The becoming-other of politics: A post-liberal archipelago

The becoming-other of politics: A post-liberal archipelago
Benjamin Arditi
Facultad de Ciencias Políticas, UNAM, Mexico City
E-mail: barditi@servidor.unam.mx
Prepared for delivery at the 2003 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Dallas, Texas, 27-29 March 2003
Forthcoming in Contemporary Political Theory, United Kingdom, 2003
Benjamin Arditi, The becoming-other of politics: A post-liberal archipelago

Abstract
The discussion about the double inscription of the political is a familiar trope among
progressive thinkers, whose discussions have focused primarily on the ontological
presuppositions of the political at the expense of a theoretical reflection on politics. This article shifts the emphasis to the latter. It develops an image of thought of our political actuality that moves beyond the commonplace observation that politics exceeds electoral representation. Its underlying assumption is that modernity is characterised by a continual process of political territorialization and re-territorialization whereby the political frontier has experienced a series of displacements along a migratory arc that goes from the sovereign state to liberal party democracies. But it does not stop there, for as politics colonizes new domains and carves up novel places of enunciation, the cartography we inherited from democratic liberalism experiences a Copernican de-centring that throws us into a scenario best described as an archipelago of political domains. This announces the
becoming-other of politics, the post- liberal setting of our political actuality.
Keywords : politics, the political, representation, post- liberal, archipelago, political frontier,
migration of politics.

Politics and the political

Over the last decade or so, much of the theoretical debate on the double inscription of the political —as the moment of institution and as the instituted, the political and politics— has revolved around the work of a handful of Continental thinkers. If we leave aside the recent interest aroused by Rancière’s work (1995, 1998), the more influential authors on this subject are probably Schmitt and Lefort. The interest in Schmitt is somewhat paradoxical, for mainstream theorists such as Habermas have panned him due to his Nazi past and conservative credentials.
However, if Alain de Benoist and the French right could speak of a Gramsci de droite, it is not surprising that the Left could eventually vindicate something like a Schmitt de gauche. Cacciari, de Giovanni, Marramao, and other leading intellectuals in the former Italian Communist Party or close to its position began to discuss Schmitt in the 1970s. By the late 1980s, no doubt assisted by Schwab’s translation of The Concept of the Political into English, people were reading him in both the UK and the US (Telos special issue, 1987; Sartori, 1989; Weber, 1992; Scheuerman, 1993; McCormick, 1998; Mouffe, 1999). Philosophers like Derrida also turned to Schmitt. The spectre of his decisionism traversed Derrida’s work on undecidability (1992), and the question of
the political was taken up explicitly in his study on politics and friendship (1997).
Despite criticisms (Derrida, 1997; Arditi and Valentine, 1999: 38-43), progressive
thinkers were drawn to his theorisation of the ‘political’ for two related reasons. Firstly, the opening sentence of his essay, ‘The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political’ (Schmitt, 1996a [1932]: 19), is meant to assert the excess of the political over its institutional formats. It sets the tone for a way of thinking the political as a ubiquitous and de-territorialized experience that manifests itself both within and outside the institutional sphere of politics (Arditi,
1995). Secondly, by conceiving the political as a form of engagement organized around the friend-enemy distinction instead of as a phenomenon tied to a particular site of confrontation, his reflection provides an operational criterion to think politics beyond a partisan incarnation.
Schmitt does not really care if the political opposition is among sovereign states, political parties, family clans, or ethnic tribes, or if struggles take place within or outside the political system, or if the issues at stake are the conquest of territory, access to government positions, transforming an institution or outlawing a practice. The political arises whenever and wherever a collectivity is
prepared to distinguish their friends from their enemies and to confront those enemies.
Lefort, who characterizes democracy as a type of society where the locus of power is an
empty place (Lefort, 1982; and Vernant, 2000), also distinguishes politics (la politique) from the ‘political’ (le politique), albeit in a different way. For him the ‘political’ designates the mode of institution of society, the shaping of the whole, the process whereby society is unified across its many divisions. By contrast, politics is the sphere where political activity —elections, partisan
competition, and so on— is enacted in modern democratic societies, and where ‘a general agency of power takes shape and is reproduced’ (1988: 10-12, 217-219). As democracy acknowledges the impossibility of a transparent society, we could describe the sphere of politics as a site where the structural non-coincidence of the inscription and the instituted meaning of the inscribed —of the political and of politics— is played out. Yet Lefort complains that political scientists and
sociologists often take the sphere of politics to be the political proper, and therefore confuse the political with its form of appearance. The political refers to the structuring or shaping of society and cannot be bound to any one particular domain: this institution or mise en forme of order certainly takes place in the political sphere, but elsewhere too. Indeed, one consequence of the democratic revolution —at least as Laclau and Mouffe see it (1985: 181)— was to dispute the
existence of a single space of constitution of the political, a point which I will discuss more extensively below.
Drawing from Lefort’s distinction between le politique and la politique, Žižek (1991:
193-197) speaks of the ‘double inscription’ of the political. It designates an ‘abyssal act’, what he calls ‘the negativity of a radically contingent decision’ that either institutes or calls into question a positive order, and a political sub-system in which negativity has been ‘gentrified’ or normalized in a set of institutional arrangements. Politics makes the general principle that generates order visible because the traces of the instituting moment of the political are present in
the sub-system; struggles among groups advocating alternative projects continually put into play the shape of the existing order and therefore reveal the contingency of all objectivity. At the same time, the commonplace reduction of the political to the sub-system obscures this generative power of the political because it overlooks the fact that the act of institution and the contestation of the instituted can take place anywhere.
Readers of Foucault will notice that the course he gave at the Collège de France in 1976 on the relation between war and politics echoes this argument. His working hypothesis was that politics is the continuation of war (presumably by other means), not the other way around. In this inversion of Clausewitz, he sees politics ‘as sanctioning and upholding the disequilibria of forces’ displayed by war, for it institutionalizes the outcome of war in laws, authorities, practices and
rituals. War, as a mode of institution, remains inside politics —that is, within the political subsystem— but mostly as a trace, for the blood of the battles is covered up by the veneer o normality of political institutions (1980: 16; expanded in Foucault, 1997). Laclau also follows this line, but he distinguishes the institution from the instituted by speaking of the political and the social. The instituted here corresponds to something more than a sub-system; he calls it the field of the ‘social’, which designates ‘the sedimented forms of objectivity’. The institution,
however, coincides with what Lefort calls le politique: ‘The moment of original institution of the social is the point at which its contingency is revealed… To show the original sense of something is to question its obviousness, to refer it back to the absolute act of its institution ... The moment of antagonism where the undecidable nature of the alternatives and their resolution through power relations becomes fully visible constitutes the field of the ‘political’’ (1990: 34-35).
This discussion enriched our understanding of the political but said little about the status of politics or the sub-system, which brings to mind the metaphor of the walking stick. According to Althusser, Lenin once said that to straighten one you must first bend it in the opposite direction, in which case one risks bending it in excess or insufficiently. Here we witness both.
The relative silence concerning the sub-system might be due to the bias for philosophy and high theory among progressive intellectuals in the English-speaking world, or perhaps it is a byproduct of the theoretical efforts to extricate the socialist tradition from its long history of economism and class reductionism. Maybe it is simply an unexpected consequence of Lefort’s criticism of political scientists. If these were guilty of confusing the political with its historical mode of appearance, then the cutting edge of theoretical inquiry would set things right by concentrating on the ‘political’. One way or another, the politics side of the double inscription
was left largely unattended —except by mainstream scholars, who always considered it their subject matter anyway. As a result, while the thesis of a liberal end of history dominated discussions about political paradigms in the aftermath of the Cold War, the post-Marxist Left either ran for cover, offered somewhat formulaic responses about the need for a radical democracy, or took to the barricades of the PC wars and thus acquiesced to the general displacement of politics into morality.
What is perplexing about this is the notorious gap that was opening up between political perceptions, attitudes, and commitments on the one hand, and on the other, the conceptual grid through which politics was being named and conceived. Indeed, by the early 80s, vast sectors of the Left already acknowledged the specificity of non-class identities and the diversity of emancipatory projects. Their practical acceptance of multiplicity —and therefore of various forms of pluralism— was contributing to dislodge progressive thought from strictly Marxist and party-based paradigms of politics. Post-Marxism was taking shape as people theorised this experience. Yet despite the enthusiasm generated by social movements and alternative forms of protest —and by the subsequent empowerment of ‘civil society’ as a site of political struggle—the reading of institutional politics remained suspiciously close to the idea of a single sub-system.
This continued reference to politics in the singular was at odds with admitting that it exceeded its state and partisan format and that we were already immersed in a polyphonic setting. If one cannot confuse the political with its mode of appearance, neither should we circumscribe politics to the set of actors, relations, and institutions of the sub-system. First, because then we would be reducing it to its twentieth century liberal-democratic format, tacitly committing us to accept the
thesis of the end of (political) history, and second, because such a reduction would leave the political condition of organized interest groups, social movements and global actors in a conceptual limbo. An easy way out would be to pluralize the singular and speak of a cluster of sub-systems. However, this is not satisfactory, for it suggests a mere arithmetic growth, whereas a condition of polyphony has to account for the qualitative differentiation of sites and modes of political engagement. If post-Marxism wishes to assess politics as rigorously as it dealt with the political, then instead of speaking of a sub-system it must advance a more compelling hypothesis
about how the field of politics is being reconfigured today.
The task is analogous to what Foucault, in his remarks on Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment, calls a ‘critical ontology’ of ourselves, of our present (1984: 47, 49-50).
To speak of our actuality is to pose the question of what is happening to politics now. What is this ‘now’? Kant (1991: 58) maintained that his was the age of enlightenment, yet not an enlightened one.
Similarly, the ‘now’ of our political actuality should be seen not as a full- fledged presence but as its becoming-other, as the becoming-other of politics. I will venture three interconnected claims to map this actuality. The first two propose a way of reading political modernity and of placing the becoming-other within its genealogy, while the third one provides an image of thought for this becoming-other.
First claim. There are various ways of thinking the political itinerary of modernity. Held (1993, 1995, 1998) invokes the international order as his criterion. He traces the shift from the system of sovereign states emerging after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 to the UN model of the post-war period and finally to the multi-polar model of cooperation in the late twentieth century to argue for a cosmopolitan democracy. Manin (1997) sketches it through successive forms of representative government parliamentarianism, party democracy and democracy of audience. My own reading highlights a certain impropriety of politics, its continual migration to new topoi. The political frontier has moved continually along a migratory arc as politics
colonizes new territories. Both the hits and the misses of contending historical projects fuel this migration, which means that it is governed by contingency rather than a telos, and each displacement of the frontier transforms the way in which politics is enacted.
Second claim. Since the dawn of modernity, the migratory arc of politics exhibits two
distinctive and defining moments. The work of Hobbes is paradigmatic in that Leviathan fires the opening salvos of modernity by offering us a model in which the sovereign state hegemonises the political field. The second moment is the offspring of liberalism, which introduces the first major shift by displacing politics into the field of elections and partisan competition, that is, by developing a model in which the political is hegemonised by the sphere of representation within the enclosure of the nation-state. Today, new migratory processes are under way as politics
colonizes other topoi —the field of ‘civil society’, traditionally conceived as a domain of contractual relations between private individuals, and the global field of supranational exchanges hitherto the sole prerogative of the state under the heading of foreign affairs or international relations.
Third claim. In an analogy with Foucault’s view of the subject as a ‘regularity in
dispersion’ of positions of enunciation (1972), these migrations disseminate politics and give rise to a polyphonic scenario where multiple voices speak the language of politics from various sites of enunciation. This dissemination in turn undermines the hegemony of territorial representation and announces a Copernican decentring of the political field. It effectively challenges the muchheralded liberal ending of history and positions us in an increasingly eccentric political scenario.
Instead of a single sub-system, or of a mere arithmetic proliferation of subsystems, we are witnessing the birth of a political archipelago —the key to the ‘regularity in dispersion’ of this polyphonic setting— made up of at least three differentiated tiers. These are the political sphere or sub-system conceived as the primary circuit of electoral politics, the second tier, or layer of social movements and organized interest groups, and the global arena of supranational politics.
Each domain has its own rhythm, which is not always in synch with processes unfolding in others. The various tiers also function as nodal points or centres of reference for the formation of collective identities, the identification and aggregation of interests and demands, the enactment of conflicts, the interrogation of norms and the institution of order or objectivity. Yet we cannot speak of a relation of pure exteriority between them. First, because they are inserted in the network of an archipelago where the various tiers overdetermine one another as they interact.
Second, because the status of this interaction varies. It oscillates continually between their mutual recognition as alternative domains for politics on the one hand, and on the other, the recurrence of rivalry and opposition that leads to shifting relations of subordination and to metastable hierarchical arrangements. This archipelago is the symptom of the becoming-other of politics, of the post- liberal condition of our actuality.
I will sketch a genealogy of modernity in order to develop the claims concerning the
migratory arc of politics described earlier, and then look into the conceptual purchase of the becoming-other of politics in order to flesh out the idea of a post- liberal archipelago and outline some of its theoretical implications.
The future past of the political sphere The conception of politics as an activity that takes place in a particular sphere is a relatively recent phenomenon linked to modernity and democratic liberalism. We can describe the modern turn as a transition in the way order is conceived. From the seventeenth century onwards, there is
a gradual movement away from a theological derivation of order from nature, which is God’s work, toward a conception of order as a construction, that is, as a contingent —and therefore disputable— outcome of a secular act of institution. Bauman captures the revolutionary import of this shift when he states that ‘the discovery that order was not na tural was the discovery of order as such’ (Bauman, 1989: 164). For the moderns, order is an artifice, a claim that Nietzsche adopts as a pillar of his constructivism by saying that instead of a pre-given harmony the play of forces
functions as the primary, constitutive terrain on which any order must be created. Artifice, or objectivity, emerges as the result of an act of political institution, and politics is a way of dealing with a world where division, and the conflicts arising from division, is our basic status.
Modernity, then, is a secular response to the fact of a-foundationalism.
The political genealogy of modernity begins with the demarcation of a domain of decision apart from the religious sphere. This occurs with the emergence of the Absolutist State, which configures politics primarily as a statal reality. The principle of state sovereignty developed by Bodin and Hobbes provides its theoretical underpinning. What makes Hobbes a truly modern thinker is his idea of a purely political mode of instituting order. The state is an ‘artificial man’ that comes to life by virtue of a voluntary pact, not God’s will. What makes him an inconsistent
or self-serving thinker is that he also attempts to efface the traces of this act by instituting Leviathan as a perfect status civilis. He thus ends up proposing a one-off act of political institution that aims to cancel out the possibility of any further artificing in the name of civil peace. As the task of the state is to prevent the return to the natural conditio n of war of all against all, subjection to the sovereign must be so complete as to exclude even the right of resistance.
The monarch both symbolizes and incarnates sovereignty, and the state must enjoy a monopoly over politics —it must become the sole subject of politics. If the political reappears within its internal domain, it is treated as a disciplinary problem. Schmitt describes this as follows: at a time when the physical safety of its subjects, internal peace and secure territorial borders were the raison d’être of the state, there was more ‘police’ than politics, and what was known as politics referred mostly to disturbances brought upon by palace intrigues and rebellions (1996b [1938]:
31; 1991 [1963]: 40-41). These disturbances unsettle the Hobbesian quest for a perfect civil state; they put limits to its effective monopoly over politics. They are traces of the ‘political’ that remain lodged within the state, so the permanence of the political is indirectly acknowledged by the continual need for policing. Thus, instead of a zero-sum game between the statal order of politics and the war- like reality of the ‘political’, what we have here is a model in which the state hegemonizes the political but cannot exhaust it.
It is clear that in this model there is little room for a political sphere of parties and elections, which only emerges later with the consolidation of the liberal state. Indeed, modernity conceived politics as a prerogative of the sovereign state until liberalism moved it into the sphere of territorial representation. This migration did not cancel the political status of the state, but neither did it leave the original field untouched. It triggered a process of de-territorialization that stripped the state of its purported monopoly over politics, and a parallel process of eterritorialization that inserted it into a new political scene. Initially, this scene was far from democratic, as representation and partisan competition are perfectly compatible with a restricted notion of citizenship and political rights. The liberal state can prosper without being democratic.
Most scholars, however, agree that from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, when the struggles for the franchise began to extend suffrage rights in successive waves (Macpherson,1965, 1977), the coordinates of liberal democracy were already in place, either as a code for the actual practice of politics or as its regulative idea.
The distinctive features of this code vary from one author to another. Kelsen (1981
[1929]: 20) describes its kernel when he says that modern democracy is necessarily a
Parteienstaat or party government, one that articulates the expansion of suffrage rights with a plural configuration of the liberal principle of political representation. In Schmitter’s broader list, its features include the emphasis on individualism and on the individual citizen, the belief that territorial representation and partisan competition provide the sole legitimate link between the
citizen and the state, the enclosure of political activity within the institutions of the nation state, and some indifference toward persistent and systemic inequalities in the distribution of benefits and the representation of interests (Schmitter, 1999: 936). Thus, unlike Rousseau, for whom the delegation of decision-making powers and the existence of intermediate organisations is incompatible with freedom, liberal democratic thought empowers citizens as voters and backs the organised intermediation of interests by conceiving politics along the lines of partisan representation. Unlike Marx, who vindicates internationalism, it confines political activity within
the territory of the national state and thus affirms —at least in principle— the validity or the desirability of Westphalian sovereignty. Finally, unlike the socialist concern for egalitarianism, it does not rank social equality high in its political agenda.
This link between electoral citizenship, partisan competition and the nation state
inaugurates an epoch when the political is hegemonised not by the state but by the sphere of territorial representation within the physical borders of the state. ‘Hegemonisation’ does not imply that from then on political activity is fully circumscribed to a particular sphere, or that it refers only to the figure of a citizen-voter, or that it becomes an exclusive prerogative of a specific actor like the political party. It only means that something like a ‘will to representation’
settles in, that the sphere of partisan exchanges becomes the dominant institutional site of politics. A myriad of other forms of politics continue to operate alongside this sphere, with or without legal recognition. Lefort speaks of ‘transitory’ modes of representation like strike committees set up when unions do not take up workers demands, ad hoc leaderships that emerge in the heat of mobilisations and social protests, or informal coordinating committees put together to organize demonstrations (Lefort, 1991: 227). Moreover, prior to the democratisation of liberalism, workers were excluded from the institutional framework of the political regime. They
lacked legal status as citizens, for the franchise was universal in name only, and unlike representatives from political parties, their trade union leaders were not entitled to participate in the legislative process. They nonetheless confronted the state over the right to unionize, labour legislation, civil rights, and so on. That is, they engaged in political struggle despite being formally barred from the institutional arena of politics, which tells us that there was (and still is)
politics outside territorial representation. The point is that labour organisations also recognized that the party system had become the main locus of politics, the principal domain for the production and transformation of order through legislation, public policy, or the conflicts and agreements between groups formally authorized to act as representatives of the general will.
Otherwise, it is difficult to understand why they fought so hard for the right to vote and to create their own political parties, that is, to enter into the political sphere as legitimate actors.
Migratory rumbles: displacing the political frontier Thus, liberal democracy establishes a format of politics in which the political ‘sphere’ or subsystem
hegemonises the political but the latter nonetheless exceeds the parameters of that sphere.
The theoretical account of this excess is arguably Schmitt’s main contribution to political thought. It became much broader over the past decades through the dissemination of the means and sites of political intervention. We must now examine whether this signals new political migrations. As mentioned, I believe it does, for dissemination is creating a polyphonic scenario through processes developing from above, from below, and from outside the sub-system inherited from the liberal tradition.
Neocorporatism illustrates the excess ‘from above’. As a reappraisal of institutional frameworks for interest groups, it is a response to the problems of the ‘overburdened’ state, an ‘overloaded’ political system and, generally, the ‘crisis of governability’ of Western democracies (Offe, 1984a; Donolo, 1981; King, 1975). Advocates of ungovernability see the growth of social demands and expectations as an inevitable consequence of party competition, the multiplication of intermediate associations, and the proliferation of social movements. These increase the obligations, responsibilities, and tasks of both governmental agencies and the political system.
They also outstretch their capacity to provide adequate responses to claims over services, policy, and participation, and create a situation of systemic overload, conceived either as an accumulation of unsolved problems or as an excess of claims and claimants that neither the government nor the political system manage to administer or control. This fosters social discontent over the unfulfilled promises of politics and politicians. It tends to undermine the legitimacy of the political system and the capacity of political parties to organize and express the electoral will, and expands the appeal of non-parliamentary political movements.
Offe discusses several conservative measures to counteract this trend. He mentions the
revitalisation of institutions of social control, the rationalisation of administrative structures to improve governmental performance, and the transfer of claims to the domain of the market through the privatisation and deregulation of public services. The irony is that this mimics the Gramscian topos of the re-absorption of the state or political society within civil society, but through a programme of privatisation whereby the market becomes the analogical model of society. Yet there has also been experimentation with modes of interest representation outside the partisan framework of the political regime. Ungovernability, Offe says, provides a strong incentive for the displacement of territorial forms of representation by functional ones, that is, for the expansion of neocorporatist mechanisms of integration and conflict-management along the lines of what he calls liberal corporatism (1984b: 190-191). Like classical corporatism, it introduces consultative, procedural, and decision-making mechanisms to institutionalize the
relations between state agencies and organized interest groups, and it grants them semi-public or political status. However, unlike state corporatism or chamber system of the type usually associated with Italian fascism, liberal corporatism does not advocate the dissolution of the party system or the authoritarian designation of valid interest categories. It simply sets up a direct relation between interest groups and government agencies, and thus creates a terrain of political exchange alongside the familiar institutions of representative democracy. This parallel terrain introduces non-electoral, non-partisan, and extra-parliamentary means, channels, and arenas of
political negotiation to counteract the overload and possible loss of legitimacy of the political system. Schmitter (1992, 1995) sees in this the chance for a progressive response and advances a project of political reform that aims to reinforce democracy by institutionalizing a second tier of citizenship that does not privatize the state but instead expands the public realm.
If corporatist responses to the problems ensuing from the unmanageable excess of claims
and claimants show us the feasibility of political arrangements that bypass the liberal sphere ‘from above’, other initiatives do so ‘from below’, regardless of whether there is overload or ungovernability. These are usually lumped under the heading of civil society, which is a valid yet somewhat misleading label, for the aim of these initiatives is not strictly to control the arbitrary exercise of state power, as was the case in Europe during the eighteenth century. Civil society also closes off options due to its complicity with a topography that places it in a relation of
exteriority with the state. In the case of Gramsci, for example, Hardt says (1995: 30) that the state appears as a subordinate ‘placeholder filling the structural void left by a not fully developed civil society’. This over-simplifies matters. The distinctiveness of ethnic, cultural, and other social movements, but also organized interest groups, various special- interest coalitions, neighbourhood associations, and occasionally even NGOs, lies not so much in their link with civil society but in
their exploration of modes of political exchange that open up of spaces, identities, and forms of collective action alongside the party system.
Marx’s reflection about the politicisation of the economy is a good antecedent, for he
realized early on that it was a fertile terrain for the emergence of a new political subject and antagonism. The proletarian struggle to overcome the inequality and injustice of capitalism led to the development of class politics in society and the state. De Giovanni (1979) sees this as an illustration of what he calls the ‘political inclinations’ present in society. For him, the workers’ movement opened the way for the activation of additional sites of political enunciation, as human rights groups, women collectives, and a wide array of social organisations showed that political
inclinations could emerge from other ‘non-political’ sectors too. Like working class organisations before them, they proved capable of generating political actions within society, thereby disputing the image of the latter as a private realm of extra-political concerns. Many of them chose to avoid the party format. They managed to create and sustain collectives based on non-partisan means of identification, aggregation, and representation of interests. Their actions contributed to renew the
political culture, expanded the public sphere, and extended the demo cratic revolution beyond the confines of electoral citizenship.
Finally, the political sub-system is also being overtaken ‘from the outside’ by initiatives that disregard the burden of territoriality. Liberals and conservatives generally have been suspicious of internationalism under any guise other than trade or financial and capital flows.
When it comes to politics, they try to keep inside and outside apart. This separation between the domestic inside and the foreign outside coincides with the distinction between the political subsystem and the high politics of international relations. The former is the site for citizen participation in politics and the latter is a prerogative of the state. This is changing as politics opens itself beyond the physical territory of the nation state (Held 1993, 1998). For starters,
human rights and public opinion free themselves from territoriality as they aim to become cosmopolitan. Moreover, the multiplication of the channels between societies and the diversity of issues and participants within global networks —what Keohane and Nye (2000: 115-116) call ‘complex interdependence’— has dented Westphalian sovereignty. One consequence of this is that frontiers cease to be rigid principles of containment. Their greater permeability blurs the line separating domestic politics from foreign affairs to the extent that it is no longer possible to confine the outside to the field of international relations alone. Whether through international
advocacy networks, cross-border coalitions, or movements of resistance to neoliberal
globalisation, politics outgrows the older topoi or places of its ‘proper’ constitution within the borders of the state and dislocates a nation-centred political cartography.
A post-liberal political archipelago and its consequences Drawing from this, we can pursue the question of the actuality or becoming-other of politics further. The existence of a sub-system is the result of conditions and decisions that, at some
moment in time, made it possible and perhaps desirable to circumscribe what we call ‘democratic politics’ to the field of citizenship, parties and elections. One reason for this is the division of labour it affords, something particularly advantageous for governing a human collective when not everyone has the interest, the time, or the disposition to occupy themselves continuously with public affairs. That is, when few live up to Rousseau’s ideal of the virtuous citizen. Advantage, however, does not entail necessity. The delimitation of politics within a particular sphere does not
mean that partisan representation is the crowning of political history, if only because it was preceded by the absolutist state, which reflects the historicity and contingency of all political forms, including representation. Similarly, to speak of this sphere does not mean that partisan representation provides us with the sole institutional site of politics. We have seen that it hegemonises but does not exhaust the political, and that the developments sketched before are symptoms of political migrations that are modifying our political topography once again.
Deleuze’s distinction between the archive and the diagnostic is useful for examining this turning point. ‘The new is the current’, says Deleuze in his reflection on the Foucaultian notion of ‘device’ or ‘apparatus’ (1992: 164; also Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 112). The archive is the historical part, the continually receding present, while the diagnostic is the sketch of that which we are gradually becoming. He explains it as follows.
The current is not what we are but rather what we are in the process of becoming —that is the Other, our becoming-other. In each apparatus [dispositif ] it is necessary to distinguish what we are (what we are already no longer), and what we are in the process of becoming: the historical part and the actual part. History is the archive, the drawing of what we are and what we are ceasing to be, whilst the current is the sketch of what we are becoming [...] In each apparatus we have to untangle the lines of the recent past and those of the near future: that which belongs to the archive and that which belongs to the present; that which belongs to history and that which belongs to the process of becoming; that which belongs to the analytic and that which belongs to the diagnostic (Deleuze, 1992: 164).
The experience of politics as a single sub-system stands for the archive, for ‘what we are ceasing to be’. It is our future past. As mentioned, non-partisan political activities have led to the dissemination of spaces and formats of political exchange beyond the sphere of representation, and supranational initiatives have dislocated the distinction between the inside and the outside.
The diagnostic or the actual —the becoming-other— is more complicated, for it requires some account of the possible direction in which we are moving while avoiding mere futurology. The transitive mode of the expression ‘becoming-other’ forestalls the temptation of conceiving the diagnostic as a pre-figuration of the future, as a mere delayed presence. Deleuze is clear about this. To speak of the diagnostic, he says, ‘is not to predict but to be attentive to the unknown which knocks at the door’ (1992: 165). It refers, then, to an opening to something to come that is already starting to happen. A legitimate yet uncommitted response to this would be to say that
while dissemination de-centres the political field, it is not clear whether this announces a more complex liberal democratic imaginary or the birth of a new political scene. This wavering is unnecessary, for even if it is only an expansion, the initial setting is likely to be affected. As politics overflows the liberal sphere, dissemination creates a polyphonic scenario characterized by the presence not of one, or two, but multiple formats and spaces for the enactment of politics.
The claim, then, is that what is now knocking at the door amounts to something more than a mere adjustment of the sphere of territorial representation to accommodate a larger field, for the political frontier itself is being displaced as politics colonizes supplementary terrains for citizen involvement in public affairs. As hinted in the discussion of the overflow from above, below, and outside the political sub-system, one refers to domestic non-partisan initiatives and another to
those developing in a global domain. The participants here are not only parties but also social movements, organised interest groups, ad-hoc coalitions and the like, but the nature of their actions is similar. They are all players in the register of the political. They align themselves into friend-enemy oppositions, and partake in the unending process of political institution of order through collective action in the public sphere, whether as direct sponsors of legislative projects and public policy or as their critics, either in the conventional field of state institutions or in the
more informal domains of sociability.
What distinguishes this seemingly commonplace claim is its derivation and departure
from the usual thesis concerning the rediscovery of non-partisan politics in either ‘civil society’ or in the global setting. My diagnostic focuses on the possible clustering of some voices, spaces, and practices into systemic constellations. This is interesting in that we may eventually describe these clusters as political tiers coexisting with the electoral arenas of the national state —the classical site of the liberal format of politics— and characterize the emerging scenario as a political archipelago of sorts. I use the notion of tiers as a loosely defined working ypothesis to explore the becoming-other of politics. The metaphor of the archipelago has a more figurative value. It expresses succinctly the image of a scenario populated by various fields or sites of political enunciation that includes the liberal democratic sub-system of electoral politics, but also the second tier or domain of movements, associations and organized interest groups, and a supranational tier that takes politics beyond the borders of the national state. Each would have a configuration of interests, demands, identities, institutions and procedures associated with various
modes of citizenship: ‘primary’ or electoral, inherited from the liberal tradition, ‘second’ or social, and supranational or global, in the making through the outward growth of politics.
The archipelago provides us with a preliminary map of the becoming-other, not an
exhaustive reconstruction of the ‘now’ of our political actuality. Yet, even as cartography, it raises important normative questions for democratic theory, such as the status of citizenship and the public scrutiny of player in the second and global domains. One cannot address this simply by extending the state-centred model of citizenship and the electoral mechanisms characteristic of the primary circuit of partisan politics. The supranational tier challenges the classical, statedependent
notion of rights and obligations, and elections are notoriously inappropriate for
scrutinising organised interest groups and multilateral agencies, for validating their democratic credentials, or for making them accountable for their decisions. Held (1998) advocates a cosmopolitan approach to frame the discussion at a supranational level, while Schmitter (1992, 1995) pushes the argument about liberal corporatism a step beyond Offe to suggest mechanisms of democratic controls for players in the second circuit. He proposes granting them semi-public status —and citizen-assigned funding— in exchange for agreed mechanisms of accountability and public scrutiny. There is also the question of whether the archipelago makes any difference
for changing a given state of affairs. Admittedly, there is no causal link between a representation of totality and the prospect of empowering people and setting them into action. But the archipelago does open up a range of strategic possibilities. The second and supranational tiers are spaces for either challenging partisan politics to place a set of demands into the public agenda or for enacting political exchanges to address those demands autonomously. Following Carlo Donolo (1982), we could designate these options as allopathic and homeopathic strategies, correspondingly. The archipelago also weans the Gramscian notion of ‘war of position’ from a proto-Jacobin conception of hegemony as a re-institution without remainder. It brings it closer to
Foucault’s ‘microphysics of power’, where domination designates not only a global structure of power but also a strategic relation between adversaries. If power, as a mode of action over actions, entails ‘government’ in the sense of structuring the possible field of action of others (Foucault 1979: 207-209), then the antagonism of strategies appears in all domains of the archipelago. The eccentricity of the latter then grants theoretical consistency to discrete resistances to domination, to a dispersion of asynchronous wills to emancipation whose illocutionary force is not necessarily pegged to projects of total re-foundation.
Further development of these issues exceeds the aim of the article, but we can nonetheless fine-tune the notion of the archipelago by outlining some consequences that follow from it. I present them in no particular order. One is that we should modify slightly the argument about the double inscription of the political discussed earlier. Just as the democratic revolution disputed the existence of a single space of constitution of political phenomena, an effect of the dissemination of spaces is that ‘politics’ —one of the poles of the double inscription— undergoes a process of
internal differentiation. It is no longer the single gentrified sub-system discussed by Lefort and Žižek since it includes the tiers of second and supranational citizenship too. The singular tense is substituted by a non-arithmetical plural, for politics becomes a multiplicity of differentiated tiers, a constellation of sites for the enactment of the political and the constitution of politics.
Another consequence, implicit in the idea of coexistence of political tiers, is that the polyphony ensuing from dissemination accounts for the increasingly eccentric nature of the political field. One should not confuse this with its Balkanisation or feudalisation, with the idea
of a unified singularity gone wrong. ‘Eccentricity’ does not betray a conservative yearning for a clear and distinct political field that in practice never existed with the purity that the gloss of nostalgia would lead one to believe. Polyphony and eccentricity do not entail the absence of a political universe either, or the impossibility of establishing links between the various tiers that make up this peculiar archipelago. Instead, they suggest a Copernican decentring of politics that
modifies the representation of totality by dislocating a political topography centred in the sphere of electoral representation and replacing the image of a centred whole with that of an archipelago of domains of power and resistance, decision-making and administration of demands. As mentioned, the archipelago describes a ‘regularity in dispersion’ of sites of political enunciation.
In a polyphonic context, the ‘totality’ of politics is neither revealed nor challenged in only one domain of the archipelago. Totality becomes a word for the interplay of domains, and is better understood as precarious or hegemonic, a process and not an empirical or transcendental entity.
This totality bears a family resemblance with the dynamics of the European Union (EU).
Schmitter (1999, 2000) argues that the EU is often thought of as a unitary space with continuous borders, and, like nation-states, one where territorial authorities and functional competences overlap. The centralizing drive advanced by the Council of Ministers, the European Commission, the European Parliament, and by the growing body of ‘eurocrats’ would seem to reinforce this perception. Alas, appearances can be deceiving. The French coined an expression, L’Europe à géométrie variable, to account for the changing patterns that make up the seemingly unitary Europolity. It describes the fact that there is not a single Europe but a series of metastable conglomerates or, as Schmitter puts it, a multiplicity of European polities at different levels of
aggregation —the Europe of the Common Agricultural Policy, of the Euro zone, of the Schengen migratory agreement, or of the joint defence forces. Our archipelago also has a variable geometry, except that instead of nation-states entering into a voluntary union, it is made of interlocking tiers with a shifting diagram. One cannot assign an absolute, a priori privilege to one or another of these tiers, for the very idea of the archipelago weakens the status of the sub-system as the independent variable of politics and therefore disputes the existence of a founding locus of politics. The critical mass for collective action might gather around electoral contests, but also
develop through mobilisations in other tiers, although more often than not, the effects of actions in any domain invariably spill over to the others. In the archipelago, overdetermination is not the exception but the norm. Action in the various tiers and the interplay between them leads to a continual realignment of its political cartography. Like the EU, this archipelago has a changeable diagram. Yet it does not prevent the dominance of one domain over others or rivalry between them. It simply reminds us that a position of ‘dominance’ is an effect of the play of tiers rather than a transcendental signified, and that choosing a scenario of action, whenever choices are possible, depends not on an intrinsic attribute of a given domain but rather on the occasion, and on the strategic orientation, objectives, resources, and capabilities of the groups involved.
Choices are neither a pure expression of free will nor necessary structural effects. One cannot close off options, for one never knows enough about the terrain on which one acts and acting itself affects the nature of the terrain.
The third and final consequence, announced from the outset, is that the archipelago is a symptom of the post-liberal condition of politics. ‘Post- liberal’ is a tricky expression that suggests different things to different people, so we need to say a thing or two about it. The prefix ‘post’ does not entail a total break with the past or a universal process that occurs simultaneously everywhere, or that party politics and elections, the central contributions of liberal thought to a working model of democracy, wither away or are eclipsed by other formats of collective action.
The historical sequence that goes from the absolutist state to the liberal state and from primary to second and supranational citizenship is certainly accumulative, but it neither follows a linear, logical progression nor does it imply the twilight of already existing political forms. The democratic effects of electoral citizenship did not cancel the decision-making capacity of the state, as many opponents of the franchise feared in the nineteenth century. Likewise, there is no reason why the emergence of new political tiers should entail replacing partisan representation.
We cannot even infer that they all have an equal weight. Electoral politics will undoubtedly remain a major league, at least in the near future, for it commands an extraordinary variety of resources and its decisions affect a wide range of actors and institutions. Even so, this league is now part of a vaster, polyphonic universe. It must coexist with other political tiers that one cannot situate strictly —or solely— within a partisan framework.
So, I do not use the expression ‘post- liberal’ simply as a polemical rejoinder to those who advocate the arrival of a liberal end of history, but as a way of describing the state we are in, one in which politics becomes less liberal —although not necessarily anti- liberal— as it spreads beyond primary citizenship. Of course, one could say, as Touraine once remarked, that ‘if one talks of a Christian society it would be absurd to think that all conducts and beliefs derive from a totality called Christianity [...] the dominant order never rules absolutely’ (1977: 25-26). Mutatis
mutandis, we might skip the terminological discussion by simply keeping the name ‘liberal’ and acknowledging that this does not exclude a polyphonic setting with second and supranational tiers. After all, drawing from the topos of the double inscription of the political, we already spoke of the political being hegemonised and not exhausted by territorial representation, that is, by a format of politics that privileges electoral citizenship and partisan mediators instead of, say, representation according to occupational categories or decisions based on the permanent
assembly of the people. Yet I have chosen the prefix ‘post’ to describe the ‘now’ of our political actuality to highlight the non-arithmetic proliferation of political spaces, the eccentricity of this polyphonic scenario, the relation of overdetermination within the ensuing archipelago, and the variability of the diagram formed by its different tiers. The prefix reflects the fact that the archipelago, as an image of thought of the becoming-other of politics, challenges the hegemony
of the sphere of representation and the containment of politics within national borders. ‘Postliberal’ gives the current setting its proper name.

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