This short piece* is an attempt to open the question about the meaning and reach of the concept of metapolitics today. Apart from Rancière, in the contemporary French thought on politics and the political this term is explicitly used by Alain Badiou. In short, metapolitics should be grasped, according to my understanding of things, in the following way:
ʺWhat Plato established in his Republic is not any 'ideal' state of relations between the state and society. It is at the same time a story about the essence of the ancient world and an ideological justification of the same world in its epoch-making possibilities. Equality cannot be derived from the idyllic politics of consensus in the environment of liberal democracies if it does not, at the same time, set its demands on what is a scandal for order in reality, which Rancière labels with the disputed notion of 'police'. Why? Simply because political equality, a contrario, is a condition for the possibility of emancipation in the area of what he called the aesthetic division of the common good (communauté). Historically, from antiquity to our days the propertyless class, sans-part (slaves, serfs, proletarians) is excluded from it. This premise is the credo of the entire post-foundationalist theory of politics. Badiou called it the metapolitics of event. When we translate this complex expression into the language of political struggle, then we are talking about a ‘communist hypothesis’ without the exposed legacy of Stalinist totalitarianism (see Badiou, A. 2010. The Communist Hypothesis. London-New York: Verso). However, in the case of Rancière, the concept of politics as equality that determines the 'essence' of democracy has its resolution in the 'mystique' of the an-archic rebellion against non-equality, non-justice and, ultimately, non-freedom of men and women in the oligarchic states of the global order today. Therefore, the talk about the 'end of politics' and the 'return of political philosophy' represents only another way of the same aporia: namely, that equality cannot be talked about without a political rearticulation of power. Hidden between the lines is the place where the politics of dissent no longer has its own direct origin either in Marx's legacy or in anarchist movements. Its place (topos) is beyond the real power politics. And that is why, in its 'heroic' reach, it is still just another utopia of egalitarian powerlessness.ʺ (Paić, Ž. 2017. The Age of Oligarchy: From the Information Economy to the Politics of Events. Zagreb: Litteris, pp. 302-303.)
How does Rancière, on the occasion of his influential book Hatred of Democracy, try to explain the limits and reach of metapolitics in a conversation with Hazan? He says that
ʺmodern metapolitical vision of politics is an expression of some socio-economic process that takes place somewhere below or in the background. But we are not dealing with appearances and reality. There are only different forms of construction and symbolization of the common which are very real and equally imbued with the conflict between equality and inequality.'' (Rancière, J. 2021. U kojem vremenu živimo? Razgovor s Ericom Hazanom [What Times Are We Living In? A Conversation with Eric Hazan], Zagreb: Udruga Bijeli val, p. 11)
Metapolitics here is a vision of something 'below' or in the 'background'. Rancière removes it from his thought horizon because it is a relic of transcendentalism or the modern referential framework of neoliberal oligarchy rule. Why? Because it assumes the existence of the idea and the phenomenon in their separation or, more specifically, the influence on the so-called real politics from various non-visible centers of power, which is primarily beyond the traditional politics of party nomenclature, trade union bodies and what Althusser calls ideological apparatuses, such as the army, police, universities, public health, etc. Metapolitics enters the realm of government below and behind the politics of parliamentary confrontations and the so-called ideological war in the media and on the streets, such as the conflict between the extreme left and the extreme right over the so-called identity issues. In France it is, at the same time, a conflict against the institutions of the state when it seems that, as in these moments, the battle of demands for labor dignity is being fought against the heartlessness of the combination of Macron's neoliberal policy in the articulation of the pension law with the extension of the age limit to 64 years.
Metapolitics is neither a descriptive nor a heuristic term, but transitive and anti-essentialist. According to Rancière, it only indicates that the matter with politics has become what is not a democratic agreement, but non-agreement, and the same applies to aesthetic dissensus. It is clear that this method of thinking about the political and politics is at the same time a strategy to fight against the governance that structures power as a combination of management technology and the technique of political construction of a discourse appropriate to the social situation, such as the issue of the pension law right now in France.
Why do I think that the displacement of metapolitics from the realm behind and below, thus some kind of profane transcendence by which transnational corporations bring the politics of the nation-state into structural dependence and the institutional disintegration of any 'sovereignism', is an insufficient analysis of the problem of non-power of any politics of radical equality advocated by Rancière?
First of all, the problem is not in the transparency of the occurrence of the so-called socio-economic process and the absence of the concept of reality. Everything is a construction since Kant and Hegel, including the notion of nature and social generality in which the rule of law within the limited territory of the nation has its inherent limits. And Schmitt's concept of the political is a construction from the existential sphere of determination, which polemologically implements the political way of articulating the struggle between friends and enemies, and it is driven by thymos or, in Platonic terms, the desire to recognize the irrational in the so-called human nature such as anger, vanity, ressentiment.
The problem is that metapolitics points to that which is behind and below the politics of equality-inequality, that is, it points to the gap between power and governance without the very subject of politics as such. Modern politics must therefore constantly constitute the reason for the existence of this subject, even though it, like society and the state, already disappeared with the advent of post-imperial sovereignty or appears as a relic of the historical drying up of the meaning of democracy. This subject that metapolitics vainly aims at is what was the problem of both Rousseau and Hobbes. We are talking about the 'people' as the fundamental concept of political rule in all possible orders, be they formally and substantively democratic or dictatorial. The nation is the subject of both sovereignty and populism, and its substantiality cannot be reduced either to the multitude or to the ideological construction of the nation as a configuration of citizens who deny Others, as the 'enemies' of the order, the right to belong to the constitution of the nation-state.
The equality that Rancière considers the basis of democratic non-consent is a construction, and from a non-existent reality it can create the reality that we see today in the streets of Paris of violence and stench, because the cleaning services are on strike, for the right to retire before the age of 64, which Macron uncompromisingly wants to legalize, already at the age of 62. By the way, why are the French fighting on the streets of Paris at all, when it is quite clear that even in the defective Croatian democracy, the age limit for the working-age population goes beyond 65 without much fanfare and without any protests? Not only is this fight of ‘labor against capital’ in France their and only their business, it is also the last relic of the failed welfare state that no longer exists even in the Scandinavian countries. Why? Because metapolitics outside and below the so-called real politics is that which emerges from the logic of the technosphere and neoliberalism as a Corporation that transcends all populism and all political protests within the outdated institutions of nation-state governance.
No amount of metapolitical protests of a violent character will turn things back, and the state as a postmodern Leviathan is no longer a monstrous institution of power, but only a medium of mediating what, by analogy with Deleuze, we can call the extended apparatus of the society of control, which must be at the service of transnational corporations or is lost in space and condemned to the fate of left or right populism and their phantom ramblings about 'sovereignism'. No one has sovereignty in the world anymore, not even the so-called empires like the USA, China and Russia for the simple reason that there is no longer a subject of international law, a traditionally understood nation state. States are networked metapolitical bodies of information-corporate capitalism that can only have different forms of execution of the basic function and task of increasing profit and accumulating capital, tendentially to infinity, but in principle the matter is the same in democracies and in autocratic models of government.
That is why Rancière's politics as an-arché of non-consent is outside and below the 'modern metapolitical vision'. The only one of the French who understood the logic of action of what I am talking about was Foucault with his thesis on biopolitics and governmentality (gouvernementalité). That is why an old man from '68, whom Foucault mentions in a conversation about politics and power, could easily understand and describe what his politics of opposition to the regime is and what biopolitics practically means, as even José Padilha, the director of the Brazilian film Elite Squad / Tropa de Elite, about the brutal and corrupt police in Rio de Janeiro and actions against criminal gangs in the favelas. However, the old man from '68 almost ironically said that Deleuze’s politics is like a hermetic mystery to him. Admittedly, without irony, I could say that Rancière's politics is not a Deleuzian complicated utopia, but it certainly has elements of an-archic revolt of unequals in the fight – for what? Absolute equality or agreement between labor and capital, a democratic order of rule by the 'people' that should be created in the struggle against capital or the state?
The problem is, and this was well defined by Rancière in his conversation with Hazan, that it is not at all clear who we are. Hence his necessary mysticism of so-called alternative visions of the world. All alternatives to the post-imperial Leviathan are naive and illusory 'little stories', although they are more or less good diagnoses of the state of political articulation in the world. The best analysis in general about the essence of informational-cognitive capitalism is surely that of Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, which clearly shows the flywheel of this rhizomatic axiomatic society-state-empire in the synthesis of technology, science, militarism and capital. However, this is where the problem appears. Because this monolith and megalith of power as a real metapolitics is no longer outside, nor in the background, nor on the surface of appearance. It happens as a visualization of the void, or as an acceleration of the technosphere that turns all things, phenomena and beings into capital, information and the inhuman as an artificial reality, and this can no longer be destroyed or defeated in the frontal struggle of the Parisian students-workers-Yellow vest movement with the gendarmerie.
If Macron gives up, France is thrown back in time. If he wins this game, and it seems inevitable, then neither his party nor neoliberalism 2.0 won for the third decade of the 21st century. It will be the victory and defeat of the economic-social logic of politics without a subject, in which not only Rancière does not know who we are, but also 'we' no longer know why to fight for people to be functions and structures in the third decade of the 21st century AI or metapolitics without thymos, pure brutality and ferocity of violence as such against a man-without-characteristics, over his right to be recognized as a free and equal citizen, even if it cost him the sacrifice of this one and only life in his fragile contingency of existence.
Neither 'revolutions' nor 'existence' are our problem anymore. And that means neither are the different theoretical metapolitics of egalitarianism as an alternative vision of a 'society' that no longer exists. Politics was left without a subject, and society without substance. That is why the logic of absolute control is at work as a total mobilization of visible-and-invisible, transcendent and immanent, brutal and subtle, this and that power.
Woe to 'us' political scientists at a time when it seems that ‘we’ are needed to explain this joyful nihilism of the spectacle of total war, presidential and parliamentary elections, the death of the queen, the brutal and corrupt Brazilian police in the favelas, the stench in the streets of Paris, Rancière’s much celebrated and washed out emancipation that no longer really means anything at all. It is better to read Houellbecq's novel Destroy and see how and why even an eccentric 'green terror' can be an alternative metapolitical vision with which the great story of the West and democracy ends as a politics of indifferent apocalypse.
* This is one of the author's letters scheduled for publication in the book Wanderings: Letters, Conversations, Records (Litteris, 2024), which has been minimally adapted to fit the format of the Annals’ blog.
