Instituting Power: On Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics

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In a 2014 blog post titled “No One is Bored, Everything is Boring,” the British cultural theorist Mark Fisher refined the suggestion that the dominant affect of the twentieth century, boredom, had been replaced by the anxiety of the twenty-first. While capturing a certain shift from the tedium of Fordism to the precarity of post-Fordism—the “dreary void of Sundays” displaced by the saturation of capitalist cyberspace, and the stabilization of “top-down bureaucracy” supplanted by the oscillations of financial (mis)management—this schema nevertheless occluded the particular forms of languor characteristic of our new condition. This was the age of repetition and reboots, of listicles and overstimulation, in which the apparent innovations of neoliberal governance—having brutally suppressed its endogenous sources of opposition—amounted to little more than an overproduction of the trite. It was, in other words, a proliferation of activity that left much the same; the machine whirred on the same spot. 

This paradox finds a mirror in a decidedly political problematic, one anatomized by Anton Jäger in his book, Hyperpolitics, the subtitle of which captures the crux of the matter: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences. In taking this condition as his object, Jager attempts a ‘history of the present’ typologized according to a set of political logics, the specificity of each expressed by its attendant prefix. Hence ‘hyperpolitics’ is ‘meant to make sense of what comes after the mass politics of the short twentieth century (1914-1989), the postpolitics of the “very long” 1990s (1989-2008), and the antipolitics of the 2010s’: a heuristic with which to mark the peculiar ‘dynamics of mobilization and contestation that determine the contemporary scene.’ Jäger roughly plots this typology across two axes—a ‘politicization’ axis and a ‘social’ axis—mapping the comparative degrees of mobilization (‘electoral turnout, protest activity, political assassinations’) and, in effect, the institutionalization of such mobilization (‘degrees of civic affiliation and membership’). 

One therefore gets a narrative bookended by, on one side, the intensity of institutionalized politicization characteristic of twentieth-century mass politics: the Golden Age of bourgeois democracy, concretized by the organization of subaltern classes through unions and parties, its striations of factory towns and working-men’s clubs. And, on the other, the ephemerality of the de-institutionalized politicization characteristic of our hyperpolitical moment, in which 2020 saw the largest protest movement in American history and left little in the way of lasting transformations; the fires that engulfed the fourth precinct in Minneapolis slowly, but surely, burned out. 

The peculiarity of such a situation is plain for all to see. As Jäger writes perceptively:

Climate strikes disrupted the school day from Sweden to East Timor and then petered out. Episodes in the culture war over “woke” themes dominate social media for a few days, or hours, before being displaced by the next scandal. Like the notoriously short cycles of financial markets and digital media, the contemporary public sphere spasmodically convulses without ever crystallising into durable infrastructure.

Indeed, this frame permits us to see that it was precisely the boredom of the twentieth century that was, at the same time, the condition of a comparative dynamism; the endless meeting in which party-political life constantly threatened to degenerate being the cost of an organization with a capacity to produce effects. Whatever the stabilization afforded by the mediating structures of the mass political era—a stabilization that, as we shall see, is worth teasing out in greater detail—it was nevertheless, pace the neoliberal memorializing of its rigidity, also a time of the new. Regimes were constructed; institutions were born and scaled; and classes constantly fought, tooth and nail, to traverse the great gulf from the in-itself to the for-itself. General strikes and revolutionary sequences, stymied and recuperated as they were, portended the genuine destruction of the given order and, where they fell short, compelled its profound recalibration. When celebrities ‘Fuck ICE!’ at awards shows it certainly appears exciting, but can we say the same thing of our time? 

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Between the poles of mass politics and hyperpolitics, then, sits a consistently incisive account of the last century or so of political life in the advanced capitalist polities; and if the strength of a social scientific hypothesis in part depends upon the parsimony of its explanation, then Jäger’s is a strong one indeed. Across a slim ninety-four pages, he takes us from the paramilitary organization of the Black and Tans to Wolfgang Tillman’s anti-Brexit posters and back again, intervening in debates as to the nature of populism and whether Trumpism might plausibly be considered fascist. What anchors these excursions is, of course, the aforementioned typology he constructs, its merit in part confirmed by the wealth of material it successfully pulls together, as a “magnet to a field of iron filings.”

The first metamorphosis Jäger relays concerns the shift from the mass to the postpolitical era, and crucial to this exposition is a materialist reconstruction of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. A notable work of American sociology indexing the precipitous decline in civic association over the last third of the twentieth century, it is an argument whose profile has been buoyed in recent years by the viral registering of the decline of “third places,” neither work nor consumption-based, in public life. Hence the collapse of bowling leagues was emblematic of a wider trend, with ‘churches, trade unions, shooting clubs, and Masonic lodges’ hemorrhaging members and closing up shop. Despite the utopian aspirations of the Silicon Valley cyber-culture, social media has done little to rectify such atomization; its ersatz sociality instead serving to intensify these centrifugal forces, the algorithmic siloization of media consumption concomitant with tendencies toward misinformation and boorishness.

Putnam adduces a range of phenomena to explain such tendencies—suburbanization, television use, increased working hours—but what he misses, Jäger argues, is the extent to which this fragmentation was the predictable consequence of a conscious process of political and economic recomposition from the 1970s onwards, in which the subordination of organized labour that inaugurated the neoliberal moment was embedded in a juridical and industrial architecture whose effects remain decisive today. As is well known, the stagflationary crisis of the ‘70s that precipitated this conflict — itself resulting from the overdetermination of capital’s contradictions by the 1973 oil price shock — was resolved from the right; and the resulting combination of hostile legislation and offshoring deprived the left of its concentrated sites of power, the historical working-class increasingly dispersed into precarious service work and underemployment. 

If bowling leagues are the archetype of Putnam’s communitarianism, then for Jäger’s mass politics it is the remarkable counter-societies constructed by political parties and trade unions. In a “Rhenish hamlet hit hard by the Great Depression,” for instance, the Austrian Social Democratic Party provided the basis for a rich latticework of institutions, running the gamut from theatre, cycling, and radio clubs, to a cremation society and, joyously, a “Rabbit Breeders Association.”

It is important to emphasize, too, that such forms were not only sources of social belonging (what Putnam calculates, tellingly, as one’s social “capital”), but organs that effectively channeled popular interests in order to amass collective power and exert influence over government. Indeed, it is the loss of this mediating function that marks the opening to the postpolitical phase, a formula that captures the various expositions of post-democracy, technocracy, or “hollowing out” that became the favourite diagnostic tool of critical political theorists in the 1990s and early 2000s. 

In this understanding, the market’s function as a block to collective control over the social metabolism was rebooted after the aberration of social democracy by the particular forms of “encasing” characteristic of neoliberalism. On both the national and international levels, policy discretion was increasingly transferred to unelected actors, with privatization and central bank independence enmeshed within (and reinforced by) an opaque web of transnational governance. Meanwhile, the representative form, no longer constrained by the “organic intellectuals” thrown up by the workers movement and the significant organizational power they deployed, resumed its function as a transmission belt for precocious members of the dominant classes to take their place in the political sphere. Their use of new media and “public relations” technologies gave a contemporary gloss to Joseph Schumpeter’s warning that electoral procedures are nothing but a means for the instrumentalization of popular opinion for an intra-elite horse race. The emergence of “catch-all” parties, pitched toward the elusive median voter constructed by psephologists, was the organizational innovation behind the unmistakable narrowing of political competition over these decades. Jäger has a knack for drawing out the most symptomatic vignettes here, drolly relaying the last secretary-general of the Italian Communist Party’s concession that Wall Street banks are “temples of civilisation,” the NATO headquarters similarly boosted as “the centre of world peace.”

With the exception of the alter-globalization movement at the turn of the millenium, these were the wilderness years for the politically committed, the apparent end of history dependent upon financialized growth and the expansion of the world market. With the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, however, the house of cards fell; and the austerian response catalyzed the re-emergence of political antagonisms previously dormant. So commences the antipolitical moment epitomized by the declaration of the Indignados protests in Spain, “No nos representan!” (They don’t represent us!), which Jäger subdivides into two phases. The first concerns the various “horizontalist” movements, from Occupy to the direct-action group UK Uncut, who were ideologically resistant to formalization and representation. The second—and recapping the argument of his previous book, co-written with Arthur Borriello—concerns the resultant “populist” moment, in which anti-establishment actors sought to channel the groundswell either by the institution of new parties (Italy’s M5S, Podemos in Spain) or the appropriation of existing apparatuses (most notably, Jeremy Corbyn in Britain).

For Jäger, that such a strategy almost totally failed — with the interesting exception of La France Insoumise, whose leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon stands a good chance of winning the presidential election next year — is indicative of the left’s inability to effectively break with the de-institutionalized condition of contemporary politics. The lithe “digital parties” and quick-footed electoral vehicles, oscillating in and out of coalitions and leaderships, lacked the cadres that gave the mass parties of yore their roots; and the unstable electoral bloc they forged — suturing together downwardly mobile graduates, proletarianized professionals, and a multiracial working-class — papered over longer-term problems of labor recomposition. That the right fared better in this context, delivering multiple “populists” to office across the Western world, is explained by virtue of the comparative insulation of capital’s organizational terrain from the tendencies described above; the hermetic worlds of privilege, from private schools to lobbyists, reinforced by a Bonapartist articulation with the base. As Jäger reminds us, given the historical project of the right — ever anxious to stabilize existing asymmetries of power — “apathy and resignation” are less a threat than an “asset.” 

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Thus we arrive back at our hyperpolitical moment. It shares with its predecessor the re-politicization within a context of de-institutionalization, and differs insofar as such politicization has generalized, intensified, and diffused; a “redoubling of antipolitics, a mode of viral panic typical of the internet age with its short cycles of hope and outrage.” Absent the canalization of the populist moment, antagonisms have once again spilled out into the streets, the George Floyd Riots finding their opposite in the storming of Capitol Hill. “Fleeting in duration,” these mobilizations “maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.” There is a low-cost of entry, lightly coordinated through group chats and message boards; and the absence of any institutional mechanisms of reproduction also precludes stable pathways for consistent participation, privileging what Albert Hirschman would call “exit” as opposed to “voice” as the modality with which to express dissatisfaction.

Despite these issues, what came before wasn’t all sunshine and roses, either. Near the end of the book, Jäger concedes that the implicit valorization of the traditional couplet of party and union “may seem nostalgic, authoritarian, or simply unrealistic.” This brings to the fore an argument loosely threaded throughout previous chapters that variously acknowledges the negatives of the “total” belonging characteristic of mass politics, its organs incubating certain prejudices and comfortably deploying authoritarian measures.

“The golden age of party democracy was,” Jäger reflects, “no irenic idyll,” highlighting in the French case the “Gaullist coup d’état that introduced a semi-presidential system with patently authoritarian features”; while “European powers” fought “bitter counterinsurgencies to forestall the independence of their remaining colonial possessions in Africa.” But he omits discussion of the complicity of the French Communist Party itself in both these cases, refusing to take a decisive position against de Gaulle and, earlier, in 1956, voting to grant the Mollet government its “special powers” with which to intensify repression of the FLN. The evidently reformist orientation of such institutions—what the libertarian communist Claude Lefort, then a key figure of the extra-party left, once termed “forms for the enrollment of labor-power within the system” —was routinely confirmed by their various missteps and impotencies, calcified at both ends by diktats from Moscow and the triangulations of electoral politics. 

Indeed, attention to the failures of such institutions is important, precisely insofar as they relate to their existence as institutions. In a discussion of Didier Eribon’s memoir, Jäger credits the party with supplying the working-class with “cohesion and a stable sense of self.” This is certainly true: Such parties, whatever their faults, ensured a basic form of articulation that liberated the masses from what Sartre would call their condition of “seriality,” shunted around like pinballs by economic forces, related only in competitive isolation. That they were able to do so is due in part to relatively complex divisions of labor and internal relations of discipline—the foundational material of organizational capacity that permitted the depth of commitment and range of activity characteristic of the German Social Democratic Party, the Italian Communists, or the United Autoworkers Union. 

But at the same time these logics risk degenerating into new modes of reification, asserting the needs of institutional reproduction against their originary aims. Such procedures thus serve to cohere and stabilize not only working-class identity, therefore, but the social form as a whole—or, more accurately, ensure the latter by virtue of the former—tending to pacify the more militant fractions of the class while seeking to incorporate any struggles that threaten the nexus of corporatist governance from which they drew their power. It is on this basis that midcentury intellectuals like Adorno and Horkheimer spoke of union “rackets” as a moment within the larger complex of administered society rather than as forces antagonistic to them, and they were not necessarily far off. “The division between leader and led to be found in the ruling class”, the former writes in his 1947 essay, “Reflections on Class Theory,” “reproduces itself compulsively further down the ladder.” And the moderation of exploitation by virtue of the Keynesian compromise, inclined to peg wages to productivity and distribute the growing pie more equitably, ensured that the “individual thrives better in an organization of special interests than one that is opposed to them.” 

Jäger is no doubt aware of these tendencies, and goes some way toward capturing them in his subdivision of the era of mass politics between a “wild” and an “embedded” phase after 1945—a historical demarcation that is partially undermined, as he himself acknowledges elsewhere, by Robert Michel’s penetrating analysis of the SPDs (Social Democratic Party of Germany) oligarchization as early as 1911. In any case, it is possible to counterpose Jäger’s narrative to an alternative account of the twentieth century, one in which the strength of the conventional organs of the workers’ movement becomes simultaneously an index of integration and counter-revolution. The Ebert-Groener pact, in which the SPD sacrificed the radical flank of the German Revolution in pursuit of a stabilized parliamentary republic, would thus be the first instance of a series of recuperative maneuvers characteristic of such institutions. The other two largest communist parties in Western Europe—the PCF and the PCI—would have their own versions: the former famously scrambling to contain the energies of the soixante-huitards, union and party leadership polarized toward the government in their acceptance of the concessions of the Grenelle Accords; the latter insisting on the separation of “economic” from “political” struggle against the maximalist demands of Italy’s “hot autumn,” a conflict immortalized in Nanni Balestrini’s inimitable novel, We Want Everything. “When we ask for increases in our base pay”, the narrator reflects on the struggle at the Fiat plant in Mirafiori, “the bosses and the unions always offer increases in the variable part,” precisely as “to make the working class accept collaborating in their own exploitation.”

This all being said, it’s hard to disagree with Jäger’s assessment that, “without a reinstitutionalization of political engagement, the left will remain hostage to impotent volatility, and its adversaries will continue to enjoy a decisive advantage.” Hyperpolitics’s diagnosis of the fractious de-institutionalization of the conjuncture is, therefore, a vital corrective to the so-called “destituent” tendencies of contemporary thought and practice, intent on making a virtue of this voidal space by intensifying the critique of institutionality as, irreducibly, apparatuses of capture and mollification. But it is not sufficient to essentialize these forms one way or another. Instead, we ought to view them as complex modalities beset by conflicting tendencies—capable of serving both as launch-pads and inhibitors for radical logics of collective action—with the question of which will predominate dependent upon their specific configuration and position within a wider institutional nexus. 

Noting the real barriers faced by attempts to reboot the figures of party and union, hamstrung by individualism and the loss of its previous centers of activity in heavy industry, Jäger concludes that “today”’s impasse can hardly be undone by a voluntaristic act of will.” He points us toward potential sites of militancy in the spheres of care-work or neighborhood organizing, and portends the re-emergence of more classic labor struggles amidst much talk of reshoring and industrial policy. But mankind, we will recall, makes its own history, even if in conditions not of our own choosing; and part of this making ought to involve an attempt to think through the failures of the older modes of composition, to invent new forms of institutionality less liable to capture and more capable of ratcheting up antagonisms instead of neutralizing them. Struggles by rank-and-file union organizers and experimentation with new party-forms should thus also be central to our “escape routes” from Hyperpolitics, strands of instituent praxis guided by Brecht’s counsel to start not with the “good old days, but the bad new ones.”