I’ve been working on the last chapter of Austere Politics, in which I try and think about some possibilities for a politics that wouldn’t be disconnected from the material complexities of “non-political” life. I’ve been thinking about the Occupy encampments as possible inspirations, so I’ve been reading Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience, by W.J.T. Mitchell, Bernard Harcourt, Michael Taussig. Taussig’s engaged anthropology of the Zuccotti park is beautifully written and very useful on the importance of the physicality of the OWS camp to its politics. I particularly like his description of the physicality of the human mic:
We hear together. We repeat together. And in that repetition we first hear, then speak, thereby tasting the words in our mouths like cherries, with time to let the ideas settle. The idea part of the spoken word gets its chance to resonate in different dimensions of thought and of feeling…. There is joy in spoofing the too-serious ones, left-wing or right-wing, who assume they are the ones who know and have come here to tell us what’s what.
This resonates with Harcourt’s description of OWS as “political disobedience,” which, unlike civil disobedience, questions the form of the civitas, our current constituted political organisation. This is obviously an approach I’m very receptive to, because it is similar to my own rejection of “austere politics.” Harcourt goes on to connect this rejection of our current narrow definitions of the political with Occupy’s rejection of demands, because, he argues, in rejecting demands, Occupy
has deliberately resisted what I would call the privileging of choice. Choice—especially rational and calculated choice—is a hallmark of these late modern times. In the West there is a premium on deliberate decision making, on reason, on intentionality, on sovereignty. To make a free, knowing, deliberate, and intelligent choice is the very epitome and the project of modernity, the project of Enlightenment…. The sovereign choosing self is at the heart of the liberal conception of Western society.
This is a useful thing for me to be reading as I come to the end of Austere Politics, because it points towards what I intend to be my next project, a critique of the rationalist politics of sovereignty and the will in the light of contemporary understandings of affective labour.
It was because of this new project on affects and the will that I picked up a copy of Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism in Verso’s recent sale. Jameson’s overarching framework for analysing the realist novel centres on the way in which affects become autonomous in bourgeois society. Unlike a description of emotions which treats them as comprehensible parts of a characters narrative arc, affects, as Jameson describes them, are more free-floating, attaching to a kind of ahistorical abstract universal individual. This probably isn’t directly relevant to my project, but I find its good to read around a topic, particularly when you’re just putting it together. In any case, it’s a fascinating book (and Jameson’s magesterial tone is always fun to read), although Jameson’s approach to affects does have some similarity to Ahmed’s theory of the objectification of affects, and I’m a bit disappointed that he doesn’t cite or engage with her work.