Democracy without Freedom (original) (raw)
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Counter public spheres and global modernity
JAVNOST-LJUBLJANA-, 2003
In the last thirty years capitalism has gone through a major transition that has seen the intensification of globalisation, the rise of neo-liberalism and the New Right, the decline of trust and of social democracy, a process of de-traditionalisation, and the rise of new social movements. These changes have profound implications for the nature and functioning of the public sphere . In this paper we argue that the public sphere has been shaken substantially by these shifts opening up increasing possibilities in the process for counter public spheres to become established and flourish. We trace the development of the concept of the public sphere post 1989 that includes crucial and too often ignored revisions to the original Habermasian thesis. We argue that counter public spheres become established in periods of instability in the dominant public sphere.
If we are to believe what many sociologists are telling us, the public sphere is in a near-terminal state. Our ability to build solidarities with strangers and to agree on the general significance of needs and problems seems to be collapsing. These cultural potentials appear endangered from a variety of quarters: from the neo-liberal attempt to universalize the norms of the market and interpret democracy as another form of consumerism to the most recent efforts of the security state to constrain civil liberties in the face of terrorism. For the past four decades the public sphere has been at the top of Jürgen Habermas' theoretical agenda. He has explored the historical meaning of the concept, reconstructed its philosophical foundations in communication and repeatedly diagnosed its ongoing crises. In the contemporary climate, a systematic look at Habermas' lifelong project of rescuing the modern public sphere seems an urgent task.
The intersection between "obvious" and "catalyzed public" through the mediating domain of civic cultures 1. INTRODUCTION Within the vast galaxy of scientific challenges posed by the digital media environment, that of citizenship empowerment represents undoubtedly one of the most debated both in academic context and in public opinion field. Other than acknowledging its fascinating implications, we cannot ignore the fact that the investigation of intersections between practices of communication, mediated by technologies with high participatory and interactive potentialities, and the practices of action and participation in the public sphere, is not an easy task insofar as it conceals a tangle of interdisciplinary issues and a prospect of reductionist temptations.
Telling a New Story of Democracy, 2019 Distinguished Humanities Lecture, Arizona State University
2019 IHR Distinguished Humanities Lecture, ASU, 2019
This 2019 Distinguished Humanities Lecture for the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University argues that there is a difference between a bottom up citizen movement addressing collective crises such as the Great Depression with government as catalyst and partner, and a top-down mobilization by government, affiliated with dominant understandings of proposals for a "Green New Deal," as well as socialism and progressive politics. I argue that how the democratic possibilities and productive potentialities of "the people" are developed is the great question of the age. In this lecture I argue possibilities that public arts and humanities are crucial wellsprings of a new story of "we the people." The lecture draws on earlier theoretical work on populism, especially the essay, "Populism and the Left," for the journal democracy: A Journal of Political Renewal and Radical Change, making the case that populism has expansive democratic possibilities because the concept of "the people" is far more open and pluralist in political possibilities than politics deriving from the ways in which groups are organized (or oppressed) in modern societies such as class, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, geography. It also makes the argument that, in democratic and political terms, the human person is best seen as a co-creators of communities and a societies -- a way of seeing expressed in the concept of "public work," developed in essays such as "Constructive Politics as Public Work," in the journal Political Theory, and "Reinventing Citizenship as Public Work," a working paper for the Kettering Foundation. Public work was at the center of the democratic energies and spirit of the New Deal and the civil rights movement, and needs to animate democratic movements to address collective crises of our time such as climate change.
On the Idea of Freedom (en)during the Age of (Post)Modernity (Dissertation British Cultural Studies)
2014
As typical as it might be for many of us to bear in mind the idea of "freedom" as an expression or exposure or rather an exhibition of the powerful hippie-underground-jazzy-jamming culture that flourished as early as the '60s, the concept itself can typically be illustrative of an opposite tendency to rationalize, hence effectively greet a harsh critique of the limits of human reason (as Kant himself would put it in his almost incomprehensible, though enlightening, "Critique of Pure Reason") during the late 17 th and 18 th centuries. The anarchic cultural movement rooted in jazz and punk and avantgarde écriture seen as genres of the rebellious anti-establishment artist speaks of itself and nothing more: if the dadaists succeeded in undermining the limits of grammar, the New Artists (to draw an analogy with the New Critics) would emphasize an urgent need for diversity and tolerance over the "Unheard Voices" as a trend in postmodernity, generally associated with a mixture of deconstructivist/ post-structuralist and neo-marxist views on what culture should be. I would like to propound, instead of this propensity for global tolerance shaped in too many theoretical colors, an alternative that would underline the role of political liberty (be it negative or positive) in tackling upon the idea of freedom (or should we spell "liberty"?) during the Age of Enlightenment and (Post)modernity. My thesis should be clarifying as concerns the requirement of rationality, individuality and authenticity in the age of Enlightenment and that of (Post)modernity. I assume a proportionate difference between what we conceive of nowadays, in (post)modernity, as "freedom" and the rational face of the Enlightened freedom. What one thought of as freedom during the Enlightenment is nowadays only a small portion of the huge script that under-girds our postmodern delicious text-puzzle called culture (triggering Roland Barthes' pleasure of text, so to put it). I will analyze various facets of the same concept of freedom as portrayed during the age of enlightenment, targeting the ideas of rationality and individualism as they were developed by thinkers representative of the Age of Enlightenment and (Post)modernity. I will deem that positive and negative (political) liberties represent a common denominator of the notions of freedom interpreted across centuries.