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23/08/2020 Category: Futile Political Gestures Tagged with: futility outcome the political

Introduction: Futile Political Gestures*

Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic

In 1942, Albert Camus, a French existential philosopher, produced a study of the Greek myth of Sisyphus (Camus, 2005). Sisyphus was ordered to push a boulder to the top of a mountain where the stone would slip and roll down. Sisyphus’s curse was to repeat his futile, absurd ascent in perpetuity. Surprisingly, Albert Camus has suggested that the myth captures the essence of revolt. But, how is it possible to recognise or ground political gestures in what appears as an infinitely meaningless action?

Political action rarely achieves its explicit goals. Too many things, too many humans seem to intervene. Even in its commitment to a clearly defined cause, political action is emergent in relations with other people and through sequences of partially anticipated events. It entails a great deal of experimentation and spontaneous thought and practice. It is not always prospective, oriented towards the future outcome but also post-hoc, looking back to pin down and explore past probabilities. However, despite the stochastic nature of the political, do we, as scholars of the political, continue to hold an intuition that a meaningful or effective political action manifests intention and moves instrumentally toward an endpoint? Do we not cling to a conception of desirability of political efficacy that we attribute to the most absurd, desperate, and ultimately futile efforts to initiate a political moment?

Assumptions about efficacy of the political inhere in many studies of political rationality, authoritarianism, and production of political subjectivities that celebrate agency and condemn or lament withdrawal. This understanding of the political might be traced to a representation of the political as actions and judgment of an accountable individual, who is guided by contractual obligations or prudence. For example, Thomas Hobbes argues that no action can be attributed to a multitude, or a crowd (Feltham, 2013:87), a claim that undermines the legitimacy of mass resistance to the state. In contrast, the political in anthropology frequently means counter-politics rather than institutions and agents of maintenance of status quo. The political is often enacted outside of manifest political movements, resistance acts, collective mobilisation, and public protest (Li, 2019). It is grounded in silences and mundane subversions that exist as incipient possibilities and potentialities.

For instance, disavowal and suspension of the political can paradoxically foreground the political content of intentionally apolitical endeavours (Yurchak, 2008). Refusal is another political modality that goes beyond resistance to authority (McGranahan, 2016). The work of the political can be channelled into generating a political event out of nothing (Ahmann, 2018), and, inversely, into downplaying contestation into a negatively charged no-action (Howe, 2016). Finally, there is a paradox of political exhaustion (Corsín Jimenez and Estalella, 2017), nihilism and fatalism, which, stripped of their implicit antipolitical connotations, assume a modality of unenforceable revolution (Ruda, 2015). Despite the recognition that political agency can be fraught, we are admonished against assuming futility or succumbing to despair (Anderson et.al., 2018). I am not sure why resilience of the marginalised can be seen as an acceptable substitute for shame and apology of those in power.

Why is it so hard, then, to envisage and comprehend political gestures without ascribing to them either agentive intention or hope to accomplish something or, at least, arrive at a point?    Do futile political gestures designate a different mode of the political or operate at the margins so tenuous that, regardless of intellectual curiosity about futile gestures, their political significance implodes? This collection constitutes an exploration of these questions. I do not suggest that futility should be elevated to an anthropological concept or method. Instead of rooting for a comprehensive definition of futility, the contributors reflect on the tangible expressions of futility in diaries, interviews, and ethnographic encounters, or a more amorphous sense of futility that suffused our research. A hundred years of political struggle with no outcome, disillusionment in party-politics, experience of captivity and permanent crisis, questioning how to put faith in the world of cynical disengagement, these are just a few examples that challenge us to recognise the fuzziness of means and ends. Theatricality, playfulness and satire make some political activities susceptible to being laughed at, yet it is far from clear if performative gestures instantiate futile politics or emerge in response to futility of other modes of political engagement. The common themes running through the essays are time and hope that emerge as powerful forces that mark the political as purposeful or futile.  The effort is to consider if some political actions can be described as futile, or unnecessary, or worthless, or quixotic since the political – especially its presumed success or failure – is an effect of how we measure, judge, arbitrate, observe or recall certain events.

 

*This collection has grown out of a workshop funded by an ERC Horizon 2020 Consolidator Grant (648477 AnCon ERC-2014-CoG). The workshop was held at the University of Edinburgh in May 2019.

 

 

References

Ahmann C (2018) ‘It’s exhausting to create an event out of nothing’: slow violence and manipulation of time. Cultural Anthropology 33(1): 142-171.

Anderson R, Backe E, Nelms, T, Reddy E, and Trombley J (2018). Introduction: speculative anthropologies. Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, December 18. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-speculative-anthropologies

Camus A (2005[1942]) The Myth of Sisyphus. London: Penguin Books.

Corsín Jiménez A and Estalella A (2017) Political exhaustion and the experiment of street: Boyle meets Hobbes in Occupy Madrid. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23(S1): 110-123.

Feltham O (2013) Anatomy of Failure. Philosophy and Political Action. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Howe C (2016) Negative space: unmovement and the study of activism when there is no action. In: Alexandrakis O (ed) Impulse to Act. A New Anthropology of Resistance and Social Justice. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, pp. 161-182.

Li TM (2019) Politics, interrupted. Anthropological Theory 19(1): 29-53.

McGranahan C (2016) Theorizing refusal: an introduction. Cultural Anthropology 31(3): 319-325.

Ruda F (2015) For Badiou: Idealism Without Idealism. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Yurchak A (2008) Suspending the political: late Soviet artistic experiments on the margins of the state. Poetics Today 29(4): 713-733.

Cite As

Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic (2020) Introduction: Futile Political Gestures. Anthropological Theory Commons. url: http://www.at-commons.com/2020/08/23/introduction-futile-political-gestures/

About the author(s)

Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic is a Senior Researcher at the Department of Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. Having published on religious failure, atheism, and freedom of conscience, she is working on a book about monumentalizing names of the dead in Moscow

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