 I'm Salvatore Bobonis and today's lecture is Post-Politics and Post-Representative Democracy. Social movements like Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados of Spain and Greece, and Nuit de Beau in France and Belgium have brought many people out into the streets. But for what purpose? Though these movements are clearly concerned with political issues, they make no attempt to gain political power. Instead they seem to represent a new form of post-politics in which participants' main goal is self-expression. In the world of post-modern identities, representative politics as such may no longer be possible because no single political party can represent the complex post-modern individual. The 2011-2012 Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City was the most visible form of protest against the mismanagement of the global financial crisis. The most recognizable symbol of Occupy Wall Street and the world's various Occupy movements that occurred all over the world in 2011-2012 and 2013 has been the ubiquitous V for Fendetta or Guy Fawkes Mask. This mask originated in England as part of Guy Fawkes Day celebrations. Guy Fawkes famously attempted to blow up the English Parliament. It was an anarchist who attempted to blow up the English Parliament in the early 1600s. But the movie V for Fendetta featured an anti-hero anarchist who wore the Guy Fawkes Mask to hide his identity. Now we see these masks all over the world wherever protest is going on. But these movements have been primarily concerned with protest, not with actually seeking political power, where movements like these have sought political power or have gained political power. They've fractured immediately. So in the United States, Occupy really shifted the agenda. It put inequality on the national and even on the world agenda, but then dissolved into internet activism and fundraising for candidates and online criticism and a myriad of websites in the U.S. that host commentary about politics. But where are the candidates? Where are the policies? Very little seems to have changed. Crises Indignados brought the left-wing Syriza party to power, and then that party immediately signed an austerity agreement with the European Union. Going back on the word it gave to its own voters that it would be a different kind of political party that would not agree to austerity conditions placed by the European Central Bank. Spain's Indignados movement splintered into something like a dozen political parties when people tried to turn from protest into actual politics. In Italy, the five-star movement is coalesced around the comedian Beppo Grillo. But Grillo says that he will not run for office, in fact has not yet run for office. The movement elected over 100 representatives to the Italian parliament, but plays no role in government, and it's unclear if it ever will play any role in government. And perhaps the most fascinating and most influential of the Occupy type movements, the Anonymous Hacker movement remains, of course, anonymous. The Anonymous movement has explicitly embraced the Guy Fawkes mask as the symbol of the movement. The Anonymous movement has punished governments, corporations, and individuals that its members feel have behaved badly. In many ways, Anonymous is a kind of global online vigilante police force fighting for justice online. But it's hard to be an anonymous online movement and actually govern in any positive way, pushing people for corruption or lying or bad behavior is one thing. Actually governing in a positive way is something completely more challenging. These kinds of post-political movements often espouse direct democracy or deliberative democracy, as kinds of post-representative democracy. The idea is that the world needs to move from representative democracy, which is irredeemably corrupt as politicians try to raise money for campaigns and merely represent the powerful interests who contribute to their campaigns, that we need to transition from that kind of democracy to a more direct democracy. The problem is that direct democracy, as it has existed in the past, has depended on representative institutions to create the very referendums that get voted on in direct democracy. Now, Occupy and Anonymous and similar movements have moved beyond referendums to propose a new form of deliberative democracy in which people directly engage in discussions to debate the future direction of society. The problem is that these forms of discussions only seem to work well for very narrowly circumscribed very local issues. For example, when a city government says that it will allocate $10,000 to improve a particular park, residents who live in the neighborhood of that park might be motivated to come together to discuss how to best spend the money. But this doesn't seem to translate into a larger scale. It also is in many ways very unrepresentative in that only the people who turn out to deliberate end up having a say. We also have a very large body of social psychological research that shows that in open deliberations those people who are more educated and more outspoken and who have stronger views tend to push the discussion in their direction so that as a result the outcome that arrives from deliberation, while it may seem like it was a group outcome that everyone had an equal say in, in fact represents the views of the kinds of highly motivated activists who wanted to have the discussion in the first place. But the biggest criticism of deliberative democracy seems to be that it's simply difficult how it to imagine how it could work in a mass society. Other than the very simplistic idea of putting proposals on an online platform like Facebook and having people give them thumbs up and thumbs down, it's hard to imagine how we could organize the kinds of complex laws that go into hundreds of pages, how these kind of laws could be deliberated and decided on by people in an open forum having unlimited discussion and an unlimited opportunity to express their views. Instead of resulting in productive positive politics, deliberative democracy instead seems to result largely in critique and self-expression. It's an opportunity for people to have their say, not an opportunity to actually create new and better forms of government. If democracy itself, if representative democracy was a response to modernity, it may be killed off by the emergence of the postmodern self. What we see in Occupy and in similar post-political movements is the self being embraced, that the personal rewards of being engaged in political debate seem to be more important to the participants than actually getting things done. Thus we see a transition from the modern self that is composed of people who can be represented by particular parties taking particular viewpoints to a very complex postmodern self in which people have multiple identities, multiple points of view that can only be expressed in a full complexity of conversation but can't be represented by a single up or down vote on any issue. If you find yourself thinking about a political issue and saying to yourself, on the one hand I see one side of the issue, but on the other hand I see the other side of the issue, you are taking a postmodern view of the issue. And while that approach may be logical, correct, valid, and meaningful, that way of thinking does not result in clear decisions to take one position or the other position. The transition from the modern self to the postmodern self may have made us all much more, it may have made for a much more rewarding experience for all of us, but it has made people much less governable. Occupy Wall Street was the exemplar of a series of postmodern, post-political, critical social movements. Second, Occupy-type movements espoused forms of deliberative democracy that are in many ways post-political, not concerned with the acquisition of actual political power. Finally, the postmodern self may simply be unrepresentable, resulting in a transition to post-representative democracy, which is something that frankly we don't yet know what it will look like. Thank you for listening. You can find out more about me at SalvaturbaBonus.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter on global affairs.