Public Space as Emancipation: Meditations on Anarchism, Radical Democracy, Neoliberalism and Violence

Springer, Simon

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00827.x

Cited by 110 publications

(93 citation statements)

References 80 publications

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“…Nevertheless, future research could add to the already existing literature on democracy and neoliberalism (Leys, 2003;Springer, 2011;Swyngedouw, 2015) consideration of the extent to which democracy in general, and representative democracy in particular, remains an oxymoron under neoliberalism. In addition to rejecting the main basis of democracy, the sovereign people, neoliberalism threatens political representation as such.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From the exclusion of the people in neoliberalism to publicity without a public

Queiroz

2017

Palgrave Commun

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This paper argues that the neoliberal political order relies on a particular concept of publicity-the concept of openness or transparency without a public (a populus or demos), the main content of which is the unconditional maxim "There Is No Alternative" (TINA for short). Its central claim is that the neoliberal conception of publicity without a public, connected as it is to secrecy and unconditional adherence to TINA, precludes the possibility of the "people" as an ultimate intentional sovereign legislator. Although research has revealed the strategic importance of publicity for communicative capitalism, this aspect of neoliberalism has yet to be addressed. As a means of clarifying the neoliberal concept of publicity, this paper will show that neoliberal theory cannot consistently accept the existence of the people as sovereign while maintaining its adherence to TINA. Second, it invokes the Kantian conception of publicity, which involves not merely openness and visibility but also the will of the populus. One of Kant's central insights is that publicity is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for fairness at the level of political decision-making. When public (openly accessible) statements are not based on the will of the people, publicity can become a means of illegitimate political domination against sovereign peoples. Building on Kant's insights, this paper will show that publicity without a public, along with its central mantra, TINA, is also, at the practical level, neoliberalism's main means of destroying the legislative sovereignty of the people. Since TINA precludes the possibility of the people as sovereign, analysis of the neoliberal conception of publicity that underlies TINA provides new arguments for the view that neoliberalism is essentially despotic in nature. It also points to the importance of the political category of "the sovereign people", which is all the greater where illiberal and undemocratic political alternatives jockey to fill the vacuum left by a system that, at its ideological core, cannot acknowledge the common good.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From the exclusion of the people in neoliberalism to publicity without a public

Queiroz

2017

Palgrave Commun

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“…As mentioned above, some of the analyses that have searched for continuities with other recent mass mobilizations have revealed that various partial mobilizations stemmed from certain injustice frames and, that they also evoked Gezi resistance.This approach involves describing the demonstrations' subjects concretely. For instance, workers, environmentalist organizations, supporters of soccer teams, secular, urban and/or middle class women, and Alawites are some of the agents referring to certain injustice frames that emerged during JDP's governing period between 2011(Dogan 2014. Any frame, indicating both a certain antagonism and subjectivity,constitutes a set of agencies and identities acting in protests.…”

Section: Features Symbols and Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Assessment of the Gezi Protests in Turkey in 2013: Political Agency as anArticulation Practice

Özdemir¹

2015

RHPS

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The Gezi protests in Turkey in 2013 were a mass reaction to a government urban regeneration project in Istanbul's Taksim Square and Gezi Park. The mobilization, which started with occupying the park and square, rapidly expanded into a mass movement beyond İstanbul. Through analyzing the subjectification that emerged in the protests, this paperargues that the Gezi resistance represents a discursive articulation among diverse agencies and identities as Laclau and Mouffe suggest intheir radical democracy theory.The article aims to describe the movement's discursive elements, and reveal how the divergent elements linked in anarticulated whole and established new political frontiers, in order to understand how a diverse set of agencies and identities were able to act as an articulated whole. Was it a movement defending rights to the city, defending a life style or struggling against the government's neoliberal policies? I argue that partial struggles and diverse antagonisms in articulatory practices constituted a subject including all these contexts.

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“…(Kristeva, 2006) It is space in which what is legitimate, and what is not, is shifting, debated and contested (Arendt, 1964a). Worldliness is contestation of repressive power and rejection of coercive authority [Springer, 2011;Jun, (2010), p.51]. Contestation is judgement of, for example, the authority of bureaucracy, which is problematic precisely because it is so abstract, as shown above.…”

Section: Space and Ephemeral Acts Of Autonomy -Creative Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, it is a collective process of making social space in which the subject comes to be and act, and, in turn, produces space. This constellation needs the physical space for people to come together, collaborate and appear as legitimate claimants (Springer, 2011). Such recognition might lead to a different outcome than violence of arrest, physical violence and deportation back into the Saharan desert (Collyer, 2010), although it might just as likely lead to no more than a moment's hesitation.…”

Section: Social Embryos Of Political Existence?mentioning

confidence: 99%

International Migration: Transit space - creative space?

Oelgemöller

2017

IJMBS

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Abstract:Is it possible to make illegal migrants intelligible as a force creating social space? What is transit space? Many migration experts seem to ignore the transit space beyond managing geopolitical borders. Much literature analyses this space in terms of the migrant's (in)capacity to act. I argue that transit space policies make possible both a particular kind of illegality of the transit space and ephemeral spaces of solidarity/creativity quite different from the places of citizenship (accorded or denied). Geopolitical transit space is intrinsically important to understanding how contradictory mobility practices are constructed. My speculation is informed by a postanarchist perspective and draws on selected ethnographic studies for illustration. Approaching transit space as contradictory constellation makes it political, in that abstract logics imposed by the European discursive order interact with ephemeral practices, producing violence and solidarity in a way that throws what is licit and illicit open to radical questioning.

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Public Space as Emancipation: Meditations on Anarchism, Radical Democracy, Neoliberalism and Violence

Cited by 110 publications

References 80 publications

From the exclusion of the people in neoliberalism to publicity without a public

From the exclusion of the people in neoliberalism to publicity without a public

An Assessment of the Gezi Protests in Turkey in 2013: Political Agency as anArticulation Practice

International Migration: Transit space - creative space?

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