Articulated Experiences: Toward a Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Movements

5: Technological Liberalism and the Oppressive Categorization of “Transgressive” Actors

103 C H A P T E R 5 Technological Liberalism and the Oppressive Categorization of “Transgressive” Actors Institutionalized violence is visible to all today in the catatonic state that is the gift of generalized production and administration. Measured against these, much of contemporary violence amounts instead to counterviolence. If there is a regression in denouncing thoughtlessness, it is an analytical step backward from oppressions to the economies that make them possible. . . . What need to be analyzed are the principles born of epochs whose economy called for them. Genealogical analysis can show that these principles are not only deadly but also mortal. Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting1 The Zapatista discourse, as discussed, articulated experiences (“past-perils”) of oppression and injustice which enabled a destinal, social movement toward the social imaginary that alluded to the possibility of freedom and justice. Any social movement goes through this process of formation. But, in the course of their struggles against the perceived sources of oppression, contemporary social movements must at one point or another deal with the state. That is not to suggest that two totally different regional laws (i.e., that of society vis-à-vis that of politics) each govern social movements and the state. Social movements and the state are different spheres within the same hegemonic regime, but they represent different or adverse horizons. The clash of horizons is what makes social movements confront and challenge the state and vice versa. In Western liberal democracies, the confrontations between social movements and the state are mediated through the discourse 104 articulated experiences of rights and the entire institutional apparatus that is based on the corroboration , processing, and regulation of the rights of citizens. As the first step toward the deconstruction of the concept of rights as an integral part of the hegemonic regimes of liberal democracy, the phenomenological “stepping-back” will allow us to refrain from the centrality of the anthropological notion of unitary subject on which the liberal concept of individual rights hinges. Laclau’s and Mouffe’s differentiation of three formerly equivalent terms—subordination, oppression, and domination— provides a perfect starting point. Oppression: “ . . . That Dangerous Supplement . . . ” The supplement is maddening because it is neither presence nor absence and because it consequently breaches both our pleasure and our virginity. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology2 If, as Gramsci suggests, consent originally stems from and is a part of the built-in apparatuses operative in hegemony, and not simply from the citizen’s “giving” of it as such (i.e., in total freedom, through choice and volition, and aware of the consequences of choice), then what are the mechanisms of the systemic construction of consent in liberal democratic regimes? Here, I shall provide an answer to this question by probing Laclau’s and Mouffe’s formulation of the “democratic revolution,” seeking to unravel what their formulation has to offer beyond its authors’ intent. The reason for this specific approach is twofold. First, the mere perpetuation of social movements, “old” or “new,” primarily exposes and accentuates the problematic areas—problematic in terms of unveiling the unequal distribution of power among different actors—within the social. Second, as a result of the first premise, social movements name and define the unequal social relations that define power in every society. In practice, the new social movements name these relations without assuming a unitary subject or a fully constituted agent, and this is one of the reasons why these movements are “new.” In their theory of the democratic revolution, Laclau and Mouffe show the relationship between power, antagonism, and democratic struggles. The differentiation between the three aforementioned terms provides a point of departure for the exploration of how oppression is operative in liberal regimes. One of contributions of Laclau and Mouffe to contemporary social and political thought is to show that far from unitary, the subject occupies a plurality of subject positions that have no necessary relationship with one another. In other words, the subject is penetrated by a multiplicity of rela- technological liberalism 105 tions of subordination, possibly being dominant in some and subordinate in others. Thus, as Mouffe writes, the identity of the “subject is . . . always contingent and precarious, temporarily fixed at the intersection of those subject positions and dependent on specific forms of identification.”3 It is through articulation and antagonism at the intersection of subject positions that the identity of the subject is fixed in an “us-them” relationship between the...