Chris Hayes made an argument on his MSNBC show “Up” that the Occupy movement demonstrates a more effective, inclusive form of government in their nightly town hall type discussions than is demonstrated in the “Super Committee” that was setup to address debt concerns. He viewed the Super Committee as an example of elitist power broking. While this apparent opposition certainly has its merit it also invites a more thoughtful analysis of the dynamics at play in this opposition.
To start, let’s think about the Up program. Chris has guests on for segments and frequently replaces the guest with other guests. While I am sure that all the guests would like to stay on for the whole program an executive decision is made based on limitation; time and relevancy prescribes the agenda. In any organization a certain kind of economy must be preserved to maintain the viability of the organism. Any democracy must harness the focus gained through the congealing of power to prioritize and preordain a practical solution to the problem of diffusion. Diffusion is the dissolution of power, the breakdown of praxis, the convalescence of action. Its ultimate political outcome is anarchy, the loss of origin, the opening onto infinity. It is the potentiality for suspension of power, the pause of reflection, the existential moment (kairos) of suspension.
In any democracy an undercurrent of power must, of necessity, assert itself endlessly. Democracy and power require a symbiosis, a tension of form (peros) and chaos (aperion) – an economy. Power preserves the past. It provides an ever changing narrative for relevance and origin. It is the sustenance of purpose and affect. It retains and bounds the infinite. It scribes and pre-scribes a sophistical system of signs that gather together a pseudo ‘totalism’, a ‘worldhood’ wherein what comes-to-be is allowed or disallowed.
Democracy is the breakup of power. It seeks to make the other relevant. It is not a substitution of one kind of power for another but a kind of darkness that limits the circumspection of light. Power, the virility of sight defines and limits. It measures and retains. Democracy breaks and recoils. It casts dispersions on frame and reference. It is the kairos that interrupts the succession of chronos (http://mixermuse.com/blog/2010/09/08/the-problem-of-logic/). Democracy dissolves ‘heterogony’ and hierarchy and as such, is chaos, aperion, infinity. It must always be taken hostage once again for production and re-assimilated into yet another moment (chronos), an occasion for, a repetition of economy. Democracy cannot be in itself and power can. Even as anarchy, power must certainly and inevitably re-inscribe, subjugate and define.
Education, the sublime ideal preserved as Greek and taken up as enlightenment is the Academy that seeks to once again measure, the good and the sophistical, the better idea, the critical examination of “facts”, the hule of brute materiality, the eternal, the time proven retention of certainty. Science, the fruit of scientific method, the proven of the profound, the indisputable of knowledge and the inclusion of democratic method has yet to fade from the germinated seed of Greek thought. Education is the promise of preserved democracy, an economy of the truly true and the eternal beauty of Greek cheerfulness. It asserts itself on the basis of ‘falsifiability’ as opposed to doxa and dogma. It holds to the claim that the unaccountable other will be brought to account, settled in its infinity and preserved in its anarchistic totality – thus, the conundrum, the riddle of infinite concern, the passion for the absurd. Education restores the living beauty that power idolizes and thus corrupts. It is the good beyond being. It promises unity in its manifold. When all can be doubted only what cannot be doubted remains. An educated electorate is the heroic and final destiny (telos) of democracy.
The problem with the beatific vision of education is its substantive congealing of meaning. Every great myth must re-produce itself in its destruction. It is the gaze of Orpheus. It must be a fetish-tic fascination for the infinite. The clay feet of education thought in “Structures of Scientific Revolution” by Thomas Kuhn maintains a perpetual revolution of the same. Inertia, the resistance to a change in momentum, is no stranger to education as congealing, convalescence and dissolution is the dunamis of power.
Light can never finally preserve light in a greater light. Light and the ‘presents’ that presence can only perpetually preserve its founding over and against its nemesis. The pitched battle of form and chaos, peros and aperion, syntax and semantics can never be resolved into an ultimate unity. Democracy can never win out against power. Education cannot end, only promise. Infinity, the other, cannot show itself as itself. Truth can never proceed beyond the moment of appropriation, Ereignis. In this malady of Error(1)* only Ethics(2)* as my responsibility to the other, my indebtedness to not-me, the voice that withdraws from monologue can hold in question the potency of power and the exasperation of light.
*see https://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2011/12/21/footnotes-from-no-one-to-no-one-but-necessary/