Tuesday Night 02.01.11 – Truth & Politics Series -- Event 2
CONTENTS:
1. About this Tuesday
2. Note for Event 2
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1. About this Tuesday
When: 7.00 pm, Tuesday 02.01.11
Who: Free and open to all
Where: 16 Beaver Street 4th floor
What: Discussion
This Tuesday, we will be continuing our reading of Michel Foucault's lectures of 1983 in Berkeley entitled: Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia. We will focus on the second and third lectures.
The readings can be found at:
http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/
We have heard rumors of a solidarity public gathering on Wall Street this Thursday, February 3th, 3pm, apparently to call attention to the transnational oligarchs. Our own meeting takes place at 7pm this Tuesday. We hope those who are interested in reflecting on the inspiring events unfolding throughout North Africa and the Middle East with the help of a specific reading, to join us for what we hope will be an interesting discussion.
For additional notes on Event 2, please read the text below.
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2. Note for Event 2
The events in Tunisia and Egypt and the rest of the region, not only merit admiration and excitement, but they are also a reminder that if democracy means anything at all today, it is not as a form of government, where oligarchs or those who serve them take turns at representing change, but precisely as an activity of taking matters which have been de facto privatized, and returning to them, a public and collective character.
One hopes that the winds of such a 'democratic' process can inspire and conjoin to actions in other parts of the world, including the former West and East.
As Jacques Rancière writes in 'Hatred of Democracy':
"We do not live in democracies. Neither, as certain authors assert … do we live in camps. We live in States of oligarchic law, in other words, in States where the power of the oligarchy is limited by a dual recognition of popular sovereignty and individual liberties. We know the advantages of these sorts of States as well as their limitations. They hold free elections. These elections essentially ensure that the same dominant personnel is reproduced, albeit under interchangeable labels, but the ballot boxes are generally not rigged and one can verify it without risking one's life. The administration is not corrupt, except in matters of public contracts where administration is confounded with the interests of the dominant parties.
Individual liberties are respected, although there are notable exceptions here to do with whatever relates to the protection of borders and territorial security. There is freedom of the press: whoever wants to start up a newspaper or a television station without the assistance of the financial powers will experience serious difficulties, but he or she will not be thrown into prison. The rights of association, assembly and demonstration permit the organization of democratic life, that is, a life which is independent of the State sphere.'Permit' is obviously an ambiguous word. These freedoms were not the gifts of oligarchs. They were won through democratic action and are only ever guaranteed through such action. The 'rights of man and of the citizen' are the rights of those who make them a reality."
(Of course, the recent efforts to label such 'freedoms of the press' exercised by various groups, for example, Wikileaks, as a form of 'terrorism' or 'criminal' activity make Rancière's sobering account appear somehow rosy. But the points in this passage remain critical in calling into question ordinary assumptions about what democracy signifies.)
Last week, in our first meeting in the Truth & Politics Series, we spoke about some of these assumptions as well as the assumed 'freedoms.' Moreover, we spoke about the recent events unfolding Iran, Tunisia, Algeria, now Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, .... And we asked, 'How is it that places associated with severe restrictions on such 'freedoms' seem to be the source of some of the most vibrant 'democratic' processes?
To cite Rancière again: "The democratic process is the process of a perpetual bringing into play, of invention of forms of subjectivation, and of cases of verification that counteract the perpetual privatization of public life. Democracy really means, in this sense, the impurity of politics, the challenging of governments' claims to embody the sole principle of public life and in so doing be able to circumscribe the understanding and extension of public life. If there is a 'limitlessness' specific to democracy, then that's exactly where it lies: not in the exponential multiplication of needs or of desires emanating from individuals, but in the movement that ceaselessly displaces the limits of the public and the private, of the political and the social."
We outlined these events in affirming that either the vocabulary we have is insufficient or we need to give them new life. So we wondered, if in fact, Foucault's return to the notion of Parrhesia in antiquity was not an effort, similar to Rancière's in 'Hatred of Democracy' to take a notion like 'free speech' and resituate it, give it a context, that could return to it an exigency and a political vocation.
This week, we hope to continue such discussions, by looking at the second and third lectures:
2 - Parrhesia in the Tragedies of Euripides
http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/foucault.DT2.parrhesiaEuripides.en.html
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/videodir/foucault/p831024b.mp3
3 - Parrhesia and the Crisis of Democratic Institutions
http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/foucault.DT3.democracy.en.html
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/videodir/foucault/p831031.mp3
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16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th fl.
New York, NY 10004
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http://www.16beavergroup.org
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