Do We Live in the Age of “Hyperpolitics”? |
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Do We Live in the Age of “Hyperpolitics”?
A conversation with the historian Anton Jäger about political polarization, the stagnation of the West, the collapse of mass politics in the 20th century.
In his new book, Hyperpolitics, the historian Anton Jäger offers an explanation for why contemporary life has become so polarized, so riven with political conflict, yet nothing seems to materially change. His explanation traces the collapse of 20th-century mass politics, and in particular unions, parties, and civic institutions that once gave ordinary people real collective power. As these structures eroded from the 1970s onward, what emerged in their wake was something far more disorienting: a public sphere overflowing with moral urgency and viral outrage. Jäger calls this condition hyperpolitics: extreme politicization without political results.
The Nation spoke with Jäger about the idea of hyperpolitics, the historical context out of which it emerged, the intellectual influences that shape Jäger’s thought, and if we are now moving beyond hyperpolitics. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
—Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: What do you specifically mean by the notion of “hyperpolitics”?
Anton Jäger: The book examines a mutation in political culture of what Branko Milanovic has termed the “political West.” It opens with a contrast. In the 1990s and 2000s, talk in political philosophy was of “post-politics” and a general disinterest in public affairs. Such a diagnosis appears out of date today. In the past decade, political activity has witnessed a steady return across the West: voter turnout, protest activity, public violence, discursive involvement are all up. This naturally invites comparisons with previous periods of high politicization, mostly the 1930s. As the book shows, however, such a similarity is deceptive: In contrast to the “wild” mass politics of the 1920s and ’30s, today’s politicization rarely takes on a durably institutional form—the hyperpolitics discussed, then, stands for a process of repoliticization without reinstitutionalization. It is in no way a totalizing style or master concept, of course. Hyperpolitics denotes an important and relatively new gravitational pole in contemporary political culture; yet it is not the only tendency around.
DSJ: It seems like you are using it not just as a political concept but also to identify a particular historical moment.
AJ: Indeed, the book is very much a history of a change in political culture, not just a shift in electoral patterns or party competition. It is also not a moral condemnation or indictment. Instead, it is about a new structural transformation of the public sphere, as Habermas would have it, which affects actors across the spectrum. As mentioned, the hyperpolitics discussed in the book is born in contrast: with the post-politics of the long 1990s that preceded it, and the mass politics which characterizes the short 20th century. The latter was marked by a type of politicization that tended towards institutional forms. The 1990s instead mark a decline on two axes: institutionalization and politicization. As turnout at elections declines and strike activity slumped, associational life also enters a secular crisis. This double minus offers an interesting entry point to the sensibility of the 1990s: a period in which citizens retreat from the public sphere and politics undergoes a privatization. The very idea that one would publicly share one one’s voting preferences becomes outré; politics becomes the province of specialists or junkies. The idea of collective action is philosophically suspect. Again, I wouldn’t want to pretend to grasp the entirety of an epoch with the concept. “All theory is gray, green is the tree of life,” as Goethe once said. .
DSJ: So is this ultimately a book about populism?
AJ: It would be dishonest of me to deny continuity with previous work—originality and self-reinvention are all too demanding standards by which we judge intellectual work.
But I would make a distinction, which the book tries to parse too, between anti-politics, populism, and hyperpolitics. The year 2008, coinciding with the credit crunch, is the cutoff point for the repoliticization which the book registers in the last decade and a half. Yet the waves of politicization after 2008 in fact unfold in two distinct stages. First, there is the initial opening salvo of “anti-politics.” This mainly presents a challenge to the methods of crisis management after 2008, in which the Western political class is identified with a post-political stalemate. Such a criticism of post-politics can evolve into a questioning of representation itself, yet there is a fundamental ambiguity here. On the one hand, the slogan “They don’t represent us”—that of the Spanish Indignados—insists on a deficit of representation. On the other hand, it could also slide into a more radical position: “We don’t want to be represented.” Such a logic is patently visible in Occupy, and it reappears in the Gilets Jaunes.
This ambiguity was eagerly exploited by anti-politicians. From the mid-2010s onwards, however, we saw the emergence of movements which, while stemming........