FOUR DEMOCRATIC PRACTICES by Katherine Goktepe A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland September 2016 Abstract: This dissertation begins with a problem. Democracy as a concept, and as a practice, has come under attack. This dissertation is concerned with bringing to attention the ways in which Shakespeare’s theater gives us access to experiences that could allow us to imagine new democratic practices or techniques of the self. I see role-playing, courage, optimism, and overhearing as a set of democratic practices that I argue can help revitalize democracy, analyzing themes from Shakespeare with and against contemporary theorists such as Jürgen Habermas, Lauren Berlant, and Jacques Ranciere. I argue that Shakespeare’s writing gives us access to dramatizations of experiences and rich characterizations of human beings that can allow us to imagine democratic ideals in fresh and exciting new ways. Through close readings and more cultural analyses, I appropriate Shakespeare for our own time, to make him relevant politically for us. Readers: Jane Bennett, Sam Chambers, William Connolly, Paul Delnero, Andrew Miller ii Acknowledgments: For their brilliant and exceedingly helpful comments on drafts, I would like to thank Jane Bennett, Sam Chambers, and Drew Daniel. For reading the dissertation, and for their thoughtful questions and suggestions at the defense, I would like to thank William Connolly, Paul Delnero, and Andrew Miller. For feedback on very early and inchoate iterations of chapters, I would like to thank Chad Shomura and Chas Phillips. For their support and encouragement, I would like to thank Daniel Deudney, Renee Marlin-Bennett, Jennifer Culbert, Mary Otterbein, Zach Reyna, Tim Hanafin, and Nathan Gies. For their good cheer, generosity, deep conversation, and profound wisdom, I would like to thank Marianna Toma, Rhonda Evans, Katie Boyle, Abby Fox, Anu Prasad, Daisy Kim, and Evelyn DiTosto. Last but most importantly, thanks to my mom— the very best. iii Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1 ‘Sometimes I Mean Things So Much I Have To Act’: Rethinking Communicative Action…………………………………………………………………………………….32 Comic Courage…………………………………………………………………………..79 Dissatisfied With The Now: Optimism And Equality Amid Villains………………….141 Democratic Overhearing: Cultivating A ‘Third Ear’ And Repartitioning The Sensible.201 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...242 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………251 Curriculum Vitae………………………………………………………………….........266 iv Introduction: Is it curtains for democracy? The case for one last act This dissertation begins with a problem. Democracy as a concept, and as a practice, has come under attack. To a number of contemporary theorists, it seems threadbare, nothing more than an empty term, a false promise. As Wendy Brown writes, democracy “has never been more conceptually footloose and substantively hollow” (Brown 2009: 44). For Brown, particularly worrisome is the neoliberal-capitalist stranglehold on democracy. Corporate and state power are welded by more than haphazard catalysis: State power is designed to support the accumulation of capital, undermining democratic practices of popular rule, canalizing democrats’ dwindling energies into bread and circuses (the spectacle of the 2016 presidential election illustrates this perfectly). “Powerless to say no to capital’s needs, they [the populace] mostly watch passively as their own are abandoned” (Brown 2009: 47). Neoliberal emphases on costs, benefits, productivity and the market undermine the importance of democratic principles such as freedom and equality. Suspension of rights and racial profiling are ascribed to the exigencies of the security state. What is worse: “the majority of Westerners have come to prefer moralizing, consuming, conforming, luxuriating, fighting, simply being told what to be, think, and do over the task of authoring their own lives (Brown 2009: 55).1 Given this assessment of democracy, to pin our lives on such a concept seems delusional. For Jodi Dean and Alain Badiou, championing democracy sidelines a rigorous leftist critique of capitalism. As Badiou writes, the literal meaning of democracy is “the power of peoples over their own existence,” and for him, this will only come to fruition, 1 See also Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” where she argues that the ideals of “democracy” give cover to the workings of an insidious and pervasive neoliberal market rationality. In neoliberalism, “the body politic ceases to be a body but is, rather, a group of individual entrepreneurs and consumers” (Brown 2003: 7). Neoliberalism signals the death of liberal democracy as we knew it. Instead, democracy is refigured as a ubiquitous entrepreneurialism. 1 “we will only ever be true democrats[,]…when we become communists” (Badiou 2009: 15). Dean sees less in the very term democracy—both as evoked by the left and by democratic theorists who implicitly assume no alternative. As Dean writes: "Calling for democracy, leftists fail to emphasize the divisions necessary for politics, divisions that should lead us to organize against the interests of corporations and their stockholders, against the values of fundamentalists and individualists, and on behalf of collectivist arrangements designed to redistribute benefits and opportunities more equitably” (Dean 2009: 76). As she reminds us, "existing constitutional democracies privilege the wealthy" and protect a neoliberal capitalism that oppresses the underprivileged even as it expands a middle-class brand of hope that everyone can believe in (ibid). Democracy, I would add, is not only a neoliberal fantasy—allowing us to believe that democratic participation will help change an oppressive economic and social system—but a liberal one. For example, Stephen White writes that political liberalism “takes shape, albeit tacitly, around a sense of the moderate well-being (both economically and politically) of large portions of the population in Western, liberal democracies” and that this is partly to blame for an inadequate sensitivity to or ability to alleviate the “substantial suffering on the part of other segments [of a state’s population]” (White 2001: 183-184). There is little hope that democratic participation alone will help change an oppressive economic and social system. Adding to these academic worries are pronouncements in the popular press regarding the democracy’s loss of momentum in the 21st Century (“What’s Gone Wrong,” 2014; Plattner 2015). The number of democratic countries seems to have reached its peak in the second half of the 20th century, but that progress seems to have 2 stalled in the past 16 years. With China's rise, Putin's power consolidation, and the Arab spring's failures, democracy looks less and less attractive as a state model, especially for capitalist states that value efficiency and swift legislative action. Countries that had made healthy democratic strides 20 years ago have descended into forms of despotism, one- party rule, or electoral chaos: Turkey, South Africa, Bangladesh, and Thailand, for example. Extremist, populist candidates in France, Austria, Greece, and the Netherlands demonstrate the drawbacks of popular rule. Even the US, with its long, illustrious democratic history, does not make a very desirable case for this system of rule. Party polarization, gerrymandering, and campaign finance regulations that allow wealthy donors to shape politics make all too visible democracy’s weaknesses. But if, according to these pronouncements about democracy, the house is on fire, this dissertation takes a turn at the pump. But it is important first to clarify what I mean by democracy, as democracy is a constellation of (contested) concepts. Am I concerned with freedom of the press, human dignity, universal suffrage, rule of law, freedom, fair elections? The main concept in democracy I wish to draw out, the primary value within the multivalent “democracy” to which I give priority, is equality. I do this despite the fact that, as Brown writes, “the promise of modern democracy has always been freedom” as opposed to a premodern, republican emphasis on the principle of equality (Brown 2009: 51, emphasis original). I take equality to be the most important perhaps because it is one of the least practiced and most difficult to implement elements of democracy today— further undermined by a capitalist system that awards those already on the top of the 2 hierarchy. 2 It should go without saying, I view democratic equality as distinct from capitalism. If there is an equality central to capitalism, it is more this idea that everyone is equally vulnerable to capitalist “risk, threat, and 3 If our democratic practices are not self-activating (as they seem not to be just looking at the empirical data), if we need periodically to cultivate a set of spirited virtues3 to enliven those practices, how can we best do that? What exemplars can we turn to for inspiration, as guides? How can we best motivate broad-scale democratic empowerment? This project is indebted to Sharon Krause’s work (2002) that answers similar questions. Her book Liberalism with Honor responds to a problem she has diagnosed in neoliberal society today, the sobering insight that we have lost faith in individual agency. Krause seeks to invigorate the civic sources of liberal democracy by affirming honor as both a code of conduct and a quality of character that can