Unexceptional politics : on obstruction, impasse, and the impolitic

288 Pages·2018·20.691 MB·English

by  Apter, Emily S.

VERS
BM0721304
First published by Verso 2018
Emily Apter 20 18
Images courtes y of V\'illiam Powhida and Postmasters Gallery, New York
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foe moral rights of the author have been asserted
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-085-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-086-9 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-087-6 (UK EBK)
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Contents
Introduction: Unexceptional Politics 1
L Resistant to Politkal Theory
"Small P" Politics 21
Micropolitics 37
Microsociologies 53
Nanoracisms 67
Il. Scenes of Obstruction
lmpolitic 83
Disentrenchment 97
lnterference 101
Obstinacy 1 'l 3
Ill. Political Fictions
Political Fiction 139
Psychopolitics 145
Collateral Damage 155
Thermocracy 163
Milieu 177
IV. Economies of Existence
Schadenfreude 199
Managed Life 213
Occupy Derivatives! 231
Serial Politics 249
Acknowledgements 269
Index 271

Introduction: Unexceptional Politics
Overflowing the bounds of Realpolitik or informa! politics, what I call
unexceptional politics could be thought of as the material and immaterial
stuff of poli tics that encompasses everything from government gridlock
and dysfonction to political cunning (lVIachiavellianism in its modern
historical mutations), frorn politicking (backroom deals, information
trafficking, the petitions of local constituents, jousting and ousting) to
Occupy or Maidan, with their neo-anarchist strategies of occupation,
assembiy, riot, strike, obstination ( utopianism against ail odds, resistance
to primitive expropriation), interference, and creative leveraging.
Unexceptional politics, as an umbrella rubric, subsumes and
exceeds micropolitics insofar as it is pointedly posed against the ideo
logical exceptionalism enshrined in nationalist compacts and the
American heritage of manifest destiny. It conceptualiy engages, in the
form of dialectical resistance, the "state of exception:' foundationally
inscribed in theories of "the Political;' from Thomas Hobbes to Carl
Schmitt, from Hannah Arendt to Jacques Derrida and Giorgio
Agamben. Thinking politics exceptionally, however-through states
of emergency or sublations of political subjectivity-blocks the repre
sentation of what is unintelligible or resistant to political theorization,
while thinking politics unexceptionally spools into explanatory struc
tures of historie al epic and of classical political theory, muddying their
structural coherence, obfuscating mainstream political and diplo
matie ends. This is politics that eludes conceptual grasp, confronting
us with the realization that we really do not know what politics is,
where it begins and ends, or how its micro-events should be called.
Claude Lefort laments the "no there there" view of statecraft that
leaches out of decentralized structures of governance and systems of
controiled information.
n
thi ng? If there is no boundary bet,veen poli tics and that which is not
political, politics itself disappears, because politics has always
implied a d.efinite relationship between human beings, a relationship
guverned the need to answer the questions on which their
common fate depends.
l
If there is no dernonstrable boundary between politics and the non
political, then how can we not accept the idea that politics invades
everything? The problern, it would seem, lies with classical political
theory and philosophy, whose language has a relatively lirnited vocab
ulary for describing the allness and everywhereness of political atrnos
phere and milieu.
Hence the impetus to initiate a glossary of terms that have no ready
standing in political theory, yet share something in challenging the
assumption that "the Political" is always for tomorrow. Rather than treat
politics Csmall p;' or "la politique") as nothing more than the fore
closure of the possibility of a critical politics, or a concession to what
Ross McKibbin calls "what-works" politics, or a "realist" politics that is
supposedly party-neutral and beyond ideology (though it is anything
but), this vocabulary focuses instead on (1) terrns for the political that
have no standing in classical political theory, particularly in relation to
psychopolitical forms of obstruction and impasse to direct action; ( 2)
an "untheologized poli tics" "where there is no Homo Sacer"2 as argued
(
1 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Iheory, trans. David Macey (London:
Wiley, 1991).
2 Stathis Gourgouris, "Society Defended against Whom or What? ;' New
Philosopher, May 25, 2013, newphilosopher.com. Gourgouris approves the term
unexceptional politics because, in his own view, "democracy is precisely the regime
that does not make exceptions, if we are to take seriously Aristotle's dictum of a
politics where the ruler learns by being ruled, making thus the ruled simultaneously
the ruler, in a determinant a:ffirination of an arche that has no precedent and no
uniqueness but is shared by all. No exceptions:' Gourgouris elaborates his own
concept of an "anarchie politics" of "no exceptions" and in which nothing is sacred:
"insofar as arche is unexceptionally shared by all and therefore lapses as a singular
principle. Anarchy as a mode of rule-democratic rule par excellence-raises a
major challenge to the inherited tradition of sovereignty in modernitY:' For
Gourgouris, the challenge is to propel "left governmentality" into a new public space;
in this space we would discover "unexceptional collective political action;' happens
by Stathis
"unexceptional politics"); (3) historical notions of politics as métier and
praxis and (4) concept-metaphors for experiments in underachieved
socialism, states of care, non-capitalized labor time, the recalculation of
social interest, non-exdusionary franchise, the undercommons, and
micropolitics.3 As Roberto Mangabeira Unger has argued, "the illusion
of the indivisibility of formative contexts:' which has led to the belief
that "all changes short of total revolution must amount to mere conserv
ative tinkering ... induces in its adepts a fatal oscillation between unjus
tified confidence and equally unjustified prostration."1 The twin poles of
unjustified confidence and unjustified prostration may admit of no
supersession, but what we are given to work with by Unger-wmth
thinking about-is "divisible formative contexf' In my own thinking,
this would be a micropolitics that foregrounds what Unger calls "disen
trenchment:' Its point of departure is the abrogation of any social
compact that consigns whole sectors of the population to the status of
"non-occupant of society" or "resource outcast:'s
not just on election days, but every day, enacted by "unexceptional people" (i.e.,
those who are not professional politicians or members of the politically empowered
classes). I agree with Gourgouris politically, but my own usage is applied descriptively,
for political states of affairs, or blockage and obstruction, rather than prescriptively.
I would therefore situate unexceptional politics squarely in the spheres of state
function and the machinations of politicians rather than in projections of a new
anarc:hy or left governmentality, regardless of their appeal.
3 Ross McKibbin, "What Works Doesn't Work;' London Review of Books 30:1ï,
2008, 20-2. "The culture of the focus group does not, however, lead to an apolitical
politics. On the contrary, it reinforces the political status quo and encourages a hard
nosed, 'realistic' view of the electorate that denies the voter any political loyalty, except
to 'what works'. 'What works: though, is anything but an objective criterion: these days
it is what the right-wing press says 'works: The war on drugs doesn't work; nor does
building more prisons; nor, one suspects, will many of the anti-terror laws. But that
doesn't stop ministers from pursuing ail of them vigorously. New Labour in practice is
much more wedded to what-works politics than the Conservatives were under
Thatcher, who was openly and self-consciously ideological:'
4 Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Social Theory (London and New York: Verso,
2004),158.
5 Rob Nixon cites Rebecca Solnit's phrase "non-occupants of society" in his
discussion of the politicization ofwhat he calls "resource outcasts": "When people feel
reduced (in Rebecca Solnit's phrase), to "non-occupants" of society, such discounted
casualties-such resource outcasts-will have every incentive to make comrnon cause
against neoliberalism's disinheritance plot:' Rob Nixon, "Neoliberalism, Genre, and
'The Tragedy of the Commons;" PMLA 127:3, 2012, 598.
or l
to think politics as it happens in circumstances thrush with contin
gency and baflled institutionai authority, on the left, on the right,
and inside the mainstream or beltway. Hence, this idiosyncratic and
by no means exhaustive glossary drafted in the face of a political
environment-neoliberal Euro-America-severely pockmarked by
obstructionism, obstinacy, the marketing of affairs and financial
scandals, rude-boy tactics (incivility, tactlessness) and the submer
sion of political struggle in the vagaries of managerialism. Drawing
on theorists of micropolitics (Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari), critics of
the bourgeois novel (Jameson and Moretti), and critical thinkers
who have mobilized political aesthetics (Lukâcs, Rancière, Badiou),
I have experimented with distilling a vocabulary for the microphe
nomenology of political lite. This has entailed investigating
approaches to modes of politicking that, despite their formulaic or
serial character, fit no precise rubric or institutional ascription.
Hannah Arendt (in "On Violence") bemoaned the paucity of termi
nology in political science for distinctions among keywords like
power, strength, authority, and violence and urged developing an ear
for the logical grammar of their usage, their contextual circulation,
and specific properties and attributes. 6
I have taken Arendt's point to heart in designating certain glosse
mes as belonging to a currency of unexceptional politics, in listening
for the logical contradictions and creative eruptions in political syntax,
in looking at how politics is pictured in narrative scenography or
anecdotally telescoped. Literature, and especially the political fiction
of French authors from the Restoration to the Belle Époque-Stendhal,
Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Taine, Proust-allows me to consider narrative
accounts of scams, seductions, backroom deals, and the kinds of
diplomatie intrigues that dilute and diffuse «the Political;' highlight
ing the elusiveness of the political event. It is the inchoate texture of
the micro-event that preoécupies writers in the post-revolutionary
period, a time marked by parallels to the present-day era, which is to
say, by crises of governmentality, financial debacle, defeat in war, civil
6 Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.,
1972), 142.