I received the following remark from an interlocutor in email:
For me, politics are a way of accounting for the forces exerted among interacting objects in systems, and as such ontology and politics are inseparable. It could just be that our conceptions of politics are radically different, where your polis is much more narrowly defined than my tendency toward a cosmopolis.
This might get at the crux of the matter between people who claim “everything is political”, and people such as myself, Badiou, Ranciere, and Zizek who vehemently reject this thesis. In my view, the idea that politics is a field of “forces exerted among interacting objects” is about as apolitical as you get and is not a politics at all. Entities exerting force on one another is merely a state of affairs, not a politics. People live for centuries with certain forces being exerted on them in highly despotic ways without ever encountering these forces as political. Rather, they see these things as “merely the way the world is” and as natural as the regular movement of the stars.
Politics is something that happens at a very precise point: it is what happens when that field of forces is contested and agents begin to envision the possibility of doing things differently. Nothing is inherently political. Things have to be made political. Indeed, making things political that were before apolitical is one of the most significant aspects of political struggle. The domestic space of the home does not begin by being political or a site of the political, but is made into a political site. Sexuality does not begin by appearing political, but is made into a political site. The workplace does not begin as political, but is made into a political site. As Philip says in a comment responding to my last post, “nothing is in and of itself political, but anything can be made political.”
If you claim that everything is political and reject the thesis that politics is a specific moment and type of activity, you’ve entirely given up politics and all that is important about politics. Politics is not merely the presence of things exerting force on one another, but is that precise moment where that field of forces is contested, challenged, and it is declared that something else is possible, that things don’t have to be this way. Making something political that was previously apolitical requires a lot of hard work. Go into any workplace around the world and you will find people that deplore their working conditions, think that they are horrible, but who also believe that this is just the natural and inevitable order of things and the natural lot for people such as themselves. Talk to any number of people suffering from incredible debt due to dishonest credit and loan practices, and you will discover, much to your frustration that while they deplore their crushing debt they do not see it as a political issue but their natural lot resulting from their own actions. It takes work to shift these things from being “the natural order of things” to something that is politically contested. The politics is not there already. The whole point is to get the politics there. Politics isn’t a state-of-affairs, but is the moment of intervention.
Larval Subjects . 
September 16, 2012 at 10:10 am
Glad you concur, Levi. My definition of politics is basically the same as yours. In fact, both are basically Latourian I think. This may lead some to exclaim that it is not radical enough — it has been said often enough.
For some it is the epitome of radicalism to extend politics to cover everything but actually I think that this is the most conservative of moves since if everything is always already political then the work that I believe is necessary to make something political, to tie it into those networks, is unnecessary. The universalisation of politics, far from being intellectual radicalism writ-large, is a conceptual rationalisation of political quietism and a justification for inaction. We need only sit around and lament.
If politics is nothing without politicisation, on the other hand, then we’re not faced with a universe of politics that some people are too stupid to open their eyes and see but rather a meshwork of politics that hasn’t gone far enough, yet. The tasks required to set the latter straight are, if not simple, then at least thinkable. There’s no mystery. The tasks necessary to solve the former, however, are so gargantuan as to be frankly unthinkable.
September 16, 2012 at 6:56 pm
In fact I couldn’t agree more. Been reading Badiou of late and one of his interpreters, Bruno Bosteels:
“The possibility of philosophy instead depends on the joint interplay of multiple truths that take place outside of philosophy, or behind the philosopher’s back. Politics is only one out of four such conditions of philosophy, next to art, science, and love. Philosophy, moreover, cannot in turn subordinate the truths produced in these conditions to the norms and concepts that would be its privilege as a crowning or higher science. Instead, philosophy opens a space of compossibility in which each of the conditions finds its place, not so much to violently seize them but rather so as to let itself be seized by that which takes place in them in terms of events.”
Bosteels, Bruno (2011-07-20). Badiou and Politics (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (p. 24). Duke University Press – A. Kindle Edition.
September 16, 2012 at 7:08 pm
to continue that thought: it is the “space of compossibility” that philosophy opens up that allows it to become aware of and seized by that which takes place within the codition of politics – as the immanent necessity of the event’s moments- that brings about the ‘moment of intervention’ equal to the event itself.
September 16, 2012 at 8:03 pm
Badiou also develops an extensive critique of how a catastrophe occurs whenever philosophy is sutured or subordinated to one of its conditions.
September 17, 2012 at 12:27 am
Isn’t this the event/machine problem all over again? Without differing from your arguments, exactly, the serious strategic danger of a purely evental conception of politics like that advanced by you and Badiou is that it encourages one to ignore, or at least singularize and theoretically deprecate, the political activity of repression that everywhere constructs the situations you wish to combat. The object-assembling (war-)machine of interacting forces is constantly articulating and being operated by logics of political eventuation – which too often have nothing to do with making forces and events intelligible or transparent; quite the opposite.
Badiou’s problem – like Plato and Marx – is that he wants his ontological schema to cleanly terminate on freedom or the Good, rather than only on war. At best, such a philosophy becomes a crippling handicap to tactical intelligence; at worst, posing ‘politics’ in an empty, privileged metaphysical position with respect to an artificially demarcated ‘ontology’ is exactly the fatal move you pointed out earlier, of considering politics to spring forth from Being.
If it makes more sense, I’m fairly certain that I’m preaching to the choir. I was with you beat for beat through the bulk of your last post – but to me political ontology always meant military logistics, as you very aptly put it.
September 17, 2012 at 12:44 am
Jake,
I’m not sure what you mean. Claiming that the political is something specific like contestation of a regime does not deny mechanisms of repression, only that there is nothing inherently political about such mechanisms and power. People live with such things for centuries without it ever occurring to them that things should be otherwise. If that’s true, why call such things political? It’s just sociological. That said, the advent of the political also brings with it, when it’s at it’s best, military logistics.
September 17, 2012 at 2:19 am
Surely not all people – do kings, union-busters, military-industrial planners, or torturers not conceive of the repressive operations they function in as political? It’s precisely this triumphalist idea of an “advent” of the political that distorts perception of repressive mechanisms, and therefore one’s military judgment. There is no real process which has an “advent” beyond and essentially distinguishing it from the enemy’s or history’s operations; believing that’s the case creates complacency, through the delusion that merely by electing to fight you gain access to some weapon or mandate that the oppo doesn’t have or isn’t prepared for, which shelters you from the spirit-battering reality of how behind we are. Your military logistics is being invented by people with more experience and urgency but worse motives, not to mention access to more proprietary social graph data and wiretaps, number-crunching power, and concealment.
It also fosters the (very peculiar and unrealistic) expectation that eventuation obeys a teleology of founding and construction, rather than dissipation, regression, or fragmentation. “Claiming that the political is something specific like contestation of a regime” is a great example. On the one hand, I understand your point – getting drunk, spraying graffiti, and dreaming of the beaches beneath the pavement is narcissism and despair, not praxis. On the other, in real life “contestation of a regime” looks more like Syria than the trial of Socrates. Are theocrats seeking to replace one regime with another part of the contestation, or divided from the proper democrats by an invisible non-ontological line? If Lonmin and perhaps the elites of the ANC are the avatars of antepolitical repression, and the miners articulate the Event, where does Julian Malema using the latter’s rage to compete for the former’s power fit in?
Perhaps I’m questioning the conceptual usefulness of ‘politics’ altogether – for the time being, at least. The word is πολιτεια, the condition of living in a city, of citizenship; which is first predicated on common assembly for battle. (Is the city the event of its founding, or the machine of its operation?) Apart from tactics, ontics, rhetorics, and ethics – this particularly is the skipped and muddled prior question – what is now the ambit of politics? I think we have war-machines and battles to assemble before this question can be properly addressed.
September 17, 2012 at 9:33 am
Jake,
I draw a distinction between politics and governance. What you describe with respect to kings and torturers is what I’d call governance. It’s the sort of work or operations that go into trying to maintain a particular order. It strives to prevent politics. Politics is when we active strive to break an order and form a new type of order. I don’t know that I’m following Badiou’s theory of events here. It just seems to me that politics is a very specific sort of thing that isn’t operative or always there. Have the work is to bring it into existence, because much of the time we live saying “this is just the way things are” or not even discerning some way of life and social organization as subject to contestation. I think the word politics has become way too general and hyper-extended, turning it into something meaningless.
September 17, 2012 at 1:18 pm
Levi maybe I can interject a little clarification Badiou’s theory of the event:
The key to the event is “precisely that an event is the taking place of a pure rupture that nothing in the situation allows us to classify under a list of facts.” He formulates it as this: “the event is that multiple which, presenting itself, exhibits the inconsistency underlying all situations, and in a flash throws into a panic, their constituted classifications. The novelty of an event is expressed in the fact that it interrupts the normal regime of the description of knowledge, that always rests on the classification of the well known, and imposes another kind of procedure on whomever admits that, right here in this place, something hitherto unnamed really and truly occurred.” Speaking of the French Revolution he tells us that to call “a Revolution the Revolution, is thus to affirm the sense in which one remains faithful to a hypothesis: the hypothesis, the wager, that something fundamental is being produced in the political field that is worth being faithful to, while trying to draw out that which, at the heart of the situation, upholds an emancipatory truth in the process of elaboration, and which opposes all the forces of the old world”.
September 17, 2012 at 1:41 pm
To continue:
Politics is always retrospective or historico-politico in that it is a truth-procedure in which we draw out the kernel of what has been repressed in the event.
If politics, in Badiou’s terms, is a truth-procedure, then what it does is to bring forth a being that up until then was repressed, and once it maximally appears, forces us to retrospectively reconsider the entire history of its predecessors: the slave, the proletariat, and today, according to Badiou, the workers without-papers (think of the repressed migrant workers here in the states) are those political invisibles who, when they come to be revealed as the vanguard of history, entirely reconfigure its logic in the eyes of their contemporaries, and add a new facet to the present as well as the past, repainting them both with the colors of their struggle.
I think of this immediate repression migrant workers in the States that seem to be forever dangled between the Democrats and Republicans in a political war of ideology rather than as real entities that need emancipation and liberation from the burden of ideology to live their lives and have a voice in our midst. 9/11 is another example of an event that is interrogated by many parties on all fronts who have actual investment in the politics that it produces.