The Re-politicization of Ordinary Things

For my first blog on this site, I would like to present a humble idea relating to an opinion I've held for some time now, being that American politics, and perhaps politics of the "First World' in general have become a somewhat stale and irrelevant undertaking for ordinary people, and fail to touch upon everyday issues and things in our immediate reality. When we take a close look at recent history and compare our institutions with those of other countries, political inclusion and participation appear to be on a sharp decline, while apathy appears to be ever more common. Often the problem appears as something of a general separation of the political process from everyday life, or as something inaccessible to many people. I've encountered a few plausible explanations for this (I'm not the only one apparently), that I will enumerate presently. If you are reading this blog and want to add something, comment, or disagree, please feel free.

1. Chantal Mouffe posits that the various political action groups, from the feminists, those fighting for racial equality, to the environmentalists etc, while undertaking politics for their own struggles have failed in general to evoke a common ground, or a struggle for politics in general. This has left the various groups all being a one-off in the process, on their own, and an exception to an otherwise exclusive political process.
2. Ernesto Laclau citing the failings of Marxism and the success of various groups throughout the 20th century, comments on the need for groups to touch on actual keystone issues of human interest and salience, where most still appropriate outmoded ideologies, political programmes, and pseudo-social sciences. More importantly he identifies politics as something more than lobbying or voting, propaganda etc. Effective politics is a social undertaking relating to identity, ideology, values, and it responds directly to expressed needs. It embraces a full range of human experiences and social dynamics, and is therefore more than a process, it is a social movement, one that we haven't seen for some time.
3. Here I will lump together various 'institution' theories. I term them so because they relate to the structure of the political apparatus itself. As early as Aristotle and Plato (not yet irrelevant), politics was supposed to be a medium of public will (whoever the public may include) managed by men of leisure, that is, persons of aristocracy, for the simple reason that working people do not possess the resources and time necessary for such undertakings. This is why Marx envisioned a "Vanguard of the Proletariat." Our institutions bear the mark of this arrangement, relating to our history of arrangements, and upon observation this reality 2000 years later continues to hold strong. For example, what percentage of our public and appointed offices are held by wealthy lawyers and industry captains? That information is somewhere in the book "Who Rules America?'" by G. William Domhoff (http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/), I don't remember it exactly. In his opinion, American government has been constructed in such a way that policy is extremely difficult to be constructed and enacted, and as such, it is groups with the largest budgets that win out. In this way, the public is effectively shut out by a completely unrewarding process. Furthermore, as my professor Simon Gomez often pointed out, a political education is more expensive than is its payoff. This seems very smart to me. Mounting a very fragmented media landscape is a difficult task for someone interested in something very basic like the background of their political candidates. In many cases it appears to be a collective failure on the part of media to provide acessible, unbiased and usefull information. A lot of people probably get frustrated and don't bother.
4. Jacques Ranciere is frustrated with modern conceptions of politics that appear to be more akin to ideas of social management rather than ideas of participation and involvement. Representation, policy, and government in general fall into this charecterization. Not that representative systems are deaf to public needs, and cannot be channels of positive change, but that the system itself adresses the general populace from a standpoint of management, a quasi-policing that occurs at the level of policy. The undertakings of government are further enumerations of an allready established order, one whose stake is in maintaining itself intact, against the throws of 'intrusive' counter movements. As early as Machiavelli, and with a more critical approach by Etienne de la Boetie, political systems were said to have the capacity to persuade a public to its consent. Politics occurs when there is a viable and momentous challenge to the estabished order, (like Laclau) a proliferation of political identities, and (like Mouffe) an assertion of equality that evokes a common space for politics to take place. He defines this idea as 'Democratic Exceptionalism' because politics is in general a very rare exception the Rule.

I personally see the merits of all of these ideas. I believe interest groups should work for a common political involvement and that they have failed in doing that, I also think a salient politics has a basis in social and cultural inscriptions, and that the institutions that politics would play themselves out in are very resilient to popular intrusions, highly complex, and most excessible to those who have the means. I think we have fooled ourselves into thinking that voting once or twice a year gives us a claim to participation or democracy. I'm sure that there are power structures in many other places than the level of policy-making that our elected representatives c/would respond to anyways. All too often politics is mentioned in relation to something most of us have very little to do or say about, and is thus something left to the authorities, or the experts. Because of this I find it hard to imagine why most people wouldn't display some kind of political apathy...which brings me to my own humble idea, that of the re-politicization of ordinary things, especially the things that carry with them an abiding anti-polical status.

Consider for a moment how much involvement you or any of your friends have in making the decisions that that create lasting changes in the very place around you. Your neighborhood, your job, your apartment, your neighborhood police, traffic court, family services, financial institutions etc etc and on to the things around you, like common commodities and household items. How much of any of this bears the mark of a collective or popular will? For example, do you really want your shoes to be constructed by asian childeren in dangerous working conditions? If yes, for you it is ok, but if not, then there is ground for a claim to be made, not only for humane treatment of employees in its production, but full disclosure to the consumer regarding the details of its production. I think people should recognize that everything around us has a political dimension, whether it be expressed as an object of dispute, that is, overtly politivcal, or purely in anti-political terms of something undisputed. Every political act begins with the dispute of a claim, and every movement begins with the mourning of wrongs and a means to redress them. So please, please go do something about it.