nettime: on media and democracy - Jaques Derrida

[Pit Schultz <pit@contrib.de>]

exerpt from:
http://www.cas.usf.edu/journal/fobo/nima.html

>From an Interview with Richard Beardsworth: Nietzsche and the Machine
Journal of Nietzsche Studies 7 (1994), 7-66

Jaques Derrida: [...] what's the situation today of democracy? "Progress" in 
arms-technologies and media-technologies is incontestably causing the 
disappearance of the site on which the democratic used to be situated. The site
of representation and the stability of the location which make up parliament or
assembly, the territorialisation of power, the rooting of power to a particular
place, if not to the ground as such - all this is over. The notion of politics 
dependent on this relation between power and space is over as well, although 
its end must be negotiated with. I am not just thinking here of the present 
forms of nationalism and fundamentalism. Technoscientific acceleration poses 
an absolute threat to Western-style democracy as well, following its radical 
undermining of locality. Since there can be no question of interrupting 
science of the technosciences, it's a matter of knowing how a democratic 
response can be made to what is happening. This response must not, for obvious
reasons, try to maintain at all costs the life of a democratic model of
government which is rapidly being made redundant. If technics now exceeds
democratic forms of government, it's not only because assembly or parliament
is being swallowed up by the media. This was already the case after the First
World War. It was already being argued then that the media (then the radio)
were forming public opinion so much that public deliberation and parliamentary
discussion no longer determined the life of a democracy. And so, we need a
historical perspective. What the acceleration of technicisation concerns today
is the frontiers of the nation-state, the traffic of arms and drugs, everything
that has to do with inter-nationality. It is these issue which need to be
completely reconsidered, not in order to sound the death-knell of democracy,
but in order to rethink democracy from within these conditions. This
rethinking, as you rightly suggested earlier, must not be postponed, it is
immediate and urgent. For what is specific to these threats, what
constitutes the specificity of their time or temporality, is that they are
not going to wait. Let's take one example from a thousand.

It is quite possible that what is happening at present in former Yugoslavia
is going to take place in the Ukraine: a part of the Ukrainian Russians are
going to be re-attached to Russia, the other part refusing. As a
consequence, everything decided up to now as to the site and control of the
former Soviet Empire's nuclear arms will be cast in doubt. The relative
peace of the world could be severely endangered. As to a response, one that
is so urgently needed, that's obviously what we've been talking about all
along. And yet, it's hardly in an interview that one can say what needs to
be done. Despite what l've just said - even if it is true that the former
polarity of power is over with the end of the Cold War, and that its end has
made the world a much more endangered place - the powers of decision in
today's world are still highly structured; there are still important nations
and superpowers, there are still powerful economies, and so forth.

Given this and given the fact that, as l've said, a statement specific to an
interview cannot measure up to the complexity of the situation, I would
venture somewhat abstractly the following points. Note, firstly, that I was
referring with the example of the Ukraine to world peace, I was not talking
in local terms. Since no locality remains, democracy must be thought today
globally (de facon mondiale), if it is to have a future. In the past one
could always say that democracy was to be saved in this or that country.
Today, however, if one claims to be a democrat, one cannot be a democrat "at
home" and wait to see what happens "abroad". Everything that is happening
today - whether it be about Europe, the GATT, the Mafia, drugs, or arms -
engages the future of democracy in the world in general. If this seems an
obvious thing to say, one must nevertheless say it.

Second, in the determination or behaviour of each citizen or singularity
there should be present, in some form or other, the call to a world
democracy to come, each singularity should determine itself with the sense
of the stakes of a democracy which can no longer be contained within
frontiers, which can no longer be localised, which can no longer depend on
the decisions of a specific group of citizens, a nation or even of a
continent. This determination means that one must both think, and think
democracy, globally. This may be something completely new, something that
has never been done, for we're here talking of something much more complex,
much more modest and yet much more ambitious than any notion of the
universal, cosmopolitan or human. I realise that there is so much rhetoric
today - obvious, conventional, reassuring, determined in the sense of
without risk - which resembles what l'm saying. When, for example, one
speaks of the United Nations, when one speaks in the name of a politics that
transcends national borders, one can always do so in the name of democracy.
One has to make the difference clear, then, between democracy in this
rhetorical sense and what l'm calling a "democracy to come". The difference
shows, for example, that all decisions made in the name of the Rights of Man
are at the same time alibis for the continued inequality between
singularities, and that we need to invent other concepts than state,
superstate, citizen, and so forth for this new International. The democracy
to come obliges one to challenge instituted law in the name of an
indefinitely unsatisfied justice, thereby revealing the injustice of
calculating justice whether this be in the name of a particular form of
democracy or of the concept of humanity. This democracy to come is marked in
the movement that has always carried a present beyond itself, makes it
inadequate to itself, "out of joint" (Hamlet); as I argue in Specters of
Marx, it obliges us to work with the spectrality in any moment of apparent
presence. This spectrality is very weak; it is the weakness of the
powerless, who, in being powerless, resist the greatest strength.

---
new Derrida sites at:
http://www.lake.de/sonst/homepages/s2442/jd.html
http://www.cas.usf.edu/journal/fobo/jd.html
http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~johnm/Archive/jd.html



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