Mutant: Dialogues at the End of Democracy

Institute for New Global Politics
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As violence against persons and things reaches a slow, catastrophic intensity worldwide; as the political and planetary become profoundly intertwined; as the deformity in our language thwarts our very ability to think about this suicidal moment in global politics and in human affairs as such, the brilliant thinker and scholar Aishwary Kumar (in LA) and editor-interlocutor Payal Puri (in New Delhi) begin a sustained, rigorous excavation of a deceptively simple question: What is up with democracy? Taking as our starting point the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet, we create an alphabet of global political thought; a rigorous recuperation of the words and concepts without which we cannot grasp the power and the fragility of the democratic promise. Never has a podcast attempted to compress, in just 52 words — two for every letter of the alphabet — the human condition itself.

  1. JUL 2

    T | TECHNOCRACY

    It is undeniable that technology has disrupted democracy, that algorithms have begun to threaten human agency and deform identity, and that artificial intelligence, deeply enmeshed in politics, harbors a brazen potential to blur the very line between the human and non-human, between truth and fabrication.  But what might shift in our perspective if we made room for the possibility that the greatest threat to democracy ensues not from the fact that technology has become too powerful but instead from the fact that we have simply forgotten what technology is, and in that forgetting, surrendered the very force—the bond between life and technique—that makes democratic politics possible? “The question we must ask about technology cannot be confined to the realm of the technological. We must turn away from the maze of contemporary confusions and anxieties about algorithms, surveillance, media, and digital platforms,” says Aishwary. “Because in relying on them, we are simply asking the neo-technocrats to justify themselves and prove the usefulness of their shiny objects.” Technocrats are mutants. They today combine in themselves, in creative and destructive ways, the classical figures of engineer, oligarch, monarchist, and clown. Whatever else might drive their nihilism or theology, they genuinely believe that technology is a life-giving thing, an alluring product, an object of lore. “But technology is not a thing,” Aishwary argues. “It is a limit. It is the extremity at which the human encounters its wholly other. Only now it does so inside of itself. Technology is the extremity at which our humanity becomes a technique of living and dying at one and the same time. Technology is to life what violence is to humanity, more an organ now than an instrument. It is an apparatus of grafting and transplanting, of amputating and prostheticizing, of surviving and killing.” This proximity with practices of life-death gives the neo-technocrats not only their delusions of omnipotence—and impunity—but a desire to conquer time and thus their mortality itself. “The techniques of domination and cruelty that the tech oligarchs today deploy are as old as the first human technique, the hand that rose to cover its own nakedness; as enduring as the many ways of executing the death penalty; as archaic as the human will to punish others,” Aishwary points out. In thinking of our technocratic age as unprecedented, therefore, we mistake its mutation for newness. The oligarchs who traffic in promises of intergalactic travel—or escape from the “hell” that the earth is—have not invented new forms of power; they have simply sharpened the art of convincing willful democratic majorities to surrender their agency in exchange for the promise of technological salvation. "We have today come to trust a group of men—products of neocolonial segregation and racial apartheid, all of them—who have delusions of conquering space and who have come to believe they bear in themselves the metaphysical secrets of transcendence.” The monarchist desires of these technocrats represents something far more fundamental than the capture of political influence. It marks the ruinous decline of democratic capacity for making collective, just choices; the public’s concerted ability to give time to the pursuit of truth and examination of facts; the will to resist the theft of a people’s time by the neo-technocracy. “Hannah Arendt long ago recognized technology's capacity to render a vast swathe of humanity superfluous through a simple “majority decision.” Today, this capacity operates through systematic destruction of the time necessary for deliberation, judgment, and beginning of something new together.” Luring us by sheer repetition, technocracy has turned the human into a mutant with infinite variations, whom we now encounter with stale wonder. Perhaps here also lies the opening for radical democratic recovery. "Technology is...

    1h 49m
  2. T | TRUTH

    MAY 26

    T | TRUTH

    When we began Mutant, we set ourselves the task of entering ordinary language. Not the magisterial or prophetic, but words, ideas and concepts so quotidian, they have paradoxically become—much like democracy—impenetrable. Nowhere is that paradox more conspicuous than in the idea of truth. To think about truth is to immediately hit a wall. Loaded with theological overtones on the one hand and metaphysical baggage on the other, truth is weak, uncertain, time-consuming, painstaking. It carries a high burden of proof. It demands hard work, and in the political realm, courage. It promises liberty but delivers disappointment. And so it enters the world quietly—often too late, frequently unwelcome. What do we do with a thing like that? And what makes this thing—truth—unnatural to politics, so rare in politics, and yet so divisive a terrain of the political? “The fundamental problem with truth is that unlike a lie, it does not serve an immediate purpose,” Aishwary points out. “A lie justifies itself. A lie has intentionality. A lie serves a political end. Truth does not come into the world as instrumentality. It does not seem to serve a purpose until that dangerous, even lethal moment, when lies and rumors have started to serve theirs.”  Truth, in other words, becomes visible to us only in its ruin. But what, in the moment of its disappearance, does truth take with it? “In her landmark 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt delivers a startling insight when she refuses a binaristic distinction between truth and lying,” says Aishwary. “She writes instead of the fundamental importance of what she calls standards of thought.” “The ideal subject of populist and fascistic disinformation, that is to say, the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is never a card-carrying Nazi or card-carrying communist, Arendt argues. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule are people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, truth and lying, has itself ceased to matter. For whom the paradigms of judgment have collapsed. And it is at that moment that we realize what truth-telling can do, and what its disappearance can mean for the modern democratic experiment.” “Truth, then, is not a rule,” Aishwary proposes. “It is a commitment, a technique. It is Baldwin’s fire, King’s pilgrimage, Ambedkar’s responsibility." T | Truth #nowstreaming

    1h 11m

  3. APR 23

    Q | QUESTION

    Has America given up its “pursuit of happiness”? Why do we ask so many questions? "How does it feel to be a problem?" Du Bois asks in a searing passage of his 1903 masterwork The Souls of Black Folk. Of all the openings that Civil Rights political thought makes in modern democratic rhetoric, perhaps the most powerful and overlooked one is its use of the question (and the pause). What if the question carries in itself not simply a moral demand but a right to logic? A systematic rethinking of the relation between truth and method not from the center of racial power but instead from the outskirts of our institutional and moral universe? We probe the implications of this question about the Question in this special episode of Mutant, anchoring our archaeology in the immortal urgency of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 question, Where Do We Go From Here? “In King, the question belongs at once to the order of epistemology and of faith,” says @realaishwarykumar. "The question is that which tests the depths of our self-knowledge. That is, our awareness not merely of what we are—which lies at the foundation of ontology and its extreme nationalism—but instead of what we have become.” To think about the "question" as this primal site of democratic faith and risk, following King, @jbouie, who has been called “one of the defining commentators on politics and race of the Trump era” by Columbia Journalism Review, joins @realaishwarykumar live in our studio in Los Angeles for this episode of Mutant. “In the noise of all the platitudes about that unforgettable moral arc of which MLK speaks, it is ironically forgotten that King remained acutely aware of how easy it was for America to pivot from its promise of community into a state of brazen and violent chaos,” Aishwary points out. “King never forgets that this moral choice between community and chaos is a matter not of consecrating but instead questioning the foundations of America’s promise of equality (including equality under law). There is nothing intrinsically just about America’s moral arc unless we, by force, bend it towards justice.” Bending, indeed force, is key to this immovability of the question about our future, Aishwary reminds us. For King, only the question can tear open the fissures of American life and lighten the hills we must climb (or the abyss we must stare at). In the Black political tradition, Jamelle lays out, the question has always been an insurgent mode of expressing this sense of the future. “Black Americans have long acted as a counterpublic, posing questions to the larger public.” The question “who belongs?”, for instance, is not merely civic, it is ontological, he argues. It exposes the very terms on which life and citizenship are distributed. And it is a disjuncture dug deep into the history of American consciousness, at least since the time Frederick Douglass first asked, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" And then there is BR Ambedkar, who would ask a century later about the undercaste, "Who were the Shudras?" What becomes, then, of the question as a mode of spiritual thought in our present? “Neither a rhetorical gesture nor a civic prompt, neither a function of restlessness nor of uncertainty, the question in our time returns—with catastrophic force—along the four militant threads that King had started to weave in the 1960s: political, epistemic, moral, and juridical (or punitive),” Aishwary proposes. “Only through the combination of logic and faith might we be able to reclaim, following King, a certain kind of transcendence, a sacrificial power that we all have and that America must rescue.” King’s question resists hopelessness. But it also rejects the nostalgia obscuring our own exclusions and distrust. To question is to stand at the edge of ruin and still insist on a moral vision. To question is to muster, above all, the...

    1h 42m

  4. MAR 10

    G | GOVERNMENT

    Watching the scale, speed, and lawless ease with which some of the most storied postwar American institutions have been attacked and dismantled in the past month makes it tempting to see this resurgent hatred against the government as an anomaly, at best a degenerate aberration even. The truth however is that for as long as there has been the idea of government in the modern world, there has been a stubborn strain of hatred against it. For as long as there has been the question of human need, there has been the fear of the government taking over life in its name. For as long as individualism and privacy have been the stuff of politics, there has been the specter of the government depriving us of them. The distrust of government as a villainous swallower of liberty is almost as old as—if not the counterpart to—the modern faith in government as a guarantor of the common good, a guardrail against lawless power, and a shepherd of our pursuit of happiness.  “The modern vision of politics rests on the idea that the government is more than simply an apparatus to manage the use and abuse of power, more than just a figure in our political and legal consciousness,” argues Aishwary. “In fact, the government exists in and through our moral consciousness, compressing in it our ways of relating to the world. An entire tradition and mentality of thinking about the common good—what we call the social contract—is today contained in the word government.” “How do we discriminate between the needs of our neighbors and of those who are strangers? When do we abandon even our friends? What do we owe the world? And what parts of it will we destroy simply because we are free to do so? The government, more than a theater of checks and balances on power, is a battleground for these insoluble—and vicious—moral dilemmas.” Not surprisingly, where earlier notions of State had at their center a juridical theory of sovereign “command,” the modern vision of Government, pace Locke’s Second Treatise, pivots to the citizen’s voluntary “consent.” Where the State became a relic of an old, archaic system run by brute force and arbitrary taxation, the Government becomes a figure of moral reasoning, its shapes defined by the need to defend private property. So much so that in the American tradition, the word “state” is banished altogether; it formally appears only overseas where power operates without constraint: in the State Department’s handling of foreign affairs. In contrast, the government oversees the pursuit of happiness, guarding liberty at home, striving to make a perfect Union out of violently unequal parts. The irony, of course, is that since the 18th century, those who benefited most from these unequal ideals and institutions have always been the quickest to sow distrust in it. And those who are most vulnerable to the government’s arbitrary excesses must always fight for its power to protect their common good. It is from this constitutional faith—forgiving the government’s excesses without forgetting its bloody violence—that the anti-colonial movements for self-government of the 1940s and the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s were forged. Whatever else one might say of the fictions of popular sovereignty, the idea of government cannot survive without this political faith. The tragedy of the neodemocratic condition is that this faith is kept alive precisely by those citizens who need the government most but who are also most brutalized by its inequalities. “Political faith,” Aishwary reminds us, “is this ability to forgive the government that rules in our name—and even fight for it—knowing well that in its moments of strength it will do us maximum harm and even seek to destroy us. And knowing even better that, after we have fought for its survival, after it has survived the lawless onslaught of the vandals, it might abandon us again.” Yet, without this faith i...

    1h 13m

  5. FEB 9

    S | SACRIFICE

    Few words in our democratic language invoke visions as paradoxical and as powerful as sacrifice. On the one hand, sacrifice recalls an archaic, ritualistic, even fetishistic set of practices, executed in the name of a sovereign power that draws its sanction from the theological, the divine right to rule. On the other hand is the transcendent world that sacrifice opens up with its vision of an equal, just life (or afterlife), of a more bearable world one wants to leave behind for others if one dies dreaming and fighting for it. This dreamy, sleepless, transcendent sacrifice—the sacrifice of a Rosa Parks, a Martin Luther King Jr., the women of Shaheen Bagh—makes democratic politics possible, in their willingness to put themselves in the straight line of harm, in their refusal to surrender their right to be human. “In this transcendental form of sacrifice, one does not abide by the religious laws that sovereigns write and masters enforce to keep or restore the artifice of violent peace: laws of giving up, of renouncing everything, of making oneself invisible, of turning one’s body into a subservient mass, of accepting the reduction of entire communities to superfluity, pushing them out of their own lands and opening them to extermination," says Aishwary. "Instead, the transcendental vision of sacrifice first and foremost transcends mortal fear and reclaims the right to not move, not disappear, not yield to the oppressor for the sake of an unequal, segregated orderliness,” says Aishwary. “In refusing to renounce her seat for a white passenger, Rosa Parks exemplified this earthly, immovable transcendence upon whose radiance the Montgomery Bus Boycott would eventually ride: her rejection of white peace that always extracts sacrifice and demands place from the rest.” “If the theological idea of sacrifice is rooted in a desire for mastery, the political idea of sacrifice is rooted in transcendence, in political faith, in the force of immovability,” says Aishwary. But there is a third vector in which sacrifice has become the substrate of the modern political, of what we at Mutant have called neodemocracy. “In its most ambiguous and yet clarifying form, sacrifice is conservative. It strives for a punitive society. A majoritarian politics constructed on the brute, cruel reality of our will to punish others.” We begin a dialogue on the theologico-political, and on democracy’s fragile, foundational relationship to sacrifice.

    1h 8m

  6. JAN 15

    E | EQUALITY

    We have so far traversed almost two dozen concepts at Mutant. And yet every word thought and spoken in these dialogues, it might be said, is about one humane dream: equality. Every episode in which we have spoken of caste, of the figure of the migrant, of the logics of segregation, of thinkers of the Black radical tradition; every reckoning we have made with our neodemocratic condition, with its cruelty and the decomposition of the human, and with our abandonment of the social contract, has returned us to the strange absence of moral and political equality on our planet. And yet it is freedom today that animates our rhetoric and galvanizes democratic politics worldwide, while equality—foundational to the very compact we make to recognize each other as human—remains ambiguous, even opaque. “Democracy is consumed by the question of freedom,” says @realaishwarykumar. “But politics is the expression of freedom, not the problem that politics seeks to solve. To what end, after all, do we seek, as Hannah Arendt might say, the freedom to be free? The problem that modern democratic politics seeks to solve is of equality.” Therein lies its fundamental paradox. For the grounds of our equality do not exist. Human beings are born unequal, sometimes unbearably so. They bear the brunt of earth—its water and fire—unequally. And they form unequal societies to maintain this disparity, slyly mocking the state of nature from which they claim to have emerged. “There is nothing radical about evil, Hannah Arendt would later concede,” Aishwary reminds us. “It is equality that is radical, precisely because it's so elusive, and because it can be understood only as an act of faith, one whose pursuit requires both political trust in our institutions and the moral courage to disobey them. Equality will require what Ambedkar calls force. A force that ends inequality.” “Like gravity, this force—the desire for equality—might already be in us, weak but irreducible, even if we remain unsure what an equal earth would look like.” Image from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)

    1h 3m
  7. D | DISAPPOINTMENT

    12/06/2024

    D | DISAPPOINTMENT

    Often shrugged off as a passing sense of dejection in a world that has let us down, “disappointment” might be the most intransigent concept that has shaped the modern democratic experiment. Rarely thought of as a political concept at all, let alone as a passion foundational to democracy, disappointment, Aishwary argues, returns us to a heightened state of loss; a sense of ending of a future and a world that barely moments ago seemed within grasp. From such a heightened state of crestfallen grief alone can we truthfully and responsibly think about the fragility of our democratic faith.  In fact, disappointment can be an attribute only in a world where faith still lives. In that, it is radically different from the sense of desolation that fuels majoritarian politics today. Disappointment is the constant reminder of our intimacy with those who repeatedly fail us and whom we can still never disown or part from. Nothing comes remotely close to disappointment in capturing this pain a people must bear to keep democracy truly democratic and anti-majoritarian. “After all, democracy is an experiment in human imperfection, as much ours as of those who overpower us, outnumber us. Only in democracy is one allowed to be disappointed in power (rather than live in fear of it). Only in democracy are you given the right to be disappointed in those you consider different from yourself, those who consider you their adversary, those who see you as their enemy. There is something about democracy alone that allows us to feel publicly disappointed and not be held in contempt or shame because we are feeling deflated.” This disappointment is the province only of those who want to push the limits of hope and test the boundaries of our political imagination. They are audacious enough to know they might be disappointed in the end, and yet, fighting against history, they still give a woman, a daughter of immigrants, imperfect like them and yet as perfect as America will ever be, a shot at power. Disappointment is the province only of those who are able to embrace their anger at the misogynoir that dashes their hopes. Which is why they never quibble about the causes of their defeat. Disappointment does not wallow in defeat or whine about populism; it does not turn desolate in entitlement and preachy in its nihilism. There is in Southern democracy a strain of militant disappointment, one that runs through the thought of Du Bois, King, Ambedkar, Baldwin, and most recently the Obamas, which stands as a bulwark against majoritarian preachers and their self-fulfilling defeatism. For these thinkers of the South, defeatism is simply an inability to muster the courage to be disappointed (again). From this majoritarian fear of defeat also appears the classic liberal disdain for Black voters and their choices (which are simply erased in all economic arguments about the results of the 2024 presidential election). Often, without irony, this disdain today speaks in 19th century socialist tones, barely even trying to conceal what Ta-Nehisi Coates has so acutely called America’s “fear of a Black President.” This “liberalism of disappointment”, as Aishwary calls for, following Judith Shklar, shows grace: grace towards those on whose toil has been built the epic story of American affluence (and inequality), and who, despite their oppression by a system put constitutionally in place 250 years ago, still refuse—in an act of immovable faith—to choose white supremacy simply because they are disappointed in the free market. Their disappointment too has grace. A grace that must in turn compel us to pause in humility and concede that liberalism will always understand income inequality less viscerally than those Black Americans who—in MLK’s immortal words—“made cotton king” and in so doing built America as such.  “I am disappointed in the lack of grace...

    1h 22m

  8. 10/26/2024

    F | FEAR

    If freedom is the most molecular of human desires and hope the most fragile of human capacities, then fear is an all too human anxiety—or weapon—that destroys both, in one stroke. Whether this is the mortal fear of losing one’s own freedom, or the fear of losing power over another—the power to give oneself an unbridled freedom to rule over others—the connection between fear and freedom is more elemental than we often acknowledge. “Absolute freedom is absolute, radical evil,” says Aishwary Kumar. “The willingness to say that our freedom is boundless—or that it should have no limits—is not very distinct from our willingness to say that our excesses and cruelty towards human and nonhuman others is perfectly justified. Freedom is relentlessly tempted by tyranny; tyrants live in constant fear of freedom. Freedom and fear are connected on this mortal plane of human temptation: the temptation to be so limitlessly free that it can only end in a barbaric inequality, a cruelty without ends.” This fear—and its counterpart, cruelty—seems disturbingly compatible with democracy. And yet, it also makes democracy wholly impossible. “Such is the enigma that Judith Shklar works through in her groundbreaking essay, “The Liberalism of Fear.” We are still to fully work out the depth of Shklar’s moral psychology, although this much is obvious: we simply cannot have a free society that is also an unequal, afraid one. And therein lies Shklar’s most profound, original insight. Inequality is the site of not just mortal fear; it is also the fuel of moral cruelty. Contra Hobbes, it is not a society of equals but a society of the afraid that is most cruel.” Yet, to think freely of fear requires that we see in fear the sources of both an incurable inequality and our irreducible equality. “There is a kind of fear that is democratic,” Aishwary proposes, “a moral, mortal fear rooted in finitude which embraces the idea that we as human beings can feel afraid, can feel anxious about the future.” This is why we think so closely in this episode with James Baldwin and W.E.B Du Bois, who seek to rescue fear—much like they seek to rescue freedom—from the defeatist, nihilistic rhetoric of the modern majority. “There is a way in which rejection of fear has become the most divisive, masculinist project over the last century and half,” says Aishwary. “Which is ironic, for the truth is that human beings always harbor fears that have nothing to do with their emasculation. If anything, there is the sort of fear that does not mean cowardice, that does not unleash rage, that does not compensate for itself by violence, but instead generates its own antithesis: a moral courage to be okay with solitude, with imperfection, with anxiety, with limits.” “That is the fear James Baldwin writes of in his essay, “Nothing Personal.” That is the fear we think with in this episode, that ethics of not just ontological fear, not just existential fear, but an ethics of feeling afraid for humanity, precisely so that human freedom can be reclaimed. That ethics of embracing fear precisely so that a new freedom can be unveiled.” In Darkwater (1920), Du Bois sees in the teacher the exemplary figure of this fear (and thus of its unveiling).

    1h 14m
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As violence against persons and things reaches a slow, catastrophic intensity worldwide; as the political and planetary become profoundly intertwined; as the deformity in our language thwarts our very ability to think about this suicidal moment in global politics and in human affairs as such, the brilliant thinker and scholar Aishwary Kumar (in LA) and editor-interlocutor Payal Puri (in New Delhi) begin a sustained, rigorous excavation of a deceptively simple question: What is up with democracy? Taking as our starting point the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet, we create an alphabet of global political thought; a rigorous recuperation of the words and concepts without which we cannot grasp the power and the fragility of the democratic promise. Never has a podcast attempted to compress, in just 52 words — two for every letter of the alphabet — the human condition itself.

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