Agonistic democracy : the decentred "I" of the 1990s

Abstract

The thesis concerns the dynamics during the 1990s of political action by many groups of people, in what came to be called the movement of movements. The activists, who held that corporations were overstepping some mark, worked on alternative arrangements for self-rule. The thesis views the movement as micropolitics, using concepts devised by Deleuze and Guattari. It sets out particulars of the rhizomic make -up of the movement. A key point is that the movement trains participants in decentred organisation, which entails the forming of subject-groups as opposed to subjugated groups. The thesis records how the movement was shaped by earlier events in political action and thinking, especially from the 1960s on. The movement had previously been read as a push for absolute democracy (Hardt and Negri). The thesis shows that reading to have been incomplete: the movement is, in part, a push for agonistic democracy. More a practice than a form of rule, agonistic democracy is found where state power is bent on not moulding peoples into any unified polity. It is found where state power fosters conflicted-self-rule, so that every citizen may engage in the polity as a decentred "I". The thesis throws light on relations between the movement and the constitutionalist state. Part of the movement, while cynical about the existing form of state rule, wears a mask of obedience to constituted authority. When one upholds the fiction of legitimate rule, one can use the fiction as a restraint on the cynics-in-power. The play creates a shadow social contract, producing detente within the polity and within the "I". The thesis also reports on a search in mainstream cinema for some expression of the movement's dynamics. The search leads to a cycle of thrillers, set in a nonfiction frame story about a coverup of gross abuse of state power.