Session 1: Democracy’s Exclusions

1st Global Conference

Friday 30th April – Sunday 2nd May 2010
Prague, Czech Republic

Democracy and Listening
Gideon Calder
School of Health and Social Sciences, University of Wales, Newport, Wales.

All accounts of  democracy provide space for the speaker; very few mention or acknowledge the place of listening in the decision-making process. Thus agency, authority and contribution to that process are located on the side of assertion, rather than attention. Yet a case can be made that listening is as crucial to any viable conception of what democratic decision-making is. Rather than passive or purely receptive, listening might be understood as a particular kind of activity or skill.

This paper will discuss both the ways in which listening has been neglected in democratic theory and the importance of involving it. It will argue that Aristotle’s conception of politics, despite its emphasis on the role of voice, in fact provides a more fertile basis for taking due account of why listening is important than much contemporary deliberative democratic theory – which barely mentions listening at all.

Democracy as Hegemony?
Thomas Decreus
Department of Political Philosophy, University of Leuven, Belgium

An important amount of contemporary democratic thinkers seem to agree that the core of democracy consists in keeping alive the discordant atmosphere in the political process. Their fundamental claim is that there can be no real pluralism without real conflict. But, of course, not any kind of conflict or pluralism can be tolerated. The specificity and uniqueness of democracy is precisely the way in which we deal with conflict and pluralism. But, in order to have democratic conflict instead of, for example, an armed conflict, we have to agree on certain principles, such as liberty and equality for all, which are constitutive for democracy and democratic society.

In my paper I want to discuss the nature of those constitutive principles of democracy. I want to start from the basic insights of Chantal Mouffe on this matter and specify her point of view. She puts emphasis on the hegemonic nature of these principles and rejects any rational (Rawls) or moral (Habermas) foundations of these principles. But is the answer of Mouffe sufficient? Can we conceive of the basic principles of democracy as merely the result of a hegemonic order? I want to argue that is not the case and that the vision of Mouffe can be questioned in name of her own basic assumptions.

However, this doesn’t mean that we have to accept the ideas of Rawls and Habermas. In my conclusion I want to develop some perspectives for another view on this topic which allow us to take into account some notions of rationality and morality without denying the fundamental critique that Mouffe has formulated concerning rationalistic and moralistic views on democracy.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Democracy in Silence: Speaking, Silence and the Saturday Vigils in Turkey
Zeynep Goker
City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, USA

Starting with an assertion that democratic theory has to pay attention to the formation of democratic subjectivities in actual practices, this paper focuses on a silent demonstration that took place in Turkey to discuss the notion of “silence” vis-à-vis democratic theory, especially in its deliberative and agonistic manifestations. Vis-à-vis silence, the paper discusses the notion of “speaking” and its association with democracy and the experience of democratic citizenship, to expand our understanding of the political. The paper aims to show that a positive discussion of silence largely misses from democratic theory while democratic citizenship is implicitly equated with speaking, either as reasoned speech or as the manifestation of the excluded voice. The paper argues that it is possible to frame silence in a political way such that it constitutes a democratic engagement and demonstrates that democratic subjectivities are also formed in actions and places that are largely overlooked. The investigation of the Saturday Vigils, held by the mothers of the disappeared-under-arrest between 1995 and 1999, confirms that silence does not necessarily represent compliance or a dead-end in communication but carries the potential to turn into democratic engagements, opening up spaces for active listening and plurality, especially in contexts where speech is burdened with barren dichotomies, as well as in expressions of the unspeakable. Especially in such politics of mourning, or vigils which implicitly invite gendered analyses of democracy and militarism, it is seen that the presence of women in the public space challenges the association of certain values with the private realm as mothers display them as democratic tools in the public sphere, hence constituting a gendered response to the militarization of everyday life that limits the experience of democratic citizenship.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)