Politactics

Political Conversations from Everyday Analysis

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Contents

Prologue: Politactics

i)

This third, short volume of Everyday Analysis writings aims to address and respond primarily to events in the field of politics, a central and perennial theme in our work. It looks to assess the unconscious politactics employed by the powers that are, and to also politactically challenge, and even change, them. It re-presents certain articles that have appeared on our online publications that have focused on political issues and writes 'around' them. Thus, the articles excerpted within these pages we approach in certain respects as 'case studies', which centrifugally spawn other bodies of text and discussion that draw on their themes and deliberate on their consequences. The title chosen for this book, Politactics, aims to achieve a couple of things. First, in part, to show up the type of accusatory riposte that so tirelessly gets wheeled out in response to criticism of political agendas: that of the 'but what's the alternative?', 'how would you do it better?', and 'if it's so bad, why don't you change it?'s. The type of political criticism in question is most often that being made by the Left and these responses often come from a Right who are either in power, and would wish to bar any access to any resources with which an alternative could be attempted to be implemented, or who support this Power and want either to 'rubbish' the opposition by mocking their relative impotence (that is, rather, often disenablement) or fully subscribe to a certain realism – 'capitalist realism', as Mark Fisher adroitly calls it – the ideological underpinning of which is so tightly sewn up as to make its fantasy appear the only possible reality in town ... or both. Secondly, however, the title is also chosen for the reason that we nonetheless do make some attempts within these pages – as far as is possible – to lay out certain forms of tactical response, on which to base a politics going forward, and enough separate attempts to warrant the modification on the word, too, to polytactics.

In some academic circles it has become commonplace to compare politics with a capital 'P' to politics with a small 'p'. This gesture is intended to indicate that while there is a subject called 'Politics' (with a big 'P'), which designates a certain kind of discussion or act, in fact everything that we do or say is or at least should be 'political' (with its small 'p'). The latter point has validity insofar as it forces us to recognise that all actions and comments are grounded in and caused by political conditions and that all actions and comments have political effects. Realising this means realising that there are no innocent and apolitical acts, and that everything needs to be interrogated. However, this primarily 'academic' idea has often become little more than a justification for academic thought and discussion not to engage with what it dismisses as 'Politics', with a capital 'P'. Academics may congratulate themselves on making 'political' difference whilst 'Politics' charges on as powerfully as ever. The end result may be that 'Politics' continues to do what it wants and the academia continues to do what it enjoys, whilst pretending to 'political' importance. In the end, 'Politics' (with a capital 'P') will likely cut academic funding before academia realises that it has been shooting itself in the foot in this respect for decades. Thus, the name of this book, Politactics, also looks to respond to this problem and to cut a path across the gap between the small 'p' and the capital 'P' so that 'Politics' is forced into conversation with not only academia, but with other modes of discourse as well. This book is therefore a collection of 'political' articles on the subject of 'Politics'.

Whereas previously we've written on the mechanism of a political elite selling the story to its public that: 'you don't have to concern yourselves with nasty politics ... leave that whole funny business to us politicians', this contrivance sometimes goes further. There are those who will criticise non-politicians for involving themselves with – or in – politics at all. One example is the constant questioning of why Owen Jones doesn't/won't become an MP (mirrored on its other side with the sentiment: 'he'll no doubt sell out and become an MP ...'). It is this that we also attack 'politactically', by emphasising what should be the obvious: one doesn't have to be a politician to think about, comment on, try to alter the course of, agitate and advocate on behalf of or for changes to, be active or an activist about, Politics (with that big 'P'; and we hope this is where we may finally collapse the small one into the big).

These ruminations, however, also lead us to a classificatory problem at the heart of this book. That is, how to decide which of the many political articles from our contributors could or should be counted as articles on Politics. In the end, this may be an impossible problem to overcome. If one insists on strict criteria (only counting the articles that directly discuss politicians, governmental policy, or things that existing mainstream media discusses under the heading of 'Politics') then one risks proliferating and entrenching the limits and restrictions that characterise our current political system, allowing politics to remain a closed language, which excludes and ignores other types of language and topics of discussion. On the other hand, if we were to follow the university in simply seeing everything as political, the book would quickly become something too far removed from Politics to make any impact in the field, falling into the same trap that the academia often has. In order to attempt to make as big an imprint on Politics as a small book through a left-wing press possibly can, we have in general kept close to what is generally considered Political discussion. To push the boundaries of existing political discourse we have tried to write at the limits of this language, on the edges of what is called Politics, bringing in other things with which politics is clearly and closely bound. The aim: to blur the distinction between politics and Politics, a distinction that has allowed Politics to survive for so long under-interrogated.

ii)

A major theme of this edition is reflected in a passage taken from Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia concerning the objective/subjective divide and the mixing-up of this divide's terms:

The notions of subjective and objective have been completely reversed. Objective means the non-controversial aspect of things, their unquestioned impression, the façade made up of classified data, that is, the subjective; and they call subjective anything which breaches that façade, engages the specific experience of a matter, casts off all ready-made judgements and substitutes relatedness to the object for the majority consensus of those who do not even look at it, let alone think about it – that is, the objective.

In our analyses of media we suggest how it is often the case that a news organisation will move a thoroughly subjective perspective into the place or position of 'objectivity'. For example, terrestrial television channels' news stories detailing human(itarian) crises often cannot avoid discussion of the effect that these have on the markets, as if costs to capitalism objectively outweigh costs to humanity. The financialisation of everyday life is everywhere in the media; a great majority of tabloid headlines include some monetary figure that we're meant to assume is a cost somehow to ourselves. Another example comes in the form of a petition that calls for the BBC to refer to David Cameron as 'the right-wing Prime Minister' in response to their labelling Jeremy Corbyn 'the left-wing Labour leader' at every mention. Whilst its observation is a ticklish one its point is a serious one: how better to manufacture a version of 'objectivity' than to erase every epithet for a certain personage, party or class, and thus present it as a norm to which everything else that gets any precautionary label is an exception? Should this get taken as the norm by readers, listeners and viewers, this will lead to the version of the 'objective' that Adorno alludes to, where things become 'non-controversial' and their 'impression' goes 'unquestioned'; that is, become subjectively accepted, as reality itself (hence this really being the realm of the 'subjective'). In contradistinction, what becomes known as the 'subjective' is 'anything which breaches that façade, engages the specific experience of a matter, casts off all ready-made judgements and substitutes relatedness to the object for the majority consensus of those who do not even look at it, let alone think about it'. That is, if, presented with an object, one does not toe the populist line or offer the stock consensus-reality response, this is seen, even vilified, as a purely subjective intervention; an anomaly, or perversion of the objective. However, surely, a 'relatedness to the object' must rather accord with objectivity: it is objective – when confronted with an object – to think about, engage with, 'cast of all ready-made judgements' about, and analyse the specificity of, that object.

But to swap these modes of relations and social bonds for one another is in effect to pathologise thinking for the public consciousness as a subjective abnormality, rather than to see it (or allow it to be seen), democratically, as an objective right, utilisable by all those bestowed with the faculties that facilitate thinking. In his Proust and Signs, Gilles Deleuze argues that 'objectivity can no longer exist except in the work of art' – that is, in the creative work, or act – and goes on to state that 'it is no longer a matter of saying: to create is to think – but rather, to think is to create and primarily to create the act of thinking within thought. To think, then, is to provide food for thought.'

To return to our title, it is this thinking, and its acts, pronouncements and changes-to-mind, that can create political and tactical responses and actualities. Indeed, at school we might have been called a 'keener' or 'beaner' if we thought hard about a piece of work – or we might have called others this if they did – but these stigmas need not hang over into our lives as 'adult', 'independent', 'free' (whatever we like to think of ourselves as) thinkers. (And nor should the 'results' we got at school, so often representative of amenability to structures of testing, rather than the ideas we may have had, or tried to advance.) For the ability to think is an endowment of human existence and not a privilege granted singly to the 'intellectual' (so often so variegated a figure, of whom an aetiology becomes impossible to pin down or standardise when put under any scrutiny), policy-maker or public enunciator. It is through thought that we may become thinkers (which – as Deleuze has shown – is not a tautology), and we hope that these articles and writings within this book will serve as spurs to thought for our readers.

iii)

Harold Wilson famously said that a week is a long time in politics. This being the case, the time-lapse between the writing and original publication of the articles here presented and what's occurring now will no doubt be inescapably noticeable, but what should be perceivable as standing behind this is the indiminishable impetus and ethos of the politics here represented. That is, of a politics that is not 'floating'; on which, one brief word, in relation to media representations. Before the 2015 General Election a local news channel's 'gauge-o-metre' of public sentiment focused on a group of 'floating voters', congregating in a Bristol café and chatting policy, umming and ahhing – as if at a pageant – over who looked best; it was utterly unconvincing, seeming forced and dated (as if it belonged to the era of the TV debates, which has perhaps passed since 2010's election). What was lacking, however – and what made the article seem trite – was a distinction that could solidify the subject positions within the piece and make them seem a bit more realistic to the audience: the scale on which these voters 'float'. That is, is it between parties or political positions that they float? It was the latter that was unanimously implied. However, one's politics might necessitate a vote for the Greens – whilst they are left of a Blairist Labour Party, and have fixed political ideas in place, as opposed to the Lib Dems' displaying of a willingness to squirm any which way – but this could change, say, after Corbyn's leadership election, which alters New Labour into a new party, of the old Labour mould. In this example, one's politics can in fact be found to be stable, and it is the parties that vacillate. It would perhaps be a more interesting gauge to present an article in terms of a voter's politics and then put these in relation to the parties, and their Politics; it would at least put paid to the myth that sets up the Political spectacle itself as just another X-Factor-style competition.

What can be seen now is that in the political era to come – that of a kind of 'kinder' politics, which will remain for four years in opposition to the unkinder kind – genuine competition, with all the baggage that goes with that term, will return, through the shift back to defined party politics. It will be (and already is) how this is capitalised upon that we must look out for. What we are now seeing with Labour is the proof of opposition; something that has been lacking in the political hegemony of the past fifteen or so years. The rhetoric of the Tories will likely change, and is changing, due to this, from the blame-game being played against 'the previous Labour government' to the target becoming the current 'Labour opposition'. Cameron's employment of one of the lowest tactical smears of recent political memory – labelling Corbyn a 'security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideolog[ist]' – whilst being laughably parodic, is an early example of the showing of the serious threat felt by the governing party: it's no longer simply a bit of banter with 'Red Ed' at PMQs – whilst the tabloids do the dogwork of tearing him to pieces – the dominating party are now stooping to the level of the gutter press. This represents the real mania over Corbyn: the death throes of a media whose game is up. But it is perhaps only up in terms of the old tricks. What must be watched out for is the press getting savvy to this; it will likely become so that the smear of not singing the national anthem or bowing low enough at the Cenotaph will stop washing with the public and will be seen for what it is and maybe even met with the same dignity as Corbyn himself meets such with, but what this could be replaced with is scary: the imputation of any unrest or unruliness to the opposition party itself, which is supposedly so 'radical' ('radicalising' will no doubt become the tune) and 'dangerous'. These imputations will be calculated and shameless, but what mustn't be forgotten is their deflection: if the pinch is felt, it must be noted that it's being administered by the party in charge, the inventors and implementers of current – and the long road ahead's – policies.

iv)

We have long been living in what Walter Benjamin called 'a culture of distraction'. However, politically, we now seem to be inhabiting something more like a 'politics of distraction', which is crucially different. Whilst a 'culture of distraction' implies that culture distracts from politics (hype about the Super Bowl distracted from Bush's foreign policy, for example), by a politics of distraction we mean that we are now distracted from politics by politics (or, indeed, from Politics by politics). It is often when we feel we are most 'debating the issue' that we are least political, least critical and the most inside ideology.

In the case of Jeremy Corbyn vs. Martin Amis in UK 'official' and social media – the latter of whom said of the former that he is 'undereducated', 'humourless', displays 'slow-minded rigidity' and is 'essentially incurious about anything beyond his immediate sphere', to which the former responded that Tories are often 'over-educated and under-learned' – if we enter the debate, we already take a side: the side of a politics of distraction. It is too late, we are inside it now and so we must care about it (that is how this politics works). The Left is increasingly becoming aware that we should pay attention to the right-wing policies that are getting through parliament on the very day that we are in a fury about Cameron fucking a pig, but there is yet still more to this. A politics of distraction ensures that we waste our time becoming angry about things that will be gone tomorrow. Will we be talking about Amis in two weeks, or even two days? It is safe to say that we will not. A politics of distraction works to focus us in on a moment, on a temporary concern that gives us something to talk about over breakfast, but will ensure that we do not think politically in a long-term way.