Tales of the Apolitical

Abstract

This article offers a critical analysis of how narratives of a generalised withdrawal from radical politics and activism circulate within contemporary political theory. In so doing, I use the term ‘narrations of apoliticality’ to highlight how such narratives have a fictive and performative dimension: they have, I argue, congealed into a widely held common sense (often buttressed by affects of pessimism, gloom and despair) and become curiously resistant to sustained empirical or theoretical scrutiny. Against this backdrop, the article has four specific aims. First, it maps the general contours of narrations of apoliticality; second, it highlights why narrations of apoliticality are potentially problematic; third – drawing on Lacanian notions of fantasy and Sara Ahmed's account of affect – it explores how the affectivity of such claims renders them sticky and intransigent; and finally, it offers some thoughts on how we might decentre narrations of apoliticality in our analyses of political activism.

Keywords

depoliticisation activism radical politics affect temporality

The recent emergence of a number of significant mass mobilisations – the Occupy movement, the Indignados and the ‘Arab Spring’, to name but three – has taken many by surprise. This is in part because such movements seem at odds with the commonly held view that our times are marked by what Jürgen Habermas (1986) called an ‘exhaustion of utopian energies’. Thus, in the aftermath of these conspicuous forms of protest and activism, we will perhaps see a reassessment of the received wisdom in much political theory and analysis that the present is marked by a generalised lack of enthusiasm for protest and radical politics. However, this article argues that we cannot assume that this will automatically be the case. This is because the oft-repeated claim that the past few decades have seen a generalised withdrawal from radical politics has proved to be surprisingly enduring. I argue that such claims have, to some extent, congealed into a shared common sense about contemporary politics that circulates within and across boundaries between different theoretical schools, and between academic and public discourse. Such claims are not necessarily dominant or uncontested. But they have played a hugely significant role in delineating the contours of the world view of the political theory community (particularly among those aligned with a progressive and/or radical politics). What is more, they are often bound up with a series of typically rather gloomy and pessimistic affective orientations, and exhibit a certain stickiness, persistence and intransigence that often renders them resistant to critique.

This article offers a critical analysis of the dominant discourses, tropes and rhetorical strategies that political theorists use when making claims about the nature and scope of existing forms of depoliticisation, and it examines how these discourses interact with – and are buttressed by – particular kinds of affective orientations. It is guided by the conviction that a consideration of how we talk about depoliticisation can shed light on how collective frames of reference – and our affective and emotional ties to particular ideas or theoretical perspectives – can at times impact detrimentally on the vitality and dynamism of our theoretical debates.

This in turn suggests that academic debate about the nature and scope of depoliticisation is not reducible to competing interpretations of the empirical data. Although, as I shall argue, empirical data do suggest that withdrawal from radical politics may not be as totalising and pervasive as some suggest, my main argument is to suggest that empirical evidence alone may not be sufficient to disrupt such claims. We also need to understand precisely how and why narratives of a pervasive withdrawal from radical politics have proved to be so sticky and enduring within (particular sections of) the political theory community, and to show how and why this to some extent shields such claims from empirical falsification.

Against this backdrop, the article has four specific aims. First, it offers an overview of the various ways in which theorists claim that we have witnessed a generalised withdrawal from radical politics (drawing in part on Clare Hemmings' analysis of dominant narratives in feminist theory and J. K. Gibson-Graham's critique of left melancholia). Second, it highlights why such claims are potentially troubling and problematic. Third, it explores Lacanian notions of fantasy and Sara Ahmed's account of affect to make sense of how the affectivity of such claims renders them sticky and intransigent. And finally, it offers some thoughts on how we might disrupt such claims, and redirect our affective orientations towards the political present. Such an undertaking is, I believe, essential if we are to respond adequately to the challenge of theorising and analysing emergent forms of protest, activism and radical politics. The focus of my analysis is on left and radical political theorists, in part because this is where anxieties about depoliticisation have been most prominent and enduring, and also because this is where I locate my own political and intellectual commitments.¹ However, the distinction between ‘radical’ and ‘mainstream’ political theory is of necessity rather slippery, and my intention is in part to give a flavour of how a diverse array of uneven and contested claims about depoliticisation circulate and traverse boundaries between theoretical orientations and between the academic and the popular.

In formulating this argument, I refer to the apolitical present to denote a particular kind of discursive representation of our times as marked by apathy, disengagement and depoliticisation. And I speak of narrations of apoliticality to refer to the stories and narrations of recent political history that discursively bring the apolitical present into being. The term ‘apoliticality’ is intended to emphasise the performative, narrative and ideational aspects that are crucial to my argument, in contrast to the more familiar term ‘depoliticisation’, which typically indexes particular kinds of empirical sociological phenomena. Indeed, there is of course already a substantial body of academic literature that deals with the empirical aspects of depoliticisation, political disengagement and social movement de-radicalisation (see, for example, Buller and Flinders, 2005; Burnham, 2001; Muntigl, 2002; Stoker, 2006). Here, there is arguably something of a consensus that traditional forms of political participation (e.g. party membership, voting in elections) have declined in the ‘advanced’ democracies in recent decades. However, that consensus begins to break down when one adopts a more expansive conception of politics, and looks beyond the ‘advanced’ democracies (Hay, 2007; Norris, 2002). This literature offers a rich array of invaluable empirical data, some of which support and some of which dispute the depoliticisation thesis. However, while we can certainly appeal to empirical counter-examples to try to unsettle narrations of apoliticality (or indeed any other widely held claims/hypotheses), such efforts are likely to be insufficient if we fail to consider how the collective and affective character of narrations of apoliticality allow them to be uncritically invoked in ways that often bypass their contentious and controversial character.² My aim here therefore is not primarily to adjudicate on which of the empirical analyses are most persuasive or accurate, but to highlight how any discussion of the empirical data will be circumscribed by shared affective orientations, theoretical investments and frames of reference.

Narrating the Apolitical

Needless to say, narrations of apoliticality come in many different guises, but the bulk of them fall into two broad categories. The first is the familiar narrative in mainstream sociology, political science and political theory that posits a shift from a recent past of civic engagement, community spirit and collective public discussion to a present marked by disengagement and individualisation, in which ‘politics’ itself is a dirty word for many citizens (Hay, 2007, p. 1). Among the numerous examples of these kinds of narrations we might include Hannah Arendt's (1958) account of the fall of the public realm, John Dunn's (2000) analysis of the increasing subservience of politics to economic power and Alasdair MacIntyre's (1981) epic tale of the displacement of Aristotelian virtue. In more sociological accounts both Robert Putnam (2000) and Zygmunt Bauman (2007) narrate stories of declining civic virtue, and a turn from stability and certainty to flux and uncertainty, often investing their narratives with a gloomy affective inflection. Such narrations reflect the consensus in mainstream social science that ‘citizens participate in public affairs less frequently, with less knowledge and enthusiasm, in fewer venues, and less equally than is healthy for a vibrant democratic polity’ (Macedo, 2005, p. 1). Their emphasis is typically on the value of civic engagement per se, rather than its substantive political content, and they tend to work with conventional understandings of politics as linked to public discussion and decision making in designated institutional sites.³

In what follows, however, I want to focus on a second set of narrations. In contrast to much of the above, this second set is motivated by an avowed commitment to critical, radical and/or progressive modes of thought and action. They typically work with a broader account of politics, and assume that the apolitical moment par excellence consists not in empty town halls or poor voter turnout but in diminishing social movement radicalism and a narrowing of possibilities for egalitarian, radical democratic alternatives to existing structures of inequality and domination. These kinds of narrations of apoliticality typically tap into, and reflect, the widespread perception on the academic left that any residual hopes for a more egalitarian socio-economic order have been extinguished, or at least severely curtailed. Such claims often display what we might call a kind of reverse Fukuyamaism, using the same tropes of teleological endpoints and historical resolutions, but from a despairing rather than celebratory normative standpoint. Carl Boggs' The End of Politics typifies this approach. He begins his treatise on what he calls ‘the epochal triumph of antipolitics’ (Boggs, 2000, p. vii) by claiming that by the 1990s, ‘American society had become more depoliticised, more lacking in the spirit of civic engagement and public obligation, than at any time in recent history’ (Boggs, 2000, p. vii). Within this context:

the culture of antipolitics is so deep and so pervasive that reasoned discussions of political strategy to reverse the decline may seem rather arcane, out of fashion, off limits, indeed unfathomable in a public sphere where supposed pragmatism gives free reign to ‘market’ forces (i.e. corporate domination) in allocating social goods and priorities (Boggs, 2000, p. 91).

Witness also the following quotations from Russell Jacoby and Colin Crouch, respectively:

A new consensus has emerged: There are no alternatives. This is the wisdom of our times, an age of political exhaustion and retreat (Jacoby, 1999, p. xii).

The mass of citizens plays a passive, quiescent, even apathetic part, responding only to the signals given them. Behind this spectacle of the electoral game, politics is really shaped in private by the interaction between elected governments and elites that overwhelmingly represent business interests (Crouch, 2004, p. 4).

Such utterances are striking for their authoritative self-confidence and the totalising, epochal sweep of the claims. And yet they are marked by a curious ambivalence: Jacoby, for instance, clearly believes that the time in which he writes is one of apathy and exhaustion, but there is a palpable ambivalence in his strategy of both affirming these beliefs himself, and yet projecting them on to an external ‘wisdom’ of the age. Similarly, Boggs' core thesis is predicated upon the absolute domination of this anti-political sensibility, meaning that possible challenges to his thesis (which might arise from emergent forms of resistance to the culture of anti-politics) must either be ignored or played down if his thesis is to hold. Indeed, this is precisely what happens when, in a postscript, he briefly acknowledges the possible challenge that the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle might pose to his thesis (Boggs, 2000, pp. 311–26). But he is very quick to dismiss their capacity to unsettle the dominant claims of The End of Politics as, according to Boggs, the emergent anti-globalisation movement is too scattered and too disorganised to constitute anything like a meaningful challenge to the pervasive culture of anti-politics.

Elsewhere, Ingolfur Blühdorn (2006) uses a similar line of argument in suggesting that emergent forms of radical activism provide something akin to a release valve, in which activists can enact forms of autonomy and agency in specific activist spaces while leaving the status quo largely unchallenged. He writes that ‘in the sense that the demonstration of autonomy, identity and political agency inside the theme park of radical action allows for full complicity with the status quo outside this arena, it may be described as a post-political and itself consumptive form of political articulation’ (Blühdorn, 2006, p. 36, emphasis in original). Curiously, Blühdorn neglects to offer substantial empirical support for his claims, and as with Boggs' account of the Seattle protests, he adopts a rather dismissive attitude towards contemporary forms of social movement radicalism (note the pejorative connotations of the ‘theme park’ metaphor). Further variations on a similar theme include David Chandler's (2009) account of the alleged depoliticisation of activism and protest and Sheldon Wolin's (2004, pp. 602–6) conclusion to the second edition of Politics and Vision, which consists of a rather dispiriting lament to the de-democratising effects of economic domination, on the one hand, and the apolitical valorisation of change and flux promulgated by postmodernism, on the other.

However, to be clear, not all current progressive and radical thought draws such pessimistically inflected distinctions between a politicised recent past and an apolitical present. Indeed, within contemporary post-Althusserian thought a number of key authors such as Alain Badiou (2005) and Jacques Rancière (1998) adopt bold and affirmative approaches to theorising possibilities for radical politics. In contrast to the pessimism that pervades much of the literature discussed above, Badiou's work in particular is carried out in an affective register that sometimes verges on triumphalist. This triumphalism is especially evident in Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek's introduction to the recent edited book The Idea of Communism (based on a conference at Birkbeck College, London that focused on Badiou's reflections on communism) which declares that ‘the long night of the left is drawing to a close’ (Douzinas and Žižek, 2010, p. vii), and that the emergent antagonisms connected to the economic crisis are ushering in the ‘return of history’. The idea of communism, they claim, ‘has the potential to revitalize theoretical thinking and reverse the de-politicizing tendency of late capitalism’ (Douzinas and Žižek, 2010, p. ix). At first glance, this unashamedly hopeful diagnosis of contemporary politics might seem radically at odds with the pessimism of Boggs, Jacoby and others. However, on closer inspection Badiou and Žižek deploy very similar rhetorical strategies: the story remains a linear narrative of post-1960s decline and withdrawal from radical politics, leading to an apolitical present. Indeed, as Saul Newman (2010) has pointed out, for Badiou ‘recent events – events which in my view are equally important, such as the emergence of the global anti-capitalist movement – are treated with a strange and unwarranted contempt’. Thus, unlike Boggs and Jacoby, Badiou and Žižek predict or seek to will into existence a future politicisation, but still from the vantage point of a present which is cast as largely apolitical.⁴ So while the triumphalist announcement of an imminent epochal success for the left might have some value in its capacity to foster hope and enthusiasm, it is certainly not adequate if our aim is to formulate a critique of narrations of apoliticality.

However, whereas the likes of Crouch, Boggs and Blühdorn provide detailed and sustained accounts of existing logics of depoliticisation, more usually – as is the case with Žižek and Douzinas' declarations of an imminent re-politicisation – narrations of apoliticality are expressed in the form of glosses, contextualising remarks and fleeting asides: narrations of apoliticality recur frequently in theoretical discourse, but they are rarely the primary thesis or object of analysis. For instance, Todd May kicks off his engaging monograph on the work of Jacques Rancière with the observation that we live in ‘an age of political passivity’ (May, 2008, p. 1), and feminist commentator Lynne Segal speaks of a ‘declining passion for politics’ in the context of a ‘solid orthodoxy’ that ‘little remains of a socialist left capable of winning popular support for its vision of a more egalitarian future’ (Segal, 2000, p. 19). Elsewhere, in a reflection on the legacy of Che Guevara, Parvathi Raman (2009, p. 255) notes how ‘his image, now emptied of real political content, can do little more than invoke nostalgia for a history that might have been otherwise, whilst pointing to the apolitical present that we now inhabit’.⁵

In drawing attention to these examples, my aim is to raise questions about the ways in which particular kinds of narrations of apoliticality can be invoked often without citational or empirical evidence, in ways that seem to presume agreement on the part of the reader. For instance, in the midst of his engaging yet rather anecdotal depiction of what he calls ‘capitalist realism’, Mark Fisher comments in passing that ‘by contrast with their forebears in the 1960s and 1970s, British students appear to be politically disengaged’ (Fisher, 2009, p. 21). Elsewhere, Yannis Stavrakakis offers an engaging set of reflections on the possibilities for radical democracy in the present, during which he remarks that the forces of consumer culture are such that we have come to be ‘engulfed’ by ‘depoliticisation and de-democratisation in Western public spheres’ (Stavrakakis, 2007, p. 258). Also located in a post-Marxist framework is Peter Bloom and Sam Dallyn's provocative rethinking of the role of openness in ideological domination, which mentions in passing that ‘the dire economic situation and resulting levels of debt have led to almost no substantial questioning of the ethos of the British economy itself or a questioning of capitalism per se’ (Bloom and Dallyn, 2011, p. 58).

While the substantive key arguments of these texts are in many ways persuasive, I am struck by how the specific claims referred to are not explicitly fleshed out or justified; rather, they appear to presume agreement on the part of the reader, despite the often highly contestable character of the claims made.⁶ Narrations of apoliticality are therefore often presented less as controversial claims that might need to be fleshed out or substantiated, and more as generalised statements about contemporary politics that are presumed to be self-evident and uncontroversial to the reader.

This in turn suggests that narrations of apoliticality are perhaps best seen not as the preserve of specific individual authors but, rather, as part of a shared, collective frame of reference, which can be invoked in published academic texts, formal embodied settings such as seminars and conferences, and also in informal conversations among academics and commentators.⁷ Thus, narrations of apoliticality should be read not only (or primarily) as empirical propositions, but as part of a collective repertoire of stories that we tell to make sense of contemporary politics (McManus, 2005). They are like political folk-tales, in that they are shared, inherited, reworked, passed around and given different inflections by different authors/storytellers. As Clare Hemmings (2011) points out, particular stories (of loss, epistemic/political progress and return) about feminism's recent past often come to be sedimented, naturalised and resistant to critique, and can thus be invoked without citational or evidential justification.⁸ A very similar logic appears to be in operation within the political theory texts discussed here: the narratives of a loss (or progression) of feminism's epistemic and political purchase described by Hemmings, and the narratives of withdrawal from radical politics analysed here, are familiar to many and go largely unchallenged because these stories constitute part of the common sense of the community of scholars to whom they are addressed, assuming a life beyond the published text.

This collective mindset is comparable to what Gibson-Graham (2006a) calls ‘capitalocentrism’, which refers to the tendency among many left economists to presume that capitalism is necessarily a dominant, homogeneous and largely uncontestable entity that lacks a constitutive outside. Gibson-Graham implies that capitalocentric (or in our case, ‘apoliticentric’) forms of reasoning are troublesome not necessarily because they are empirically inaccurate (although they may well be), but because they presume a certain modality of disappointment towards the present in advance, foreclosing the possibility of fostering more hopeful orientations to the present, or more nuanced empirical diagnoses. Crucially, then, capitalocentrism and narrations of apoliticality consist not just of a series of (contestable) empirical propositions, but form a shared world view, a shared way of seeing contemporary (a)politics, ‘widely present if not fully manifest in any person or pronouncement’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006b, p. 6). Thus, although theorists of radical politics might not necessarily adhere to narrations of apoliticality (or a belief in the dominance of capitalism) in a crude and simplistic way, such ideas can still figure prominently within the collective imagination of the academic left, and can potentially have a stifling effect on the vitality and energy of our political and theoretical debates.

Gibson-Graham refers primarily to capitalism's alleged colonisation of our social, political and economic space. However, capitalocentric discourse has an implicit temporal dimension as well: along with narrations of apoliticality, capitalocentrism presupposes a recent past in which the forces of capitalism/depoliticisation were not so pervasive. This in turn suggests that the apolitical present – and capitalocentric discourse – comes into being by way of contrast with an imagined radical past of possibility and politicisation. Indeed, the relative ease through which the apolitical present can be discursively brought into being is perhaps because it taps into widely shared presumptions about ‘1968’ (broadly conceived to encompass the wave of global upheavals in the late 1960s and early 1970s) as the authentic temporal site of an (allegedly now dissipated) spirit of political rebellion. Witness, for example, Jacoby's claim that ‘the distance between today and the most recent utopian eruption of the 1960s might be measured in centuries’ (Jacoby, 1999, p. 159) and the overviews of 60s radicalism offered by Jenny Diski (2009), Gerd-Rainer Horn (2007) and Mark Kurlansky (2004), all of which foreground the exceptionality of the ‘radical 60s’ through explicit or implicit contrast with the apolitical present. Horn, for instance, begins his fascinating analysis of the ‘spirit of ‘68’ by remarking that the book was:

written at a time of widespread pessimism experienced by social movement activists in the age of Bush and Blair … [therefore] it appeared important to recall a very recent period in modern and contemporary history when, to paraphrase one of the ubiquitous Situationist graffiti gracing the walls of Paris in 1968, it was considered realistic to demand the impossible (Horn, 2007, p. 1).

This is not to say that there is anything intrinsically wrong with using ‘1968’ as a reference point for one's political investments, but simply to highlight that the framing of the present as apolitical often – indeed perhaps always – relies upon some notion of a politicised recent past to bring it into focus as a specific problem for discussion.

Questioning the Apolitical

But why, precisely, should we consider narrations of apoliticality problematic? I have already gestured towards this, but the question requires clarification. First, although I want to suggest that appeals to empirical data might be more fraught with difficulty than we may at first imagine, that does not mean one should bypass the empirical altogether. Indeed, there is already a substantial and diverse literature that seeks to contest narrations of apoliticality/depoliticisation at the empirical level. Colin Hay (2007) and Pippa Norris (2002) both argue, albeit in different ways, that the empirical evidence in favour of declining levels of political participation is far from conclusive, particularly when viewed in a global frame. Overall, the dominant narrative they suggest is one of a diversification of political practices encompassing a range of informal modes of activism and agitation often outside the sphere of formal institutional politics, rather than a retreat away from politics in toto. Indeed, this emphasis on diversifying rather than declining political participation can also be found in Henrik Bang's (2009) account of the formation and practices of democratic communities beyond the formal channels of political decision making, as well as Maarten Hajer and Hendrik Wagenaar's (2003) analysis of the emergence of deliberative policy making as a response to the changing topography of political institutions.

We could also challenge narrations of apoliticality (or at the very least raise questions about their conceptual and empirical reach) by drawing attention to the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, a revitalised student movement (Solomon and Palmieri, 2011), the empirical complexity of young peoples' diverse forms of (dis)engagement with mainstream politics, ongoing forms of transnational anti-capitalist protest (Gilbert, 2008), the Occupy movement, current forms of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activism (Binnie and Klesse, 2011) and new instances of domestic and transnational feminist activism (Dean, 2010; Eschle and Maiguashca, 2010). None of these developments is, in itself, sufficient to deal a decisive falsifying blow to narrations of apoliticality but, taken together, they do at the very least suggest that narrations of a shift from a politicised recent past to an apolitical present perhaps serve to overlook or downplay a number of important ongoing forms of political participation and social movement activism.

But to focus one's efforts on the falsification of narrations of apoliticality at the empirical level leaves a more fundamental set of issues untouched. This is because narrations of apoliticality, when framed as dominant or totalising, risk reinforcing existing epistemic and political hierarchies within political theory and analysis. For one, as Mihnea Panu (2009) has argued, to foreground ‘1968’ in one's theorisations of radical politics risks naturalising a Eurocentric frame of reference. Furthermore, it is striking how many narrations of apoliticality (e.g. those advanced by, among others, Fisher, Blühdorn, Badiou and Žižek) are largely silent on issues of race, gender and sexuality. Such narratives often explicitly or implicitly frame radical opposition to capitalism as the radical political moment par excellence, even in the aftermath of ‘post-Marxist’ critiques of class essentialism by authors such as Stuart Hall (1988) and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985). This in turn might suggest that the prevalence of narrations of apoliticality is to some extent symptomatic of a reluctance to respond to the challenges to traditional temporalities of radical politics offered by feminism, gay rights, anti-racism, post-colonialism and environmentalism, and to acknowledge the different histories of politics and activism to which they give rise (Chakrabarty, 2008; Hawkesworth, 2010; Philipose, 2007).⁹

In so doing, feminist, queer, post-Marxist and post-colonial criticisms all – in different ways – gesture towards the problem of what ‘counts’ as an authentic moment of radical politics. There is often a sense that many contemporary moments of radical politics (and particularly those concerned with race, gender and sexuality) are seen to fail to ‘count’ as authentic moments of radical politics: for instance, we saw above how Boggs, Badiou and Blühdorn all, in different ways, seek to play down the significance of particular forms of anti-globalisation activism (and are largely silent on anti-racist, queer and feminist politics, as are other authors mentioned above such as Colin Crouch and Mark Fisher), in so doing leaving narrations of apoliticality untroubled.

Using Linda Zerilli's (2005) terminology, what is striking about these narrations of apoliticality is that they resort to a somewhat crude form of determinate judgement, in which particular cases of radical politics are subsumed under – indeed perhaps pre-empted by – a secure, already existing epistemological framework in which we simply know that genuine, authentic radical politics ended in the aftermath of ‘1968’ (or perhaps in some cases 1989). Narrations of apoliticality are therefore problematic because they risk standing in the way of acknowledging and confronting the potentially strange, unfamiliar and challenging in moments of contemporary activism. That is not to say that (certain instances of) contemporary radical politics might well be read as less significant than (certain instances of) 60s and 70s radicalism. And it is not to say that analyses of depoliticisation are ipso facto problematic: indeed, examining particular instances of apathy and disengagement from politics may prove invaluable for thinking about possibilities for renewed political participation. However – and to echo Gibson-Graham once again – we should avoid presuming that a generalised withdrawal from (authentic) radical politics is necessarily a pervasive and all-encompassing phenomenon. The crucial task is to effect the transformation ‘of familiar theoretical certainties about capitalism [or in our case, depoliticisation] – its powers and extent, its nature and effects – into empirical questions susceptible to answers both various and changing’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006a, p. xxxii). For Gibson-Graham, the process of transformation from theoretical certainties to empirical questions consists not just in simply subjecting our hypotheses to empirical testing; it also involves a cultivation of a new affective orientation. Such an undertaking is required not because we have already found out that the forces of capitalism and depoliticisation are less totalising than first thought, but because existing affective orientations (of despondency and despair) to some extent foreclose the possibility of even beginning to try to find out. To counteract the mutual reinforcement of moralism, despair and subsumptive certitude, we should instead cultivate an openness to the strange and the unfamiliar, and to those aspects of contemporary politics that might diverge from, and potentially disrupt, our existing categories and frames of reference.

Therefore, to contest narrations of apoliticality successfully, we cannot rely solely on empirical counter-evidence: after all, there can be no guarantee that potential counter-examples will not simply be recast as further instances of an already existing general rule. We also need to theorise the affective and emotional dispositions that render narrations of apoliticality so intransigent, and to cultivate a different set of affective and political orientations towards the present. To be clear, we are not dealing here with a distinction between affective narrations of apoliticality and a ‘non-affective’ alternative. Rather, I assume that all theoretical discourse is of necessity shot through with a range of affective investments: indeed, the argument in this article emerged in large part because of my own affects of irritation and frustration towards the erasure or dismissal of current forms of radical politics enacted by narrations of apoliticality. Therefore, what we require is an analysis of how particular affects operate in particular circumstances, rather than trying to rid ourselves of affective investments tout court.

Explaining the Apolitical

So how can we make sense theoretically of the affective and collective character of narrations of apoliticality? Fortunately, in the aftermath of what is sometimes called the ‘affective turn’ in social theory, we have an increasingly rich array of theoretical resources at our disposal through which the intransigence of narrations of apoliticality could potentially be theorised. Specifically, I want to suggest that the Lacanian notion of fantasy can help shed light on the grip of narrations of apoliticality, while Ahmed's account of affect is helpful in highlighting the historicity of our affective investments. Lacanian accounts of fantasy have gained some currency in political theory precisely because of a sense that discourse-analytic accounts of the discursive construction of hegemonic formations need to be complemented by a theorisation of how and why such formations are able to win over subjects' identifications and investments, and thus become largely resistant to counter-hegemonic discourses (Glynos, 2001; Glynos and Howarth, 2007, p. 148). Such an approach relies on a particular conception of both the human subject and the realm of language (what Lacanians call ‘the symbolic’) as marked by a constitutive lack, which the subject experiences as traumatic and seeks to overcome (Fink, 1995; Glynos, 2001; Stavrakakis, 2007). The logic of fantasy refers to the way in which subjects invest in particular identities or ways of thinking because they offer the possibility of overcoming this constitutive lack via a promise of order, coherence and stability, which in turn allows for ambiguity, uncertainty and vulnerability to be cast out to the margins (Glynos, 2011, p. 59). However, these fantasies of order and stability are in some sense ‘false’, as they are ontologically resistant to achieving full closure (or ‘suture’ to use Lacanian parlance) and so are always in danger of being undermined or contested. And yet because the subject invests heavily in the fantasy of order and stability offered by particular identities and ideological formations, such contestations will often be experienced as traumatic, potentially even undermining the subject's very sense of self.

Of course, these are fairly strong ontological claims about how the subject and power function, and I remain agnostic about the extent to which fantasy and lack structure all forms of power, ideology and subjectivity. However, in the context of the specific problem at hand, I would argue that narrations of apoliticality do often assume a fantasmatic character, and that there are three crucial dimensions of narrations of apoliticality that a Lacanian approach can help illuminate. First, as discussed above, narrations of apoliticality – particularly in their more totalising incarnations – serve to efface and marginalise ambiguity and uncertainty, often by recasting the potentially strange as simply a further instance of the familiar. A Lacanian account of the logic of fantasy might suggest that this happens precisely because the academic left has invested in the fantasy of coherence and order offered by narrations of apoliticality: although they narrate a political situation that those on the left ostensibly abhor, they at least provide a degree of ontological security, a clear frame of reference in which one's own position of unambiguous marginality is secure. And although this positions the academic left subject as defeated, that ‘theoretical investment in failure’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006a, p. xxx) can therefore, as Ahmed (2010, p. 178) argues, function as a defence against contingency and the possibility of disappointment. They can even, paradoxically, provide a source of enjoyment or pleasure, via the moralistic pride in marginality they sometimes engender (Brown, 1999; Özselçuk, 2006; Roy, 2009).

Consequently, even though narrations of apoliticality are, in principle, underpinned by a desire for a return of politics, if one fantasmatically invests in narrations of apoliticality then the emergence of new forms of politicisation will very likely be experienced as troublesome, even traumatic, as they potentially disturb the deeply sedimented frames of reference that have come to constitute the symbolic universe of the academic left subject.¹⁰ This in turn suggests that we should not be surprised that narrations of apoliticality are so persistent and enduring, even in the face of new forms of politicisation and theoretical problematisation.

Second, a further crucial aspect of narrations of apoliticality is the often rather underhand, covert way in which they are expressed. Although clearly they are given expression in the official discourse of published academic texts, they are also expressed in fleeting comments, contextualising remarks and ‘off the record’ comments in academic seminars, conferences and conversations. Lacanian analysts have drawn attention to how collective fantasies are often transmitted implicitly, largely because they may be transgressive of official discourse (Glynos and Howarth, 2007, p. 148). There is perhaps something transgressive about narrations of apoliticality in the aftermath of the deconstruction of Marxism and the emergence of the new social movements, as they arguably betray investments in modes of thought and action that, from the point of view of current intellectual fashions, might be deemed outmoded. What this perhaps suggests is that even though intellectually the idea of an epochal withdrawal from politics has been challenged and deconstructed in some quarters, this need not translate into a weakening of the affective pull of such narrations. What happens, rather, is that they take on a rather shadowy, clandestine existence below the radar of ‘official’ academic discourse; again, there may be a certain degree of pleasure and enjoyment (or what Lacanians call ‘jouissance’) from investing in a frame of reference that some might consider to be anachronistic or transgressive of the ‘official’ line on contemporary theoretical fashions.

The third key issue relates to the connection between the fantasmatic and the empirical. As indicated, one of the key problems with narrations of apoliticality is not just that they are empirically problematic (in so far as they do not correspond to the complexity of ‘actually existing’ forms of activism) but that, in Lacanian parlance, people become fantasmatically overinvested in narrations of apoliticality. It is perhaps not narrations of apoliticality per se that are problematic, but the strength of the attachment to such narrations. As Jason Glynos (2011, p. 55) points out, this requires a shift in emphasis from questions of empirical correspondence to the mode and strength of subjects' attachments to narrations of apoliticality and depictions of the apolitical present. Fundamentally, what a Lacanian approach tells us is that an emphasis on empirical (lack of) correspondence, useful as it may be, can only go so far: narrations of apoliticality are problematic not necessarily because of their content, but because any discourse or frame of reference capable of ‘gripping’ subjects that can be invoked without empirical or citational justification should be subject to scrutiny, even if the discourse in question were to correspond well with actual empirical events (Glynos, 2011). This state of affairs is akin to Lacan's infamous observation that even if a patient's spouse really is sleeping with multiple partners, this need not render the patient's jealousy any less pathological (Glynos, 2011, p. 54).

The crucial point is that the affective pull of narrations of apoliticality takes on an existence, a life, to some extent independent of ‘actually existing’ political struggles, and the Lacanian logic of fantasy can help us understand this. However, what a Lacanian account perhaps misses is the historicity of our affective investments: Lacanianism is strong on the form and character of our affective investments, but is perhaps weaker when trying to understand precisely why particular objects, discourses and frames of reference become so sticky, so intractable. It is here that Ahmed's account of the endurance and ‘stickiness’ of our affective investments proves useful. While Ahmed distances herself from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis by moving away from a subject-centred account of affect (Ahmed, 2004, p. 11), her account nonetheless speaks to a very similar set of concerns to the Lacanian approaches discussed above, in so far as she is also concerned with making sense of the stickiness and intractability of social norms (Ahmed, 2004, p. 12).

In so doing, Ahmed argues that certain affects, particularly negative ones such as hate and disgust, acquire force through repetition. For instance, offensive racial slurs, and their associated affects of repulsion and disgust, are only possible because they reference a particular history of associations between affects and bodies, such that particular affective orientations come to be seen as a natural response to some inherent property of the body or the object (Ahmed, 2004, p. 45). Therefore, through repetition and prior histories of contact, affects come to ‘stick’ to particular kinds of bodies and objects. This implies that the ‘stickiness’ of narrations of apoliticality is not random or arbitrary. Rather, narrations of apoliticality – and their associated affects of gloom, despair, pessimism, resignation and pain – index a particular history of defeats and setbacks for the academic left. Consequently, academic left disappointment with the present is perhaps not just a response to the particularities of the (a)political present, but also labours under the weight of a deeply sedimented sense of despondency in the aftermath of, say, Thatcher, Reagan, Bush, Blair and post-Cold War neo-liberal triumphalism.

This in turn means that, to some extent, disappointment and despair have congealed into reflex, instinctive reactions for some radical theorists; perhaps disappointment has become constitutive of the academic left (and the left in general). Following Ahmed, we can say that the historical contingency of the left's often despairing affective response to contemporary politics has, to a degree, come to be effaced: despair comes to be a necessary and inevitable response to the present, rather than a contingent response to a particular history that could have been (and could be) otherwise. This affective glue or stickiness effaces contingency and so blocks the possibility of alternative orientations towards the present, or at least makes them more difficult (Ahmed, 2004, pp. 92–3). The task, then, is to recover and reaffirm the contingency of our affective orientations, paving the way for the cultivation of an alternative set of dispositions that might weaken the grip of narrations of apoliticality.

Beyond the Apolitical

In seeking to move beyond narrations of apoliticality, the task is not naïvely to prescribe optimism as a panacea for our present dilemmas, or to try to wish away existing obstacles to political action. Rather, it is to try to foster ways of seeing that are open to acknowledging and grappling with the potential strangeness and peculiarity of present and past forms of activism, in ways that might resist their domestication into established histories and frames of reference. Such an undertaking will – I hope – allow us to furnish richer analyses of contemporary instances of radical politics, but it also suggests that we should be sceptical of the familiar, indeed almost clichéd, periodisation whereby 60s radicalism gives way to consensus and apathy after 1989; this in turn might open up channels for a rethinking of popular representations of the ‘90s’ as one of political quietism (particularly in Europe). The analysis presented here potentially also raises wider questions about the affective life of ideas, and the ways in which our affective investments impact upon theoretical debates more broadly (i.e. beyond those specifically concerned with (de)politicisation).

But this still begs the question of what theoretical resources we have at our disposal to go about the task of affirming contingency and loosening the grip of narrations of apoliticality. I think one should not be too prescriptive about this, as a wide variety of different theoretical perspectives could potentially enable such an undertaking. However, my own unease with the hold of narrations of apoliticality is to a large extent a consequence of my own commitment to the post-Marxist and post-structuralist claim that contingency, unpredictability and untimeliness are central to politics. At the very least, such a view demands a degree of scepticism towards narrations of apoliticality, particularly in their more totalising inflections (Chambers, 2003; Marchart, 2007). For example, authors in the post-Marxist tradition as diverse as Simon Critchley (2007), Aletta Norval (2007) and William Connolly (2008), while taking different lines of theoretical inspiration (Levinas, Wittgenstein and Spinoza/Deleuze, respectively), advance post-Marxist approaches to contemporary radical politics which affirm that promising modalities of politicisation exist in the present (sometimes in ordinary protean settings) rather than projecting their hopes on to the future emergence/return of a radical politics that will shake up our existing malaise.

Much post-Marxism emphasises the intertwinement and mutual constitution of our affective orientations and our perceptions of the empirical world. The above authors all offer their own often implicit take on the precise character of the intertwinement of the affective and the empirical, but the issue is made explicit and given a particularly compelling formulation by Gibson-Graham, who rejects the belief that thinking operates ‘in a register above and separate from untamed bodily sensation’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006b, p. 1), and is sceptical of the academic left's tendency to regard ‘the accepted or correct “political” stance as one in which the emotional and affective dispositions of paranoia, melancholia, and moralism intermingle and self-reinforce’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006b, p. 4). To effect a change in our affective orientation away from moralism and despair, says Gibson-Graham (2006b, pp. 6–7):

perhaps we need to draw on the pleasures of friendliness, trust, conviviality, and companiable connection. Our repertory of tactics might include seducing, cajoling, enrolling, enticing, inviting. There could be a greater role in our thinking for invention and playfulness, enchantment and exuberance. And we could start to develop an interest in unpredictability, contingency, experimentation, or even an attachment to the limits of understanding and the possibilities of escape.

Such an approach is striking, unusual and appealing because it unashamedly emphasises the pleasures and joys that can be gained from intellectual inquiry, and frames theoretical limitations and uncertainties as virtues, rather than as obstacles that need to be subsumptively cast aside. Of course, this does not amount to a clear-cut model or a template for how to proceed. But Gibson-Graham's work does offer some helpful indications of how an ethos characterised by interdisciplinary thinking, an openness to ambiguity and uncertainty and a scepticism towards moralising theoretical certainties might allow for a weakening of the grip of narrations of apoliticality and potentially also the production of richer analyses of existing forms of activism and mobilisation.

Such an undertaking may even prove unnecessary: given the renewed attention afforded to radical activism in public and academic discourse it may well be that attachments to narrations of apoliticality will be gradually weakened. However, this is far from inevitable, and it is vital that political theory is equal to the task of making sense of current forms of mass participation in the context of the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, etc. This will prove challenging, but taking inspiration from Gibson-Graham's dogged resistance to disciplinary purity, theoretical certainty and despairing moralism would be a good place to begin.

Footnotes

I am extremely grateful to Maria do Mar Pereira and Sean Nixon who both provided most helpful feedback on an early draft of this article. I also owe a debt of gratitude to those members of the POLIS reading group here at Leeds – Alex Beresford, Charlie Burns, Neil Winn, Graeme Davies, Derek Edyvane, Jason Ralph, Simon Lightfoot and Charlie Dannreuther – whose feedback on, and enthusiasm for, the article were immensely helpful and encouraging. Furthermore, I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers of the article: the detail and generosity of their comments made my reworking of the article a genuinely rewarding exercise. Finally, I thank those who offered comments and questions received at the European Feminist Research Conference at the Central European University, Budapest, in May 2012, where an earlier version was presented.

1

Here, I use ‘radical’ in a fairly broad sense to refer to theorists or activists whose starting point is an implicit or explicit emphasis on the pervasiveness and undesirability of logics of inequality and domination in contemporary political, social and economic life. My focus in this article is on radical politics in the so-called ‘advanced’ democracies, although my analysis does potentially raise questions about transnational epistemic hierarchies within the political theory community.

2

To be clear, I do not intend to suggest that narrations of apoliticality are wholly dominant and uncontested; rather, what concerns me is the way they tend to be invoked in ways that presume familiarity and consent on the part of the reader or audience.

3

Similar narratives can also be found in much popular and non-academic writing on contemporary politics. For instance, the recent overviews of modern British political history advanced by Andrew Marr (2008) and Mark Garnett (2008) both invoke narratives of declining political engagement and radicalism – ‘the defeat of politics by shopping’, as , p. ix) puts it – as a narrative glue through which to piece together their analyses.

4

For critiques of Žižek's rather totalising rendition of capitalism and resultant theory of political action, see Coles, 2005; Stavrakakis, 2011.

5

Interestingly, the other explicit references to the ‘apolitical present’ that I have found in the literature also involve descriptions of narratives of a shift from a politicised recent past to an apolitical present. Clare Hemmings (2011, p. 68) invokes the term in her critique of loss narratives in feminist theory, and Jennifer L. , p. 126) notes how ‘Successful African-Americans contrast the self-centred, apolitical present with the moral and political fervour of the 1960s’.

6

In fairness, Stavrakakis does offer a detailed series of theoretical reflections, but they focus on a fleshing out of a radical democratic response to pervasive logics of depoliticisation, rather than a substantiation of the claim that we are indeed witnessing generalised levels of depoliticisation.

7

Indeed, as has argued in relation to the marginalisation of women's and gender studies, the influence of particular ideas and frames of reference within the academy is secured in large part through collective embodied practices such as seminars, conferences and classrooms, and not just at the level of the published academic text.

8

There is, says , p. 162), something of a ‘general citation scarcity’ in narratives of the loss of feminist theory's political impetus.

9

That is not however to suggest that feminist, queer and anti-racist histories of theory and activism necessarily subvert narrations of apoliticality. Some feminist discourse, for example, invokes narrations of apoliticality by casting the present as one of diminishing possibilities for a transformative feminist politics (Fraser, 2009; McRobbie, 2009). However, feminist theory has been witness to a thorough and ongoing debate about the locatedness, partialities and oversights that are enacted in narrations of the recent history of feminist theory and politics (Hemmings, 2011; Roy, 2009; Thompson, 2002), a discussion that has been much less prominent in mainstream political theory.

10

See for an analysis of a similar state of affairs in which attachments to narratives of the decline of feminist activism can lead to the active erasure or dismissal of emergent forms of feminist mobilisation.

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