Thinking Antagonism by Oliver Marchart

Author:Oliver Marchart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Beyond ‘Grand Politics’ and ‘Micro-Politics’

Let me state at the outset that there are political stakes riding on the reformulation of the problem in terms of minimal politics. Our intention is to rehabilitate those forms of political actions that are too often denied a political status, and which are frequently said to be too inefficient (because they did not have an effect), or too small (because they did not cross the mass media’s horizon of perception), or too corrupt (because part of them rests in the institutions of the state, or indeed because they entered into deals with ‘the enemy’). Although the truth of such accusations can only be assessed in concreto for each individual case, we can nevertheless state that these accusations largely adhere to a historically outmoded notion of politics. They hardly do justice to modern-day social movements, which act on the basis of mobile and growing associations and in doing so do not measure the success of their efforts at political mobilisation in the mere number of demonstration participants or the simple breadth of mass media reports. They look for and create different kinds of public presence. They have recourse to highly diverse forms of political action that usually take place on a small scale, quite like the more traditional forms such as vigils or neighbourhood councils, but which are also not centrally concerned with issues of size anyway. In a way, they fly underneath the radar of traditional perspectives on politics (see Marchart 2013b).

In the traditional perspective, the fantasy of ‘grand politics’ dominates, whether that is taken to mean the politics of grand collective actors (parties, trade unions, state institutions) or those of ‘grand’ individuals. On the Marxist Left, the grandness of the agent was a result of the global, historical mission of a universal class. All action was guided by a political act that itself had to be of sufficient magnitude to guarantee a total breach with the past. The classical left-wing idea of grand politics culminates in the notion of the revolution. The revolution of the whole of society, however, is only possible when (a) society is imagined as a totality and (b) the universal subject is equipped with a metaphysical guarantee of omnipotence in order to achieve the total breach with the past. The phantasmatic character of this notion is obvious. Yet, the notion of the ‘grand’ individual that is apparent in particular on the political Right is no less phantasmatic, assuming, as it does, that the mere deeds of an individual – from Bismarck to Trump – can elicit political upheaval. Social movements are rarely bothered by such fantasies, even as they are regularly charged with producing no palpable or lasting effects. However, political mobilisation cannot so easily be judged with regard to efficiency and inefficiency, effect or lack thereof. Protests can, for instance, assume the function of exemplarity (see, for example, Ferrara 2008), even when they themselves have next to no effect and tend to gravitate towards the zero degree of politics.

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