Chapter 1 The Art of Democratic Engagement

Whether in its thinnest guise of regular elections or its most radical forms of agonistic and pluralizing collective action, democracy is fundamentally a system that values, sustains, and institutionalizes contestation and potential change. It acknowledges that the differences within a given polity are the very stuff of politics, and that there is both obligation and benefit to enabling that which is currently excluded, devalued, or simply unheard to challenge and potentially transform political life. And yet we seem hardwired to do the very opposite: we so easily distort the unfamiliar as it filters through our prevailing terms or, when it breaks through, defend ourselves against it as obstacle or threat. From xenophobic backlash against refugees in Europe and Australia to police and community reactivity to the call that 'Black Lives Matter,' from the spread of straight pride parades and men's rights groups to the sense of white victimhood among Brexit and Trump supporters, demands for even basic security, recognition, or minimal power-sharing are often met with indifference if not hostility by dominant groups. Even when the desire is to truly understand others, patterns of representation and engagement are still fraught with voyeurism, distortion, or reduction of what is unfamiliar. This democratic demand to engage across difference might be the greatest placed on us and the most difficult to achieve, particularly in conditions of inequality.

This book is provoked and shaped by a sense of the political significance of the briefest of moments within encounters when we can decide to either close or open ourselves to others - that grainy point of friction where one's frame of reference rubs up against another, a fraction of an embodied moment when one decides either to turn to familiar strategies of self-preservation against the intrusion of the foreign, or to open up to the unknown and risk unsettling one's terms for living and making sense of the world.

What happens in this moment? What structures and shapes our responses, which are so quick that often we miss the moment altogether and see only what we recognize, recognize only what validates, and cannot hear the persistent murmur and occasional shout of the difference that exceeds it? What defines and enables those rare moments that interrupt this pattern so that we come to perceive others and ourselves in ways that surpass and rework our very terms of understanding? And, far more challenging, what defines those moments where implication - even shame - in light of such encounters opens rather than closes us into defensiveness, deeper entrenchments and denials? It is this delicate, tenuous, elusive moment - that which is shared by and radically splits into responses of productive unsettling or fundamentalist entrenchment - that seems absolutely crucial to theorize in democratic societies.

Democratic theory has long recognized the need to broaden political processes of deliberation and decision-making to include marginalized communities and positions. It also increasingly acknowledges that formal inclusion is no guarantee of real participation in practice, as the 'discursive hierarchies' within civic engagement structure relative access for some people over others. Yet little work has been done on the conditions in which meeting across difference can happen. And with so much attention to the issue of 'voice' in democratic theory and recognition of the high threshold for participation this presents, alternative modes of communication beyond literal and deliberative speech - the visual, the aural, the physical - have yet to be well-theorized in this literature.

Other subfields of political theory have understood politics as inherently aesthetic and embodied, the activity by which terms of the perceptible are contested and reworked in the 'space of appearance,' often through physical assembly (Arendt 1958; Rancière 1999). And yet works that have most advanced recent scholarship on the politics of aesthetics have remained largely focused on either the politics of protest (Butler 2018; Frank 2021; Çidam 2021; Honig 2021) or static forms artistic practice that centre sight or language - particularly visual art, film, and literature (Shapiro 2018; Green 2010; Schoolman 2020). Where scholars engage performance as a site of politics, this is still largely through the study of scripts and lyrics, equating performance with its textual archive rather than live practice. This has meant, with a few important exceptions (Love 2007; Panagia 2009), a neglect to date of the politics of live performance, where aesthetic, embodied, and democratic practices meet beyond the streets. There is also a growing scholarship on the practical dimensions of realizing democratic sensibilities in everyday life, and the innovation of concrete strategies to do so (Bennett 2001; Connolly 2002; Thrift and Amin 2013; Schiff 2014; Coles 2016), though this has yet to extensively investigate the role of embodied artistic strategies in fostering such an ethos. Performance scholarship has, by contrast, deeply engaged and in turn highlighted the politics of aesthetic and embodied modalities, and yet almost wholly refrains from making claims regarding the traceable effects of such practices on political life, and has yet to examine such practices in the context of and accountable to democratic norms (Reed 2005; Cleveland 2008; Taylor and Townsend 2008; Sommer 2014).

This book responds to compelling calls in democratic theory for communication and coalition across social difference by asking how we realize these ideals in concrete terms. It shifts the focus from if and why marginalized difference should find entry into politics, to the practical question of how this is to be done. How does the noise of marginalized difference - what is yet-salient, yet-emergent in dominant terms of meaning-making, what challenges prevailing terms for identity and politics from both within and without - become sound on the terrain of public discourse? How do conventional modes of political communication affect how marginalized positions are represented and received, and what resources do alternative modes of communication like live performance offer to the challenge?

The Terms of Democratic Engagement

Let's face it. We're undone by each other.

And if we're not, we're missing something.

- Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

In light of developments in critical theory and politics over the last quarter of a century, it has become outmoded, indeed counterproductive and ethically suspect to employ a static form of identity politics when contending with social difference. In the place of notions of identity as clearly bounded, cohesive and essential, literature in the 'politics of difference' across democratic, post-colonial and critical multicultural theory have argued that identity is far more complex - that we have multiple, intersecting identities; that they are concrete, porous and particular rather than clear stable categories; and that they are ever contingent and continually in formation in light of our experiences in the world. Indeed, across highly varied schools of thought within the 'politics of difference' scholarship - from the liberal multiculturalism of Charles Taylor to the radical pluralism of William Connolly, from the deliberative theory of Seyla Benhabib or Iris Young to the poststructuralism of Michel Foucault or neo-Marxian agonism of Chantal Mouffe, from the cultural and postcolonial theory of Gayathri Spivak or Stuart Hall to the critical feminism of Donna Haraway or Chandra Mohanty - identity is no longer considered something essentially opposed to and undermined by difference, to be guarded and policed with vigilance, but rather indebted to difference.

Difference - what exceeds the bounds of dominant narratives for identity and politics at both the individual and social level - is not an obstacle to be overcome, but a resource to politics, in two ways: first, it represents what is excluded from and yet might hold possibilities for thought, action and relation that are viable, legitimate, even preferable. In this way, social difference signals that prevailing accounts are ever-partial and political systems are never final, and provides a means to 'enlarge' our mentality (Young 2000) regarding socio-political issues and realities, informing decisions and even enhancing social justice. Secondly, it is precisely because identities do not have clear boundaries and cohesive form like so many atoms floating in political space, but are complex, intersectional, and multiple, that we can connect with others and live together-in-difference as democracy requires of us (Brah 2000: 273).

This debt to difference calls on us to enact what I will call throughout this book a care for difference - a care for what exceeds and challenges present terms for identity politics, and the perpetual disruption and transformation this excess of difference creates. This should not be confused with a relativistic romanticization of difference: the ethical mandate of a care for difference necessarily sets a limit at only those possibilities whose...