ABSTRACT
In the introduction to this book, I cited Robert Boyers’ assertion that politics “cannot be serious or effective if it is nothing more than the mobilization of anti-credal, promiscuously ‘open,’ deconstructive enthusiasms.” Neither “can it hope to succeed as a call to reason or order.” At the same time, politics “must be made to do more than empty the contents and demythologize the forms of existing institutions;” it “must help us to imagine binding alternative institutions.”3 Throughout the previous chapters, I have explored the notion of a “fugitive” or “oblique” politics that persists in “negative” spaces-small resistances to the totality of instrumental reason and the mechanisms of a monetary and “conceptual” economy. This is a politics which “passes” but does not “pass away,”4 a politics that manifests itself as a task rather than a given, a politics of fragments. I have employed a “micrological” method in order to cast these “fragments” as sites of loss and recovery, as sites in which what was hidden comes to light. They are the genesis points for new forms
of ethico-political understanding, in spite of the weight of history bearing down on them. However, as the analysis stands, these fragments have not yet yielded a fully visible system of ethico-political action, let alone any kind of “binding” political institution through which such action could be legitimately mediated (a “Now everybody” as it were). They may have produced counter-historical forms of knowledge and experience but they have not yet translated into socially reproducible practice. There have been glimmers along the way,5 but no more than that. In order to explore this question of “socially reproducible practice,” the point at which a fugitive politics stops running and settles down, the final phase of the dialectic comes into play. After touring through the Enlightenment and the two World Wars, we have reached the “postmodern world.” The critical focus here therefore shifts to the last forty years of social, political and economic transformation. Rationing and rocket bombs are behind us, Californian sunshine and the mall lie ahead.
