Between Multitude and Pueblo: Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution and the Government of Un-governability

Abstract

Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution uses officially sponsored commemorations, festivals, and publications to underscore its relation to and dependence on unrest and un-governability. In this way, it founds a basis and legitimacy not through a historical link to a people or territory, juridical recognition of sovereignty, nor to bureaucratic and institutional continuity, but rather to a direct link to constituent power. However, as opposed to other cases in the Republican tradition that celebrate the revolutionary origins of modern nation states, this article contends that this discursive practice highlights the way in which the Bolivarian Revolution shuttles between poles of un-governability and representation, reflected at a subjective level in the figures of the multitude and the pueblo. I suggest a reading of official discourses that celebrate the autonomous and collective subjects of the caracazo—an anti-neoliberal uprising and massacre in 1989—and the April 2002 coup and counter-coup as valorizations of un-governability. The article contends that these dynamics illustrate a desired and novel—but as yet not fully realized—democratic praxis that breaks with forms of constituted (state) power more familiar to the Western and North Atlantic political traditions.