‘Politics’ is not politics

Simone Weil against the spectacle

Anyone in favour of political localism, as I obviously am, has to face a question: ‘are people still capable of politics?’

This question can seem ridiculous when the 24-hour news cycle is continually getting shriller and harder to avoid. It can look as though politics is everywhere and people are more passionately engaged with it than ever before. Friendships are lost over Brexit, or Trump, or COVID lockdowns.

This passionate engagement, whether it is about the actions of politicians, the latest incident in a culture war, or a crisis in a foreign land, is not politics.

In my last post, I talked about ‘politics’ in Aristotle’s sense of a communal orientation to the good life. Broadly speaking, individuals organise into households, households into villages, and villages into a political community. This sense of ‘politics’ is a set of social relations between people. ‘Politics’ in the modern sense is a different set of social relations, one in which the middle layers of ‘household’ and ‘village’ have been removed.

In the older sense of ‘politics’, the connections between people are mediated through networks of other social relations. I know you as one of the Jones family, you live on the other side of town, you are a member of the same union as me, you are also a member of local Methodist congregation, and so on. In the modern sense of ‘politics’, the connections between people are mediated through images, chunks of decontextualised pictures and text. You share an emotionally moving video, you have an emoji by your twitter username, you despise a politician that you will never meet, you share your opinions on the geopolitics of country that you will never visit, and so on. This second set of social relations are part of what Guy Debord called the spectacle. Even in 1967, he could see that the spectacle gradually degrades the ideal of human fulfilment from being about who you are to how you appear.

We are now deeper into the spectacle. The combination of social media, internet shopping, and working from home allows the comfortable classes to almost entirely replace the directly lived set of social relations that constitute real politics with social relations mediated by images. The rest of society seems to be moving along the same path. Anxiety about the effects of the internet, particularly on teenagers, is widespread; but the social relations that have created this technology and are furthered by it are not new. They are the same spectacle that Debord analysed half a century ago. Debord ends the first part of his book by remarking that the ‘spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images’. This now sounds like he was prophesising the Metaverse and non-fungible tokens. He was not. They are bullshit and nothing new.

It is because we are so deep in the spectacle, and have been for so long, that anyone concerned with localism must ask whether people are still capable of politics: whether we are still the kind of people who can organise ourselves into ‘households’, ‘villages’, and ‘political communities’ or whether we are only capable of relating to one another in the temporary and conditional ways that the spectacle requires.

It would be easy to say that we are no longer capable of politics. Membership of political parties is reduced; church membership is in decline; union membership remains low; and even loyal football fans are crowded out by plastics. The negative story could perhaps be fleshed out with some reflections on way that dating apps turn even the most intimate human relationships into aspects of the spectacle; and then it could be concluded that politics is over, the spectacle has won, and nothing is to be done.

I don’t buy this negative story. I think it confuses two things. We are not generally engaging in politics in the old sense, but that does not prove that we cannot do so. People, obviously, do still self-organise sometimes: the rapid spread of independent food banks across the country is evidence of that. So, too, is the plain fact that people still care about their families and neighbourhoods, just as they always have. We are still the same human beings, although living in different social and technological circumstances. We are not using our political capabilities as we once did, but that does not mean that we cannot use them.

If we can still self-organise in Aristotle’s sense, then why don’t we? I think two possible answers can be discounted out of hand. On one hand, this is not a case of oppression or coercion, at least not in Britain in this time. People are not desperately attempting to create alternative political structures, but being stopped by the authorities. On the whole, they are not attempting politics at all. On the other hand, it’s not that people’s political needs are being met by the spectacle; so they no longer need politics. You can barely throw a stick in the North without hitting simmering political dissatisfaction. The real reason why politics in the old sense is vanishing is, I think, more to do with how the spectacle operates. It makes it very hard for us to pay attention.

Here, I am using an idea of Simone Weil’s, and her ideas can be subtle and tricky to grasp. When I say ‘the spectacle makes paying attention hard’, it perhaps makes you think of a busy social media feed that distracts you from sitting and talking to your spouse or neighbour. That is not really what I’m getting at. On that picture of things – I don’t talk to my spouse because I am too busy with virtual relationships – paying attention is seen as a sort of activity, a thing that you do. I’m paying attention to social media, not my spouse. Weil, though, would say that when you’re on social media, then you are not paying attention to anything at all.

For Weil, attention is not something that you do. It is something that occurs only when you stop doing and start ‘waiting’: in her poetic language, ‘the soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at’. For those of us that aren’t saints, this is almost impossible. We come to every social interaction with agendas, worries, and preoccupations. All the same, true attention is possible and even ordinary. The passing comment that changes the way you see something, the way that dusk over the moors seems to momentarily silence my mind, a growing loyalty between colleagues that emerges just from working side-by-side: these are all examples of a soul emptying itself a little bit to receive a little bit of the other. These things are not the mystical union that Weil describes, but they are on the same continuum. This self-emptying is something common, important, and easily missed. If politics is ever to be anything other than the raw exercise of power, it is here that it must begin.

The set of social relations that Debord calls the spectacle are directly opposed to attention in this sense. Images – whether social media profiles, news reports, or newsletter posts – require activity to produce; and competition for clicks means that this activity always risks collapsing into self-promotion. Nothing could be further away from Weil’s silent attention on the other. Engaging with the spectacle as a consumer, rather than a producer, is not better. Even if I ignore the constant barrage of the feed and take the time to truly and carefully attend to one item, then I have only attended to the image, not to its creator. Aesthetics may be able to begin with this level of attention, but politics demands more.

And that thought, ‘politics demands more’, sums up both why localism is necessary and why it is difficult. It is necessary because the discontent of our time has deep roots. Humans need to be part of something more than the spectacle. It is difficult because truly paying attention to others is hard and scary and it leaves us vulnerable. Politics demands more from each of us, not just from Westminster or the political hate-figures of the moment.