The concept of ‘the everyday’: Ephemeral politics and the abundance of life

From elites to common people

The concept of the everyday is used to disrupt elite focussed sociologies that define the international as political spaces in which mainly elites are acting and the common people are mainly being reactive or passively submitted to what takes place in these spaces. By including the political agency of the common people, the literature on the everyday moves from a relation between elites, usually the group identified most with the practice of international politics (for instance, the diplomats; see Morgenthau, 1978: 146–150, 529–560), to either the relation between elites and ordinary people or to solely concentrate on the latter. Domains that were usually associated with ‘high politics’, such as the military, or taken from the perspective of states and international institutions, such as those linked to the international economy, become personal by applying analytical lenses, such as gender, to show how these domains are not only intertwined with personal stories of exploitation and resistance, but also how seemingly ‘un-’international topics, such as sex work, are actually central to understanding the dynamics at work in shaping the international (Enloe, 1989; Guillaume, 2011). Another example can be taken from surveillance studies. Given the increasing acceptance that surveillance is operating in diffuse ways and at a distance making it difficult to locate sites for sustained collective mobilisation, resistance and politically significant practice has been increasingly conceptualised in micro terms: the little things people do when seeking to avoid or trick the surveillance techniques when shopping, walking, claiming benefits, and so on (Gilliom, 2001, 2005).

This operation implies more than simply adding ‘ordinary people’ as significant actors. It more generally seeks to address the failure of IR ‘to generate those questions that allow individuals to uncover the linkages between global politics and their everyday lives’ (Davies and Niemann, 2002: 558). Georges Perec (1989) expressed a similar sentiment, asking where in news reporting is the stuff of the life we live, all the rest that passes every day. Davies and Niemann make an excellent argument and introduce a set of moves — in particular, drawing on Lefebvre’s work — that help to effectively embed what, from the perspective of the daily life of many people, must often seem abstract and/or distant. The more challenging issue, however, is whether problematising global life through the concept of the everyday should not spill over into an analytics that erases the two-world view itself, that erases a referential distinction between ordinary and extra-ordinary, between the global life of maids or season workers and the global life of elites. What we mean here is not that the lives of global elites are the same as that of the workers cleaning their hotel rooms but that an analytics of their global lives is done in a similar way and if they connect, like in hotels, they are not a meeting of the global and the local, the extra-ordinary and the ordinary but rather that this very encounter in all its habitual practices is what actually makes the global in that situation. In that sense, ‘the everyday’ foregrounds a horizontal conception of relations. ‘Horizontal’ does not refer to power relations being symmetrical but rather refers to an analytics in which processes like globalisation or sovereignty (on the latter, see De Carvalho et al., 2018), or entities like the state or world-systems, only exist as they are enacted in daily practices, relations and entanglements. In this understanding, ‘the everyday’ disturbs the distinction between micro and macro in terms of both scope and levels. It is not a reversing move that favours the micro over the macro. Rather, it deletes levels as key analytical tools and effaces the extra-ordinary or elite as the referent for becoming politically and analytically meaningful. In doing so, it foregrounds that processes like globalisation are ‘ours’ because ‘they are the “dimension” within which we make our ethics and bodies, within which we conceive our conduct of life, within which we suffer and desire, within which we subordinate and in which we are subordinated’ (Bayart, 2004: 11; translation is ours).

For example, Hobson and Seabrooke’s work in International Political Economy argues for changing focus from dominant elites to everyday actors and to a level of everyday practices. The book does significantly change how we understand who shapes the global economy. Yet, the core move is to add a set of actors that have been largely ignored and then reverse the analytical lens from those considered meaningful and powerful to the latter.

[O]ur central purpose is neither to marginalise the importance of the dominant elites nor to reify the agency of the “weak,” but rather to analyse the ways in which the weak affect and respond to the dominant and how in the process this interactive relationship generates change in the global economy. (Hobson and Seabrooke, 2007a: 2)

However, they do not explore explicitly what the global economy would be if the very distinction between ordinary and extra-ordinary actors would be deleted. In making common, ‘the everyday’ does precisely the latter. It refuses to make a separation between a meaningful political order of things somewhere – in a United Nations or European Union office in Geneva or Brussels – and another everyday order of things elsewhere – in the living rooms or the streets of either city. What is political, the extra-ordinary and ordinary, takes place commonly. Commonly means that revolutions, for example, are not either macro-spectacles or micro-enactments, but just enactments. The radical but ordinary transformation of a political regime and social structure (e.g. Skocpol, 1979) is also the relational unfolding of moments and encounters, of acts, that consist of repetitive practices and momentary happenings, within which that what is called ‘revolutionary’ exists and takes shape and reshapes.

Obviously, one of the challenges is that this world of commonness is not a great idealistic equaliser but that the commonness of life is full of controversies, stratifications, disputes, compromises, appropriations, asymmetries, and so on. Béatrice Hibou (2011), for example, develops a ‘political anatomy of domination’ that opens up to such a horizontalising of power relations while retaining an analytics of domination. Drawing on approaches of the everyday, she conceptualises traditional political questions about legitimacy, power, and domination in authoritarian situations by showing how domination is enacted in banal economic practices and the daily functioning of the economy. At first sight, this may read similar to what Hobson and Seabrooke do, but when working through the analytical moves she makes it clear that more than a reversal between elite and quotidian actors is going on. Like Hobson and Seabrooke, she is careful not to functionalise everyday practices as expressions of and sustaining a systemic logic; however, she does displace the intentionality of dominations from a subject’s intentions to exercise power to it being an effect of heterogeneous and multiple relations.

The latter makes it possible to unpack how domination is not a top-down, or vertical, process but a horizontally enacted process in which political decisions, violence and coercive state practices are coexisting, and in many instances entangled, with the most banal economic practices that shape and reshape dominations. Yet, there is neither the idea that the multiplicity is functionally reduced to a systemic reproduction nor that authoritarian politics is simply made by a political elite that imposes it on a population. Rather, domination, legitimacy and power are enacted through constellations of heterogeneous interests in the lives that people live. The same analytics applies to transactions in a daily market, what goes on in a clothes shop, and national economic decisions, for example. Domination becomes common. Yet, in being common, domination turns from a given situation into a series of moments, phenomena, practices that appropriate situations, thus creating a more emerging sense of political life. Hibou’s ‘political anatomy’ avoids locking readers into a dystopian world by creating a sense that the horizontality of domination is a world full of possibilities without having to specify that if x, y, and z would happen, a new world will be created.

To sum up, the concept of ‘the everyday’ works the limits of elite sociology by embracing the abundance of political life in a double move. It democratises political analysis by bringing specific political agents – whether women, workers, citizens, soldiers, individuals belonging to subaltern groups, scholars, etc. – back in our analytics of the international/global, by putting forth how they are affected by or engaging with the international/global in their quotidian lives and how ultimately their practices are a key part of the international/global. However, ‘the everyday’ does also seek to make the life of different actors common by entangling them through erasing scalar and level conceptions of politics.

Politicising through densification

The everyday does not just draw in or highlight distinct actors. It more generally draws attention to a wide variety of practices, subjects, relations, things that usually would not feature in political analysis. When Cynthia Enloe calls the international ‘personal’, and the personal ‘international’, she makes a key feminist move within IR that dilutes the distinction between common life and political life. One of its effects across feminist work is that multiple ‘new’ practices, events, subjects and sites are brought into the analysis to demonstrate the hold of patriarchal analytics on our understanding of politics as well as to demonstrate the important part a multiplicity of often unaccounted for practices play in shaping the worlds we live in. Political life becomes abundant. Such operations approach politicisation distinctly. Instead of foregrounding moments of intensification, they prioritise analytically densifying situations and times.

Considerably increasing the number of subjects, things, relations and practices that matter in a given situation is not the same as asserting the complexity of a situation. In a sense, it is a far more banal move of simply bringing more elements into play. However, it is also a substantive analytical interference that seeks to challenge a mode of political analysis that conceptualises politicisation as a practice of intensification, of increasing the intensity that action establishes between a political unity or order (e.g. the state, or global institutions) and a set of events (Morgenthau, 1933: 58). In public policy terms, intensification manifests itself in a process of moving the stakes up the political and bureaucratic agendas and prioritising implementation of policy in this area. In security studies it takes the form of asserting exceptional existential threats to a referent object. Politics as intensity has close links with a temporality that prioritises exceptional moments as drivers of history. Crisis talk, emergency actions, and renditions of radical breaking points in historical time are important techniques of intensification.

A focus on density works differently. It prioritises the need to thicken the sites of international politics, whether they are intense or not. For example, war can be read politically differently if it is linked to various mundane cultural processes through which military violence is made legitimate in specific circumstances (see Cardini, 1992 [1982]), including, for example, producing and distributing a song by widows of soldiers, selling poppies to commemorate past wars, connecting heroism to violence in multiple popular media including movies and video games, and so on. As a result, many more things, subjects and practices enter the site of war than diplomatic relations, mobilisation of military institutions, personnel and technology, and patriotic speeches by political leaders. Combining these thickens the situation, not in the anthropological sense of introducing cultural meaning, but in a textual sense of increasing the concentration of threads that make a situation, through which political claims about rights and care are enacted, that create legitimacy for certain forms of violence, etc. Asserting the abundance of political life thus implies a method of politicising through densification. Such an approach has implications for how one analytically renders the politics of security, for example. Rather than analysing speech acts of existential threats that render politics exceptional, it invites creating dense textures from relations organised through banal objects and practices such as Key Performance Indicators (Schouten, 2014), lists (de Goede and Sullivan, 2016), rubbish (Acuto, 2014) or disputes (Huysmans, 2016).

The everyday as working the abundance of life thus implies a set of distinct operations. Not everyone follows through on the horizontalising and densifying that we see as key analytical moves in taking life as abundant. In that sense, what we propose as two baseline operations of the concept of the everyday are both quite general but also specific. They invite exploring a political analytics that focusses on densifying textures and refuses to see the everyday as a distinct level or scale of politics.

Any analysis that makes political life abundant triggers a broader challenge, however, of how to avoid making everything politically significant and thus deleting the distinctness of politics. If politics is everywhere and everything, does that not imply it is nowhere and nothing? That is a risk indeed; the risk of disappearing politics. Yet, this risk of deleting politics altogether by seeing politics everywhere is also paradoxically the condition for creativity, for giving attention to imaginative modes of politics and inviting imaginative analytics. ‘The everyday’ is then a device for engaging with conceptions of politics that hold that everything and everywhere can be political, in yet unnamed ways, but without letting this slip into politics being nowhere or nothing. The question ‘what is the everyday?’ then refers to how different scholars work this paradox of abundance into distinct interferences in our understanding of politics. This operation can be seen at play in, for example, Hibou’s work, which we referred to earlier. She explicitly draws on lineages of the everyday to challenge both elite approaches that rarify domination to political and economic elite practices and infra-political approaches that see politics everywhere. She creatively uses these lineages to reconceptualise familiar political categories such as ‘political intention’ and ‘legitimacy’ (Hibou, 2011).

Everyday time and the ephemeral

Introducing specific temporalities, ‘the everyday’ is an invitation to study the political significance of ephemeral practices that would otherwise easily be dismissed as either irrelevant or insignificant because of their momentary or fleeting presence, such as graffiti and billboards (Trumper, 2016), banners (Artières, 2013), and appropriating city spaces through gardening activities (Adams and Hardman, 2014; Iveson, 2013) or simply through walking a city (Ingold and Vergunst, 2008). This ephemeral quality of the everyday seeks to challenge familiar modes of analysing time. International political history is often a history of ‘great moments’ or ‘moments of crisis’, such as wars or economic crises, in which the future course of history and what the international (system) will look like are at stake. ‘The everyday’ generally questions such conception of international political history in two ways. First, the notion of the everyday works to move away from the calendar-like temporalities of international events, such as a succession of peace and war, and its bird’s-eye view of what international time is. It does this by showing how the personal also is the international (and the international is personal; Enloe, 2014) and bringing in an analytics of how quotidian and ordinary temporalities are affected by or affecting the international. Second, the everyday is also used to bring in the power of routine in shaping situations. The international can, for instance, be shown to be the results of elites but not in a disincarnate extension of the state but in their own quotidian routines as diplomatic or security professionals in situations of bureaucratic competition (Bigo, 2000; Neumann, 2002, 2007). The international is then not a sequential history of exceptional moments and events but rather a series of personal stories of those ordinaries affected by and affecting the international, or a history of reiterative practices linked to embodied routines. By shifting the analysis from extra-ordinary politics to the ordinary, ‘the everyday’ underlines a multiplicity of political temporalities and spaces as a distinct point of interest in defining what may be analytically or politically relevant and significant.

The ephemeral conception of the everyday that we seek to introduce does something similar but specifically draws attention to the political nature of fleeting moments and how they can paradoxically be simultaneously fleeting and durable. Camilo Trumper (2016) studies how temporary public art and other public expressions in urban areas in Chile, preceding and following the Pinochet coup, created distinct but always momentary political sites and between them politically appropriated the city of Santiago. His question is ‘How do we write a political history that takes these ephemeral entries and practices as essential sources of analysis?’ (Trumper, 2016: 3–4). What makes ephemeral histories distinct is, in the first instance, the kind of activities considered to be politically relevant and significant. Yet, as Trumper’s work brings out, the specific analytical challenge and contribution that the ‘ephemeral’ brings to political analysis is how what is fleeting can have duration without analytically destroying the possibilities created in fleeting practices.

It [new forms of visual culture and new scopic regimes that emerged after the coup of 1973 in Chile] paradoxically offers a window onto the tense interplay of persistence and change that characterized the early years of military rule and that animated urban politics but is obscured by scholars’ emphasis on the coup as a single moment of rupture and violence. (Trumper, 2016: 176)

Thinking politics as conjunctural is one way of working this paradoxical demand for retaining the fleeting quality of life while giving it duration. A graffiti rapidly drawn, displayed for a little while and as quickly removed or covered (Trumper, 2016), or, as Robert Darnton (2014) has masterfully described, the seditious anonymous poems in 1749 Paris (a common mode of communication for popular rumours in the streets of Paris), all bear the mark of fleeting, thus likely insignificant and irrelevant, political practices. Yet they are all situated in series of events granting them a semantics of succession and political bearing. The artistic and linguistic practices that Trumper analyses in Chile are indeed momentary (graffiti applied and then removed), but they have political signification because they have duration as they enable a form of political continuity within repertoires of political dissent and mobilisation. Similarly, in Darnton’s analysis of the so-called Affair of the Fourteen, what amounted to an ordinary practice of the street, resounding of ‘a true seditious cacophony of rhymed verses’ (Darnton, 2014: 17), led to an uncharacteristically powerful and harsh response from the police. They became political because they conjecturally became relevant; the ordinary practice that they amounted to played out in politically significant situations. Sheila Crane emphasises a similar challenge in her study of ephemeral tactics in the Battle of Algiers. Quoting Lefebvre (2003 [1970]), she defines ephemeral as

… the means by which ‘every place becomes multifunctional, polyvalent, transfunctional, with an incessant turnover of functions; where groups take control of spaces for expressive actions and constructions, which are soon destroyed’ (Lefebvre 2003 [1970]:130). Importantly, in this formulation, the ephemeral is a conjectural space, a space of projective anticipation that is necessarily fleeting. (Crane, 2015: 399)

This notion of time as intertwining succession, anticipation and fleetingness is what the concept of ‘duration’ seeks to capture. It is distinct from approaches that give moments or temporary artefacts meaning by making the relevance of momentary events or artefacts dependent on their connection to long-term reproductive practices or structural conditionings. In art and architecture the ephemeral is about representation that is not or cannot be done by static means of representation. It implies working with non-static forms or matter, with transformable or fading materials, as for example the Dadaists did. At issue is not just the temporariness of a building or a mural, but that it eludes capture in fixed forms (Karandinou, 2013: 2; Purpura, 2009: 11). Similarly ephemeral time presents time as unstable, as without origin or end, as evading capture of how things really are, were or will be. Instead of process, time is made up of fragments that resonate, that perform together in succession, heterogeneity and multiplicity. José Munoz, a performance studies scholar, expresses how this ephemeral time implies a particular mode of looking back.

Ephemera… is linked to alternative modes of textuality and narrativity like memory and performance: it is all of those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself. It does not rest on epistemological foundations but is instead interested in following traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of thing[s]. (Munoz, 1996: 10, quoted in Turner, 2009: 159)

Instead of reconstructing a moment as if it is the real moment thus fixing its meaning, it constructs time as succession and presences of traces.

By shifting the analysis from extra-ordinary (international) politics to the ordinary, the concept of the everyday introduces a multiplicity of political temporalities as a distinct point of interest in defining what may be analytically or politically relevant and significant. The political nature of these fleeting moments does not require the larger scale of longer time of (international) politics or the separation between times of continuity and times of change as they can be, paradoxically, both fleeting and durable. As a result, political analysis becomes more intensely sensitive to the enactment of — and, lingering within — possibilities (in Crane’s quote above ‘projective anticipation’) rather than constraints and reproductive patterns. It introduces a conception of time as indeterminate. Elizabeth Grosz emphasises how such conception of time as duration is always hesitant because of implying multiple possibilities of unfolding; it is always emergent rather than smooth, linear, homogenous or continuous (Grosz, 2001: 113). She speaks of time understood in terms of a logic of invention rather than a logic of identity or self-containment (Grosz, 2001: 111). This logic differs from the romantic notion of subjective creativity or the romantic embracing of the moment as the authentic time that escapes structuration (Abu-Lughod, 1990; Brown, 1996). It is a paradoxical time that messes with temporal conventions by valuing the inherently fleeting nature of events, experiences and practices while giving them a duration that does not destroy their creative possibilities as to how they become relevant and for whom by folding them into the structures of politics. ²

Ephemeral politics

Although Trumper’s analysis of a multiplicity of public expressions and appropriations of the city is not built on the same lineages of thought as Grosz’ work, the method he uses to disrupt homogeneous and linear narrations of political history of the Chilean coup of 1973 expresses a similar disposition to connecting the quotidian with a logic of invention, with possibilities.

Recognizing that archives and memory are both shaped by and reproduce historical silences, this book intertwines political, cultural, urban, and oral history to find the sometimes surprising, quotidian forms, places, and practices that people used to express their political concepts and concerns. (Trumper, 2016: 10)

Such expressions create political possibilities within what was politically a highly repressive situation. While Hibou’s work, to which we referred above, draws on lineages of ‘the everyday’ to focus on how domination in authoritarian regimes is multiple and heterogeneous as well as embedded in an abundance of practices rather than simply a centralised state practice, Trumper draws out how ephemeral practices and artefacts enact politics of contestation and dissent. His analysis emphasises that what counted as politics in Santiago was much more than and quite different from what the archival narrative of radical break from democracy to authoritarian destruction of politics foregrounds.

“Everyday urbanism,” those quotidian forms of urban practice that included protests and marches, posters, murals, graffiti, street photography, and urban documentary film, became part of a broader political repertoire by which a wide range of Santiaguinos [people of Santiago, Chile] entered into and shaped political debate. (Trumper, 2016: 6–7)

What is of analytical and political concern here is what we term a politics of the ephemeral. The political analysis aims at demonstrating how ephemeral practices, sites and objects are not simply fleeting expressions of artistic, consumption, economic and other use value, but bear upon political contestation and governmental practices. Their politicality derives from its link to a politics that is already known as being political. The intention is similar to Goldfarb’s ‘politics of small things’,

the theoretical implications of the global changes in our recent past go beyond […] large-scale transformations and geopolitical challenges. It is in the microstructures of social interaction that the innovations of political culture become apparent, as these innovations, in their interactive contexts, constitute public space. These microstructures, I suggest, form the foundation of democratic culture. (Goldfarb, 2006: 38)

Goldfarb is interested in making what he refers to as small things central to a conception of democratic culture. The ephemeral practices and artefacts in Trumper’s analysis are political because they appropriate public rather than just private spaces, because they allow people to enact themselves as political subjects, and because they keep an agnostic conception of politics alive under military dictatorship. What is distinct in their approach is in the first instance the small and ephemeral nature of the practices and artefacts within which they inscribe political relevance. Hence, we name this an analysis of politics of the ephemeral, that is, of how ephemeral practices take on political significance.

Yet, the concept of the ephemeral also invites a further question about politics that is related to the politics of the ephemeral but takes it in a different direction. So far, we have focussed on how ‘the everyday’ performs an analytics of political time in which ephemeral phenomena and practices are central and which combines fleetingness and duration. However, ephemeral art or architecture also refers to what it means for architecture or art to become ephemeral: What does the concept of art or architecture become when it takes on the qualifier ‘ephemeral’? Similarly, the concept of the everyday in our understanding invites thinking through what it means and how to do a political analytics that takes politics itself to be ephemeral. Rather than using defined conceptions of politics upon which ephemeral phenomena bear, how do we work with a concept of ephemeral politics, that is, a politics that is not represented through fixed forms but through materials and practices that escape capture?

Ephemeral politics invites an approach to the political that echoes Maurice Blanchot’s (1969) understanding of the everyday as epistemically undetermined. The ‘quotidian’, Blanchot writes, ‘does not let itself be seized. It escapes. It belongs to the insignificant, and the insignificant is without truth, without reality, without secret, but it may also be the site of all possible significations’ (Blanchot, 1969: 357). Inventing the everyday is not only giving signification to something that may be insignificant, from the perspective of IR, but to something that may have no relevant signification beyond that which is given by naming it ‘the everyday’. Writing the everyday seeks to write something that, when written has already escaped it, yet is not insignificant. The indeterminacy of the everyday, in Blanchot’s terms, thus implies a specific mode of signifying, one that ‘eludes objectification because [the everyday] consists in perpetual becoming’ (Sheringham, 2006: 16). In other words, the everyday says something about how practices, objects, subjects exist. It invites disrupting conventions of temporality and signification in IR by understanding politics as emergent and as a presence that is both too little and too much. Ephemeral politics takes as its starting point the unfinalisability of politics. ‘Unfinalisability is the notion that everyday life is a messy and open undertaking where freedom, creativity, innovation, and surprise make the world an incomplete and inconclusive place’ (Morson and Emerson, 1990: 36–40, 90–96; see also Hutson, 2000).

Such an approach may sound slightly odd but it is not unfamiliar. Trumper’s (2016) analysis of ephemeral practices is political not only because he places art, billboards, or graffiti, in what has been named a political time: the military coup and the Pinochet regime that followed it in Chile. Sajed’s argument about the importance of minor practices of dissent in eastern Europe during the Communists regimes is not only political because it explores minor practices in what is recognised as a highly political time (Sajed, 2011). They are also political because once they chose these sites and times — once they set the recognisable political referent — they implicitly or explicitly invite reading the practices and objects as a non-referential series that appropriate spaces, language, modes of expression or briefly shape what living in these political times is but without a strategy to capture or overthrow the ‘centres of power’ (De Certeau, 1984 [1980]; Konrad, 1984). They also express an abundance and emergence of politics that is connected but not reduced to familiar imaginings of politics such as modes of dictatorial regimes, mediatised political spectacles, or political mobilisation through protest marches sustained by social movements.

Feminism has done similar work. Mobilising private or personal lives as political, they politicise by drawing on the instituted distinction between private and public, but they also immediately disrupt that distinction through series of banal practices and things picked from the abundance of private life thereby creating an emergent politics. Lingering in a beauty parlour, a government department, or talking to female migrant sex workers, the abundance of private desires, family situations, shuffling of papers, small talk, and so on create an overflow of politics that is difficult to contain. It is a fleeting politics, a conversation that is there but then also gone; the small talk takes place but then one moves on to do something else (hooks, 2015 [1989]). Yet, it also creates a sense of how situations are continuously adjusted, reshaped, created. In doing so, they dislodge what politics can be in IR, not just by introducing ephemeral sites and practices but by doing so changing the possibilities of what politics can be. While drawing on the private/public distinction the stories told displace this distinction with conception of politics in which publicness does not define politics but is displaced by ‘the personal is international and the international is personal’ (Enloe, 2014: 343–359), by women’s journeys (Sylvester, 2002), and so on. It is a set of analytical moves that brings attention to an imagining of political life that does not fit already received conceptions of politics by working an abundant and emergent political life. It is a conception of theories and analysis of politics as inventive that sees them as ‘throwing trajectories, or suggesting paths out into practice, rather than being used as “tools” or “applications”’ (Rendell, 2006: 10).

Similarly, Rob Walker challenged IR theory with a demand for imagining political life that does not fall back on essentialised accounts of politics, that is, accounts for which there is no surprise in politics because we seem to already know what politics is — the sites as well as processes that can be political, that make something political (Walker, 2010). The politics of the ephemeral meets this challenge half-way by introducing new sites, objects and practices but tends to connect them back to familiar accounts of politics, such as debate in the public sphere, revolution, mobilisation to pressure governments, and keeping possibilities for dissent and regime change alive. Walker’s statement calls for something else, similar to work in feminist IR: to name something as political without knowing its political valence in the first place and without imposing an essentialist conception of politics in its very naming. It invites a mode of thought that focusses on emergent conceptions of politics in which what is political remains inherently unstable, fleeting, heterogenous. We refer to this reading of the everyday as ephemeral politics to differentiate it from – but also retain its close relation to — the politics of the ephemeral.

The main point we want to introduce is thus that ephemeral politics implies that the naming of what matters as political is not necessarily an institutionalised reproduction of a fixed order of politics but a continuously emergent enacting of what politics can be. The everyday then performs a conception of political time as ‘unfinalisability’, as possibilities that are not already defined by fixing what politics can possibly be. The order of politics is then not understood in terms of an order of mastering the political but as an immanently precarious succession of situations and practices in which lived political lives remain inherently aleatory, momentary and emergent (Macherey, 2009). In doing so, the everyday as ephemeral draws attention to the immanent elusiveness and fragility of politics as it loses its ground, its referent. Hence, the tension it creates, for example, with and within analyses focussing on structures of domination that fix in advance the terms of political stakes and practice. As Purpura reminds us in relation to ephemeral art, making art ephemeral can itself be a political act. For example, the Dadaist’s turn to unstable materials and writing was a critical political move challenging the culture of sovereignty in which permanence is a virtue and preservation a right (Purpura, 2009: 12).