Elaboración de los modelos de intervención

In arguing what a political realm entails and why it is needed, the implication is that such a realm does not easily or obviously exist. As alluded to with reference to the protest movements, examples of political realms have tended not to be durable or permanent but sporadically and unexpectedly come into being against the normal state of affairs in which there is very little that could be considered a political realm in the sense described above. Arendt has a name for this situation which characterizes life in the modern liberal democratic state: the social realm. In the modern era there is no longer much of a

distinction between public and private, and instead we have the realm of the social where public and private “constantly flow into each other like waves”.128 _{In the modern social}

realm, which devours both the political realm and the private realm, there is an inversion effect at play. Everything that was once considered public, such as politics, is now deemed private, and everything which was once considered private is now displayed publicly. The results of this inversion are especially striking when considering the internet, where governments presume they can spy on the private activities of everyone yet call those who publicize government secrets “traitors”.129 _{The key difference between}

the public and private realms, as opposed to the social realm, is the status of publicity and privacy. The separation of the two realms means that some things should not be a matter

128 _{Arendt, The Human Condition, 33.}

129 _{Jonathan Turley, “Edward Snowden: Whistleblower or Traitor?,” Al-Jazeera, June 9, 2014,}

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/06/edward-snowden-whistleblower-tra- 20146955611522671.html.

of public discussion and should be kept private, while others, in particular politics, cannot exist privately and require a broad sense of publicity. Before moving on to discussing the internet fully, I will briefly interrogate the idea of the social in order to fully elaborate how it most accurately describes the current state of online space in the next chapter.

In a situation where the social realm has swallowed up the political realm, the possibility for political action as a means to both distinguish oneself, engage with one’s equals, and be free, is greatly diminished. The social excludes action in favour of behaviour, which normalizes people and equates individuals with their status, rank, or categorized identity within society.130 In the social realm, action becomes a statistical deviation through which large numbers eliminate the meaning and significance of rare deeds. In politics, it is the statistical outliers consisting of great deeds which are most interesting and relevant, whereas in statistical economics such outliers are thrown out as irrelevant in favour of analyzing the everyday behaviour of consumers and taxpayers.131 Especially in the neoliberal era, even elected officials for the most part attempt to avoid any kind of grand acts in favour of the everyday activity of administration where the highest goal is balancing the national budget rather than performing some great deed that will immortalize them.

Given that the closing off of the political realm is a common theme in thinkers as diverse as Arendt, Rancière, and Foucault, the anti-political character of the social realm has a tendency to take on many different forms and employ different methods. Rancière categorizes these forms of social anti-politics into three regime types: archipolitics, parapolitics, and metapolitics. Archipolitics involves positing a community in which everyone is assigned a specific place in order to ensure a harmonic society in which politics is exclusively the domain of those who are assigned to that position.132 Political space takes on a character of being a limited and exclusive container, in which only those assigned to a given place are allowed within it. Plato’s myth of the three metals being mixed into each class of people demonstrates the archipolitical conception of the social

130 _{Arendt, The Human Condition, 40–41.} 131 _{Ibid., 42.}

realm, as the assigning of roles, statuses, and places is meant to be taken as natural. Those mixed with gold are assigned to the place of philosophy and rulership, those mixed with silver become the guardians of the city, and those mixed with iron and bronze become the farmers, craftsmen, and merchants.133 Plato develops this myth in order to naturalize and depoliticize the spatial arrangement of his city, thus if a farmer were to stray from the space of farming and attempt to enter the space of rulership, that farmer would be sewing disorder and committing a crime against nature. Plato’s entire archipolitical spatial strategy relies on the virtue of sophrosyne: the art of minding one’s own business.134 _The

archipolitical spatial strategy involves keeping people within their assigned place and rests on the presumption that people cannot take on multiple roles at the same time, and to attempt to do so is inherently disruptive.135 Echoes of archipolitical rejections of political activity are evident when protesters are labelled as disruptive nuisances and told to get a job, with the implication being that they are straying out of their assigned place in society and thus causing unnecessary discord.

Today, however, the primary anti-political regime type is parapolitics, which is based on displacing political conflict onto the contest over the occupation of offices as in representative democracy.136 In this sense rulership is still based on the model of force as an acting on people from a distance, rather than the power of the people coming together to act collectively, but there is now a rotation of people through those offices so that as Aristotle put it, there is an alternation of “being ruled and ruling in turn.”137 _{There is still}

a strict separation between the space of public affairs and the space of other activities, but with parapolitics, people are not confined to given spaces but can enter the decision space when it is their turn. The egalitarian presumption of parapolitics is that anyone can be a ruler due to the alternation of the rulers and the ruled, which obscures its spatial strategy of making the space of rulership distant and very small. This is evident in Aristotle who states that the best form of democracy is one where the bulk of the people are farmers.138

133 _{Plato, The Republic: 415a-d.} 134 _{Ibid: 443d.}

135 _{Plato’s critique of mimesis underscores this point, see The Republic: 596-608} 136 _{Rancière, Disagreement, 72.}

137 _{Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985): Book 6,}

Chapter 2.

Unlike in a city, farmers are spread across the land and are distant from the centre of authority, making it difficult for them to enter a political realm, even if they have the theoretical right to do so. As Rancière puts it, parapolitics “is thus realized as the distribution of bodies over a territory that keeps them apart from each other, leaving the central space of politics to the ‘better off’ alone.”139 _{Parapolitics relies on the spatial}

strategy of allowing citizens to theoretically occupy a limited official political realm by allowing anyone to be elected to that space, but in practice makes the occupation of offices available only to a select few who have the time and money to run.

In the modern state, which encompasses large areas of territory and huge populations, the parapolitical argument on spatial distance is often cited as the primary reason for representative government over any other form that is more inclusive and participatory. Tocqueville sums up this parapolitical attitude well when he claims that the viability of American democracy was a result of that country’s wide open spaces with few inhabitants.140 This notion of a rural farming democracy with people living too far away to meet and engage in politics at first glance would seem to be in stark contrast to urbanized modern capitalism. Even Marx and Engels praise capitalism for having “greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and [having] thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”141 This kind of agglomeration of people into cities, driven by industrialization, was believed by Marx and Engels to set the stage for communism since it brought people together and allowed for the possibility of forming political connections. Instead, however, people were pushed together into societal masses in which we trip over each other without being able to distinguish ourselves from anyone else.

Marxist metapolitics devalues the political realm into mere superstructure and as something to be done away with by the progressive march of history. As Rancière argues, “metapolitics is the discourse on the falseness of politics” in which “politics is the lie about a reality that is called society.”142 _{If the social is the truth that politics seeks to}

139 _{Rancière, Disagreement, 94.} 140 _{Cited in Ibid.}

141 _{Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 224.} 142 _{Rancière, Disagreement, 82–83.}

distort through ideology, then the specificity of politics is eliminated in favour of the natural life process and once again public and private are inverted and flow into each other, and a properly political realm is lost. The gap between the formal declaration of equality and the lived experience of inequality are, in metapolitical terms, interpreted as evidence of the falseness of politics. Whereas for politics proper, the internal division of the people and the gaps between formal rights and practiced wrongs become the basis for continued collective action.143 _{Like with archipolitics, there is a desire to purge the}

agonistic element inherent in politics by eliminating the realm for politics altogether in favour of a conception of the social realm where not only is the specificity of politics lost in favour of wide scale impositions of consensus and economic administration, but our privacy is sacrificed as well.

While usually the focus is on the social realm eroding the political realm, it eats up the private realm as well. In doing so, our private place where we can hide from others, away from the harsh light of the public is taken away, which in turn makes public life shallower.144 This can be seen even with something as trivial as Hollywood

celebrities, as when they are constantly filmed by paparazzi their official public appearances seem hollow and uninteresting. The weight of celebrity depends on not being seen, so that public appearances of celebrity are actually more meaningful. This is especially true for politics, as for most people there are times when they simply want to do something else away from their public political commitments. This is the problem of modern politicians who, in the social realm, are not afforded privacy as their private endeavours are often more of a public concern than their actual activities in parliament.

In many ways homelessness is the primary characteristic of the social realm. There is both no place to go that is truly public and political, and yet also no place that is truly hidden from the gaze of the social, especially in the era of the internet in which every mundane detail of our lives is shared on social networks or is the possible object of government spying. As Benhabib notes, the private realm should function as a shelter for the body, so that when we do enter the political realm, our private person, identity, or

143 _{Ibid., 87.}

body are not threatened as a result of our public opinions.145 This does not mean that in the political realm one must pretend to be neutral or ignore the fact that our private experiences shape our political views, but simply that one’s private life and our body need protection from the public so that one’s political opinions do not harm one’s private life away from the public realm. In the social realm, private identities are flung into the public and the result has been an influx of identity-based movements which at best argued for inclusion into the social realm and at worse have attempted to exclude other identities from the social whole. In this sense, the rise of depoliticized multiculturalism and xenophobic outbreaks of violence which focus on private cultural, religious, or ethnic identities are both symptoms of the social realm’s attack on privacy. The loss of privacy that accompanies the lack of political space in the social realm is nowhere more apparent than on the internet where the problem of the social is becoming more and more evident. While the social realm has become dominant both offline and online, the capacity to create new political spaces is not lost. As the examples from Egypt, Tunisia, and Occupy demonstrate, activists are increasingly turning to the internet to create political realms that have the capacity to resist both the ossification of official state politics and to some extent even the creep of the social realm.