arts of the POLITICAL

NEW OPENINGS FOR THE LEFT

By ash amin, nigel thrift

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5387-4

Contents

acknowledgments……………………………………………………viiprologue………………………………………………………….ix1 THE GROUNDS OF POLITICS…………………………………………..12 LEFTIST BEGINNINGS……………………………………………….173 REINVENTING THE POLITICAL…………………………………………394 CONTEMPORARY LEFTIST THOUGHT………………………………………775 ORGANIZING POLITICS………………………………………………1116 EUROCRACY AND ITS PUBLICS…………………………………………1357 AFFECTIVE POLITICS……………………………………………….157epilogue………………………………………………………….187notes…………………………………………………………….201references………………………………………………………..211index…………………………………………………………….229

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

the grounds ofPOLITICS

POLITICS + THE POLITICAL

Let us make one thing clear right from the start. We take progressivepolitics to be the domain of practice in which new orientations towarda just society can emerge. This is a wider domain than leftist politics aswe know it, since it can also include, for example, what Lauren Berlant(2008) calls the juxtapolitical domain. This is the domain that thrives inproximity to the political; it occasionally crosses over into political alliancesof various kinds and even participates in actual concerted politicalcampaigns now and then, but it is not normally organized around specificpolitical goals. Thus, our interest lies, on the one hand, in retainingpolitical aspirations historically associated with the Left, but also, on theother hand, in being open to considering all sorts of other domains ashaving the potential to be drawn into the political, when issues of commonconcern are brought to the table of disputation. At these points ofinflexion, the Left has to invent new stances, which cannot simply be extrapolatedfrom previous concerns, forms of attachment, and means ofgaining emotional sustenance. The Left cannot simply assume “the positionalsafety associated with the arrow of emancipation” (Stengers 2011a,139). It has to venture outside the circle.

Times are often awkward for progressive political forces, but the currentconjuncture seems to be a particularly awkward moment. The pressureof events has compounded some standard political dilemmas whilealso producing new ones. According to one familiar lament, the Left andother progressive forces have been disarmed by many of these developments.They have lost their grip, at the same time as losing certainty overwhat they stand for. But since the same forces are apparently gathered—capitalism and imperialism, for example—while the environment seemsto be going to hell and high water, all we need to do is sing the sameold refrains, suitably adjusted for modern times: the same song of classstruggle, the same song of the need to recover old values, the same songof adulation of subversive politics, the same song of suspicion of all commerce,and the same song of pristine political clarity. Rather unkindly,Michael Bérubé (2009) calls this kind of attitude Great Leap Backwardthinking. Whatever it is, it isn’t helpful.

It would, of course, be difficult for anyone to argue that the world isin a state of perfection. But what we want to argue emphatically in thisbook is that songs of nostalgic and often Manichean militancy cannotbe the way forward. Instead, the Left needs to redefine itself so it canboth face up to issues that are longstanding and understand that manyof the issues the world now faces have no immediate solutions, for whatwe might call the “Left” or the “Right,” a distinction that, after all, wasoriginally based on the seating arrangements of the French LegislativeAssembly of 1791 (Bérubé 2009). This will not be an easy task. To beginwith, the Left as conventionally understood has splintered and in somecases sundered. As Albena Azmanova (2011) has argued, globalizationhas brought about new political cleavages that challenge a simple left–right divide and mean that the structure of political contestation andthe nature of political mobilization are less easily correlated than before.The shift has resulted partly from the addition of new concerns(whether they are identity politics or ecological issues) and partly fromthe results of a series of continuing economic and cultural tendencies,such as the diminishing political relevance of class, the growing salienceof post-material values and risks (often summed up by the term “lifestyle”),and a general tendency toward individualization, as well as fromthe concrete economic results of globalization, which has produced verydefinite losers and winners (most notably through the widening of thegap between low-skilled and highly skilled workers). In turn, patterns ofpolitical mobilization have altered so that collective action is no longerthe exclusive preserve of the typical social constituencies of the Left andthe paramount political debates have increasingly hinged on issues suchas insecurity of income and sheer physical safety—or what Azmanova(2011) calls the order-and-safety agenda.

Issues that were originally clearly the preserve of the Left have beentaken up by the Right, too. Look at how in Britain, for example, an issuesuch as social empowerment, which traditionally has been championedby the Left, has become a matter of concern to the Right. Look at how inEurope identity politics has become a concern of both Left and Right, althoughoften in very different ways. Or look at how, in the United States,following the first victory of President Barack Obama, what counts as theLeft has often returned to traditional social-democratic concerns suchas market regulation, social welfare, and global peace, while some partsof the Republican Right have turned to greater regulation of the economyin the wake of the financial meltdown. More broadly, look at howthe historical opposition between secularism and religiosity has becomeblurred in many places around the world.

So simply extending the left brand will not suffice. But looking forwardis no easy matter, either; it is by no means clear what historicallydefined political movements such as social democracy, socialism, andenvironmentalism should stand for; how they should take a stand (thatdelivers); what political tools they will need—or, indeed, on whose behalfthey now speak in a time of considerable political heterodoxy. In thisbook, we therefore try to provide the beginnings of a map of what a newleftist politics might look like. When we say beginnings, we mean that intwo ways. First, this is a map with no strongly defined destination. In asense, it is a map of continual beginnings. Second, it is a map in whichthe journey is open-ended. In politics, the goal and the means are neverentirely clear, and they very often need to be created as the process unfolds.We are aiming to produce a sense of the world in which politicshas a grip in situations that are ill-defined and do not always make clearwhat the stakes are. So this means that we are not seeking out notions oftranscendence or immanence that can act to stabilize what is and whatis not regarded as political action. Political actors normally have to workwithin situations that are themselves powerful determinants of what ispossible and how it may be understood and acted on.

An important task of political thought is to be able to read the situationand mobilize publics that will want to think in a particular wayabout it. Mobilization here is a matter of key words and phrases, resonantimages, affective interest in what is on offer, and thereby an inklingof the kind of world that might produce both satisfaction and voice. Thatmeans that we have to be clear that the way forward lies in a combinationof vision and a commitment to an open-ended, democratic politicsin which others are able to feed into the political process without beingdismissed out of hand. Walking this fine line requires the ability to offerattractive futures that really call out to people and that allow them somerole in their achievement. But it also requires openness to changing direction,as the momentum of democratic debate and involvement grows,not just as a deviation from some set line but, in the spirit of a contribution,to a politics that is able to expand worlds and their orientations.

Most important, there may be more things vying for the Left’s attentionin the world than have been countenanced as occupying the politicalsphere, and some of them may well pull the Left in unexpected directions,some of which will prove to have potential and some of whichwill prove to be dead ends. The challenge is to articulate a “mid-range”politics that is able to recognize and talk about this sometimes forgottenworld that is continually producing pressures in all our lives, steer acourse across such diversity, and make appropriate connections. We are,of course, well aware that such a depiction of leftist politics might seemakin to simply going with the flow as defined by the polls at any givenmoment. But a large part of the political consists of knowing preciselywhen and when not to go with the flow. It requires judgment, and this isnot a secondary matter automatically following on from a political program.Rather, it is a key part of the arsenal of political skills and craftsthat the Left needs to develop. It has long been attractive for the Left tothink in terms of a program that can be burnished and kept pure, but theprice is stepping out of life. So the kind of political judgment we havein mind is a political art that can open up situations so the possibilitiesbecome clearer, that can invent instruments that allow leverage to be applied,and that can generate new feelings of commitment and solidarity.

Lest it sound as though we stand for a Left without a project—or,worse, that stands for a project that unfolds opportunistically, simply followingthe twists and turns of changing popular sentiment—this is absolutelynot the case. Rather, we believe that the project can only becomeclear in the unfolding: circumstance is a powerful tutor. So for us, beingon the Left is about mobilizing world-making capacity that we recognizecan come only from a combination of fidelity to some basic principlesand an understanding of the circumstances, a cultivation of political artsthat can bring these two together, and a permanent commitment thatarises from the fact that world making can never be complete.

In other words, there is always more there to come, and if there is aconsistency of cause that allows us to claim the Left as Left, this has tobe the historical commitment to contest oppression and exploitationthrough struggles by many that have made the world more than the preserveof the gilded few. As Adolfo Gilly (2010, 33) notes, it is generallythe case that “one is led to rebellion by sentiments, not by thoughts,”and historically the line of leftist thought that has grasped this particularpoint has “in common a concern with the preoccupations of the people,based on the impulse to understand their world and what motivatesthem. The reasons why people rise up in rebellion are not incidental.They are substantive.”

To be clear, what we mean by world-making capacity is the ability toproduce what Peter Sloterdijk has called “atmospheres,” that is, spaces ofresonance in which the oxygen of certain kinds of thought and practiceseems natural and desirable. Such world-making requires an arsenal ofmethods, dispositions, and motilities. At certain times in its history, theLeft has understood this point about constructing what Sloterdijk (2011)has also called “sounding chambers,” but then, too often, it has tendedto opt for command and control as a simpler and more efficient way ofproceeding, thereby producing movement but without consent. Alternatively,the Left has offered world visions that have no sensory gripand therefore appear to large parts of the population as nothing morethan fairy tales. What we have in mind instead is not the constructionof a total world in which everything runs in lock-step, but rather a seriesof worlds that act as glimpses of a better future, worlds that are worthfighting for, and that strongly resonate with actual and real concerns andneeds. These are worlds that, quite literally, are attractive in two senses:they both articulate a practical necessity and, at the same time, they aresufficiently glamorous to draw in new proponents.

Any leftist politics, in other words, has to be willing to take risks toinvent new worlds. It has to experiment without certitude. What shouldmark leftist politics is not just its allegiances, but this experimentalstance, which understands the world as an opportunity even in the mostdifficult circumstances. This is not to duck the question of content orcanonical principles historically associated with the Left, but it is to saythat these principles must be continually adapted and reinvented andthat these adaptations and reinventions will themselves be formative.There is no set manifesto that can simply be adjusted to suit all times andcircumstances, and there is nothing necessarily wrong with mutation. Aprevalent tendency on the Left has been to try to legislate the nature ofthe political field by restricting it to class, revolutionary subject, or theclamorous public, to give three examples. Our view is that this is a politicallydisabling way to proceed, because it ignores the continual reinventionof the political that occurs as a result of political action, as well asthe fact that no emancipation comes without new attachments.

An alternative way to proceed adds to the range of what we mightconsider the political by recognizing that through history, differentkinds of politics have been formed that have manifested openness towhat the political can consist of in any moment in time. To put it differently,many books about politics are written as though it is a defined fieldthat, while changing in form, consists of roughly the same activity overmany centuries. They hold political practice to be an invariant entity. Butanother way to look at politics conceives it not as a stable field but as afield whose form and content are continually redefined. It is this viewthat we attempt to push in new directions in this book in the belief thatthis is the shifting ground on which the Left must operate. Once we arewilling to admit that the political field is complex and mutable, we inturn are able to highlight certain aspects of the conduct of politics thatremain relatively neglected. So, for example, we want to take what isnow becoming a familiar view that places all human, nonhuman, natural,and artificial objects on the same footing (Latour 1999) and expands therealm of the political according to the dictum that “all reality is political,but not all politics is human” (Harman 2009, 23).

Like the pragmatist theorists, we do not believe that theory can beused as if it were a well-defended base from which it is possible to forayout and righteously pronounce about how the world is and what it does,secure in this judgment because the theory has already dictated whatis there, has already yielded abstractions which require no need to payattention to what might escape them, or even the desire to do so. Sucha stance of cleansing the world of doubt in which “we sort between thegood (reasonable, objective, progressive) and the bad (irrational, subjective,backwards-looking)” (Goffey 2011, xviii) is the road so oftentaken by writers “who have an enemy, who array themselves in somekind of intellectual battle … and for them there is no true theory, butonly an encampment discourse. Every morning marks the issuing of anorder, a briefing and the observation of hostile operations” (Sloterdijk,cited in Van Tuinen 2007, 303). Critique, in other words, is too often away to make your mind up before an event. You know what is there:all that needs to be done is to confirm the existence of the bloody entrailsand make the prophecy. “Is it not the case,” writes Isabelle Stengers(2011b, 380), “that conveniently escaping a confrontation with the messyworld of practices through clean conceptual dilemmas or eliminativistjudgments has left us with a theatre of concepts the power of which …is matched only by their powerlessness to transform?”

Insofar as this book is a work of political theory, we want to moderatethe tendency to critique in four ways. First, we want to strengthenthe hands of those who believe that politics is important in its own right.Whatever one thinks of Lenin, he knew one thing well: politics countsfor and in itself. It is not an epiphenomenon that arises out of otherforces. Second, we want to inject a note of uncertainty about what thepolitical is. The field we often rather glibly call the political is constantlybeing redefined: new struggles come into existence, and others fall awayas relations shift shape. At the same time, we do not want to appeal tothe political simply for its own sake as though the very utterance of theword provides a promissory note. Third, we are keen to understand thewhole of the political field. There is a tendency among some on the Leftto argue that the only political game worth the candle is transgression.Although transgressive hideouts may provide a sense of security, theyalso tend to limit what can be regarded as political action in a way thatcan be counterproductive (Read 2008).

Fourth, we want to inject an ethic of generosity into the often fractiousfield of left politics. As Graham Harman (2009, 120) notes, “Thebooks that stir us most are not those containing the fewest errors, butthose that throw most light on the unknown portions of the map.” Sowe are interested in “promoting the gambler who uncovers new worlds”over the author who is the strictly accurate legislator who has nothing tosay. After all, we want to create an appetite “for an effective type of hold,and not a taste for voracious denunciation” (Pignarre and Stengers 2011,22). Sometimes that will mean flashes of inspiration. Sometimes thatwill mean sheer hard slog. Sometimes that may mean reconsidering unpalatablemoments in politics and political theory on the grounds thatthere might be redemptive moments that get lost in the rush to outrightrejection (Zizek 2008). But whatever it might mean, it is not about convertinglost souls; nor is it about the sacrificial militancy that so oftenaccompanies that practice. Rather, it is about encountering and workingwith mutually interested parties according to a pragmatics that suits aworld that is irremediably hybrid and can therefore respond to the questionsthat are put to it in unforeseen ways. It is, in other words, aboutcultivating the power to activate thought and practice and so transformthe urgent cry of the misfit into worlds that require “the affirmationthat exposes, not the prudence that reassures” (Pignarre and Stengers2011, 9).

(Continues…)
(Continues…)Excerpted from arts of the POLITICAL by ash amin. Copyright © 2013 by Duke University. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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