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
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 various other progressive
and minority blogging communities all over the world. In this paper, I
argue that the models for understanding discourse in activism that are
commonly used in studies of online politics need to be re-oriented.
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.
1
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 will assess 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 politics need 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
2
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 as
themselves 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 counterhegemonic 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
3
(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,
4
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 discourses at
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-democraticparticipation” (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).
5
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 the public media as antipolitical, and uses new
discourse theory/agonistic democracy to 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 politics makes
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 act gives political agency
6
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 theorists have 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 order
are justified in a way that constructs those who don’t meet the norms
as 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.
7
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
8
of power and processes of exclusion and inequality (Baym 1995, 141;
Mallapragada 2006, 200).
This is not to say that inequality and power imbalances are irrelevant
to the study of online political discourse, but rather that they can’t be
relied on to disappear in online social life. The norms that Habermasian
public sphere theory includes are of course desirable: in particular the
requirements of personal reflexivity, empathy for the other, sincerity,
equality, and so forth (Dahlberg 2004). The problem is that the
literature on the possibility for deliberative democracy online seems to
express a utopian expectation for this to occur (or to be made to
occur) in online spaces for debate. A double bind based on this
assumption is evident in Albrecht’s (2006) research into online political
deliberation, in which he determines that because access and
participation is likely to be unequal, the potential for creating spaces
for deliberative democracy online has not yet been realised, which
leads to the devaluation of online political debate as something with
significance, as a result of its not meeting the criteria for the rationalcritical debate of the public sphere.
This leads to both a utopian vision for the political potential of the net
based on the concept of the public sphere which believes the internet
to be (or to potentially be) an entirely inclusive space, as well as a
more sceptical view of politics online due to the identification of
exclusivity and inequality, that is also anchored in that same ideal
(Dean 2003, 98). Such an emphasis on the public sphere-ness (or lack
thereof) of the internet provides a very limited model for discursive
politics online. In addition, the use of the public sphere model can lead
to the conclusion that the internet is too inclusive because of the
inevitability of disagreement that such a multiplicity of positions make
possible, and the desirability of consensus that the public sphere
model supposes (Dean 2003, 100).
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. Developing such a theoretical
perspective is crucial for research into the ways that social movements
may potentially develop sites for discursive political activism in online
communities.
Other theories of discursive politics
9
Benhabib (1993, 95) as well as Fraser (1993; 1995) argue for the
“feminisation” of Habermasian deliberative democratic theory, and
Fraser (1993; 1995, 291) and Warner (2002) oblige by arguing for the
inclusion of multiple and competing discourses within the model of the
public, as well as the negotiability of the terms of the debate, and
these solutions go some way to solving the problems of public sphere
theory. However, I would argue along with Iris Marion Young (1985,
396), Norval (1997, 38), and Flax (1993, 88-89) that the assumptions
behind public sphere theory are at least partially incompatible with
feminism and other emancipatory or counterhegemonic projects. As
Stacey Young (1997, 5) explains, “a definition of equality that pays
only passing notice to individuals’ embeddedness in social structures of
inequality can never be used to bring about actual – not just nominal –
equality”.
Maddison and Scalmer (2006, 101) point out that the concept of
democracy can sometimes be wielded against “those who threaten the
existing order” by dubbing them “undemocratic” and thereby robbing
their actions of legitimacy. The use of the theory of publics as the
basis for understanding discursive politics in blogging communities
carries this risk. The development of activist counterhegemonic
communities will necessarily involve the development of exclusive or
semi-exclusive communities defined by or complicated by the identity
of the participants, and therefore the norms of equality, transparency,
inclusivity and rationality (Dean 2003, 96) are unlikely to be met.
The use of the word democracy as a shield and a weapon (Maddison
and Scalmer 2006, 101) has certainly been used to discredit feminist
and other minority communities online. For example in the Australian
feminist blogging community, the strategies that bloggers have
developed to prevent the derailment of discussion, and to prevent
abusive and harassing responses (such as the strict moderation of
comments, “disemvowalling”, and disallowing anonymous comments,
for example) has been seized upon by opponents as evidence of the
community being anti-democratic. A policy that is designed to prevent
the more destructive aspects of trolling and online harassment, which
many feminist bloggers see as necessary, may be inconsistent with the
ideal of the public sphere.
As Mouffe (2005, 70) argues, politics “always consists in the creation
of a ‘we’ versus a ‘they’” and “requires the creation of collective
identities”. Habermas’s (1996; 2003, 546) approach to politics does
not recognise this need, which is evidenced by his assertion that the
most important thing in politics is “the general accessibility of a
10
deliberative process whose structure grounds an expectation of
rationally acceptable results”. According to Mouffe (1995, 87), this
conclusion “reveals the anti-political nature of Habermas’s approach”
because it fails to acknowledge that the criteria for what will be
“rationally acceptable” is always going to be politically determined. In
addition Habermas here denies the possibility of antagonism/agonism
or conflict – consensus is the legitimate outcome of discourse (Dean
2003, 103) and the productive uses of conflict are not explored (Flax
1993, 89). Although Fraser (1995, 291) and Warner (2002) modified
the concept of the public sphere to include the possibility of multiple
publics and productive conflict, in an agonistic understanding of politics
disagreement and struggles for hegemony are the basis of the political
(Dean 2003, 110; Mouffe 2005; Norval 2007, 41-42).
The continuing emphasis of public sphere theory in research into
discursive politics on the internet, combined with an emphasis on the
organisational potential of online activism rather than on discursive
activism, has led to a neglect of research into discursive activism
online. If politics on the internet (or particular areas of political
activism on the internet) fail to meet the criteria of the public sphere,
a less strictly normative model of discursive politics may be required.
Rather than expressing continual disappointment with the failures of
liberal democracy to adequately describe and explain online political
discourse, or making attempts to adjust the internet to fit it (Dahlberg
2005a, 2007), we should work to find another conception. By the
same token, rather than adjusting public sphere theory to fit with the
reality of the internet, there is the possibility of finding another centre
for our research.
There is a need to use a model for online discursive politics that takes
into consideration the intent and capacities of online activists, and of
social collectivities and networks that seek to transform the social.
Other possible conceptual understandings include counterpublic theory
(Fraser 1995; Warner 2002), overcoming the requirement for full
inclusion that public sphere theory requires; and an agonistic rather
than a consensus model of politics, based on the writings of Laclau and
Mouffe (1985). The latter is the approach that I concentrate on in this
paper.
Case study: Invisible Women, Invisible Politics
I am basing this case study around several threads that developed in
the Australian blogosphere in mid August 2009, to demonstrate how
using a public sphere model of online public debate, and in particular
11
concerns with inclusion and representation, can actually function to
exclude people from the sphere of politics, rendering them invisible.
The threads also demonstrate the ways in which Australian feminist
bloggers engage in discursive activism and see themselves to be
engaging in discursive activism, but in particular they show how a
push for inclusion in online political communities (in line with a public
sphere ideal) can perversely lead to exclusionary practices and
thinking.
The threads that I briefly analyse in this paper are: “Where are
Australia’s female political bloggers?” by “Possum Commitatus” (2009)
on the blog Pollytics which is hosted by the Australian independent
journalism site Crikey.com; “Quickhit: Invisible Women, Invisible
Politics” by “Lauredhel” (2009) on the blog Hoyden About Town. The
blog post by “Possum Commitatus” (2009) was the post that triggered
the discussion, and was itself triggered by a twitter post by a
crikey.com editor asking why there were so few female subscribers or
regular commenters on Crikey.com. Speculating on this fact led
“Possum Commitatus” to identify “the lack of big female political
bloggers” in Australia.
The question “Where are the women bloggers?” has been a popular
refrain since the beginning of blogs, and has been problematised by
several writers (Bell 2007; Gregg 2006; Harp and Tremayne 2006;
Herring 2004). According to Gregg (2006, 151), "men's blogs are often
seen to be more engaged in political debate, especially when the
notion of what counts as political remains undefined".
The Australian feminist group blog Hoyden About Town responded to
the question with the post “Quickhit: Invisible Women, Invisible
Politics” by “Lauredhel” (2009). The title of the post referred to two
things; the fact that there are a large number of women political
bloggers in Australia, and secondly “Possum Commitatus”’s (2009)
claim that Hoyden About Town and other feminist blogs “touch on
politics occasionally”, and thus that both political blogs by women and
the political content of blogs by women were rendered invisible in
“Possum Commitatus”’s (2009) post.
The debate that developed in the comments on “Lauredhel”’s (2009)
post was interesting for several reasons. Discussion developed in
several directions, but of most interest for this paper was a discussion
around definitions of what political blogs were, and the discourses that
participants in the discussion used. Several themes emerged.
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Firstly, “Possum Commitatus” constructed the justification of his
question about the “lack” of female political bloggers around concerns
of “inclusion” or “representation”. He asks what it is about the
Australian internet “that causes a hole in female representation in the
blogosphere” (“Possum Commitatus” August 20, 2009 at 9:26 am in
“Lauredhel” 2009). In addition, “Possum Commitatus” (August 20,
2009 at 4:48 pm in “Lauredhel” 2009) defined this sphere variously as
“those same issues that affect the largest possible majority of the
population”, “what the mainstream media defines as daily politics”,
and “the same issue space as the political reporting of the mainstream
media”. He argues that “independent female voices *competing* daily
with the [mainstream media]” on these issues “would be a GOOD
THING by any yardstick” and would constitute these women “speaking
to power” (“Possum Comitatus” August 20, 2009 at 7:05 pm in
“Lauredhel” 2009).
Putting aside the fact that many Australian political blogs written by
women do engage directly and daily with issues in the mainstream
media, this question, as it is framed, consists of “Possum Comitatus”
simultaneously expressing concern about the exclusion of women from
the (internet) public sphere while defining the terms of inclusion. The
question of exclusion and equality, as well as the concept of “voices”
and “speaking to power” within the public sphere combined with a
politically delineated concept of that sphere for rational political
speech, sums up the problems with using the public sphere model for
the study of discursive politics online. Even for a critical researcher,
the traps are contained within the model.
Many commenters on the Hoyden About Town post pointed out that if
it wasn’t obvious to male political bloggers that feminist blogs like
Hoyden About Town were political, the definition of “political” must be
constructed to exclude women’s political concerns. “Oh, wait. ‘Big-p
Political.’ That means ‘about dudes.’ I forgot”, said “softestbullet”
(August 19, 2009 at 3:43 pm in “Lauredhel” 2009). “Lauredhel”
(August 19, 2009 at 4:11 pm in “Lauredhel” 2009) speculated that
Hoyden About Town wasn’t understood as a political blog because “we
also post about gardening, and food, and parenting, and life”, which is
“pretty thoroughly deprecated in some masculine-coded online
spaces”. “WildlyParenthetical” (August 20, 2009 at 8:39 am in
“Lauredhel” 2009) points out that feminist blogs are being constructed
as “apparently not ‘real politics’ according to those who consider
themselves in a position to define it” and that “this inside/outside
distinction, whereby women are considered to be ‘not doing politics’ is
key in producing this sense, for women, that they are not welcome on
13
‘big-p political’ blogs” (WildlyParenthetical August 20, 2009 at 12:21
pm in “Lauredhel” 2009).
Thirdly, several commenters identified that blogging in modes that do
not simply reproduce the concerns of mainstream media or indeed the
online public sphere is itself a political strategy. “WildlyParenthetical”
(August 20, 2009 at 8:39 am in “Lauredhel” 2009) noted that “the
blogs I read that are written by Australian women […] tend to focus on
the marginal, attempting to destabilise the centre” while the “’political
blogs’ […] tend to reiterate the centre”. For Lauredhel (August 19,
2009 at 4:11 pm; August 20, 2009 at 6:00 pm in “Lauredhel” 2009),
posting about the context of her life in the midst of posting about
politics is partly “a deliberate political strategy” and argued that the
narrow concept of the political that is being described is “politically
sterile”. “WildlyParenthetical” (August 20, 2009 at 10:24 am in
“Lauredhel” 2009) is even more emphatic:
[P]art of why women bloggers tend not to participate in political
blogging as you have delineated it (and that’s part of the problem) is
for political reasons: because they don’t like how mainstream political
blogging functions, and are working to intervene in that.
Finally, “Possum Comitatus” (August 20, 2009 at 5:52 pm in
“Lauredhel” 2009), shortly before disengaging, concludes that the
differing definitions of the political in the debate have directly led to
mutual unintelligibility; “Speaking to two separate audiences with two
very different understandings of politics is pretty difficult. I’ll live and
learn for next time”. I think this is a logical consequence of a (popular)
public sphere conceptualisation of political debate, in which all
participants are assumed (required) to share definitions of what
constitutes “the public”, “justice”, and “the good life”. Because of
differing norms, the spheres for debate must be in some sense
separate. Because of this separation of spheres, as “pharaoh-katt”
(August 20, 2009 at 2:06 pm in “Lauredhel” 2009) said: “These female
bloggers aren’t failing to be heard. They’re failing to be heard by you”.
The exclusion of the norms for what constitutes the political from
political debate precludes the possibility of respect for the Other. The
denaturalisation of such definitions, as practiced by those in the
Australian feminist blogging community in these threads, is necessary
for meaningful inclusion.
Public sphere theory does include “respect for difference” as a norm of
political debate (Poster 2001, 133), however hegemony creates the
conditions that make critical self-reflexivity (im)possible and
14
(in)effective. The possibility of affording equal respect to all parties in
a discussion is constituted by power relations and the discursive
expectations of particular groups. A self-critical and open aspect in a
discussion will go partway to overcoming these barriers to equality,
but the assumption that all people in public space will take each other
equally seriously in spite of hegemonic discourses and power relations
is false.
To engage in political debate that is respectful of the “other”, there is
an ethical imperative to critically examine one’s own politically derived
norms, and here the concept of “political listening” is more crucial than
the concepts of “voice” and “representation” (Crawford 2009, 526).
“Possum Commitatus”’s discourse of “voice”, “representation”, and
“speech” conflicts with the community’s emphasis on “being heard”
and on his failure to hear/listen, which is ultimately “silencing”
(“pharaoh-katt” August 20, 2009 at 2:06 pm; “Possum Comitatus”
August 20, 2009 at 7:05 pm; “Wildly Parenthetical” August 20, 2009
at 4:49 pm in “Lauredhel” 2009). This ethical imperative to “listen
across difference” is required to overcome discursive expectations in
political discourse, and such an ethics is more at home within an
agonistic understanding of democracy (Dreher 2009, 451).
A model for discursive politics that results in the exclusion of
counterhegemonic politics through the valorisation of particular
political norms and definitions, while it has been useful for
conceptualising the blogosphere in ways that recognise the importance
of discourse and speech in politics, is inadequate for research that
meaningfully explores the potentialities of discursive activists online.
Agonistic democracy and online discursive politics
My research into the discursive impact of social movements online
requires a theoretical perspective that is compatible with the
understanding of politics as discursively constituted, and of discursive
politics as action. The theory of agonistic democracy developed by
Laclau and Mouffe (1985) has contributed significantly to my critique
of Habermas’s theory of publics. So how can this theory contribute
positively to an understanding of online political communities, and how
compatible is this understanding with my study of feminist bloggers in
Australia?
Mouffe (2005, 51) advocates an understanding of what she terms “the
political” as agonistic in nature, as opposed to “dialogic”. The
significance of this claim lies both in her understanding of the
15
necessity of collective identity and an oppositional position in political
discourse, but the recognition of the primacy of discourse itself in “the
political”. This involves defining democracy as based on agonistic
discourse rather than simply democratic institutions and representative
bodies. These assumptions form the basis of Mouffe’s (2005) criticism
of consensus-privileging discourses. Mouffe (2000, 28) claims that
consensus-based political theory in fact expresses a desire for the
elimination of the political. This echoes Rancière’s (1999, xii)
contention that political philosophy is the attempt of philosophy to “rid
itself of politics” which is grounded upon “disagreement” by deciding
upon particular values and norms.
According to Bohman (2004, 134), "any social exclusion undermines
the existence of a public sphere". The internet is proposed to allow for
total inclusion because it allows for open spaces in which anyone may
respond. This is part of a broader discourse the “democratic potential
of voice, representation, speaking up and talking back in the media”
are emphasised (Dreher 2009, 446). Online participation, in this
discourse, is understood as the contribution of a “voice” and this is
considered the prime form of participation (Crawford 2009, 526). This
understanding not only doesn't take into consideration the affective
dimensions of communication (fear, shyness, anxiety, kindness, anger,
and hatred, to name some) but also doesn't take into account social
expectations of being heard. Thus anyone may speak, but not
everyone will feel equally able to, and not everyone will be equally
heard. The concept of the public sphere requires inclusion, which in
some cases may preclude the possibility of safe places for people
whose interests are marginalised by the mainstream.
An example of how this might work: in a counterpublic composed of,
for example, fat acceptance activists, a requirement of inclusion will
enable hegemonic discourses around the unacceptability and negative
social perception of fat to be allowed to dominate discussion, if anyone
is able to respond, and everyone is expected to be included. However
in such a community, such views expressed would be considered
"trolling" because the constitutive outside is what creates the
community, therefore exclusion is in some sense required to enable
counterhegemonic discourses to develop. A requirement of inclusion in
all communities is not in the interests of an agonistic politics. This is of
course not to prevent debate, but to recognise the workings of power
in such a way as to allow debate to develop in non-hegemonic ways
through the political constitution and maintenance of alternative social
identities. The use of an agonistic understanding of democracy leads to
the recognition of these groups as not anti-democratic, but as
16
disrupting and undermining hegemonic consensus, in other words as
participating in agonistic democracy (Marchart 2007, 11). In this way
politics “makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for
noise” (Ranciere 1999, 30).
The concept of “political listening” has relevance for this understanding
of democracy, to counter the emphasis on “voices” and
“representation” which dominates consensus-based democratic theory
(Bickford 1996; Crawford 2009; Dreher 2009). These approaches aim
for “engagement and possibilities for shared action across difference
rather than consensus” (Dreher 2009, 449). It also brings the affective
dimensions of online communication into view, which has particular
significance for the study of online social movements in an
understanding of social movements where emotional investment is
crucial (Jasper 2003; Polletta 2006, 35). The concept of “listening” as
politically significant also leads to a new understanding of “lurking” in
online communities, where far from being “freeloaders”, lurkers are
understood to contribute a “mode of receptiveness” by gathering as an
audience in those communities, and allows for the “sense of
connection” that lurkers may feel in spite of a lack of what is generally
understood as participation (Crawford 2009, 527).
Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) new discourse theory (Torfing 1999) is also
useful for our understanding of political agency and identity. The
notion of dislocation articulated by Laclau (1996, 67) enables the
agency of individuals to be retained, by preventing the possibility of
structural determinism. Dislocation refers to events that disrupt the
discursive
structure;
events
that
resist
symbolisation
and
domestication (Torfing 1999, 149). This conception sheds light on
processes of identification through subject formation (Norval 2007,
15).
Political actors may even create dislocations themselves through acts
of political “jamming” (Cammaerts 2007, 75). Most importantly, an act
"breaks[s] with […] existing symbolic conventions" (Butler 2005, 66).
What bloggers do in the Australian feminist blogosphere is identify
dislocations in the structure of society, seizing these opportunities to
redescribe or rearticulate the symbolic order; “The gap opened by this
dislocation will be filled by emerging hegemonic projects that have the
character of myths” (Torfing 1999, 151, emphasis in original).
Importantly, this conception of discursive activism allows for the role
of passionate expression, hyperbole, satire, transgression and other
affective and affecting devices as part of the process (Cammaerts
2007; Sowards & Renegar 2006, 63). This process is “eminently
17
political” (Torfing 1999, 151). I propose that the Australian feminist
blogging community be understood as a counterhegemonic project
that politically rearticulates meaning at points of dislocation, at the
same time constituting the identity and agency of the participants
(Torfing 1999, 151).
Conclusion
Public sphere theory, due to its underlying assumptions, leads to false
conclusions and obscures the possibilities of political activism online
that don’t conform to the normative prescriptions of the public sphere.
This is not to say that these models (of publics and of counterpublics)
don’t have use-value in the study of discursive politics online, but it is
to say that their problems are such that some other models must be
explored. This is particularly true for communities that are in tension
with the mainstream, and people who have often been sidelined (aside
from concerns about inclusion and inequality) in a public sphere
understanding of the blogosphere.
Like Dahlberg (2007, 2007a), I have found the use of an agonistic
model of democracy useful for the reconceptualisation of discursive
politics away from a public sphere model. It may be possible to "reradicalise" the concept of the public sphere, as Dahlberg (2007,
2007a) argues. However, what I have outlined here is an argument for
the identification of a theoretical perspective for the study of discursive
politics online that decisively moves away from the concept of the
public sphere, rather than simply adjusting it to account for difference,
conflict and affect. The concept of the political that is proposed by
Mouffe (2000, 2005) and Rancière (1999), among others, rather than
simply sufficing as a modifying concept for the public sphere, is
incompatible with its assumptions. It is also centrally explanatory and
itself supportive of an understanding of discursive activism as central
to the work of social movements.
This paper elucidates why, for activist subcultures online, an agonistic
understanding of politics should be further explored. In my research
into the Australian feminist blogosphere, I propose to use an approach
that supplements an agonistic understanding of the political with affect
theory, aspects of feminist philosophy, and a “politics of listening”.
This approach would be supportive of an understanding of activism
that takes account of the affective dimensions, non-essentialised
identity politics, power relations, and processes of exclusion in
everyday political interactions.
18
Wordcount: 6747
29th August 2009
19
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