Gary Hall via nettime-l on Wed, 5 Aug 2026 10:46:57 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics 

Hi Frédéric,
I'm not sure I've fully understood what you're getting at, but let me have a go at responding.
I'm wondering if the circularity may actually be part of the point - or at least whether reversing the direction of travel is. What if, rather than concentrating on changing the philosophies of politics, we also tried changing the technologies through which we think, work and live as philosophers of politics? Might things - including political philosophy itself - begin to change in more interesting and hopeful ways than the endless succession of new and (as Brian says) not-so-new legacy theories have managed to achieve over the decades with their analyses of capitalist states and societies?
Mouffe, Žižek, Dean, Jäger and Toscano all write radical political philosophy (often about communism and Marxism). Yet the institutional and technological means through which that  philosophy is conceived, produced and distributed remain surprisingly conventional and conservative, closely bound up with the logics of capitalism and liberalism. All five publish with Verso, for example, despite the long-standing criticisms of the way Verso operates as a company - criticisms that have frequently characterised its practices as neoliberal.
What would it mean to carry one's politics over into the practices of philosophy itself: its institutions, technologies, forms of organisation and material conditions of labour and production (rather than leaving these masked, unmarked, black-boxed)?
It may sound like a lot to place on the shoulders of political philosophers. But, if we want things to change, perhaps that's precisely the challenge. After all, if we aren't prepared to change, when it's more or less our job, how can we expect anyone else to?
It all reminds me of a line from George the Poet's Track Record: Me, Music and the War on Blackness: 'being a radical is hard, and being a liberal is easy.' 

Best, Gary


On 31/07/2026 16:29, Frédéric Neyrat wrote:

Hi Gary,
But isn’t trying to understand our “digital” condition through a new “technology”of philosophy a vicious circle of sorts? It's not that we shouldn't be thinking about the "digital" and new "technology" for thinking, but I believe the circle mentioned above must be interrupted. 

Best,

Frédéric


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On Fri, Jul 31, 2026 at 10:22 AM Gary Hall via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote: 

    Hey Felix,

    I agree with what you say about the article. At the same time I have
    some mixed feelings.

    On the one hand, Jäger’s done something genuinely useful by
    identifying
    another era – hyperpolitics - to follow on from the post-politics of
    Mouffe, Zižek and Jodi Dean and then what he refers to as
    anti-politics.
    It’s an intriguing way of describing our political present.

    On the other, Laclau, Mouffe, Zižek, Dean et al. all also provided us
    with powerfully accurate accounts of earlier political
    conjunctures, and
    things still took the direction they did. So how useful is adding yet
    another model to the list of periodizations actually likely to be?

    It’s not an either/or, of course. We need this kind of work too.
    Still,
    I keep coming back to Boaventura de Sousa Santos's observation
    that what
    we lack isn't yet another theory of resistance or revolution to sit
    alongside the many we already have, Marxist and otherwise, but a
    revolution in theory itself.

    Or to put it in terms I used on the list recently in relation to
    understanding our digital condition: it's not a new philosophy of
    technology we need; it's a new technology of philosophy.

    Best, Gary


    On 31/07/2026 12:09, Felix Stalder via nettime-l wrote:
    >
    > I haven't read the book, but from the article here, I think two
    things
    > are useful. One is that Trump doesn't represent fascism, but
    > Bonapartism, ie. not a collective mass movement, but a mass of
    people
    > joined individually to a singular leader.
    >
    > The other is this:
    >
    > "They [the far right] are not more organized or more ideologically
    > coherent or more strategic [than the left]; they are just better
    > funded – which puts quite a lot on the shoulders of capital
    itself as
    > the overarching organizing principle of global politics. Money
    might
    > not be the only thing talking, but it’s the only thing getting
    what it
    > wants."
    >
    > In other words, somebody is still doing the boring but necessary
    > organizational, institutional work. It's capital.
    >
    > Also, there is a great line on Reform UK: "There is just Nigel
    and a
    > smartphone and then a couple of private donors." (I think this
    doesn't
    > apply to the far-right in France or Germany.)
    >
    >
    > all the best. Felix
    >
    >
    >
    >
    > Meet the man whose groundbreaking book is being devoured by the left
    > Zoe Williams
    >
    > 23.07.2026
    >
    >
    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/23/anton-jager-groundbreaking-book-being-devoured-by-left

    >
    >
    > “I am acutely conscious,” said Andy Burnham outside 10 Downing
    Street
    > on Monday, “that I am the sixth person in the last 10 years to
    walk up
    > this street.” It was good to hear him say it because, beneath
    all the
    > cabinet gossip and rune-reading, there is a feeling of terror about
    > the immediate future and also about ourselves, the electorate.
    Is this
    > who we are now? Wildly enthusiastic one minute, seething the
    next; as
    > passionate about the change we want as we are convinced that
    those who
    > promise it are incapable of enacting it?
    >
    > It is perhaps not surprising that Anton Jäger’s recent book,
    > Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political
    Consequences,
    > is being read by Labour watchers and leftwing thinkers. As the New
    > York Times wrote, it’s “among the best and most dazzling efforts to
    > model the political present in all its maddening strangeness”.
    Still,
    > I think Jäger was surprised to have his honeymoon interrupted so I
    > could interview him about it. Life comes at everyone quite fast
    in a
    > hyperpolitical age.
    >
    > Jäger, 32, raised in Brussels by parents who work in the arts
    > (“bohemian class?” I ask, and he says carefully that they are boho
    > “adjacent”), educated at the University of Essex, then
    Cambridge, is
    > now a lecturer in the history of political thought and theory at
    > University College, Oxford. He has an intense, angular face and a
    > calm, almost self-effacing manner. His philosophical reference
    points
    > are Deleuze and Guattari, Mouffe and Laclau, but asked to situate
    > himself in the firmament of the European left, he says simply:
    “Even
    > with all the baggage and connotations, I still think the easiest
    thing
    > is to call myself a Marxist.”
    >
    > His thinking runs as follows (don’t get hung up on the dates,
    though
    > some, like 1989, are non-negotiable). The years 1914 to 1989
    mark the
    > age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and
    > institutionalisation was also high – so people engaged with
    politics
    > electorally and on the streets. They were joiners – of political
    > parties, unions, congregations, working men’s clubs, reading
    groups;
    > they participated in multiple interlacing institutions. Not by
    > coincidence, this was also a time when political struggle
    resulted in
    > concrete gains. Then, 1989 to the financial crash in 2008 (the
    years
    > often called the “long 90s”) was the age of post-politics, when
    > institutionalisation was low (we emphatically did not join clubs
    then,
    > we went to clubs), and politicisation was through the floor. It
    was a
    > time when technocrats took care of business while everyone else
    went
    > to a rave, and we said history was over. From the crash through to
    > about 2020 (sometimes earlier, this boundary is the most fluid) was
    > the age of anti-politics – a resurgent Tea Party in the US, Beppe
    > Grillo and anti-establishment protests in Italy, the Arab
    spring, the
    > Occupy movement. Politicisation in this period came back with a
    > vengeance, and even while institutionalisation hasn’t recovered,
    these
    > movements still have institutional ambitions. Protest movements in
    > Spain and Greece bore political parties, Podemos and Syriza;
    protest
    > candidates in the US, France and the UK, had their eyes on retaking
    > traditional parties from which the revolutionary intent had long
    been
    > stripped away.
    > protester in a mask that says ‘I can’t breathe’
    > A Black Lives Matter protest in London on 6 June 2020 after the
    > killing of George Floyd. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
    >
    > Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with
    neither
    > institutional roots nor ambitions. “On the surface,” Jäger writes,
    > “the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in
    common
    > with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally,
    they
    > are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements
    exhibit
    > a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they
    maintain no
    > membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on
    their
    > adherents.” As a consequence, everything explodes and nothing
    changes;
    > movements surge suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He
    > quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s contemporary
    interpretation
    > of the evocative phrase “bodies without organs”. Modern political
    > movements, he writes, are “concentrated and muscular, yet
    without an
    > internal metabolism”.
    >
    > He found this pattern across the Organisation for Economic
    > Co-operation and Development and he only stopped there, he says,
    > because “I don’t have the linguistic and cultural reach to fully
    tell
    > this story globally”. His descriptions are powerful. He writes of
    > climate strikers and anti-lockdown demonstrators alike as “a myriad
    > animated by brief, potent stimuli, stirred to action by charismatic
    > influencers and digital demagogues”. And that, you have to
    admit, is
    > exactly what it looks like.
    >
    > These four eras – mass politics, post-politics, antipolitics and
    > hyperpolitics – “are not just concepts,” Jäger says, “they have
    some
    > empirical data behind them. ‘How institutionalised is society?’ is
    > basically a question of, how does civil society look? How are
    > membership organisations looking? What are the affiliations,
    what are
    > the types of bonds that people have? That’s not very difficult to
    > quantify. You can look at union membership, you can look at church
    > attendance, you can look at less overtly political forms of
    belonging.
    > The political axis is more difficult to measure, but not
    impossible –
    > namely, how many people attend elections, how many people
    strike, how
    > many people engage in political violence, how many people engage in
    > political communication, write letters to editors or now post
    online?”
    >
    > He argues that the height of mass politics was between the wars. To
    > illustrate this in the book, he lists all the civic organisations
    > during the Great Depression in the small Austrian hamlet of
    Marienthal
    > – they spanned all human activity, from work to thought to
    > rabbit-breeding. I won’t list them all here but there were many.
    > Considering the effect these organisations might have on the
    > collective psyche, Jäger considers the history of his own
    family: “On
    > the Flemish side, this meant that the Christian Democratic or the
    > Catholic party was not just a party that said how you were to
    vote, or
    > which union you joined, but also had a very strong say in what
    > happened in the bedroom. It was a total doctrine, not something
    that
    > purely applied to your political deportment.” There was little
    > boundary between public and private, and no such thing as a
    political
    > identity without a membership card. It was personally quite
    > constraining, but it got shit done. (Sidebar, I’ve seen a nascent
    > institutionalised-politics like this, in Manchester, in 2019; the
    > local Momentum group was campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn, but it also
    > had a running club, a knitting group and a book group. I was
    overcome
    > by the sense of seeing a trade union movement reborn. Needless
    to say,
    > Corbyn did not win that election. Institution-building can’t be
    done
    > on the fly.)
    >
    > The destruction of political organisations was “not monocausal”,
    Jäger
    > says, though in the book he puts it squarely on the shoulders of
    the
    > union busting by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. People lost
    > faith in organisations because the crunchy bit of their leverage
    – the
    > bit where you get what you want by withdrawing your labour, the bit
    > before all-out war – was taken away. Unions were defanged and
    workers
    > impoverished, and many ultimately saw their industries collapse
    in the
    > process.
    >
    > Jäger says there were also cultural and generational shifts over
    > decades – people in the 60s and 70s seeking a different
    relationship
    > with collective institutions, for example, and looking instead for
    > emancipation and equality – so it takes a while for the picture to
    > cohere, and Communist parties remained tenacious through the
    1980s in
    > Italy, for instance. “In 1989, suddenly it’s as if there’s a day
    and
    > night difference,” he says. With the fall of the Berlin Wall,
    the end
    > of the cold war, he says: “Suddenly everyone deserves to party.”
    > Large crowd climb onto the Berlin Wall
    >
    >
    > It is a strange sensation to have the 90s narrated back to you by
    > someone who was born in 1994, but it is mainly unsettling
    because it
    > is so accurate. Tony Blair did describe globalisation as a
    process as
    > inexorable as the weather, and that is also how neoliberals
    described
    > the economy – a thing that happened to you. “This is the
    ambiguity of
    > the post-politics of the 90s,” Jäger says. “Politics is no longer
    > something that you see as effecting large-scale social change,
    and the
    > forms of liberty that are available to you are now more private,
    more
    > intimate, more individual. At the same time, the idea that you can
    > collectively bundle together with other individuals and change
    society
    > starts to appear very, very remote.”
    >
    > There was also a lot of beauty to that time, which he describes
    > through the photography of Wolfgang Tillmans and the novels of
    Annie
    > Ernaux and Michel Houellebecq. We were obsessed with Houellebecq in
    > the 90s, but we will have to talk about why, and the direction his
    > novels took, and whether we will ever again live in a world
    whose best
    > cultural artefact is the novel, another time. “The fact that
    Tillmans
    > as a gay man is able to express and experience the rave culture
    of the
    > 90s and 00s as a new form of collectivity that wasn’t available
    to him
    > in the 70s and 80s, I don’t think we should deny the liberatory
    value
    > of this. It very clearly is the case that there are individuals who
    > did not feel at home in the families, or the communities or the
    > neighbourhoods in which they grew up, in which they finally find a
    > kind of new community that is much less demanding and is less
    exigent
    > than what they had before. The ambiguity is, of course, that it
    also
    > implies a profound disenchantment and cynicism around what politics
    > can do.” That’s politics with a capital P – you might see a
    community
    > animated about an issue, but with no faith in parliamentary
    channels.
    >
    >
    > There is a critical and rarely mentioned adjunct to the neoliberal
    > destruction of institutions and the post and antipolitics that came
    > afterwards, which is that it didn’t only come for the left.
    “Thatcher
    > basically did a controlled demolition of popular Conservatism,”
    Jäger
    > says, “and replaced much of this with PR spin, and also a lot of
    > private funding, because the idea was: ‘We can get rid of our mass
    > party because we’re in control of the media, we can win
    elections with
    > that.’” The right today, he says, is just as inconsequential as the
    > left, and for exactly the same reason, that it’s hyper but not
    > formally organised. “The people who go on marches subscribe to the
    > same podcast, might follow the same pages on Instagram, might be on
    > the same Telegram channels, but they don’t have an organisational
    > history they shared before they entered the march. This is
    different
    > even to the BNP, where marchers had a shared history in football
    > hooliganism, and the National Front. That shared subculture is no
    > longer there.”
    >
    > He says this is clear with Reform UK, “which is so heavily
    > leader-dependent. The entire movement is at risk with this
    scandal of
    > the crypto-billionaire, because there’s no party infrastructure.
    There
    > is just Nigel and a smartphone and then a couple of private
    donors.”
    > To me, this fails to take into account that the right is
    different to
    > the left: they have more money. “Maybe I understated the
    availability
    > of private funding,” he says mildly. “The fact that we can even
    talk
    > of a trillionaire, such as Elon Musk, means there’s a complete
    > secession of that individual from what we could even call society.
    > That is a variable in explaining why hyperpolitics on the right
    > thrives and why hyperpolitics on the left has found it much more
    > difficult to achieve tangible results.” They are not more
    organised or
    > more ideologically coherent or more strategic; they are just better
    > funded – which puts quite a lot on the shoulders of capital
    itself as
    > the overarching organising principle of global politics. Money
    might
    > not be the only thing talking, but it’s the only thing getting
    what it
    > wants.
    >
    >
    > The more immediately controversial proposition of the book,
    though, is
    > that what we are watching in Trump’s US is not fascism, because the
    > right only travels to that extreme in the face of a direct
    threat of
    > organised socialism. “The left is doing itself too many favours by
    > considering its opponents fascists,” he says. “You’re
    overestimating
    > your strength. The contemporary far right is more a function of the
    > crisis of liberalism than it is a function of the strength of the
    > left.” What we’re looking at instead, with Trump, is “Bonapartism”
    > says Jäger. He writes that Trump, and everyone else who has ever
    got
    > ahead by championing the “left behind”, isn’t representing a strong
    > mass movement or class, but, like Napoleon, relying on “the largely
    > passive support of impoverished peasants … not a collective but
    > ‘formed by the simple addition of isomorphous magnitudes, much as
    > potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes’.” (That bit about
    potatoes
    > is from Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.) We
    > skirmish a little about the US Immigration and Customs
    Enforcement as
    > a standing army that looks extremely fascist, until Jäger
    concludes:
    > “The spectrum from fascism to Bonapartism can flip into
    something more
    > radical. At the same time, I’m still more struck by the differences
    > than the similarities with these 20th-century phenomena.”
    >
    > Neal Lawson, guru of Manchesterism and an Anton Jäger fan, lays
    these
    > arguments over the predicament of our new prime minister. “It isn’t
    > just lack of money Burnham has to contend with but the absence of
    > secure political footings. Temporary hyper-political swarms have
    taken
    > the place of substantial and secure alliances. He must find a
    way to
    > surf these volatile waves or be another victim of them.” But we,
    the
    > volatile waves, also have to figure out how to re-engage with
    > institutions and build new ones, and is that possible? Jäger
    pauses,
    > dispiritingly, like a mechanic who is about to give you bad news
    about
    > your fanbelt. “This is an interesting and scary question. We do
    live
    > in a society in which the incentives for leaving rather than
    entering
    > organisations are much higher. Recent experience, whether joining a
    > party or joining a union, often militates against the idea that
    > there’s any sense in collective action, and the rational
    response is
    > helplessness. And yet, repoliticisation is good. Hyperpolitics has
    > increased people’s consciousness of the fact that politics matters.”
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
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