tructures or institutions of advocacy. In other words, the shape that institutions assume in supposedly democratic societies, usually on account of the decisions that selected elites make about the details of those societies, does violence to democracy in its most unambiguous political sense. In this regard, Lummis cites conventions of defining democracy or indeed the people that have been adopted from the time of the democracy of Athens, through the democracy of the United States, the French Revolution, and in proto-fascist states posing as democracies as failing to define democracy in a way that reaches meaning. For Lummis, democracy cannot be readily defined, but its meaning can be reached, and it reaches meaning when the people in a civil society have a continuous expectation that they have direct access to the power to transform their lives. In other words, there is always the realistic possibility that the people can act on the stake they have in their own lives to transform them for the better. That is why reference is made not to a set of institutions but rather to "a state of being," the transition to which "is not an institutional founding but a 'change of state'" (159). In this view, where there is a realistic sense of access to meaningful action instead of a sense of being circumscribed by structure, there democracy is most likely to be found. Thus it is that Lummis can say, "Democracy is essential politics: the art of the possible. As an art, democracy is a performance art, like music, dance, and theater" (159). The formation of institutions may be a consequence of such performance art, but it is the process of democratic praxis, not its result, by which democracy may be identified.
From such a formulation follows the idea of the people as principal actors. One coul
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