Pardon the silence; I’ve
been sojourning in the land of the academic job market.
I want to think today, quite
bluntly, about political subjectivation. How is it that in the punctum of our
present a political subject has emerged? Why Occupy? And what do I even mean by
political subject, by the political itself? Gestures toward “the political”
saturate my own discourse, and, thus far I’ve refused to define the term except
indirectly: it’s something lost, something irreducible to regimes of
calculability, and so on. But it remains
a vague term. Those of us who live anti-liberalism religiously tend to invoke
the political as a blank, critical resource. Given that the political is that
against which liberalism defines itself, that which liberalism seeks to limit,
contain, and expel, we inflate the signifier as signifier, as if “the
political” has a transcendent signified utterly exorbitant to linguistic
capture. It has no such signified, and we kind of know this, and when we’re
pressed to contort the exorbitant(ly empty) term into a communicable form we
typically stutter out some Schmittian line. Here, I don’t want to define “the
political”; rather, I want to think of the political itself as the process by
which signifiers, on one hand, point beyond themselves to a transcendent
exorbitancy and, on the other hand, point to nothing in the world. Let’s say
that the political is ex-orbitant: it names a world saturated with transcendent
meaning even as it marks an emptying-out, a cancellation, an active ex-ing of the orbis. In this double-play of the ex-orbitant we can locate the
emergence of the political subject called Occupy.
The political isn’t
identical to a scale, institution, or form; rather, the political is what
advenes in the de-structuring of a worldly ordinary. It comes to pass in the
conditions of absolute undecidability, when the nomos of the given world is
cancelled. I use the passive voice [“is cancelled”] because I want to leave the
agency of cancellation unmarked, just as I want to leave the structuring nomos
unmarked. This cancellation, I want to suggest, actually produces the nomos it
cancels as a self-conscious entity; it subjectivates it. (The “Keynesian state”
becomes subjectivated after its wholesale destruction, and is subjectivated as
a critique of neoliberalism, for instance.) The political takes place in the
withdrawal of a world that only appears as a world in its withdrawal, when the ex produces the orbis it cancels. The political, then, couldn’t be a scale or form
of activity—it takes place in the break, between regimes, as an interregnum
where undecidability is the norm. Nor could it be an agential subject,
something that an intending actor does, for subjectivation happens as an effect
of structural cancellation, as the subjectivation of a lost world, a lost
ordinary. The political subject is called into being by a lost world, a cancellation
of a structure that becomes legible only through its cancellation. The ancien regime
appears as a political subject only through revolutionary fighting in the
streets.
The political subject is a
structure of intentionality that survives the loss of the world that made that
mode of being-toward-the-world an unexceptional aspect of being-in-the-world. It
emerges in the cruelty of a desire or demand that won’t quit despite the
structural impossibility of its realization—a demand for a state that cares,
for instance, that is not set to work merely to facilitate the valorization of
capital. The political begins when we’ve lost our grip on reality, when our
worldly ordinary vanishes and, vanishing, seems to have been real, when we're forced to decide on new approaches to the real. The inaugural
tonality of the political is thus one of frustration, of disorientation. This
frustration, I want to suggest, is not primarily a frustration with the given
world, but a frustration with one’s inability to unlearn the protocols of
intentionality that produce this frustration—a frustration not with the world
in which one is but a frustration with one’s being-toward-the-world that could
only produce frustration. Conservative political subjectivity refuses to let go
of this frustration; it wishes for the world to re-conform to its worldless
structure of intentionality. This dynamic explains how both conservative and radical political subjectivity can
be denigrated as romantic, as utopian—each prioritizes a structure of
intentionality over an epistemically valid description of the world as such.
But the radical political
subject relates to intentionality differently. If the political emerges in the
mismatch between a structure of intentionality and the given world, radical political
subjectivity enacts itself by unlearning the intentionality that binds subjects
to a lost world, by destroying the phenomenological structure that makes the
subject optimistically invest again and again in a world that has abandoned the
worldly structures that might have made this investment worthwhile. The radical
political subject is not one who decides, simply, on a new world but one who,
in all its fractured plurality, co-decides on a new being-toward-the-world.
Occupy is now, finally,
radicalizing, becoming a radical political subject. (There were always radicals
a part of Occupy, those for whom the world of capital held no promise. My point
is that the radical is becoming the set that incorporates the reformist [and
Ron Paulite] elements.) Oakland
Will the world follow our
intentions? Who knows. The co-decision on a new being-toward-the-world is
necessarily exorbitant to the world that is—there is nothing that guarantees
that the world will bear the burden of the novel intentionality we will decide
upon. We don’t necessarily know what a new world will look like, and we couldn’t:
the exorbitant will remain undecidable, and we’re leaning how to dwell in this
undecidability, how to occupy the space of the incalculable. For now, we’re
content to frighten power by our radical refusal to be frustrated by a world
that has abandoned its promises. We’re already desiring other worlds. We're already political.
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