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Post-politics
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Post-politics refers to the critique of the emergence, in the post-Cold War
period, of a politics of consensus on a global scale: the dissolution of the
Eastern Communist bloc following the collapse of the Berlin Wall instituted a
post-ideological consensus based on the acceptance of the capitalist market and
the liberal state as the organisational foundations of society. Generated by a
cohort of radical philosophers – namely Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou and
Slavoj Žižek – and their concern with politics as the institution of radical, active
equality, this critique claims that the post-ideological politics of consensus has
occasioned the systematic foreclosure of the properly political moment: with the
institution of a series of new “post-democratic” governmental techniques,
politics proper is reduced to social administration. Meanwhile, with the rise of
the postmodernist “politics of self” comes a concomitant new “politics of
conduct”, in which political values are replaced by moral ones (what Chantal
Mouffe terms “politics in the register of morality”).
Roots of the post-political consensus
The global political landscape post-1989
The disintegration of the Eastern communist bloc following the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989 announced the end of the Cold War era, and with it the
great ideological stand-off between East and West, between the communist and
capitalist worlds. Capitalism emerged the victor, with liberal democracy as its
corresponding political doctrine. With the fall of state-communism as the final
blow to an already crisis-ridden system, the latter abandoned its social
democratic, Keynesian form; and so, under the aegis of a triumphant
neoliberalism, entered its advanced, global phase. With Francis Fukuyama’s
End of History as its founding statement, this was the birth of the post-political,
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post-ideological “Zeitgeist”. The Third Way politics of British New Labour and
other parties of the so-called “radical centre” are its most emphatic symptom.
Intellectual climate
Alongside Fukuyama, various other intellectual currents are associated with the
consolidation of the post-political consensus. The “reflexive modernity” thesis
of post-industrial sociologists Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, for example,
has acted as the intellectual accompaniment to Third Way politics. In “reflexive
modernity”, say these authors, the central imperative of political action shifts
from issues of social welfare (a politics of redistribution) to the management of
“risk” (a politics of “distributive responsibility”): that is, the “environmental
externalities” that are the ever more visible, unwanted by-products of technoeconomic progress. For both Beck and Giddens it is this imperative, and the
new “social reflexivity” that has developed in response – rather than
instrumental rationality or, crucially, political struggle – that has driven the
profound social changes of the post-war period. Indeed, for Giddens, it is
“social reflexivity” – the enhanced autonomy of individual action called forth
by the dispersal of socio-technological knowledge and risk in “post-traditional”
society – that paves the way for:
 post-Fordist production (based as it is on flexible production and bottomup decision-making);
 the reconfiguration of society’s relation to authority (political, expert and
administrative, both within the state and beyond) according to the
principles of deliberation and “active trust”.
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According to both Beck and Giddens, these changes render obsolete material,
class-based, ideologically grounded politics organised via traditional, collective
forms such as the party or trade union. In their place, we see the emergence of a
new “politics of self” (“subpolitics” in Beck; “life politics" in Giddens) in
which, as part of the wider post-modern turn, issues previously considered to be
purely personal enter the political arena.
Not all commentators agree with this version of events, however, and it is the
critical perspectives considered in this section from which the post-political
critique derives. Nikolas Rose, for example, counters Beck and Giddens by
highlighting the role of a new governmental “politics of conduct” in forging the
political subjectivities that emerge with the advent of Third Way politics in
Britain under New Labour (and, by extension, in developed nations in the postindustrial period). Against Giddens’ “social reflexivity”-based account, Rose’s
study of this new “ethopolitics” suggests that it is the strictures of the new,
market individualist (Schumpeterian) forms of governance-beyond-the-state that
has driven the recent emphasis on the autonomous, freedom-aspiring, selfsufficient individual. A key feature of “ethopolitics”, says Rose, is its concern
with the ethical, rather than political sensibilities of its subjects; a trend wholly
consistent with the moralistic turn that politics took on under neoliberalism.
Indeed, in his work on the decline of the public sector in Britain, David
Marquand relates the moral ideology that – via the wider “revenge of the
private” – underpinned the neoliberal reforms and sell-offs imposed on the
sector by the Thatcher and Blair governments. This is a key development to
which the post-political critique responds: Mouffe speaks here of “politics
played out in the register of morality”; while Rancière’s re-envisioning of the
political is an express challenge against the de-politicisation of political
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philosophy that occurred with the field’s Aristotlean, “ethical” turn in the late
1980s.
Similarly, while Beck points to environmentalism as a paradigm case of the
progressive potential of the personalisation of politics, Erik Swyngedouw
reminds us that in the guise in which it most often appears in the developed
world, environmentalism’s emphasis on personal lifestyle choices and on
particularist struggles against the locally felt effects of environmental “bads”
can work to draw attention away from the properly political issue of human
society’s structural relationship with nature. Likewise, Beck celebrates the new
scepticism associated with post-modern, identity-based politics as a progressive
consequence of the universal uncertainty that characterises risk society. By
contrast, critics lament the profound consequences that the anti-essentialist
position on truth has had for the imagination of “grand narratives” (read
political teleologies) – for proponents of the post-political critique, it is these
grand narratives that are the real substance of politics.
The post-political critique
Proponents of the post-political critique do not represent a united theoretical
body. Nonetheless, and excepting Mouffe, the philosophers associated with this
critique are sometimes treated together, based on:
 the contribution they have made in recent years to the beginnings of a
reinvigoration of radical left thought
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 their concern with active, radical equality (equality as an axiomatic given,
in contrast to formal equality) and with human emancipation
 their broadly materialist bent – while engaging to a greater or lesser
degree with Marxism in their later work, all were influenced by Marxism
in their early years. Additionally, while influenced by it in important
ways, all depart substantially from post-structuralism
What Rancière, Badiou and Žižek, along with Mouffe, agree upon is that under
the present post-political conjuncture we have seen a systematic foreclosure of
the “properly political dimension”, the reinstitution of which will depend upon a
radical re-envisioning of our notion of the political.
Against the widespread resignation to addressing politics solely at the ontic or
empirical level – that is, a concern with the “facts of politics” or with politics as
‘the exercise of power or the deciding of common affairs' – this re-envisioning
must, they say, concern itself with the ontological dimension of politics: that is,
with the essence of the political. While each conceptualises the properly
political in different ways, all agree upon its irreducibly and inherently
antagonistic dimension: a radical-progressive position must, says Žižek, ‘insist
on the unconditional primacy of the inherent antagonism as constitutive of the
political’. Hence the charge that post-politics, with consensus as its defining
logic, forecloses the properly political.
Rancière’s account of the political
Politics versus police
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Rancière’s work reclaims the notion of politics. For him, the latter does not
consist in ‘the exercise of power or the deciding of common affairs’, as is
ordinarily assumed. Rather, if politics is born out of the fact of sharing a
common space and thus common concerns; and if ‘every decision on common
affairs requires the prior existence of the common’, politics proper surely, says
Rancière, denotes the inherent antagonism that exists between competing
representations of this common.
From this basis, Rancière’s account of the political proceeds via the distinction
he draws between this latter notion of politics proper (le politique) (as
antagonism), and what he terms the police or police order (la police). The
fundamental divergence between politics proper and the police, says Rancière,
is their respective representations of the common. The former not only
recognises, but also calls forth the contested nature of the common. Meanwhile,
the police:
‘…symbolises the community as an ensemble of well-defined parts, places and
functions, and of the properties and capabilities linked to them, all of which
presupposes a fixed distribution of things into common and private – a
distinction which itself depends on an ordered distribution of the visible and the
invisible, noise and speech, etc…This way of counting [parts, places and
functions] simultaneously defines the ways of being, doing, and saying
appropriate to these places.’
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In this sense (and although he disagrees with Foucault on some crucial points),
Rancière’s definition of police is akin to that given to it in Michel Foucault’s
work.
Le partage du sensible (the “partition” or “distribution” of “the
perceptible”)
Rancière’s aesthetic conceptualisation of politics allows him to take Foucault’s
“police” one step further: not only, says Rancière, does the specific allocation of
“parts” given in the police order govern ‘the ways of being, doing and saying’
(i.e. the behavioural codes ‘appropriate to these places’); rather, as the
nomination suggests, this particular “partition of the perceptible” also acts to
draw, and subsequently police, the very boundaries of what is and is not visible,
audible, comprehendible – in short, perceptible – under this order.
This distinctive insight derives in part from Rancière’s enquiry into the origins
of democracy and in part from the centrality to his theory of the notion of
mésentente. While translated into English simply as “disagreement” (with
obvious reference to the constitutively antagonistic element of politics, as
discussed above), in French mésentente also implies, in a speech situation, the
fact of misunderstanding between parties, or more precisely in the Rancièrian
sense of “talking past one another”. Rancière’s point here is to underline that the
fact of misunderstanding is not a neutral one: rather, the partition of the
perceptible given in the police order decides whether an enunciation is heard as
speech or instead as noise; as rational discourse (as in deliberative democratic
theory, such as that of Jürgen Habermas or John Rawls), or instead as a grunt or
moan. In Rancière, the fact of labelling a voice “inaudible” is, therefore,
associated with the denial of the subject of that voice as a (political) subject.
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The contingency of the police order: constitutive excess, the miscount and
political subjectivation
As suggested above, in so far as the “count” always entails a “miscount” (i.e.
denies the subjecthood of certain constituencies), the “logic of the proper”
according to which the police order operates is incommensurable with the logic
of active, radical equality proposed by Rancière. Grounded in his account of the
usurpatory action that instituted the demos as the locus of popular sovereignty
in ancient Athens, Rancière defines democracy as ‘the specific power of those
who have no common title to exercise power, except that of not being entitled to
its exercise’: ‘democracy is the paradoxical power of those who do not count:
the count of the unaccounted for’. The properly and essentially political
“sequence” (to borrow a term from Badiou), then, arises in the rare moment in
which les sans-part exercise this title and make their "usurpatory claim" to a
stake in the common: in this moment of “political subjectivation” – that is, the
coming into being of a new political subject – the logic of equality meets with
and violently unclothes the inegalitarian police logic of the proper; les sans-part,
asserting the audibility of their voice and the visibility of their collective body,
thus seize their place in the partition of the perceptible and overturn the
inaugural “wrong” done to them by a police order whose count left them
unaccounted for.
For Rancière, this moment of dramatic ‘rupture in the order of legitimacy and
domination’ is a constant possibility and as such posits the ultimate contingency
of any given police order. This assertion is explained by the specific agency lent
to les sans-part by the nature of their relationship to the police. Rancière is at
pains to underline that les sans-part is not so much a social class or group
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excluded and thus awaiting incorporation: that would imply not only a
procedural account of equality but also the existence of the emergent political
subject – as an identity pre-given in the police order – prior to the political
moment, both scenarios not worthy of the name politics according to Rancière.
Les sans-part should instead be thought of as a supernumerary category,
existing ‘at once nowhere and everywhere’: ‘…political subjects are
supernumerary collectives which call into question the counting of the
community’s parts and the relations of inclusion and exclusion which define
that count. Subjects…are not reducible to social groups or identities but are,
rather, collectives of enunciation and demonstration surplus to the count of
social groups’.
It is from this conceptualisation that les sans-part derive their agency: crucially,
the police logic of the proper is a logic ‘predicated upon saturation’, upon the
assumption that it is possible to designate society as a totality "comprised of
groups performing specific functions and occupying determined spaces". As the
at-once visible/invisible proof of the age-old adage that, contrary to this logic,
‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’, the very existence of les sans-parts
as excess therefore radically negates the police logic of the proper.
Excess and the Universal in Rancière, Žižek, Badiou and Mouffe
There would seem to be a contradiction that appears in Rancière’s schema
(outlined above): political subjectivation entails assertion of a place, yet it also
negates the very logic of places, of the proper. Rancière deals with this by
specifying that the political moment is called forth only to the extent that the
‘part of the no-part’ is asserted in such a way that it forms an identification
‘with the community as a whole.’ Rancière’s claim is that this distinctly
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universalist gesture works to deny the particularist logic that partitions social
space into a series of private, proper places, functions and parts, thus resolving
the aforementioned contradiction. In his account of the (post-)political, Slavoj
Žižek also insists heavily on the role of the universal. For Žižek, a situation
becomes political when:
…a particular demand…starts to function as a metaphoric condensation of the
global [universal] opposition against Them, those in power, so that the protest is
no longer just about that demand, but about the universal dimension that
resonates in that particular demand…What post-politics tends to prevent is
precisely this metaphoric universalisation of particular demands.
In terms of dealing with the aforementioned contradiction, however, Žižek’s
concept of the “indivisible remainder” is somewhat more instructive than his
emphasis on the universal. The figure of the “remainder” of course corresponds
closely to that of “excess” or “surplus” in Rancière. Meanwhile, the notion of
“indivisibility” implies a strong resistance to partitioning (perhaps stronger than
the universalist gesture upon which Rancière relies).
In this respect, the ontological status of the remainder in Žižek comes closer to
that of the privileged figure of Badiou’s “non-expressive dialectics”: the generic
set. Derived from mathematical set theory, a generic set is the name given by its
discoverer Paul Cohen to ‘the mathematical object without clear description,
without name, without place in the classification…[it is] an object the
characteristic of which is to have no name’. It therefore offers the solution to the
fundamental problem of politics, which according to Badiou presents itself as
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follows: if in the battle between the suturing logic of Law (the police) and the
emancipatory logic of Desire, Desire must necessarily always be directed at
something beyond the ontological universe specified by Law, the crucial
problem for political action must be to find ways of naming the object of Desire
without prescribing it and thus subsuming it back under the ontological domain
of Law, as this would be to negate Desire, and with it the possibility of politics.
With genericity being closely associated to universality in Badiou’s work, the
latter therefore contributes a great deal to developing the notion of “surplus” or
“excess” in both Rancière and Žižek. It also points more resolutely than does
Rancière to the designation of politics proper as the moment of institution of an
entirely new conception of the social totality. Or, as Žižek puts it:
‘…[A]uthentic politics…is the art of the impossible – it changes the very
parameters of what is considered “possible” in the existing constellation’; hence
also, for Žižek, its inherently antagonistic dimension.
The figure of excess fulfils a different purpose in Mouffe’s theory of the
political, which rests heavily on her and Laclau’s notion of hegemony.
According to Dikec, hegemony in Laclau and Mouffe’s image presupposes the
impossibility of ‘a totally sutured society, or, in other words, a total closure of
the social’. This is because hegemony is possible only through antagonism; and
antagonism, in turn, can exist only through lack or surplus: consensus, in this
view, is never a complete closure; rather, it only ever exists as the ‘temporary
result of a provisional hegemony’. Insofar as it rests on an assertion of the
impossibility of saturation, Mouffe’s critique of post-politics therefore displays
some commonality with those of Rancière, Badiou and Žižek. Mouffe’s
resistance to saturation, however, is explained by her post-structuralist politicotheoretical persuasion and its attendant anti-essentialism. In this respect, her
theory of the political differs widely from the above-mentioned philosophers, all
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of whom, while inspired in various ways by it, are careful to distance
themselves from post-structuralist thought, not least on account of the
contribution it has in their eyes made to the consolidation of the post-political
Zeitgeist. It also explains the absence of the universalist gesture in Mouffe.
Indeed, as explained above, the political is the struggle for hegemonic control
over the particular content that is to stand-in for the Universal. An authentic
universality is therefore impossible.
Saturation and post-politics
The present conjuncture is characterised as post-political not insofar as it denies
equality: on the contrary in the advanced liberal democracies that are the
heartlands of post-politics, formal equality is declared triumphant, leaving only
the “perfection” of democracy via more participative, deliberative mechanisms.
Rather, from the philosophical perspective outlined above, post-politics is
characterised as such insofar as its insistence on saturation and its denial of
excess are particularly strong. Thus, under the present, liberal democratic
conjuncture, the drive towards the democratic inclusion of all has particularly
suturing effects. Meanwhile, the insistence on the achievement of formal
equality is especially ignorant to the fact of “surplus”. Despite the concerted
strategies of consensual incorporation or exclusion directed at it, the persistence
of “surplus” is clearly evidenced in the present period: firstly in the deepening
of real-world, material inequalities and secondly in those properly political
gestures that resist the conditional nature of (post-)democratic participation: that
is, that resist accession to the post-political consensus.
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