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July 29, 2005
When framed by the rhetoric of the war on terror democracy is seen as under threat and our 'way of life needs to be protected from 'them' who hates 'us' and what 'we' stand for. Any dissension or criticism of this division marks one as un-Australian and against 'us', democracy and 'our way of life.'
Jane Mummery argues that in this context there is a need for the commonality of democracy in a liberal nation-state to be informed by pluralism, dissension and undecidability.
She turns to Chanatal Mouffe to help her think through the questioning of the 'us' versus 'them' logic:
"Mouffe argues that 'the belief that a final resolution of conflicts is eventually possible is something that puts [democracy] at risk. For Mouffe (as it also is for Derrida), the democratic project is constitutively agonistic and pluralist. It marks and sustains the practice of contestation rather than any substantive consensual notion of the common good or even a 'we'... As a plurality, Mouffe insists, democracy is necessarily agonistic, insofar as the sustaining of difference is the sustaining of dissension...what this means is that the crucial problem in democratic politics for Mouffe is... the establishing of these democratic equivalences in a process she sees as the transformation of antagonism into agonism...Mouffe argues that every truly democratic community requires that both pluralism and its character of conflict are recognised as constitutive of the public sphere."
The democratic project certainly does not have a clear-cut identity or community. It doesn't need to have. Mouffe is careful to not set any specific identity to this 'we', given that it is constantly under negotiation.
One presumes that Mouffe's conception of democracy, as the agonistic plurality of determinate democratic struggle that undermines the 'us' versus 'them' logic is enframed by particular existing institutions, practices and values of liberal democracy.
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