Depoliticization

Streetlight

We hear lot about the ‘politicisation’ of this or that; most recently perhaps the ‘politicisation of sports’ in the US. But what about depoliticization? What happens when the space - and time - of politics is shut down, when our very ability to ‘politicise’ is cut off? And what does it mean to be able to practice politics anyway? One source of help with answering this last question is Hannah Arendt, who helpfully understood politics to consist in all that which goes beyond the need to attend to our basic biological needs: politics is what can happen once you’re no longer struggling for food, no longer worrying about your safety, no longer living paycheque to paycheque. As Arendt put it somewhere, the realm of politics is the realm of freedom from our biology.

Now, Arendt’s conception of politics is not perfect, but it’s a start. Among other things, it’s been criticised for it’s somewhat elitist character, insofar as the struggle for food - for example - may well be itself part of a larger, political struggle in itself. Nonetheless, one of Arendt’s principle worries thought her writings was the closing down of political space - that is, the reduction of humanity to a state of ‘bare living’: one in which free action, the ability to forge for oneself a 'life project’, or the ability to bring something new in being (all of which belong to space of politics for Arendt), no longer become central concerns, but become replaced by the need to simply ‘survive’. Arendt speaks of this as what happens when life itself becomes the ‘highest good’.

While Arednt, to my knowledge, doesn’t use the term, what she speaks of is essentially what has elsewhere been called ‘depoliticisation’. Modern versions of depoliticization take many forms. One is ‘medicalization’, where issues that ought to be tackled politically are tackled medically instead: the field of mental health and the blight of homelessness is often treated in these terms: not as problems of policy, community action, or funding, but of medicating. Another form that depoliticisation takes is via ‘securitisation’. Like medicalization, securitization takes problems out of the realm of politics can places it under the rubric of ‘security’: the contemporary treatment of refugees is often treated as a security problem, for instance, rather than a political one.

What I’d like to suggest is that the problem of depoliticisation is, perhaps, among the biggest problems we face today. Giorgio Agamben, among others, has gone so far as to declare that, ‘European society today is no longer a political society’ and that ‘political life has become impossible’. While I don’t share Agamben apocalyptic outlook - not yet anyway - I do think the concern is real, and pressing. At the philosophical level, two things are worth stressing. The first is that politics is a 'good'. The attempt to eliminate politics - contestation, world-building, etc - leaves us poorer off. The second is that politics is fragile - if not cherished and cultivated, it might well disappear. Our very status as zoon politikon - political animals, as Aristotle called us - is liable to disappearance. Perhaps the chief political task of the modern age is simply a reflexive one - to keep politics itself alive.

unenlightened

We hear lot about the ‘politicisation’ of this or that; most recently perhaps the ‘politicisation of sports’ in the US. But what about depoliticization? — StreetlightX

Seems to me that when it it is said that sport has been politicised, it is not that there is a politics of sport in the sense that there is a runners party and a jumpers party, but simply that sport is exploited as an arena for propaganda on other issues. This is rather different from the politicisation of race or gender, say, which is the formation of a social identity and consciousness in oppositional mode. There is a women's movement.

I don't know why the struggle for food should be excluded from politics, it seems an odd notion. Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath is a political novel that describes - surely - a political struggle, for food, for decent treatment?

the problem of depoliticisation is, perhaps, among the biggest problems we face today. Giorgio Agamben, among others, has gone so far as to declare that, ‘European society today is no longer a political society’ and that ‘political life has become impossible’. While I don’t share Agamben apocalyptic outlook - not yet anyway - I do think the concern is real, and pressing. At the philosophical level, two things are worth stressing. The first is that politics is a 'good'. The attempt to eliminate politics - contestation, world-building, etc - leaves us poorer off. The second is that politics is fragile - if not cherished and cultivated, it might well disappear. Our very status as zoon politikon - political animals, as Aristotle called us - is liable to disappearance. Perhaps the chief political task of the modern age is simply a reflexive one - to keep politics itself alive. — StreetlightX

Again, to make political life impossible is a process of disempowerment; the attack on organisations representative of identities - trade unions, for example, combined with distraction "look at these terrible people disrespecting your flag". Again it seems odd to call a process of disempowerment and subjugation 'depoliticisation', as though a one-party state is non-political.

I almost feel that the entire discussion of politicisation and depoliticisation is a deliberate distraction and disempowerment technique in action intended to delegitimise opposition and justify the entrenchment of the power of vested interests.

Wayfarer

I agree with the OP, but I think the problem is one that is being addressed by quite a few writers under the headline of the retreat of liberalism. That is not a reference to what American politics calls 'liberalism', but the broader liberal economic and political tradition of Adam Smith, John Locke and John Stuart Mill. At issue are the subjects of principled disagreement and the attainment of any kind of consensus on the basic principles of society and culture. The polarisation of debate has become such that the protagonists want to go beyond winning their case - they wish in some sense to destroy their opponents or at any rate to deny them any legitimacy. This is especially visible in US politics at the moment.

one of Arendt’s principle worries thought her writings was the closing down of political space - that is, the reduction of humanity to a state of ‘bare living’: one in which free action, the ability to forge for oneself a 'life project’, or the ability to bring something new in being (all of which belong to space of politics for Arendt), no longer become central concerns, but become replaced by the need to simply ‘survive’. Arendt speaks of this as what happens when life itself becomes the ‘highest good’. — StreetlightX

That seems an inevitable consequence of economic rationalism and biological determinism. Somewhere in Aristotle's writings, there is a reference to the 'noble uselessness' of metaphysics - the idea that contemplation of the first philosophy serves no practical purpose, but ought never to be thought of in those terms. Perhaps that is the dimension that is being lost. Perhaps the founders of the liberal tradition took for granted those metaphysical elements that had been part of Western culture for millenia, without realising how they might be lost, and what would happen if they were.

Wosret

Yup, politics is definitely what happens when you're bored and not busy with your own life... you become interested and controlling of everyone else'.

Wosret

https://www.campaignsandelections.com/campaign-insider/the-6-political-personality-types

Streetlight

I don't know why the struggle for food should be excluded from politics, it seems an odd notion. — unenlightened

I agree, it shouldn't be. But the point remains that if one's battle for food takes on a political tenor, it becomes a matter of, as it were, changing the world in some small way, rather than simply trying to align with a world already given. So yeah, I think Arendt's notion of the political ought to be expanded - that's exactly why I mentioned the counterexample of food in the thread - in a way that doesn't, for all that, throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Again, to make political life impossible is a process of disempowerment; the attack on organisations representative of identities - trade unions, for example, combined with distraction "look at these terrible people disrespecting your flag". Again it seems odd to call a process of disempowerment and subjugation 'depoliticisation', as though a one-party state is non-political.

I almost feel that the entire discussion of politicisation and depoliticisation is a deliberate distraction and disempowerment technique in action intended to delegitimise opposition and justify the entrenchment of the power of vested interests. — unenlightened

I think this is coming at cross-purposes here. In some sense it's true, I think a one-party state isn't 'political' in the sense I mean it: a one party state is one in which the possibility of politics - of contesting claims, of taking part in the process of world-building, of dictating the course of one's own life - is indeed foreclosed. One party states are precisely states that eliminate the space of the political in order to claim it entirely as it's own.

A distinction might help: Claude Lefort famously made the distinction between 'politics' and 'the political', where 'politics' accorded to the realm of the party-room and instruments of the state, while 'the political' encompassed actions in the everyday life of people, protest, words, and so on, up to and including the official mechanisms of the state. When I speak of depoliticization, I mean it in the second sense, and not the first. Politics in the second sense - as 'the political' - is something I understand that can well affirm the need for empowerment and so on. One can act politically in order to empower. I don't see, or intend there to be, any zero-sum game here.

Streetlight

That seems an inevitable consequence of economic rationalism and biological determinism. Somewhere in Aristotle's writings, there is a reference to the 'noble uselessness' of metaphysics - the idea that contemplation of the first philosophy serves no practical purpose, but ought never to be thought of in those terms. Perhaps that is the dimension that is being lost. Perhaps the founders of the liberal tradition took for granted those metaphysical elements that had been part of Western culture for millenia, without realising how they might be lost, and what would happen if they were. — Wayfarer

For someone like Arendt, the vita contemplativa (the life of contemplation) was the diametric opposite of the vita activia (the life of action), and it was only in the latter that politics proper could be located. Or put otherwise, the imperative to return to 'the contemplative life' stands as another effort of depoliticization, insofar as it stands against making changes to the world and instead withdraws into the life of the mind. She even traces this devalorization of of politics back to it's roots in the Christian tradition, whose lasting legacy has been nothing but damaging to the life of politics:

"The reason why life asserted itself as the ultimate point of reference in the modern age and has remained the highest good of modern society is that the modern reversal operated within the fabric of a Christian society whose fundamental belief in the sacredness of life has survived, and has even remained completely unshaken by, secularization and the general decline of the Christian faith ... For the Christian "glad tidings" of the immortality of individual human life had reversed the ancient relationship between man and world and promoted the most mortal thing, human life, to the position of immortality, which up to then the cosmos had held

... Historically, it is more than probable that the victory of the Christian faith in the ancient world was largely due to this reversal, which brought hope to those who knew that their world was doomed, indeed a hope beyond hope, since the new message promised an immortality they never had dared to hope for. This reversal could not but be disastrous for the esteem and the dignity of politics. Political activity ... now sank to the low level of an activity subject to necessity, destined to remedy the consequences of human sinfulness on one hand and to cater to the legitimate wants and interests of earthly life on the other". (Arednt, The Human Condition).

On this I think she is largely correct - that 'contemplation' is complicit in the forces of depolitization, and cannot serve as a bulwark against it.

unenlightened

One party states are precisely states that eliminate the space of the political in order to claim it entirely as it's own.

A distinction might help: Claude Lefort famously made the distinction between 'politics' and 'the political', where 'politics' accorded to the realm of the party-room and instruments of the state, while 'the political' encompassed actions in the everyday life of people, protest, words, and so on, up to and including the official mechanisms of the state. When I speak of depoliticization, I mean it in the second sense, and not the first. — StreetlightX

Why not call it disempowerment and oppression? I would guess Arendt has in mind life in the concentration camp as the end state of dehumanisation. And I suppose in that sense, depoliticisation is appropriate; one does not talk about the politics of cattle in the slaughterhouse.

I think this is a rather accurate diagnosis. — StreetlightX

It looks a bit lopsided to me - quite close to Nietzsche's view of Christianity. But to put the doctrine of divine right of kings together with the Quaker anti-slavery campaign, the political machinations of the popes, the liberation theology of S America, and all the manifold entanglements of church and state into one basket of dismissal is a bit simplistic. I see threads of anarchy as strong as the threads of quietism in Christianity.

Cavacava

I think we are nearing the end of the master-slave dialectic. Technology is making the slave in principle otiose and it may in principal make itself unnecessary, if AI reaches its ideal of singularity.

Capitalism has been able to absorb every and all political movement in Western Civilization, turning them all into ideologies which blur the differences between truth, falsity, beauty and goodness. Trump's call to the recalcitrant senators to vote for GOP's healthcare bill was to do it for the sake of the Party. The Party, not the for the good of the people. People are no longer citizens, they are consumers, and politicians are no longer representatives, they are Party members.

The modern scourge of depression is due to a lack of meaning, and the boredom which this necessary entails. A boredom that plasters individualsl to glowing screens where all their fantasies can be safely experienced. Media is the opium of the masses and politicians are aware of this. Fantastic amounts of money are being spent on elections. All the outrageous comments, actions are all designed to shock the public who have become so accustomed to political depravity that the intensity of the shock has to reach epic proportions to get them involved. (instead of burning draft cards, we now have NFL season ticket holders burning season passes).

Wayfarer

For someone like Arendt, the vita contemplativa (the life of contemplation) was the diametric opposite of the vita activia (the life of action), — StreetlightX

Fair point. That was the first thought that came to mind - I wasn't really suggesting that the cause of the decline of liberalism, was that people aren't doing enough metaphysics. What I was hamfistedly trying to articulate, was the sense of there being a common enough core of cultural identity to accommodate a divergence of views. That there can be a culture where citizens have fundamental disagreements, but still agree on what culture is and means. So I meant to say that underlying the origin of liberalism, as such, there is a kind of implicit or assumed set of ideas, but that these themselves have been called into question.

andrewk

Claude Lefort famously made the distinction between 'politics' and 'the political', where 'politics' accorded to the realm of the party-room and instruments of the state, while 'the political' encompassed actions in the everyday life of people, protest, words, and so on, up to and including the official mechanisms of the state. — StreetlightX

It's a crucial distinction. Sometimes the word 'policy' (policy discussion, policy debate) is used to encompass the second kind and distinguish it from the first. Unfortunately, the distinction is nearly always obscured by media commentators and MPs - sometimes unintentionally, but often, I suspect, with unhelpful intent.

It is a subject of great regret that most of our media political pundits - in Australia at least - focus most of their words on the first type - the power struggles and personalities. This, together with the conflation of that with policy discussion, leads people to turn away from both - thereby throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Criticism of the politicisation of sport - such as the famous 200m medal ceremony in 1968 or football players kneeling for the national anthem now - seeks to exploit this conflation. They try to co-opt people's distaste for some politicians' Machiavellian machinations in their quest for increased personal power as a reason to condemn the sincere policy campaigning of the likes of Tommie Smith.

I am not as pessimistic as Lefort though. I see signs of hope in things like the Black Lives Matter movement, or in my own country - the Change the Date movement.

Depoliticization

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