The Improper Politics of Democracy and Property

ABSTRACT

Interrogating the limits of post-foundational accounts of political economy, this response to Taavi Sundell, proposes three conceptual shifts. First, I argue that the distinction between politics and economics polices a border that absolves economic questions of their implication in policing appropriation and political order. Second, I think political economy in terms of proprietary order. The notion of proprietary order situates reproduction in relation to regimes of property, material inequality and propriety: the securing of ‘proper’ objects and subjects through technologies of inequality. Here I reconceptualize first the politics of equivalence, and second logics of ‘propertization.’ I argue that post-foundationalist theorists tend to focus on equivalential logics in relation to populism and hegemony. However, they forget logics of debt and financial equivalence and thus cannot adequately conceptualize hegemony. Second, I rethink property as a technology that polices ways of being, seeing and doing. I characterise property as a contingent form of political articulation that nonetheless has sedimentary effects that haunt any present. I situate property in relation to the sedimented colonial legacies that haunt it legal forms today. How, I ask, do different proprietary and equivalential orders police equality and limit democracy?

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Padrões were the stone markers left by Portuguese colonists proclaiming the territory they landed on as property of the Portuguese Empire.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Devenney

Mark Devenney is Professor of Critical Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics at the University of Brighton. Specializing in contemporary critical theories and radical politics, his most recent works include Towards an Improper Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Thinking the Political: Ernesto Laclau and the Politics of Post-Marxism (Routledge, 2018), and Interrogating Terror (Routledge, 2015), co-edited with Bob Brecher and Aaron Winter.