Whose Politics? Which Antipolitics?

The noted political philosopher Russell Brand begins his essay on revolution by recalling the nonpolitical reason why he was willing to edit The New Statesman's issue on revolution. "I said yes," he tells us, "because it was a beautiful woman asking me." Whether it is Brand's intention to highlight the connection between beauty and political revolution is a matter for separate inquiry. The real thrust of Brand's complaint is simply that we have no politics in which to participate. There's no reason to vote, he told Paxman, and thus he violated the sacred rule that one mustn't impugn the democratic process no matter how undemocratic it may be. To do so would of course be "deeply dangerous."

Doubts about the democratic process are now routinely cited as examples of the "rising climate of anti-politics" (anti-politics being evidently not a tide). Americans want sexual permissiveness and legally sanctioned access to marijuana, FT notes, and they are concerned about the national debt. But they may not go in for the Southern-tinged populism of the Tea Party, and they're likely to prefer Rand Paul to Ted Cruz -- two largely similar senators who nevertheless project different images.

As everyone knows, only 8% of Americans think Congress is doing a good job. The hand-wringing class isn't sure whether to fault Congress or the American people for such a dismal statistic: who, after all, elected the bastards? The people perhaps, but certainly "democracy" doesn't deserve the blame.

The European Union's poll numbers are hardly better, and recently registered their all-time low. But if Nigel Farage points this out as he did yesterday, he can count on UKIP's being called "indignant, angry people" and "brainless Eurosceptics." It takes a special brain to appreciate European democracy.

Our blame of the people and exculpation of democracy indicate that whatever else it may be, today's democracy is by no means rule of the people. Nor could it ever be. The rule of the people is now wholly impossible. Why?

When we ordinarily speak of "the rule of the people," we indicate that the people take themselves as their own ruling principle. It's this aspect that has become impossible today. Only non-"people," namely intellectuals and academics, assert that the people rule. The people themselves defer to other gods, to the sports-actors whose exertions enable their lassitude, to the musicians whose songs are elaborate disguises spun over a core of nothing, to the techno-prophets and their endless stream of computational anesthetics. The rule of the people is a cipher for the rule of technocrats over the ruins of ordinary life.

The reason why democracy is always on the lips of our technocrats, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and other cynics, is that "the people" are the object of their social science. Politicians and capitalists alike aspire to perfect knowledge of the behavior of "the people," no longer constituted as the subject of political action but as an aggregation of very peculiar codes -- genetic, epigenetic, environmental, "political" and consumer codes. Knowledge of these codes is a different type of wisdom, not the wisdom enabling activity in ordinary life, but knowledge enabling the extraction of resources from those who are living (putatively) ordinary lives.

Who is the greater cynic, the "anti-political" citizen or the authors of The Victory Lab? Everyone knows the answer. The cynics who rule cannot tolerate cynicism in the ruled.

Every former context of political dispute is now outside the realm of politics properly so called. What the psychotic technocrats call "anti-politics" is only a vestige of human nostalgia in the posthuman world.