Hyperpolitics and the History of Political Experience

Beyond the Narrative of Historical Decline

by Liam Egan

After the end of the end of history, politics reenters the scene. So many attempts to characterize the current political moment—polarized, disinvested, apathetic—reiterate tired tropes about the structures of our contemporary lives and the path by which this has come to be the case. Anton Jäger's Hyperpolitics stitches together an account of many of these tropes, radicalizing some, muting others, and threading them together into a narrative of institutional decline and increasing politicization. Though the brief pamphlet serves less as a historiographical experiment and more as a political call to action, at its core, it contains a practical lens through which, with a thematic adjustment, the last century of political life can be understood and thus transformed.

Jäger depicts the trajectory of social and political life over the last hundred years in four rough acts. The first, the age of "mass politics", identifies the period during which discrete groups of individuals collectively served as the engine of sociopolitical change. The political party, the labor union, and the interest-based social club all feature as the primary actors in this period from the First World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Following this, a roughly twenty-year span that Jäger terms "postpolitics" corresponds to the dominance of international finance and globalization. Within this timespan, the importance of the social organization is replaced by the importance of the individual, and politics as such becomes uninteresting. This period culminates in the financial collapse of 2008, which figures as a dramatic assertion that politics, and the requisite management of the economy, have not disappeared after all.

In response to the transformation in the political landscape inaugurated by the financial crash, attempts as numerous as they are amorphous emerge as the new mode by which politics is carried out. Movements like Occupy, as well as new parties like Podemos and SYRIZA, serve as demonstrative examples of political actors in this "antipolitical" age. Rather than being enacted through coherent groups representing discrete interests, Jäger presents political activity during this period as articulated around generalized sites of confrontation. Political identity is suddenly determined by the contingent and fleeting coincidence of interests rather than through the structuring principle of an organization. Contrasting "the many" against "the few" (or some analogous formulation), populist formations rise as quickly as they fall.

Jäger’s novel contribution to the somewhat tired narrative he sketches consists of its culminating act. Following the failures of insurgent, anti-political movements, politics goes “hyper” and political activity becomes untethered from even the faintest illusion of long-term planning or causal agency. Political engagement begins to be primarily carried out in online forums, with heightened topics of conversation being discussed in increasingly polarizing ways for decreasing amounts of time. Only rarely do these online conversations break out into events in the material world. When they do, they appear as flashpoint explosions, not manifestations of strategic and engaged planning. Neither the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020 nor the storming of the U.S. Capitol served a function in broader logics of political contestation, each merely another brief eruption in the hyperpolitical age.

Jäger breaks down each of these periods schematically along two axes, 'institutionalization' and 'politicization.' Mass politics constitutes a high degree of both, postpolitics a low; antipolitics and hyperpolitics, on the other hand, are both characterized by low institutionalization and high politicization. The political party, as mentioned, is understood as the form par excellence of the mass politics period, a singular institutional structure whose primary activity is the politicization of all aspects of life as such. In the post-political period that follows, however, it is not merely that no one institution dominates social and political life. Instead, there is a decline in institutional involvement overall. Using Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone as a cipher, Jäger reads the disinvestment from institutional life as an overcorrection to its previous hegemony, a corollary to the contemporaneous emphasis—both materially and ideologically—on individual choice and achievement as the primary form of self-definition. When the global economy collapsed in 2008, the lack of institutional development led to an increase in political activity without a single location in which to be carried out. 'Hyperpolitics,' then, constitutes the endpoint of this development and the exacerbation of the conditions of antipolitics which preceded it. Political activity fails to achieve institutional stability and coherence, and a hysterical, cyclical logic results.  Jäger's prognosis is deadly, but his recommendation is simple: revive the political party, the labor union, the social institution, lest left-wing political energy continue to cede the capacity for organizational capture to the right.

One could be forgiven for scoffing, initially, at the high degree of abstraction in which Jäger's analysis deals. To paint with such a broad brush is to lose precision in the specifics: mass politics denotes a period too general, covering too much and too differentiated a historical ground; hyperpolitics identifies a phenomenon too narrow, too presentist, and insufficiently differentiated from its predecessor. No causal framework is provided to explain the coherence of any period, let alone to provide an account of the transition from one to the next. If a vague impression of economism is present, it is notably absent the moment it might play an explanatory role. Differences in superstructural affect suggest foundational transformations rather than identifying the mechanisms by which the latter are made possible. Each period is less governed by an underlying logic than characterized by an overarching theme.

These problems become even more apparent when carefully examining the cultural artifacts that Jäger deploys to describe each politico-institutional regime. The bulk of the material analyzed consists of novelists, cultural theorists, and (scant) accounts from social historians. Contemporaneous excerpts are offered, their synchronicity alone deployed to account for similarities in affect or cultural perspective. Despite claiming to portray a history of the ways in which political subjects relate to their environment, few ethnographic, experiential details are provided. Except by elision and implication, rarely are these accounts fitted into a larger framework of causal or structural change. Instead, Jäger’s narrative floats between collections of affective styles, tying them together through a loose matrix of stilted classifications. It is perhaps fitting that among the voices characteristic of each period, it is the French novelist and public intellectual Michel Houellebecq who can be heard above all the rest. Houellebecq is practically the world-historical embodiment of the reactionary ressentiment that animates the narrative of decline from the enlightened age of mass politics to the fallen one of hyperpolitical malaise. His constant presence provides little in the way of holistic explanation, as one might expect. Rather, the consistent deployment of his singular maneuver—to shock, to offend—serves only to animate the narrative with Houllebeq’s own tone of disappointment and resignation, frustration taking the place of constructive action.

Yet, frustration at the decline of institutionalized politics is not without justification. Jäger's rough periodization and dual axes of evaluation offer a useful framework for understanding the transformations of political and social forms, and the trajectory along these axes that he presents—less institutionalization, more politicization—is empirically undeniable in the most general sense. An antidote to reactionary misanthropy, however, cannot be found in a retrograde belief in the adequacy of lost forms, as Jäger briefly gestures towards. To assert the necessity of capturing the lost spirit of a past age while simultaneously attempting a particular reading of history is to, counterintuitively, think in a non-historical way. Jäger’s analysis forfeits its attempts at utility when it resolves itself into a backwards-looking claim.

In order to reorient away from the narrative of decline, one might be compelled to first clarify the exact object which this narrative seeks to describe. Jäger insists a number of times that the categories which he presents are "gravitational force[s]" within the periods they each denote. He suggests that they are merely "tentative" and "meant to make sense" of the passing dynamics of the moments which they identify, rather than rigorous concepts meant to describe discrete phenomena. This could, in a limited sense, be attributed to the organizing context of the book; Hyperpolitics, like many academic monographs, is an assemblage of previously published work lightly adapted for a shared context. One could therefore read Jäger's gestures of self-deference as acknowledgements of the impromptu circumstances of the collection or the exploratory character of columns in a magazine compared to articles in a journal. Yet this would be to reject any latent readings which his work allows.

To think Jäger's thought on its own terms would be to not regress into such simplistic explanations regarding originating contexts. It would instead seek to understand Jäger's categorical sketches as provisional by their very constitution; the task would be to discover in what way they are assembled such that they are tentative and ambiguous by nature. One would begin with the fact that the story of Hyperpolitics is a social history told primarily through objects of cultural analysis, not an economic history told through figural fact. This is not a question of legitimacy, but of the appropriate modality of history and the corresponding object under study. To treat this question of historiography fully is out of the scope of the current analysis, but suffice to say that Jäger's choice of materials illustrates that to determine the way in which politics and institutions are lived necessitates an understanding of the way in which they are represented, the way in which the amorphous relationships between individual and organization constantly reproduce themselves through cultural works. In other words, terms such as "mass politics" and "antipolitics" can only denote structures of experience because they deal in representations thereof, which are the medium through which experience is made possible. Cultural, rather than strictly economic, accounts therefore dominate Jäger’s narrative as it seeks to depict the modes of experience which these works both allow and produce. To take each of the periods in their chronological order:

"Mass politics," in Jäger's sense, does not merely describe the dominance of the party as an institutional form or political actor. It more precisely identifies a particular mode of experience by which these dominant forms cohere into a hegemonic unity of experience. The appeal of the mass parties during this age is, in part, due to the fact that they exist in so many forms of life and inhere in their members an experiential sense of belonging like no other organization. Such is obvious from the first-hand accounts which Jäger provides wherein party members find not merely a plethora of organizations (Men's and Women's clubs, athletic clubs, workingmen's associations, etc.), but more specifically organizations which provide a totality through which one's life can be experienced. Party membership was not merely, as one source recounts, a key to entry into a broad social scene. It provided a foundation and a principle of organization for one's entire social and political life.

It is this total, organized, interrelated experience that can be contrasted with that which follows, the postpolitical one. Rather than a particular life being integrated with a universal horizon—the party, the class, even the nation—it is reduced to the absolutely atomic pursuit of one's own goals and desires. Jäger mobilizes Annie Ernaux and Sam Kriss’s descriptions of individualist, postpolitical culture to depict a mode of subjectivity that is constituted by its refusal to engage in both politics and society writ large. Whereas the mass party provided totality in the form of the universal, postpolitical experience can be understood instead as the totality of the individual, experience itself being both the motor by which it is driven and the goal towards which it strives.

This characterization thus makes understandable why populist modes of engagement preponderate following the transition to antipolitics. Rather than a particular universal horizon, populism is instead motivated by the universality and the universalization of particulars themselves. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who later became representative theorists of this moment, canonized this idea in the notion of the “multitude.” For them, the “multitude” is exactly this object that coheres together a set of radically isolated individuals. The multitude is not the party; the populist 'people' is not, and cannot be, totality itself, but is rather the moment when the latter is represented by a particular series of particularities. Ernesto Laclau, a contemporary theorist of populism whose work will similarly get picked up during this period, describes this process as the construction of a "chain of equivalences" between a series of interests which articulate themselves around an "empty signifier": a singular conflict or site of contestation ("the few" against "the many," etc.) around which a series of analogies is drawn between different interests in order to force them to cohere. The mode of experience which therefore dominates during this period is the hegemonic rather than the totalizing one, that which "obtains only a borrowed presence [of totality] through the distorted means of its investment in a certain particularity." Gone is the coherence of the mass party form, or the individual consciousness, each of which possesses particular interests; in their place stands the concept of interest as such.

Establishing a chain of equivalences, constructing a multitude, and articulating a particular instance of hegemony are, however, fragile operations. Jäger demonstrates that each of these populist moments fails, ultimately, to persist. Hyperpolitics, then, would constitute the failure of this mode of experience to achieve the coherence it so emphatically strove towards. One could more properly understand it not as an amorphous explosion of political activity without the ability to find any one home, but more precisely, the disappointed response to the failure of previous modes of experience to provide access to totality as such.

Under this reading, hyperpolitics would identify the spilling-out of the constitutive act of signifier construction into every facet of social life, hence every activity taking on a political tone. If the construction of universality is the activity that fills the void the mass party left, the emergence of hyperpolitics would signal the failure to achieve this construction at the level of politics alone and the subsequent attempt to do so in multiple registers instead. The chains of equivalence and the empty signifiers through and around which populist politics had organized itself made possible an experience of totality which was fragmented and ultimately unsatisfactory. As such, the populist mode of experience expanded beyond the boundaries of the political in an attempt to rectify this fragmentation.

In this light, Hyperpolitics’s ultimate conclusion, calling on us to 'return to the mass party,' does not follow. The absence of the old party-form has been internalized and, as such, cannot simply be recreated because it is exactly what the contemporary mode of experience does not allow. Instead, Jäger's analysis is more appropriate as a pragmatic, rather than programmatic, description. If the book accurately describes the history of modes of experience in social and political life, it also points to a potentially new type of politics which embraces hyperpolitical subjectivity instead of shirking away from it. If such a mode of experience is constituted by the collapse of the clean limits of the political, a politics of the moment could make good on this context collapse and attempt to constitute a people accordingly. A response to the contemporary situation that does not refuse it would seek to constitute a new people, a new politics, which cuts across the varying modes of experience that preponderate in the hyperpolitical world. “Hyperpolitics” could therefore signal not a rejection of that which it identifies, but rather an injunction and a description around which to craft a new politics for the contemporary, hyperpolitical mode.