Zoe Williams writes:

‘I am acutely conscious,” said Andy Burnham outside 10 Downing Street on Monday, “that I am the sixth person in the last 10 years to walk up this street.” It was good to hear him say it because, beneath all the cabinet gossip and rune-reading, there is a feeling of terror about the immediate future and also about ourselves, the electorate. Is this who we are now? Wildly enthusiastic one minute, seething the next; as passionate about the change we want as we are convinced that those who promise it are incapable of enacting it?

It is perhaps not surprising that Anton Jäger’s recent book, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences, is being read by Labour watchers and leftwing thinkers. As the New York Times wrote, it’s “among the best and most dazzling efforts to model the political present in all its maddening strangeness”. Still, I think Jäger was surprised to have his honeymoon interrupted so I could interview him about it. Life comes at everyone quite fast in a hyperpolitical age.

Jäger, 32, raised in Brussels by parents who work in the arts (“bohemian class?” I ask, and he says carefully that they are boho “adjacent”), educated at the University of Essex, then Cambridge, is now a lecturer in the history of political thought and theory at University College, Oxford. He has an intense, angular face and a calm, almost self-effacing manner. His philosophical reference points are Deleuze and Guattari, Mouffe and Laclau, but asked to situate himself in the firmament of the European left, he says simply: “Even with all the baggage and connotations, I still think the easiest thing is to call myself a Marxist.”

His thinking runs as follows (don’t get hung up on the dates, though some, like 1989, are non-negotiable). The years 1914 to 1989 mark the age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and institutionalisation was also high – so people engaged with politics electorally and on the streets. They were joiners – of political parties, unions, congregations, working men’s clubs, reading groups; they participated in multiple interlacing institutions. Not by coincidence, this was also a time when political struggle resulted in concrete gains. Then, 1989 to the financial crash in 2008 (the years often called the “long 90s”) was the age of post-politics, when institutionalisation was low (we emphatically did not join clubs then, we went to clubs), and politicisation was through the floor. It was a time when technocrats took care of business while everyone else went to a rave, and we said history was over. From the crash through to about 2020 (sometimes earlier, this boundary is the most fluid) was the age of anti-politics – a resurgent Tea Party in the US, Beppe Grillo and anti-establishment protests in Italy, the Arab spring, the Occupy movement. Politicisation in this period came back with a vengeance, and even while institutionalisation hasn’t recovered, these movements still have institutional ambitions. Protest movements in Spain and Greece bore political parties, Podemos and Syriza; protest candidates in the US, France and the UK, had their eyes on retaking traditional parties from which the revolutionary intent had long been stripped away.

Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with neither institutional roots nor ambitions. “On the surface,” Jäger writes, “the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.” As a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s evocative phrase “bodies without organs”. Modern political movements, he writes, are “concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism”.

He found this pattern across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and he only stopped there, he says, because “I don’t have the linguistic and cultural reach to fully tell this story globally”. His descriptions are powerful. He writes of climate strikers and anti-lockdown demonstrators alike as “a myriad animated by brief, potent stimuli, stirred to action by charismatic influencers and digital demagogues”. And that, you have to admit, is exactly what it looks like. [Continue reading…]