Abstract
Anguish around the absence of a positive programme for the left saturates the pages of Jodi Dean’s Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies. Such critical reflections on the condition of the left have been somewhat of a leitmotif over the past decade – featuring such notable players as Anderson and Bobbio – the problem being that few suggest anything beyond this practice of seemingly eternal reflection. Dean herself struggles to find a way of moving beyond the terra of passivity so many of us in the ‘academic and typing left’ (in Dean’s terminology) seem to inhabit.
Why do we inhabit this position? Much of Dean’s work occupies itself with answering such a question. A number of reasons are offered: the left lacks unity, it shares values with neoliberalism (critique of the state form, celebration of the individual, of the singular, etc.) and it has assumed a victim mentality – a situation arising from the left having essentially folded in upon itself, on the ‘progress’ it made through the 1960s into the early 1980s. The victim mentality is such that the left ‘is always morally correct … and never politically responsible – for victims are too weak and injured to govern’ (p. 6). Hence our passivity, our inactivity, our inability to offer anything more than what already is. We have become submerged within the circulating flows of ‘communicative capitalism’.
It is this latter concept that is Dean’s most original contribution to a well-worn area of debate. When moving beyond this concept in her critique of the left and its position vis-à-vis neoliberalism, democracy and ‘the political’ more generally, Dean draws upon Žižek’s Lacanian Marxism, Lacan (or, usually, Lacan via Žižek) and Eric Santner. Her heavy reliance upon other theorists, and the manner in which this book has been pieced together from articles that previously appeared elsewhere, starves the book of a strong authorial voice.
Nevertheless, Dean’s concept of communicative capitalism is deserving of some consideration. This concept ‘designates the strange merging of democracy and capitalism in which contemporary subjects are produced and trapped’ (p. 23). Networked communication is the field in which this merging takes place, and it is here where ‘ideals of access, inclusion, discussion, and participation come to be realised in and through expansions, intensifications, and interconnections of global telecommunications’ (p. 23). The rhetoric which has come to surround these ideals is seen by Dean to secure the technological infrastructure of neoliberalism.
The paradigm resting on this infrastructure is such that it occludes, qua Laclau and Mouffe, the antagonism necessary for politics. In place of antagonism, Dean argues, we are immersed within three fantasies: those of abundance, participation and wholeness. Abundance refers to the manner in which improved communications is believed to enhance democracy. Optimists genuflect towards the abundance of information, voices, opinions, messages, perspectives, etc., that networked technologies have brought into circulation. Dean is pessimistic. She sees a swirling mass of content where most contributions fail to elicit a response. Within this paradigm what is considered relevant is that communication circulates – that it is ‘repeated, reproduced, forwarded’ (p. 27) – not that it be understood. The ideology underpinning communicative capitalism is such that, while we might know on one level that our contributions merely circulate (rather than resonate), we continue to contribute to the abundance of information – believing in doing so that we are engaging in something that matters (blind to the hierarchical structure of the network as expressed in Albert-Làszló Barbàsi’s power-law factor).
This latter point underlines the fantasy of participation (aka technology fetishism): that we act as if our thoughts and ideas are registering, as if we believe that our contributions matter. Borrowing from Žižek, Dean terms this ‘interpassivity’, which occurs when we let a fetish object become active in our stead – the fetish objects here being networked communication and information technologies, which are seen to have captured and reformatted our political energies. Politics has been reduced to communicative engagements, mere contributions to the circulation of content, all of which offer no threat to the reigning neoliberal status quo. The fetish covers the trauma caused by the left’s complicity in the collapse of the welfare state (amongst other things). It ‘protects the fantasy of an active, engaged subject by acting in the subject’s stead’ (p. 37). The processes of condensation (technology fetishism reduces the complexities of politics), displacement (‘ordinary’ people’s engagement with the internet is ‘teeming with politics’) and denial (the assumption that the internet/technology is imminently political) populate the fantasy of participation.
Further, the fantasy of wholeness is such that we imagine our contributions matter all the more as we can locate them in ‘the most significant of possible places – the global’ (p. 42). The internet fosters fantasies of unity and wholeness through participation in this ultimate sphere of networked interaction. Dean characterizes the internet as a ‘zero institution’, an empty signifier, with no determinate meaning or positive function. It signifies the presence of meaning, a harbinger of imagined totality, action and belonging – the point being, of course, that participation in this fantasy, along with the others outlined above, allows the left to escape into a virtual world of action without upsetting the powers that be who operate in the ‘real’ sites and flows of power.
While many aspects of Dean’s notion of communicative capitalism overlap with aspects of Castells’ writing on informationalism, she avoids the tinges of techno-determinism that sometimes show through in his writing. Dean has been accused of having too static a view of what constitutes ‘the political’, of not realizing the latent political potentiality inherent in the new forms of interactions taking place within networked communications (see Paul Stacy in Cultural Politics 4.1 2008). Such criticisms withstanding, I find myself agreeing with Dean’s assessment of the current situation: that optimism about the potential of networked communications in relation to the political is overstated, if not entirely misplaced.
Following her discussion of communicative capitalism, Dean moves on to discuss the role that ‘free trade’ plays as the animating fantasy of neoliberalism. Here she draws heavily upon Žižek’s discussions of the role of fantasy in ideology and the ‘decline of symbolic efficiency’. The latter refers to the absence of an ultimate guarantor of meaning, hence the importance of fantasy. In the face of uncertainty the ‘undisciplined subject’ (as Dean terms it) falls under the sway of ‘ferocious superego figures’ who, as Žižek has famously argued, command us to ‘enjoy’. This regime of enjoyment underpins the ‘neoliberal ideological formation’ where the fantasy of free trade promises ‘that everyone will win’ (p. 72).
Next Dean tackles the question of democracy where, following Žižek, she asks if this is really the ‘ultimate horizon of political thought?’ (p. 76) – especially since we should all know that actually existing constitutional democracies privilege the elite. Here she takes shots at deliberative democracy theory, in particular the work of Amy Gutman and Dennis Thompson, as the notion of deliberation itself is seen as a sham. Lacan’s four discourses – those of the master, hysteric, university and analyst – are deployed by Dean to support her position. She argues that instead of rational deliberation what we actually have is people talking past each other in mutually unintelligible discourses.
At this point we have reached the start of Chapter 4 and here, to my mind, it becomes apparent that this is a collection of articles stuck together to form a book. A lengthy discussion of the use of the word ‘evil’ in US presidential speeches takes place to illustrate the resolve the right has (and which the left has not). The next chapter is essentially an extended review of Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). Butler is symptomatic for Dean of an ethical turn in the left – a turn concerned with ‘making sure no one is offended’ and which consequently avoids ‘divisive political engagement’ (p. 124).
The final chapter on certainty resumes the thrust of the argument left on hold at the close of Chapter 3. The 9/11 truth movement is the chief concern of this chapter and is considered ‘symptomatic of a larger sociocultural development that involves a new constellation of questioning, doubt, credibility and certainty’ (p. 148). Dean sees this discourse moving from that of a ‘hysteric’ towards a ‘psychotic clone of the university discourse’. The psychotic is troubled by the notion of ‘certainty’. This is a reaction to a hole created by the foreclosure of the name-of-the-father, to the disintegration of the social link. Communicative capitalism contributes to the flourishing of the psychotic discourse engendered by such conditions – the problem that arises here being that the left, lost as so much of it is within communicative capitalism, is unable to move beyond the deadlock that 9/11 has created.
As pointed out by Chomsky and others, the energy going into the conspiracy around 9/11 could be better spent elsewhere. But, as Dean so stridently argues, the left has been unable to provide an elsewhere to which this energy could be directed. It is not until the left moves beyond its present values, it is argued, that a coherent politics can be formed. Despite the piecemeal nature of this work Dean develops a powerful critique of the left and its contemporary shortcomings (within the US at least), although she too is unable to offer any concrete solutions that move beyond this impasse – which I found a frustrating feature of her work. Nevertheless, for those of us who identify with the ‘academic and typing left’, Dean’s challenge is clear: it is time to break the deadlock.