One of the great beauties of politics as an art form was its lack of restriction to merely standard forms of realism.
—Bruce Sterling, Distraction
This chapter turns from the vernacular culture that re-mediates our contemporary political situation to the field of institutionalized politics. I imagine this transit not as a turn from aesthetic practice to the “real” historical context in which this practice unfolds—not a turn from fiction to its broader social conditions, in other words. Rather, here as elsewhere in this book, I am interested in the derealization of political life: the dismantling of representative government, the decomposition of the body politic and what follows, for better and for worse—namely, our collective emancipation from the norms and constraints of a common reality. From the vantage of the categories and institutions that organize modern political life, designed precisely for the construction and administration of those fixed coordinates—that real world—by which the masses take the common measure of their prospects and their limits, this derealized politics appears simply fantastic. This is one reason, as I have argued, that (nonrealist) narrative genres routinely yield a more generative heuristic for contemporary political life than the established categories of critical analysis. So I move from fiction to actuality (and then back again, in the final section of the chapter) not as one might move from text to context, but in an effort to render the relation between the two reversible. In both this penultimate chapter and in my conclusion, the lines of speculation opened in my reading of the post-soul and SF narratives explored in chapters 3 and 4 provide the context for approaching these “texts” of electoral politics and political activism in the twenty-first-century United States.
Reflecting on the intersections of what she terms neoliberal and neoconservative “rationalities,” Wendy Brown suggests how the former paves the way for the latter’s authoritarianism, particularly in the register of citizenship. Neoconservatism is wrongly gauged as a problem of “ideological obfuscation,” she contends. To claim that the electorate is simply duped may “resurrect a certain political hopefulness through the worn figure of ‘false consciousness,’” but it “eschew[s] the more troubling possibility of an abject, unemancipatory and anti-egalitarian subjective orientation amongst a significant swathe of the American populace” (Brown 2006, 703). This new orientation Brown puts to neoliberalism’s account: “Neoliberal de-democratization produces a subject . . . who may be more desirous of its own subjection and complicit in its subordination than any democratic subject could be said to be” and in so doing, she goes on to say, lays the ground on which neoconservative politics flourish (2006, 702).
This is a curious charge. From one perspective, we might say that desiring subjection is the very thing democracy makes possible. Democracy is what makes subjection desirable, inasmuch as it permits us to cathect subjection as its obverse, as our emancipation from arbitrary and externally imposed authority. Elsewhere in the essay, Brown herself concedes that “the choosing and the governed subject are far from opposites” (2006, 705). We might go further and propose that the identity of these two subjects is a hallmark achievement of political modernity. To be governed is not to resign choice and submit to a divinely invested, fundamentally alien sovereign, since the power to which democratically constituted subjects submit is imagined as our own. This is the lure and the fiction of democracy: that ruler and ruled are the same. It is also, as Derrida explored with such remarkable economy of prose on the occasion of the national bicentennial, a form of science fiction—a time travel narrative, to be precise, in which we must imagine that the “people” constituted by the governing bodies are present at the institutional origin, to constitute and consecrate those governing bodies in the first place.1 In other words, as Derrida contends, the people who declare independence from the British crown do not exist, except as the retroactive postulate of those who will sign the declaration in their name. But the fantasy of an originary popular sovereign who calls up and empowers its governors runs deep. From this perspective, the recognition that political struggle is always about the form of our subjection might offer a form of useful critical leverage.
But Brown’s remark cuts very differently, to suggest that “we” have stood passively by as the power of the demos has been dismantled—indeed, that the citizenry has taken a perverse sort of pleasure in submitting to the power of illegitimate governance—to a government that abdicates its obligation to the promulgation of the common good, that proliferates inequality in the name of “free markets,” that treats the law as a mere tactic and recasts questions of right as questions of efficiency. So it is, she contends, that “the exercise of executive power comes to rest on a pacified and neutered citizenry” (2006, 709). To suggest that the role of an oligarchical executive requires a “neutering” of the popular sovereign is to make the power of the citizenry constitutive. If we acknowledge that there is no popular sovereign before it is called forth by the laws and institutions of the state, then it seems hard to fault the citizens’ submissiveness. On what ground do we resist—as citizens—if, in effect, our sovereignty has been rescinded by the state that confers it?
In other words, in avowing the temporal slippage on which the concept of the popular sovereign rests, we are pressed to ask whether the seemingly disengaged citizen is “pacified” or simply canny, having correctly gauged the de-instituting of her own capacity to dissent. Brown’s analysis is implicitly committed to the idea of the citizen’s constitutive agency and, tellingly, her language of “neutering” dovetails in substance if not in tone with the journalist Matt Taibbi’s witty but unabashedly masculinist indictment of our civic failure. “At a time when the country desperately needed its citizens to man up and seize control of their common destiny,” Taibbi writes, “they instead crawled into alleys and feverishly jacked themselves off in frenzies of panicked narcissism” (2009, 9). There is, of course, a strong moral cast to the charge: citizens are taking the wrong kind of pleasure—pleasure in the wrong form of subjection. By contrast, from a feminist perspective of the sex-positive variety, one might begin by observing that the submissive who takes pleasure in her abjection is not, for all that, without agency.
Certainly, left thought in the United States, both academic and non, has come centrally to dwell on the dismantling of modern political institutions, as we recognize that what seemed, not so long ago, like staggering transgressions are simply the new order of things—as we recognize, in other words, that there is no going back to the days when the dedication of the state to private property lived in tension with an obligation to the common good; when the exclusionary character of the nation was transacted on the ground of its universalist aspirations; when the legal sanction of the dominant classes still required the semblance of formal equality before the law. For many, no doubt, it was the 2008 election and its aftermath, the purely hallucinatory nature of the “progressive” alternative, that brought home the demise of liberal democracy—though the writing has been on the wall for at least a decade, and arguably much longer, even as we struggled to understand what we were seeing. But if we can increasingly agree on the dissolution of modern political institutions in the United States, the implications for citizenship, and by extension for the form of popular opposition, seem less clear. For Brown, the profound transformation in the organization of the state leaves the very idea of the citizen strangely intact and indeed, the citizen herself culpable for (or at any rate complicit in) her own degradation—and Brown is surely not alone in this claim, which constitutes, it seems to me, something like the common sense of left thought in the contemporary United States. Hence the bewildered despair at the seeming absence of large-scale organized opposition—and the more or less open condescension toward the debilitated electorate that can no longer even minimally discern its own interests. Hence, too, the relieved embrace of Occupy Wall Street, which was read, almost across the board and from the very moment of its inception, as a “civil revival,” proof of the people’s capacity for self-affirmation.
But surely to perceive that the central institutions of political modernity are unraveling means to recognize that the forms of political subjectivity are necessarily reconfigured. Historically, that is, in the contexts of popular sovereignty and the nation-state synthesis, protest matters (at the polls or on the streets) because the performance of dissent delegitimates the state that must appear to act in the collective interest of a national body politic. But if the power of the state no longer operates on a claim to represent—if the representative state has been largely superseded by a managerial apparatus for which questions of legitimacy are entirely beside the point—then the agency of the citizen-protester, as well as the contexts and horizons of protest are also fundamentally transformed. To suggest that the citizen has passively succumbed to her own disenfranchisement is to bracket the larger question of where and in what fashion she might (yet) act as a citizen; it is to proceed as though the relation between modern states and the populations that they govern were essential, rather than historical. And to anticipate or celebrate the rising of the sovereign populace is to imagine an oppositional movement predicated on the very synthesis that the nonrepresenting, neoliberal state is in fact dissolving. Brown presents us with the de-democratized citizen who survives her own demise—in effect, a zombie. If the contemporary citizen is only the rotted, shambling remainder of the modern citizen-subject, an unreasonable creature, moved by visceral appeals and wholly absorbed in the urgency of her own hungers, the simple assertion of her ruination begs the question of the forces that animate her. What might it mean to take her as something other than a figure of abjection—not simply abandoned by the state, but acquiescing in outrageous self-abandon? How not to judge the neocitizen by the exercise of a political reason whose obsolescence is evidenced by her very existence?
While in some respects Taibbi’s complaints about the unmanned electorate resonate with Brown’s and, indeed, with a chorus of contemporary commentators who lament the debased condition of the American voter, still his writing, especially The Great Derangement, provides remarkable insight into the collapse of a political center in the United States “There was a consequence, a flip side to the oligarchical rigged game of Washington politics,” he writes; “apparently recognizing that they’d been abandoned by their putative champions in Washington, the public was now, rightly it seemed, tuning out of the political mainstream. But they weren’t tuning out in order to protest their powerlessness more effectively; they were tuning in to competing versions of pure escapist lunacy. On both the left and the right, huge chunks of the population were effecting nearly identical retreats into conspiratorial weirdness and Internet-fueled mysticism” (2009, 4). For Taibbi, the emergency presents not as the electorate’s abjection, but as its psychotic break with the exterior world:
A key aspect of the derangement is this cutting off of the people from outside reality. We are like a person slipping into a paranoid psychosis for whom hallucinations and imagined conversations increasingly take the place of real object relations in the outside world. A paranoiac can handle those imaginary conversations just fine—but shake him by the shoulders and force him to focus, and he might very well stare back at you in terror, not knowing who you are or what you want. In that one panicked moment before he can think of some new fantasy that explains what’s happening before his eyes, you’ll see the whole sorry deal laid bare. (2009, 102)
Even as Taibbi’s analysis shares with Brown’s an emphasis on civic pathology, his study as I read it usefully insists, not on complicity with a dominant—“neoliberal,” as Brown would have it—political rationality, but on the retreat of political reason. By the retreat of reason, I mean something other than the often-cited disappearance of a plausibly public sphere of reasoned civic debate and the attendant recalibration of political discourse to the genres and temporalities of commercial media. I mean rather the evisceration of the norms by which political culture generally distinguishes between credible and fantastic assertions. This is, perhaps, a delicate point to make, inasmuch as the norms of civic reason are always and at their core partial and interested, and thus to that extent unreasonable phenomena. The unreason of normative political reason is precisely what gonzo journalism—of which Taibbi is a faithful and brilliant practitioner—so insistently reveals. But even if (or, perhaps, precisely because) these norms operate in bad faith, they have historically sustained the boundary between the moderately variegated positions of the political mainstream and the outlier politics of the far Right and far Left. Taibbi’s suspicion—and his worry—is that the fringe has swamped and dissolved a political culture centered on the consensual construction of social and political reality. The irony of Taibbi’s position is the irony of the Left in the United States today, as we witness, appalled, the evisceration of discursive norms and evidentiary standards that it was once—not so long ago—the business of the Left to assail.
While Taibbi—like Brown—tends to hold the electorate to account for its flight into dimensions of political fantasy that can no longer mediate their position in the exterior (“real”) world, his writing nonetheless discerns something of the broader collapse of the political culture—and its institutions—that have historically served to interpellate citizens into the domain of civic reason. In this way, he puts us on the trail of the forces—and forms—of derealization that have stymied the Left since (at least) the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when it confronted, not for the first time, no doubt, but in particularly virulent form, the disconnect of official reason from the domain of a reproducible (relatively coherent and readily iterable) reality. The problem was not that the Bush administration had spun “the facts” to support the invasion, but that it had not really bothered to manage “the facts” at all—had not bothered to establish a basis for the war and its necessity in a way that carried anything like the fullness and fixity of the real. Hence the difficulty of contesting the state’s rationale for “regime change” in Iraq via the most fundamental of critical gestures, by calling the facts into question as representing a partial and insufficient truth, at best. To cite only the most obvious manifestation of this novel political situation, it turned out not to matter much either to the prosecution of the war or to the public discourse around it that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—nor, indeed, that the WMD rationale was barely credible in the first place. If the WMDs supplied the legitimating cause of a military invasion and occupation urged (whatever other objectives were also in play) by the aspiration to control the flow of Iraqi and Central Asian oil, then why did it fail to signify politically when the cause (flimsy as it was) had been disproven? For that matter, why permit the cause to go missing at all, when it would seem to require only a modest effort (relative, at any rate, to the scale and cost of the occupation) to procure, plant, and discover the evidence? But the WMDs were never an ideological gambit—at least, not in the sense that we usually think ideology, as seeking to efface contradiction and produce an ostensibly coherent, readable account of the war, or of the wider geopolitics in which it was embedded. If realism is a paradigmatically ideological project, ideology, as we know to engage it, is a fundamentally realist enterprise, suturing its subjects to a world whose meaning appears already secure. Ideology is what strives to arrest the play of the signifier, in other words, and so to generate the reference points of a given and reproducible world—a world that hails the subject precisely because it seems to ratify the substance and necessity of her own place within it. From this perspective, we might reverse the emphasis of Althusser’s classic formulation and assert that ideology is the imagined relation to material conditions (conditions of embodiment, labor, kinship, sociality) that projects them into the dimension of the real. This is, of course, the reason that ideology traffics unfailingly in “fact” and other forms of empirical evidence: ideology seeks to array the world in its facticity and thereby invest selected representations with the authority of transparent reflection.
But the Bush administration rationale for the war appeared oddly invulnerable to forms of ideology critique that sought to expose and pressure the gaps—indeed, the chasms—in its rationalization of the war on terror, precisely because the rationale was never embedded in a realist narrative framework. For all its aggressive saturation of the mediascape with the memes of national injury, imperial valor, and the salvific powers of free markets, the Bush regime and its allied institutions stunningly declined to assemble an ideological narrative of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, proffering instead an array of disarticulated catchphrases and soundbites that functioned more on the order of feedback, a kind of constant, staticky interference. The WMDs were a case in point: they were not a grounding element in a narrative of unlawful power contained, but only one in a series of potent but disposable fixations. From force of habit, it was easy enough to imagine at moments that this ideological noise was an ideological project of a more familiar kind—an effort to fix or stabilize political referents, to produce an account of the U.S. bid for continuing global hegemony whose truth effects would be vested in the unfolding of events along established signifying chains, an unfolding, therefore, in which the resolution was already inscribed. But the efforts of the Left (and of anti-war liberals) to interrupt and impede that unfolding could never find political traction, despite the fact that an ever rising percentage of Americans were either explicitly opposed to the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or at least skeptical of their ends and efficacy, because the signifying chains of U.S. imperial dominance were already broken and decomposed. In place of an ideological narrative, the administration and its brokers orchestrated the unremitting flow of decontextualized narrative fragments, trigger points for a repertoire of intense but dissociated feeling. So in the months and years following 9/11, we witnessed, for example, the spiking of patriotic sentiment, as well as an upsurge of anti-Arab and anti-Islamic feeling that seemed alarmingly to traverse the political spectrum (encompassing nominal liberals, no less than an overtly xenophobic and anti-immigrant Right). Yet these feelings played out rhizomatically across the political map, binding people in seemingly arbitrary and inchoate ways to an increasingly decentered and heterogeneous array of positions. To cite an example I encountered often in the anonymous public contexts of everyday life, one could believe that the Bush administration let 9/11 happen and also that a diffuse and ineradicable terrorist threat mandated total governmental surveillance of American citizens.
This was (and remains) the truly incredible “feel” of the moment: maybe we believed that Saddam was a threat to the United States, or that deposing him was central to securing U.S. interests in the region, or that we were in Afghanistan to save brown women from brown men, or that our amorphous antagonists in something called the “global war on terror” hate us for our freedom—or maybe, and more often, not. Yet there was no ground to be gained in undermining these assertions, which were floating signifiers, rather than the anchoring assumptions of a specific (hegemonic or would-be hegemonic) political position. There were no threads to pull and unravel the ideological fabric, because there was no fabric, only great quantities of ideological noise, which seemed intended perversely, and against the grain of all conventional political management, to stress and enervate the population living within the broadcast zone, rather than console and compensate.2 In any case, the effect was to drive the proliferation of a whole range of eclectic, eccentric, overtly inchoate positions, based not infrequently, as Taibbi observes, in an array of counterfactual assumptions. The Tea Party stands perhaps as the most visible, hypermediated example of the newly centered—because ubiquitous—fringe, although Taibbi’s account takes as its primary case studies elements of the millenialist/evangelical Christian Right and the extravagant conspiracy theories of the 9/11 truth movement.3 But beyond such more visible consolidations of political unreason, I would argue that political culture in the United States has been (re)configured along the lines of a kind of point-and-click environment, in which people are cut loose to assemble their views and sensibilities from a burgeoning menu of political memes and affects, variously cross-hatched with the remnants of older ideological formations (ethnonationalisms, multiculturalisms, family values, for example), therapeutic discourses of healing and self-care, and more or less canny insights into both the autocracy of money and the depth of their abandonment by the state.
The problem on the Left is, of course, that this other-than-ideological moment has been saturated with ideological matter of the most conspicuously retrograde order. Yet ideology as the effort to stabilize political meanings, to fix an ensemble of signifiers into the reference points of a comprehensible, common, and abiding reality appears to have receded. It is this fundamental derealization of political life that Taibbi labors to convey, even as he moves to secure a register of “objective fact” outside the terrain of its ideological mediation.
When a people can no longer agree even on the basic objective facts of their political existence, the equation changes; real decisions, even in the approximate direction of righteousness, eventually become impossible. The Great Derangement is about a stage of our history where politics has seemingly stopped being about ideology and has instead become a problem of information. Are the right messages reaching the collective brain? Are the halves of the brain even connected? Do we know who we are anymore? Are we sane? (2009, 12)
Inasmuch as the work of ideology is to determine and delimit the category of “objective facts,” a “problem of information” is itself an ideological problem. Yet Taibbi’s language usefully flags how data now appears to circulate to no specific or coherent social end, so that the “right messages,” the ones that would constitute a mass political actor forged (for example) in the common awareness of how the state has plundered public wealth for the benefit of the elite, are dissolved in the flows of undifferentiated data. There is no shortage of information, but information no longer functions to in-form, to give shape and purpose to mass political subjects—to constitute an array of normative political orientations, in other words. Hence Taibbi’s intuition that the body politic—the national “we”—has incurred a traumatic injury, can no longer know—or perhaps, more aptly, can no longer know what we know—about the world.
So we come to the insistence on civic pathologies, be they “anti-egalitarian subjective orientations,” “panicked narcissism,” or sometimes, more crassly, the complaint that American voters are flat-out stupid and uninformed. Such claims are not wrong in any simple way—it would be difficult, for instance, to argue the reverse and contend that any substantial share of the electorate can (re)produce a more or less plausible—more or less realist—explanation (of whatever ideological stripe) of their diminished material prospects, much less apprehend how the proliferating crises that bear on their own conditions of living affect the situation of national, planetary, or even local others. But the indictment of the citizenry begs the question of how we arrive at a political culture where stupidity need no longer apologize—where it need not come forward in the guise of reasonable argument, which adheres (as proof of “reason”) to a set of relatively fixed, seemingly verifiable assumptions about the world, just as we need no longer cathect anti-egalitarian self-interest (hardly a new arrival on the U.S. political stage) as an emancipatory equality of opportunity. To point to the Tea Partiers, the Millenials, the conspiracy enthusiasts, or simply the generic “low-information” voter is to miss the more interesting point that what makes this stupidity possible and so nearly pervasive—what stupefies—is the dissolution of normative political cultures.
The primary run up to the 2012 election season offered some of the most spectacular proof of the arrival of political unreason to the “mainstream” of electoral politics. As Noam Chomsky mused on Democracy Now in the fall of 2011,
Well, I must say that politics in this country now is in a state that I think has no analogue in American history and maybe nowhere in the parliamentary system. It’s astonishing. I mean, I’m not a great enthusiast for Obama, as you know, from way back, but at least he’s somewhere in the real world. Perry, who’s very likely—very likely to get the—to win the primary and win the nomination, maybe to win the election, he’s in outer space. I mean, his views are unbelievable. Bachmann is the same. Romney is kind of more or less toward the center. These are—the positions they are taking are utterly outlandish.
One might debate whether Romney’s positions were substantially more centrist than those of his former competitors in the primary field, if only because a “center” gauged by the measure of Rick Perry’s or Michelle Bachman’s overtly theocratic agendas has relatively little to do with the political terrain that term was once used to delimit.4 Romney’s ostensible “centrism” was perhaps less a matter of political circumspection than of class sensibility, a depthless managerialism that belongs to the boardroom rather than the prayer meeting. In any case, neither Romney nor his competitors for the Republican nomination could be said to have been inhabiting “the real world,” to the extent that neither these candidates nor the party apparatus were (or are) committed to (re)producing such an entity ideologically by binding their adherents to a set of durable reference points in a narrative of collective self-realization. The Republican Party’s effort to cultivate and mobilize the varying registers of anti-government feeling is not such an ideological project, even if it sometimes yields a slim electoral margin, assembled from various flavors of Christian fundamentalists, an array of “social conservatives” still fighting the culture wars like so many contemporary Rip Van Winkles, and the vast ranks of the déclassé bourgeoisie and especially petty bourgeoisie, whose political expression is now contained along a spectrum ranging from simple ressentiment to explicit rage, apathy to Schadenfreude. The circumstance that the commonplaces of earlier ideological syntheses are continually, compulsively recycled within Republican and indeed, as I will argue, the broad range of contemporary political rhetoric in the United States should not blind us to the dissolution of these syntheses in our own historical moment. To the contrary, it is because there are no ideological projects proper to the present political conjuncture that we are free to cite so broadly and exuberantly from the past.
The Republican Party’s actual practices—the rosters of its candidates, their rhetoric, and the legislative (in)actions they pursue—offer one form of evidence for the claim that the party now understands the electorate’s fury and revulsion as a form of political capital. We find another in the occasional published exposés of life in the halls of power, and one can only wonder what a more sustained ethnographic study of the office holders and their staffers might tell us of the institutional cultures and imaginaries that sustain a post-realist political practice. A former Republican congressional staffer, Mike Lofgren, offers (at the moment of his defection from the Republican fold) one suggestive glimpse into the ethos and sensibilities that inform the Republicans’ electoral calculations, which could hardly be farther removed from an incorporative political agenda that seeks to rally the masses to its cause. While Lofgren tends at moments to depict cynical operatives manipulating a malleable public, he also recognizes the extent to which the manipulators are themselves in grip of the unreason that they cultivate.
Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation, and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself. . . . A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner. (2011, 3)
From Lofgren’s vantage, “This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic,” by which he means that it is irreconcilable with the reverence for the Constitution and the founders that the party professes, and in that vein, he goes on to consider how the party’s hostility towards government is inchoately joined to its support of the Patriot Act, as well as laws and sentencing policies that have produced the largest incarcerated population on the planet (2011, 4). More than grossly and unapologetically contradictory, however, the Republican obstructionism Lofgren cites is keyed to a political investment in the negation of the electorate’s attachments to its political forms and institutions, attachments that live on, for the time being at least, almost entirely in the register of (still) unresolved disappointment. The withdrawal of popular consent to the (in)actions of the state in its name is no longer an impediment to the exercise of governmental power, only another opportunity for political speculation.
And what of Obama and the Democrats, yet abiding, or so Chomsky proposes, in the real world of normative political reason, however much they, too, have aggrieved the liberal/Left? By the measure of personal style, Obama is certainly less deranged than most of his Republican antagonists, as he hews rhetorically to the conventions of reasoned debate, appears in command of relevant facts and historical contexts, and in contrast to both the mania of the theocratic revisionists and the vagueness of the corporate managers, can sustain a range of variable affect that bears (or at any rate, appears to bear) some relation to the context of the occasion. But for all the welcome tokens of a deliberative and charismatic personality—the sense, to recall Taibbi’s sketch of the psychotic in reverse, that he lives in focus, can return an interlocutor’s gaze, and know something of who and what they are—Chomsky’s faith in Obama’s real world coordinates seems unwarranted. I am thinking not only of the traffic in noisy ideological memes, dissociated from the narrative frameworks that seemed to guarantee their reference, such as Obama’s persistent allusions to the virtue and the suffering of the American middle classes, which seems about as functional for shoring up a vision of the bourgeois nation as was “they hate us for our freedoms” in securing the conviction of imperial benevolence. More fundamentally, Obama’s progressivism was unreal from the get go, in the sense that it never corresponded to a discernible progressive vision for the United States either within or beyond its own borders. Obama urged no retreat from the war on terror and cited no commitment to rescind Patriot Act provisions, and while he promised to bring the occupation of Iraq to a close, he pledged escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Aside from his preoccupation with the plight of the middle classes, he cited no concern with matters of social and economic inequality more broadly (the ranks of service workers, migrant laborers, day-jobbers, and other low-wage earners would have to look after themselves), nor did Obama draw the link between the destruction of the social safety net, the collapse of public infrastructure, and the ever-rising levels of corporate welfare. And yet, incredibly, this was the progressive, grassroots candidate? As Jeffrey St. Clair rightly observes, “His vaguely liberal political ideology remained opaque at the core. Instead of an over-arching agenda, Obama delivered facile jingoisms proclaiming a post-racial and post-partisan America. Instead of radical change, Obama offered simply managerial competence” (2011, 3).
Of course, St Clair’s account cannot explain why the promise of Obama’s 2008 candidacy was so keenly felt, unless (again) we imagine a deeply incompetent voter, so steeped in “anti-egalitarianism” or, perhaps, so diminished in her capacity to assess a political program as to misrecognize the interests and institutions represented in the Obama campaign. Rather, I would suggest that Obama’s agenda was never the point—never the object of attachment for that other segment of the imperiled bourgeoisie sunk, not in ressentiment, but in melancholy, who flocked to the campaign in droves and rechristened it a “movement.”5 The “movement” status of the campaign was an effect of its much-cited organizational structure, the “grassroots,” community-centered organization of volunteer campaigners that was at least as much the object of liberal/left commentary as any element of the candidate’s agenda, an organizational structure that found additional warrant in Obama’s own, oft-cited “community activist” beginnings and crucially, in his African American identity, which forged the link between the “community activist” of the 1980s and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Racial affiliation and personal narrative authenticated the grassroots campaign organization, which—quite apart from the candidate’s political record or professed agenda—was itself the signifier of “hope” and “change.” Indeed, when skeptics pressed supporters about the substance and the limits of Obama’s progressivism, supporters’ faith in the genuinely alternative quality of his candidacy hinged almost invariably on the form of the campaign apparatus. The innovation and the brilliance of the 2008 Obama campaign was to offer the left-liberal electorate a simulacral alternative, steeped in the affect and iconicity of mass social movement, but absent the political referent. The campaign was not the representative organ for a set of actually existing political possibilities for progressive change, which were at that point effectively foreclosed by the privatization of public office—by the increasingly deregulated flows of cash from corporate and other large private donors via lobbyist groups, PACs, and other entities into the coffers of both national party organizations and office holders, and also by the revolving door between public office and lucrative appointments to governing boards, consultancies, and other positions in or closely bound to donor organizations, which over the past several decades has produced a fusion of institutional cultures across state agencies and private enterprise, especially financial institutions.6 Under these circumstances, it was hard to imagine how a grassroots social movement could possibly emerge and flourish at the level of national electoral politics. By 2008, the prospect of a bottom-up presidential campaign, always a rarity, was effectively dead: this was the elephant in the room of Obama’s first presidential run. In the face of its actual impossibility, the architects of the campaign revived grassroots politics as virtuality—as a self-contained, deferentialized world of left identification and feeling. As an added bonus, progressive voters actually paid for the service, ponying up, according to the Federal Election Commission figures, roughly half of Obama’s $659-million post-nomination war chest.7 At the same time, of course, the other half of Obama’s campaign monies—totaling, in themselves nearly four times the amount of the $85 million in public campaign funding he declined—represented larger donations, and one need hardly immerse oneself in alarmist right-wing speculation about illicit foreign donors and repeat anonymous giving to recognize that the Obama campaign was all about big money or that the entire infrastructure of the two party system was by this point so thoroughly saturated with corporate dollars and corporate personnel that no one even marginally committed to a progressive agenda of serving public interests and protecting public wealth could attain major political office.
But my argument is not that the electorate was duped or that the Obama campaign strategically misdirected voters’ attention. To the contrary, the campaign was exactly what it claimed to be—including, crucially, an address to liberal and progressive voters reeling from the shock and awe of the two-term Bush presidency. Only this address never entailed the promise even of a moderately progressive political agenda in the White House, nor indeed did it operate in the register of promises and their redemption, of the present (re)production and regulation of futurity. Rather, what the Obama campaign offered immediately—in the moment—was a derealized progressive politics—an arena for the inhabitation of liberal/left political desires that was not a lie so much as a zone of discrete alterity, standing in a nonreferential relation to the state, where such desires could and would have no part in the determination of its policies and practices, and so, too, to the wider world on which these policies and practices weigh. Yet to say that Obama’s progressivism was unreal is not to claim that it was inconsequential, a mere distraction, while the “real” political agenda was transacted elsewhere, behind closed doors. I am arguing instead that the unreality of Obama’s progressivism—indeed, the proliferating unrealities of politics in the United States today—are an index to the wider disintegration of a “real world” orientation. If a realist politics labors to construct an anterior world to which “we”—a nation, a hegemonic bloc, a mass public—are fundamentally bound as the ground and object of our thought and actions, a post-realist politics unbinds across the board, freeing elites as well as voters from the obligation to abide by the measure of a common, given world.
Behind the closed doors of the campaign strategy session or the congressional hearing room, in other words, we find strategists and legislators no less committed to seemingly fantastic propositions than the reviled “low-information” voter. Taibbi makes this point explicitly in The Great Derangement, when he takes a brief hiatus from his infiltration of a Texas evangelical movement to cover the Senate debates over an Iraq supplemental appropriations bill:
The driving motivation of all Washington politicians is to quell or deflect [voters’ demands] . . . and this is visible even in such a terrible, immediate emergency as the Iraq war, when one would think that some kind of civic instinct would kick in, for five minutes or so at least. But no: instead a newly conquering congressional majority armed with a fresh mandate essentially spent its first year in office trying to stay on the right side of public anger while maintaining business as usual; it was very plain that the party viewed its end-the-war mandate as a burden, not a privilege. (2009, 150)
By the measure of their popular mandate to end the war, and the emergency of a massively failed occupation that has neither streamlined reconstruction nor stabilized the region for U.S. interests (its apparent aims), even as it incurred devastating human loss and monetary expense, the liberal Democrats’ ready capitulation to the congressional hawks appears incomprehensible. But such a measure posits a mass social organism that encompasses the rulers and the ruled—so that the interests of the dominant fractions must be tallied on the broader scale of social losses and gains. In this modern context, politics is the struggle over the material and symbolic means to manage the difference between particular and general interests. The ruling elements rule insofar as their particular aspirations are understood and felt to correspond with a mass social interest. Politics is the practice of hegemony, in other words: it is the production of mass identification on the ground of fundamentally differentiated relations to capital. To dwell “in the real world” (rather than succumb to mass psychosis) is to accede to this form of politically mediated sociality—or conversely, I am proposing, it is the hegemonic character of power that defines the political value and function of the “real world” as the continuum in which “we” live in simultaneous proximity, according to generalized forms of reckoning within fixed (because reproducible) parameters.
But contemporary politics in the United States are simply not of that world any longer. The congressional hearing room is not an institutional space for calibrating the ruling political and economic interests with the broadly national interest with which it must appear to converge. In such a world of hegemonic politics, the Democrats’ stand in favor of withdrawal would have corresponded to a “real world” calculation—a calculation that the societal costs of the war in Iraq had come to exceed the prospects for accumulation and control that originally impelled the invasion. But the congressional hearing room in which the electoral mandate was a “burden” is better understood as a virtual reality, a self-referential domain of political reckoning. This is (obviously) not to deny that the decisions made and the policies implemented there have decisive and routinely dire effects on the conditions of life for broad segments of the population inside and outside the United States, but simply to observe that this venue enables forms of political calculation, algorithms of cost and benefit, that consider those effects extraneous—outside the purview of the calculation. Even as the rule of capital and its political agents persists, the form of domination changes: rather than craft a popular mandate by aligning capital’s aspirations with a (seemingly) general social interest, domination proceeds more and more by shattering the fiction of a social organism. In place of aggregation, domination works by dissociation—no center, only proliferating margins (or “outlands”), constructed for whatever impulses and whatever calculus enable and animate its denizens.
I am arguing that power increasingly takes the form of declaring autonomy from having to live in anyone else’s world, and so it follows, as well, that the (mimetic) declaration of autonomy—the retreat from normative political assumptions—becomes the prevailing modality for the disenfranchised electorate to articulate political aspirations. We are reminded of what we should probably not have lost sight: that the “real world” is not a transhistorical given, but an invention specific to (and decisive for) modern, horizontal sociality and the incorporative aims of hegemonic power—specific to and decisive for the political life of the masses.8 Insofar as the state is reimagined, no longer the proxy of a sovereign national people, but a managerial power dedicated to the concentration of capital among an ever smaller fraction of elites, there is scant political value to the ideological production of an inclusive reality and of the relatively fixed, relatively durable reference points that sustain it. If power is no longer bound up in the (re)production of mass social entities, why pursue the quite extraordinary labor of fabricating the world in which such an entity can exist? Why not accede to the proliferation of (un)realities in which people live and aspire? At the same time, to suggest that the masses have been cut loose from an anchoring political reality is hardly to propose that they fall outside the managerial intentions of the state. Quite the contrary, from the hyper-production of polls to the exacerbated surveillance of the population and the elimination of legal protections and the rights of due process, the masses are being minutely and obsessively monitored.9 But the form of the state’s interest has shifted. The struggle is not for hearts and minds, but data sets: polling numbers, surveillance footage, browser histories, and the further reams of information that can be mined, assembled into so many profiles of public proclivities and public menace. The public called forth from the data streams—including the “electorate” emerged from the endless political polls—is, of course, perfectly unreal, a model of no actual or original thing.
Thus the incorporative political project of modernity has yielded to its obverse at the most fundamental level: political power no longer presents as the capacity to norm public sentiment, to bind the popular masses both broadly and deeply to a certain vision of the world and to specific forms and spheres of self-expression that will—supposedly—secure their place within it. Instead, it seems to me, we are moving into a context where the interests of the ruling elements are most aptly served by decomposing the social body and permitting us to dwell in whatever (un)realities of our own devising. Lawrence Grossberg has observed how citizenship is historically keyed to the conditions of wage labor and suggested how transformations in the value of labor have implications for the forms of political subjectivity. “If we are witnessing a revaluation of labor, then we most look also at this struggle in relation to the complex cultural economy through which labor has been articulated to identity,” he writes, and goes on to consider how citizenship has served historically as a site (one among several) for the compensatory self-realization of alienated labor (2000,70).10 Grossberg’s argument hinges on a claim that neoliberalism entails a “move from labor to money as the source of value” (2000, 66).11 Bracketing the more contentious elements of Grossberg’s analysis (his discussion of value detached from labor opens on a much larger debate about the status of production and productive labor in an information economy), I note simply that the mobility of capital permits a fundamental disregard for the reproduction of the worker (there are always more workers somewhere), that the ranks of the formally employed are receding not expanding, and that credit rather than income is now the engine of consumption. From this vantage, one might well anticipate that the impetus to an incorporative political project—formal equality as (self-)proprietors palliating material inequalities of property—has dissipated. As Grossberg reminds us, the citizen-worker is an articulation for the recruitment of a population to the ranks of wage labor and unravels at the point where populations compete for the relative privilege of their exploitation.
At the core of the novel political situation Taibbi intuits, signaled to all appearances by the exacerbated lunacy of the electorate, is the complex de-linking of the terms that comprise an organizing historical relay between personhood, property, and rights. Along those lines, I have been arguing that the lunacy signposts, not the pathology of the electorate but a transformation in the ends and practices of government, are expressed (among other ways) in the decommissioning of a realist politics that aims at the production of a readable world. In such a world, derealization is a critical practice: we defect from the hegemonic view; we demonstrate that it is merely a view, and an inadequate one at that. But what is effective political protest when power operates through derealization—not by conscripting our participation in a reigning world view, but by rescinding our reference points and scattering us to the winds of fear, loathing, delirium, and despair?
In this way, I come more or less to the inverse of Wendy Brown’s conclusion that neoliberalism represents a new calculus of political reason, an economic rationality that comes to pervade the domain of the political, introducing new criteria of legitimacy (the state’s legitimacy is now tied to “sustaining and foster[ing] the market”) and “eras[ing] the discrepancy between economic and moral behavior by configuring morality entirely as a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences [such that] . . . the rationally calculating individual bears full responsibility for the consequences of his or her action, no matter how severe the constraints” (2005, 41, 42). Brown is emphatic that neoliberalism is a normative enterprise, because it understands economic rationality as having to be cultivated: “Importantly, then, neoliberalism involves a normative rather than an ontological claim about the pervasiveness of economic rationality and it advocates the institution building, policies, and discourse development appropriate to such a claim. Neoliberalism is a constructivist project: it does not presume the ontological givenness of a thoroughgoing economic rationality for all domains of society but rather takes as its task the development, dissemination, and institutionalization of such a rationality” (2005, 40–41). So Brown situates neoliberalism as supplanting one form of (bourgeois) normative political culture with another, predicated on cost-benefit analysis and its allied values: efficiency, accountability, optimization (best practices), risk-assessment, and so forth. Brown’s abject citizen, then, belongs to this new norm—even as her sensibilities are assessed by reference to the norms of an older liberalism in which she has been unschooled.
In many respects, Brown has proven one of the most acute and tenacious critics of the articulation of capital to government we call neoliberalism, expanding Michel Foucault’s rather sketchy—and sometimes cryptic—insights into an elaborated understanding of neoliberal discourses and institutional practices. But inasmuch as neoliberalism forwards a vision of the social as a series of self-optimizing entities, it engenders not a new form of normative culture, but one in which the fragmentation and multiplication of social and political (un)realities are normalized. Neoliberal “values” may be ubiquitous, as Brown suggests, but they have no normative social referent: Costly or beneficial for whom? Accountable to what supervision? Efficient in relation to what parameters? The answers to these crucial questions about the social meaning and effects of neoliberal values are left largely to the determination of the particular organizations or individuals who embody them, so that neoliberalism in fact dissolves the very concept of the norm, of the disciplinary measure to which the ensemble of social agents and institutions adheres. Implementing control without discipline, neoliberalism cedes to a disincorporated “us” the task of deciding in what domain (lived collectively with which others? oriented to what ends?) we tally up the cost and benefits, reap the fruits of our “good choices,” or the burden of our bad ones. The capacity to construct the environment in which we reckon our gains and losses is now the mark of social agency.
We might consider the difference between a normative and a normalized function by reference to the operations of the market from which, as Foucault and Brown alike contend, a generalized neoliberal rationality derives. As Doug Henwood observes, “The U.S. financial system performs dismally at its advertised task, that of efficiently directing society’s savings toward their optimal investment pursuits. The system is stupefyingly expensive, gives terrible signals for the allocation of capital, and has surprisingly little to do with real investment,” by which Henwood means investment in actual productive enterprise. “Over the long haul,” he notes, “almost all corporate capital expenditures are internally financed, through profits and depreciation allowances” (1998, 3). Simply put—and surely, by now, the point seems too apparent to belabor—by any general social measure, markets are utterly inefficient and dysfunctional. At the same time, of course, they have shown themselves remarkably efficient at the upward redistribution of social wealth, though this endeavor has required the effective privatization of government institutions, which now function to indemnify major market players against the (otherwise) market-shattering effects of their financial speculations. Markets can be deemed “efficient” only if their task is to concentrate capital at the very apex of the social pyramid and if the accounting is performed within the customized (un)reality of the too-big-to-fail corporation that has absorbed (among other things) the agencies and institutions designed to regulate its doings. So we see the spectacular bonuses meted out to the architects of the mortgage crisis that immiserated millions, because in the virtual reality of the corporate boardroom, their choices were “rational” and “beneficial.” But such a measure of “reason” and “benefit” will not travel—and indeed, from most any other vantage within the social field, the speculators’ choices were both lunatic and criminal. To be sure, one need only remark the penetration of the discourse of economic reason into the spaces of everyday life—the workplace, the school, the neighborhood association, the support group, and so on—to concede its normality. But “efficiency” and “optimization” and the further array of neoliberal values commit us to no standards of self-government—to no general, organizing distinctions between legitimacy and illegitimacy, virtue and shame, productivity and waste, decency and perversity. Rather, the rule of the cost-benefit analysis seems to urge the proliferation of computational environments: it is not the consolidating ethos of a social world, but an invitation to devise the frame of reference in which one’s returns may be maximized.
Inasmuch as neoliberalism is about the extension of market logics to other domains of life, it seems worth lingering for a moment longer on the relation of the market itself to the “real world,” which seems now, as I am arguing, in retreat within the contexts of political life, certainly (though doubtless not exclusively) in the United States. This is, of course, a huge and contested question, usually framed as a debate about the relative importance of “immaterial” versus “material” production (is information capital bound up in material production? are services a separate sector from goods?) or sometimes, relatedly, in terms of the relation of finance to materiality. In a rejoinder to Fredric Jameson, Henwood provides a ready gloss on the terms of this debate, worth citing at length even though, or rather precisely because, he tends to frame both his own and Jameson’s positions in starkly polarized terms. “All the weightless nostrums are represented” in Jameson’s “Culture and Finance Capital,” Henwood complains, and goes on to synthesize and rebut Jameson’s claims as follows:
[Jameson refer to] “profit without production”—in fact, the disappearance of production, except for “the two prodigious American industries of food and entertainment”—and “globalization,” defined “rather as a kind of cyberspace in which money capital has reached its ultimate dematerialization,” as messages which pass instantly from one nodal point to another across the former globe, the former material world. Globalization has become the triumph of nothingness, and finance capital becomes “deterritorialized,” and “like cyberspace can live on its own internal metabolism and circulate without any reference to any older type of content. . . .” It seems very old old-fashioned to point out a few facts about the apparently weightless, placeless capital thoroughly unmoored from the real. The world money of the 19th century, gold, though quite tangible, circulated without the imprint of any state; today’s nonphysical monies need state entities like central banks and the IMF to guarantee and regulate them. . . . The alleged importance of the entertainment industries is a staple of both left and right discourse, with extravagant claims made about their rank in production and trade, but it’s just not true. Motion pictures account for about 0.3% of U.S. GDP—half as large as the primary metal industries. . . . And though financial markets seem very fanciful, appearing detached not only from production but even from social relations, they are actually institutions that consolidate ownership and control among the very rich of the world. . . . Much of the damage done to Southeast Asia in 1997 and 1998 and to Mexico in 1994 and 1995 was done by allegedly weightless financial flows. (2003, 27–28)
Henwood’s claims boil down to three: (1) production of real commodities still matches or outstrips the production of what we might call, following MitsuhiroYoshimoto, the production of image-commodities; (2) the more capital is virtualized—circulates in the form of so much information—the greater the importance of mediating state and private institutions to control the flow of money; and last but certainly not least (3) that “weightless,” virtualized capital has very tangible material effects (not least the capacity to prostrate entire populations).
Henwood argues an important and in some respects indisputable counter both to the celebratory accounts of information capital and to critical accounts, like Jameson’s, oriented too thoroughly, perhaps, to the discernment of the new. At the same time, the deregulation of the marketplace over the last several decades, alongside the emergence of techniques of flexible accumulation, both enables and reflects a sea change in the organization and workings of capital that is too thoroughly downplayed in Henwood’s emphasis on fundamental continuities. And ironically, much of what Henwood himself so meticulously documents (in his books Wall Street and After the New Economy, as in his newsletter, Left Business Observer) is the explosion of intricate new instruments of financial capital and their effects. If profit is never entirely divorced from production, as Henwood would insist, at the same time the financial operators evince no concern to protect the profitability of the “underlying” industry (such as internet commerce; housing). Just the reverse, this form of accumulation depends on adroit temporal manipulation and the extraction of surplus value before the swift and inevitable collapse in the value of the commodity. Not only is financial investment rarely routed to new productive enterprise, in other words, but it also operates in ways fundamentally hostile to the health of productive industries. While financial capital remains linked to production, the cadre of financial managers appears to operate on a plane quite remote from the interests of producers, a situation intensified by the mind-bending number and complexity of the financial “instruments” devised to manage time—nearly a hundred invented in the past century, ranging from “puttable/adjustable tender bonds” to “synthetic convertible debt” to the now infamous “collateralized mortgage obligations.”12 Indeed, as Henwood observes, speculation now takes the form of increasingly byzantine bets, and bets on bets, that suggest, “at the risk of anthropomorphizing social conventions, how money capital longs for exotic forms” (1998, 49). Financial capital does not flow weightlessly through virtual spaces that connect to nothing else, to be sure, but the cost-benefit analysis can be reckoned as if it did, which is to say, that the social relations of capital are redrawn as the financiers declare autonomy, operating without reference to interests besides their own.13 Finance capital proceeds less and less as if the monies wagered were a representation of “real” values, in other words, which signals a change, not in the nature of value, as though it were finally become an ethereal thing—bubbles still burst, after all—but rather a change in the social and political organization of capital. Historically, it is the danger of explosive devaluations that supplies the incentive for internal and especially external regulation of the financial market. The contemporary unleashing of finance capital follows not simply from technologies of instantaneous transfer (communication speed-up that opens the gateway to the creation of new financial instruments via new forms of sensitivity to time) but from the relation of capital to government, which is transformed from a regulative entity into a means for the indemnification of speculators via the private appropriation of public funds. If neoliberalism represents the extension of market logics to other domains, as is commonly asserted, then we do well to reflect that the market is never a discrete entity, but politically structured from the get-go and so anticipate that the (politically informed) derealization of market processes correlates with the (economically informed) derealization of political processes.14
The ascendance of a fully predatory capitalism, in other words, means the proliferation of the derealized worlds in which it operates. Politics is no longer the art of norming mass sentiment to confirm to the priorities and agendas of the dominant bloc—indeed, of a bloc that dominates precisely because it can produce the masses as the political referent for its policies. Politics becomes instead the art of running simulations, of redistributing the political life of the social body along so many nonintersecting planes. These simulations do not float free of materiality, of course, but they are not the re-presentation of what they must, therefore, maintain as a pre-constituted (referential) world. The simulation reverses the hierarchy, as the copy precedes the original. In this scenario, identities have subjects and iconographies have social movements. I argue that this is both the outcome and the condition of a situation in which capital has freed itself of the requirement to profit societies, just as government emancipates itself from the requirement to represent a sovereign people. To be sure, capital has never profited whole societies, but rather schooled societies in the ethos of property and accumulation; similarly, the institutions of the state have never represented populations, but rather cultivated that version of the national people that is represented and representable. But capital and state were themselves committed to the logic of these normative projects: they were bound by the requirement that they serve—appear to serve—at least this version of national prosperity and the common good. In the contemporary moment, the effort to consolidate, to constitute relatively homogeneous mass bodies, yields to a different organization of power, one in which the masses are essentially cut loose, relinquished to whatever strategies of economic survival and whatever political enthusiasms, even as and precisely because they are also minutely and constantly surveilled, profiled, risk-assessed, and interned.15 This is not to deny that political discourse still traffics in tropes of national self-realization and collective futurity—only to insist that political institutions and practices in the United States no longer have much of anything to do with the production and reproduction of this organic social world as referent.
This is the basis of the split between the Reichs, Stiglitzes, and Soroses and the neoliberal profiteers. Advancing a liberal critique of capital from the standpoint of capital, as I suggest in chapter 2, the former are appalled at the complete disappearance of the long-term calculation dismayed at the ethos of disaster capitalism, the repudiation of a stabilizing, incorporative agenda, and the volatile consequences of abjecting billions of human beings. It is fascinating to watch how, in the context of the present emergencies, they appear, if not as Leftists, then at least as allies. Their curious repositioning on the political map suggests the difficulties and the perils of confronting derealization without nostalgia for the very institutions, touchstones, and protocols that we regarded, not so long ago, with quite considerable skepticism: rule of law; political reason, consensus, hegemony. Arguably, the left position in modernity is predominantly anti-realist: it refuses the givenness of the world, challenges the norms of political reason, pits itself against power’s incorporative aim (even as it pursues its own mimetic, incorporative agendas). If these are the critical aspirations in and through which the Left has been formed, how do we approach the contemporary moment, in which the repertoire of left opposition is repurposed as strategies of economic and political domination? Lawrence Grossberg presses a similar concern, suggesting how “ironically, North Atlantic Modernity is being challenged most significantly . . . not by its explicit critics on the Left, but by neoliberal and neoconservative apparatuses attempting to restructure the forces of domination and exploitation themselves,” and he goes on to recommend that “the cultural Left think beyond its current project of deconstructing the modern liberal subject within a theory of difference” (2000, 60). Likewise pondering the Left’s ambivalent attachment to liberalism as object of critique, Wendy Brown cites the effects of losing what one never loved and cautions how “incorporating the death of a loathed object to which one was nonetheless attached often takes the form of acting out the loathed qualities of the object” (2005, 54). If the aim is something other than reasserting the value of liberal democracy in a capitalist order, she suggests, then the “idea that leftists must automatically defend liberal political values when they are on the ropes, while sensible from a liberal perspective, does not facilitate a left challenge to neoliberalism” (2005, 55). This is, perhaps, more easily said than done: How does one not agitate for rule of law in the face of indefinite detention, or murder by executive fiat, or corporate impunity for fraud, all of which have become status quo? How can one not insist on the world of demonstrable reality and rational argumentation when answering to the bizarre rantings of Tea Party fomenters? What would it mean to adopt a critical stance on the derealization of political life that did not take the form of advancing “objective” (real world) political claims? And above all, perhaps, what would it mean to imagine opposition outside the terms of hegemonic (and anti-hegemonic) power—opposition in the absence of a (re)constituted “people”?
One part of my aspiration for this chapter has been to show that the ground is shifting under us in ways that make it difficult to discern the possibilities for opposition. This is not to abdicate the task, but simply to recognize the radically unsettled terrain on which the elaboration of new forms of oppositional politics will transpire. How do we imagine practices of contestation that do not seem to depend in one way or another on resurrecting the forms of power we know to contest? In this section, I turn to Bruce Sterling’s 1998 novel Distraction to suggest how the novel’s speculative future provides an optic for thinking about the decomposition of the national body politic and the proliferation of self-styled autonomous political agents without nostalgia for the anterior organization of political modernity. Although ultimately, the novel’s vision of an emergent political functionality seems to rest on the reintegration of a national government responsible to a recuperated notion of the broader, social good, Distraction lingers on the improvisational politics of its protagonists in their derealized present, which it manages to appreciate as something other than degraded.
Distraction envisions a near future (mid-twenty-first-century) United States in which many of the features of our own historical moment persist in amplified or fully elaborated form: the economy has crashed, due in part to the pirating of intellectual property; entire categories of professional labor—from programmers to dentists—have been rendered obsolete by technological advances, and joblessness is rampant and endemic; masses of the unemployed survive on the margins, as squatters, scavengers, and casual labor; the infrastructure of entire regions has collapsed (Louisiana is described as “underwater,” the West as “on fire”); the perennial crisis has enabled the emergence of an entire system of ad-hoc governance, while the electoral process and the established structures of government persist, in the form of pure spectacle; polling is instantaneous, unceasing, and operates, like TV ratings, to constitute political celebrities and fan cultures. As the narrator observes, “The country now had two national governments, the original, halting, not-quite-superseded legal government, and the spasmodic, increasingly shrill declarations of the State-of-Emergency Cliques” (1998, 120).
In this world where, as one character puts it, “Money just doesn’t need human beings anymore,” a significant portion of the population has opted out of a money economy altogether (1998, 256). Confronted with the privatization of public space, the merciless invasion of interior life by consumer culture, and the pervasive loss of income, Americans by the millions develop new modes of self-organization along “lines . . . deeply orthogonal” to the established culture:
Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities. (1998, 368–369)
One segment of this abandoned population becomes migratory. “Nomadism had once been the linchpin of human existence,” the narrator muses; “it was settled life that formed the technological novelty. Now technology had changed its nonexistent mind” (1998, 369). When “the American people simply ceased to behave,” many find prospects for subsistence and sociality in perpetual mobility. “They gathered to publically burn their licenses, chop up their charge cards, and hit the road. The proles considered themselves the only free Americans” (1998, 369). By appropriating biotech that can fabricate nutrition bars from scrub grass, weeds, and other valueless materials, the novel’s nomad proles live off roadside detritus, which they also use to fabricate the phones and laptops central to their wired, moneyless reputation economy (a nongeographical, networked-based status culture, in which people vie for “trust ratings”).16 “These were people who had rallied in a hoard and marched right off the map. They had tired of a system that had offered them nothing, so they had simply invented their own” (1998, 61). If the reversion to nomadism most emphatically signposts the dissolution of the social body in the novel, Sterling’s representation of the nomad societies also insists that disaggregation is not the same thing as disorder. The proles are “a lot better organized than the government is,” one character points out. “Organization is the only thing they’ve got!” (1998, 159).
Another segment of this prole population dwells in the interstices of urban space, by commandeering existing infrastructure and repurposing technologies. The resulting transformation of urban space is particularly advanced in Washington, D.C.:
Nonviolent noncooperation had reached unheard-of strategic and tactical heights in the American capital. Its functional districts were privatized and guarded by monitors and swarms of private thugs, but huge sections of the city had surrendered to the squatters. . . . In many neighborhoods of Washington, the division of streets and houses had simply dissolved. Entire city blocks were abandoned to the protestors, who had installed their own plumbing, water systems, and power generators. Streets were permanently barricaded, swathed in camou nets and rain-streaked plastic sheeting. (1998, 160)
Elsewhere in the city, the squatters have appropriated plans originally developed by NASA with an eye to Mars colonization. This “most remarkable of Washington’s autonomen” groups, known simply as “martians,” answer the “studied nonreaction to their crazy grievances” by “resolv[ing] to act as if the federal government did not exist,” meaning, among other things, that they treat the city’s natural and built environment as so much common “raw material.” Excavating beneath the Potomac, the squatters dehydrate the soil, compact it into bricks, and “construct an endless series of archways, tunnels, and kivas” (1998, 161). “Now NASA’s ingenuity had borne amazing fruit and the streets of Washington were lavishly bumped and measled with martian settlements. Slums of compacted dirt, all glue and mazy airlocks, climbed straight up the walls of buildings, where they clung like the nests of mud-daubing wasps. There were excavation hills three stories high near Union Station, and even Georgetown was subjected to repeated subterranean rumblings” (1998, 161).
This new urban geography figures saliently in the novel when its central protagonist, Oscar, a political campaign manager turned Senate staffer, arrives in the capital for a committee meeting; he finds that the federal office building where the meeting is scheduled has “fallen into the hands of squatters,” who, in addition to seizing the property, have fully digitized its contents, by installing a system that logs the presence and movements of people, animals, and household objects (1998, 162). Oscar admires how this universal tagging “made the contents of the building basically theftproof,” though one effect of this “digital socialism” is to turn “inside out” the formerly privatized arenas of domestic human life, so that “bugged and safety-tagged” children live in hallways replete with toys, tools, and animals. But the squatters’ seizure has not interrupted the building’s operation as a venue of government. Arriving in Room 358, an apparent “sculptor’s studio, reconstructed from a fire-blackened set of office cubicles,” Oscar encounters the committee’s secretary and tech support, who arrive in prole disguise, “their hair . . . dyed blue, their faces . . . streaked with nomad warpaint,” business attire concealed by dirty caftans and overalls. They proceed to revamp the space for a teleconference, in which the handfull of on-site personnel who have arranged secure transportation to the meeting site confer electronically with staffers elsewhere. In the representation of the parasitical martian structures, the adaptation of public city space for human inhabitation, and the dual purpose socialist tenement–federal office building, Distraction envisions not the simple transfer of city space to a surplus population and the retreat of the powerbrokers to secure ex-urban enclaves, nor, indeed, the descent of planned urban environments into disorder (the urban proles are no less rigorously organized than their nomad counterparts), but rather a new urban infrastructure in which multiple, autonomous actors construct discrete, customized social worlds within adjacent or sometimes coterminous physical spaces.
Politics bears to established structures of governance in this world something of the same relation that the martian settlements bear to established civic infrastructure: an eruptive bumping and measling of political designs across the residual landscape of modern political infrastructures. The novel opens on the successful conclusion of Alcott Bambakias’s campaign for the U.S. Senate under Oscar’s savvy management; yet election to this dysfunctional and largely irrelevant body leaves Bambakias casting about for opportunities to enact the public political presence forged in the campaign. In a seemingly random series of events, Oscar, en route to East Texas to visit a federal science laboratory, reports to Bambakias about his travels in the backcountry, including an email on the predicament of a Louisiana Air Force Base that has lost its federal funding. Facing lack of pay and supplies, including water and heat, desperate base personnel have road-blocked the nearest interstate and staged a “bake sale,” extorting hefty ransoms from hapless motorists in return for passage and French pastries. Bambakias seizes on this particular manifestation of the government’s pervasive and advanced collapse and declares himself on hunger strike until the base’s federal funding is restored. The brilliance of the gesture, as Oscar grows to appreciate, is its apparent rejection of a merely gestural, image-bound politics. “The Cambridge PR team had certainly done a thorough job surveilling the fasting Senator,” Oscar observes. “Blood pressure, heartbeat, temperature, calorie consumption, borborygmus, bile production—there was no possible doubt about the raw authenticity of his hunger strike. The man’s entire corpus had become public domain. Whenever Bambakias had a sip of his famine apple juice, a forest of monitors twitched and heaved across the country” (1998, 58). The protest proves as ineffectual as its target is arbitrary: federal funding is not restored, and the base is eventually commandeered by nomad proles, acting for Louisiana’s rogue governor, Green Huey. Meanwhile, the emotionally fragile senator-elect succumbs under the pressure of fasting to full-blown bipolar disorder, to the point where his own chief of staff bluntly describes him as “toast.” But a dissociated mental state is no impediment to the accumulation of political capital. “It’s true—he’s had a mental breakdown,” Oscar concedes. “This is the problem: he starved himself half to death in a sincere protest, and now he’s lost his mind. But our keyword here isn’t ‘crazy.’ Our keywords are ‘sincere’ and ‘protest’” (1998, 229). And true to Oscar’s appraisal, Bambakias’s iconic appeal rises as his orientation to reality erodes. Responding to a colleague who has asked whether the senator’s condition might be stabilized with continued use of anti-depressants, Oscar enthuses:
“Well, the treatments make great media copy. There’s a huge Bambakias medical fandom happening, ever since his hunger strike, really. . . . They got their own sites and feeds. . . . Lots of get-well email, home mental-health remedies, oddsmaking on the death-watch. . . . It’s a classic grass roots phenomenon. You know, T-shirts, yard signs, coffee mugs, fridge magnets. . . . I dunno, it’s getting kind of out of hand.” (1998, 245)
Bambakias’s medical fandom is “grass roots” in precisely the way that Obama’s 2008 campaign was “grass roots:” not because it stands for a popular mobilization of ordinary citizens who have discovered in the senator a representative of their perceived political interests, but because it comprises a virtual arena of political feeling to which ordinary citizens are drawn. (In the novel, these feelings are calibrated to the spectacle of hunger, dissociation, and bodily wasting, in which regard, of course, the similarity of Bambakias’s fandom to Obama’s “movement” ends.) From this perspective, Oscar’s reference to “grass roots” mobilization is not cynical, but registers with indifference the shift from representative to simulacral politics that appears already completed and mundane in Distraction’s near future. Bambakias’s mania and depression represent nothing, but they infuse a small, self-referential zone of affective communion in which his fandom has opted to dwell.
One meaning of the word “distraction,” then, is supplied by Oscar’s security chief, Kevin, an inveterate surveillance freak who laments the effects of encompassing surveillance:
“We have no decency as a people and a nation, Oscar. We went too far with this technology, we lost our self-respect. Because this is media, man. It’s evil, prying, spying media. But we want it and use it anyway, because we think we’ve got to be informed. We’re compelled to pay total attention to everything.” (1998, 406–407, my emphasis)
In this saturated and saturating mediascape, politics is the competition for attention, a struggle against distraction (immersion in information flows and the diffusion of attention it entails) that proceeds via distraction (siphoning off attention into relatively discrete, relatively autonomous sites, feeds, and networks). The other meaning of distraction follows: there is no distinction—no ground for distinguishing—between political substance and political smoke, the “real” aim and the “diversionary” tactic. As Bambakias’s hunger strike suggests, the political objective is an appearance, while the cultivation of the diversionary opportunity is itself the political yield. Along these lines, the major plot development of the novel concerns Oscar’s phased takeover of the Texas laboratory for purposes that are, at best, fluid and emergent over the course of the narrative. Initially, his interest in the lab appears vaguely linked to Oscar’s new position as a staffer on the Senate science committee, on which Bambakias is also slated to serve. So Oscar travels to the site on a kind of reconnaissance mission, though whether unofficially scouting the situation for Bambakias or investigating the facility so as to enhance his own prestige on the committee remains unclear. Barely arrived in Buna, with only the faintest sense of how the laboratory operates or the kinds of research it supports, Oscar announces to his assistant, Pelicanos, the beginning of a new “campaign”:
“It’s going to be just like the campaign was. First, we’re going to lowball expectations, because nobody will really believe we have a serious chance here. But then we’re going to succeed on such a level—we’re going to exceed expectations to such a huge extent—we’re gonna bring so much firepower into this campaign that we just blow the opposition away.”
Pelicanos smiled. “That’s you all over, Oscar.”
Oscar lifted one finger. “Here’s the plan. We find the major players here, and we find out what they want, and we cut deals. We get our people excited, and we get their people confused. And in the end, we just out-organize anyone who tries to stop us. We just outwork them, and we swarm on them from angles they would never, ever expect, and never, ever stop, and we just beat them into the ground!” (1998, 35)
This speech is remarkable in a number of ways, not least because nothing anyone in the novel has said or insinuated suggests that Bambakias, the Science Committee, or any other “people” (“theirs” or “ours”) actually have “expectations” for Oscar’s exploratory visit, much less criteria for measuring “success.” Oscar’s determination to mobilize has no recognizable objective; the rallying cry precedes the cause, as the point of the mobilization is to generate the field in which an objective might (eventually) be imagined. In this sense, Oscar operates essentially like the nomad proles, bypassing (the elements of) a system that offers nothing in order to invent a situation where a tally of gains and losses becomes newly possible. Like the nomad proles, as well, Oscar traffics in “organization”—the management of people and resources, to be sure, but most fundamentally, the management of information that makes for the accelerated and intensified organization—the “swarming”—that gives Oscar the edge in this oddly evacuated and gratuitous “campaign.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the outcome of this operation is an alliance of research scientists and nomad proles, which Oscar creates when he enlists a nomad group, the Moderators, to help his faction seize and occupy the lab. “Am I the only person who sees the obvious here?” Oscar asks when the scientists balk at the presence of painted nomads wielding laptops made from straw. “You people have amazing commonalities. . . . They live exactly like you live—by their reputations. You are America’s two most powerful noncommercial societies. Your societies are both based on reputation, respect, and prestige” (1998, 372–373). The alliance is possible, in other words, insofar as both scientists and proles operate within nonmonetary, trust-based social networks that can be therefore be made to communicate with each other, at least for the purpose of organizing economic and political life in the Buna lab. The outcome of Oscar’s machinations turns out to be an interesting disposition of people and information, about which the operative question is not “What does it represent?” or even “How can it act in and on the world?” but rather, “Is it functional?” “How long do you expect all this to last?” a drug-stabilized Bambakias asks Oscar on a visit to Buna toward the novel’s end. “This?” asks Oscar, evasively. “Whatever it is that you’ve created here,” Bambakias retorts. “What is it, exactly? Is it a political movement? Maybe it’s just one big street party” (1998, 473). Bambkias proceeds with escalating hostility:
“When one network meets another that’s set up along different lines, they feud. They kill each other. . . . Now you’ve made these people aware of their mutual interest with the scientific research community. Another group of people who basically live outside the state, outside of economics. . . . We no longer hope that science will give us utopia or even a real improvement. Science just adds more factors in the mix, and makes everything more unstable. We’ve given up on our dispossessed, too. We have no illusion we can employ them, or keep them docile with bio-bread or more cyber-circuses. And now you’ve brought these two groups together and they’ve become a real coalition. . . . What now, Oscar? What are they going to do now? What becomes of the rest of us?” (1998, 475)
Bambakias worries about this “coalition” because he is apprehensive about the appearance of a new autonomy. The question of what this coalition will “do” is not so much a question of what it will do to “the rest of us”; the concern is precisely what will become of the rest of us left on our own, living in proximity but without organizational ties to either proles or scientists. Yet tellingly, as Bambakias’s own account concedes, “we” have already given up on the dispossessed, as well as on the brokers of scientific progress; from this perspective, his reproach to Oscar is not that he has engineered additional defections from what is left of the nation-state, but rather that he has discerned in the common form of proles’ and scientists’ estrangement the possibility of configuring a radically new particularity that cuts across (seemingly entrenched) class lines. Oscar is put out by Bambakias’s interrogation—“Hell, I don’t know!” he protests—which seems to hold him to norms of political calculation that are no longer meaningful, norms geared to the reproduction of a generalized (non-network-specific) “we.”
Distraction envisions the practice of political life after the dissolution of a national people—after the collapse of the civil and governmental institutions that sustained it—and on this new terrain, Oscar recognizes, politics is no longer about securing the form of a mass political subject. His task as an organizer—someone who manages “campaigns”—is not to organize particularities so as to stake a position in a broader social field, but simply to organize particularities according to whatever internal calculus—whatever ethos and whatever protocols—will enable their political self-elaboration. In Oscar’s preferred formulation, the point is to determine what is “doable,” not “doable” within a pre-established political order of licit and illicit action, but “doable” insofar as it imposes some way of reckoning value, of marking a political good in the absence of any encompassing institutionalized determination of progress or prosperity or the reasoned behavior of political subjects to these ends. Even as Oscar appears to operate within the residual infrastructure of national government, his understanding of political organizing finally aligns him with the nomad proles and others who bump and measle the ruined terrain of the nation-state with smaller collectives: hordes, occupations, or fandoms living by “orthogonal” principles of communal self-realization and civic virtue.
So it is notable that we find Oscar in the novel’s opening chapters baffled by and thoroughly fixated on a particular prole action, captured on video, which he rewatches again and again: the ransacking of a federal bank in Worcester, Massachusetts. The action strikes him as “absolute madness”—the sudden coalescence of a mob, its bare-handed destruction of the bank, then equally sudden disappearance. Sometime later, he discovers that his newly hired security specialist, Kevin, was present at the event:
“Who ordered all that?”
“Nobody. Nobody ever orders it. That was a fed bank, they were running cointelpro out of it. The word bubbled up from below, some heavy activism accreted, they wasp-swarmed the place. And once they trashed it, they all ducked and scattered. You’d never find any ‘orders,’ or anyone responsible. You’d never find the software. That thing is a major-league hit-server. It’s so far underground that it doesn’t need eyes anymore.”
“Why did you do that, Kevin? Why would you risk doing a crazy thing like that?”
“I did it for the trust ratings. And because, well, they stank.” Kevin’s eyes glittered. “Because the people who rule us are spooks, they lie and they cheat and they spy. The sons of bitches are rich, they’re in power. They hold cards over all of us, but they still have to screw people over the sneaky way. They had it coming. I’d do it again, if my feet were a little better.” (1998, 258)
For Oscar, the fascination of this episode lies in the manifestation of a new kind of political agency, coordinated, purposeful—in fact, quite remarkably so—but acting on a fully internalized set of priorities that seem not to communicate with the broader world, even as it rearranges that world in material ways. From the first, the Worcester mob intrudes its difference on Oscar’s rationalist understanding of politics as chess, “curing him” of the metaphor. “Because this phenomenon on the tape was a not a chess piece,” Oscar thinks. “It was on the public chessboard all right, but it wasn’t a rook or a bishop. It was a wet squid, a swarm of bees. It was a new entity that pursued its own orthogonal agenda and vanished into the silent interstices of a deeply networked and increasingly nonlinear society” (1998, 4). Operating in a world of disaggregated social fractions, Oscar is both transfixed by what he rightly understands as the novelty of this new entity, and yet remains palpably nostalgic for “national reform . . . so we can have a system with a decent role for everyone” (1998, 256). As we encounter him in the first half of the novel, he holds to the necessity of a controlling ideological vision vested in political office, even as his own “campaigns” seem increasingly to operate otherwise. Debating Kevin’s suggestion of enlisting the Moderators to manage the Buna lab, Oscar initially baulks: “It’s not doable,” he tells Kevin, “because there are no brakes. There are no brakes because I can’t control the course of events. I don’t have the authority. I’m just a Senate staffer!” (1998, 283). “That’s never stopped you so far,” Kevin counters, provoking Oscar’s shrill rejoinder: “Well, I don’t like your idea because it’s bad ideology. I’m a Federal Democrat. We’re a serious-minded Reform party. We’re not a revolutionary vanguard” (1998, 283). Of course, Oscar goes on to orchestrate precisely the alliance of proles and scientists that his ideological commitments to national reconstruction would preclude. Along these lines, the novel can be read as marking an evolution in Oscar’s feeling for the “doable,” which migrates from its original moorings in a kind of realpolitik that sits mildly askew of his reformist sensibilities into more fundamentally autonomist waters.
In this process, the “doable” shifts from a real-world calculation bound to the idea of a general subjection to dominant powers into a simulacral political calculus geared to the creation of self-referential political worlds. As Oscar perceives, the attack on the bank is not a move on a public game board. The proles (or rather the prole server) target(s) the bank as a matter of deep-rooted political orientation—the fed bank is antithetical to prole constructions of value—but not as part of a coordinated effort to bring down the edifice of finance capital, or to oust the spooks from power (though no doubt, the proles would be happy enough to see those things occur). The attack on the bank is not a bid for political advantage in an integrated social field, but a moment of communal self-elaboration—not about opening a front in a war on autocratic power, but about testing and developing the strength of the prole network, by marking its capacity to exist and operate on its own terms within the very material precincts of the system it leaves behind. The attack is a declaration of autonomy by a collective that has fled the ruined nation, emigrated not to another geographic location, but to an alternate, noncommunicating social plane. As he learns how to understand the Worcester video and the redrawing of the political field it indexes, Oscar’s sense of the “doable” veers from a realist orientation to an already constituted world governed by relatively fixed, relatively durable rationalities to an appreciation that other, perhaps better worlds are possible in the derealized spaces of autonomous organizing. In this way, Distraction traces and elucidates the connections between the ruination of political modernity and the derealization of political life as it comes to transpire on a set of nonintersecting social planes.
While Oscar’s trajectory in the novel pivots on his growing comprehension and embrace of prole sensibilities, interestingly, at the novel’s end, Sterling can envision only a scenario in which this political landscape of functionally autonomous, antagonist collectivities has been set on the path to reintegration: through the device of a staged military conflict with (of all things) the Netherlands (one of the more strident of this future world’s sinking nations), the president, a Native American lumber baron from Colorado named Two Feathers, wrests control from the emergency government and institutes the “New Normalcy”:
A new tax structure would soak the ultra-rich and come down brutally on carbon-dioxide production. Derelict and underused buildings would be nationalized en masse, then turned over to anyone willing to homestead them. Derelict cities and ghost towns—and there were many such, especially in the West—would be scraped clean from the face of the earth and replanted in fast-growing trees. Roadblocking was henceforth to be considered an act of piracy and to be punished without mercy by roving gangs of the CDIA [Civil Defense Intelligence Agency], who, since they were all former roadblockers of the most avid temperament, could be expected to know just how to put an end to the practice. . . . A constitutional amendment was offered to create a fourth branch of government for American citizens whose “primary residences were virtual networks.” America’s eight hundred and seven federal police agencies would be streamlined into four. (1998, 485)
In a move that exactly duplicates Oscar’s own, Two Feathers assembles the new, federal, all-volunteer Civil Defense Intelligence Agency (CDIA), from the gangs of nomad proles, who provide expert security against the very sort of dangers they themselves present to the operations of a re-emergent centralized power and, inasmuch as they work without pay, place no burden on the federal budget. Crucially, Two Feathers’s national reorganization is marked by the political resuscitation of realist politics. To this end, he attempts to recruit Oscar as a “White House congressional liaison to interface with the current party structure.” In particular, he proposes, Oscar will “shake the radicals and crazies out, and agglomerate them into an up-wing.” Oscar queries:
“I’m not down-wing, sir?”
“Oscar, there is no down-wing without the up-wing. It doesn’t work unless I mold my own opposition. . . . The up-wing has to be brilliant. It has to be genuinely glamorous. It has to be visionary, and to almost make sense. And it has to never, ever quite work out in real life.” (1998, 517, my emphasis)
Yet at its best—and outside the imposition of this dubious closure—the novel discerns the terrain of a post-hegemonic politics, which it declines to frame, along the lines Brown suggests, as the citizenry’s political debasement. Less an allegory than an exercise in a more literal kind of world-building (Oscar’s America is not an uncanny elsewhere, but a meticulous elaboration of present forces in the direction of a possible future), Distraction aims to reckon with the prospects for political subjectivity after the demise of the popular sovereign and the atrophy of the institutions that were the condition of this entity’s historical emergence. In its attention to the hypermediated quality of life (in a word, to the “distraction”) that seems to foreclose the prospect of acting in and on “the real world,” the novel veers towards Taibbi’s preoccupation with the predominance of “escapist lunacy.” But it also, acutely, understands the derealization of political life as the effect of dissociated social and political worlds occupying coterminous geographic space, and the collapse of political modernity as a new condition of possibility.