Unexceptional Politics. Emily Apter

      Contents

       Introduction: Unexceptional Politics

       I.Resistant to Political Theory

      “Small P” Politics

      Micropolitics

Microsociologies

Nanoracisms

       II.Scenes of Obstruction

       Impolitic

       Disentrenchment

       Interference

       Obstinacy

       III.Political Fictions

       Political Fiction

       Psychopolitics

       Collateral Damage

       Thermocracy

       Milieu

       IV.Economies of Existence

       Schadenfreude

       Managed Life

       Occupy Derivatives!

       Serial Politics

       Notes

       Acknowledgements

       Index

       Introduction: Unexceptional Politics

      Overflowing the bounds of Realpolitik or informal politics, what I call unexceptional politics could be thought of as the material and immaterial stuff of politics that encompasses everything from government gridlock and dysfunction to political cunning (Machiavellianism in its modern historical mutations), from politicking (backroom deals, information trafficking, the petitions of local constituents, jousting and ousting) to Occupy or Maidan, with their neo-anarchist strategies of occupation, assembly, riot, strike, obstination (utopianism against all 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 ideological exceptionalism enshrined in nationalist compacts and the American heritage of manifest destiny. It conceptually 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 representation of what is unintelligible or resistant to political theorization, while thinking politics unexceptionally spools into explanatory structures of historical epic and of classical political theory, muddying their structural coherence, obfuscating mainstream political and diplomatic 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 controlled information.

      How, in fact, can we cling to the idea that politics invades everything? If there is no boundary between politics and that which is not political, politics itself disappears, because politics has always implied a definite relationship between human beings, a relationship governed by the need to answer the questions on which their common fate depends.¹

      If there is no demonstrable boundary between politics and the non-political, then how can we not accept the idea that politics invades everything? The problem, it would seem, lies with classical political theory and philosophy, whose language has a relatively limited vocabulary for describing the allness and everywhereness of political atmosphere 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 (“small p,” or “la politique”) as nothing more than the foreclosure 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) terms 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 politics” “where there is no Homo Sacer”² (as argued by Stathis Gourgouris, who has himself adapted my own coinage of “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-exclusionary 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 conservative tinkering … induces in its adepts a fatal oscillation between unjustified confidence and equally unjustified prostration.”⁴ The twin poles of unjustified confidence and unjustified prostration may admit of no supersession, but what we are given to work with by Unger—worth thinking about—is “divisible formative context.” In my own thinking, this would be a micropolitics that foregrounds what Unger calls “disentrenchment.” 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.”⁵

      In lieu of a theory of unexceptional politics, I have