On Politics and the Little Tools of Democracy: A Down-to-Earth Approach

Abstract

The aim of this paper is not to explore what democracy is in some normative sense, but rather how, and with what, democracy gets carried out in practice. In doing this the author seeks to rework the focus on the tactics and materialities of government developed within Foucault's work on governmentality, as well as in actor-network theory, by way of a deliberative approach: Political technologies are not to be understood in a context of the microphysics of power, as techniques of domination exclusively, but as tools for public involvement, for democratisation and deliberation as well, it is argued. Hence the notion ‘tool of democracy’. Empirically the paper attends to the early 1970s and explores the contestation over a power plant that never came into existence. It demonstrates that non-existent objects may have long lasting political effects: The power plant took part in bringing a politics of emissions down to earth, thus enabling the evironmental issue as well as another political landscape. By exploring these events, closely and historically, the paper argues that perhaps democracy was never like we thought it to be.