archive : s0metim3s

A couple of paragraphs of an essay - “Oikopolitics, and Storms” - I just hit send on last night. On Fordism and post-Fordism, the coincidence of financial and climatic crises, environmental audits, war and more - but in a more specific sense an argument about why it might be better to think these and other questions through the wider, more complex lens of oikopolitics along with the more narrow (though purportedly neutral) concepts of biopolitics, affect or labour.

[…] Storms happen all the time. From Lucretius to Marx and well beyond, storms – whether ironically rendered as ‘perfect’ in their simultaneity or construed as more eventfully singular – have often characterised various attempts to apprehend the encounter that contingency is. Political writings have been replete with all manner of revolutionary storms, storms of war, desert storms, financial storms. Storms, after all, disturb the earth’s surface, the geographies and architectures of what is given. They challenge forgotten and buried histories of appropriation, their infrastructure and their limits. They are the ubiquitous motif of that which is excessive in its violence, indistinct in its desires, and unpredictable in its consequences. They can bring relief in the midst of drought and heatwave, or they can portend disaster. Storms can, also, be unleashed. To invoke a storm is to raise questions about what presents itself, simply and presumably without finite conditions and histories, as a Way of Life; doing so in the dramatic (and oftentimes naturalising) language of meteorology, whether the effect is to underline – and perhaps embrace – the volatility or to insist on the protection of this Way of Life. Let it be noted that ways of life, in the twentieth century like no other, are thought in national terms, as the Australian Way of Life, and so on. And so, if, as Maarten Hajer put it (2005:4), “whether or not environmental problems appear as anomalies to existing institutional arrangements depends first of all on the way they are framed and defined,” it is also the case that these are enframed within the nation-state superintending households. In the discourses of conservation and protection, given both the composition of the problem and their framing, there is the predictable appeal to a normal state to which things might be returned or, at the very least, a call to preservation in the guise of the merely technical or neutral; or, what is much the same thing, as an appeal to civic virtue and the ostensibly empty figure of citizenship.

The storm is, to put it briefly, the occurrence of politics, however concealed or expressive. It is the appearance of conflict over and about (as Arendt understood politics) the infra-, being-with-others, the between and beyond of relation (which is also to say, disconnection). Melinda Cooper puts it this way: “Turbulence is the event emerging from an irresolvable relation between two or more ‘flows’ that are themselves relations” (2008:7-8). In this sense, the storm emphasises the ineliminable, incalculable plurality that politics is. In its more conventional – i.e., teleological – presentations, the storm is politics as it appears ‘before’ the decision and the calculus that founds the political, or what is regarded as proper to politics and economics. It is, in any case, the conditional of the political and yet, still, the condition of politics; the con- and the tangere that is neither reducible to its specific articulations, nor swerves, nor their mastering. Within the storm, contingency is in no way the not-yet, the appeal that will necessarily culminate in decision or measure. To be sure, it can serve as pretext or opportunity for mastery, its enjoyments and delusions, but the storm nevertheless persists as trope precisely because the sensorium of politics exceeds the borders and definitions of the political, even in those moments where what is at stake and what is asserted as inevitable are those boundaries and the figures which inhabit them. One could point, here, to the debates over globalisation or precariousness, in which the catastrophe was perceived as that of a purported decline of the nation-state in the midst of an actual fortification of its borders or in terms of the never-universal condition of regular, full-time work. In some instances, the presentation of a storm can set off a surge, or trip a panic alarm, where there are no longer questions, in the ensuing terror or mild anxiety, about what is defended, why and how. It is the sensory, indeed sensual, equivalent of the idea of the crisis, often likely to be personified as Fortuna. It arouses. Though, while the storm seems to expose foundations, brings down powerlines and tears apart buildings, or at least threatens to, as with the notion of a crisis, it is when these are already shaking that one is able to sense a crisis at all. It is not, foremost, a question of visibility – unless the sense here is akin to the visibility of a tip of an ice-berg, the complex peak and irreducible coincidence of movements and histories. Which is to say, Hurricane Katrina disclosed the crisis that is the norm in the United States. Put another way: contingency is not reducible to something that might be accounted for as contingencies, as unforeseen but nevertheless capable of being measured, in due course. Contingency is not foremost a question of freedom – or one that assumes a subject who is deprived of godlike foresight but nevertheless capable of deciding, weighing, comparing, eventually; of entering into contracts and reckoning their conditions – but of touch, though freedom remains at issue. Freedom, in its various incarnations, including factal freedom, presupposes an autonomous (if not entirely conscious) subject, a figure that is – as Michael Dillon (2008) underlines – man. This figure of man has its conditions and histories; is, therefore, contingent. It has its particular affective and geopolitical map, a history from which it was raised up and situated within matrices of relations both intimate and public. […]

The climactic, then, as a means for the contemplation or exposition of contingency – but, also, in its non-meteorological definitions, as a narrative form that might give shape to a sense of politics – is nothing new. What might be new, given the current paradigmatic coincidence of environmental and financial turbulence, is a tightening of the etymological slide between the ecological and (to borrow another term from Arendt) the oikopolitical. As something far more explanatory of the genealogical and familial than any understanding of sovereignty through a biopolitical lens has been able to admit, and something far less subjectively universal than many accounts of affect and intimacy aspire to, Arendt’s term does not simply point to a blurring of the classical distinction between the public realm of politics and the private domain of the household – or, put otherwise, the indistinction between politics and economics in the rise of the social, whose contours and versions of possible forms of relation are remarkably and, almost without variance, those of the national state conceived as home. It also invokes the sense in which politics comes to assume the task of securing an intimately normative disposition, the raising of a properly political (i.e., autonomous) subject on the grounds of the at once familial and national as if this were the most natural – and therefore, apolitical, eternal – thing on earth. […]

[The full pdf here.]