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March 10, 2006
Mathew Sharpe reviews Daniel Ross' Violent Democracy.
Sharpe says that Ross brings resources from the traditions in continental European thinking to the contemporary Australian political debates around the rise and fall of One Nation, the docklands struggle of 1998, East Timor, the Republican debate and referendum, the events of 2001--Tampa, children overboard, and 11 September---followed by the 'war on terror' prosecuted in Afghanistan, Iraq, and on the 'home front' in terms of markedly changed political rhetoric, and legislation that challenges existing liberal divisions of power.
Sharpe says that:
...these continental resources are usually disregarded--when they are not dismissed---in the Australian public sphere....The fact that Violent Democracy brings theoretical resources usually simply ignored in Australia is surely an overwhelmingly positive thing, especially in today's climate where more and more the 'new conservatives' and their spokespersons position the humanities academy as hopelessly 'out of touch' and 'elitist'.... By doing so, Ross' book invites a wider, non-philosophical audience to raise far-reaching and deeper questions about the nature of politics. In particular, as Violent Democracy's title suggests, Ross's concern is with how and why our political life always seemingly involves violence, whether this is inevitable, and what can and ought to be done about it.
So we have the violent heart of democracy--a theme argued in this weblog with respect to the work of Giorgio Agamben, with the camp signifying the violent heart. That's about as far as I've got. Sharpe says:
Violent Democracy runs two arguments about democracy's "violent heart". The first argument is that "the origin and heart of democracy is essentially violent". The book's second contention is that "the violence of democracy has changed, or is unfolding in a certain direction, across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries."
My interest is the second contention as I accept the first. Australian liberal democracy was founded on the destruction of the indigenous population. The historical proclamation which announced that "we the people are sovereign" at federation in 1901 excluded the indigenous population.
So what does Ross say about the second contention---that the violence of
democracy has changed, or is unfolding in a certain direction, across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries.
Ross says that even on its own terms, democracy has reserved the right to resort to violent action, that it has claimed a monopoly on the "legitimate" use of violent means, with the legitimacy of this monopoly being dependent upon the assertion of just ends. However, things have started with the endless War on Terror. Ross describes the change thus:
Violent means were always relative to and justified on the grounds of democratic ends, even when democracy perpetrated deadly violence. With the advent of the War on Terror comes a reorganization of these concepts, a shift away from democratic ends, and towards the self-justification of violent means. In the concept and reality of terrorism those states that refer to themselves as democracies are discovering a new potentiality for violence and are resolutely and confidently granting themselves a new right to act on it. Democratic states are re-assessing the situation of the world, with conclusions that affect democracy more profoundly than did the great wars of the twentieth century.
The new situation, signified by the War of Terrorism, is one in which the sovereignty of individual states becomes less important than a coordinated and integrated system of "security"--a system that I have been calling up the national security state. Ross takes this further by suggesting that this security system involves the creation of planetary security arrangements that transcends any particular nation-state. He illustrates it well in the book:
Ross remarks:
The notion that one could be lifted from the nation of which one is a citizen by the military of another, taken to a third country and imprisoned, without sentence, without trial, without charge, and without law, yet indefinitely, and with the very real possibility of execution at some indeterminate point in the future, all in the name of freedom, is a significant challenge to all existing legal and political thought. [p.142]
By interpreting the security system as within a nation-state I've missed the system across nation states.
Ross offers a chart of the new terrain in which liberal democracy is being transformed or undermined:
In the new state of democracy, old authoritarian tendencies are transformed into new ways and means, new laws and powers, new techniques of surveillance and control, new spaces and forms of imprisonment or homicide, that redefine the essence of the state itself. The state ceases to be the form through which the citizenry freely and politically, singly and collectively, make their lives. It becomes, rather, one mechanism within the overall system dedicated to the security and survival of the populace.
This is a significant change: one marked by a biopolitics that is not superseding or undermining the power of the sovereign.
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Gary, I have started reading Multitude. It surprised me how much it flowed on from Agamben's State of Exception.