Emily Apter - Unexceptional Politics - On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic

Overflowing the bounds of Realpolitik or informal politics, what I call unexceptional politics could be thought of as the material and immaterial stuff of politics that encompasses everything from government gridlock and dysfunction to political cunning (Machiavellianism in its modern historical mutations), from politicking (backroom deals, information trafficking, the petitions of local constituents, jousting and ousting) to Occupy or Maidan, with their neo-anarchist strategies of occupation, assembly, riot, strike, obstination (utopianism against all odds, resistance to primitive expropriation), interference, and creative leveraging.

Unexceptional politics, as an umbrella rubric, subsumes and exceeds micropolitics insofar as it is pointedly posed against the ideological exceptionalism enshrined in nationalist compacts and the American heritage of manifest destiny. It conceptually engages, in the form of dialectical resistance, the state of exception, foundationally inscribed in theories of the Political, from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt, from Hannah Arendt to Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. Thinking politics exceptionally, howeverthrough states of emergency or sublations of political subjectivityblocks the representation of what is unintelligible or resistant to political theorization, while thinking politics unexceptionally spools into explanatory structures of historical epic and of classical political theory, muddying their structural coherence, obfuscating mainstream political and diplomatic ends. This is politics that eludes conceptual grasp, confronting us with the realization that we really do not know what politics is, where it begins and ends, or how its micro-events should be called.

Claude Lefort laments the no there there view of statecraft that leaches out of decentralized structures of governance and systems of controlled information.

If there is no demonstrable boundary between politics and the non-political, then how can we not accept the idea that politics invades everything? The problem, it would seem, lies with classical political theory and philosophy, whose language has a relatively limited vocabulary for describing the allness and everywhereness of political atmosphere and milieu.

Hence the impetus to initiate a glossary of terms that have no ready standing in political theory, yet share something in challenging the assumption that the Political is always for tomorrow. Rather than treat politics (small p, or la politique) as nothing more than the foreclosure of the possibility of a critical politics, or a concession to what Ross McKibbin calls what-works politics, or a realist politics that is supposedly party-neutral and beyond ideology (though it is anything but), this vocabulary focuses instead on (1) terms for the political that have no standing in classical political theory, particularly in relation to psychopolitical forms of obstruction and impasse to direct action; (2) an untheologized politics where there is no Homo Sacer

I have taken Arendts 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 poqueStendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Taine, Proustallows 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 Jamesons watershed study Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, were integral to the books 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.

This attempt to define the amorphous construct of unexceptional politics undertakes no systematic critique of theories of sovereign exception, which, recurring to Carl Schmitts 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 decisiondefined as the exceptional authority vested in the sovereign to institute a state of emergencywhich 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 iek and Judith Butler (among others) during Americas 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.