ON SPINOZA’S POLITICAL TREATISE

Emanuel de Witte 1675

The world cannot have been created for any purpose other than which it fulfils by being that it is. To say that it has been created for the good of man, or for any similar end, is to indulge in grotesque anthropomorphism. (XXV)

Spinoza (1632–1677) was a contemporary of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and pretty much influenced by the latter. Hobbes thought of humanity as self-interested and always struggling for power and, in his 1615 Leviathan, set out to understand why and how can men actually cooperate and trust each other despite their nature. Hobbes idea, as pointed out by David Held in Models of Democracy, is that to be able to escape a lonely, hard and most certainly short life men have to come together. So society is better than natural state, and as Spinoza would argue, in choosing between two goods or two evils one goes for the greatest of the goods and lesser of the evils, and this could almost be an universal truth, and the reason why men are willing to “surrender their rights of self-government to a powerful single authority” (Held 1996), for the sake of security and self preservation. Hobbes theories were the beginning of the need to establish “both the liberty of individuals and sufficient power for the state to guarantee social and political order.” (Ibid) Hence he thought that the perfect state was absolute but with the consent of the people. “A multitude of men, are One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented” (ibid – Leviathan p. 220). A sovereign, therefore, is someone or a group of people who has been given the right of governing through the social contract.

But before engaging in his own definition of the perfect government Spinoza will spend a considerable time convincing his readers, in his Theological-political Treatise, that the Bible “leaves reason absolutely free; that it has nothing in common with philosophy, in fact, that Revelation and Philosophy stand on totally different footing” (p. 9); demonstrating that there is no contradiction between being religious, i.e. obedient, and scientific experimenting and thinking. If we are looking for empiric knowledge we won’t find it in the bible. He always sought to “separate philosophy from theology, and to show the freedom of thought which such separation insures both” (p. 200) and having done that he could concentrate on the pursuit of the ideal state.

The concern of philosophers have been to understand what is the aim of the state, and how can a state secure that aim, but even before focusing on what is the goal and goodness of a state, the question might be how can men live together?

According to Spinoza “every individual has sovereign right to do all that he can; (p. 200) so the individual who does not “yet know reason” will act “solely according to the laws of his desire” as the wise man will live according to the laws of reason … “the natural right of the individual man is thus determined, not by sound reason, but by desire and power.” (p. 201) But men, he continues, that do not live in community and by reason “live most miserably”, as argued also by Hobbes, therefore “men must necessarily come to an argument to live together as securely and well as possible if they are to enjoy as a whole the rights which naturally belong to them as individuals, and their life should be no more conditioned by the force and desire of individuals, but by the power and will of the whole body” (p. 202) deciding by doing so to be guided by reason. The question is, how to keep men under human law? If everyone was led by reason, they will keep the social pact for the sake of the good of the state, but according to both Hobbes and Spinoza this is not true. Spinoza believed that mankind is drawn away by pleasure so we are only restrained by the hope of some greater good, or the fear of a greater evil.

Balibar, in Spinoza and Politics, explains how Hobbes argues that in order to establish security, “natural right must be replaced by civil right” (Balibar 1998) which can only be imposed by a higher force, the state, and through the acceptance of the social contract, the natural state is replaced by the “body politic”. But Spinoza rejects this distinction between “natural right” and “civil right”, for him freedom of thought lies beyond the reach of the state.

Having come together in society men are giving away part of their rights and power, but this, argues Spinoza, would not enslave them, because the individual might be less free but the state is the freest; the subject “obeys the orders of the sovereign power, given for the common interest, wherein he is included.” (p. 215) Here we can see how he differs from Hobbes, for men remain as they were in the state of nature, equals, because no one transfers his rights absolutely, one still has a voice. Furthermore even in acting out of fear for the state, men act according to their own thought, “obedience does not consist so much in the outward act as in the mental state of a person obeying.” (Ibid)


Security or common good have been seen as the aim of governance but for Spinoza the true aim is liberty. The best government allows “freedom of philosophical speculation no less that of religious belief” (p. 263) and this is why we went to such a length defending freedom of thought in the Theological Political Treatise. Freedom of speech was of extreme importance to Spinoza, which saw no contradiction between the liberty of saying what one thinks and the authority of the sovereign power.

Spinoza, as Hobbes, desired an absolute state, but, unlike the latter, he believed that it could be in the hands of the multitude, i.e. it could be a democracy. In a democracy “everyone submits to the control of authority over his actions, but not over his judgment and reason (ibid)

As Balibar exposes, all of Spinoza’s arguments, in the Political Treatise, are to prove that the closer a state is to democracy the stronger it will be. “The basis and aim of a democracy is to avoid the desires as irrational, and to bring men as far as possible under control of reason, so that they may live in peace and harmony: if this basis be removed the whole fabric falls to ruin.” (Balibar 1998) Moreover that his democratic propositions are strongly connected to his belief in equality and freedom, freedom of thought as mentioned above and equality between all citizens, which can “exist by the joint result of institutions combined with collective praxis” (ibid)


But Spinoza’s argument, weaved in the Political Treatise thought the analyses of different political regimes, was left unfinished in the middle of the democratic regime, for he died before being able to conclude it, but as Balibar points out, in all regimes’ analyses we see the tendency to democracy “the less sovereignty is physically identified with one fraction of society… the more it will tend to coincide with the people as a whole, and the stronger and more stable it will be. But at the same time, the more difficult it will be to imagine its unity (its unanimity) and its indivisibility (its capacity for decision), and the more complicated it will be to organise them in practice. (Balibar 1998) The question left unanswered then, and still threatening contemporary democracy is, how can the multitude govern its own passions?

“[E]very individual wishes the rest to live after his own mind, and to approve what he approves ... reason can ... do much to restrain and moderate the passions, but ... the road, which reason herself points out, is very steep...” (p. 289) Reason will then refrain the passions, but it does not mean that it destroys them; and passions, Balibar argues, create forms of dependency to others.


To better understand Spinoza’s preference for the democratic rule we follow his own path: what is the best Dominion?

“Where men have general rights, and all guided, as it were, by one mind, it is certain that every individual has the less right the more the rest collectively exceed him in power; that is, he has, in fact, no right over nature but that which the common law allows him. But whatever he is ordered by the general consent he his bound to execute, or may rightfully be compelled thereto. This right, which is determined by the power of a multitude, is generally called Dominion.” (p. 297)

He continues by saying that if the rule, which is decided by the multitude, is entrusted to a “council composed of certain chosen persons” we are facing an aristocracy; if to a sole man, then it will be a monarchy, if “to a council, composed of the general multitude” (ibid) then the dominion is a democracy. But what is the best, i.e., which one can ensure individual’s liberty? Spinoza thought that the best and most independent would be the one “founded and guided by reason” (p. 313) and he added... “a free multitude is guided more by hope than fear” (p. 314). Hope is then the bond between individuals and of those with the state. Hope in Liberty?

How can a Monarchy ensure a good governance and freedom? According to Spinoza, a monarchy is always, in fact, an aristocracy; for no man can “by himself hold the supreme right of a commonwealth.” (p. 317) Moreover, because normally aristocrats are more interested in securing their lineage and plotting against each other, than governing for the people, their subjects will be under worst conditions. Nevertheless, and because from his perspective politics is the science of preserving the state, Spinoza will articulate how could a monarchy persist. First a monarch should be careful of is own inconstancies. “Every law be an explicit will of the king, but not every will of the king a law.” (p. 328) And he thought that the multitude would be willing to hand to a king that “which it cannot itself have absolutely within its authority, namely, ending controversies” (p. 330) and regarding that the king is surrounded by many counsellors that can express the multitude’s interests, “the multitude may preserve under a king’s an ample enough liberty, if it contrive that the king’s power be determined by the sole power, and pursued by the defence of the multitude itself.” (p. 344)


What about aristocracy?
“A king needs counsellors, but a council like this” as we said before, composed of chosen people, “doesn’t. Kings are mortal, but councils are everlasting” (p. 346) Here the multitude is under no consultation and the only reason why aristocracy is not absolute is because the council fears the multitude, therefore the multitude retain some liberty, even if only by a tacit agreement. Spinoza’s conviction was that “aristocracies were formerly democracies… that augmented with foreigners…” (p. 351) and since those could not become citizens of full rights a class of patricians was formed. Spinoza states that if “the nature of patricians was that they were free from all passions (in choosing who his or not a citizen) and guided by mere zeal for the public welfare in choosing their patrician colleagues, no dominion could be compared with aristocracy.”(p. 387) but has said before, reason can refrain passions but never extinguish them.


Therefore we arrive at the third dominion; democracy, which differs from aristocracy mainly because the latter “depends on the supreme council’s will and franchise only, that this or that man is made a patrician, so that no one has the right to vote or fill public offices by inheritance, and that no one can by right demand this right as is the case in the dominion whereof we are now treating.”(Ibid) Thus, a man can claim the right to vote and fill public offices, and even if the supreme council might have fewer citizens this shall still be called a democracy, “because in them the citizens who are destined to manage affairs of the state, are not chosen as the best by the supreme council, but are destined by law.”(Ibid)

That the rule is chosen by lot is the main characteristic of democracy, how it can be, as Spinoza wished, an absolute government is what he did not succeed to explain. Therefore the only clue given has to why he thought this would be the best dominion is what Balibar points out when we says that in the analyses of the former dominions, they are best as they approach a more democratic governance.

But then, how can the multitude govern its passions when one knows that every man thinks the other should live as he does? Can state institutions distil the multiple opinions into a common opinion? Although true equality does not exist and can only be achieve through the action of the state, as true independence does not exist, and citizens have to establish relations of dependence between each other and between them and the state; it is this state and their institutions who should “distil a single opinion, and thus a choice, out of the fluctuation of minds” and to produce a union around a common purpose. Then, as Balibar states, it is imaginable that the multitude might rule itself “on the basis of the dialectic between these two forms of rationalisation of the State, one of which begins by privileging equality, and the other, freedom”. (BALIBAR 1998)




BALIBAR, E. 1998. Spinoza and Politics, Verso.

HELD, D. 1996. Models of Democracy. 2nd edition, Cambridge: Polity Press.

SPINOZA, B. 1951. A Theological-Political Treatise. Dover Publications.

Notes#019

@http://www.edinburghsculpture.org/magazine.html

Democracy according to Aristotle and the Revolutionary Workers in Venezuela.

A society is called a State when it has a collective aim, and according to Aristotle it aims at the highest good, this good is of the State itself and not of each citizen’s as individual.

Naturally, thought Aristotle, this State shall have rulers and subjects and is to be governed in a way ‘where everyman can act best and live happily’. This happiness is bond to wisdom and not to material possessions, but to be wise one has to have leisure time and not be engaged in everyday life survival, therefore wise man must be provided with property. Here comes a vicious circle, those who are wise must be entrusted with property, those with property and free time will certainly be wiser. So property is again a condition to rule and in the end of the day Aristotle polity is an oligarchy.

Nowhere in his treatise Aristotle considers a State without rich and poor; even though he affirms that the best States are those where the middle class is the larger class; as a matter of fact it could be accepted – there have been always rich and poor, but is troubling when it is never questioned why are always the same getting the best gifts from Fortune, for it seems that there is not much class interchange in his treatise.

Education is paramount to Aristotle’s constitution, and it is a matter of the State; this reveals which instrument is used to maintain each player in its own position, for education is the same among equals but some are equals as possible rulers and others equal as permanent subjects. Aristotle will use a similar argument to Plato’s to differentiate natural rulers and natural subjects making an analogy with the anatomy of the soul where one part – rational – naturally rules and the other – irrational – is ruled. Again why some are soul and others body is difficult to accept as natural.

Now, let the citizens rule! But what is a citizen? A citizen is not an individual who lives in a certain State, he is the one who takes part of the government of the State; and the constitution will be different if this government is in the hand of one, or of few, or of many; and of course governing to the common interest otherwise they are perversions. The best constitutions are then, according to Aristotle, kingship, aristocracy and polity or simply constitution, which is a ‘fusion between oligarchy and democracy, inclining towards democracy in an attempt to unite the freedom of the poor and the wealth of the rich.’

In practice there are only two types of government: oligarchies and democracies, both perversions, or imperfect constitutions. A form of government is a democracy when the free, who are also poor and the majority govern, and an oligarchy when the rich, being few, rule. Focusing only on Aristotle notion of democracy, we find that it arises out of a revolution based on ‘the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.’ With which he disagrees, because men are rarely absolutely equal, the simple fact of being young or old, he would argue, differentiate men. And because a democracy governs towards the interests of the majority and not of the common is, therefore, a perversion.

Nonetheless the main characteristics of democracy, for Aristotle, are: ‘the election of officers by all out of all; and that all should rule over each, and each in his turn over all’; the appointment to every office is made by lot; the possession of property should not be required for offices; no one should hold an office twice, and this tenure should be brief; all men should judge, in all matters, or in the most important; the assembly should be supreme over all causes, or the most important. This highest type of democracy is based strictly on equality, rich and poor have the same right to hold office and the multitude has supreme power. But because it is the highest it is also the worst type.


As a counterbalance I propose a look at 5 Factories, the 2006 documentary by Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler about five self-managed factories in Venezuela, which seems to show that a democratic rule is possible. After the Bolivarian Revolution (term coined by the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to refer to the social movement, or twenty first century socialism in South-America) many workers in Venezuela took charge of factories that they had worked on and had been closed down by their former administrators as ruined and led them to full operational plants. Organized in cooperatives, the five examples given in this documentary portray a different way of managing a company, a social administration way. Taking the example of the presented CAIGUA tomato sauce factory, which won a government subsidy - already during Chavez legislation – to invest in modern equipment and enlarge the range of products, but which subsidy was diverted for personal expenses, I will demonstrate how a democratic management is done. The workers, realizing, that the factory was working only at 10% of its maximum capability, due to lack of raw material but specially due to ill administration, saw in the misuse of the government’s subsidy and the lack of payment the excuse they were looking for to take the management of the plant in their hands. Occupying the factory day and night over three months, they prevented the former administration to enter the facilities. Encouraged by Chavez government they constituted a cooperative, that gives shape to their social struggles. Part of this different way of managing a company, which is directed towards the benefits of the whole community and not only of the company itself, CAIGUA helped the local producers with machinery in order to augment the producing of their raw material, tomatoes. The company is managed by a temporary board of directors, selected from the body of workers, which works closely with the assembly all, 58, workers. All the projects and decisions pass by this assembly where all the opinions count. It seems only possible because there is such a small body of workers, critics of democracy would argue; but in another example presented in this documentary, an aluminium plant, the same management is being done with 3200 workers. Part of the success of these co-managed companies is due to the fact that all workers are informed of all the procedures necessary for the company’s production and management; that all workers are involved in all decisions and also because part of this type of cooperative administration involves a social-political engagement and education. At CAIGUA all workers earn the same salary, being administrators, technicians, or operators; and the surplus is distributed between the community by supporting education centres, medical care or opening their canteen tho the most needed. The aim of a democratic state, Aristotle would say, is liberty. Listening to these workers one can understand this idea of liberty, of not being constrained to express one’s opinion and ideas regarding the management of the common, but they are also aware that it does not mean simply licence - as described by many democratic critics.


The danger for Aristotle is that in democracy ‘the people becomes a monarch’, which grows into despotism. The best democracy, for him, would then be that which is subject to the law. The multitude is not call to decide upon every matter, specially the most important, for those would be in the hands of the magistrates; and the best citizens are in charge, so the more qualified represent the uninformed.

Yet, we realize in this documentary that when a worker feels that his opinion counts; that the company also belongs to him and that the result of his labour will benefit not the company and its few owners but himself and his community; he will be engaged in aiming at that Aristotelian highestgood, which is not the good only of himself but of the community, and ultimately he is HAPPY.

Aristotle, 1921, The Works of Aristotle, Oxford, Clarendon Press
Azzellini, D. and Ressler, O. 2006. 5 Factories. [DVD].

@http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/ressler.html

(An Ideal Society Creates Itself: Venezuela and the Bolivarian Process) Oliver Ressler

see also the text "Can the Bolivarian Process Achieve Socialism? 5 Worker-controlled Factories in Venezuela" by Sharat G. Lin

Notes#018

Different types of constitutions

Notes#015

Is it the question of maintaining a public sphere the question of the possibility of democracy?

ORWELL: Political purpose - using the word "political" in the widest possible sense - the desire to push the world in a direction, to change other people's ideas about the type of society for which they should fight. (2008, 17)

I have always defended artistic intervention in public space, for the defense of a participated public sphere, therefore democratic and this is my political purpose. But what is public sphere or even democracy and its relationship with art it is still to be understand, and what I share here is just the beginning of a search. Neither the fabric is woven, or the loom ridden, but only the warp preparation is being done.

The bourgeois public sphere, which Habermans gives account of its disintegration in the The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, was a the late eighteenth century sphere of private individuals gathered as a public and thus controlling public authority. This enlightened public use of reason was not only the courage to think for ourselves, but to do it aloud, and is seen as the paradise lost, but with the mixture of state and society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a 'public sphere has lost its political function, namely: that of subjecting the affairs that it had made public to the control of a critical public.’

Salons disappeared, in the course of twentieth century, the leisure activities of culture-consuming public replace them, but these new activities do not require any critical discussion. The diagnosis was that the discussion has become a mere exchange of tastes and preferences among consumers since the occupation of the public sphere by the dispossessed masses, which led to an interlocking of state and society that has demolished the old foundation of that sphere without supplying a new one.

The importance of a critical public sphere in connecting society with the state seems still paramount to democratic theory, therefore many defend its rehabilitation, but is there only one public sphere, or are they multiple?

HANNULA: The idea of an open public sphere, where so the story goes, all interested parties can collaborate and exchange ideas equally is a beautiful dream, but not much more that that. Public space is a tool of control, and a tool for achieving certain ends. (2006, 74)

Let’s admit the plurality of public spheres – but Habermas considers only a democratic public sphere, which does not coincide with the public spheres of mass culture, is one and only one in which citizens could communicate about the regulation of public affairs.’

Unlike Habermas the Viennese philosopher Marchart opposes to this idea that the democratic public sphere 'is naturally privileged over others’. He asks, ‘what makes all the various "partial" public spheres such as the everyday public spheres of advertising, backstairs gossip, sports events, youth cultures, etc. any less public, less autonomous or less universal than a public sphere created through rational discussion.’

LACLAU: For me, a radically democratic society is one in which a plurality of public spaces constituted around specific issues and demands, and strictly autonomous of each other, instils in its members a civic sense which is a central ingredient of their identity as individuals. Despite the plurality of these spaces, or, rather, as a consequence of it, a diffuse democratic culture is created, which gives the community its specific identity. Within this community, the liberal institutions - parliament, elections, divisions of power - are maintained, but these are one public space, not the public space.

Mouffe would follow saying that despite this plurality democracy does not consist of a colorful harlequin suit of public spheres, ‘rather the conflict of the question as to which public spheres are tolerated as politically legitimate and which are not’. This is the notion of an agonist democracy where different groups will be in permanent conflict, not as enemies but as competitors. Public sphere emerges where is dissent since homogeneity is an illusion and consent an impossibility. What Mouffe proposes, therefore, is a continuous and permanent agonist conflict, that instead of trying to eliminate power relations brings them to the fore to be disputed. The possibility of democracy lies also there where a constant articulation and re-articulation of alliances, or temporary consensus is made.

HANNULA: We are part of the game, part of the mess. What we ought to strive for is the perspective of a critical reflective participant... (2006, 76)

In what sense can art – and we shall say public, including performance which is the reason for this ‘warping’ – be a part of this ever-present attempt ceaseless attempt to build a public sphere and hence society?

BEGGAR: you have nothing to do with it. Now you have your chest hollow, like a hole in the sewer, because you made a stupid question. They are all stupid questions. What stupidity, questions! *

So lets untangle the skein from another end. Democracy for Plato was not only a form of government, but the third degree of the good government’s decay. The democrat, son of the oligarch, blind due to excessive freedom: for him everything is the same, good and bad, everyone is entitled to equal civic participation, liberty and equality is his motto. Jusque ici tout va bien. But it is not the fall but the landing that is matters, and according to Plato all that is excessive comes back as its opposite. The destruction of democracy, he announces, will be by the metamorphosis of its highest good - freedom - into its opposite: excessive slavery, and with it tyranny.

By this diapason the contemporary critics of democracy tune their repertoire, portraying democracy as the destroyer of the social body due to its excessive individualism – the search for personal pleasures and material prosperity - which in turn is seen as the antidote since time Aristotle’s time of that which is fatal to democracy and which reveals the known democratic paradox: the excess of democratic activity is the ruin of democracy and therefore should be repressed. In turn this repression leaves citizens indifferent to the common good and undermine the state’s authority. Good government, as Rancière affirms, shall be that which is capable of balancing this excess of collective activity and individual withdrawal inherent to democratic life.

RANCIÈRE: democracy is the worst of governments with the exception of all the others. (2006, 4)

Being able to rule or be ruled is an aphorism dear to the good government of Plato - where the most stronger and wise were the guardians of the city - but it is also exactly where democracy turns out to be problematic. The real scandal, Rancière would say, is not in the excessive demand for individual pleasure but in the superiority to rule be based on nothing more than the absence of superiority, i.e., the guardians would be chosen by drawing of lots.

Politics begins exactly there, where the power of birth is undermined and declared for what it is, the power of the property-owners. Democracy is precisely this dissociation and not a kind of constitution, or a type of society. The power of the people is not the union nor the power of the majority but the very particular power of those who have no more right to govern than to be submit, which is then the power of anyone, and everyone.

The public sphere, as stated above, shall be in constant conflict, just as democracy must fight continuously against the distribution of public and private under the control of oligarchs, and also, as Rancière says, ‘struggle for the enlarging of the recognition, as equals and as political subjects, of those that have been relegated by State law to the private life of inferior beings, and to assert the public character of spaces, relations and institutions regarded as private.' It will then be in the small gestures of emancipated political subjects that democracy operates.

* In The Begger or the Dead Dog. 1919. Bertolt Brecht

HABERMAS, J. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Polity Press.
HANNULA, M. 2006. The Politics of Small Gestures: Chances and Challenges for Contemporary Art, art-ist.
MARCHART, O. 1999 . Art, Space and the Public Sphere(s). [Online] disponível em http://www.eipcp.net/transversal/0102/marchart/en [Acedido a 14 Novembro 2009]
MOUFFE, C. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London, New York: Verso.
ORWELL, G. 2008. Por Que Escrevo e Outros Ensaios. Antígona.
PLATO. 1997. Republic. Wordsworth.
RANCIÈRE, J. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. Verso.

Notes#013

'We are accustomed to hearing that democracy is the worst of governments with the exception of all the others.' (Ranciére, 2006, 4)

Democracy has been hated since ancient times as a perversion of the good government due to the excess of license which with intensive participation ruins the state; this has been re-directed to the search of material prosperity and private pleasures which results on citizen’s indifference towards the common good and the weakening of public authority. So if not by the illness death comes by the cure.

The diagnosis is identical today, people are disengaged from politics, and if politics is, as in ancient times, the search for the common good, and today’s citizen is the individual consumer pursuing his private affairs we can see how democracy was reduced to a mere form of society emptied from politics, and seen as a corruption of it’s people and not of its government.

Who is entitled to govern has always been the question in search of the good government and it is where democracy, states Rancière, reveals the trouble. Plato lists seven titles to govern; four related to birth: being older, or the father, highborn, free; and two associated to relations in nature: stronger over the weaker, wiser over the ignorant. The first four, base government of kinship; the latter two on excellence, and according to Rancière it is where politics commences, when the title to govern is separated from kinship, and also when the seventh title appears – the drawing of lots – the title of chance, the democratic title which is no title. And that is what is so outrageous for some people: that age, birth or even wisdom has to ‘bow before the law of chance.’

Then, if politics begins when the power of birth is undermined and its true nature disclosed – property-owning power – democracy creates a rupture relegating to different places the principle of government and the principle of society, and this dissociation is its ultimate meaning: ‘the primary limitation of the power of forms of authority that govern the social body.’ (45) And for Rancière ‘if politics means anything it means something that is added to the possible governments’, that naturally are oligarchic, ‘and put themselves forward as models for the construction of larger an more complex human communities.’ (45) This something is democracy, the government of chance. So in his view democracy is neither a type of constitution nor a form of society, ‘but is this ungovernable on which every government must ultimately find out it is based.’ (49) The condition to have a political government, thus, is to be founded on the absence of title to govern, and politics exists only if there is a supplementary title, and again the scandal of democracy, is that this title is the absence of title; the power of anyone at all. So at the bottom of every government is equality, for inequality cannot exist without a ‘multitude of egalitarian relations’.

Democracy has been confused with representative democracy, but lets not be fooled says Rancière, ‘representation was never a system invented to compensate for the growth of population’ it represents the property owning minorities ‘who are entitled to take charge of public affairs.’ But again democracy is not a type of constitution; it can never be identified with a juridico-political form. It is the power of the people – not of the majority but of anyone and everyone – and this power works beneath the state, because of its egalitarian foundation; and beyond the state, because its public activity frustrate the ‘State’s tendency to monopolize and depoliticize the public sphere’. The State’s tendency is to shrink this public sphere , by relegating the interventions of the citizen’s to the private domain; democracy fights this tendency in the endless effort to enlarge this sphere. This struggle is then about distribution, a key concept in Rancière’s thought, the ‘distribution of the public and the private that shores up the twofold domination of the oligarchy in the State and in society’. This re-distribution is a struggle to: defend the ‘public character of spaces, relations and institutions regarded as private’ (56); recognize ‘the public character of types of spaces and relations that were left to the discretion of the power of wealth;’ (55) by doing so it enlarges the ‘recognition, as equals and as political subjects those who have been relegated by the State law to the private life of inferior beings.’

The idea of becoming a political subject is also paramount to Rancière’s thought; are man and citizen the same subject? Rancière unpacks this question through Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx notion of Human Rights. To the first these are the rights of bare life, of those who do not belong to any constitutional national community, therefore without rights, so the Human Rights are an illusion; to the latter these are the rights of citizens, property owners who belong to a national community, therefore the rights of those who have rights. But to Rancière they both miss that the one of politics exists only through that supplement which is democracy. Neither bare life, nor citizenship of constitutional texts are political subjects, these are always defined by an interval between identities, when the distribution of terms and places are overturned.

Rancière uses the statement of Olympe Gouges to further this idea: 'Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum', i.e., if she can be sentenced to death then she does not belong solely to the domestic life. ‘Women can therefore claim rights as women and as citizens, an identical right that, however, can only be asserted in the form of the supplement.’ (60) Gouges, maintains Rancière, proved wrong both Arendt’s and Marx’s views. She ‘inserted a third possibility: women's and citizen's rights are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not.’ (61) They are deprived of the rights but at the same time they exercise them. Politics is that operation of splitting into two – which he illustrates with the example of the women that in 1955 refused to leave the white people’s seat in an Alabama bus. ‘That is what the democratic process implies: the action of subjects who, by working the interval between identities, reconfigure the distributions of the public and the private, the universal and the particular.’ Democracy must constantly bring into ‘play, inventions of forms of subjectivation and of cases of verification that counteract the perpetual privatization of public life, in a ‘political movement that blurs both the given distribution of the individuals and the collective, and the accepted boundary of the political and the social.’

Ranciére call us to renounce to the faith in the vision of democracy by the multitude, which is such a dreadful task; but if we understand democracy’s true meaning, that an ‘egalitarian society is only ever the set of egalitarian relations that are traced here and now through singular and precarious acts,’ (96) and that ‘it is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts,’ then, as he finishes ‘to those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence,’ democracy can ‘inspire courage, and hence joy.’ (97)

Participation in, and the construction of, democracy, according to Rancière, is then to act in the intervals of our own identity split and therefore fight the state’s privatization of our private life with single and precarious gestures of equality.

RANCIÉRE, J. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. Verso.

Notes#012

Which kind of participation is possible in Plato's aristocracy?


In his book Republic, Plato supposedly transcribes a conversation between Socrates and some young Athenians that starts by analysing what is justice leading to the creation of a just city. This ideal city follows – what was identified by Leon Battista Alberti during the Renaissance as – concinnitas universarum partium, or the harmony and concord in all the parts in relation to one another, where each and every organ mind its own performance and to remove one part compromises the whole. Being on one’s place is here proved to be the required participation in this city. Divided in four elements: wisdom, bravery, temperance and justice; Socrates will analyse the city’s first three elements believing that the remainder would be justice, the gathering’s inquire. As the appetite is the largest element in an individual, followed by courage and both governed by his reason, the smallest element; so is the city ruled by a few wise men and women or by a king with a true love for philosophy, helped by soldiers and a larger amount of auxiliaries. Each element does it occupation, that should be a single one if to be done with excellence, and respect the rule of the few and this harmony and respect to the wise element is what makes a man or a city just. To be sure, in such a city to be a just man means performing the assign task, be it to be a shoemaker or a philosopher, according to one’s gifts and training; and this is the required participation, to be just.

Why then, have I been dreaming about the reasons to escape Plato's perfect city and fall into the extravagant excesses of a democracy? For I truly have.

Until the city is ruled by philosophers there shall be no constitution worth being called a city, under this oath Socrates debates on the reasons why philosophers are considered useless by the multitude and nevertheless are the right ones for the job. The reason being that philosophers are the ones with access to the essential forms lighten by good and revealed by pure reason. To achieve this level of knowledge requires years of training in several subjects and to be considered as guardians requires a just city. Democracy for him is not a just constitution but the third level of decay from the desired one, aristocracy. An oligarch’s son, the democrat is blinded by license; all appetites are alike for him, good and evil; everyone has equal participation in civic right, liberty and equality is his motto. Jusque ici tout va bien. However it is not the fall but the landing that matters, and as is noticed in their conversation to do anything in excess seldom fails to provoke a violent reaction to the opposite extreme. Democracy destruction shall be by the metamorphosis of the object of its supreme good – freedom, into its worse shape: excessive slavery, and with this tiranny arises.

This hate of democracy is as old as its very origin, ancient Greece. And today’s hate formula is not against democracy itself, conversely to Plato’s idea, democracy is not a corrupt form of government, the problem is about the people, democratic civilization. What provokes the crisis of democracy is nothing other that the intensity of democratic life (Ranciére, 2006, 7).


PLATO. 1997. Republic. Wordsworth.
RANCIÉRE, J. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. Verso.

continued on note #13 with the reading of Ranciére's Hatred of Democracy…

Notes#007

Carey Young -Donor Card
Frieze 2009

Impossible Exchange (curated by Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado) Frieze Projects

“Carey Young once wrote that she explores ‘how the artist’s role, agency and identity could or might need to change in response to the collapsing categories between business, politics and culture’. She has been appropriating corporate ideology and manipulating it in order to examine the era of global capitalism. Recently, she has focused on the law apparatus and its realtionship to civil government. For example, with the assistance of a legal team, she once created a United-States-Constitution-free zone within a New York-based gallery. Contractual agreements with the visitor have been one fo Young’s major strategies, and Donorcard (2005 –ongoing) is one of the works that better represents this aspect of her practice. Wallet-size human organ donor cards in general, and the design of such a document issued by the British NHS in particular, inspired Young in the making of this work. Each time it is on view, Young previously signs a limited edition of Donorcards copies, which are free to take and also have to be signed by the viewer in order to become art, a status that will last only while both of them are alive. In a new instalment of its preservation, for Frieze Projects Young is signing the work at the booth during the VIP preview of FAF. bringing together the language of jurisdiction, authorship, and rituals of collecting, Young comments on the forms of power ruling the art world.

Donorcard was created with the assistance of a legal team comprising Robert Lands of Finers Stephens Innocent LLP and Dr. Jaime Stapleton of Birkbeck College.”

"Mining institutional critique, community-based movements, self-organization traditions, and activism, their proposals address the production of symbolic value in the “age of questioned capitalism” – an expression suggested by the global financial crises. Through their socially engaged practice “impossible exchange” establishes a counter-public sphere that radically envisions change on the economic, political, and cultural levels."

Carey Young Donor Card

By principle in Portugal everyone is an organ donor unless one manifests the will against it to the health ministry (RENNDA) in a system of contracting/out, thus taking advantage of people's natural inertia the country has an enormous potential donors list . In the UK we have a completely different approach, one has to join organ donation. Hence the former has a non donors card, while the latter a donor card.

uk donor card

Politically, we can say in the Portuguese case that the state (even though one has the possibility to sign out) is taking the decision for the citizens by presuming that everyone would want to be an organ donor, whilst in the UK the citizens are accounted for the decision, but then the state has to campaign for people to meet that responsibility. Uk's example seems the most democratic to me, in an horizon of a social responsible society were our relation to others - human beings and not - is constantly being activated and reevaluated, but I also know that most of the time we function in automatic pilot, and that's why the Portuguese example might be more effective for the case presented, but then what does that tell us about a more general political engagement?