6

Towards a Multivocal Democracy

The question that we are faced with now is how to translate these insights, specific and archaic as they have been at times, into something of an ethos capable of producing a more vibrant, open-ended and multivocal democracy? In spite of all that has been said in the preceding pages, we would nonetheless be mistaken if we thought that the link between democracy and tragedy was anything other than fraught. After all, it is not so much tragedy as notions like representation, equality, freedom and rationality that have most frequently been associated with democracy today. So, what can we really learn from viewing democracy through a tragic lens?

For one, we might, like the Greeks who lived through democracy’s adolescent years, find ourselves more likely to see the injustices, hypocrisies and exclusions that democracy is supposed to uncover and overcome but which it is not always capable of doing in reality. Democracy in our eyes would become a commodity, valuable for its ability to make apparent the interplay between order and disorder and reality and fiction. So invigorated, we would become dissatisfied with delimiting our democratic endeavours solely to national congresses, parliaments or conventional venues of popular participation. Though vital, we will begin to understand that to extend democracy, we necessarily must search out disorder and fiction, neither of which are typically found within official institutions and practices of democratic politics. Accordingly, what we would become increasingly aware of were we to view democracy through a tragic lens is that formal institutions of democracy are not always enough, that instead of unearthing what we do not know and giving voice to those who are all too often ignored, it can actually suppress difference and work to revoke democratic rights in the promotion of entrenched democratic values. Our objective, even before we think about taking the next step of establishing any new body, convention or concert of democracy, is to recalibrate how we are to balance order with disorder and reality with fiction in politics.

This is where the Greek’s experiment can still be of use. When statesmen, citizens and the institutions of popular rule they had molded to provide unequalled access to the ruling of their ancient city stalled, as often became the case in a city-state mired down by international warfare and domestic turmoil, it was the dramas performed in the theatre of Dionysus that offered political insights of unusual clarity. Faced with geopolitical instability, personal greed and political overconfidence, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides taught audiences the lesson that life is ephemeral, filled with unknowns, which can trigger in them the need for certainty and immortality – pursuits quite capable of producing arrogance, conflict and downfall. These were lessons in the lures of hubris and the dangers of nemesis, all of which sit at the heart of any democracy. Unlike today, theatre was public and political, seen by the people as political education. Performances in the theatre created a polis that, as Hannah Arendt once said, ‘properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together’.¹

Elevated by democracy, tragedy checked the political excesses unleashed after the democratic revolution. From what we now know, the birth of democracy occurred at a time when repression, inequality and injustice dominated political affairs. The aristocratic order which had existed and that, at the expense of the many, had served the few so well, roused widespread discontent and anger. Eventually, it became too much to bear. Discontent and anger boiled over, rupturing the traditions of the once unquestionable hierarchy as it did. It is not difficult to see why tragedy rapidly came to prominence within this tumultuous environment. The space that was once sure, now became a vacuum, begging to be filled with new dreams and expectations as well as more inclusive norms and structures.

Tragedy became a vital theoretical backbone of democracy. It debunked the absolute certainty and life force that had sustained the aristocratic world, without debunking the certainty and life force needed to sustain the Greek world as a whole. It gave back to democracy, when democracy faltered, what it had first given Athens: the fleeting realization that no single voice or way of life was absolute and wholly true; that even the greatest among them was not all great. By doing so, tragedy proved itself to be an intrinsically democratic art form.

Tragedy’s ability to do this was due in large part to its multivocal form. By bringing a variety of otherwise marginalized stories, characters and voices onto the public stage and into democratic debate, the multivocal form represented tragedy’s most direct intervention into democratic politics. It was an explicit reminder to the masses who attended these performances that democratic rights and freedoms had severe limits. It acknowledged that, when faced with unknowns and life’s transience, it can be all too easy to seek reassurance by reaffirming what one knows and erecting structures that immortalize one’s own way of life. In short, what tragedy’s multivocal form did was to impart the lesson that democracy was not perfect, especially when it sought to conceal its own limits by pursuing its own self-perfection. When it did this, tragedy could speak paradoxically more candidly about democracy than could be done in reality.

How tragedy did this, as this book has shown, was through its capacity to draw out the core democratic interplay between order and disorder and reality and fiction. By dramatizing the underbelly of existence, the multivocal form reminded audiences that disorder exists at the heart of all orders, as unpleasant a realization as that is. Through staging a diversity of plots, characters and languages, order was, in effect, made perpetually susceptible to the threat of disorder. But that, at its core, was precisely what democracy had been created to encourage in the realm of politics: to self-institute and then self-limit. Having toppled the order of aristocracy in Athens, democracy was conceived to defy every closed system of thought. Tragedy extended this when democrats, impeded by the triviality of politicking and the threats to existence they faced both within and beyond their city walls, applied the political brakes in reality. It showed to the polis that, at sites and times of disorder, new perspectives, foreign peoples and anathema beliefs can encroach into the ordered existence of Athenian life, and that this could be both necessary and potentially enriching.

In such a world, where nothing was known with any degree of certainty, how one should understand and deal with political reality was a task that opened itself up to logical deduction, rational dialectic as well as unbound creativity. For this reason, the Greeks did not restrict themselves to the use of only factual accounts to understand reality. On the contrary, fictive sources were often considered as legitimate and expedient as their non-fictional counterparts in the conduct of politics. It was normal – even prudent – to draw from political, philosophical and aesthetic sources in an attempt to resolve democratic dilemmas. Self-institution, being an act of creation, demanded that the Athenians boldly imagine a new future distinct from their aristocratic past. It required them to think, imaginatively, about what was possible in reality as well as about what reality was itself. The multivocal form, in this respect, was one particularly crucial if unconventional source that helped to enrich democratic politics. Tragic art dramatized the paradoxes of politics and existence – through its resort to fictional plots, characters and language. By drawing on fiction to reinterpret and better understand reality, the Athenians were able to learn from and discuss experiences that had been silenced or vilified in reality.

Through the multivocal form of tragedy, audiences therefore became privy to the realization that life under democracy would be a tragic one and that whatever greatness they, as a civilization, had laid claim to would never be dissociated from the horrors of slavery, warfare, colonization and exploitation that, together, comprised the democratic way of life.

A multivocal democracy today

Given the importance of tragedy to the development of the West’s first great democracy, this book has laboured under the assumption that it constitutes a rich, if untapped, source of democratic insight today. Perhaps, like the ancient Greeks, tragedy might be capable of aiding contemporary efforts to extend the institutions and procedures of democracy – especially from a rigidly defined national realm into a more post-national configuration befitting of today’s global flows of people, ideas and capital. Might tragedy’s multivocal form possess something capable of inspiring contemporary democrats to revive the interplay between order and disorder and reality and fiction as a premise for our own democratic initiatives?

It is true that we probably will not, as a result of this study, be directly equipped to begin to articulate concrete institutions and procedures amiable to a more democratic world. Nor would we, by returning to ancient Greek politics and theatre, be able to see immediate if any overlaps between our own democratic ways and a democratic way of life that has since elapsed into the annals of history. But before we can begin to redress these questions and undertake such tasks, problematic due to their novelty and scale, we might find it necessary to first remind ourselves of what essentially it is about democracy that we would wish to see made available on a global scale and what a world crying out to be heard really wants out of a democracy. It has been to this end that the forgotten link between democracy and tragedy has been revived: so as to place us in a better position to think through some of the more trenchant and vexing global challenges confronting contemporary democracy – in critical, unorthodox and imaginative ways.

With this in mind, this book established a novel analytical framework, based around an unconventional reading of tragedy’s multivocal form, to guide its analysis of the democratic insights of two tragedies: the first being Aeschylus’ Suppliants and the second Charles L. Mee’s contemporary adaptation Big Love. It argued in each instance that learning to read these dramatic plays as possible democratic texts is to re-read ‘historical’, ‘artistic’ and ‘fictional’ artifacts as key political texts – which is precisely what the ancient Greeks would have done with their own tragedies. The benefits of such an undertaking would not merely enrich our cultural horizons, though it inevitably would, but it would allow us the opportunity to reinvigorate democracy and debates germane to the prospect of a post-national democracy in two key ways.

Democracy is predicated on both the presence of order and disorder

In the first instance, as this book has stressed, one of the foremost effects of tragedy’s multivocal form is the capacity it has to leave its audiences with a more nuanced appreciation of how their sense of order – namely, the life, knowledge and civilization they have erected – could never be detached from the forces of disorder. To think of these two conditions as opposites, somehow unrelated, is to misconstrue the nature of existence. The democratic urge arose in Athens, in part, as a recognition of the tensions that existed between order and disorder in Greek life. Tragedy dramatized this, personally, for each individual audience member. Yet, the realization that the life we lead might somehow not be as incorruptible as we had thought is of no less significance today than when the Greek tragedians of the antique past first dramatized it. Shielded by the ever-expanding knowledge base that we have acquired through increasingly scientific means, we have curiously become less self-aware of just what our civilization has wagered for the sake of its own survival. Arriving at a more nuanced appreciation of the crucial links between order and disorder in our own political struggles should therefore continue to be a pressing political objective – one that, in turn, would work to enhance how we conceive of democracy and our capacity to engage in politics more openly.

Especially because the concept and procedures of democracy today are often considered synonymous only with the search for order, the tragic intervention may oddly be particularly timely. Order here connotes the regime of meaning which has come to be composed of notions like representation, equality, freedom and peace, which together have given form and function to the way of life known as democratic. Order, according to most mainstream democratic discourses, is the by-product of progress and rationalism in the political realm.² Being entwined with the project of modernity, the current agenda to democratize the global realm effectively holds that to be democratic is to value teleological development and rational discourse.³ As Bruce Russett, one of the intellectual forefathers of democratic peace theory, states: ‘if history is imagined to be the history of wars and conquest, then a democratic world might in that sense represent “the end of history”’.⁴ For his part, Francis Fukuyama confers. His argument is that with the end of the Cold War, a resounding global consensus arose with regard to the prevalence and legitimacy of liberal democracy as the best system of governance.⁵ Given this, he equates liberal democracy with the ‘end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the final form of human government’ – as such, the end of history.⁶ Unlike previous ideologies and systems of governance whose intrinsic ‘defects and irrationalities’ caused them to self-corrupt and capitulate, liberal democracy represents the pinnacle of an ‘evolutionary process [that] was neither random nor unintelligible’ but ‘would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings’.⁷ With his prescriptions, democracy becomes interlinked with a teleological order made possible through a rational ideology and a system of governance.

As a result, it has not so much been the search for disorder rather the creation of order that has become the lynchpin of contemporary democratic configurations at every level, from the local to the global.⁸ Without order, we have been told repeatedly, ‘there can be no society. And without society there can be no civilized life’.⁹ Democracy is no different.¹⁰ It seeks, at the level of the community, the nation and the society of nations, to bring about norms and institutions specifically designed to encourage a certain social and political formation. The point, through democratic procedures, is to establish some sort of order that is broadly conceived by the constituents of that society to be the precondition of the good life.

This is a model that we now know would have only been considered partly democratic according to the Greeks. For them, it was the threatening presence of disorder that initially gave rise to the need for order. Disorder provided the greatest inspiration for democratic inclusion and change. In this endeavour, tragedy’s multivocal form played a key democratic role by bringing a variety of otherwise marginalized stories, characters and voices onto the public stage and into democratic debate. A true democracy, tragedy reiterated, should not just be about the eradication of conflict, the solidification of rational knowledge and the creation of distinct territorial, structural and epistemic boundaries. Perhaps more important than that, it needs to become a kind of ‘rhetorical vocabulary that neither masks nor apologizes for the disorderly, agonistic, unkempt, and fundamentally unstable character of democratic politics’.¹¹ Open to what is unknown and beyond questioning, democratic politics should aspire towards the creation of a precarious balance between that which is and that which is not in the world. Disorder, in this regard, would necessarily take its rightful place on the public stage and be incorporated into democratic debate. This was how democratic politics was conceived as an idea and a practice that has become as much about self-realization as about self-negation.¹²

Reading tragedy’s multivocal form democratically, perhaps we too can begin to uncover democracy as a vital interplay between order and disorder. When contemporary democracy seems struck above all else by the promise of unfettered progress, the logic of tragedy may help to slowly peel back what has been concealed by our modern life, knowledge and civilization, and ask such questions as what lies beyond, at whose expense have we prospered and what might they have to say to us?

Problematizing the notion of order through disorder is a democratic act. Being open to the presence and demands of disorder, even as we strive to erect an overarching global order, is crucial to any truly democratic ethos. Tragedy’s multivocal form has shown us that democracy should not be solely about the creation of order. Order, though vital, can frequently conceal more than it reveals. Order privileges the status quo and threatens to continually delegitimize individuals, issues and events currently struggling for recognition on the margins of society. Automatically suppressing what threatens order can mean that we might never get the chance to move beyond our present injustices and problems. It can mean that we continue to make light of stories, characters and voices marginalized in contemporary political struggles. Sites of disorder, as such, are as crucial as sites of order in politics. Seeking out the fluid connections between order and disorder is central to understanding what democracy is all about – or so the Greeks would argue.

Indeed, for all our talk of order, it is often forgotten or accepted as unproblematic that all orders exist only because they have been superimposed, sometimes violently and at other times incongruously, onto some form of pre-existing disorder – and that this is deemed to be both natural and desirable. Rarely do we question the allure of order or see disorder as an alternative form of order which, though undeniably different, might also offer some alternative form of comfort, security, stability and knowledge. All orders cover up and smooth over something that once appeared too dangerous, incomprehensible or repugnant to tolerate unadulterated.

It is this theme that, in various ways, has animated much of the preceding reading of Aeschylus’ Suppliants and Charles L. Mee’s Big Love. In both tragedies, we sense that the elimination of political crises and conflicts do not in themselves produce understanding and peace. Understanding and peace exist only because they were slotted abruptly into the place where crisis and conflict stood. But, where crises and conflicts are artificially averted or ignored, the disorder that has been eliminated or suppressed is likely to be shrouded and kept falsely at bay. To redress this, appropriate mechanisms for widespread political contestation and dispute must be put in place within any political order. This, as Derek Barker writes in Tragedy and Citizenship, is what the ‘art form of tragic drama provides’.¹³ Through it, he continues, students of tragedy can begin to recognize the ‘paradoxical sense that the reconciliation of conflict is an indeterminate and even impossible task . . . . [which] requires both a yearning to mediate and cope with conflict and an understanding that conflict in omnipresent and ineliminable’.¹⁴ Coming to terms with this is how we can come to terms with the democratic utility offered to us through these sites of disorder.

Similarly, by forcing us to see stories where before we may have only seen one story and a set of conflicting narratives in lieu of the official narrative, tragedy’s multivocal form reminds us that in any order there is always a corresponding disorder. In this process, writes Howard Stein, what we actually learn is how ‘to reflect and illuminate human life, to know ourselves a little better, to be reminded of ourselves – both our civilized and uncivilized elements – over and over and over again’ – a lesson entrenched within Big Love.¹⁵ When the civilized come into contact with the uncivilized, without obliterating the other, is when we can truly see and hear multiple stories, characters and voices. When our world view comes into dialogue with the world views of others, however trying, imperfect and momentary that exchange may be, we initiate the process of complicating the world or, rather, of realizing just how complex a place our world can be. There is no one world view, regardless of its perceived preponderance, that can effectively bring into relief the countless realities that exist all together and all at the same time.

The overall message that we can therefore take away from this is that where there is order there will be disorder too. Even Hedley Bull, the international relations scholar famed for delineating the existence of an international order from a realm better known for its anarchy, admitted that ‘the element of disorder looms as large or larger in world politics than the element of order’.¹⁶ We need to better recognize this at the global level and at the domestic level. Additionally, we need to learn to countenance the troubling predisposition in politics that attempts to dissociate order from disorder: to see them as separate categories if not as polar opposites. Order exists where disorder does not – and vice versa. For them to coexist is both a contradiction in terms and illogical. It is for this reason that the world is often uncritically categorized into distinct and separate zones: one of democratic peace, for instance, and the other of violent turmoil.¹⁷

Yet, reality is never quite as simple. Order is rarely divorced from disorder. Oftentimes, it exists because of it. At other times, what may be considered as order for some might rightly represent chaotic disorder for others. As Bleiker notes, ‘[j]ust as order can be the basis of terror and repression, disorder can provide the opportunity for freedom and justice’.¹⁸ At a more primordial level, all orders are but an arbitrary set of facts, truths, institutions and norms that have been selected and then imposed against a broader, if less cohesive, array of facts, truths, institutions and norms. Without realizing this, we can neglect to take seriously those stories, characters and voices whose existence contravenes what we have identified as real and pressing. Uncovering the arbitrariness of our own order, from time to time, and identifying with those who have been delegitimated through the course of our ordering is, in essence, a democratic act which intrinsically re-evaluates power relations, scrutinizes the realities of our political ideals and practices and reinvents a broader, more inclusive society than what had previously existed. Through this process, we can come to see the potential tyranny of order and the opportunities that are available to us in disorder. Seeing order and disorder as two sides of the same coin, not as separate or distinct, is to see reality as it really is. Especially when orders become too repressive and totalizing in their claims to legitimacy, ‘disorder can be both the only reality we have and a valuable source of democratic politics’.¹⁹

Analysing tragedy’s multivocal form helps turn our attention to the existence of both order and disorder. This becomes democratic to the extent that it asks us to eradicate the dissociations we may have possessed between order and disorder, peace and turmoil, knowledge and understanding, civilization and violence, so as to reveal their connections. Geographical, political and epistemic divides misconstrue the complex political realities and unnecessarily sideline a vast number of stories, characters and voices. In this regard, zones of peace – or order – do not represent the condition that prevails in the absence of turmoil – or disorder. A real democracy is drawn from both conditions; it is the composite of both conditions.

By reading tragedies like Suppliants, Big Love and others, what we are left with is precisely a more astute awareness of the interplay between order and disorder – the upshot of which can help to institute a more vibrant and dynamic global democratic system. By seeing order and disorder as valuable sites of democratic understanding and practice, we would place ourselves in a more secure if less stable environment. While we all have a need for order – as ‘orders’, writes Richard Devetak, ‘are always established against threats’ – so too do we have a need to understand what threatens order.²⁰ Especially when threats change, as they inevitably do, the order that was created to hold them at bay can become ineffective and, worse still, even more arbitrary and exclusionary than when it was established. If orders do not undergo periodic self-examination – or self-limitation – they can themselves become a threat to ongoing security, peace and justice. Tragedy’s multivocal form, by drawing on insights gleaned from a variety of otherwise marginalized stories, characters and voices, is a reminder of this. The multivocal form, in this sense, seeks to draw explicitly from disorder to help renegotiate the parameters of what order best accommodates life in the present. What may be antithetical to order now, may, in time, come to inspire a more just and other-inclusive order. Collectively questioning the composition of our orderly world is thus crucial. At times, this requires that we actively engage in discussion of what threatens to intrude, invert and rupture our orderly world.

But tragedy’s multivocal form does not just remind us of the democratic need to search out and locate disorder. More importantly, it reminds us that order – our order, any order – is itself a form of disorder, just as disorder can be a nascent site of order. Examining disorder is to examine how others choose to live their lives and to understand the reasons why they might find the lives we lead problematic. Seeing how marginalized stories, characters and voices intervene and intertwine with those at the rational centre is to see the connections that exist at all levels. It is to come to grips with both the oneness and the plurality of our world. This is the challenge that, for Walker, has faced us for some time now: to ‘see Many Worlds not as the negation of One World but as the condition for its possibility’.²¹ When we see disorder not as the negation of order in our world but as the condition for its possibility is when we can ensure that any institutions and procedures of democratic politics that we establish at both the national and post-national level are more attuned to a greater number of stories, characters and voices than ever before.

Democracy understands the dichotomy between reality and fiction fluidly

Though all this sounds relatively reasonable and even desirable in theory, none of it can actually come about without a fundamental rethinking of what we deem as legitimate and illegitimate in the political arena. Too often, our retreat to the shores of order, hastened by our fear of disorder, has been the result of an unnecessarily narrow and rigid demarcation of what is politically acceptable from what is not. Thus, increasing our sensitivities to the intricate interplay between order and disorder will not be possible without an equal commitment to the destruction of another entrenched modern dichotomy: the false opposition that partitions reality from fiction.

What we glean from tragedy’s multivocal form also speaks to this overdrawn distinction. By its very nature, tragedy dramatized stories, characters and voices that the tragedians had imagined and reinterpreted. They were dramatic representations that, in today’s parlance, operated in the realm of fiction, as a form of popular entertainment. And yet, the Greeks regarded what they encountered in the theatre to be just as politically incisive as what had been taught by their statesmen and philosophers. Although only fictional representations, tragic dramas were, nonetheless, regarded in Athens as a legitimate form of political discourse in reality.

All this suggests that the fundamental dichotomy which we have erected in modern times between the realm of reality and the realm of fiction was a notion foreign to the ancient Greeks.²² To them, fictional forms of representation, such as tragedy, could legitimately draw on and be drawn upon by rational understandings of reality. Fiction was just another resource that thinkers and practitioners of politics looked to for inspiration and guidance. It broadened reality, especially if what constitutes reality is rigidly ordered and beyond dispute.

Put differently, institutions such as democracy and tragedy drew their inspiration from factual and fictional sources alike. Together, the intellectual and aesthetic horizons of both institutions, and of their patrons, were broadened and put in better stead to give expression to a greater range of issues and individuals in a greater variety of ways. In Thomas Docherty’s words, the key task of a democracy of this kind is ‘to make culture happen, to bring about the event that reveals the extraordinary by making us step out of that which is ordinary for us’.²³ Crucial, in this regard, is fiction or the ‘truth of the private realm’, which gives political representation to the irrational and unrepresentable.²⁴

The understanding that sometimes rational discourse is not enough to convey the world’s complexity – that instead of giving expression to it, complexity can actually be suppressed and belittled – is a fundamental truth latent within the multivocal form of tragedy. Resorting to sources that to us are better known for their literary, artistic and sensory qualities, the Greeks sought to retrieve what had been suppressed by rational understandings of reality alone. Tragedy’s multivocal form grasps that when the former is suppressed by the latter for too long, it will find expression in any way it can. In Suppliants, it is externalized through the widespread psychological despair and political violence that descended on Argos not long after the sisters landed on its shores. And in Big Love, it emerged through the physical release, the Dionysian outbreak that both the sisters and brothers gave in to.

As a result, when rational discourses are incapable of conveying the complexity of reality, there is a need to explore other forms of expression – to free language from the official discourse – so that others, too, can have a legitimate voice in political deliberations. As Anna Agathangelou and Ling remind us, ‘[s]howing the spaces where gaps exist between voices does not signal an end to understanding but a beginning to negotiations across these gaps in a location that is suspended, if only for the moment, between locations of power’.²⁵ A multivocal democracy must enable individuals to search out new languages and sources of knowledge as they seek to further understand and give expression to a life where crisis and conflict are the inevitable corollaries of their own disparate values, wills and circumstances.

This goes against the grain of most contemporary political discourses, which have come to view these fictional sources of knowledge with suspicion. The reason for this, as Bleiker laments, is because these discourses continue to be wedded to a Newtonian frame of mind and, as a consequence, maintain a rather myopic conception of what equates to real knowledge.²⁶ The effect of this has been that more artistic representations of politics have tended to be ‘routinely ghettoised’ within political debates.²⁷ Legitimate political knowledge of reality is produced through rational and social scientific methods. There continues to be a preconception that if observation of political reality utilizes rational and social scientific methods, then the information gathered will equate to facts about political reality. We can see this logic at work, for instance, in one of the foundational twentieth-century political texts on international relations: Hans Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace.²⁸ Though a vast and sprawling book, covering topics from power, imperialism, ideology and morality to diplomacy, Politics Among Nations had fairly strict objectives and methodologies. The ‘theory of international politics’ it set out to establish was ‘this-worldly’,²⁹ to be

judged not by some preconceived abstract principle or concept unrelated to reality, but by its purpose: to bring order and meaning to a mass of phenomena which without it would remain disconnected and unintelligible. It must meet a dual test, an empirical and a logical one: Do the facts as they actually are lend themselves to the interpretation the theory has put upon them, and do the conclusions at which the theory arrives follow with logical necessity from its premises? In short, is the theory consistent with the facts and within itself?³⁰

The objective and methodology are quite clear. Reality and facts about it are of the utmost importance. Through rational and social scientific methods, order can be garnered from a mass of phenomena that would otherwise be disconnected and unintelligible. Other sources of knowledge – namely, those that emanate from fictional representations – have no legitimacy in the politics among nations. Importantly, the desire to possess these facts about political reality is no different from the desire to give political reality a definitive order. Disorder, or so the logic goes, can be kept in check if the correct methodology is applied.

There is little freedom for scholars, politicians and policymakers to appreciate the democratic benefits of utilizing factual as well as fictional accounts to engage political matters. Fiction symbolizes the lack of real knowledge. It does not, as Damon Young writes, divulge those truths which are ‘hidden by superfluous facts, interpretations, myths’.³¹ And it certainly does not have the potential to reveal the arche: ‘the primal theme or tension at work in a person, a relationship or a situation’. That remains the preserve of factual analyses, that is, those carried out through rational and social scientific methods.

Important though these facts about reality are in the creation of a rational political order, they are not enough. Political analysts who are serious about democracy must also subject order to question. And one way that this can be done is by interrogating, from time to time, ‘how reality is seen, framed, read, and generated in the conceptualisation and actualisation’ of political reality.³²

In her innovative textbook, International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction, Cynthia Weber gives us some concrete examples of how one might do this in the conceptualization and conduct of international affairs.³³ Using popular films such as Lord of the Flies, Wag the Dog and The Truman Show to re-read dominant theories of world politics, Weber reveals how reality can be mediated through various mediums and modes of representation – some deemed legitimate, while others not. For her, pairing dominant international relations myths (e.g. Waltz’s theory of anarchy) with popular films (such as Lord of the Flies) enables us to see them as stories or as ‘a particular vision of the world’, not as unquestionable, objective facts about reality.³⁴ It is only by doing so that we can understand how mediated or fictional our so-called facts about politics are; how what may erstwhile amount to fiction can, in turn, possibly be a source that can show us new realities. And, more importantly, how the facts of ‘IR theory may not be located in the realm of “truth” and “reality” any more than popular films are’.³⁵ Consequently, where dominant facts fail to adequately explain or accommodate marginalized stories, characters and voices, Weber shows us that it is possible to turn to fictional sources and representations of politics. There, we may be able to find the answers which evade us in reality.

Another scholarly illustration of what such an endeavour might look like is Chan’s recent book, The End of Certainty.³⁶ Chan’s book is, as he openly acknowledges, written as if it were ‘a meandering novel’.³⁷ Because of this, his writing – how he writes, what he writes of – betrays the discipline he proclaims to speak of. That is to say, we are familiar with many of the stories he tells about global politics. We have after all heard them many times before: stories about the ‘end of history’ by Francis Fukuyama; the ‘clash of civilizations’ by Samuel Huntington and even Robert Kagan’s story ‘of paradise and power’. Yet, we have never heard them quite like this. Drawing from a truly global cast of characters, Chan delves deep into the texts, myths and cultures that international relations scholars in the West have long proclaimed to understand – though often, as it turns out, have little if any understanding of. To make his point, he populates his book with other stories told by and about Jean Sibelus’ Finlandia, Kwame Gyekye’s An Essay on African Philosophical Thought, Jacques Lacan’s Antigone, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood. It is a book that draws on fictional sources to illuminate the factual realities of the political world in a fashion that the dominant theoretical frameworks are often at a loss to do. The chaotic unity or ‘doubling’ (Chan’s term) that comes from fusing reality and fiction this way brings these otherwise disparate and excoriated figures, stories and philosophies to the fore.

All this can be seen as democratic because, through fiction, we expand facts about reality. As Hayward Alker writes, ‘the world of fiction leads us to the essential heart of the real world of action by playing the unreal’.³⁸ That, in itself, is a democratic endeavour. Seeing the dichotomy between reality and fiction as inherently fluid is to see and hear stories, characters and voices marginalized through factual accounts alone.³⁹ It is to locate the ‘cracks and fissures and dissent of difference’, which is where we can find the ‘micro-personal story’ that belies the ‘macro-structures’ of our grand political narratives.⁴⁰ In short,

[a]ccepting a fiction/reality binary among texts as unproblematic therefore allows “reality” to continue as the privileged signifier, making it harder to challenge those who claim special access to this “reality” and ignoring the meaning we derive from other sources of information.⁴¹

By expanding and exploring a greater range of accounts, we can interrogate political order and disorder wherever they occur: in canonical texts, institutional practices, university classrooms, as well as in fictional representations of reality.

In this enterprise, tragedy can once again become an explicit source precisely because its multivocal form brings into relief the fluid connections between reality and fiction. Reading tragedies as a democratic source reminds us that there are truths in fact as well as in fiction, and both have the potential to offer new and relevant political insights. Tragedy cultivates a democratic sensitivity that relays both official narratives and forgotten stories of personal repression, struggle and survival. Drawing actively on factual and fictional sources as part of democratic deliberations has clear and practical benefits. It can open up opportunities to learn from and discuss experiences that would otherwise be impossible: foreign perspectives, silenced opinions and uncomfortable truths. Not all of these efforts will necessarily provide political insights of equal worth. Nevertheless, we must learn to encourage fictional accounts which ‘not only provides voice but [can also demonstrate] the variety and scope of voices, thereby curbing the hegemony of one’.⁴² Our inability to ‘see another as fully human’ has, according to Martha Nussbaum, much to do with the technocratic forms of rationalized knowledge we have become accustomed to.⁴³ To liberate us from this bind, she encourages the cultivation of a literary imagination which, with the help of literary sources, makes it more possible for us to enter ‘imaginatively into the lives of distant others and to have emotions related to that participation’.⁴⁴ New perspectives, greater empathy and more introspection can emerge in the wake of such aesthetic explorations. Only then can we begin to think more expansively, even imaginatively, about the sites, peoples and structures most in need of democratic intervention.

When certain stories, characters and voices remain imprisoned by the dominant discourses of fact, true democratic politics must dare to look further. Through fiction – where private, repressed and sordid truths lie – we can see and hear more than we did; things we may not have seen or heard in political discourse before. A revival of such a holistic approach to knowledge is perhaps more timely now than ever.

And so, radical and short-lived as it was, maybe the Greeks’ experience still has something to teach us about our own democratic tendencies? Maybe we can even draw from their tragedies in order to create our own, so that we may better understand our own?

When the Greeks expanded democracy to the courts, festivals, marketplaces and, of course, to the theatre, they soon heard voices beyond the official political purview. Individuals who would have otherwise remained invisible began to take centre stage, along with the daily struggles that marked their existence. Were we to do the same, we might just find that our answers to Sheldon Wolin’s question – ‘What has Athens to do with Washington?’ – are actually more than we think. And that would be a good place to start.