Democracy and the Question of Power

Discussion on the viability of democracy in what can be broadly conceived as a “postmodern” age has mainly turned around two central issues: 1) does not the current dispersion and fragmentation of political actors conspire against the emergence of strong social identities which could operate as nodal points for the consolidation and expansion of democratic practices?; and 2) is not this very multiplicity the source of a particularism of social aims which could result in the dissolution of the wider emancipatory discourses considered as constitutive of the democratic imaginary? The first issue is connected with the increasing awareness of the ambiguities of those very social movements about which so many sanguine hopes were conceived in the 1970s. There is no doubt that their emergence involved an expansion of the egalitarian imaginary to increasingly wider areas of social relations. However, it also became progressively clearer that such an expansion does not necessarily lead to the aggregation of the plurality of demands around a broader collective will (in the Gramscian sense). Some years ago, for instance, in San Francisco there was widespread belief in the potential for the formation of a powerful popular pole, given the proliferation of demands coming from blacks, Chicanos, and gay people. Nothing of the kind, however, happened, among other reasons because the demands of each of these groups clashed with those of the others. Even more: does not this fragmentation of social demands make it easier for the state apparatuses to deal with them in an administrative fashion ‐ which results in the formation of all types of clientelistic networks, capable of neutralizing any democratic opening? The horizontal expansion itself of those demands which the political system has to be sensitive to conspires against their vertical aggregation in a popular will capable of challenging the existing status quo. Political projects such as the “Third Way” or the “radical center” clearly express this ideal of creating a state apparatus sensitive to some extent to social demands, but which operates as an instrument of demobilization. As for the second issue, its formulation runs along parallel lines. With the breaking up of the totalizing discourses of modernity, we are running the risk of being confronted with a plurality of social spaces, governed by their own aims and rules of constitution, leaving any management of the community ‐ conceived in a global sense ‐ in the hands of a technobureaucracy located beyond any democratic control. With this, the notion of a public sphere, to which was always linked the very possibility of a democratic experience, is seriously put into question. One