Although the mode of engagement we are describing here does not involve a final, unified agenda, it would be a mistake to conclude that continuous experience and imperceptible politics are purposeless. By contesting exclusion through inclusion they generate alternative means for doing politics. In our current socio-political conditions state-politics, identity politics and micropolitics provide the necessary terrain for the proliferation and functioning of new hegemonic forms of transnational, postliberal sovereignty (Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2007a; Balibar, 2004). What we are witnessing is not so much the demise of the state, the rise of transnational powers, or cultural political struggles, not even a new alliance between these actors. In postliberal sovereignty the state ceases to represent itself in its actions; it splits itself, and certain parts of it participate in broader social aggregates articulating interests, wills and political views from many different bits of social classes, social groups, associations of civil society (such as trade unions, customers organizations, pressure groups), local businesses, TNCs, NGOs, international governing bodies, transnational organizations (Sassen, 1999). What are emerging are vertical aggregates of power which use cultural politics to help maintain the coherence of postliberal power formations.
In this field, state-politics, identity politics and micropolitics all fail to establish a break with these emerging aggregates of sovereignty. For example, micropolitics were introduced as an answer to the limitations of state-politics. The intention was to counter everyday normalisation, to counter the effacement of subjectivities, the codification of otherness and Fordist immobility (Massumi, 1993; Connolly, 2002; Moulier Boutang, 1998). But as the state splits itself and disseminates into the finest fissures of society micropolitics (or the aesthetic cultivation of experience) have become necessary elements for its functioning and for its effective transformation into a postliberal mode of governance. Postliberal conditions require more than self-regulating individuals to proliferate. Networked subjects are needed, subjects who, by assuming responsibility for creating connections between disparate actants, actively forge new vertical aggregates of power (Sassen, 2004).
However, in situations where postliberal sovereignty recuperates the production of experience into a crucial moment of its own reproduction, there is still an excess of experience which infringes on and ruptures the new logic of control. The political relevance of this excess, of continuous experience, is that it creates new forms of sociability which operate in the everyday and outside of the inclusive strategies of
postliberal aggregates. Continuous experience fuels the engagement of those who are excluded from the logics of representation in current forms of sovereignty. We are not proposing that continuous experience is inherently subversive of hegemonic political rationalities (Bove and Empson, 2002). Rather, we are suggesting that if there is one form of politics which can be subversive in the current configuration of the everyday it is this. Through the creation of sociabilities, outside politics make apparent in everyday activity a world which is neglected or silenced by the dominant discourses of contemporary power.
Opening Night depicts the struggle over a move from identity politics and micropolitics to the politics of imperceptibility in the everyday. Continuous experience materialises – not through the resolution of tensions between all those involved in staging the play – but as a fact with which all have to contend. A new play is there. Unburdened by others expectations of their success, or even failure, Sebald’s characters simply move imperceptibly. The migrants take up the dispersal of continuous experience and in so doing they reveal the social relations which are being forged in the neglected spaces between hegemonic discourses of tragedy and loss – modes of sociability which rework our sense of the everyday lived experience of the Holocaust and the futures such experience makes possible. Their everyday experience is the place where history unfolds. Rather than moving towards futures which are determined by their pasts, the migrants navigate without ever puncturing the “mist that no eye can dispel” (Sebald, 1997: 25). Moving deeper into the immanence of the present entails a refusal of clichéd subject positions, a retreat from the self. This is the subjectless condition of outside politics. Policing proliferates through the capacity state-politics, identity politics and micropolitics have to evoke subjects through processes of representation. In contrast, outside politics refuse representation, harnessing everyday sociabilities which exceed the constitution of today’s subjectivities. In this paper we argued that it is through continuous experience that these sociabilities operate and de facto change the world we live in. They create an imperceptible world, World 2 (Papadopoulos, 2006), which has the power to challenge the political constitution of post-liberal societies. Outside politics insist that another world is here.
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Niamh Stephenson is a senior lecturer in social science at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, where she teaches social theory, medical sociology and qualitative research methods. She has published widely in the fields of social research and cultural studies as well as co-edited two collections on subjectivity. Most recently, she has co-authored a book with Dimitris Papadopoulos entitled Analysing Everyday Experience: Social Research and Political Change (Palgrave, 2006)
Address: Dr Niamh Stephenson, School of Public Health & Community Medicine, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
E-mail: [email protected]
Dimitris Papadopoulos is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, where he teaches social and cultural theory, social science studies, and labour studies. He has published on subjectivity, social and cultural theory and, most recently, together with Niamh Stephenson, a book on experience (Palgrave, 2006). He is currently finishing a co-authored book called Imperceptible politics: Experience, Migration, Precarity on contemporary forms of political sovereignty and new radical social activism.
Address: Dr Dimitris Papadopoulos, Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Ave, Cardiff CF10 3WT, UK.
E-mail: [email protected]