Jodi Dean (2009) _Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics_, Durham: Duke University Press. 

In disputing the notion of the post-political, Jodi Dean unpacks neoliberalism and the collective fantasies around the free market. As part of this, and along with others, she considers really existing democracy to be an empty cipher invoked by both right and left, arguing for a more radical political imagination. One of the problems is that a consensus based model like representational democracy fails to acknowledge that the political is necessarily antagonistic (2009: 13). This is Chantal Mouffe's position not least, as she draws upon Carl Schmitt's critique of liberalism (Schmitt famously argues that liberalism fails to account for the core opposition between friends and enemy that underscore the political) to stress the unavoidability of antagonism. Although taking a different position to Ranciere on the issue of the post-political, the point is that democracy is closely tied to systems of legitimacy (the law) such that it becomes the justification of various tyrannies - such as to invoke the 'state of exception' despite its contradiction with the principles of democracy.

Dean uses the phrase 'communicative capitalism' to point to the convergence of democracy and the present form of capitalism, thus emphasizing the importance of networked communication technologies - indeed materializing them. The ability of these technologies to allow interconnections and participation indicates their ideological power, and despite appearances how scale-free networks contain hubs and hierarchies (here Barabási's explanation of power-laws proves useful, 2009: 31). Dean summaries this:
'Communicative capitalism is a political-economic formation in which there is talk without response, in which the very practices associated with governance by the people consolidate and support the most brutal inequalities of corporate-controlled capitalism.' (2009: 24) 
'Communicative capitalism captures our political interventions, formatting them as contributions to its circuits of affect and entertainment - _we feel political, involved, like contributors who really matter_.' (2009: 49)

Participation remains a fantasy in her terms, in clicking a button on an online petition for instance or as part of an interactive artwork (Zizek's use of the term interpassivity is cited, 2009: 31). The fantasy of social technologies would be a case in point to indicate how the social is produced ultimately as a passive relation. The collective fantasy extends to the idea of global unity materialized in the Internet (or events like the World Cup presently taking place as I write). Again referring to Barabási (2002), scale-free networks like the Internet can be seen to offer certain 'directness', divided into four continents for instance. The architecture is distributed and fragmented but imagined in terms of its totality, or what Dean calls the 'fantasy of global unity' (2009: 43).  

To define what is meant by neoliberalism in more detail, like others, Dean turns to Foucault's lectures on governmentality between 1982-3 (Michel Foucault (2010) _The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France 1982-1983, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Foucault draws out a distinction between early liberalism and contemporary neoliberalism. Neoliberalism replaces the regulatory function of the state to the market with the market itself, and emphasizes the human subject in different terms reacting to the market rather than the limits of government. The goal of government becomes the construction of certain types of subjectivity in line with competition within markets (2009: 52). 

After the collapse of socialism, the fantasies of real existing democracy emanates from this logic. 
'Real existing constitutional democracies privilege the wealthy. As they install, extend, and protect neoliberal capitalism, they exclude, exploit, and oppress the poor, all the while promising that everyone wins.' (2009: 76)
Participatory networked communications technologies consolidates the logic. This leads Dean to conclude that democracy is not the answer to contemporary political problems but a symptom.  

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