public sphere watch: iraq's constitution

iraqi blogger Riverbend raises some very important issues for the possibilities of the development of a true public sphere developing in Iraq. Here I mean the concern for a genuine public sphere emerging in Iraq and the discussion of the constitution taking place in that context. For this to happen, according to Habermas (whom she doesn't quote or even refer to, but it is still the ideal described in his writing) two requirements would need to be met. The first is that everyone would be free to take part in this process. This is something that the media has been focusing on in particular because, for the most part, in this country, we fetishize this requirement at the expense of the second: that the discussion process take place in the context of a rational critical dialogue.

The second requirement for Habermas is a bit hazy and, ironically, a bit authoritarian. After all, it is fairly straightforward to measure who is allowed to vote or to find out who is being included in the process. But if you are trying to make a rational critical dialogue a restriction, well you are not only limiting a wide variety of possible expressions, but you are assuming that the concepts of rational and critical are transparent and universal, niether of which, as many post-structuralist critics of Habermas point out, can ever be the case.

But that is definitely not the reason that we don't focus on that aspect as much. After all, we know that this rational critical dialogue is possible because we experience it on a daily basis. It is the way our government and media function, right? So the only thing we've ever had to really worry about is who gets to vote. After all, that is the only problem we've ever had with our system: for a few dozen decades or so, we made sure a bunch of people weren't allowed to enter the polling center. But now that problem is fixed and our democracy functions just fine so it makes sense to measure it in these terms. This is also, on the other hand, the most obvious way to limit the public sphere--by literally disenfranchising people based on some legal restriction, be it land ownership, a poll tax, a gender qualification, etc. These limits are now widely seen as an ananthema to democracy. In fact, they are seen, for the most part as the only limit to democracy: so long as everyone is allowed to vote, the public sphere works fine.

The other advantage of this is that it places the problem of democracy's malfunction squarely on the individual. The Iraqi people have all been given ample time to evaluate the constitution. They have had copies made available to them in Arabic and have had the time to discuss it. When the election occurs, it won't matter whether most of them are voting without ever having read it or understood it. It won't matter that, as Riverbend tells it

most of the people who do want to vote, will vote for or against the constitution based not on personal convictions, but on the fatwas and urgings of both Sunni and Shia clerics. The Association of Muslim Scholars is encouraging people to vote against it, and SCIRI and Da’awa are declaring a vote for the constitution every Muslim’s duty.

It will simply matter that they have voted: kneel pray and you will believe. I say this not out of pity or contempt or shaking my head at their inability to do this right, but noticing that this is probably not all that different than the process through which our own constitution was ratified. The only difference is that now we have social scientists and pollsters who will tell us just how many of the people need to vote for it to be a legitimate vote, just how open the process needs for people to feel that democracy has happened.

People in Iraq have voted before, though I am not all that familiar with just how skewed those elections were (since Saddam won something like 99% it doesn't seem likely that the public sphere was actually in effect.) Still, this whole process reminds me of the wooing of a tramatized woman who has been abused her whole life, but who has always heard of the wonders of lovemaking when there is love involved. In comes her latest "suiter" to tell her that this is what love feels like, this is what it feels like when I make love to you, baby...He thinks he's got her fooled, he may even be fooling himself, but deep down, she knows he's fucking her like all the others, only this time when she tries to kick him out, he'll try to make her look like the crazy one: bitch, you never had it so good--that was love, don't you know what love feels like?

I know it's quite offensive to posit Iraq as the female in this equation. It reifies the weakness of women (though she does eventually kick him out) and reactiviates years of feminizing "the Other." But this definitely seems to be the way that democracy works. Like Mattalart and, as I discovered, Innis discuss in relation to communication and communication technology; as the muckrakers of the early twentieth century discovered, to quote the introduction to Innis' Bias of Communication

The essential tension in his work was this: that the initial result of newspapers, telegraph, and radio gave primary producers such as trappers, fishermen, farmers, access to market information, providing advantages in dealing with middlemen; however, in the long term these new media helped draw even the remotest harvester into the sphere of larger systems. What at one level provided human agents with information and a means of negotiation, bypassing barriers or inspiring alternative actions, at another level helped explain how metropolitan centres, nation-states, empires, and civilizations all use media to reproduce their influence, establishing cultural as well as economic monopolies over time and space. (xx)

or, in the words of Jack White:

The Nurse should not be the one who
Puts salt in your wounds
But it's always with trust that the posion
Is fed with a spoon

someday I'll add the mattelart and ewan quotes: they are both in the field statement and it's time for bed.

Basically, however, this is the tension that is alive in the conflict between the values of the enlightenment and of liberal modernity and the real forms of oppression that they can inflict, or, in the words of the Frankfurt School, the dialectic of enlightenment.

NOTE: it is worth noting that all of these theorists, even as they critique these values as being double edged, eventually come back to using them in order to back up their arguments. This is where I think, despite the problem of Anthony Giddens' proposition that the Consequences of Modernity lead us not to a rejection of those values but to expand them even further. Despite even the most vociferous Marxist or Post-Structuralist or Post-Modernist critique of this proposition--and there are probably plenty of those critiques that I would eventually agree with if argued well--it would be difficult to prove that they did not in some way rest on the foundations of modernity or even ask for its extension. That was certainly what Marx thought would happen and critiques of logocentrism are, unfortunately, usually based on a certain logic. I am probably screwing up all of these arguments irretrivably, but I really am tired.