the participation of users, sites like YouTube, Facebook,
Twitter, or Reddit would sit completely empty of any content. According to Dean, the sites which
rely on participation have two anti-political effects. First, they direct people’s participatory
impulse away from politics and channel it into other means, and second they create an “intense
circulation of content” in which everyone registers an opinion that no one listens to, thus
undermining the agonistic and deliberative aspects necessary for politics. Specifically, Dean cites
the example of people having political blogs where they can publicly state their opinions on any
given issue whenever they want. The problem, however, is that very few people will read it, and
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thus people end up feeling like they have participated without their participation being
meaningful. Under no circumstances would blogging be considered a model for a new online
political realm, and thus Dean’s critique, although valid, is hardly a condemnation of online
political participation as a whole as she draws her examples from one small element of online
activity.
There are plenty of examples of legitimately political uses of the internet today, including
Anonymous, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement. The real problem with critiquing how
people currently use the internet, and then taking this to be a critique of the medium itself, is that
it closes off the potential of what the internet could be and how it could be used in the future. The
fact that the internet could serve as the infrastructure of a radically engaged participatory politics
is not in any way negated by the fact that it may currently and continue to serve as the
infrastructure of a new form of anti-political “communicative capitalism” or as a way for
governments to spy on citizens. If this argument was applied to offline space, then all
transformative political action would have to be disqualified on the grounds that offline space is
somehow inherently anti-political and immutable. The internet is not a monolith and multiple
experiences and configurations of its space easily coexist on different websites. While most
critiques of online political participation as slacktivism tend to lack theoretical depth, there are
two versions of an argument against participatory politics in general which can be interpreted in
terms of online participation which merit further consideration.
5.6 The Elitist Argument against Participation: Too Much Quantity
Degrades Quality
Beyond the space and time argument, which the internet renders invalid, the most serious
argument against participatory politics has to do with the quality and quantity of the
participation. This argument takes two forms; the elitist version argues that the quantity of
participation will overwhelm the quality while the populist argument argues that the quality of
participation will overwhelm the quantity. Both versions would seem to be amplified when
considering online participation, however, as I will show, online participation can more than
compensate for any increase in negative aspects to which these two critiques point. This section
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will deal with the elitist version of the quality versus quantity argument, while the next section
will look at the populist version of it.
In its most simple form, the elitist argument states that by allowing anyone and everyone
to participate politically it will lead to poor decisions and the consideration of uninformed and
unreasonable opinions. The ultimate fear is that the unwashed masses will degrade politics into
some sort of vulgar talk show where people scream their prejudices at each other and nothing
serious can happen. The elitist argument is persistent in the history of political philosophy, as it
begins with Plato’s philosopher kings and is even raised against representative democracy by the
likes of John Stuart Mill who argued that the educated elite should be given two votes in
elections to compensate for the enfranchisement of the working class. Remnants of this suspicion
toward the political intelligence of the average person persist in institutions such as the Canadian
Senate and British House of Lords, which were originally meant to operate as a check on any
potential “democratic excess” that might occur as a result of allowing regular people to choose
their own representatives for the House of Commons.
The elitist argument becomes amplified in the online context, as there is a persistent view
that allowing just anyone to publicly comment on a news story, for example, simply leads to a
series of vacuous and pointless comments. Often the toxicity of online commenting is blamed on
anonymity and the so-called “internet disinhibition effect,” but there is no reason to believe that
someone would only make a ridiculous comment online when he or she would otherwise never
make the same comment when discussing the same news article with friends. Anonymity does
not cause people to act immaturely but allows them to reveal what they really think without
worry of social consequences. Anonymity breeds honesty, whereas social pressures may lead
individuals to make insincere political comments in the name of fitting into one’s social context.
Online commentary on political issues tends to cover a wider spectrum of beliefs, including ones
that are generally not socially acceptable, not because anonymity makes people act differently,
but because it enables honesty.
A second aspect to the perception that online discussion is of lower quality relates to its
publicity. Usually the revealing of opinions, including ones which are ignorant or prejudiced, are
kept to a small group of people due to the lack of a public political stage. The difference between
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talking about politics online and among a small group of people is not a matter of anonymity but
is a matter of how many people can see the comments. The founder of Gawker, one of the larger
websites which focus on allowing users to comment on posted articles, argues that the site may
move toward a model where only a select few pre-approved readers will be allowed to comment
on any given story, in an attempt to improve the quality of comments on the site. The real issue,
however, of why people are either so willing to engage in toxic behaviour, post pointless
comments, or proudly proclaim their ignorance publicly is not merely a matter of the functioning
of the internet but poses the question of why are these people so uninformed and poorly behaved
in the first place? The argument for the internet disinhibition effect rests on the assumption that
in offline space the same people who act boorish online would be capable of serious and
reasonable political debate. In contrast to Suler’s initial argument, psychological research is
increasingly demonstrating that people who behave badly online tend to also behave badly
offline. In this sense, the internet does not turn people into miscreants; it simply makes people’s
normal behaviour more visible to a wider audience.
The elitist argument looks at some of the worst examples of poor behaviour and
uninformed political discourse online and then draws the conclusion that most people are
incapable of serious political activity or at least that the majority lack the education necessary to
take part politically. This argument, however, confuses cause and effect. In a system where the
vast majority are alienated from participation there is no motivation to become informed and
knowledgeable about either the political system or any given daily issue. Politicians debate and
decide on these issues, not the average person. Thus, when comments are solicited from the
public on news stories for example, is it really surprising that a good deal of them come off as
ignorant or vapid? If people were given a real opportunity to participate, the motivation to get
informed becomes strong, especially if one’s opinions will be tested in debate by others who are
highly knowledgeable and educated on the topic.
The idea that participation spurs people to become more informed seems to fly in the face
of the claims that internet commenting is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to serious
discourse. Especially among journalists there is a common theme that enabling mass
participation through the internet simply brings out the worst in people. The quality of
commenting, however, depends on which sites are analyzed and the algorithmic structure of the
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commenting system. In a brief comparison of newspaper comments to comments on Reddit of a
single controversial news story (Canada pulling out of the Kyoto Accord) an obvious difference
in the quality of comments can be witnessed. Comments on CBC, the National Post, and Sun
News Network were of significantly lower quality than those posted on Reddit. In conducting
this comparison, poor quality comments were defined as falling into one of three categories. The
first category consisted of comments that simply agreed or disagreed in a way that did not lead to
discussion. The second category were comments which were pointless, off topic, or reposts. The
third category consisted of offensively racist, sexist, or homophobic comments, as well as
personal insults which did not advance an argument. Using this metric, it was found that on the
same news story across multiple sources, 45% of comments on CBC were of poor quality, 65%
on the National Post, and 55% on Sun News Network. These same stories posted to Reddit
generated an overall much higher level of discussion and discourse from people who both agreed
with the government’s decision and opposed it. The story posted on /r/Canada contained 12%
poor quality comments and on /r/worldnews contained 36% poor quality comments.405
The vast majority of news sites whose primary medium is offline, operate on a flat
commenting model in which the original story is posted with an unconnected list of unrelated
comments responding directly to the original article. In the case of my comparison study, many
users of the newspaper sites would attempt to address the comments of other users, but because
the comments were displayed in a flat list, there was next to no discussion, as such attempts at
direct response became lost in the structure of the comments. This problem of flat commenting
was especially problematic on the CBC website, while the Sun News website only allowed
replies one level deep. In the case of CBC, replies to other comments were not connected to the
original. For Sun News, the one level reply structure only increased confusion, as it made it
appear as if people’s comments were replies to others, when in reality they were attempting to
reply to someone else. By contrast, the nested tree structure of Reddit enabled users to actually
have back and forth debates and discussions which were easy for readers to follow. The situation
of the newspaper comments is precisely what Jodi Dean critiques as talk without listening, as on
such sites there is no formation of relationships (either friendly or adversarial) among users,
because they do not talk to each other. Most comments on the news sites were directly aimed at
the article or even addressed to the Prime Minister, rather than fellow commenters. In this sense
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the newspaper commenting sections mirror the structure of government and citizen, where the
government makes the decisions and the best the citizen can do is yell in protest at them. The
structure of authority is maintained where the commenters are alienated, and take on the role of
yelling into an unresponsive void. The journalist (or the person who posted the story off a news
wire service) rarely responds to comments on an article, just as the government rarely engages in
debate with individual citizens. With this structure it is no wonder that newspaper comment
sections seem to bring out the worst in people and fail to generate any interesting discussion.
The other fundamental problem with the structure of most newspaper comments sections,
contributing to their poor quality, is the lack of interaction and debate between users. When
someone says something toxic, there is no real way to engage with or challenge that person
directly. Comment replies get lost in the flat list, or if there is some nested structure, the original
commenter rarely sees it. If one can get away with saying anything without challenge, then this
will naturally lead to more vacuous and toxic comments. On sites which are structured toward
commenting and not simply talking at the original article, such as Reddit, there is a much higher
level of discourse. In the comparison of comments on Kyoto, the two Reddit discussions
generated 3% and 2.3% of comments which were in the third category outlined above of either
being offensive or insulting. All of these types of comments had a comment score of zero or less,
meaning they were filtered to the bottom of the list of comments, due to being downvoted by
other users. By comparison, CBC had 2.5% of these comments, the National Post 17.6% and Sun
News 23%. While the numbers for CBC are likely low due to moderation (many of the off topic
comments were complaints about moderators removing their previous comments), the numbers
were very high on the National Post and Sun News sites. While this might be expected for Sun
News, given its ideological reputation, these types of low quality comments were directed at and
came from viewpoints that spanned the political spectrum. Given the lack of structure which
enables interaction on that site, such comments went socially unpunished. On Reddit you cannot
help but notice when people think your comment is of low quality, due to the fact each comment
gets a score from voting and replies are sent directly to you as messages. Posting a low quality
comment on a newspaper website, by contrast, will not lead to any awareness that it might be of
poor quality.
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In addition, Sun News uses a real name policy where all comments must be linked to a
Facebook account, meaning that the most toxic discussion site was the only one with no
pseudonymity. In fact, since it was trivially easy to simply click a commenter’s name and get to
their Facebook page, some of the insults were unnecessarily personal and went beyond simply
posting an insult as a means of disagreeing with an opinion. Anonymity then did not lead to
disinhibition as Suler claims, but in reality the ability to quickly access personal information
enables a toxic atmosphere where users are more prone to insults which attempt to disqualify the
ability to participate based on knowledge of a user’s identity. Real names policies and linking
comments to a person’s offline identity does not create more accountability which leads to higher
quality comments but, in fact, simply provides more ammunition for character attacks which can
become more personalized and thus more hurtful. By contrast, Reddit’s structure promotes
engagement among users which explains the lower level of third category comments. In this
sense, the disinhibition effect which leads to the posting of poor quality comments is not a result
of internet anonymity but a result of being able to talk without reply. When everything one says
is subject to critical response, one becomes more careful in what one says, and there is a strong
motivation to do a little research to make sure one’s statements have some kind of factual
backing. Seeing that one’s comment has received hundreds of downvotes and generated tens of
critical replies demonstrating how one is wrong is embarrassing and provides social impetus to
do better next time by becoming more informed on the issue.
The problem with poor quality comments is not structurally related to the internet or too
much participation but in fact is directly related to the lack of participation. To continue with the
metaphor of the theatre, can one expect a good performance out of an actor who has never had
any practice acting, never had any education as an actor, and has never been on stage before?
Clearly not, but the elitist argument essentially attempts to naturalize the lack of opportunity into
a lack of natural ability. This argument is analogous to claiming that people in Botswana are
simply not naturally talented hockey players, despite the fact that virtually no one in Botswana
plays the sport or has the opportunity to do so. How do we know that given the opportunity to
play and practice the sport, as well as train with excellent coaches, that people from Botswana
may not become excellent hockey players?
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Contrary to the elitist fear that mass participation will degrade political discourse, making
participation more open and accessible could very well empower common sense. The current
system enables lobbying by interest groups, and if they are motivated enough or have enough
money, they can easily sway policy in their favour even if their demands run contrary to the
public interest or even common sense. Industry lobbying of government would be muted in a
more participatory political system. It would be more difficult for a lobbyist to persuade the
public to do things that go against its interest, as compared to convincing a few politicians. There
is also the issue of small but motivated groups who rely on the lack of engagement by the public
to get measures passed. A good example are the conspiracy-oriented anti-fluoride movement and
anti-wind farm movements in Ontario. Both groups rely on arguments that are scientifically
unsupported and which, when faced with broader public scrutiny, tend to be ridiculed as
pseudoscience. When anti-fluoride groups show up to every city council meeting and demand
that their issue be discussed, it can make it seem like that issue is disproportionately important to
the public. Very few people have the motivation to show up at a public meeting to counter the
claims of anti-wind farm or anti-fluoride activists because, to most people, defending common
sense is hardly something that inspires political passion. The lack of visible opposition, however,
is what allows these measures to get passed. In a participatory system such issues would face
much broader public rebuke and be quickly pushed aside in favour of more serious
considerations. The ease of posting a rebuttal online can elevate political discourse and minimize
the effect of those who rely on not being publicly challenged to push their issue.
Once one accepts that the elite argument against mass participation is unfounded, an
inevitable corollary is the question about having the time to decide and debate every minute
detail of every issue and proposal. This question seems to derive from the attitude that voting in
elections is a civic duty. Thus, in a participatory democracy, there would be a duty to participate
in every possible debate and decision. There would, however, be little incentive or need to be
involved in every issue. People would naturally only gravitate toward participating in issues that
mattered to them, and in fact it would amount to interference to try to join the decision on every
issue. It is always better to not participate than to participate blindly, and there will be a measure
of self-selection on any given political issue. At the same time, if someone simply was not
interested in politics that person would be free to let others make the decisions, allowing the
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pursuit of wealth accumulation or whatever else one might prefer to political participation.
Participation could take on a number of different roles, ranging from complete uninvolvement, to
voting on final proposals, to debating the crafting of proposals, to discussing issues which the
political body should be addressing. The fact that participation would be a matter of selfselection
leads into the flip-side of the quantity versus quality argument: namely, that these selfchosen
people will form a new elite which would undermine widescale participation.
5.7 The Populist Argument against Participation: Too Much Quality
Degrades Quantity
The populist argument against participation states that if too much emphasis is placed on the
quality of political discourse and participation, the citizens who self-select to participate will
form a new elite which will push out most people and, thus, not actually increase participation at
all. Hindman makes this argument with relation to blogs, arguing that the internet does not
democratize the media but simply transfers power to another form of elite, thus reproducing a
structure of elite driven politics online. The problem with an elite-driven politics is not, however,
simply a matter of how many are participating. The real problem with an elite-based politics
derives from the fact that becoming a member of the elite few able to participate is not a matter
of self-selection. Non-participation in the context of a self-selected elite would be a personal
choice, making it fundamentally different from representative democracy in which the exclusion
from participation is not up to the individual. The ability to self-exclude from politics also
ensures that the negative liberty of being free from politics is upheld.409 Thus, even if a small
number of citizens end up as the major participators, it would still be more participatory, because
it would allow those who most want to participate to do so, and allow those with no interest in
politics to go about their private business without demands that voting is a civic duty and the
associated guilt trips.
Having only a small number of self-chosen participants is not problematic, because
anyone can choose to become part of that small group of participants, there are no barriers to
enter the public realm like there are under representative systems. If one does not like how a
participatory self-selected elite is doing things, then one can simply join it in order to try to
change how things are done. Ironically this tends to be the argument used in favour of
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representative democracy, in which if one does not like the government, one simply needs to run
for office and join it. Of course, winning office is an extremely difficult task, as it relies on being
selected by others and is not simply a personal choice as it would be in a participatory
democracy. On another level, even if a self-selected elite is not such a bad thing, the probability
of this occurring should be questioned as well. While research on preliminary online
participatory experiments shows that very few people participated, such experiments were also
relatively limited in scope.410 As the ability to influence public decisions grew, the number of
people interested in participating would in all likelihood grow as well. The number of
participants, however, is not a measure of legitimacy in a participatory system because
participation is not closed off and, thus, the self-chosen participants do not need to try to
legitimize their authority with an appeal to broad support, such as in a representative system.
The use of the internet can vastly simplify participation and, thus, make participation
more accessible. One no longer needs to have a household full of slaves in order to be afforded
the time to enter the public arena, as in ancient Athens. The increased proliferation and
penetration of the internet through not just computers but mobile phones makes participation
easy and accessible. Even someone who works long hours could receive cell phone alerts about
issues he or she was following, which would keep people informed without having to travel
somewhere and dedicate a specific period of time to political activities. At the same time, cheap
mobile devices with internet connectivity are rapidly spreading across the developing world
while public libraries with internet terminals can facilitate access to the political realm by even
the most marginalized sectors of the population. In fact, there may even be a reverse bias in
political participation in which those with time-consuming professional jobs, who are today the
most likely to become politicians due to their wealth, actually participate less because their
occupations take up so much of their time. The tendency for a participatory politics to be
dominated by educated professionals or business elites would be offset by those able to dedicate
more time to political matters.
Another way of dealing with the populist argument that politics would simply be taken
over by a new elite relates to the notion of public happiness and the experience of freedom which
comes from political activity. Currently, politics is treated as a kind of burden that usually
wealthy people must grudgingly enter into, in order to preserve their ability to accumulate
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private wealth. This attitude is the modern version of Plato’s argument that the philosopher must
trudge back into the cave and rule the city in order to make it safe for philosophy, which was
then modified by Locke into the burden of property owners to ensure their property is kept safe.
Participatory politics emphasizes the public element of public affairs and affirms participating in
the decisions and debates of one’s community as empowering. Rather than viewing participation
as an annoying burden necessary to promote private wealth, political participation should be
reoriented as a means to facilitate public happiness. It is the loss of the concept of public
happiness as participation in politics that Arendt is most critical of when it comes to the modern
revolutions which she otherwise admired. She finishes On Revolution by paraphrasing Sophocles
and arguing that “it was the polis, the space of men’s free deeds and living words, which could
endow life with splendour” and thus make life’s burden bearable. Given the opportunity to
actually participate, many people would discover the joys of political participation, which would
have the dual effect of making those who self-choose to engage in politics be primarily
concerned with the public good over private advantage, as well as be less likely to form into a
rigid elite with a common background, economic status, or education simply because
selfempowerment is something universally desirable.
One final aspect of the quantity versus quality argument which should be considered is a
hybrid version of the elite and populist argument developed by Mark Warren, a prominent
advocate of deliberative democracy. Warren argues that modern society is simply much too
complex to allow for citizen participation, as people would simply be in way over their heads
when it comes to working out the complex issues that face contemporary societies. He argues
that participatory politics would in fact turn into a technocratic situation where only specialists
could participate in any meaningful way, thus alienating the vast majority. He proposes to fix this
problem through a deliberative model in which citizens have spaces outside of the formal
institutions of the state to form opinions. If society is so complex that only experts can engage in
proper political action, then why do we have elections to choose our political leaders today?
Deliberative democracy generally places a layer between the state and the people, and, by
engaging in this civil society, the public can develop informed and rational opinions which are
supposed to guide the decisions of politicians. If the public, however, are limited to more general
discussions of the issues because of their complexity, what guarantee is there that an elected
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government will have any more expertise than the general population? Very rarely are experts in
their fields elected to parliaments. So what happens when the elected politicians fail to
acknowledge the complexity of contemporary society because they themselves lack expertise? Is
it better to hope that elected politicians will listen to scientists on matters such as the causes of
climate change, or is it better to let those scientists participate directly?
The problem with the complexity argument is that it assumes expertise from existing
politicians or, at least, assumes that they will defer to experts on matters of fact and will defer to
civil society on matters of opinion. Neither of these assumptions holds under representative
democracy, and deliberative democracy is at best a mild modification of it. There is
overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change, and yet little is
being done to address climate change even in countries where public opinion matches scientific
fact. By allowing experts in their fields to directly participate in politics, they can help inform
and shape the debate on complex issues that require specialized knowledge. If today’s political
issues are more complex, then, if anything, this is an argument to get more people involved. The
likelihood of a small group of elected politicians making informed decisions outside their realm
of speciality (or contrary to their private business interests) is much less likely than in a situation
where participants (including specialists) were self-chosen. In addition, there is no reason to
believe that citizens would necessarily need to participate in every single detail of crafting policy
or be engaged in every aspect of a public project. If a political body decided that a bridge needed
to be built, it obviously would not be debating and voting on every last detail of its construction
and architecture and would leave that up to engineers and technical experts. Everyone would not
need to be an expert in everything, just as today’s politicians are not.
5.8 Conclusion
The recent surge in protests across the world demonstrates that there is a latent frustration with
governments that fail to provide avenues of meaningful participation. As the internet increases
the ability for people to participate in all aspects of life, from media and entertainment to politics,
the old argument that there is not enough time and space for participatory politics is losing its
lustre. By placing the infrastructure of politics online, participation on a wide scale is fully
realizable and can provide citizens with the opportunity to exercise their freedom to speak and
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act politically. Politics is performative in nature, and can be likened to a theatrical performance,
as it requires spectators to witness and remember the action. These spectators are not merely
passive onlookers, but engage in critical judgement of what they see. Representative democracy
tends to cast out the spectators and transform them into easily swayed consumers. An online
participatory politics would soften the barrier between spectator and actor as the role of the
spectator would be magnified through the ease of registering judgements.
If participatory politics can be likened to a theatrical performance, then it has the most in
common with a tragedy. The desire to participate usually stems from disagreement and
conflicting opinions. Individuals want to offer their opinions, because they are unique and
different from others, which brings them into conflict with their peers. The next chapter will
develop the idea that politics, like a tragedy, is about participating in conflicts and disagreements
on political issues, rather than trying to develop a society where all conflict is reconciled. The
continued existence of conflict is necessary if politics is to remain participatory. If all conflict
disappeared then what would political actors have left to do?
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Chapter 6 — Conflict
6.1 Introduction
The significance of political conflict cannot be understated, as it is the defining reason why
politics exists. The desire to disagree is the very core of politics, as it drives people to participate
and become subjects who seek to enter the political realm. Politics arises precisely because there
are no singular truths in public affairs, leading to disagreement among a plurality of conflicting
opinions. By drawing on the theory of agonistic pluralism, politics is positioned as the debate
between conflicting opinions and provides the means to make decisions on public affairs against
the backdrop of a lack of certainty over which course of action might be best. Despite this status
as the basis of all politics, political conflict and disagreement are all too often viewed as
problems to be overcome by politics, rather than as what gives politics its reason to exist.
Considering politics in an online context also introduces unique problems for the status of
political conflict. Some argue placing politics online enables people to exist in bubbles which
filter out opposing views, thus making the conflict of opinions necessary for an agonistic politics
impossible. On the other hand, others argue that the internet amplifies conflict to the point that
politics becomes impossible, as people become more interested in attacking and humiliating their
opponents than in critical debate. Both of these sides have merit, but, as with the other examples
where the internet’s political suitability is attacked from two radically opposed ends, a middle
ground opens up which can enable the internet to enhance the expression of dissent.
The problem with viewing political conflict and disagreement as something destructive,
rather than as the constructive basis of politics, continues to be apparent in the reaction to the
Occupy, Arab Spring, and Anonymous movements. Criticism of these movements often stems
from an anti-political attitude that seeks to deny the legitimacy of disagreement. In this sense,
conflict is the least ambiguous of the four terrains of contestation between politics and
antipolitics, in that conflict is viewed anti-politically as a problem to eliminate rather than to
minimize or to which to restrict access. When considering conflict and disagreement in an online
context, especially with a controversial movement such as Anonymous, the discourse is often
driven by this anti-political desire to eliminate conflict, which can take the guise of a critique of
technology, even if the real target is actually dissent.
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If conflict and disagreement are prerequisites for politics, I argue in this chapter that
putting politics online can help enable disagreement and dissent, as the shield of anonymity and
the depersonalized nature of online political discussion helps promote vigorous conflictual
debate and decreases the risks associated with public dissent. At the same time, there are dangers
that must be mitigated, such as uncivil behaviour, trolling, and the echo chamber effect. In order
to develop the argument in favour of conflict, I draw on Arendt and Rancière as well as theorists
who advocate for agonistic politics, most prominently Bonnie Honig and Chantal Mouffe. These
thinkers are unique in that they recognize that conflict, and the passionate attachment to causes
which it generates, are what drive people to participate in politics in the first place. Without
conflict there can be no politics in the sense described in the preceding chapters.
The agonistic approach also rubs against theories of deliberative democracy, with their
ideal of rational communication and deliberation leading to an overcoming of conflict and an
embrace of consensus. Gutmann and Thompson are problematic in this respect, as is Habermas,
who views consensual democracy as a means to overcome conflictual politics. The embrace of
agonistic politics and the attempt to situate it online is related to the work of anthropologists such
as Gabriella Coleman, who has done extensive work on the nature of trolling and, in particular,
the history of Anonymous as a political movement. Also of relevance is psychological research
into how agonistic behaviour can turn antagonistic in an online context. The literature and
debates about online behaviour tend not to focus on directly political contexts, and thus, studies
that focus on non-political websites are often of little use, as political disagreement and the
resulting conflict is of a fundamentally different nature than personal conflicts on Facebook, for
example. As such, I look to the results of my own comparison of comments on political
discussion sites discussed in the last chapter, in order to argue that increased conflict can actually
lead to more substantial and even more civil online interactions.
In considering the nature and role of conflict within an online context, I look at two major
critiques of the internet that depict it in a radically opposite manner. Both conclude that the
internet is an unsuitable habitat for politics because it is either completely lacking in conflict or
simply has too much of it. The internet cannot be both an echo chamber where people only hear
what they want to hear, while at the same time being so antagonistic that all conflict becomes
personal. Similar to the depictions of the internet as either dangerously anonymous or completely
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surveilled, the internet as a whole eludes such overarching depictions as each website presents a
different experience that cannot be reduced to the workings of the hardware of the internet.
Finally, the role of trolling in relation to political conflict is considered. Are trolls merely a
disruptive nuisance or can they be considered legitimate conflictual political actors? Ironically,
the desire to prevent trolling can often become just as disruptive as actual trolling, leading to
demands for censorship and labelling all disagreement as trolling. In this sense, the issue of
trolling must be approached delicately within the context of online political realms.
6.2 Agonism and Antagonism
Returning to the picture developed in the previous chapters, politics so far consists of a plurality
of unique subjects participating in meaningful speech and action inside of a political realm.
Given that these subjects are unique, it is inevitable that political participation will be driven by
disagreement. The procedure of politics is a means to sort out disputes, which is a common point
of agreement among advocates of representative democracy, deliberative democracy, and the
participatory agonistic democracy being advanced here. Politics is predicated on using speech to
talk through these disputes and arrive at a decision, rather than using violent force to impose a
decision. The nature of these disputes is, however, highly contested. Representative democracy
advocates an economic model of interest aggregation, in which voters express preferences via
competitive elections, enabling these representatives to then make the decisions. Disputes on
issues are displaced into a competition for offices among parties, a model Joseph Schumpeter
accurately labelled as “competitive elitism”. Deliberative democrats, such as Habermas and
Rawls, posit disagreement as an institutional flaw which can be solved by better institutions.
Disputes are merely a matter of temporary miscommunication which, through rational
deliberation, can be solved in a way such that all parties involved can be satisfied with the
outcome.
Against these two approaches, agonistic pluralism seeks to assert the ineradicability of
political disagreement and conflict, and celebrates it as what gives politics its reason for being.
The agonistic approach has its roots in thinkers as diverse as Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Arendt,
and finds contemporary expression in the work of Chantal Mouffe, Bonnie Honig, and to some
extent Jacques Rancière. Agonistic pluralism recognizes that plurality brings conflict and that the
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best way to deal with such conflicts is to allow them to find political expression. The goal of
politics is to treat those who disagree as political adversaries to be persuaded through political
speech, rather than as enemies to be eliminated. Politics is not a matter of antagonistic friends
and enemies, as Carl Schmitt would have it, but of agonistic adversaries. Agonistic adversaries
do not patronizingly tolerate the position of others or simply ignore those who disagree, but
instead actively critique and debate each other.
Agonistic pluralism presents a middle ground on the status of disagreement and conflict.
By taming antagonism into a political contest it prevents the extremes of both Schmittian
ultrapolitics, which posits violence as constantly present, and the conflict-eliminating assertion
of consensus found in deliberative democracy. Both extremes are anti-political as dissent is
radically expelled. For Schmitt, the enemy cannot be debated or persuaded because they are
foreign and lack a common ground. Politics is between states for Schmitt, and enemies are those
who must be driven back inside their own borders. For deliberative democrats such as Habermas,
the answer to the extreme forms of antagonism pointed to by Schmitt is the radical negation of
conflict. Essentially accepting Schmitt’s definition of politics as an antagonistic conflict between
friends and enemies, Habermas argues that those who question the possibility of consensus
undermine the possibility of democracy in the name of politics. Democracy is posited as a way to
overcome politics by arriving at a consensus situation through rational deliberation, and, thus, it
is not substantially different from the position of representative democracy, which seeks to
aggregate the different interests present in society into a harmonic whole.
Against both of these extreme positions on conflict, the goal of democracy should not be
to eliminate “we/they distinctions” altogether, but to make it so that these political distinctions
are compatible with pluralism. In this way, Mouffe and the other agonistic theorists present a
middle ground on conflict which retains the value of political disagreement against both the
consensual attempt to generate total agreement through communicative rationality and the
violent negation of conflict through the use of force which is always present in the Schmittian
conception of politics. Consensus and violence, however, tend to operate not as extreme opposite
poles, but instead circle into each other. When there is no political way to express dissent,
violence can become an option. At the same time, the violent suppression of conflict is always an
imposition of conflict-negating consensus.
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An agonistic form of politics which embraces disagreement means that the persistence of
conflict is a benefit to this approach, rather than a drawback as the deliberative democrats argue.
Politics is fundamentally about making decisions on conflicting courses of action, in which there
is no objective or rationally discoverable ideal solution. By ensuring that the political realm is a
site of agonistic contest and disagreement, political outlets are provided which channel
antagonisms into non-violent political agonisms. Lacking a political outlet for such
disagreements, conflict can become antagonistic and turn into a matter of moral absolutes or a
conflict between identities rather than ideas. Rather than political adversaries who need to be
persuaded through speech, those who disagree get cast as morally evil or radically other in which
they become enemies to be destroyed. When people lack the outlet to articulate their dissent
politically because of the imposition of consensus, then those political disagreements will find
expression in another form. Put in Lacanian terms, when the symbolic of political speech is
foreclosed, the disagreement will return in the real, in the guise of racism, sexism, or extremist
religious movements.
The upsurge in xenophobic far right wing political parties in Europe and the upswing in
fundamentalist religious movements across the world are examples of how conflicts which lack a
means to be articulated politically can turn into violent antagonisms. One of the most striking
examples is the rise of the British National Party in the context of the morphing of the British
Labour Party into New Labour under Tony Blair. While Labour traditionally represented the
economic interests of the predominantly white working class, the abandonment of social
democratic principles and the adoption of neoliberalism by New Labour fundamentally alienated
a large section of the working class. Lacking a social democratic discourse which critiqued the
more excessive aspects of neoliberal capitalism, sections of the British working class felt
politically abandoned and turned to the only other societal critique of their lower economic
position that was being publicly presented: that of the British National Party. The BNP presented
the argument that the white working class was poor because of immigrants destroying the social
fabric of Great Britain, thus channeling a critique of political economy into essentialist racial
antagonism. The same phenomena could be seen across the Middle East prior to the Arab Spring
movement. Lacking any political critiques of neoliberal capitalism in the post-Cold War era, the
only opposition came from Islamist groups who were able to transmute political and economic
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discontent into an argument about the moral decay of secular society and the need to re-embrace
religion.
The rise of these extremist groups is directly related to the lack of political outlet for
people to express their discontent and open up a conflict. If people feel there is something wrong
but are unable to express this sentiment in political terms because political conflict is closed off
due to the imposition of consensus, it is no wonder that people will support any sort of group
willing to present a conflict, even if it is on racist or fundamentalist grounds. This is part of the
appeal of these extremist groups. They break the mainstream consensus and call for clear cut
decisions to be made which will generate winners and losers. Rather than presenting a vague and
technocratic approach where core issues are not up for debate, these groups are willing to open a
conflict and take a clear position. Their extreme positions are not political, however, as they tend
to be merely an expression of Schmittian internal consensus, in which opening a conflict with an
external enemy for the purposes of pushing them out is meant to bring about an internal harmony
which restores consensus.
While extremist groups are the more problematic expression of the lack of ability to
translate social antagonisms into political agonisms, the same issue occurs within representative
government. Since it has become a popular cliché to claim that politics, referring to
representative government, has become too divisive and conflictual, how does this fit within the
framework of agonistic pluralism which presents representative government as anti-political?
The bulk of what people do not like about politicians, and which they label as conflict, is not a
vigorous clash of ideas but bickering over trivial differences motivated by party affiliation. This
form of partisan-driven conflict without any real disagreement or debate of real issues is the very
definition of consensus, the “state of the world in which everyone converges in veritable worship
of the little difference, in which strong passions and great ideals yield to the adjustments of
narcissistic satisfactions.” The primary example of this sort of consensual system where
irrelevancies are elevated to the status of alleged great divides is the United States, which in the
popular and some academic literature, is posited as deeply divided between Republicans and
Democrats with fundamentally different visions for the country. In reality the two parties are
virtually identical in policy and there is next to no debate on big ideas. The illusion of political
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conflict, which is derived from having two teams both wanting to win but not having any
significant ideological differences, is extremely powerful at papering over the actual lack of
serious debate and political conflict, as people get swept up in cheering for their team.
In this sense, the conflict that derives from individuals and parties competing for office
who essentially agree can be much more bitter and divisive than actual political conflict. If one
cannot criticize the opinions and views of one’s political opponent, because they are for the most
part very similar to one’s own, the only other avenue is an attack on character. The more
elections and party politics move toward a consensual neoliberal position, the more elections
have become personal and bitter. The wish to overcome the pettiness of personal attacks and
dirty tricks takes on a consensual guise, with calls to overcome conflict. The assertion of
legitimate disagreement and conflict-driven debate over actual ideas would, in fact, be much
more productive in overcoming this problem. The people who see electoral democracy as too
divisive and filled with petty insults should advocate not for yet more consensus which caused
the problem in the first place, but for the expression of real conflict, so that politics can have
substance, alleviating the need to devolve into character assassination. In addition to
misidentifying the nature of political conflict and confusing it with personal insult, the advocates
of consensus fail to take into consideration the many positive effects that political conflict
generates. Disagreement need not be an unfortunate reality that we begrudgingly deal with
through debate and political decision, but can lead to personal empowerment and a wider
consideration for others. The ability to engage in a conflict of opinions does not degrade politics
into petty insults but, as we will see, can actually increase the overall level of civility.
6.3 Consensus as Exclusion
The problem with the deliberative democracy approach is that it fails to recognize that consensus
and plurality are incompatible. All consensus on political matters is always the expression of a
hegemony and thus generates exclusion. When applied, consensual decision making does not
work by including all possible perspectives but by radically eliminating them. It becomes a
means for denying dissent altogether rather than generating consensual compromises. The
consensual elimination of conflict has two responses to persistent dissent: forcing everyone into
the consensual whole or radically excluding dissenters. The first method follows Rousseau and
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argues that dissenters must be forcefully compelled to agree, or be “forced to be free” as he puts
it. Dissent and the conflict it generates are positioned as obstacles to political freedom in this
sense, rather than the proper exercise of it, causing this brand of consensus to veer toward
totalitarianism. It becomes not enough for even an overwhelming majority to agree on a
proposal, but every single person must make a declaration of public agreement. The door to a
police state which is concerned with monitoring how people think is kicked wide open in this
scenario.
Even at the relatively smaller scale of activist movements, such as Occupy Wall Street or
the alterglobalization movement, issues of dissent and coercion in relation to consensus-based
decision making procedures are apparent. In many of the smaller organizational meetings
associated with these movements there becomes an overwhelming social pressure to simply give
in to the consensus opinion and not state one’s own disagreements. If someone has an
irreconcilable disagreement against the majority, they act to simply block the process from
moving forward since they must be made to agree in order for the decision to be considered
resolved. This provides a motivation to simply feign agreement for the sake of moving things
along, which naturally leads to later resentment and is likely part of the reason why activist
groups so often shatter and splinter into new factions in such dramatic fashion. If proposals were
the subject of a vote after a debate which played out all the disagreements, a decision could be
made which preserved the ability for those who disagreed to express and maintain their
disagreement, while still moving on to making a decision if the majority agreed. Potentially even
worse, dissenters against a consensus may be asked to simply “stand aside” on the issue under
consideration in order to move things along, but this “nullifies the dissenter as a political being.
It resolves the problem of dissent essentially by removing the dissenter from the political sphere
and eliminating the dissenting view from the forum of ideas.” Without a mechanism to vote,
disagreement is radically quashed and there becomes an overwhelming social pressure from the
other members of the group to simply go along with the herd and not be obstructionist. The
ability to register individual dissent while assenting to the wishes of the majority is much
healthier for group cohesion than forcing people to publicly state consent to things they
fundamentally disagree with or kicking them out of the group altogether.
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While forcing people to agree to proposals they do not actually accept is extremely
problematic, the other option is to disqualify people as political subjects for disagreeing. This is
the reality of consensus, namely, that it is always based on an exclusion. The consensus system
rests on the idea that the whole is whole and the nothing is nothing and that there cannot be any
part with no part leftover which can open up a disagreement.438 When dissent persists after the
deliberation process is over, it becomes essentialized into something that can only be dealt with
through radical exclusion in order to maintain the illusion of consensus. Part of the problem for
deliberative democrats is an unwillingness to acknowledge that all deliberations, no matter how
inclusive, always must end in a decision which excludes other possibilities. Deliberative
democrats try to dodge the responsibility of decision through claims that the end result can be a
matter of consensus acceptable to all interested and rational parties. Politics will always have
winners and losers, as no single outcome can ever please everyone due to the reality of plurality.
Making claims that such decisions can be matters of broad consent will only push individuals
away from the political process, as their dissent goes unacknowledged, which could push them
towards violence. In the case of activist groups which utilize consensus-based decision making
procedures, internal divisions will appear and the group dynamic can become toxic. Ironically,
the embrace of conflict can enable better group cohesion as internal debates are considered
healthy, not grounds for expulsion or self-censure.
The agonistic pluralism approach recognizes that political conflict is part of a perpetual
process, and that attempts to design institutions meant to be consensual simply result in closure.
When politics is closed off exclusions become solidified, as there is no political means to
introduce disputes and conflicts related to who is able to take part in politics. One such example
is provided by Susan Moller Okin, who in a feminist critique of Rawls, questions who exactly
would be included in the original position that Rawls argues will enable the design of just
institutions. In Rawls’s original version of his argument, it was only heads of households who
would enter the original position and rationally figure out the best society behind the veil of
ignorance, which as Okin argues, means there was a real possibility that the status of women and
children would be ignored or not given full consideration, as those behind the veil would never
end up in any position in society other than as a head of household.
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Even if Rawls’s scheme is expanded to include the whole family, what about animals who
lack the rational argumentation abilities needed to enter into the original position and advocate
for their own treatment? The original position relies on the idea that no one would be treated
unjustly because anyone behind the veil of ignorance may land in any possible position in
society. If, however, no one can turn into a dog or a cow outside of the veil of ignorance, the
entire device fails to account for a serious ethical issue which is more and more becoming subject
to political action and dispute. To dismiss the possibility of ethical treatment of animals, or even
something such as artificial intelligence, as outside the concern of those in the original position
recreates the same problem that led Rawls to originally exclude women and, once upon a time,
led to the exclusion of racial minorities and the poor from consideration as political subjects.
In many ways, the advocates of consensus fail to grasp the nature of political universality,
as they believe the universal is a set of values which everyone can agree to be true, when the
proper nature of the universal in politics is its emptiness and thus possibility for plurality. As was
argued in the chapter on subjectivity, positive universality is an unfortunate hangover from the
Enlightenment which has been thoroughly critiqued for generating exclusions. Agonistic
pluralism, however, fits with the form of negative universality in which politics is universal in its
lack of qualifications needed to take part. A plurality of views can thrive as a result of the
universal having no positive properties or qualifications associated with it. The empty universal
is always a site of conflict because it remains open and is therefore subject to dispute and
conflict. Any political decision that results in one side winning over the others is never able to
permanently fill the void of universality, for to do so would close off the political space from
dissent and effectively deny plurality. When it is presumed that the void of the political universal
can be permanently filled with a set of values or institutions arrived at through rational
consensus, politics becomes impossible and progress and change is closed off. The emptiness of
the universal facilitates progressive change on issues such as animal or robot rights which may
be off the radar now but could become hotly contested issues in the future, in the same way that
gay rights were once not on the radar as a possible site of dispute, but have since become one.
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6.4 Passion and Rationality
The basis for the idea of consensus within the deliberative democratic framework comes from the
assumption of rationality. In a Habermasian “ideal speech situation,” consensus outcomes that
can be generally accepted by all interested parties are guaranteed by both the ability to engage in
uncoerced speech and the assumed rationality of those deliberating. While
Habermas certainly recognizes that such ideal situations may not always be realizable, calling the
ideal speech situation a “regulative ideal,” the general practicality of rational consensus must still
be questioned. By treating political issues as rationally solvable and subject to consensus,
deliberation becomes more about unmasking ideologies so that people can set aside what is
blinding them from the objective answer. However, even if it were possible to get everyone in a
deliberation to be rational, why would rational individuals necessary agree on any political
decision? Agonistic pluralism recognizes that people who share a common world will still
engage in conflicts in which there is no rational resolution. Deliberative democracy positions
itself against the antagonistic extreme which argues that those who disagree have no common
world and thus there can be no grounds for deliberation, but what is left out is the middle
position of agonism. Disagreement stems from plurality, and providing a common realm in
which plural subjects can talk politics is not a means to consensus.
By positing deliberation in terms of ideals, either in the Habermasian sense described
above, or in Rawls’s formulation of the original position, there is a sense that by making people
equal, they become the same. With Rawls especially, conflict is seen as stemming from major
institutional injustices such as economic or social inequality. Through imagining ourselves in an
“original position” behind a “veil of ignorance”, Rawls argues we can rationally come to a set of
consensus institutions. The assumption is that differences in political opinion stem from
institutional inequality, and that once those differences are stripped away, people are all basically
the same. Rational disagreement, which is accepted as a fact stemming from plurality in the
agonistic approach, is assumed away. Not only does the assumption of rationality and equality
leading to consensus eliminate the potential for real political conflict, but it also assumes away a
large part of politics. The Rancièrian politics of fighting to be recognized as politically capable in
the first place is set aside. If anti-politics operates through policing the boundaries to ensure that
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those who are deemed unqualified to speak remain in their place, politics in Rancière’s
formulation involves fighting for the ability to speak politically. Before there can be a
deliberation on any political issue, there is “the dispute over the existence of the dispute and the
parties confronting each other in it.” When the nature of the dispute itself is not considered to be
a political dispute itself, as when Habermas and Rawls posit ideal situations of rationality, then
the danger is that those who persist in the metadispute are cast out as irrational or morally
backwards.
Even though increasing public participation is meant to be a strength of deliberative
democracy, Habermas argues that it is the rationally acceptable results of deliberation, rather than
its mechanisms for participation, which are the source of legitimacy. If outcomes of political
disputes can be a matter of rational consensus, then why is participation in the deliberation
process even needed? If it is assumed that legitimacy stems from rationality and that political
problems can be solved in a way agreeable to all involved, then minimizing the empirical
obstacles to ideal rationality would increase legitimacy. Human participation in deliberative
democracy becomes its greatest flaw. To achieve a more legitimate form of deliberative
democracy, an algorithm could be designed which would take a broad range of complex inputs
representing the interests and situations of all people involved in any political dispute, and then
produce a rationally acceptable consensus solution to the problem. Such an algorithm,
programmed on a sufficiently powerful computer, would eliminate the empirical obstacles of
human bias and practical irrationality that impede the ideal speech situation. If rationally
consensual positions are possible, then using a computer program would streamline and speed up
the rather inefficient deliberation process. So long as the algorithm is designed in such a way,
perhaps using Rawls’s original position and veil of ignorance devices, that it is a matter of
rational consensus, its results would be more legitimate than humans deliberating. In an ideal
sense, deliberative democracy would replace all human participation, and in fact politics as a
whole, with sufficiently advanced computer programs. Such an outcome is in stark contrast to
the agonistic approach advanced here, which seeks to use computers to enhance human
participation.
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In contrast to the deliberative approach, legitimacy in the version of politics that I am
advocating, stems from both the lack of barriers to participate politically and the acceptance of
conflict. In deliberative democracy, there are still elected representatives with final decision
making power, but they are expected to simply act on the consensus arrived at within the
deliberative layer of civil society. Irreconcilable conflicts of opinion on decisions are positioned
as a threat to the legitimacy of the system, as, if all do not agree, then consensus is impossible
and the system is called into question. Given that eliminating such conflicts is practically
impossible, the real question asks what level of conflict is politically legitimate. Agonistic
pluralism generates legitimacy by providing an arena in which individuals can disagree, and thus
the ability to engage in political conflict is what provides the political realm with its legitimacy.
Conflict only becomes illegitimate if it spills outside of the realm of debate and persuasion and
into the realm of coercive force. Such antagonistic conflict is illegitimate because it threatens the
existence of politics itself. By failing to differentiate agonistic and antagonistic forms of conflict,
deliberative democracy’s stance against conflict is anti-political.
The demand for rationality in politics, represented by this robotic ideal of eliminating
humans from the decision making process altogether, is related to the desire to purge passions
from politics. It may be beneficial that computer programs could replace humans in a
deliberative democratic system because in a politics that demands rigid rationality there would
be little motivation for people to participate. An emphasis on consensus and rationality, as in
deliberative democracy, prevents the passionate attachment to a cause that spurs so much
political participation. People are motivated to get involved in politics not through the prospect
of setting aside individual opinions and attempting to arrive at a rational consensus, but through
taking a side in a dispute and arguing that one’s own opinion is correct. By producing
“conflictual representations of the world,” an agonistic politics can mobilize people to participate
by channeling their passions into agonistic political causes, rather than antagonistic conflicts over
identity, religion, or culture.
While the deliberative democrats seek to strip politics of its passion in the name of
rationality, the advocates of ironipolitics wish to purge passion in the name of making politics
safer. The common reference point for many of these thinkers, Lyotard and Rorty especially, is
the Holocaust. All passionate political commitments are viewed through the lens of the past and
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proto-totalitarian impulses are discovered everywhere. Thus, Rorty constantly reminds us not to
take our opinions too seriously because passionate attachment to a cause is what led to the Nazis
and the Holocaust. Lyotard similarly recasts the promise of future emancipation as a past lie that
resulted in “infinite crime” whose only response is a process of “endless mourning.” Purging
political passion in the name of preventing totalitarian catastrophe also purges passionate
commitment to progressive causes that can make the world a better place. The result of these
demands to look back, are an inability to move forward. Only by embracing agonistic conflict is
progress possible.
6.6 Plurality
While deliberative democratic consensus at the level of civil society does not offer an alternative
to representative democracy but merely a few minor changes meant to improve it, the
deliberative idea can also be applied at the micro-level of individual decisions and, in this sense,
does take on something of an alternative model to that status quo. The association of voting and
majoritarian decision making within representative democracy has led many activists, most
recently those within the Occupy movement, to adopt a consensus based decision making model,
under the idea that it is more inclusive than simple majority votes. Under this model, after
deliberating on a given issue, a consensus needs to be reached in order for it be considered
resolved. The idea is that, by considering all the concerns of those involved, rather than simply
having them vote on the proposal, everyone’s concerns will be addressed and the final decision
will be fully inclusive and supported by everyone. On the surface, this model seems to be more
inclusive and egalitarian than a conflict-embracing debate and vote model, especially to minority
voices, as their concerns would need to be incorporated in order to generate consensus. The
problem with this model, however, is that, despite good intentions, it ends up annihilating the
minority voices it alleges to be especially mindful of, and ends up being a more coercive form of
social control than even the representative status quo.
Practically speaking, the generation of consensus is simply unrealistic, as it is impossible
to get everyone to agree on any given issue due the basic fact of plurality. Everyone is different
and has different points of view. To claim to be able to incorporate all these conflicting opinions
into a solution that would appeal to everyone is unrealistic. The role of politics should not be to
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try to eliminate the divisions that cause these conflicts, but to draw the line between the
conflicting sides in a way that is compatible with the preservation of plurality. Consensus
requires the elimination of pluralism, as only a homogenous population could ever resolve
conflicts in a manner that was rationally acceptable to all. Arguing that plurality is compatible
with consensus because plurality is maintained in the private realm is to avoid the issue. Plurality
in a political sense means a plurality of different political opinions and viewpoints, which will
never be able to rationally come to a consensus.
The impracticality of arriving at a consensus decision is further complicated by issues of
scale. The more people there are to be included in the deliberation, the harder it gets to reconcile
divergent opinions, to the point where consensus-based decision making could not possibly
extend beyond the scope of a handful of people. So, while the internet can help overcome the
issues of scale traditionally associated with participatory politics, it would actually be
counterproductive for a consensus model, as more participants decrease the possibility of
consensus. The only way to arrive at a consensus on any significant scale would be to deny
human plurality and either posit everyone as essentially the same, or to paint all political issues
as uncontroversial and having only one objectively correct answer which can be arrived at
through computerized calculations.
Underestimating the significance of plurality as a source of disagreement undermines the
idea that consensus is more inclusive to minority voices, as without a plurality of opinions there
can be no minorities to begin with. If everyone is essentially the same, and disagreements will
not arise stemming from differences in perspective and experience, then the idea of consensus in
politics would not even be necessary. No politics would be needed as the sameness of everyone
would mean that no decision would be controversial and, instead of decision making, there
would simply be an enacting of the consensus view. Politics as a decision making layer would be
unnecessary, as the bureaucracy could simply act directly on the consensual will of the people.
The entire reason politics is necessary is because it provides a mechanism to make decisions on
controversial issues on which people have differing positions. Eliminate the differing positions
and the whole reason to have politics in the first place disappears.
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Contrary to the inclusive intention of consensual thought, the persistence of conflict
enables a wider array of voices and perspectives to be heard. As Barker argues, the ability to
publicly present disagreement and engage in conflict enables the outsider to speak and forces the
majority to consider its own status in relation to that of the outsider, thus expanding its
sympathetic boundaries. Rather than the outsider being an ethical victim who is to be acted on by
the majority so that they are no longer outside or disagreeable to the community, the outsider
must be empowered to open up a conflict with the majority through the expression of dissent. In
presenting this conflict with the social whole, the outsider is able to address the whole as an
equal. The very ability to present a conflict in this manner is a demonstration of equality which
can undermine any claims that the outsider’s exclusion is legitimate in a way that treating the
excluded person as a passive victim to be acted on cannot.
6.7 Reconciliation and the Political Death Drive
Part of the drive behind the various anti-political theories which seek to eliminate conflict is a
desire to arrive at a final reconciliation and simply be done with vexing political questions
altogether. Politics and conflict are linked to risk, and the goal of these theories is to design
institutions that create stability in order to allow people to engage in their private lives free from
the entanglements of politics. As Honig goes on to argue, Rawls’s political theory of
reconciliation is appealing because it “promises to satisfy a deep yearning, a yearning for peace
and quiet, for the privacy of withdrawal so many liberals have sought throughout the history of
liberal thinking.” What is missing here is the idea that politics is empowering and satisfies the
need to distinguish ourselves as unique subjects by freely engaging with others. If politics is
assumed from the start to be a burden, then naturally doing away with it altogether would seem
to be the ideal solution.
Along with the desire to be left alone to engage in private pursuits, the desire to reconcile
conflict once and for all finds expression in the wish to do away with the uncertainty that stems
from political conflict. Plurality is linked to natality, as each new person who comes into the
world is unique and different, which spurs conflict and political uncertainty. In order to eliminate
uncertainty, and thus the risk that goes along with plural actors acting in concert, the
reconciliatory projects of both Rawls and Habermas need to imagine a situation where plurality
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is done away with. Even when posited as a self-regulating ideal, reconciliatory political projects
become a “self-refuting ideal”, as their realization would be their disintegration. To conceive of a
politics of reconciliation, free of political conflict and uncertainty, is to conceive of a politics
without politics. Political participation in a reconciliatory system is nonsensical: if there are no
conflicts and nothing to debate because the institutions are so well designed, there is nothing
political left to do. In order to ensure that politics remains dynamic and is a means to bring about
change, the idea that there could be a time when society is so well ordered that dissent simply
would not arise must be abandoned. Without conflict and dissent, there is nothing but stagnation.
Asserting the persistence of conflict can be troubling to some, as it can seem like politics
is nothing but arguing without any advancement toward a goal. Since no final reconciliation of
conflict can be possible because creating such a perfect society would require the elimination of
plurality, the goal of political action should be to focus on individual issues. On this register,
political conflict works in a similar manner to Freud’s concept of the death drive. In Lacan’s
interpretation, we always circle around the cause of our desire without ever actually obtaining it,
as to obtain it is to terminate the desire that drove us to pursue it in the first place. In political
terms, an ultimate reconciliation of all conflict, expressed in the termination of the desire to act
politically and open a dispute, is to give over to the death drive and thus die. While we will
inevitably derive some pleasure and satisfaction from the conflicts we win (Lacan’s jouissance),
to try to achieve the satisfaction of eliminating all conflict negates the entire process, in the same
way as a drug user overdosing and dying negates his or her ability to derive satisfaction from the
temporary high of the drug. Political conflict must be approached in the same way Freud
recommends navigating between the pleasure principle and the death drive. In Civilization and
its Discontents he argues that “the programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle
imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not—indeed, we cannot—give up on our efforts
to bring it nearer to fulfilment by some means or other.” This should be the method of political
activists, always trying to bring about a better future, while recognizing that no final
reconciliation or perfected society is possible.
The empowering aspect of politics that derives from revealing oneself as a unique subject
by participating politically is contingent on the perpetual existence of an agonistic political
sphere. The desire to appear publicly and have one’s opinions heard is motivated by
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disagreement, and, as such, without the ability to express dissent and engage in political conflict
the ability to participate and to reveal oneself as a unique political subject is lost. In a truly
consensual system there is little motivation to actually participate, as adding yet another public
“yes!” to the overwhelming chorus of yesses makes no impact and does not reveal an individual
as a unique subject but as a faceless member of the herd. It is precisely the ability to say
something different and, thus initiate a conflict that provides political subjectivity and
participation with their empowering characteristics. Far from being a necessary evil, conflict
provides the outlet through which subjects distinguish themselves and empowers people to
participate in the freedom of political action. To give up the ability to take part in this political
process in the name of final reconciliations, is to allow politics to die.
6.8 Conflict in an Online Context: Echo Chambers and “Flame Wars”
If conflict is not only necessary for politics, in that it provides the entire reason for its existence,
as well as having a productive role in fostering plurality and subject formation, the next question,
then, is how such an agonistic politics would play out in the online context that I have been
arguing is necessary to revitalize a more robust form of politics. Two opposing arguments are
generally presented to dismiss the suitability of online politics with respect to conflict. Both of
these arguments confuse the software and hardware layers and, thus, extrapolate the experience
of one group of users on a specific website to argue that the internet has a certain essence that
makes it inherently incompatible with conflictual politics. The first branch of this argument
argues that the ability to customize and personalize one’s experience on the internet turns it into
an echo chamber where people are able to isolate themselves from conflicting views and only
visit sites and talk to people who already agree with them. The second argument about online
conflict states that, because of the anonymity of the internet, no one is accountable and everyone
behaves poorly, thus escalating conflict to the level where having a political debate is impossible
because every disagreement turns into an insult-trading “flame war”. Both of these arguments are
grounded in real experiences, and many people do use the internet in these manners, but as is
demonstrated by the fact that these two arguments about the nature of the internet are in direct
contradiction, the internet remains a space which can be produced in a number of ways, some of
which are productive to politics, some of which are not.
One of the more prominent versions of the echo chamber argument was put forth by
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American legal scholar Cass Sunstein in his 2001 and 2009 books Republic.com and
Republic.com 2.0. Sunstein argues that the personalization technology of the internet, from
Google News to personalized book recommendations on Amazon, work to create a kind of
insulated bubble around people, where everything is customized to their tastes and they end up
not seeing anything that might challenge their point of view. Customization can act as an almost
accidental tool that simply ends up reinforcing a user’s already established beliefs, thereby
undermining the pluralistic clash of opinions needed for a healthy democratic politics. Sunstein
goes on to point to examples from terrorist groups and conspiracy theorists using websites as
gathering places where their own views gain reinforcement from like-minded people. While
some people certainly do use the internet for these purposes, customization and personalization
can also have the opposite effect. The political dissenter whose views are never expressed in the
mass media can find common ground among others and then translate that experience of dissent
into a greater challenge against mainstream society. The origins of the Arab Spring, Occupy
movement, and even the alterglobalization movement all began from small groups of activists
linking up with a wider like-minded group of people through the internet.
Combine these example with Anonymous’ enacting of dissensus directly online, and, in many
cases, the seeking out of like-minded people leads to opening up new avenues of conflict and
dissent as a collectivity has more power to push forward an opposing viewpoint than a single
person.
Even more suspect is the assumption, made not only by Sunstein but various scholars
doing work on online community, that people will predominantly seek out discussion groups
online which reinforce their own opinions. Wojcieszak states that it is simply “widely known”
that people will seek discussion in order to reinforce their own views and then goes on to argue
that the chatrooms and message boards are particularly problematic in this respect. While many
such closed groups certainly proliferate across the internet, it is by no means a settled notion that
people prefer discussion with like-minded people. A brief look at Reddit, the largest such
message board on the internet, demonstrates this. The forum /r/Politics, which is dedicated to
American politics in general and which has frequent and often bitter conflicts of opinion across
the political spectrum currently has around 3 million subscribers. By contrast subforums
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dedicated to specific positions which would encompass those discussed on the more general
American politics forum are much less popular. Democrats has a mere 11,000 subscribers,
Liberal 19,000, Progressives 34,000, Conservative 35,000, Republican 14,000, and Libertarian
115,000. The numbers for Canadian-related political discussion are even more dramatic, as
subreddits dedicated to individual parties and views have in the order of hundreds of subscribers,
while the more general /r/Canada has close to 150,000 subscribers and /r/CanadaPolitics has
14,000. If people were truly looking to avoid conflict and simply have their own views
reinforced, then one would expect the ideologically homogenous subreddits to be much more
popular than the general forums which contain frequent clashes of a variety of different opinions.
Despite these counter examples, Sunstein’s point about customization technology is not
really new, as political dissenters have been publishing their own newspapers and pamphlets,
trying to break people out of the mass media echo chamber for as long as mass media has
existed. The more interesting problem of conflict happens within the internal dynamics of groups
dedicated to a specific viewpoint or cause. In many cases chat rooms, social network groups, and
discussion forums simply replicate existing group structures where there is some kind of explicit
or implicit structure of authority. In an online context, people who join an activist group, for
example, but who consistently go against the prevailing opinion may simply be banned or
blocked from participating or even viewing the website, in the same manner people can get
kicked out of political parties or blocked from attending organizational meetings. While the
internet makes it easier to facilitate such groups, it also makes it easier to simply ban a person
and never have to deal with him or her again, something that is problematic for advocates of
agonistic politics. Political groups which favour internal consensus-based decision making
models, such as Occupy Wall Street, would have a much easier time banning people from the
movement’s online spaces than it would from a physical protest.
Issues like these are more dangerous to the expression of diverse views and the existence
of plurality because they can enable censorship, not because of accidental over-customization at
the software level, but by actually putting too much authority into the hands of the human
element. The best online political discussion forums are ones which are either moderated socially
via their algorithmic design or ones in which human moderators have extremely limited authority
and a very set role. In systems where there must always be a present moderator, especially where
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politics is discussed, the temptation to censor disagreement is simply too high for most people to
resist. Recent moderator scandals on Reddit demonstrate this problem. In 2014, the moderators
of /r/politics were found to be deleting stories from sources they deemed to lack journalistic
standards. Posting news or opinion pieces from sites such as Salon, Reason, and MotherJones
were subject to automatic removal. During this time, the moderators of /r/technology were found
to be removing all stories related to Edward Snowden, the NSA spying scandal, and anything
related to discussions on net neutrality. Users of these forums revolted, and the top level Reddit
administrators banned the moderators responsible for the censorship. The smaller the community,
however, the less recourse there is to deal with abusive moderation. Reddit is caught in
something of a contradiction as they still use human moderators, while at the same time their
social ranking system is meant to democratically moderate submissions to the site.
Discussion and debate forums where there are no human moderators or where their
presence is kept to a bare minimum are much more open to the expression of conflicting
viewpoints because of the lack of censorship or appeals to the authority of the moderator to
remove certain content. Instead, people have to confront uncomfortable and conflicting opinions
head on, and attempt to persuade and debate rather than censor and banish. Investing authority in
a small group of people to moderate discussion is anti-democratic, as there is usually little
recourse against abuse. Many discussion sites, including many on Reddit, operate more as
miniature kingdoms which enable moderators to exert their control over others. The problem of
attempting to eliminate plurality from online forums is squarely an issue with how people are
using and producing these spaces, and not an inherent flaw within the technology. Designing
better discussion sites and promoting more egalitarian political structures online will solve many
problems related to censorship as destructive of plurality.
A more nuanced version of the echo chamber effect is pointed to by Pariser, who argues
that the internet can cut people off from opposing views not because it enables people to join
insular communities and customize away opposing views but because some of the biggest
websites are automatically filtering away content we may not like behind the scenes.467 One of
the best examples of such behind the scenes filtering is the order of search results on Google. The
same search will show results in a different order depending on whether one is logged into one’s
Google account or not, and depending on which localization of Google one is using. Facebook is
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another target of Pariser’s critique, as their timeline is filtered and ordered in such a way that
may hide news stories that a conservative friend posts if one fills out the detailed profile and lists
liberal as one’s political viewpoint. While such filtering can be problematic, as Pariser explains,
in the context of using the internet as a conflictual political realm there is no reason to replicate
such a structure in a non-transparent manner on a political discussion site. While one may get
fewer opposing views when looking at their social networks or searching for information, these
are somewhat peripheral issues which demand algorithmic awareness, rather than arguments
against the capacity to have a conflictual online political realm. If people rarely encounter
opposing views outside of their political involvement, then this means that a conflictual online
political realm is even more important, as it would be a place that would purposely expose
people to contrasting opinions and different points of view.
Another version of the echo chamber argument is presented by Mouffe, who, although
she acknowledges that the internet remains open and is not inherently consensual or conflictual,
still maintains that most people simply use the internet to reinforce their own views and that the
only way to truly confront opposing ideas and opinions is in person. Of course, if people go
looking for opinion reinforcement online, why would they not do the same offline? Other than
that somewhat obvious contradiction, it is precisely the ability to enhance the number of
opportunities to encounter difference that works as one of the internet’s main agonistic strengths.
Contrary to Mouffe’s claim that we find more conflicting views in offline space, the internet
actually provides ease of entry into a proliferation of different worlds and can create spaces of
actual political debate which contain a plurality of different viewpoints. If someone wants to
debate some particular issue and see what other people think about it, where do they go in offline
space to do so? There are no designated and widely accessible spaces for political discussion
where a plurality of people can be found. Official sites of politics are restricted in access,
universities are not accessible to the average person wanting to discuss the issue of the day, and it
is unreasonable to expect random people in public spaces to be willing to discuss politics. By
contrast, there are widely recognized spaces on the internet which are devoted to political
discussion that one can enter at will and find others willing to discuss these issues. As a wide
scale and sustained political realm where agonistic pluralism is actually practical, the
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possibilities outside of the internet are extremely limited in scope, to the point that they could
never serve as a political alternative to the status quo.
In addition to the availability of conflictual spaces online, the face to face element that
Mouffe advocates actually hinders disagreement because in person communication is often
biased by the desire to get along. It is much easier to disagree with an anonymous argument
online than it is to disagree and debate political issues with your friends or coworkers. Often
people take disagreement personally, and a clash of opinions can alienate friends and
acquaintances hurting one’s social position. Political speech and action is risky and requires
courage. The shield of anonymity has been, and continues to be, essential to the expression of
dissenting points of view. If politics is to maintain its agonistic edge and not devolve into
antipolitical consensus, then making it easier to take part by shielding one’s private life from
one’s public statements is necessary. If one cannot make dissenting statements without social
ramifications, then the freedom to participate and reveal oneself as a unique subject will be lost
in a sea of conformity dictated by the tyranny of the majority.
The response to Mouffe’s position outlined above leads to the argument on the other end
of the spectrum, which is that the internet is actually too rife with conflict, to the point where
political discussion will get washed away in the anonymous and unaccountable “flame wars” that
will inevitably erupt every time anyone disagrees. This line of argument states that because the
shield of anonymity enables courage, people are not afraid to act uncivilized and, thus, instead of
political debate, conflict turns into the trading of personal insults. This view is advanced by
Richard Davis, who argues that the nature of online discussion promotes “vigorous attack and
humiliation” and, as such, leads to most discussion turning into belligerent flaming which turns
off people who want to actually discuss ideas and political issues. Davis goes on to argue that the
prominence of flaming or insults in place of actual discussion is driven by anonymity and its
associated lack of accountability. The internet is positioned as a kind of Hobbesian state of nature
where the lack of authority stemming from the allegedly unaccountable nature of online
anonymity leads to a nasty and brutish existence which is wholly unsuitable to civilized political
disagreement. While I have dealt with the argument against anonymity previously and found it to
have little theoretical weight, recent studies have shown that knowing the identity of the other
person has little impact on the potential for flaming, as having one’s views directly challenged
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was cited as the primary factor leading to flaming. While attempts to simply link anonymity to
incivility fail to explain much, the issue of political disagreement becoming uncivilized and
leading to flame wars is a common occurrence online which deserves further attention.
Transforming antagonism into political agonism is the goal of agonistic pluralism, thus the
creation of antagonism out of political agonism online is an interesting case to consider.
Some advocates of deliberative democracy, with its goal of developing rational
consensus, have similarly argued that online discussion is simply too conflictual or “nasty” and
that democratic politics is hindered when it is placed online.471 Such arguments frame democratic
deliberation as a sterile and unemotional affair, which is not only an unrealistic ideal but also an
undesirable one. By contrast, the conflictual status of politics naturally stirs people’s emotions, as
people become passionately attached to causes and sides in a conflict. Sometimes these passions
may overflow, leading to conflict that turns personal and harms political debate. While such
breakdowns in politeness as a result of passion are not helpful, they are also not the catastrophe
they are made out to be by deliberative critics of the internet or those seeking to paint the internet
as a site of moral panic. The fact that people who are passionate about an issue may get frustrated
and throw out some insults in the course of a political discussion is not the end of the world, and,
at least in an online context, can be ignored by the rest of the participants in favour of focusing
on more substantial conversations. While such disruptions can be off-putting or annoying, they
are not capable of imposing a certain viewpoint through force, and can be contained without
threatening the political process itself.
Too much emphasis is placed on these passionate overflows by many critics interested in
claiming that online politics is impossible.472 The spectre of the dreaded flame war is raised, in
which all pretense to political discussion is dropped and the involved parties end up drowning
out those trying to engage in actual issues by posting a constant stream of insults. Is this,
however, an accurate characterization of online debate which condemns the entire medium as
politically unsuitable? While there is certainly a fair bit of insult trading in online political
debates, it is actually not that disruptive and the majority are able to engage in conflictual yet
civil disagreements.
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In Papacharissi’s analysis of political themed Usenet discussion groups, she found that,
while these discussions had a tendency to become impolite as arguments got heated (swearing,
insults, sarcasm, etc.), they tended to remain civil. Civility was defined as not threatening other
individuals, respecting their basic rights, and not making comments which would be deemed
offensive to social groups, such as racist or sexist comments.474 As she goes on to argue, the
examples of uncivil comments and behaviour which were impeccably polite were much more
disturbing. She pointed to one discussion in particular, where discussants were calm and polite to
each other but were promoting white supremacy and arguing that large groups of people should
be denied their basic human rights. In this sense, so long as heated discussions do not turn racist,
sexist, homophobic or engage in other forms of bigoted insults but remain isolated to
impoliteness toward another discussant they can be tolerated and ignored by the majority without
threatening the civility of political debate altogether. In my own comparison of comments on
political discussion sites, I found that sites which promoted interaction between users were
overall more substantial in content and less hostile in tone. When one can post uncivil comments
in a manner which goes unchallenged, there is a likelihood that behaviour will continue, whereas
getting challenged in the form of direct replies or other social punishments, as in Reddit
downvotes, can influence users to avoid such behaviour, in order to maintain a positive
reputation.
The focus of debates on the suitability of online political conflict should be on whether or
not they are civil rather than simply polite. Civility is accepting of conflict and passionate
disagreement but seeks to limit the extremes of violence and attacks on basic rights in order to
create a public space where people can be free to speak their mind without their identity or
person coming under discriminatory attack. Following Balibar on this point, we need not view
the plurality of conflictual subjects as intrinsically prone to violence or incivility that must be
tamed with a strong top-down government in the manner of Hobbes. Political civility, by
contrast, can be democratic and bottom up in that it is derived from “joining” the political realm,
rather than having membership in it. By actively joining the political realm, as opposed to simply
being born into it, there is a sense that one is partly responsible for its upkeep and existence,
which can generate a bottom-up form of civility, which as Balibar explains, has driven the state
to become more civil and less cruel.
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The demand for politeness in political debate often amounts to a demand not to disagree,
for in polite company one does not raise controversial political issues. Thus politics need not be
polite, it only needs to be civil, because an obsession with politeness can lead to censorship and
constrained expression. Again this idea of civility and politeness speaks to how such a political
forum is organized and moderated. When the role of moderators is enforcing politeness, there
can be serious consequences for people who are passionately presenting an argument. Such
passionate debates can quickly become censored, as the “tone” of the participants may be
deemed impolite and lead to removal. Bringing up certain controversial ideas may also be
deemed as impolite because the majority or moderators may not want to discuss them. Going to a
forum dedicated to a specific viewpoint and presenting critiques of that viewpoint is often
deemed impolite, resulting in censorship in the name of maintaining the established consensus.
Since passionate conflicts of opinion are interesting and mobilize people to get politically
involved, they should be encouraged. The internet’s proclivity as a medium to produce more
avenues for conflict makes it well suited for an agonistic conception of politics. The advocates of
politeness often seem willing to tolerate incivility, which is truly destructive to political
discourse, in the name of politeness. Those who argue that online political debate is too impolite
and that the internet is unsuitable to politics are not any different from those who argue that
protests which have confrontations with the police are impolite and thus are not suitable avenues
for politics. The argument from politeness is part of a wider anti-political argument against any
form of political conflict, and its application to the internet is simply its most recent
manifestation. If we accept a little bit of impoliteness now and then as the cost of ensuring
passionate mobilization, then the primary concern is whether online debate remains civil, which
for the most part, can be easily accomplished. There is, however, a rather notorious complication
for online political conflict that can disrupt and derail entire forums and debates: the figure of the
troll.
6.9 Trolls, Gadflies, and Political Conflict
A seemingly unique aspect of online political discussion is the phenomenon of the troll. The troll
is a complicated figure but is generally viewed as someone who enters a discussion for the sole
purpose of disrupting it. Politically speaking, trolling occupies a liminal position, as the
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expression of legitimate dissent is often considered disruptive and gets labelled as trolling, which
can muddle the entire idea of what trolling is and whether it actually is harmful to political
debate or not. What exactly trolling consists of is a contested notion and various definitions exist,
which vary based on context. Donath defines trolling as related to identity deception and uses
examples from social forums where an individual takes on a false persona in order to upset the
other users. While adopting an insincere identity is certainly an aspect of trolling, within a
political context, trolls tend to be more flexible. Donath’s definition is problematic for the case of
a political troll who maintains a consistent username and presence, but will say anything
necessary to annoy others. For the political troll, being flexible is more important than creating a
false identity. A troll interested in disrupting a political discussion and provoking emotional
responses does not need to maintain a consistent false identity, or even any identity at all, as the
troll will argue whatever position that he or she feels will annoy the target of the trolling the
most. The same troll will take radical left-wing positions when arguing with a conservative, and
then take radical right-wing positions when arguing with a leftist.
Bergstrom further complicates the idea of trolling as identity deception in her report on a
Reddit user who was ostracized for trolling, but claimed his trolling was not meant to deceive
people but was a work of interactive fiction. In the situation described by Bergstrom, the user
saw himself as playing a character, while allowing others to believe that this character was
actually his real identity. Identity deception which is not meant to be disruptive would be less of
a problem on politically-oriented discussion sites, as the user’s real identity is less important than
the arguments they were presenting. While it may be strange, and even unlikely, to adopt a
character and consistently play it within a political context, there is no reason to believe that such
deception would be disruptive. A big part of trolling, as Coleman points out, is creating a
spectacle. Such spectacles tend to be disruptive of political discussion, but a single person
playing a consistent character that no one knows is a fake identity is less likely to become a
spectacle in a political context as compared to a social setting. Combining some aspects of the
deception and spectacle definitions, I define a political troll as someone who enters an online
political forum with the sole intent of provoking emotional responses from people by saying
whatever is necessary to generate a reaction, resulting in actual political discussion becoming
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sidetracked. A troll is essentially someone who seeks to transform political agonism back into
social antagonism, therefore threatening the sustainability of political discourse.
A troll, by definition, is not a conflictual political actor because the troll does not seek to
reveal him or herself as a unique political subject motivated by the desire to share his or her
opinions with others. In this sense, provocation is not necessarily trolling, as the intent may be
political, where for a troll the intent is personal amusement. When a leftist visits a discussion
forum predominantly inhabited by conservatives for the sole purpose of picking arguments, that
leftist is not a troll because the intent to provoke is derived from the wish to engage in political
debate as a result of sincerely held opinions. Dahlberg’s definition of trolls as disruptive
infiltrators is also too broad, as in this example the leftist would be disrupting the consensual
proceedings of the conservative forum. From a deliberative point of view, persistent disruptions
and dissent with the purpose of blocking the achievement of rational consensus can get labelled
trolling, even if such disruptions are the expression of sincerely held beliefs. From an agonistic
point of view, such expressions of dissent would be considered legitimate political expression.
A troll cannot simply be a political opponent or a person who is generally impolite in the
context of a political debate. Someone who might be quick to anger and has a tendency to
become impolite is not a troll, so long as the impoliteness and anger stem from sincerely held
beliefs and the person is not trying to shut down the conversation altogether. The annoyance
people feel when they realize they have been tricked into engaging in a discussion with someone
who legitimately does not care and was simply trying to provoke a reaction feeds the negative
attitude toward trolling and can lead to muddled definitions, where a troll becomes anyone who
positions themselves against the majority. In this sense, to accuse someone of trolling and
insincerity can become an anti-political method of shutting down legitimate debate itself.
Labelling an opponent a troll and then appealing to others to not engage with or not to “feed the
troll” can play on negative associations of trolling to effectively expel someone from a
discussion in an unwarranted manner. Calling someone a troll, with the purpose of preventing
that person from participating in a debate is disruptive, and can be a form of trolling itself.
While engaging in pointless arguments with someone who is simply trying to provoke
you for personal amusement can be extremely frustrating and devalue the seriousness of political
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debate, the almost universal condemnation of trolling needs to be more closely examined in the
context of political conflict. In this sense, we can ask if trolling has any redeeming value, and the
answer may not obviously be no. In some cases the troll is willing to put forward controversial
views that, even if not actually supported by the troll, can give participants practice in arguing
against extreme positions which rarely get expressed. The troll can also force subjects to examine
their own viewpoints and help them find problems in their own opinions. It may be more useful
to consider trolling not in absolute terms, but on a gradient from disruptively antipolitical to
relatively mild expressions of insincerity.
Holmes attempts to link such milder forms of online trolling to Rancière’s concept of
dissensus, but does so through an analysis of a group whose position is thoroughly ironipolitical,
in that their goal is essentially to keep the internet from becoming a site of serious political
practice. What Holmes takes as a repartitioning of the online sensible is actually the attempt to
enforce, through trolling, the prevailing anti-political norm of online space as a playground and,
thus, entirely non-political. According to Holmes’s interpretation, the offline equivalent to what
he thinks an online troll is doing would be the police breaking up a protest and setting things
back to normal. The dispersion of a serious protest is not a redistribution of the sensible but its
end, as the temporary political disruption of a space is returned to its normal function. To
interpret trolling in terms of Rancière’s notion of politics as a distribution of the sensible, one
might imagine a troll, who in the course of attempting to disrupt a political forum for his or her
own amusement, ends up accidentally enhancing the level of discourse and seriousness of debate
among the other participants. In the same way a work of art need not be explicitly political to
have political consequences, a troll may lead people to sharpen their arguments and rethink their
own positions, leading them to take politics more seriously as a way of frustrating trolling
attempts.
According to the definition of trolling advanced here, Socrates seems to have been the
original troll. While advancing no position or opinion of his own, Socrates went around Athens
provoking the citizens by demonstrating that those who thought they were wise were actually
not. The people of Athens clearly considered Socrates a troll. They denounced him for not
putting forward any of his own opinions and only criticizing those of others. They claimed he
was simply interested in causing a disturbance, and it could be argued that his supposed quest
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from the Delphic Oracle was simply Socrates’s attempt to justify the pleasure he derived from
annoying the Athenian elite. Socrates, however, saw his role as a gadfly whose annoying bites
woke up the sluggish beast of Athenian public opinion, and for this Socrates claims he is doing a
public service. Arendt argues that Socrates’s Apology is one of the great examples of persuasive
political speech in that Socrates saw a public role for the philosopher that differentiated him from
Plato’s hostility to politics. Taken in this light, Socrates was less a troll than public critic who did
not claim to have all the answers but, by asking questions, improved the level of political
discourse in the polis. Socrates, if he was a troll, was a politically productive one as he sought to
improve the opinions of the citizens for their own benefit, making this form of trolling rather
mild and certainly not disruptive for the sustainability of political debate.
Even a gadfly which bites for its own benefit can have positive results, as such, the
reaction to trolling must be contingent upon whether it has political or anti-political outcomes. If
trolling turns into bullying or gets so disruptive that, rather than improving the opinions of
people by forcing them to deal with uncomfortable questions, it makes people unwilling or
unable to feel they can comfortably express their views, then it takes on an anti-political
character and should not be tolerated. Milder Socratic-type trolling, however, may be allowed to
persist so long as it stays mild. The methods of dealing with trolls are controversial, as, if left to
moderators, personal bias can cloud who exactly is a troll or not, and, if left to public vote then
the potential for more trial of Socrates situations is rife. In many cases the best response is one of
collective action against the pleasure the troll derives from their comments. This can work by
ignoring known trolls, attempting to counter-provoke a troll, or simply responding to a suspected
troll calmly and rationally by keeping one’s emotions in check.
While trolling can be extremely disruptive, especially when it takes on an uncivil tone, in
many ways mild forms of trolling can be a kind of a political maturation process for adolescents
and even movements as a whole. The young person who comes to an online discussion forum,
not really having formed many opinions but curious about these public exchanges, may engage
in trolling for their personal amusement, only to be drawn into actual debates by accident which
can facilitate the opinion formation process and get that individual interested and involved in
politics. Adolescent trolling can also operate as a kind of testing of opinions and practice making
arguments, where the troll can try putting on a variety of different political hats in the course of
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trying to annoy people, only to find that one of those hats might fit quite well, leading the troll to
abandon annoying people and actually start advocating for a cause and attempting to persuade
others of his or her own opinions. In many ways, this trolling as maturation process was fully
evidenced by the transformation of Anonymous from a form of organized collective trolling
motivated by the desire to have some fun at other people’s expense to a full on mature political
movement. The participants in Anonymous came to realize that their actions can have
consequences and that, if they wanted to maintain the internet as a space of freedom where one
could have fun, they needed to treat it as a real space and fight for it politically.
6.10 Conclusion
Since conflict is essential for politics, as without disagreement and dissent politics would simply
wither away into technocratic administration with no need for public debate or decision-making,
the key question for an online politics is whether or not online political spaces can help foster
productive forms of conflict. The answer is complicated, as different websites can produce
different interactions which depend on how people want to use these spaces and the algorithmic
structures which push their behaviour in certain directions. The internet has the potential to help
foster more contentious political debate and disagreement as it is able to connect more people
from a plurality of viewpoints and make it easier to disagree and dissent through the shield of
anonymity. The argument made by those critical of online politics that the internet is simply a
forum for bullies and trolls to engage in personal attacks that they can get away with, due to
anonymity, fails to recognize the real nature of conflict. People are more likely to say uncivil and
hateful things when they cannot be challenged or contested, meaning that political discussion
sites tend to have a much higher level of discourse than general one-way commenting sections
such as on newspaper websites. The ability to challenge and disagree is essential for civil
political discourse, as the ability to critique and debate those who make harmful comments can
have a civilizing effect which can keep the topic focused on political matters. The internet as a
medium can produce more impolite and heated exchanges, due to the potential duration of such
encounters, but this is a small price to pay for having a space to actually disagree and debate
political matters in the first place.
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Conclusion — Steps toward the Digitization of Politics
Using the internet for political purposes, whatever they may be, is no longer a new phenomenon.
As we have seen, the internet was indispensable for the Arab Spring protests, while the Occupy
movement was able to harness the internet not just to get its message out, but to globalize itself
and enable its themes to become part of the popular conversation. Meanwhile, the activists of
Anonymous grew it into a full-fledged political movement, and treat the internet as their primary
site of engagement. The internet is also increasingly becoming a site of political dispute itself, as
issues of net neutrality, privacy, and government spying are increasingly the topics of both
government and public concern. While these are interesting developments in their own right, my
main concern throughout has been with how politics might be reinvigorated and transformed into
something more participatory and agonistic by placing it online. The goal was to outline a form
of internet-enabled politics that would inspire engagement and empowerment, rather than
cynicism and alienation.
By placing the common stage of politics online, old boundaries are erased and new
possibilities emerge. Representation as the default position of realistic democracy no longer
makes sense, as the asynchronous communication that is enabled by the internet allows both
many more to take part and to do so at times and durations of their choosing. By having a
common space on the internet accessible to all, people can have a place in which the exchange of
political opinions can reveal who they truly are. With the opportunity to participate in debates
and decisions on political manners, there is an opportunity for people to exercise the freedom to
be political, rather than to be merely managed as bodies in a population. The common stage of
online politics is one of conflict, where the passionate disagreement between adversaries can be
expressed. Each of these terrains, both in their online and offline expressions, can be configured
in ways which make them more or less political. By focusing on these terrains of contestation, I
have sought to ground my understanding of politics in these concrete practices in order to ensure
that the reader is not left wondering what exactly politics involves. Doing so was also meant to
clear up confusion over uses of the word politics which describe configurations of a terrain
which are thoroughly anti-political.
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As has been my argument throughout, the internet as a technology provides an
opportunity for change which must be shaped by human activity. The internet will not
automatically reinvigorate politics, nor is it is entirely unsuited for political matters. Activists
need to create political space online, as well as to defend and expand the openness of existing
nascent spaces. While new online political realms will no doubt come about organically and take
on unanticipated forms, there are existing spaces which I have used as examples of how some of
the functions of such a political space could operate. In the academic scholarship, there is
currently too much focus on social networking, given both its relative novelty and its heavy use
by recent activist movements. The social nature of social networking makes it unsuitable to serve
as anything but a communications tool, and future scholarship on online politics must look
deeper. Pseudonymous discussion forums are where the true potential lies, and I have continually
pointed to Reddit for practical examples of how online political discussion could operate.
The front page of Reddit collects and displays the most popular submissions from all the
subforums the user has subscribed to. An online political structure could work in the same
manner, with each regional level having its own forums, and allowing for the creation of forums
dedicated to specific issues. In this sense, if someone was only interested in issues related to
climate change as well as what was happening within their city and neighbourhood, they could
subscribe to these three forums and not have to wade through discussions related to other issues
or other regional levels which they were not interested in. At the same time, if this person saw
that there was a major proposal related to climate change being discussed at a regional level
different than what they were usually interested in, they could easily access that regional forum
to discuss the issue they were interested in without needing to be subscribed to it or be a member
of that higher level forum.
Each regional level, which could go from the neighbourhood level all the way up to the
global scale, could have multiple forums with different purposes. There could be a general
discussion forum through which people could raise issues for discussion and which might
warrant further action. Such a forum would be more about responding to and discussing current
events. A second level of forum would take issues which gained the most attention in the general
discussion forum and invite proposals for action which could be debated. To move to the
decision making forums, there could be a meta-vote attached to the issue in the discussion forum
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which would allow certain issues to be nominated for action if they reached a certain vote
threshold. In the debate forum, the most prominent proposals and opinions would be re-presented
for the purpose of being shaped into choices to vote on, and after a set period of time a set of
options based on the discussion would be chosen. Developing the debate into options to vote on
could be performed either by elected moderators or could be chosen based on the comments
marked as potential proposals which received the highest proportion of agree to disagree votes.
Winning proposals could then be moved to a third implementation forum, where the specifics of
winning proposals could be discussed. This section might deal with issues of cost, budgeting,
and specific policy implementation and be directed by civil servants with a speciality in the area,
ensuring that proposals were properly costed and within the operating budget.
A layered structure would also provide many options in terms of how much influence
human moderators would have. Algorithms could be written in order to choose which issues
were advanced to the decision forum and how to choose which options in votes. Alternatively,
elected moderators could perform these tasks as well as bring forth cyclical issues, such as
budgets, which would need to be periodically brought into the decision forum whether the issue
was popular or not. While an algorithmic approach could eliminate the problems of moderator
bias, having human moderators elevating issues could also ensure that important but less popular
issues were acted on. The matter of dealing with trolls and comments that become uncivil is
more difficult, as detecting such behaviours with algorithms is extremely difficult. At the same
time, such behaviour often walks a fine line and is prone to interpretation. The goal should be to
generate a bottom-up form of civility by empowering participants and giving them a real stake in
what happens so as to make them feel responsible for keeping discussions civil. By contrast,
people feel little responsibility for the quality of discussion on a website on which they feel like
an intruder or on which they have little stake in its continued existence. Above all, civility must
be a personal responsibility, however, for those who lack such feelings of responsibility,
mechanisms can be created to flag and alert people of uncivil behaviour. In addition to the ability
to agree or disagree with a button press, the ability to simply click an uncivil button to make the
commenter aware that others feel they are overstepping the bounds of civility could be used as
well, with persistent reports being escalated to moderator action. Matters such as these would
have to be a matter of trial and error experimentation and some combination of the two
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approaches would likely work best. The structure of current systems of governance are generally
too rigid for fear that the elected authorities will overstep their reach, but an online politics which
replaces the authority of individuals with the power of groups could be more open to
experimentation and tweaking of the structure to make it more effective.
With a multi-layered approach, people could easily choose to what degree they wished to
participate without getting bogged down in aspects of the political process they simply did not
care about. Such a structure demonstrates the strengths of the understanding of politics which I
have advocated in the previous chapters. By having a single online space which is recognized as
political and with real decision making power, the biggest exclusionary obstacle to political
engagement would be overcome. People would go to this space to test their opinions in debate
and reveal themselves to be unique individuals by sharing their perspective on the common
world with others. The various layers would provide multiple avenues and degrees of
participation, allowing citizens to do anything from raise issues to participate in crafting policy.
The agonistic spirit of online debate would be promoted through different mechanisms which
could be used to express agreement and disagreement, in order to ensure that real options would
be presented for votes and that no one’s dissenting position would be steamrolled by consensual
wholes or tyrannical majorities.
Even with the above as a kind of rough draft vision of how an online layered politics
might operate, the big question, perhaps even bigger than the question of what alternatives would
look like, is how to get from here to there. With electoral politics increasingly becoming more
administrative and narrow in choice and the old idea of forming a vanguard party and seizing
power through armed revolution simply out of the question in today’s context, the question of
how to go about bringing any sort of major change remains puzzling. It is on this register, that
the four terrains of contestation between politics and anti-politics once again become
informative. If each terrain can be configured to be more or less political, then the idea of an
alternative to the status quo has actionable steps. In addition, each of the elements of the four
terrains can be more or less digitized. By focusing on ways to expand both the politicization and
digitization of each terrain, a progressive reinvigoration of politics is possible. Such progress
may be uneven, as digitization does not necessarily result in politiciziation and vice versa, the
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terrains of contestation can provide activists with both a point of focus for individual action and a
wider vision.
The political realm as a common space for political speech and action presents many
avenues for action. Existing websites with large political forums should seek to become more
than unofficial discussion spaces and start to take on the guise of shadow governments. By
politicizing an existing digital space and turning it into more of a common site where everyone
could go to discuss political issues, a political realm that functioned as a common world could be
established online. Governmental spaces can be sites of digitization as well. Legislative debates
and decisions should be broadcast online, and governments should be encouraged to set up
digital means to get feedback from citizens. A member of parliament, for instance could be
encouraged to hold online meetings where people could bring up and discuss issues, eventually
leading to the transformation of representatives into delegates beholden to the decisions of the
constituents.
Participation in unofficial discussion forums can be politicized by enabling people to not
just take part in discussions and debates, but allowing community votes and decisions which
could influence official decision makers. Adopting such structures could make a whole host of
organizations more political and democratic, eliminating the need for leaders and officials.
Unions, community organizations, and political parties would be better served adopting digital
participation methods in order to ensure their various debate and decision making procedures
were more accountable and encouraged political participation. Voting in elections should be
available online more widely, as it could encourage more direct citizen participation in other
aspects of government.
Digitizing and politicizing conflict and subjectivity involve resisting anti-political
framings. Consensus and identity are too often taken by activists as goals to celebrate, rather than
as anti-political obstacles to overcome. By opening identity up to agonistic criticism, and by
problematizing the assumption of consensus with the assertion of a plurality of different people,
depoliticization from within can be fought. Although digitization can make managing conflict
more difficult, especially if identity is reproduced online, the internet can shape both of these
terrains in a way that is suitable to a reinvigorated politics. If disagreement becomes normal
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because a plurality of different subjectivities are encountered online, then disagreement and
conflict can be treated less as hostile encounters with others but as an opportunity to test one’s
views against an adversary.
Even though, taken altogether, the vision of an online politics presented here amounts to
a radical alternative to the status quo which would fundamentally change how public affairs is
conducted, the focus on the four terrains as a sliding scale of politicization and depoliticization
enables a framework for incremental improvement. To reinvigorate politics by making it more
participatory and conflictual seems to be a daunting proposition today, but the internet is opening
up the potential for a political space and political subject formation process that simply is
unavailable elsewhere. Without an embrace of the online world, the prospect for politics is
extremely dim. The continuing potential to shape the software layer of the internet in political
ways represents a rare opportunity that advocates of agonistic, participatory, and radical politics
need to embrace as quite possibly the only way to realistically implement alternative visions of
politics. Just as the internet remains plastic, activists such as those from the Arab Spring,
Occupy, and Anonymous movements, must continue to adapt and evolve their alternative vision,
rather than simply refusing to put forth alternatives, as is the case with Rancière, or simply trying
to repeat history, as with Badiou and Žižek’s attempt to repackage communism. The internet
provides a rare opportunity to reinvigorate politics which is otherwise practically impossible.
Abandoning the internet as unsuitable to politics amounts to abandoning politics altogether, and
allowing yet another victory for the anti-political status quo.
