Minima Politica

What happens, as Jerry Rubin quipped, when a Hippie, hit by a policeman's truncheon, turns into a Yippie? A transubstantiation of a particular kind can be witnessed: the emergence of a political agent from the sedimented routines of the social in a moment of protestation. In Laclau's theory of populism, this was characterised as the moment when a social request transforms into a political demand. While, for Laclau, populism serves as the quintessential case of political mobilisation, I have tried to substantiate a more general claim: that the transition from request to demand involves a moment of protestation to be found in all political mobilisation. Politics, when traced back to its ‘degree zero’ of reactivation, is always protest politics. Whatever else might be called politics – in everyday language or in political science – is merely a sedimented social practice (a practice of governance, for instance) that remains untouched by the reactivating moment of the political. Spaces for politics, in a strict sense, only open when the instituting ground of social sedimentations is reactivated by antagonism and the social world is suddenly perceived as contingent and conflictual. In such a moment of dislocation, dispersed social differences become available for political articulation, but only if they are turned against what they are not: against an instance of radical negativity that is presented as the ultimate source of their frustration. Laclau was right in claiming that, politically, this involves the transformation of a frustrated request into a more widespread political demand: into an empty signifier that holds together an equivalential chain.

And because politics, in the moment of reactivation, turns against – and is activated by – a radical outside, all politics is protest. Let us attempt, on this premise, to establish some further conditions of political action – in the very prosaic sense of politics. Keeping our previous critique of micro-politics in mind, we will ask: What does a process of ‘going macro’ in actual fact imply on the ontic level of ordinary politics? We must proceed with care, however; it would not do to simply make a checklist of an arbitrary choice of conditions, similar to an Aristotelian catalogue of categories.