The Promise of Democratic Populism in the Face of Contemporary Power
2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/goodsociety.21.2.0177
ISSN1538-9731
Autores Tópico(s)Participatory Visual Research Methods
ResumoIn its most exemplary radical democratic moments, populism has cultivated unexpected collaborative networks across vast differences to organize powerful and transformative action for a flourishing pluralist commonwealth.1 Such politics addresses a broad range of issues and involves diverse modalities that stretch from “everyday politics to outrageous resistance.”2 Cultivating civic agency is both the means and an end of such politics, through which a diverse and dynamic ‘we’ becomes more capable of responding to the grievances, needs, dreams, and well-being of people and the earth.Radical democratic expressions of populist politics always form themselves in relation to critical interpretations of the hegemonic powers in relation to which they articulate counter-movements and alternatives. Thus, we can only understand and evaluate their directions, possibilities, and limits by situating ourselves in relation to a field of contesting and overlapping critiques of power. If a movement understands state sovereignty to be the elemental mode of power, it will craft political struggles that are very different from one which takes ownership and control of the means of production to be most salient (or cultural recognition, or interest group liberalism, or an ethos of consumerism and technocracy, or white supremacy, or gender, or mastery of the earth, or various combinations of the above, etc.). In turn, the apparent profundity, breadth, efficacy, and goodness of alternative political efforts (historical, present, and possible) will vary dramatically depending upon the critique of power that orients our vision. We cannot avoid the need to carefully analyze power, for both explicit and tacit interpretations of different modes of power—their operations, relative salience, interactions with other modes, etc.—profoundly influence our vision of contending democratic populisms as well as those we may wish to initiate.In this context, consider that for the past several years a rapidly growing number of people at Northern Arizona University (NAU) and in surrounding communities have been collaborating to interpret the world and change it. We have been creating a myriad of Action Research Teams (ARTs) around energy efficiency and renewable energy, alternative food systems and food justice, K-elders democracy education, water rights and conservation, cooperative economics and entrepreneurship, indigenous environmental justice, civic science, sexuality, free spaces for engaged pedagogy and community organizing, rights and relationships around immigration, alternative medicinal practices, art and social change, civil discourse on ‘hot topics’, teaching climate science and civic responses, and a host of other interrelated issues. At the end of each semester hundreds of first year undergraduate students have gathered at the NAU ARTs Symposium to give increasingly informative, insightful, and inspiring presentations on their collaborative research, public work, and political action. The ARTs are part of a broader process of institutional transformation emerging at NAU that involves deep partnerships with a wide variety of community organizations, growing numbers of self-organizing campus residential learning communities, intergenerational mentoring, faculty communities of practice, multimedia outreach, broad based organizing, and curricular innovation. This NAU-community work, in turn, is a responsive and catalytic node in a variety of regional, national, transnational, and trans-border multi-sector initiatives around civic education, grassroots democracy, solidarity economics, and ecological sustainability and resilience.Depending on one's critical analysis of power, such hyper-activity may appear utterly incoherent, well-meaning but tangential to the real forces that govern our times, doomed to failure, etc. Yet I will argue that a complex critique of power and an ‘ethos’ of receptive democratic populism combine to form a vision that discloses this political and pedagogical activity to be a compelling transformational movement. Moreover, this analysis illustrates ways in which institutions of higher education still have—and can generate more—freedoms to play a crucial role as responsive collaborators and catalytic change agents, in spite of the budget and paradigmatic assaults on K-20 education that are currently underway. Indeed, I suggest that the movement to reclaim democracy education (illustrated by the case of NAU and efforts underway in many institutions associated with the American Commonwealth Partnership)3 is both indispensable to a re-emerging democratic populism and the best way to defend and expand support for higher education today, by meaningfully connecting it with transformative goods in surrounding communities.Careful attention to theory (born in collaborations between many communities and ways of knowing) is indispensable to the power, democratic quality, and resilience of the emergent practice of this populist moment. At its best, action research names the intersection where theory and practice critically and creatively inform one another so that this democratic moment might become a resilient movement, in which the promise of widespread civic engagement, ecological stewardship, and a flourishing commonwealth finds its legs and becomes more than a promise—even as it generates new promises. As such, it names a politics of knowledge that poses a profound alternative to the corporate, market-driven, instrumental, technocratic, and consumerist priorities that are terribly reconfiguring schools, communities, and ecosystems across the U.S. and around the world.There are several modes of power (not the only ones)4 that are particularly salient, in both their global reach and their capillary reconstruction of the world. First, power increasingly operates, intensifies, and accumulates by means of massive circulations of things, people, energy, water, finance, military, etc., that saturate and reconstitute our lives. Second, contemporary communication technologies generate widespread resonance, by means of which affective sensibilities, perceptual fields, and ideologies are molded in unprecedented ways. Third, these processes of circulation and resonance have created unfathomably steep topographies of inequality that are increasingly impossible for most to negotiate. Fourth, for the vast majority, relentless systemically produced contingencies repeatedly uproot and shock people in ways that greatly challenge our capacities for public work, political action, and stewardship of the commons.Since the latter third of the nineteenth century democratic populists in the U.S. have suffered, interpreted, sought to resist, and struggled to build alternatives to modes of circulatory power that overflow institutions of democratic accountability and saturate the world with a new regime of exploitation.5 With the development of breath-taking circulations of commodities made possible by the construction of comparatively fluid railroad transportation, a new mode of liquid capital was developed in association with an emerging regime of corporate law and rights associated with corporate personhood. The latter increasingly freed economic power from constraints such as democratically specified charters, mechanisms of periodic accountability, jurisdictions of place, durable identity, limits to horizontal and vertical concentration, as well as new legislative regulatory initiatives.6 By proliferating and governing flows of commodities, transportation, communication, capital, and finance, corporations were able to uproot a myriad of local and regional forms of life and reconstitute them—capillaries by capillary—to further intensify the magnitude of exploitative circulations moving through increasingly concentrated channels. The populist movement in the latter nineteenth century was both a response to this mode of power—and provoked further corporate counter developments.Michel Foucault argues that this mode of power—in contrast to disciplinary and sovereign forms—seeks maximization by managing and proliferating circulations rather than enclosures. He traces the beginnings of this “governmentality” to the “suppression of city walls,” which start to come down in eighteenth century Europe in response to increasing trade, circulations of grains, goods, and people, economic growth, problems of hygiene in the midst of overcrowding, etc.7 On Foucault's account, circulatory power doesn't supplant disciplinary power and sovereignty so much as it tends to subordinate them to its own requirements (though the relationships and relative salience vary historically and geographically). It aims to order and govern aggregates and populations in terms of managed probabilities that enhance the volume and exploitative characteristics of circulatory flows. Governmentality operates by means of a technocratic political economy that interweaves laissez-faire, regulation, and continually changing hybridizations of public and private powers.8 The creation of the insatiable consumer is integral to an ever-expanding capillary network necessary for enhancing flows through the antidemocratic mainstreams of circulatory power. While sovereign powers accent systems of proscription, for circulatory power, the problem is “how to say yes”—how to stimulate desire.9In the contemporary world, circulatory power runs wild, creating flows of technocratic productivity and consumption that increasingly reconstructs the world, human beings, ethics, and political economic institutions—in order to maximize further circulations. One of the most compelling popular examinations of this mode of power can be found in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, in which he analyzes the genetically engineered global “river of corn” that flows from a field that is twice the size of New York State.10 Pollan shows in great detail how this flow is managed by a corporate-political technocracy governed by several mega-firms that control the regulatory and subsidy context, have differentiated corn into over 10,000 products, and manipulate everything from advertising, to sweetness, to caloric composition, and so forth, to produce “industrial eaters” who desire and absorb ever-increasing volumes. Through the lens of corn seeds, he traces the ways in which related power-enhancing flows of fertilizer, pesticides, energy, water, finance, pharmaceuticals, military, migrants, institutional revolving doors, and so forth, are reconstituting and wreaking havoc on our land, our communities, our health, and our political economy. Many of Wendell Berry's writings tell the story of how our ethical and educational systems have been colonized by these developments. Populist critiques of and alternatives to technocracy and consumerism are at their politically sharpest (and least moralizing) when they address these pervasive practices and powers.Contemporary power is also distinctive in how it produces the world through technological modes of resonance. While resonant drama is an aspect of many historical forms of power, with electronic media, powers of resonance undergo intensifications and extensions that generate qualitative social, cultural, and political transformations. Resonant technological practices gain capacities to more forcefully and continuously realign our affective energies, desires, perceptions, ideologies, relationships, and imaginations of the possible and impossible. In a manner hitherto inconceivable, day in and day out we are bombarded with resonant waves of light and sound which reverberate through our bodies and surroundings—from living rooms, to classrooms, to offices, to waiting rooms, to sporting events, to churches, to cars, to airports and airplanes, to shopping spaces, restaurants, gas stations, etc.—infusing and co-constituting our experiences, dispositions, attention, inattention, feelings, and practices. As we move through and experience these multiple spaces, electronic media practices—network news, televangelists, press conferences, blogspheres, T.V. and radio talk shows, internet and twitter chatter, corporatized tele-education, infomercials, endless polling, inane political campaigning, cinematic bombardments, etc.—infiltrate one another and penetrate our lives with increasing ubiquity.William Connolly aptly refers to this complex as a “resonance machine,” arguing that increasingly resentful, punitive, and dogmatically fundamentalist forms of both neo-liberal capitalism and Christianity currently resonate in ways that drive dominant anti-democratic and ecologically destructive developments around the world (even as he generatively explores some of the more promising forms of Christianity and capitalism as part of a radical democratic ‘assemblage’).11 Diverse powers and practices, he suggests, congeal into recalcitrant complexes intensified by contemporary technologies of resonance as well as the vitriolic political energies they carry. While demonization is fostered explicitly, it proliferates even more in registers of visceral resonance such as tone of voice, volume, facial expressions, bodily gesture, performances of hostility, loud engines, staccato images, tempos of unaccountability, etc.The movement of democratic populism requires cultivating capacities for receptivity, generosity, tarrying with ambiguity and tension, an element of modesty in relation to the faiths one holds, attenuating resentments, co-creative relationships across difference, and free-spaces in which new and courageous initiatives can be enacted and reflectively explored. Yet such cultivation is extremely difficult in the context of the dominant resonance machine. Facing such powers, many progressives pursue political forms that claim to rise beyond contestation by pretending to abstract from passions, interests, and ethical commitments, but in so doing they become technocratic and ‘policy wonkish’ in ways that often appear to be simultaneously controlling, deceitful, and politically impotent. Alternatively (and less often), they sometimes mimic the vitriolic modes of those they would oppose–though this generally closes far more doors than it opens and is rarely compelling. Our imagination and innovative political repertoire for broad-based powerful democratic action and public work toward a flourishing commonwealth is severely challenged in this context, even as many people from very diverse backgrounds and political persuasions hunger for more.The sublime is often conceived in terms of those magnitudes that are so vast as to defeat our ability to really grasp them in a single meaningful perception. Contemporary inequalities—fundamentally intertwined in vicious circles with anti-democratic powers of circulation and resonance—are examples of such impossible magnitudes. Most efforts to help us envision contemporary topographies of inequality by means of analogy fail miserably. The Roman Empire was egalitarian by comparison.12 The ‘pyramids’ often employed as pedagogical tools are now absolutely useless. To include the extremely wealthy in relation to the typical pyramids we put on our black boards to depict inequality, we would have to situate them at the top of a thin wire extending twenty stories up from the top of the pyramid.13 Evocative as this image is we may get lost in it in ways that escape meaningful human significance. Try this: “the total net worth of the bottom 60 percent of Americans is less than that of the Forbes 400 richest Americans. Perhaps even more shocking, the six heirs to the retail giant Walmart had the same net worth in 2007 as the bottom 30 percent of Americans,” or about 93 million people.14If we are to critically portray the topographies of power in our times, we must visualize a world in which the wealthy dwell not on peaks, but on a few thousand soaring towers that are so thin they are generally unseen by those scrambling to survive beneath their stratospheric summits. Managed from dizzying heights, torrential flows of things, people, capital, and finance circulate around the globe at increasing rates, creating vast erosions and concentrated deposits in an insanely dynamic landscape where the tips of the pin-like towers grow dizzily higher as the abysses shift and often deepen. In the U.S. alone, the income of the wealthiest 1 percent grew over 13 times as fast as that of the bottom 20 percent during the three decades prior to 2007—while billions sink into severe poverty across the globe.15 Meanwhile, intertwined with these circulations and discrepancies, a resonance machine grows louder and more continuous, distracting, demonizing, and disabling of democratic institutions, sentiments, imagination, deliberation, work, and action through which a new and desirable twenty-first century populism might develop capacities for movement.Just prior to the Dust Bowl of the 1930's in which much of the soil and many people were ultimately blown off the land, a massive assault was launched on the prairies of the U.S. Midwest. The prairie ecologies were populated by communities of plants like blue stem grass, each specimen of which has about twenty-five miles of fibrous roots, so the job was tough and special tools called ‘sod busters’ had to be invented in order to do it. This process paved the way for corporate agricultural forms that depopulated communities centered on small farms and turned an ecological polyculture into a monoculture of genetically engineered corn and a few other species. An analogous process of uprooting is happening today in cities, neighborhoods, schools and other institutions across the U.S. (and around the world), as well as the lives of individuals and families every several years or so.The term “root shock”—coined by Mindy Fullilove—refers to one aspect of this process that has occurred through “urban renewal” that ripped up and displaced neighborhoods and people.16 Naomi Klein coined the term “shock doctrine” to describe “free market” ideologies and practices that both take advantage of and manufacture disaster in order to uproot communities, relationships and historical memory and “wipe the slate clean” for corporate social, economic, and political reengineering.17 Sheldon Wolin powerfully analyzes the ways in which “relentless change” and “perpetual mobility” become engines that devastate individual and collective capacities for democratic citizenship.18 Agrarian populists like Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry have powerfully described the ways in which farming communities and polycultural farming practices—along with human hands, ears, and eyes were ripped from the land throughout the twentieth century.19While change and mobility sometimes have effects that are healthy for democracy and difference, the likelihood of more generative possibilities hinge on their rates, qualities, relationships, and proportions to practices that are more rooted. Current levels and types are generally profoundly deleterious to democracy. Communities in which vast numbers of people are so new that they have little knowledge and memory of the place, nor relationships to it, nor the prospect of futures where they live, are communities that have extremely difficult challenges cultivating civic agency and engaged citizenship. Combined with the other modes of power we have already discussed, these challenges can be overwhelming.In the first half of this essay, I sketched four types of power that are intensifying and pose some of the most profound challenges to the development of receptive democratic populism in our time. I will now briefly situate four modes of democratic practice that are becoming increasingly widespread, reflective, and powerful in the democratic education movement at NAU and among its partners—as well as in other institutions of higher education and communities across America and beyond. My aim is to show that these modes offer promising counter-movements and alternatives in the context of contemporary power. They also illustrate important ways in which higher education, even in the midst of current cuts and constraints, can play a major role in catalyzing, co-creating, and cultivating receptive democratic power. I think this movement can be as or more powerful—and far more enduring—than the student movement of the 1960's. This time however, the most salient characteristic will likely not emphasize alienation so much as radical ways of connecting with a multitude of different and unexpected communities and organizations in a transformative movement to co-create a receptive pluralist commonwealth.In a profound contrast to technocratic mega-circulations that serve gargantuan corporate flows of power by means of a constitutive oblivion to the specific goods of peoples, practices, traditions, and the land, contemporary pedagogies of democratic populism are fashioning practices of attentive movement that generate radically different kinds of knowledge and power. Elsewhere I have referred to this as “moving democracy.”20 Where technocratic education and politics encourage the aspiration and circulation of leaders toward political capitals and/or the acquisition of economic capital, moving democracy generates receptive circulations of people into areas that are often on the disempowering sides of such power in order to co-create democratic powers and a pluralist commonwealth.Exemplary in this regard, in the early 1960's, Ella Baker and Bob Moses encouraged Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizers to move into small towns and rural areas populated by black people across the South, in order to build receptive relationships through which to co-create a different kind of imagination, new forms of democratic knowledge, and insurgent democratic powers.21 SNCC organizers thus spent hours listening to and crafting political aspirations with sharecroppers in the fields, on front porches, and in the backrooms of country stores. Broad based organizing picks up this tradition in the form of “neighborhood walks” that are among the most elemental arts of building democracy, in which diverse groups of people move slowly and attentively through neighborhoods, listening to the stories, troubles, and hopes of people they encounter, as well as attending to the infrastructure, buildings, and feel of the neighborhood. Such organizing also tends to move around the deliberative tables of democracy beyond the official chambers of power to schools, community centers, church basements, so that people relearn the art of creating and experiencing democratic free spaces in multiple sites where many thought it was impossible. Through such practices people move beyond the indifference, fears, and hostilities that debilitate our political life, and begin to learn how to regenerate at the capillary level—step by step, conversation by conversation—receptive democratic circulations that rejuvenate our imaginations of valuable knowledge, community, power, and possible action.These arts of moving democracy and receptive circulation are a cornerstone of engaged pedagogy and action research at NAU and beyond. Many think these “routes” are indispensable to developing “root clods” of resilient democratic knowledge and vitality in higher education and in our communities. In ARTs such as Public Achievement, that are engaged in co-generating democratic capacities in relationships and team building with students, teachers, and administrators in K-12 schools, NAU students are drawn into schools where they work with youth who are often impoverished, often recent immigrants, often Navajo (Dine) or Hopi. Together—working on challenges and aspirations that the youth identify—they learn about the neighborhoods, families, congregations, traditions, dreams, and the relations to distant places of the younger people with whom they collaborate. In the process, NAU students (and faculty) re-experience and rethink the meaning of democracy, the places for and practices of gaining innovative knowledge, as well as the purposes and directions of their own lives. Through hundreds of receptive dialogues, stories are shared and relationships are formed through which a rich and complex vision of a community and its possibilities develops. Similar practices of attentive movement are at play in action research with community partners on issues like immigration, residential energy use, etc., in an epistemological process that generates knowledge for a flourishing pluralist commonwealth.Receptive movement is also pivotal in relation to the more than human world in ARTs working on alternative agriculture, water conservation practices, renewable energy, climate change, etc. In a manner deeply indebted to people like Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, NAU students collaborate with alternative gardeners and food growers to learn to move in ways that are receptive to qualities of soil, varieties of plants that thrive in particular microclimates, microbes in compost heaps, symbiotic relationships among native plants, etc.—in school gardens, community gardens, innovative small plots on campus, farms across the region, and wild lands. Students in the water conservation ART receptively move around to observe micro circulations, and re-imagine the land and built world in terms of possibilities for water flows and catchment. Both teams are drawn into stories of different communities' challenges, resources, and opportunities in ways that generate research action on food security and justice, regional and global water rights, and more.Unsustainable mega-circulations are rapidly depleting our ecosystems, and climate change and peak oil are creating pressures to shift our practices. Students and communities across the nation and around the world are rediscovering and creating knowledge in which ecologically and socially resilient flourishing emerge from receptive creativity. Between 1996 and 2010, the number of farmer's markets in the U.S. rose from 1,755 to 6,132).22 The millions of diverse people increasingly drawn to these markets are part of an emergent culture—of public work, narrative, research, pleasure in “slow food,” cooperative economics, and food policy councils—that is creating food systems which are good for farmers, equitable enterprise, the health and pleasure of attentive eaters, and the environment.23 I think the students working in an ART called Students for Sustainable Living and Urban Gardening (SSLUG) outside my office window are onto something.The dominant resonance machine, continuously shouting at us and inciting us to shout at each other, vitiates our receptive democratic capacities—our power. Relatedly, it diminishes our capacities for political newness, which Hannah Arendt referred to as natality, or the capacity of selves and movements to say and do new things that far exceed the “probable” and the “possible.” Dominant practices of resonance vibrate through our body with fears, demonization, indifference, and desires which aim to manage populations in predictable ways. More generally, they spread a pervasive sense that radical democracy is a delusion: we either require technocratic governance by corporate or political elites, or we must disaggregate and become isolated individuals whose liberties are maintained by “free markets.” Given the volume and ubiquity of this “messaging,” how might we generate receptive resonances of democratic renewal?With this question, let us return to Public Achievement (PA), a movement for democratic pedagogy that is growing rapidly at NAU, across the U.S., in South Africa, Palestine, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.24 In deep contrast to dominant practices of resonance, beginning with Kindergarteners, PA cultivates democratic collaborative capacities across a wide range of differences. In Killip and Kinsey Elementary Schools in Flagstaff, this means that new immigrant children from South of the U.S. border, long-time Hispanic residents, Dine (Navajo), Hopi, White, and Black children must learn to listen to and understand each others' lives, histories, problems, and aspirations, find common ground, then muster inter-cultural relationships, enthusiasms, powers, and practices that are far greater than most in their parents' generation have yet achieved.You might not think this has much to do with resonance, but consider the following, starting at the cellular level. One of the cutting edge areas of inquiry in the field of neuroscience concerns “mirror neurons,” by means of which human beings literally resonate with one another.25 When we are in a conversation, say deliberating about our community in a meeting or engaging in a one-on-one relational meeting, what we take to be cognitive rationality is the tip of an incredible inter-bodily resonance between and among us. As people look into each others' faces, each person's mirror neurons fire in relation to the other's at unfathomable rates and this resonance is an integral part of what enables us to understand and relate to each other. Shut down this resonant interactive process (for example by having a person bite down hard on a pencil in a manner that impedes facial resonance), and people's tested abilities to accurately interpret facial expressions and cues deteriorate, become slow and laborious. Analogously, it seems likely that faces tensed in rage or indifference or fear at the faces of others who are stereotyped by the dominant resonant practices we experience (whether in terms of national, racial, class, gender, or even partisan differences) will have diminished capacities for perceiving and interpreting these others. In this context, the relational arts nurtured in Public Achievement are likely generating receptive democratic capacities across numbing and dampening divides—mirror neuron by mirror neuron—and quite literally cultivating resonant democratic bodies more capable of relationships, attentive perception, and understanding.The evidence is qui
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