Abstract
For many readers, the invocation of the ‘post-political’ in the title of this book will suffice to mark out Eric Swyngedouw’s latest collection of essays and papers as a contribution to a particular discourse that has gained intellectual and academic traction during the last decade and a half. Promises of the political does indeed stake out its claims as a contribution to ongoing debates about the role of ‘the political’ in an ostensibly ‘post-political’ world, positing this central social scientific category as a non-reducible practice involved in all social processes. Broadly speaking, such arguments conceptualize ‘the political’ not as one amongst a number of stages within the constitution of society in the form of a mediation of otherwise non-political claims, rationalities or desires; rather, ‘the political’ acquires the role of a sine qua non, a category that motivates and explains any epistemological pursuit emanating within the social sciences. The backbone of this argument owes its present dominant articulation chiefly to the work of Chantal Mouffe (2005; 2013), her earlier seminal work with Ernesto Laclau (1985) and the writings of Jacques Rancière (2000); here, their arguments are invited to encounter those of, amongst others, David Harvey (2012) and Slavoj Žižek (2013).
As the mere mention especially of David Harvey will suggest, ‘spatialising’ the ‘political’ is part of the agenda of the book. Given the author’s academic background in political economy and human geography, this will not surprise anyone. For non-geographers, the inclusion of a spatially sensitive set of registers may well prove to be part of the allure attaching to an engagement with the argument: it is, however, also the Achilles’ heel of the argument.
The book comprises previously published work covering roughly the last decade, which has been substantively revised to form a coherently presented argument. In this sense, the book succeeds, but individual chapters still bear some of the hallmarks of previously published material. Readers familiar with all or part of this material will, nonetheless, profit from engaging with the carefully crafted introductory and concluding sections of the book which capture the spirit motivating and underlying the more substantive encounters.
The argument builds around a careful and highly readable exposition of what Swyngedow posits as the ‘excesses’ of modern, capitalist democracy: namely an increasing focus on differentiations inviting individual fulfilment in the areas of consumption, identity and justice – at the expense of more egalitarian and fair modes of social totality aspired to by CSP readers. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the book culminates in an attempt to resurrect an explicit ‘communist’ terminology. Discursively recalibrated as ‘commonism’, in Chapter 8, the argument explicitly engages with recent debates in the social sciences about different forms of commons, of communing and of ‘being-in-common’. Here, the author owes a good deal to the writings of the late Elinor Ostrom and Nancy Fraser. The passages of the book making an explicit attempt to link with these debates and literature hold the most promise for future work given that are built on grounded experiences and concrete work already being critically digested in the social sciences.
The arena for the materialisation of these thoughts and claims is the city – or rather those materialities involved in urban ways of life that can become subjected to progressive processes of ownership or communing, but are often exposed to privatisation and dispossession. Basing his argument in parts of Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, Swyngedow builds a compelling case that the these latter developments are not merely the result of decades of neoliberal attempts to ‘hollow out’ the state, they form part of a general depoliticisation of social and cultural realities within a majority of Western societies. Aiming to capture a move towards managerial and thus often automated, rather than debated and explicitly determined, outcomes within nominally democratic societies, this depoliticisation is contrasted with a plea for a radical form of democracy that is not per se built around consensus and compromises: in fact, as Swyngedouw states with laudable clarity that consensus is ‘precisely what suspends the democratic’ (p. 136).
Swyngedouw’s treatment of the issues in hand is hard-hitting and radical without ever becoming one-dimensional. At the same time, it is relentless in its pursuit of a singular logic that appears to offer very little space for self-critical or reflective engagement. To give but one example of this lacuna: an argument that theorises different forms of ‘being in common’ against the excesses of individual freedom ought to be interested in helping readers to critically to engage with the excesses of collective expressions of the general will à la Brexit, Trump or populism more generally. As in the writings of Chantal Mouffe, a reader is invited to contemplate the possibility of a populism, not based on fear, but on the progressive, non-exclusionary ‘mobilization and normalization of a certain populism’ (p. 34). The vagueness of the term ‘certain,’ gleaned from the work of Cas Mudde, is indicative of a recurrent ambiguity permeating the book. Despite its interest in a nuanced (or ‘scaled’) argument, it provides neither a generalised nor a specific answer to the problems borne of the need to re-imagine and re-invent a different form of ‘populism’.
Nevertheless, the book is of value to critical social policy because it invites a recasting of such work in a radically different, non-remedial manner whilst tempting us to conceptualise the interventionist work emanating from such policies.