What is Politics

I was having a coffee with a colleague yesterday, and at one point she said to me: "We have a different understanding of the word 'politics.'" I'd been talking about the political implications of the internet and had been making the case that the internet was creating new patterns of social organization, and therefore new political forms. "When you use the word politics, you seem to mean social and cultural," she said, "I have a different understanding."

At the time, I understood this remark in the context of a simple difference of opinion. In retrospect, though, I wonder whether or not I was wrong.

I've been asking myself this question: "What is politics - as distinguished from the social and cultural?" Any takers?

I remain unsure. But I think she does think, yes, that politics is ultimately a matter of state, and of government, and the concerted and organized forces acting upon it. Fundamentally, she thinks there is a distinction between the social and cultural, and the political. And what I wonder is a) whether she's right, and b) what this difference would consist of?

One possible answer: One of the things which I've begun to become much more wary of in recent years, in the spectacle of the professor registering more-or-less prescriptive political appeals through their academic paper. What real relationship, I've been asking myself, does this have with anything? What is the chance that this kind of gesture actually affects things?

The argument runs as follows: Beliefs can be changed through procedures of suasion, and if those beliefs change correctly, politics follows. This isn't ridiculous. But I wonder if it isn't too simple.

Let's take a concrete historical example - the rise of the Neo-Cons in the United States. Clearly, there were larger world-historical elements in play in the background. But in the foreground what there was more primarily was a series of operations, foundations of institutions, and so on... I think it would be difficult to link these to the larger cultural landscape, though not impossible.

This is definitely true - and I think puts the finger on why this subject is quite difficult to understand.

Let me try something else. Say, you are a political activist. You are committed to a certain way of understanding the world, a certain frame of belief, a certain set of convictions. You want to impose these convictions, transmit them, put them into wider circulation. How do you do this?

Immediately, a certain number of material questions come into play. First of all, there is the issue of how adequate your understanding of the world is to present circumstances. Or maybe, not adequate, but persuasive. Certain frameworks will be resisted by the world, for various reasons. I don't think I would have that much success if I tried to convince people that the ultimate political imperative of our present moment is to, say, overthrow the lizard people.

So here is where the wider points about your socio-cultural background come into play. The socio-cultural allows for certain possibilities, and blocks certain others. It is easier to transmit certain messages then others - because of the shape of the message, because of the shape of the receiver, and so on. Someone like Alain Badiou seems to me perhaps to deny this mediological aspect, insofar as he says that politics is ultimately a matter of axioms, of insisting on axioms.

One point: Certain radicalisms (Marxism, extreme rightisms) argue that their traditions and perspectives are systematically suppressed by prevailing extant systems (capitalism, liberalism). This is worth considering, both on a rhetorical level (consider the psychological appeal of the discourse that "they don't want you to hear") as well as on a practical level - it is true that there is a certain prevailing way of understanding information instilled by the media. Though in the end this might be more formal then ideological - less important, ultimately, I think, then what you want to say, is how you want to say it.

This is kind of scattershot, but maybe someone will be able to shoot these arrows off somewhere.

Agent Nucleus said:

baader-meinhof was political

Click to expand...

I question this... Baader-Meinhof certainly believed they were political. But there was a big hole in their political theorizing - it was never precisely clear how their actions were ever going to translate into real political change, in anything other than negative way - that is, through a police state crackdown, which is in fact broadly what happened.

For me, the model of the political actor in the twentieth century has to be Gandhi. Why? Because he put his finger quite precisely on where the pressure points were, and then... did *nothing*, and the political situation reorganized itself accordingly.

BM were spectacular politics, the politics that says: "We are political actors, we are doing political things." Real political actors don't do that...