My comrade in another country, Jason Wilson, has a rousing Guardian column critiquing the middle-class progressive view that credentialised expertise — in the form of political ‘wonks’ — shall save us (and follow up Tumblr post clarifying comments about Piketty’s celebrity wonk book). Jason’s thesis is that politics is inherently antagonistic. The consensus-driven post-war prosperity was an anomaly and all post-political ‘Third Way’ technocracies of the 1990s have failed. With manifest irony, the problem is — to appropriate Heidegger — the essence of technocratic political wonkery is politically apolitical. Jason argues that political wonks need to resuscitate a partisan appreciation of society. The most savage way to interpret his critique is that alleged progressive political wonks want to perfect and take care of ‘the system’ first… and care for ‘the people’ second.
The grammar of progressive politics needs to put ‘the people’ before the ellipsis, sure, but what if antagonism is integral not only to democracy but to capitalism? Think about narratives of ‘disruption’ and the way total precarity is deployed as a capitalist technocratic project, it turns antagonism inward so the self becomes the site and project of coping with all kinds of insecurities while at the same time turning outward to fetishise the maintenance of borders. Do we need a way to appreciate different kinds of antagonism? What about all the ‘wars’ we have in the Culture Wars, or the neoconservative preference for launching wars on things (war on drugs, war on poverty and so on). What would this aesthetics of antagonism look like? How would it be ‘judged’?