Many young people tell me that they fear there is no future. When they ask about the future, they are also asking: what is still imaginable or for what may we still hope? To say there is no future, or that the future moves only in the direction of greater destruction, then we are still imagining something, even if it is a dark picture, one that shows no signs of hope. If we are imagining a fatal conclusion, we are still imagining.
When we say, for instance, that we are imagining the end of the world, or the end of the world as we have known it, we are imagining the end to imagination itself. That is surely something difficult, if not impossible for the imagination to do. For it is one thing to imagine an ongoing destructive process and quite another to feel one’s own power to imagine draw to a halt, potentially destroyed by the destructive processes one is tracking. Tracking fatality is still anticipating, and that assumes a form, whether a picture, a sequence of associations, a cluster of images, a story yet to be narrated about history unfolding, or the new landscapes now lay before us.
If we have an image or story to communicate or we find a form or discover that the image or story is already taking form and that the story took shape in one of the languages we speak. No one is predicting the future at such moments, since it is the unknowable dimension of the future that has us most concerned.
And so, we find that what we imagine is framed and formed in ways that support one kind of interpretation of what will happen over another. The frame and the form are central to an everyday form of conjecturing, one that informs the fear we feel and the imagining we do. All this happens not only inside the mind, but in the modalities and objects through which fearing and imagining take place: specific sensuous modes of presentation, specific media. These are not simply vehicles for preformed thought, but formative powers in themselves.
I am not sure that democracy and the humanities owe each other anything—it is not exactly a debt relation—but they do require one another.
The media brings something to the object it represents, whether the language of story, the lost sounds of natural history or, indeed, the future of democracy. The end of the world is, as Denise Ferreira da Silva has argued, a point of departure for a new kind of imagining, one that supplements the traditional work of critique with that of the imagination. She remarks,
I am very worried that we may not be able to stop the end of this world in which we exist; I am worried about the demolition of democratic structures that, though limited and perverse, provided at least an anchor to claims for social and global justice (from indigenous, migrant, LGBTI*, non-white populations everywhere) and could (at times) limit total violence; I am worried that insects and other species are becoming extinct, that rivers are drying up, that oceans are being suffocated by plastic, that fracking is destroying and threatening to contaminate large areas of underground water. This is a long list. However, I am invested—because I don’t see how we will be able to exist otherwise—in the end of the world as we know it.
She continues, “This new world will have to be rebuilt and recuperated from the destruction caused by the extractive tools and mechanisms of global capital.”
Hence, it is not just that imagining the end of the world is still a form of imagining, a sign of its survival or persistence, but that a new kind of imagining starts precisely at that end, considered as a threshold for a new point of departure. The world we have known is the world that is bound up with the movement toward greater destruction. What about a world we are yet to know?
The fundamental questions of the humanities concerning what and how we express a point of view or create a vision of the world is already at work when we ask about the future and try to fathom its possible forms. In this way, the most compelling and urgent existential questions require the arts and the humanities. I am not sure that democracy and the humanities owe each other anything—it is not exactly a debt relation—but they do require one another. Indeed, democracy cannot get underway without the kind of imaginative experiment that literature provides, a perspective provided by the rearrangement of temporal and spatial coordinates that suggest that the parameters of this world are not the limits of all possible worlds.
Imagining the future beyond the end of this world is part of what it means to live life now. This does not, in my view, entail a negation of this world, but only a critical interrogation of the limits of the imaginable in light of radical democratic claims. It may be that the end we fear is already with us, or that many, especially those to whom the world never belonged, have been living beyond the end of the world for some time. That is what Ferrera da Silva tells us. So, if that end is a limit or a threshold from which to imagine the future, it is also one that moves beyond the limits naturalized as the democratic imaginary for these times.
Let me briefly elaborate this point a different way. Democracy is that form of rule that is by and for the people. It is the people who come together and decide how best to live with one another, who make the laws under which they agree to live, and who seek, through debate, to produce an abiding understanding of what it means to live together?
There are, as you know, various freedoms exercised under conditions of democratic self-rule. People are free to assemble and to move, to express their views, and to affiliate with political groups. But the people are not, as it were, this or that political group or a specific organization or party. The people have various affiliations, and they assemble in different places and for different purposes, espousing conflicting viewpoints, seeking to gain support for their vision of the world, even their interpretation of what democracy entails. But who are the people?
They are invariably diverse—but under fascist political conditions, Enzo Traverso tells us, that multiplicity is denied. Forms of subjugation and exclusion are developed to narrow the scope and multiplicity of the people. For instance, under conditions in which citizenship is unequally distributed, suspended, or foreclosed, then not all the people are “the people,” since not all people can exercise those freedoms that are supposed to be equally shared, including those who are denied citizenship, or live within apartheid structures, or whose lives and political freedoms are suspended at the militarized border or in prison. Those who called for President Yoon to be removed from office claim to represent “the people” but so too do those who gathered to thwart the police from removing them. Did the people elect Donald Trump? If so, who are the people?
Democracy makes sense only if all the people participate equally in the collective democratic right of self-determination.
The problem is not just that the people are divided into groups which often claim to be the people at the expense of other groups. “The people” do not just exist as constituted groups, since they are the basis of the constitution of democratic polity itself. In democracies, the people establish the laws by which they are governed. If so, they appear to exist and to be forming laws prior to being governed or defined by those laws. This “priority” seems to be sequential in the stories we tell about how democracy comes into being: the people, it is said, who come together to found a state, or to ask for legal access to the state, and, in this sense, they are separate from and “before” the law, either temporally prior or spatially before. If so, the people who make the law, the demos from which democratic orders emerge, are thus lawless at the moment that they first make the law.
But where are they exactly and at what time in history? By what temporal and spatial coordinates are they constrained? Can we locate them in space and time? Or is this suspension of temporal and spatial coordinates necessary for the emergence of democracy itself? Perhaps we can talk about a fable, as Thomas Keenan has done, or maybe a parable, residing at the heart of democratic process?
Democracy is the rule of the people, but if only some people are making the laws, or debating what the laws should be, then the people are not part of the democracy, the “sans part” in Ranciere’s view, the part that has no part. The people found the state and make its laws, and the state and those laws are said to represent the will (Rousseau) or the freedom (Arendt) of the people. They have determined their polity as their own, or so the story goes.
But if political self-determination is a power that belongs only to one group and is not equally shared, then not democracy, but oligarchy or apartheid result. Democracy makes sense only if all the people participate equally in the collective democratic right of self-determination, which means that a democracy worthy of its name will refuse to abandon some people to a condition of non-participation or bar them from the practice of making a government and the laws according to which they live. The exercise of collective freedom remains legitimate if, and only if, it is equally shared.
This founding freedom is posited that is outside and before the law, characterized both by its indetermination and radical universality. That freedom is in its most initial or fundamental forms not governed by law. It makes law and so determines itself as law to vanquish that unruly freedom that we know mainly through dissent and revolution where people declare the end to that legal world, throwing off its shackles, living without a legal regime or calling for a new one. This unlocatable and an-archic founding of law cannot be rightly identified in place and time without losing its transposability, its potential for universalization.
The beginning of democracy requires a transport into a necessary fiction. Here again, we see how democracy, and the question of legitimacy, relies upon a kind of imagining.
It is, rather, in Arendt’s view but also for Denise Ferreira da Silva, an experiment in time and space, not an historical period that anyone can actually locate on the pregiven maps. It is a hypothetical scene, an imaginary positing, sometimes cast as a state of nature or an impossible elsewhere or a necessary fiction that is not the same as a lie.
Needless to say, to imagine outside the laws by which we were formed or cast aside demands a certain de-constitution of who we are within the letter and culture of the law, a way of thinking outside, or against, the laws by which we were formed and/or effaced, which means thinking against our own formation to form something new. This doubling of critique and imagination transports us outside the law into an unknown set of temporal and spatial coordinates, or it positions us before the law, face to face, to ask about its legitimacy.
The beginning of democracy requires a transport into a necessary fiction. Here again, we see how democracy, and the question of legitimacy, relies upon a kind of imagining. And if we are to imagine otherwise, that is, think of new ways in which polities might form that would more fully realize the ideals of democracy, we require the imagination. Transformation, dissent, and revolution are impossible without collective imagining. And democracy requires precisely this: a form of collective assembly in impossible time and space.
“The Problem of our Laws” is a parable written by Kafka in 1920, and its title in German is Zur Frage der Gesetze: on or toward the question of laws. In this a parable, a narrator tries to describe the situation where he lives, where access to the laws that govern the people are restricted to a very few. The nobles (die Adelsgruppe) are the only ones who have access to the law, and the narrator is at pains to explain why this must be so. It is right and even just that only the nobles have access to the law because they are the ones who know how to preserve and care for the laws. The narrator belongs to the people and so has no access to the laws. And yet he offers a metacommentary on the laws that takes a parabolic form.
Some people, he tells us, question the social hierarchy and exclusion of this legal system. For them, it is unjust that people are governed by law to which they have no access, laws they are barred from knowing. And while some are content to accept this situation, trusting the caretaking functions of the nobles, others have started to develop what may properly be called critical positions, even grounds for protest. The narrative voice vacillates between defending the status quo and espousing the viewpoint that contests the status quo. It vacillates throughout the text.
This narrative takes place in no particular place or time that we can easily recognize. We are given no hints about what century we are in or what land this might be. That it takes place nowhere means that its form is open to any number of historical interpretations and adaptations. A transposable form or, rather: transposability is built into its form. In this sense, the form is anti-context, but open to indefinite contextualization.
A small party concludes that law is simply what the powerful say it is. Or, rather, some gain power by saying that they are the law.
Whoever the people are, they have, for the most part, an unknowing relation to the law that binds them together. Having no access to the law is what defines them as the people, the clear obverse of the democratic imaginary that Rousseau and Arendt have offered. The narrator remarks that it is painful for we, the people [Qual fuer uns] not to know the laws by which one is governed or the deliberations that lead to our being governed in this or that way. In such a form, or under such conditions, the structure of the polity is such that the people are defined as those who have no access to the law.
This situation is no democracy, and yet there is something called the people, outside the law, some of whom are planning some protests, demanding that access be given, demanding, somewhat outlandishly, that the laws belong to the people. In this way, they defy the law of exclusion upon which the polity is built. And some come to understand that the nobles have this power only because they give it to themselves. There is no law apart from the assertion of law by the nobles themselves “What the nobles do is law” “Was der Adel tut, ist Gesetz.” This is the law!
A small party concludes that law is simply what the powerful say it is. Or, rather, some gain power by saying that they are the law. There is no supervenient law to which one has recourse to correct or check that performative (illocutionary) assertion of law. Any number of conclusions could follow such as revolution, anarchism, radical democracy.
In the final paragraph, a contradiction (Widerspruch) is formulated: any party that would repudiate (verwerfen) all belief in the laws and in the nobility would have the support of all the people (the whole people); however, no such party could come into existence for no one would dare to repudiate the nobility. In other words, the people have the requisite knowledge for repudiating or overthrowing this operation of power, but they do not dare to act upon what they know, because they fear life without the nobles, for the nobles are the law that they know. The loss of the nobles would be the end of the world, that world, the world that has been known. What, we may ask, is life without the nobles? We are given no image of such a life except for a figure that Kafka give us of a breathing space, suggesting that this version of the law has always been a chokehold.
Kafka’s narrator summarizes the situation with the claim, “We live on this knife’s edge.” (“Auf dieses Messers Schneide leben wir.”) It would be difficult under the best of conditions to live on a knife’s edge, and doubtless more difficult for a plurality to do so. Since the start of the parable, we have had no idea where the people live, and it turns out to be a tortured topos indeed.
There is a particular knife on the edge of which the “we” lives, and this surely seems like an unlivable place, a place of perpetual risk and threat. We live, in other words, in a place which is no place, but, rather, a cutting instrument, perpetually exposed to a potential shredding or decimation and an imagining that will take courage and doubtless seems at first terrifying and absurd. We stay within the parable that furnishes the formal conditions of its own reading, but the parable seems to be about a law that seeks to do the same. Is the parable capturing the law, or is the parable captured by law?
Consider then that our [MLA] leadership, the one right here, tells us that it is obligated to quell democratic rights to debate for reasons—financial ones—that sadly cannot be shared and that it cannot rescind its act of censorship because laws exist that forbid such a reversal, even if justified. And yet we are not given those laws; they are not posted, withheld and simply asserted.
Thus, those deprived of knowledge of the deliberation, of evidence, even of the transparency of the law are now “the people”—or perhaps the membership—as those who live without knowledge of the laws that deprive them of freedom and knowledge at once. We have immediate reason, then, to ask how the parable informs democracy, and how democracy depends on parables such as these. The humanities and democracy. Indeed.
