Unleashing the Democratic Microverse

Abstract

AbstractWhat does the politics of becoming contribute to an emancipatory strategy towards democratic futures? The concluding chapter situates the politics of becoming in a larger progressive project of radical democratic transformations. It offers a concise recap of the politics of becoming developed throughout the book and summarizes how self-transformation can take place in democratic spaces through disidentification and anonymity. It then revisits debates that pit the recognition of identity against the redistribution of economic goods and argues for the inherent connection between these two strategies. Rereading the democratic (deliberative) systems debate through assemblage theory, the chapter introduces the concept of a democratic microverse—a miniature participatory configuration that prefigures a potential future constellation. The democratic microverse extends from the individual democratic subject to democratic spaces and finally to a societal and potentially planetary level. It interrupts the dominant logics of the present by rearranging assemblages of human and nonhuman bodies and in doing so opens spaces for democratic transformations. Not only the subject itself, but the political and societal system is subject to change.