CHANTAL MOUFFE’s Democratic Paradox seen through TERRE THAEMLITZ’s Rosary Novena for gender Transitioning – Soulnessless Project.

http://www.comatonse.com/releases/soulnessless/

Assuming, as the Oxford Dictionary states, that a Paradox is a “proposition that, despite sound reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems logically unacceptable or self contradictory” and democracy is a system of government by the whole population, what is contradictory about the rule of the many? This is the starting point of Mouffe’s analyses, that the Modern Democratic project poses a threat to democracy itself.
By criticizing the supposed essence, i.e. permanent nature, of liberal democracy Mouffe builds an argument for a radical pluralist democracy.

Pluralism as the dissolution of the markers of certainty (a notion that Mouffe takes from Lefort) legitimates conflict and division and proposes equality. The modern liberal democracy accepts pluralism, but this is taken as irrelevant and relegated to the private sphere as differences being mere facts, but Mouffe argues that pluralism is a not a fact but a valuable principle that should be enhanced and not hidden. Nonetheless if pluralism is to be celebrated it is also presented with limits, Mouffe does not defend heterogeneity to an incommensurable point, she proposes a continuous challenging of the relations of subordination but not their extinction, for this relations help us building the “we” which is the construction she claims as holding the political dimension.

Then in order to understand the importance of conflict she shows the eradicable nature of power. Objectivity, i.e. identity, is perceived always in opposition to something outside itself, and that outside is what makes it perceptible, so is part of its nature, power is identity’s “constitutive outside”. Identity is consequently contingent and therefore no one can claim to represent the totality. Power relations will always be there, so democracy can not be about abolishing power and antagonism, therefore the question is how to transform antagonism and Power according to democratic values?

Liberal democracy by concealing pluralism instead of building institutions that could present antagonism (rivalry) in an agonistic (contestant) way creates a problem, this being the transformation of political adversaries into enemies; and by presenting its institutions solid as real buildings unlegitimates and irrationalizes any possible challenge. Since homogeneity is an illusion and consensus an impossibility, what Mouffe proposes is a continuous and permanent agonistic conflict that instead of trying to erase power, brings it to the fore so it can be challenged.

Terre Thaemlitz is not looking for consensus, he is not looking for political correctness. He affirms boldly in his performance: I hate all religions.
For he is not an atheist that tolerates others belief, he re-asserts:

- I hate all religions. Without exception. Yours too.

Here, in the first part of his project Soulessness: ROSARY NOVENA FOR GENDER TRANSITIONING, Thaemlitz is deconstructing is own religious upbringing, his catholic upbringing.
So when I speak against religion and spirituality, I do so not as a person with the rare luxury of a secular upbringing, but as a person who has struggled to overcome one's own spiritual programming, and who sees others struggling to do the same. I assure you, any harshness to my words rests in defensive panic, not arbitrary aggression. I do not stand proudly before you. I am laying prostrate, an anti-Holy Roller speaking in tongues, trying to catch my breath for one more kick and "Fuck you!" against the endless trample of faiths and superstitions framing my existence in this world from birth to death. I concede the inescapability of religious and spiritual dogma to one degree or another in all corners of life - from extremist religious militarism to the seemingly harmless transcendental pretenses of "soul music," ambient, new age, classical, pop, rock, folk, house... No matter how much I wish for the eradication of spiritual thinking, I have no faith in the possibility of an atheist society or godless world. I am truly without faith. In a media marketplace that demands soulness, I can only offer soulnessless.

Thaemlitz presents this project as lecture performances, directing the narrative in the first person, where theory and facts are interwoven, to a point where it does not really matter the veracity of the facts, they serve to grip the public to his narrative. He stands before the audience in drag, dressed as an old fashion schoolteacher, reading from his notes (which are transcribed in his website). Subsequently he projects a video, where the audio is of equal importance, we should not forget that he is mainly an audio artists. The performance started with this anecdote:

I lived in Oakland, California. Although I did not own a radio receiver, the wires in my studio acted as an antenna, filling the line noise with religious broadcasts from a local public-access radio station.
Some might call them messages from God.
I called them fucking annoying.

The grainy video tells the story of an encounter, or an heritage. A little figurine owned by his grandmother led him to a whole new reading of catholic dogmas, the sinless conception of christ, his death and ressurection. Through the wax figurine of the Virgin Mary displaying a large erected penis to the stained glass representation of the Piéta; Thaemlitz takes us on a journey of individual transubstantiation, not of blood into wine, but of female into male and back again.
The woman that engenders from her own body her sexual opposite, and dies to return to the female form. ROSARY NOVENA is transgender tale.

I use the concept of agonistic pluralism to present a new way to think about democracy which is different from the traditional liberal conception of democracy as a negotiation among interests and is also different from the model which is currently being developed by people like Jurgen Habermas and John Rawls. While they have many differences, Rawls and Habermas have in common the idea that the aim of the democratic society is the creation of a consensus, and that consensus is possible if people are only able to leave aside their particular interests and think as rational beings. However, while we desire an end to conflict, if we want people to be free we must always allow for the possibility that conflict may appear and to provide an arena where differences can be confronted. The democratic process should supply that arena. (MOUFFE, 2000)

I believe Thaemlitz is performing that arena. Presenting us with the affects of such liberal pluralist project that diverts conflict into an underground space, erupting violently on specific subjects, on him.

A limited inquiry into the influences of Catholicism in my own life would be a safer topic to discuss here, since anything less subjective could be labeled culturally insensitive, bad karma, anti-Semitic, demanding fatwah, or any number of other curses bestowed upon outsiders. I wish to limit the potential for such curses because I have already endured acts of verbal and physical violence at the hands of Christians, and suspect that fanatical followers of the other great religions of the world are no less capable of the same.

Thaemlitz voices dissent, he does not play the general tolerant model, that “forces the participants to leave aside all their particularities and interests.” (Mouffe, 2000, 87), the democratic tension is ineradicable and Thaemlitz performs it. Critic of spiritualism and the patriarchy society, he uses the symbol of the Virgin Mary, but has he states, not only as a possible feminist icon, but beyond that, as a gender trouble. Extremely critic, as well, of sexual transition through surgery, because in the end what happens is that we all conform to the old same binary of male female. The same old roles, the same old play. Thaemlitz ends the video with a hymn, sung to medical footage of vaginoplasty operation.

On that resurrection morning
When all dead in Christ shall rise
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life
Won't it be so bright and fair
When we meet our loved ones there
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life

I'll have a new home of love eternal
Where the redeemed of God will stand
There'll be no more sorrow (No more pain)
There'll be no more strife
Raised in the likeness of my savior
Ready to live in paradise
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life

When ol' Gabriel blows his trumpet
And we walk the streets of gold
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life
No more pain, worry, sorrow
In this wicked world of sin
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life

I'll have a new home of love eternal
Where the redeemed of God will stand
There'll be no more sorrow (No more pain)
There'll be no more strife
Raised in the likeness of my savior
Ready to live in paradise
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life

Oh dear brother are you livin'
For that day when Christ shall come
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life
Graves all burstin'
Saints a' shoutin'
Heavenly beauty all around
I'll have a new body (Praise the Lord)
I'll have a new life

This sex change, for her, levels down the necessary complexity of gender identities, and the tale of desire to embody the idealized shape is counter posed with the compulsory sex change that homosexuals have to go through in Iran when stating their homosexual preference openly.


Thaemlitz finishes her video presentation and opens the performance to questions from the audience. Again we can sense the opening up of that space for articulation of antagonism, but is society prepared to voice differences and still be able to break some bread afterwards? For Mouffe the goal is to transform antagonisms into agonism. “This requires providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to express themselves over issues which, while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but an adversary.” (MOUFFE, 2000, p.103)

How can we construct society on this model, against the liberal notion of being a mere collection of individuals and interests groups? For Mouffe “the prime task is not to eliminate passions from the sphere of the public, in order to render rational consensus possible, but to mobilize those passions towards democratic designs.” (MOUFFE, 2000, p.104) We can hint the open up of that place of encounter, of dissent in Thamelitz work, but how will the democratic institutions that could embody society agonistic play, in large scale, look like? Thaemlitz is very pessimistic; she does not believe that there will be any substantial change, even though we can witness this change in her performance; so while not believing in change she is already performing that very same change. And even though we cannot envision the agonistic institutions that Mouffe argues for, where ‘conflictual consensus’ can be achieved, Thaemlitz is voicing out loud all that remains hidden, all that can be only uttered as private (here I mean as non public therefore almost as non political). Hers, as many other projects, is maintaining this possible agonistic pluralism, and therefore keeping “the democratic contestation alive” (MOUFFE, 2000, p.105). Thaemlitz performs democracy, but could it really be institutionalized, as Mouffe believes, in order to save democracy as a form of government and society, or is democracy something else, or better, lying somewhere else, ‘below and beyond’ state policy.

Mouffe argues that the common good is always something unreachable, is “a vanishing point, something to which we constantly refer when we are acting as citizens, but that can never be reached.” (MOUFFE, 1992, p.379) While for Rancière democracy is not a form of government nor a type of society, but egalitarian relations “that are traced here and now through singular and precarious acts,” is there is where we can spot democracy. (RANCIÈRE, 2006, p.96) Somehow their positions do not seem very different, but while Mouffe believes that change, even if precarious, can be achieved through governance, Rancière alert us to look at all that we consider today as democratic achievements, and how they were actually achieved outside the state framework, through people’s struggles and isolated acts.

My queries are these; what could an agonist democratic institution look like, and is it really necessary, or could democracy maintain itself on these temporary agonistic platforms, such as those provided by the arts? Moreover if democracy will never be a form of government but precarious single acts between equals, what is the role of organized social struggle and how can we envision different forms of community? What it seesm to happen in Thaemlitz work, for example is the possibility of different forms of community and empowerment within our oligarchic societies, done with the belief that nothing susbtancial will change, but it must be done anyhow. Although, I might accept that potential for change can be found in that articulation, I am still puzzled with the possibility of a truly democratic governance. But maybe I am down in the belief trap that Thaemelitz so violently urges us not to fall into.

NOVENA PRAYER (FOR NINE DAYS)
Hail, O Lady of Gender Transitioning, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, my hope!
To Thee do I send up my sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
O Holy Mother, in this age when feminine napkins are sold by South Korean transgendered celebrity Harisu, as Your imitators we beseech Thee for humility.
Forgive her envy of menstruation as that which she is "jealous of and wishes to do as a woman," and forgive my envy of sexual reassignment surgery as that which I am jealous of and wish to do as a "man."
Bless me, as You have blessed her, in granting faithful imitation and homage to Thine sacred womb, to give birth to my gender opposite.
Bless me with Thine beauty and grace.
Bless me with the heavenly riches necessary to complete such a transformation.
May the financial success of this audio project serve as the sacred seed of my own menstruation, an idillic flow like that seen in tampon commercials, a holy blue flow reflecting the plasticity of gender transitioning, draping my legs like Your blessed blue robe, that I may follow in Thine image.
O Lady of Gender Transitioning, pray for this sinner now and at the hour of my death, and receive me in my resurrection. This I humbly pray in Your name. Amen.

CHANTAL MOUFFE is a Belgium political theorist, knowned exactly for this notion of the pluralist agonistic democracy. From her vast work she is better known for have writen Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics with the Argentinian political theorist Ernesto Laclau in 1985.

TERRE THAEMLITZ is “a multi-media producer, writer, educator, DJ and owner of the Comatonse Recordings record label. His work combines a critical look at identity politics - including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race - with an ongoing analysis of the socio-economics of commercial media production. This diversity of themes is matched by Thaemlitz' wide range of production styles, which include electroacoustic computer music, club oriented deep house, digital jazz, ambient, and computer composed neo-expressionist piano solos.”

http://www.comatonse.com/thaemlitz/gigs.html

Thaemlitz is both addressed as male and female throughout this paper both because his own appearance in drag in the performances and her self address in her website are always in between male / female binary, therefore I used the hymn of gender transition to do the linguistic change on Thaemlitz, in lack of a better tool to convey her own gender troubling in a society where one can still not be gender neutral.


MOUFFE, C (1992) Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics. In BUTLER, J. and SCOTT, J. W. 1992. Feminist Theorize the Political. Routledge.

MOUFFE, C. (2000) The Democratic Paradox. London, New York. Verso.
RANCIÈRE, J. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. Verso.
THAEMLITZ, T. (2009) http://www.comatonse.com/writings/becoming-minor.html (01.05.2010)

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.