Unexceptional Politics. Emily Apter
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 submersion 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 (Lukács, Rancière, Badiou), I have experimented with distilling a vocabulary for the microphenomenology of political life. 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 terminology 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 glossemes 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 diplomatic intrigues that dilute and diffuse “the Political,” highlighting the elusiveness of the political event. It is the inchoate texture of the micro-event that preoccupies 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 disorder, strikes and attacks, imperial expansionism, new strands of xenophobia, new forms of democratic leisure, and a burgeoning mass media fully participant in the spread of journalistic irony and political corruption.
From the beginning I was faced with the question of how politics, as a scene of maneuvers and an application of cunning, maps onto (or does not) formal, abstract models of political aesthetics; onto the workings of capitalist epic, democracy in language, the “revolutionary” dimension of avant-gardism, comic forms of class struggle, modes of narrative realism, and tragic aporias of communitas. Meeting this challenge of a structural interpretation of politics soon proved impossible, but the abiding issue of politics and form, as framed in 1974 by Fredric Jameson’s watershed study Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, were integral to the book’s heuristic. Where Jameson focused on dialectics in structuralist aesthetics, I focused instead on the structurelessness of political atmosphere that suffuses what Jameson named the “political unconscious,” as well as the “atmospheric walls,” associated by Sarah Ahmed with internalized moods, that stratify social space and foreclose participation in community.7
This attempt to define the amorphous construct of unexceptional politics undertakes no systematic critique of theories of sovereign exception, which, recurring to Carl Schmitt’s application of Ausnahmezustand to the Roman justicium and auctoritas, refer to the “state of siege” and “suspension of the rule of law.” After all, this critique already exists, fully developed in the 1990s and early 2000s around the construct of the sovereign decision—defined as the exceptional authority vested in the sovereign to institute a state of emergency—which has gradually taken over as the basis of Western models of the sovereign subject, or sovereignty subjectivized. Such theorizations of exceptionalism acquired renewed traction and impetus in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler (among others) during America’s Iraq invasions, when the exercise of extralegal powers transformed the “state of emergency” and “extraordinary rendition” into routine political measures. The routinization of the state of exception continues to underwrite drone warfare, supranational border patrol, domestic police practices, and the surveillance abuses of the National Security Agency; taken together they constitute an “unexceptionalization” of illegal political intervention.
While exceptionalism may be an unexceptional feature of routinized war and staple of American jingoism, I would rather construe unexceptionalism less as the logic of “exception to the rule,” and more as one of “just politics as usual,” an attitude that inevitably shores up the status quo. Sidebars in the business of deal-brokering, sex scandals in the stalls of the national assembly, information-trafficking in diplomacy; all have formed the traditional stock-in-trade of pamphlets, caricatures and post-revolutionary political fiction. Their contemporary correlate may be found in media reportage and insider accounts of the political “Club” (as in Matt Bai’s book All the Truth is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid [2014], or Mark Leibovich’s This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capital [2013];8 art (as in the satirical graphics of financial derivatives and corporate data by William Powhida); and in myriad films, comedy specials, and TV serials that take government back-offices as their settings.9 What these books, films and serials depict so well is how the quirks of human personality—complacency, wounded narcissism, lassitude, bloody-mindedness, bureaucratic reflex—transfer to the workings of political institutions. Bureaucratic hurdles and legal obstruction are symptoms of human agency, such that simple words like “decrees,” “signatures,” and “contracts” become the currency of political logjams.10 As Bruno Latour reads them:
“What?” they exclaim. “How could this little obstacle have the power to stop us?” … On the one hand astonishing force, objectivity, on the other remarkable weakness. We feel that force every time we learn that, “because of a simple signature missing on the decree,” the appointment of a bank director was blocked; or when we see that a dam construction project essential to the survival of a valley has been suspended owing to “a tiny defect in the declaration of public utility”; or that jobless workers have lost their rights “because they misread the contract that bound them to their employer”; or that one business was unable to acquire another “because of a legal constraint imposed by Brussels.” But we feel the weakness every time we despair at seeing that the “legally justified” decision is not necessarily just, opportune, true, useful, effective; every time the court condemns an accused party but the aggrieved party has still not been able to achieve “closure”; every time indemnities have been awarded but doubts still remain about the exact responsibilities of the respective parties. With the law, we always go from surprise to surprise: we are surprised by its power, surprised by its impotence.11
The toxic combination of despair, grievance, doubt, and impotence lends psychic specificity to notions of obstructive “force,” carried over to political speech in the guise of a special kind of impasse (a “category mistake” consisting in the accusation of lying “brought by a way of speaking that claims for its part, not to pass through any pass”), or form of talk that goes nowhere. As Latour elaborates:
There is nothing more fragmented, interrupted, repetitive, conventional and contradictory than political speech. It never stops breaking off, starting over, harping, betraying its promises … getting mixed up, coming and going, blotting itself out by maneuvers whose thread no one seems to be able to find anymore.12
In Latour’s estimation the only counter is “the dissolution of coalitions of naysayers,” so that “what was united disperses like a flock of sparrows, becomes a ‘crooked movement.’”13
Perhaps all one can aspire to is “crooked movement” during a period in US political history when partisan obstructionism remains the order of the day. President Obama’s election in 2008 precipitated a hard right turn in US politics, already in an archconservative place after two terms of the junior Bush presidency. By Obama’s second-term election a culture of venomous incivility fanned by Tea Party extremism further encouraged the incessant posturing of the “party of no.” Partisan voting blocks in Congress and the Senate, acting in lock-step, opposed all legislative and diplomatic initiatives, from routine committee member nominations, to nuclear nonproliferation agreements with Iran, to virtually any meliorist environmental legislation or gun control. The expansion of “conceal and carry” and “stand