2
democratic participation and political community. As Benjamin Barber has noted, liberal
democracy is intended more “to keep men safely apart rather than bring them fruitfully
together.”
5
In contrast to liberalism’s “politics as zookeeping,” democratic theorists have increasingly
advocated increased political participation, understood primarily in terms of citizen deliberation
and public speech. Reacting to liberalism’s distrust of majorities acting together, democratic
theorists believe that, “There can be no democratic legitimacy without ongoing talk.”
6
For
scholars like Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, legitimacy is understood in terms of the
capacity of citizens to reach mutually acceptable decisions. Deliberation is what encourages
citizens to take a broader perspective than they might otherwise take alone, increasing the
possibility of arriving at a justifiable politics.
7
Democratic theorists such as Barber, Gutmann, and Thompson seek a deliberative culture
that is both richer and more vivid than what currently exists. But in their focus on public speech,
they inadequately theorize the type of participatory practices that Delany spoke of — namely,
non-deliberative participatory practices emphasizing presence and shared witnessing. The result
is that participation and deliberation are essentially conflated. And by presuming that
deliberation is synonymous with participation, democratic theorists overlook the significance of
public gatherings, mass protest, marches, and other forms of public spectacle capable of uniting
the affections of subjects in ways that exceed the realm of rational deliberation.
In order to explore the distinction between participation and deliberation, I turn to the activist
tradition within Chicano and Puerto Rican politics. During the movement of the 1960s and ’70s,
the shared experience of visibility and public action gave Latinos access to a civic vocabulary far
richer than any they had had in the past. Self-interest and rights were supplemented by a lived
practice of mutual recognition and civic performance. More recently, Latino community activists
have utilized public performance as a way to forge political alliances between native-born
Chicanos and undocumented workers from Mexico and Central and South America.
5
Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984) 4.
6
Barber 136.
7
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1996) 42-3.
Convention