Reclaiming the Public Sphere

Communication, Power and Social Change

T. Askanius, L. Østergaard, T. Askanius, L. Østergaard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349485567, 9781137398741
• eBook ISBN: 9781137398758
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume brings together a range of different specialists in the arts and cultural industries, as well as international academics and public intellectuals, to explore how media and communication practices for social change are currently being reconfigured in both conceptual and rhetorical terms.

Part I

Theorising Communication for Social Change and the Transformation of Public Spheres

1

Voiceblind: Beyond the Paradoxes of the Neoliberal State

Nick Couldry

This book revolves around the idea of reclaiming the public sphere. When land is reclaimed from the sea, a common story in Denmark, the United Kingdom and many other countries, major work must be done to redirect the sea’s flow and to plan and build new types of foundations strong enough to support life on land that has been damaged. So, too, with democracy. In many countries, the experience of democracy has been eroded for decades by flows that once seemed supportive of democratic expression, but which have damaged its very basis. I refer to what I call the ‘crisis of voice’ in neoliberal democracies (Couldry, 2010). To survive this crisis and rebuild a democratic culture ‘after’ neoliberalism, we need to be attentive to where the energies of democracy are flowing right now, and to where they might be redirected. The circumstances of that rebuilding will be unstable. They will require clear-sightedness as to the conditions for new voices to be sustained, overcoming the paradoxical state of voice-blindness that characterizes the present. How we might start to do this is the main topic of this chapter.

The problem of neoliberalism¹

Let me start with the problem: the multi-level crisis of voice in which we find ourselves in neoliberal democracies. By neoliberal democracies, I mean states with the formal properties of democracy, which have been dominated for decades by neoliberal doctrine. By a crisis of voice I mean a situation in which, in many domains, voice is continually offered and yet retracted, endorsed but then made empty. The contradictions of late modern democratic politics are multiple and complex, and I do not mean to understate that complexity. I do, however, want to insist, as one element in the mix, on the specific intent of neoliberal doctrine for over three decades to make market functioning the overriding principle of social and political organization. The core of neoliberal doctrine – popularized by Milton Friedman and others in the US and the UK in the 1970s but with roots going back almost two centuries – is stated most clearly by Michel Foucault in his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, in which he identifies a deep rethinking of liberal governmentality that ‘does not ask the state what freedom it will leave to the economy, but asks the economy how its freedom can have a state-creating function’ (Foucault, 2008, pp. 94–95).

Here are the seeds of the idea, now so familiar, that markets themselves provide a principle of social organization, and therefore in turn a preferred model for transforming politics. Neoliberal discourse is an attack not just on particular conditions of political speech (or ‘voice’ in the familiar sense of political expression), but on the very idea that the opinions, desires and goals of human beings might matter in the organization of social and economic resources. Familiar here is the intellectual imperialism of a certain type of economic thought that, as Wendy Brown puts it, ‘while foregrounding the market, is not only or even primarily focused on the economy; rather it involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action’ (2005, pp. 39–40).

What do I mean by voice, the term that I diagnose as in crisis? I mean, first, the process whereby people give an account of the world within which they act (for a more detailed account see Couldry, 2010, chapter 1). This process is reflexive; that is, it is embodied and requires a material form, which may be individual, collective or distributed. The process of voice also relies on socially produced resources and is oriented to social exchange, which is why it can be undermined by an organizational rationality that takes no account of voice. So models for organizing life that place no value on voice undermine it by crowding out alternative narratives that would authorize us to value voice. I call any such model ‘a voice-denying rationality’.

Neoliberalism is just such a voice-denying rationality. It operates with an account of the social, as a space for expanding freedom modelled only on economic competition, which lacks most of the features associated with social life. If it is ever to be resisted, neoliberal rationality must be opposed by what Wendy Brown calls a ‘counter-rationality – a different figuration of human beings, citizenship, economic life, and the political’ (2005, p. 59). This is what must be established if democratic culture is to be rebuilt, although, as yet, we have few clear signs about how to do this.

You may say, however, that things are much more complicated than that – and of course they are. The current crisis of democracy in Europe, for example, is much more than a cultural construction. It is a profoundly practical crisis – a crisis of economic and political management. Neoliberalism’s slogan that ‘markets are always right’ has been intensely contested, if not exploded, ever since the financial collapse and banking crisis of the autumn of 2008 – and yet the crisis of democratic functioning continues. That democratic crisis has only deepened in the past year to a point where whatever voter majorities say in Greece, in Spain, in France, and so on, the same measures (budget cuts, labour market flexibilization, public service privatization) are imposed on the basis that global markets and ‘economic reality’ demand it.

Today’s crisis of voice, then, is shaped not just by neoliberal doctrine, but by the independent practical reality that the means available to national governments to manage their national economies have been drastically reduced during three decades of expanding global financial markets. As Colin Leys pointed out over a decade ago, the ‘internationalized state’ is characterized not just by its exposure to the huge growth in global capital markets but, just as importantly, by the huge increase in the dependence of national economies on foreign direct investment. The process has only intensified, particularly in the UK.

Leys uses 1997 figures (Leys, 2001, p. 16; and note 25). Using 2010 UNCTAD figures (www.unctad.org), the UK’s inward foreign direct investment as a percentage of GDP increased from 19 per cent in 1997 to 48 per cent in 2010. As a result, national governments face increasing pressures to adopt policies that are favourable to global markets.

What we call ‘the economy’ – nationally, regionally, globally – seems beyond democratic control. The theorist of the market-state, Philip Bobbitt, makes the same point more vividly. For him, attempts by the contemporary nation-state to control global markets are like those of ‘a bear chained to a stake, trying to chase a shifting beam of light’ (2003, pp. 220–221). During the unresolved euro crisis of the past year, intergovernmental meetings have become, we might add, like a sad circus of trapped animals gesturing at democratic freedom, but with little effect.

We have become accustomed to the idea that democracy does not work – and on many levels. We are already accustomed to this on a smaller scale in the organizations in which we are employed, which are dominated by what the UK financial sociologist, Michael Power, has called ‘audit culture’. This culture supplants the internal democratic processes of organizations and replaces them with the demands of apparent economic necessity. Whatever its apparently democratic motivation, ‘the audit process’, according to Power (1997, p. 117), ‘requires trust in experts and is not a basis for rational public deliberation. It is a dead end in the claim of accountability ... audit is in this respect a substitute for democracy rather than its aid’ (My emphasis added).

Yet celebratory theorists of the market-state, such as Bobbitt, may be more alive to its contradictions than conventional political commentary. Writing in 2003, Bobbitt announced the replacement of the nation state by the ‘market state’ as world markets are restructured along supranational lines. The aim of national governments shifts from maximizing the welfare of citizens to maximizing the opportunities for the population to participate in global markets. The offer of participation in government cannot be completely abandoned, however, if government is to retain any democratic legitimacy. Instead, that offer becomes contradictory: ‘there will be more public participation in government, but it will count for less’ (2003, p. 234).

There is a deeper contradiction. The legitimacy of the market state has its roots in the public goods necessary for any quality of life – goods that, as Bobbitt admits, the market ‘is not well adapted to creating or maintaining’. Bobbit lists these public goods as ‘Loyalty, civility, trust in authority, respect for family life’ (2003, p. 814). This is the underlying paradox of neoliberal politics: that neoliberal doctrine requires social goods that its market principles disavow and even undermine. If today’s crisis of voice involves a genuine impasse, namely how to manage economic life democratically at all on any level, then the only way forward must be a great deal of collective practical effort to rethink how populations manage what we call ‘the economy’. Efforts in that direction have only just started.

Again we must complicate our analysis, since this impasse in democratic management in all economies has much in common with deeper historical problems that have afflicted the modern concept of democracy itself. Drawing on the French political theorist, Pierre Rosanvallon, and his recent book, Political Legitimacy (2011), one way of reading today’s crisis of democratic management is as a conflict between the time of the global markets, which can move within minutes against a national economy through the yields demanded on its government’s bond offerings, and the time of democratic decision-making, which can never be synchronized with the changing demands of market processes. If the democratic crisis within the euro crisis is such a conflict between different temporalities, then, Rosanvallon notes, we can find just such a contradiction in the early discussions on democracy that followed the French Revolution.

It was the Marquis de Condorcet, Rosanvallon points out (2011, p. 128), who realized in 1790 that popular deliberation in a democracy requires a reflective context, the time for which must always extend beyond the moment of an election, or the moment when an elected government has to make a difficult decision. As a result, democracy inevitably involves multiple temporalities, and the role of ‘popular will’ is somehow to connect up those temporalities into something more coherent. Only in this way can we restore the dimension of political legitimacy that Rosanvallon calls ‘legitimacy of reflexivity’. Here, Rosanvallon notes, civil society organizations make a vital contribution to government’s response to such contradictions by ‘denouncing discrepancies between the fundamental principle of democracy and the reality’, and by ‘reintroducing the people as principle ... into the political arena’ (2011, p. 148). We can understand the Occupy movement and its attempt to interrupt the policy process in this way. Today’s democratic crisis has historical roots that long predate neoliberalism.

Rosanvallon sees another problem of legitimacy that runs alongside the difficulty of organizing democratic reflection to match the accelerated speed of government decision-making. This additional problem Rosanvallon calls ‘the legitimacy of proximity’, that is, the conflict between the distance from everyday life necessary if complex societies are to be governed at all and the proximity to everyday life experience needed if governing is to have any legitimacy over the long-term. Rulers must, within this new model, be ‘present’ to the people. Contemporary media of course provide practical ways for politicians to be ‘present’ to the people, and for the experiences of particular people to be ‘presented’ to government. There is a risk, however, Rosanvallon argues, of this media interface between government and people collapsing into an empty spectacle, which obstructs decision-making.

In response to this problem, Rosanvallon argues that we need new forms of democratic experimentation that allow citizens to become involved in government through new types of engagement that enable a better ‘exchange of information between government and society’ (2011, p. 209). Through his rich analysis, Rosanvallon opens our eyes to the continuing value of democratic experiment, and the possibility of new forms of democratic invention that might point beyond the current crisis. The static notion of the ‘general will’ in earlier democratic theory needs to be refreshed by what Rosanvallon calls ‘a constant generalization of the social’ (2011, p. 215), but without collapsing into a pure localism that ignores the very real coordination problems in contemporary societies.

How should we respond?

Rosanvallon’s recognition of democratic creativity provides a link to my focus on how we as citizens might respond to the difficult challenges that face the practice of democracy today. I want to make three points: first, on the importance of saying no; second, on the importance of saying yes; and, third, on the importance of reorienting ourselves away from false arenas of democratization towards other, more promising, ones.

My first point is that future democratic experimentation cannot succeed unless it is prepared to say no to the forces that negate democracy. Saying no does not, of course, require an act of violence: its negation operates at the level of discourse. In Jose Saramago’s wonderful novel Ensaio sobre a Lucidez (Seeing) (2007), published one year after the deeply undemocratic decision of some countries to go to war in Iraq, ‘saying no’ takes the form of submitting a blank ballot paper. This simple rejection of what is on offer – ambiguous as to its underlying reasons but completely clear in its enunciation, especially if, as in the novel, it is repeated a second time – works as if it were an act of symbolic violence against the principle of government. In the novel, it is interpreted as an act of violence by a government t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I Theorising Communication for Social Change and the Transformation of Public Spheres
• Part II  Contemporary Drivers of Social Change: Art, Technology and Public Pedagogy
• Part III  Practitioners and Practices: New Communication for Social Change Perspectives and Initiatives
• Afterword
• Index