Читать книгу Unexceptional Politics - Emily Apter - Страница 6

Overflowing the bounds of Realpolitik or informal politics, what I call unexceptional politics could be thought of as the material and immaterial stuff of politics that encompasses everything from government gridlock and dysfunction to political cunning (Machiavellianism in its modern historical mutations), from politicking (backroom deals, information trafficking, the petitions of local constituents, jousting and ousting) to Occupy or Maidan, with their neo-anarchist strategies of occupation, assembly, riot, strike, obstination (utopianism against all odds, resistance to primitive expropriation), interference, and creative leveraging.

Unexceptional politics, as an umbrella rubric, subsumes and exceeds micropolitics insofar as it is pointedly posed against the ideological exceptionalism enshrined in nationalist compacts and the American heritage of manifest destiny. It conceptually engages, in the form of dialectical resistance, the “state of exception,” foundationally inscribed in theories of “the Political,” from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt, from Hannah Arendt to Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. Thinking politics exceptionally, however—through states of emergency or sublations of political subjectivity—blocks the representation of what is unintelligible or resistant to political theorization, while thinking politics unexceptionally spools into explanatory structures of historical epic and of classical political theory, muddying their structural coherence, obfuscating mainstream political and diplomatic ends. This is politics that eludes conceptual grasp, confronting us with the realization that we really do not know what politics is, where it begins and ends, or how its micro-events should be called.

Claude Lefort laments the “no there there” view of statecraft that leaches out of decentralized structures of governance and systems of controlled information.

How, in fact, can we cling to the idea that politics invades everything? If there is no boundary between politics and that which is not political, politics itself disappears, because politics has always implied a definite relationship between human beings, a relationship governed by the need to answer the questions on which their common fate depends.¹

If there is no demonstrable boundary between politics and the non-political, then how can we not accept the idea that politics invades everything? The problem, it would seem, lies with classical political theory and philosophy, whose language has a relatively limited vocabulary for describing the allness and everywhereness of political atmosphere and milieu.

Hence the impetus to initiate a glossary of terms that have no ready standing in political theory, yet share something in challenging the assumption that “the Political” is always for tomorrow. Rather than treat politics (“small p,” or “la politique”) as nothing more than the foreclosure of the possibility of a critical politics, or a concession to what Ross McKibbin calls “what-works” politics, or a “realist” politics that is supposedly party-neutral and beyond ideology (though it is anything but), this vocabulary focuses instead on (1) terms for the political that have no standing in classical political theory, particularly in relation to psychopolitical forms of obstruction and impasse to direct action; (2) an “untheologized politics” “where there is no Homo Sacer”² (as argued by Stathis Gourgouris, who has himself adapted my own coinage of “unexceptional politics”); (3) historical notions of politics as métier and praxis and (4) concept-metaphors for experiments in underachieved socialism, states of care, non-capitalized labor time, the recalculation of social interest, non-exclusionary franchise, the undercommons, and micropolitics.³ As Roberto Mangabeira Unger has argued, “the illusion of the indivisibility of formative contexts,” which has led to the belief that “all changes short of total revolution must amount to mere conservative tinkering … induces in its adepts a fatal oscillation between unjustified confidence and equally unjustified prostration.”⁴ The twin poles of unjustified confidence and unjustified prostration may admit of no supersession, but what we are given to work with by Unger—worth thinking about—is “divisible formative context.” In my own thinking, this would be a micropolitics that foregrounds what Unger calls “disentrenchment.” Its point of departure is the abrogation of any social compact that consigns whole sectors of the population to the status of “non-occupant of society” or “resource outcast.”⁵

In lieu of a theory of unexceptional politics, I have made an effort to think politics as it happens in circumstances thrush with contingency and baffled institutional authority, on the left, on the right, and inside the mainstream or beltway. Hence, this idiosyncratic and by no means exhaustive glossary drafted in the face of a political environment—neoliberal Euro-America—severely pockmarked by obstructionism, obstinacy, the marketing of affairs and financial scandals, rude-boy tactics (incivility, tactlessness) and the submersion of political struggle in the vagaries of managerialism. Drawing on theorists of micropolitics (Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari), critics of the bourgeois novel (Jameson and Moretti), and critical thinkers who have mobilized political aesthetics (Lukács, Rancière, Badiou), I have experimented with distilling a vocabulary for the microphenomenology of political life. This has entailed investigating approaches to modes of politicking that, despite their formulaic or serial character, fit no precise rubric or institutional ascription. Hannah Arendt (in “On Violence”) bemoaned the paucity of terminology in political science for distinctions among keywords like power, strength, authority, and violence and urged developing an ear for the logical grammar of their usage, their contextual circulation, and specific properties and attributes.⁶

I have taken Arendt’s point to heart in designating certain glossemes as belonging to a currency of unexceptional politics, in listening for the logical contradictions and creative eruptions in political syntax, in looking at how politics is pictured in narrative scenography or anecdotally telescoped. Literature, and especially the political fiction of French authors from the Restoration to the Belle Époque—Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Taine, Proust—allows me to consider narrative accounts of scams, seductions, backroom deals, and the kinds of diplomatic intrigues that dilute and diffuse “the Political,” highlighting the elusiveness of the political event. It is the inchoate texture of the micro-event that preoccupies writers in the post-revolutionary period, a time marked by parallels to the present-day era, which is to say, by crises of governmentality, financial debacle, defeat in war, civil disorder, strikes and attacks, imperial expansionism, new strands of xenophobia, new forms of democratic leisure, and a burgeoning mass media fully participant in the spread of journalistic irony and political corruption.

From the beginning I was faced with the question of how politics, as a scene of maneuvers and an application of cunning, maps onto (or does not) formal, abstract models of political aesthetics; onto the workings of capitalist epic, democracy in language, the “revolutionary” dimension of avant-gardism, comic forms of class struggle, modes of narrative realism, and tragic aporias of communitas. Meeting this challenge of a structural interpretation of politics soon proved impossible, but the abiding issue of politics and form, as framed in 1974 by Fredric Jameson’s watershed study Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, were integral to the book’s heuristic. Where Jameson focused on dialectics in structuralist aesthetics, I focused instead on the structurelessness of political atmosphere that suffuses what Jameson named the “political unconscious,” as well as the “atmospheric walls,” associated by Sarah Ahmed with internalized moods, that stratify social space and foreclose participation in community.⁷

This attempt to define the amorphous construct of unexceptional politics undertakes no systematic critique of theories of sovereign exception, which, recurring to Carl Schmitt’s application of Ausnahmezustand to the Roman justicium and auctoritas, refer to the “state of siege” and “suspension of the rule of law.” After all, this critique already exists, fully developed in the 1990s and early 2000s around the construct of the sovereign decision—defined as the exceptional authority vested in the sovereign to institute a state of emergency—which has gradually taken over as the basis of Western models of the sovereign subject, or sovereignty subjectivized. Such theorizations of exceptionalism acquired renewed traction and impetus in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler (among others) during America’s Iraq invasions, when the exercise of extralegal powers transformed the “state of emergency” and “extraordinary rendition” into routine political measures. The routinization of the state of exception continues to underwrite drone warfare, supranational border patrol, domestic police practices, and the surveillance abuses of the National Security Agency; taken together they constitute an “unexceptionalization” of illegal political intervention.

While exceptionalism may be an unexceptional feature of routinized war and staple of American jingoism, I would rather construe unexceptionalism less as the logic of “exception to the rule,” and more as one of “just politics as usual,” an attitude that inevitably shores up the status quo. Sidebars in the business of deal-brokering, sex scandals in the stalls of the national assembly, information-trafficking in diplomacy; all have formed the traditional stock-in-trade of pamphlets, caricatures and post-revolutionary political fiction. Their contemporary correlate may be found in media reportage and insider accounts of the political “Club” (as in Matt Bai’s book All the Truth is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid [2014], or Mark Leibovich’s This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capital [2013];⁸ art (as in the satirical graphics of financial derivatives and corporate data by William Powhida); and in myriad films, comedy specials, and TV serials that take government back-offices as their settings.⁹ What these books, films and serials depict so well is how the quirks of human personality—complacency, wounded narcissism, lassitude, bloody-mindedness, bureaucratic reflex—transfer to the workings of political institutions. Bureaucratic hurdles and legal obstruction are symptoms of human agency, such that simple words like “decrees,” “signatures,” and “contracts” become the currency of political logjams.¹⁰ As Bruno Latour reads them:

“What?” they exclaim. “How could this little obstacle have the power to stop us?” … On the one hand astonishing force, objectivity, on the other remarkable weakness. We feel that force every time we learn that, “because of a simple signature missing on the decree,” the appointment of a bank director was blocked; or when we see that a dam construction project essential to the survival of a valley has been suspended owing to “a tiny defect in the declaration of public utility”; or that jobless workers have lost their rights “because they misread the contract that bound them to their employer”; or that one business was unable to acquire another “because of a legal constraint imposed by Brussels.” But we feel the weakness every time we despair at seeing that the “legally justified” decision is not necessarily just, opportune, true, useful, effective; every time the court condemns an accused party but the aggrieved party has still not been able to achieve “closure”; every time indemnities have been awarded but doubts still remain about the exact responsibilities of the respective parties. With the law, we always go from surprise to surprise: we are surprised by its power, surprised by its impotence.¹¹

The toxic combination of despair, grievance, doubt, and impotence lends psychic specificity to notions of obstructive “force,” carried over to political speech in the guise of a special kind of impasse (a “category mistake” consisting in the accusation of lying “brought by a way of speaking that claims for its part, not to pass through any pass”), or form of talk that goes nowhere. As Latour elaborates:

There is nothing more fragmented, interrupted, repetitive, conventional and contradictory than political speech. It never stops breaking off, starting over, harping, betraying its promises … getting mixed up, coming and going, blotting itself out by maneuvers whose thread no one seems to be able to find anymore.¹²

In Latour’s estimation the only counter is “the dissolution of coalitions of naysayers,” so that “what was united disperses like a flock of sparrows, becomes a ‘crooked movement.’”¹³

Perhaps all one can aspire to is “crooked movement” during a period in US political history when partisan obstructionism remains the order of the day. President Obama’s election in 2008 precipitated a hard right turn in US politics, already in an archconservative place after two terms of the junior Bush presidency. By Obama’s second-term election a culture of venomous incivility fanned by Tea Party extremism further encouraged the incessant posturing of the “party of no.” Partisan voting blocks in Congress and the Senate, acting in lock-step, opposed all legislative and diplomatic initiatives, from routine committee member nominations, to nuclear nonproliferation agreements with Iran, to virtually any meliorist environmental legislation or gun control. The expansion of “conceal and carry” and “stand your ground” laws at the very moment of mass shootings; the increase in militias, border militarization, and incarceration without due process; the failure to prosecute police in the killings of black men, women, and children, along with the impact of movements associated with corrosive ideologies—“corporations are people,” Citizens United, abortion restrictions, “right to work” attacks on organized labor, curtailment of public welfare, climate change denial—all contributed to the deathliness of obstruction. It goes without saying that governance at a standstill has only been further exacerbated in the era of Trumpism, where “the man in the white house sits, naked and obscene, a pustule of ego, in the harsh light, a man whose grasp exceeded his understanding, because his understanding was dulled by indulgence.”¹⁴ Legislative blockage is not only the chronic symptom of politics as usual, or the nasty aftereffect of government shutdown and paralysis (fortified by post-Brexit, new-populist cross-Atlantic mirroring to become what Balibar diagnoses as “a deep crisis of the political institution”), but also channels a lethal undertow, a death wish; it tolls the suicidal endgame for deliberative democracy.¹⁵

No longer persuaded that we can simply block blockage with its own blunt instruments (in the spirit of Wikileaks and Anonymous), I have channeled my critical ire (and profound political frustrations and fears) into compiling a lexicon whose terms, directly or indirectly, flow out of the conditions of political obstruction, impasse, and impolitic actions and speech. Bifocal by design, the book is organized, first, as an (albeit idiosyncratic) critical vocabulary of keywords that describe micropolitical phenomena for which classical political theory and political science have no precise names, and second, as a narrative about “the long Restoration” (the name of Alain Badiou’s conservative sequence), whose through line extends from the French monarchie censitaire to configurations within early twenty-first-century capitalo-parliamentarianism.

To this end, I emphasize the character and range of “small p” politics, half of a dyad whose other half is “big P” Politics, or “the Political.” “The Political,” with emphasis on the definite article, has served as shorthand, especially on the left, for the refusal to accept the terms of politics on offer in the mediocracy. Though no uniform theoretical program is identified with it, the Political is commonly taken to mean the categorical rejection of capitalist triumphalism in a post-Wall era of global hypermarkets. As Alain Badiou explains in his chapter of Metapolitics titled “Against ‘Political Philosophy,’” the Political delegitimates “plurality of opinion” in order to effect the “possibility of a rupture with what exists.” It has been used as a catchall for modes of political thinking that are at once classical (Platonic, Kantian, Schmittian) and as yet unthought: a communism to come, a democracy relieved of applied ethics, an “inarticulable” subject of politics.¹⁶

I remain committed to these retreated forms of the Political, yet find myself at the start of a turning circle whose purview entails taking stock of politics in its messier, everyday guises. The abandonment of “small p” politics to pundits and members of the chattering classes risks putting theorists of “big P” Politics” out of action. By framing the Political in terms of that which is extraneous to or other to problems of statecraft, constitutionalism, and institutionalism, many thinkers have left undertheorized the formless force field of “smallest p” politics that keeps the system of capitalo-parliamentarianism in place and prevents emancipatory politics from taking place. This situation prompts a return to some of the classic writings on micropolitics by Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour with an eye to building out a non-classical, non-canonical vocabulary of microphysical or molecular or non-transcendent disarticulations of power. Political fiction, with its exploration of psychopolitics, impolitic gestures, and idiosyncrasies of political intelligence, has also provided essential material for elucidating “small p” politics. And recent work on economies of existence have led me to highlight specific modes of financialization, managerialism, and calculated social relations as quintessential mediums of a “small p” political lexicon.

While the terms selected are occasionally neologistic (“thermocracy”) or may involve an unconventional usage (the shift from substantive to adjectival inflections of “the impolitic”), they are chosen for their value as paleonymy—reworked old names that draw out recessed political dimensions within ordinary language. Derrida associates paleonymy with the “extraction of a reduced predicative trait that is held in reserve” and considers it an instance of “the name being maintained as a kind of lever of intervention in order to maintain a grasp on the previous organization, which is to be effectively transformed.”¹⁷ It is precisely this heuristic of interventionist, paleonymic conceptual levering that one finds in the Political Concepts initiative, a loosely affiliated group of philosophers and theorists who produce an online journal. Typically the intellectual gambit involves reworking well-worn political vocabulary (“amnesty,” “grandeur,” “legitimacy,” “consent,” “equality”); or making-political parts of speech or minor words (prepositions, adverbs, adjectives), as in the juridical measure of “enough” when applied by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Jacques Lezra), the semantic traction of “blood” in contexts of theological vengeance (Gil Anidjar) or the neoliberal tincture of “development” within the politics of modernization (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). A similar way of working informs Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s idiosyncratic “An Atlas of Concepts (with interspersed stories)” which offers (for my purposes) a particularly rich and useful definition of “Obstinacy” [Eigensinn] as something plastically political: a “resistance to primitive expropriation” whose “elements continually construct themselves anew and grow out of such heterogeneous roots that the type of experience and resistance identified as OBSTINACY cannot be conceptually isolated.”¹⁸ Rather than the assumption of a predetermination of what does or does not count as a political concept, there is in such lexical experiments an effort to expand the scope of what demands political accounting or is considered politically significant. “Political” is taken to refer to the multiplicity of forces, structures, problems, and orientations constitutive of modes of existence and being-in-community. The concept of political concept, accordingly, becomes a way of endowing non-political vocabulary with political significance, and a way of thinking concepts not just as freestanding, transhistorical monoliths, but as time-sensitive and site-specific units of language. Barbara Cassin’s notion of “philosophizing in languages” contributes to this view of political concepts as inflected by particularities of idiom, history and geopolitics.

Throughout the book, select terms are distilled from episodes that are themselves culled from scenes in novels, films or TV serials that fill in areas where political theory falls short. Such episodes typically feature intense lobbying; interests that are secured, only to be razed from memory by the arrival of ascendant agendas; opportunistic shifts of ideological position; flurries of bait and switch; and the traffic in personal information, mutual interest, earmarks, and palace intrigue. These are the effluvia constitutive of the anthropology of the opinion system and that render “what happens” historically unintelligible and politically unnameable. The debased foil of the Political, this micro, unexceptional politics is often barely perceptible, but it is there nonetheless, manifest at its most minute scale as a hum, a whisper, a mood, an atmosphere, a trade wind that sends particulates of ambition eddying around evanescent goalposts.

Unexceptional politics is an intangible milieu, but it may also be associated with distinct forms of political realism within political fiction; a political fiction that shares with postmodern fiction the loss of confidence in historical reality (and here we understand postmodernism in Fredric Jameson’s sense of a movement made to order for “an age that has forgotten how to think historically”). Postmodernism, he notes,

rattles at the bars of our extinct sense of history, unsettles the emptiness of our temporal historicity, and tries convulsively to reawaken the dormant existential sense of time by way of the strong medicine of lies and impossible fables, the electroshock of repeated doses of the unreal and the unbelievable.¹⁹

In the place of a grand theory of history, or the Romantic absolute, postmodernism presents us with a theater of mental machinations and performative obstructions tailored to a society of calculation. In the place of a grand theory of the Political, it disseminates myriad political symptomologies that coalesce punctually around particularist names. One thinks here of Berlusconismo, which Paolo Flores d’Arcais associates with the destruction of critical independence brought about not by Fascism, but “through the creation of a pensée unique that blends conformism and commercial spectacularization, reducing culture to a form of consumption.”²⁰ Berlusconismo is distinguished by its variety show effect and anthemic proclamations: with the Ministry of Love or Party of Love, featuring “rituals of enthusiasm worthy of Ceaucescu, replete with slogans and songs—‘Thank heavens there’s Silvio!’”²¹ A political pasquinade, Berlusconismo resorts to the mawkish props of hair transplants and face-lifts, sexual boasting, and vulgar jokes to distract from the spectacle of counterfeit democracy.

By contrast, Merkiavellianism (an expression coined by Ulrich Beck in a much-circulated 2012 editorial in Der Spiegel, designed to put the world on guard against German Europe) is a sober affair. Beck attributed the Chancellor’s effectiveness to “a tactical adroitness that might well be deemed Machiavellian,” specifying that

Merkel has positioned herself between the Europe builders and the orthodox adherents of the nation state without taking either side—or rather, she keeps both options open. She neither identifies with the pro-Europeans (whether at home or abroad) who call for binding German commitments, nor does she support the Euroskeptics, who wish to refuse all assistance. Instead, and this is the Merkiavellian point, Merkel links German willingness to provide credit with the willingness of the debtor nations to satisfy the conditions of German stability policies. This is Merkiavelli’s first principle: on the subject of German money to assist the debtor nations, her position is neither a clear Yes or a clear No but a clear Yes and No.²²

For Beck, Merkiavellianism denotes the art of “deliberate hesitation,” a method of coercion that turns on the constant threat of “withdrawal, delay and the refusal of credit.” Merkiavelli’s “trump card,” said Beck, is actually a “siren call”: “better a German euro than no euro at all.”²³ Of all the leaders in Europe, Merkel has proved to be the most successful in navigating between a punishing austerity policy that violates democratic principle, and a “humanitarian” stance on refugees that puts the onus of responding to their dislocation on countries like Greece, Italy and Turkey. Navigating the posts between being feared and being loved, Merkel epitomizes the stance of what Beck called the “good-natured hegemon.”

A particularist politics that could never be dubbed good-natured is now named Trumpism. It represents the endgame of politics as name-branding, as well as a type of the impolitic associated with “janking,” a term connoting the art of dissing or offending, as in the game “the dozens,” or rapping and slamming. “Janking off” describes Trump’s incessant jibing and calumniating, specifically, the vicious, viral, Twitter vomit of his lamely derisive adjectives, weaponized as cyber-bullying. Trumpist janking derives its energy from hate speech, trolling, and verbal battery. It exults in forms of baiting reliant on ad hominem attacks on a person’s heritage, race, gender, physical “rating,” character, and body parts, or a worker’s professional integrity (as when he vilified Chuck Jones, union leader of United Steelworkers Local 1999, who called out Trump for “lying his ass off” after Trump made specious claims about saving jobs at the Carrier plant in Indiana). No “average Joe,” no former beauty pageant queen, no building contractor, no newscaster, no veteran, no journalist, no actor nor comedian is too unworthy of public interest to qualify for targeting by the Trumpist jank. The jank-off not only comes close to satisfying the risibility factor of the jank, but underlines the importance of scaling to the art of belittlement and to tumescent states of the ego in situations of political contest and phallogocentric competition.

Trump’s denunciation of Washington’s stalemate political culture with the phrase, “It is out of control. It is gridlock with their mouths,” invents a strange figure of speech that, when one focuses on the mouth of the utterer, registers like a warning signal against mouthing off. Mouthing off, wandering off script to some indefensible position that must be defended for lack of any other possible strategy, is the essence of jank, and it becomes consonant with a new meaning of the verb “to Trump,” signifying quite literally the vagaries of disestablished politicking, or going rogue.

Derrida begins Rogues (Voyous) with a question that references La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb”: “What political narrative, in the same tradition, might today illustrate this fabulous morality? Does this morality teach us, as is often believed, that force ‘trumps’ law [que la force ‘prime’ le droit]?”²⁴ The verb form of prime in French contains the idea of “blocking,” but also that of “adding to,” “topping,” accompanying prime in its use as a substantive to mean “bonus.” Derrida’s “que la force ‘prime’ le droit” suggests that force has the lead, surplus, or advantage over the law. His phrase echoes one attributed to Bismarck in the context of a speech delivered to the French National Assembly. It was taken to mean either that force breaks any laws that obstruct its course, or that force is the author of its own rule of law. Both senses are evident in La Fontaine’s fable, in which the Wolf defies the natural laws of reality and makes up his own laws each time the Lamb raises a reasonable, evidence-based objection. “With that, deep into the wood/The Wolf dragged and ate his midday snack./So trial and judgment stood.”²⁵ “Trumping” (close to tromper, to betray or act mistakenly) describes the strategy of brazenly upping the ante of the counterattack when you are patently at fault. The justice it recognizes belongs to the kangaroo court, where damages are routinely awarded to plaintiffs who make baseless allegations of libel and injury. Trumpism in this sense means justice flouted, and justice that panders to the caprice of the infant sovereign in the ego. Thin-skinned reactions to criticism or public displays of animosity and grievance are championed and fully claimed as the tactics of a winner at all costs. Trumpism brings to the public stage a performative incivility, taken in its full measure as a political concept designating extreme impolitesse—improper or uncivilized behavior, uncivic-mindedness, bad manners, and displays of contemptuous mockery that destroy the fellow-feeling of spirited raillery. Trumpism calls up what Balibar discerns as the profound violence inherent in civil society, including the “modalities of subjection and subjectification” in Sittlichkeit (Hegel), such that civility is in fact little more than a response “to contemporary extreme violence from inside extreme violence.”²⁶

Trumpism inflates the dollar value of its patent with the trappings of wealth; with garish fashion redolent of the 1980s era of greed: tall buildings, gold fixtures, private jets, trophy wives. This plutocratic display is pumped up further by a litany of jankish hyperboles: “very, very best,” “great,” “tremendous,” “huge,” and so forth. While intended to provide ballast to the old doctrines of American exceptionalism, this bombast dissipates into vatic trumpetings. Trumpism—whose “ism” is keyed to populist autocracy—is identified with a rogue way of speaking that provides scaffolding for an absent political discourse. The proper name is tautologically performative, which is to say, Trumpism trumps public interest by facilitating the decampment of the citizen from the demos to media theaters of depolicitized life.

Trumpism lines up on axis with Berlusconismo inasmuch as both qualify as names for oligarchic name-branding, pasquinade, and the mastery of political special effects. In each case the proper name erects a fence—a wall—around a motley assortment of personality traits, bait and switch tactics, and, in the case of Trump and Berlusconi, crass publicity stunts that supply the playbook of political impasse. Impasse is perhaps the new watchword for the contemporary state of politics, at once unexceptional and diffusely traumatic. Lauren Berlant makes the argument that once trauma is conceived no longer as an exceptional event and “crisis ordinariness” takes hold as the norm, history becomes little more than an adjustment narrative in which difficulties are succumbed to or navigated. From this perspective, the extraordinary “always turns out to be an amplification of something in the works, a labile boundary at best, not a slammed-door departure. In the impasse induced by crisis, being treads water; mainly, it does not drown.”²⁷ Perhaps it is this sense of “small t” trauma that most effectively captures what is at stake in “small p” politics, from the ordinariness of exceptional crisis and the routinization of habitual politics, to the micropolitics of molecular cultures implanted in the byways of managed life.