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https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-were-all-political-now-but-can-that-lead-to-real-change-289208>
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Review: Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger (Verso Books)
It was the summer of 2024 in Carindale, Queensland. I had gone to a salon for
lashes and somehow found myself inside a political monologue.
The gen Z eyelash artist was white, university educated, hit hard by COVID,
barely getting by. She was also fiercely anti-vaccine – and devoted to Donald
Trump with the confidence of someone who had found, at last, a story that made
the chaos cohere.
I mostly listened. Her world had too many moving parts: lockdowns, debt, work
that did not pay enough, institutions she didn’t trust, online spaces she did.
Trump gave shape to it by supplying villains, certainty and, most importantly,
structure. I lay there with my eyes taped up, which is perhaps the ideal
posture for receiving a monologue about the end of liberal democracy.
A year and a half later, reading Belgian historian Anton Jäger’s
Hyperpolitics, I kept thinking of her.
Hyperpolitics names a world in which everything is political, yet politics is
rarely durable. Private life comes with public meanings attached: the cola you
drink, the person you date, the family member you cut ties with, the school
your child attends, the vaccine you take (or refuse).
Jäger names the atmosphere of our time with real force. What he does less well
is explain who has been formed by this atmosphere.
The young eyelash artist in Carindale was not apolitical or disengaged. She had
read enough, watched enough, absorbed enough, distrusted enough to assemble a
complete worldview.
But she was also saturated with causes, enemies, instincts and explanations.
What she lacked was any durable institution – the parties, unions, churches or
civic associations past generations turned to – through which all that
political energy could become power.
So, politics is everywhere. Power is nowhere in particular. That is the
condition
Hyperpolitics captures."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
