A series of public events and conference meetings to remember and critically appraise the Soviet Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 struck a pessimistic tone. Having gathered in central Moscow in May 2018, dissidents and witnesses recalled a sense of futility in opposing a cruel machinery of the repressive state. Previously in a skype interview, Pavel Litvinov, one of the prominent participants in the protests, claimed that their gesture could not have had a positive outcome. The Soviet state machinery appeared too formidable, too entrenched to be toppled by a handful of protestors. In my view, dissident activities, especially when endorsed by Western politicians and activists, exerted some pressure on the Soviet government, but the Soviet Union broke down two decades later because of multiple causes and multiple events. Acts of protest mattered but they had no instrumental causality. For dissidents, a discrepancy between a projected action and an anticipated outcome of their political activities did not point to intentionality and its limits – their futility was designated as necessity to act which paradoxically cancelled hope for the outcomes of their action. Fifty years on, the futility of the past sacrifices for a political cause of freedom had acquired a new dimension; retrospectively, their protest seemed to have been vain in the face of rising Russian populism and political conservatism. Some expressed concerns that the shape of progressive politics had been unclear as their own efforts had discredited socialism as such without proffering an alternative. Mikhail Gorbachev was too unwell to attend the conference, but he dictated a letter in which he questioned the purpose and outcomes of what most imagine as a life of spectacular political achievement.

On a warm Friday evening, the last day of the conference, the tired panellists reminded each other of the ultimate value of political freedom, when their lacklustre conversation was disrupted by a young, handsome ‘troll’. Dressed in a slim-cut cobalt suit, with a quiff of dark brown hair, the young man stood up to argue that most people would choose prosperity and political stability over something so ephemeral as freedom. Russia, he insisted, has extraordinary reservoirs of oil that can bring petrodollars, so why bother with freedom?

‘Don’t answer him! He is a troll. He is United Russia (pro-Putin’s political party). Don’t engage with him; it’s pointless’.

The troll blushed and rushed outside. Five minutes later, several fire brigades arrived to investigate an anonymous phone call about fire in the building. While waiting outside on the pavement, everyone was convinced that the troll had made that phone call.

What counts as futility here? Although impossible to define in rigid terms, a sense of futility was apparent in the language of ineffective protest; political and personal sacrifices that, in hindsight, did not succeed in shaping a democratic polity; and, finally, the pointlessness of having a conversation with what most saw as a biased saboteur rather than a political adversary. Nevertheless, do these articulations of futility point to a kind of purposefulness beyond utility? Should they be accepted as a capitulation of the political? Or can we re-imagine the political outside its teleology?

Residual teleological thought in expert and folk political theories postulates the primacy of the end over means and is expressed in political notions of unity of action, historico-moral progress, moral personhood and agency (Levy, 2017).  More, teleology implies a kind of economic rationality. For example, the classical understanding of economic utility balances usefulness and productive expenditure and opposes waste and squandered energy (Bataille, 1970: 118).

In contrast, Bataille has suggested, some realms of human activity, such as art and literature, carry ‘the use value of excrement’ (1970:93), or more elegantly put, they are assigned ‘a value of intellectual waste products’ (Kennedy, 2018:117). A tenet of Bataille’s heterological aesthetics, wastefulness of art – its senseless and useless – is precisely what enables art to resist utilitarian appropriation (Kennedy, 2018:122). Like Bataille, many Russian conceptual artists valorised the autonomy and agency of marginal art that had no purpose other than gesturing to its own powerlessness, helplessness, and incapacity (Emery, 2017).

However, if experiments in art and literature seem apt to defy existing conceptual models, for example by taking phantasmal forms that cannot be found in the concrete empirical, how can we conceptualise the political outside purpose? It sounds as if to think about the political through futility is to re-invent the political outside itself. There are examples from philosophy, such as Alan Badiou’s emancipatory politics that is predicated on sovereignty without purpose, on self-questioning (rather than self-determination) that suspends concern for the future, which is, after all, a rational concern (Kennedy, 2017: 125). An alternative rendition of the political as non-instrumental form offers us a different view of politics, as ‘the sphere of pure means, that is, of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings’ (Agamben, 2000:59), a re-orientation of experience to immediacy.

It is here, that the notion of gesture is poignant in its ability to recuperate rather than abandon the political through the notion of futility. If futility disrupts the possibility and desirability of a means/ends causality, gesture signals non-instrumental talking, talking to no-one, being non-strategic actors (Agamben, 2000), or talking without anticipation of response (Bernasconi, 2019). Agamben (2000:58), for example, has built on Kant’s idea of ‘purposefulness without purpose’ to consider ‘mediality’ of gesture that reveals a movement and process of making a means without an end. For Agamben, the political is situated in the exposition of its own means, that is, an activity with no end product or final destiny but carried out in the presence of others. To harken back to the above example of snubbing the troll, the political appears to capitulate not in the pursuit of an a priori futile protest but in the reluctance to engage in what is perceived as a pointless dialogue.

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