The Politics of Blogs: Theories of Discursive Activism

The Politics of Blogs: theories of discursive activism

Frances Shaw

University of New South Wales, Australia

“[Politics] makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise.”

- Jacques Rancière, Disagreement

Abstract

My research relates centrally to the concept of discursive politics. The Australian feminist blogosphere will provide a case study for this research into discursive activism in online contexts. Most discussions of discursive politics online take a deliberative democracy or public sphere approach. While this approach has had its uses, the problems of public sphere theory have consequences for the political analysis of online community. A requirement of full equality and inclusion perversely leads to exclusionary thinking and a limited model for discursive politics. In this paper I propose that an agonistic understanding of democracy should be explored as an alternative framework for the study of online political communities. In addition, I propose that this conception be modified with greater analysis of the affective dimensions of online politics, the productive uses of conflict, the role of political listening, and an understanding of discursive activism informed by feminist philosophy.

I emphasise the importance of developing a critical theory of political discourse in online settings that recognises the contingent nature of both discourse and the political, as well as the inevitability of processes of exclusion and power relations, and the role of affect in any understanding of political discourse.

Introduction

The Australian feminist blogging community is a network composed of group and individual blogs, linking to one another and also linking into the international feminist blogosphere and other progressive and minority blogging communities all over the world. The Australian members, however, form a loose-knit but daily reinforced network of blogs that create a discursive community. One aim of my research is to provide an exploration of the role of this community in Australian feminist activism, but in addition I willassess and develop theoretical frameworks for understanding the role of internet communities in discursive politics.

My research relates centrally to the concept of discursive politics. Discursive activism can be briefly defined as speech or texts that seek to challenge opposing discourses by, for example, exposing power relations within these discourses, denaturalising what appears natural (Fine 1992, 221), and demonstrating the flawed assumptions and situatedness of mainstream social discourse. Katzenstein (1995, 35) calls discursive politics “the politics of meaning-making”, in that it “seeks to […] rewrite the norms and practices of society”. Activist discourses break social silences, and in so doing they fracture the political discourses that justify inequality (Fine 1992, 221). Discursive politics is considered “an essential strategy of political resistance” (Fraser 1989, 165 cited in Fischer 2003, 81). Feminism has a strong tradition of discursive political activism, whether through consciousness-raising groups, critical media analysis, or interventions in the use of language (Young 1997, 13) but feminism is by no means the only social movement that engages in discursive politics. The Australian feminist blogosphere will provide a case study for my research into discursive activism in online contexts.

In this paper, I argue that the models for understanding discourse in activism that are commonly used in studies of online politicsneed to be re-oriented. I propose another way of understanding discursive politics online, that makes productive use of an agonistic rather than a consensus-based understanding of politics, along with developments in cultural and sociological research into the concept of “political listening” and the role of affect in political participation (Mouffe 2000; Mouffe 2005; Dreher 2009).

What is politics? What is discourse?

My understanding of politics in online communities is aligned with what Mouffe (2005) refers to as “the political” as opposed to “politics” and what Rancière (1999) refers to as “politics” as opposed to the “police”. For Mouffe (2005), the political is defined by the agonistic struggle of actors for discursive hegemony, and with the definition of ‘us’ and ‘them’. She uses the concept of the “constitutive outside” to show that political positions are defined in terms of their opposition to other political positions, that every order is based on some form of exclusion, and that “the political” is thus necessarily an oppositional struggle (Mouffe 2005). Her notion of democracy is one in which the agonistic struggle of political positions is allowed to take place, rather than simply a representative, aggregative or dialogic consensus being reached. An understanding of the political as agonistic rather than deliberative will lead to new ways of conceptualising online discursive politics.

Agonistic democracy describes a democracy in which consensus is understood as contingent and the terms of political engagement asthemselves negotiated. For Rancière (1999), “politics” is roughly comparable to Mouffe’s (2005) concept of “the political”, in that it is defined in opposition to the institutional politics (Mouffe 2005) or “police” (Rancière 1999) that are generally understood as the stage on which politics takes place. Politics is not understood as something through which individuals or parties “place their interests in common” through “the privilege of speech” but in which people “make themselves of some account” by speaking (Rancière 1999, 27). This notion of speech as action and as politically constitutive is essential to the concept of discursive politics that I am naming in this paper.

What theorists such as Mouffe and Rancière do is demonstrate the ways in which competing discourses are central to the power struggles that politics is composed of. The state and its institutions are understood as “a sedimented framework for political struggles” (Torfing 1999, 71). In this way the institutional or partisan politics that is generally understood as politics proper is rather a system of distribution and legitimisation of politics – an acting out of the political - and thus in fact secondary to the politics of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourse (Rancière 1999, 28).

This paper is written on the assumption that discourse, and the question of who can speak and whose words are recognised, is the very basis of the political.In Foucault’s (2002 [1966]) concept of discourse, power is enacted through it, through the discourses that are available to people for their use. Such power does not so much actively repress as it constrains through the normalisation of language (White 1991, 18). Discourses are both enabling and limiting, in that they enable certain statements and truth claims but preclude others (Flax 1993, 138).My research concerns the uses of the internet for those who are in some way excluded from the traditional public sphere:those whose discourses are marked as separate from the mainstream. This paper questions the use of a public sphere understanding of internet discourse, and proposes that a different conception would be more productive for a study of this nature. As Burgess (2006, 203) argues “The question that we must ask about ‘democratic’ media participation can no longer be limited to ‘who gets to speak?’ We must also ask ‘who is heard, and to what end?’”.

Blogging and the political

Activist and political cultures have developed within the social networks created within and between blogs. These networks engage with and disrupt mainstream discourses by criticising ideological stances implicit in the mainstream media and responding with alternative perspectives. They can also share information on systemic injustices and issues that are not given (enough) coverage in the mainstream press, however they are also “very much embedded in and part of their environing society” (Bahnisch 2006, 145). People use the internet as the place in which they do politics, not only by organising politically and seeking political information, but also by engaging in political debate (Olsson 2006, 124).

The blog network is created through dialogue and interlinkage. As Bruns (2006, 12) argues, it is not the individual blog post that is politically significant, but a network of blog posts that are generated around a particular issue. Blogging is a “deeply social commitment” (Lovink 2008, 38), in which “individuals construct their social world through links and attention” (Boyd 2009). The social nature of the commentary that generates around particular issues makes blogging far more discursive than other media, and more potentially deconstructive (Bruns 2006, 16). Although the networks that form between blogs are often loose and informal (Lovink 2008, 38; Rettberg 2008, 57), they are also in some ways quite resilient, due to the practice of providing lists of permanent links or ‘blogrolls’ on each blog.

The Australian feminist blogosphere criticises the mainstream press from the perspective of feminism, although intersecting with multiple identities and critical of multiple systems of oppression (Mowles 2008, 36).Australian feminist blogs engage with politics of disability, race, transgender rights and discrimination, queer politics, and many other issues relating (in particular) to difference and exclusion, but also engage with mainstream political issues. On the whole, this blog network functions to critique the ideology of mainstream discoursesat least partly in order to change them. In this way, among other things, these blogs can be understood as discursive activism.

Survey of research into politics online

My concern in this paper is with existing approaches to studying discursive politics and political speech online. A significant proportion of research into online politics and social movements looks at political organisation and mobilisation online, the potential for deliberative democracy online, and the concepts of the public sphere and social capital. A minority of researchers, however, have made use of agonistic models of democracy in their analysis of online blogs. I focus on these and argue that such an approach should be further developed for an understanding of activist politics online. This approach may also provide new ways of conceptualising the affective and collective identity aspects of discursive activism.

Researchers that do focus on political discourse online tend to do so by exploring the internet’s potential for developing deliberative politics, political participation, and social capital, as well as the possibility for developing a globalised political sphere (Albrecht 2006; Ayres 1999; Best & Krueger 2005; Chambers 2005; Dahlberg 2001; Dahlgren 2005; Dean 2003; Edelman 2001; Gimmler 2001; Papacharissi 2002; della Porta and Diani 2006; Putnam 2000). These approaches frequently also explore the equality of access to the internet, and the problem of the digital divide, which will potentially inhibit the democratic possibilities of internet use (Albrecht 2006).

The emphasis here is on how the internet will enhance the existing political system by altering and easing communication, creating the ideal criteria of the public sphere, or creating the perfect conditions for deliberative democracy (Albrecht 2006; Gimmler 2001).Common in these accounts is an understanding of “voice-as-democratic-participation” (Crawford 2009, 527). These approaches have as their assumption the possibility of rational-critical deliberation based on perfect or at least improved access to information, and emphasise the potential of the internet to make the Habermasian public sphere “come true” (Albrecht 2006, 64).

A minority of researchers into online politics have brought the concepts of radical or agonistic democracy, neodemocratic politics, nonrepresentative democracy, new discourse theory, and other related concepts, into understandings of politics online (Dean 2003; Kahn & Kellner 2004; Kellner 1999; Marchart 2007; Rossiter 2001; Rossiter 2006). Kahn (1999) first proposed the use of radical democracy in the study of “technopolitics” in the late nineties, and Kahn and Kellner (2004) later deployed the concept of oppositional politics as an alternative to deliberative democracy. Rossiter (2001; 2006) discusses Mouffe’s (2005) concept of agonistic democracy and also develops the idea of nonrepresentative democracy, also explored by Lovink (2008, 245). Dean (2003) discussed a model of online discursive politics based around issue networks called “neodemocratic politics”.Marchart (2007, 10) sees thepublic media as antipolitical, anduses new discourse theory/agonistic democracyto show the necessity of conflict and antagonism to create a political public space online.

An illustrative change in the literature in the late 1990s to the late 2000s is that made by Lincoln Dahlberg. His early writings (Dahlberg 2001) use an uncomplicated, though critical, application of public sphere theory to the internet. In later works he responds extensively criticisms of public sphere theory in order to defend the concept as a model for discursive politics online (Dahlberg 2005). Other later writings, while maintaining the concept of the public sphere as their centre, bring in post-Marxist agonistic democracy theory (Dahlberg 2007). This development reflects the shortcomings of public sphere theory and the potential of an agonistic perspective, and is valuable work in the context of online discursive politics, "utilizing discourse theory to develop a radical public sphere conception" (Dahlberg 2007a, 829).However, an agonistic understanding of politicsmakes disagreement, conflict, and dissensus “the core of the logic of the political”, and sits uncomfortably with the Habermasian tradition (Marchart 2007; Norval 2007, 41-42).

The internet and the public sphere

In spite of these developments, most of the studies into discursive politics online focus on the idea of the internet as public sphere, and many researchers into online communities have used Habermas’s concept of publics to inform their discussions (Dahlberg 2001; Dahlgren 2005; Dean 2003; Gimmler 2001). I will focus here on how Habermasian theory has been used in these discussions. The theory of communicative democracy has been useful for the study of discursive politics because its emphasis on the speech actgives political agency to those involved in discursive politics (Fraser 1995; White 1991, 24). Discourse is understood as political and therefore those who speak in the public sphere are political actors.

However, communicative democracy is a highly procedural model for discursive politics (Benhabib 1996, 9). Discourse, in this model, takes place under the normative constraints of an “ideal speech situation” in which each participant has an “equal chance to initiate and continue communication” (Saward 2000, 41). The norms that are required for the ideal functioning of a public sphere include: equality, transparency, inclusivity and rationality (Dean 2003, 96). The (desirable but) problematic nature of these requirements, along with the assumption of the split between public and private concerns, are some criticisms that feminist political theoristshave of the ideal of the public sphere (Benhabib 1993; 1996; 1996a; Dean 2003; Young 1985).

Young (1985, 387) argues that Habermas reproduces an opposition between reason and desire. This “implicit separation” leads to the “silencing of the concerns of certain excluded groups” (Benhabib 1993, 82) and the public achieves unity only through this exclusion, for example the exclusion of women and others “associated with nature and the body”, as opposed to those associated with reason and factual discourse (Young 1985, 387). This happens in spite of the fact that the model “makes no substantive claims about what human beings are”; the conclusion comes from the internal logic of the model, which implicitly “presupposes the priority of […] rationality, and also presupposes the suspect character of ostensibly non-rational features of human conduct in the domain of politics” (Butler 2000, 15). This means that the framing of civic publics as impartial and universal itself leads to exclusion (Young 1985, 383).

So, the first problem with Habermas’s theory of publics is that it lacks an understanding or acceptance of power relations and other factors that determine the possibility of participation. The second problem is that it lacks an understanding of the politically determined nature of its own norms, such as the division of the public sphere from the private sphere, and the concepts of “the good life” and of “justice” (Flax 1993). According to Mouffe (2005, 56), the norms of a political orderare justified in a way that constructsthose who don’t meet the normsas outside “the political”, which means that those norms are no longer “open to political contestation”. Both of these problems undermine the usefulness of the theory to understand speech as political action. The use of language to act politically is understood by Habermas as legitimate, but only under particular circumstances.

Habermas's conception of the public sphere also opposes communicative action to instrumental activity, which, applied to activism, means that both discursive forms and protest activity are understood as "acts", but that the rational-critical, communicative speech act is divested of passion - that is properly aligned with the actions of the street protestor (Habermas 1996, 337; Žižek 2008, 122; 324). Such a conception of the speech act as emotionally disinvested also fails to mesh with people's understandings of common online communicative forms, including (especially) in spaces where political conversations are taking place, in which the "stoush" becomes "personal", and the use of sarcasm, satire, and hyperbole (among other such affective devices) is commonplace.

These problems have particular consequences for the political analysis of online communities. A lack of acceptance of the inevitability of power relations and inequality in social life, means that when assessing deliberative democracy online, internet researchers must exclude from analysis debate that takes place in non-universal, or non-heterogeneous publics, because “access to political debates must be open for any person affected by the issue at stake, and within the debate it must be possible to raise all kinds of arguments freely” (Albrecht 2006, 66, citing Habermas 1996). These criteria inhibit the possibilities for taking online politics seriously, since exclusion (whether active or passive) operates in all political communities and online spaces, and power relations within the group necessarily affect the possibility for equal communication.

Mouffe (2005, 51) argues that dialogical or communicative theories cannot form the basis of understanding radical politics because “no radical politics can exist without challenging existing power relations” and without the definition of an adversary, which is what the communicative perspective forecloses. An understanding of publics that necessitates universal and equal power for all participants therefore excludes the possibility of a public at all, because the political (understood in the agonistic sense) would be removed. The study of politics online must take exclusion, affect, identity, power and inequality into consideration, and therefore cannot require an ideal public in which these things do not exist. Such a hope expresses a problematic desire for a disembodied space in which people are treated “as if” they were equal because of the body blindness of cyberspace (Dahlberg 2001). This desire for universality through disembodiment cannot be realised, as the internet becomes increasingly embedded in daily life and domestic and national worlds in which there are relations of power and processes of exclusion and inequality (Baym 1995, 141; Mallapragada 2006, 200).