Re: <nettime> Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics

[Frédéric Neyrat via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Hi Gary,

But isn’t trying to understand our “digital” condition through a new
“technology”of philosophy a vicious circle of sorts? It's not that we
shouldn't be thinking about the "digital" and new "technology" for
thinking, but I believe the circle mentioned above must be interrupted.

Best,

Frédéric


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On Fri, Jul 31, 2026 at 10:22 AM Gary Hall via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

> Hey Felix,
>
> I agree with what you say about the article. At the same time I have
> some mixed feelings.
>
> On the one hand, Jäger’s done something genuinely useful by identifying
> another era – hyperpolitics - to follow on from the post-politics of
> Mouffe, Zižek and Jodi Dean and then what he refers to as anti-politics.
> It’s an intriguing way of describing our political present.
>
> On the other, Laclau, Mouffe, Zižek, Dean et al. all also provided us
> with powerfully accurate accounts of earlier political conjunctures, and
> things still took the direction they did. So how useful is adding yet
> another model to the list of periodizations actually likely to be?
>
> It’s not an either/or, of course. We need this kind of work too. Still,
> I keep coming back to Boaventura de Sousa Santos's observation that what
> we lack isn't yet another theory of resistance or revolution to sit
> alongside the many we already have, Marxist and otherwise, but a
> revolution in theory itself.
>
> Or to put it in terms I used on the list recently in relation to
> understanding our digital condition: it's not a new philosophy of
> technology we need; it's a new technology of philosophy.
>
> Best, Gary
>
>
> On 31/07/2026 12:09, Felix Stalder via nettime-l wrote:
> >
> > I haven't read the book, but from the article here, I think two things
> > are useful. One is that Trump doesn't represent fascism, but
> > Bonapartism, ie. not a collective mass movement, but a mass of people
> > joined individually to a singular leader.
> >
> > The other is this:
> >
> > "They [the far right] are not more organized or more ideologically
> > coherent or more strategic [than the left]; they are just better
> > funded – which puts quite a lot on the shoulders of capital itself as
> > the overarching organizing principle of global politics. Money might
> > not be the only thing talking, but it’s the only thing getting what it
> > wants."
> >
> > In other words, somebody is still doing the boring but necessary
> > organizational, institutional work. It's capital.
> >
> > Also, there is a great line on Reform UK: "There is just Nigel and a
> > smartphone and then a couple of private donors." (I think this doesn't
> > apply to the far-right in France or Germany.)
> >
> >
> > all the best. Felix
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Meet the man whose groundbreaking book is being devoured by the left
> > Zoe Williams
> >
> > 23.07.2026
> >
> >
> https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/23/anton-jager-groundbreaking-book-being-devoured-by-left
> >
> >
> > “I am acutely conscious,” said Andy Burnham outside 10 Downing Street
> > on Monday, “that I am the sixth person in the last 10 years to walk up
> > this street.” It was good to hear him say it because, beneath all the
> > cabinet gossip and rune-reading, there is a feeling of terror about
> > the immediate future and also about ourselves, the electorate. Is this
> > who we are now? Wildly enthusiastic one minute, seething the next; as
> > passionate about the change we want as we are convinced that those who
> > promise it are incapable of enacting it?
> >
> > It is perhaps not surprising that Anton Jäger’s recent book,
> > Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences,
> > is being read by Labour watchers and leftwing thinkers. As the New
> > York Times wrote, it’s “among the best and most dazzling efforts to
> > model the political present in all its maddening strangeness”. Still,
> > I think Jäger was surprised to have his honeymoon interrupted so I
> > could interview him about it. Life comes at everyone quite fast in a
> > hyperpolitical age.
> >
> > Jäger, 32, raised in Brussels by parents who work in the arts
> > (“bohemian class?” I ask, and he says carefully that they are boho
> > “adjacent”), educated at the University of Essex, then Cambridge, is
> > now a lecturer in the history of political thought and theory at
> > University College, Oxford. He has an intense, angular face and a
> > calm, almost self-effacing manner. His philosophical reference points
> > are Deleuze and Guattari, Mouffe and Laclau, but asked to situate
> > himself in the firmament of the European left, he says simply: “Even
> > with all the baggage and connotations, I still think the easiest thing
> > is to call myself a Marxist.”
> >
> > His thinking runs as follows (don’t get hung up on the dates, though
> > some, like 1989, are non-negotiable). The years 1914 to 1989 mark the
> > age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and
> > institutionalisation was also high – so people engaged with politics
> > electorally and on the streets. They were joiners – of political
> > parties, unions, congregations, working men’s clubs, reading groups;
> > they participated in multiple interlacing institutions. Not by
> > coincidence, this was also a time when political struggle resulted in
> > concrete gains. Then, 1989 to the financial crash in 2008 (the years
> > often called the “long 90s”) was the age of post-politics, when
> > institutionalisation was low (we emphatically did not join clubs then,
> > we went to clubs), and politicisation was through the floor. It was a
> > time when technocrats took care of business while everyone else went
> > to a rave, and we said history was over. From the crash through to
> > about 2020 (sometimes earlier, this boundary is the most fluid) was
> > the age of anti-politics – a resurgent Tea Party in the US, Beppe
> > Grillo and anti-establishment protests in Italy, the Arab spring, the
> > Occupy movement. Politicisation in this period came back with a
> > vengeance, and even while institutionalisation hasn’t recovered, these
> > movements still have institutional ambitions. Protest movements in
> > Spain and Greece bore political parties, Podemos and Syriza; protest
> > candidates in the US, France and the UK, had their eyes on retaking
> > traditional parties from which the revolutionary intent had long been
> > stripped away.
> > protester in a mask that says ‘I can’t breathe’
> > A Black Lives Matter protest in London on 6 June 2020 after the
> > killing of George Floyd. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
> >
> > Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with neither
> > institutional roots nor ambitions. “On the surface,” Jäger writes,
> > “the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common
> > with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they
> > are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit
> > a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no
> > membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their
> > adherents.” As a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes;
> > movements surge suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He
> > quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s contemporary interpretation
> > of the evocative phrase “bodies without organs”. Modern political
> > movements, he writes, are “concentrated and muscular, yet without an
> > internal metabolism”.
> >
> > He found this pattern across the Organisation for Economic
> > Co-operation and Development and he only stopped there, he says,
> > because “I don’t have the linguistic and cultural reach to fully tell
> > this story globally”. His descriptions are powerful. He writes of
> > climate strikers and anti-lockdown demonstrators alike as “a myriad
> > animated by brief, potent stimuli, stirred to action by charismatic
> > influencers and digital demagogues”. And that, you have to admit, is
> > exactly what it looks like.
> >
> > These four eras – mass politics, post-politics, antipolitics and
> > hyperpolitics – “are not just concepts,” Jäger says, “they have some
> > empirical data behind them. ‘How institutionalised is society?’ is
> > basically a question of, how does civil society look? How are
> > membership organisations looking? What are the affiliations, what are
> > the types of bonds that people have? That’s not very difficult to
> > quantify. You can look at union membership, you can look at church
> > attendance, you can look at less overtly political forms of belonging.
> > The political axis is more difficult to measure, but not impossible –
> > namely, how many people attend elections, how many people strike, how
> > many people engage in political violence, how many people engage in
> > political communication, write letters to editors or now post online?”
> >
> > He argues that the height of mass politics was between the wars. To
> > illustrate this in the book, he lists all the civic organisations
> > during the Great Depression in the small Austrian hamlet of Marienthal
> > – they spanned all human activity, from work to thought to
> > rabbit-breeding. I won’t list them all here but there were many.
> > Considering the effect these organisations might have on the
> > collective psyche, Jäger considers the history of his own family: “On
> > the Flemish side, this meant that the Christian Democratic or the
> > Catholic party was not just a party that said how you were to vote, or
> > which union you joined, but also had a very strong say in what
> > happened in the bedroom. It was a total doctrine, not something that
> > purely applied to your political deportment.” There was little
> > boundary between public and private, and no such thing as a political
> > identity without a membership card. It was personally quite
> > constraining, but it got shit done. (Sidebar, I’ve seen a nascent
> > institutionalised-politics like this, in Manchester, in 2019; the
> > local Momentum group was campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn, but it also
> > had a running club, a knitting group and a book group. I was overcome
> > by the sense of seeing a trade union movement reborn. Needless to say,
> > Corbyn did not win that election. Institution-building can’t be done
> > on the fly.)
> >
> > The destruction of political organisations was “not monocausal”, Jäger
> > says, though in the book he puts it squarely on the shoulders of the
> > union busting by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. People lost
> > faith in organisations because the crunchy bit of their leverage – the
> > bit where you get what you want by withdrawing your labour, the bit
> > before all-out war – was taken away. Unions were defanged and workers
> > impoverished, and many ultimately saw their industries collapse in the
> > process.
> >
> > Jäger says there were also cultural and generational shifts over
> > decades – people in the 60s and 70s seeking a different relationship
> > with collective institutions, for example, and looking instead for
> > emancipation and equality – so it takes a while for the picture to
> > cohere, and Communist parties remained tenacious through the 1980s in
> > Italy, for instance. “In 1989, suddenly it’s as if there’s a day and
> > night difference,” he says. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end
> > of the cold war, he says: “Suddenly everyone deserves to party.”
> > Large crowd climb onto the Berlin Wall
> >
> >
> > It is a strange sensation to have the 90s narrated back to you by
> > someone who was born in 1994, but it is mainly unsettling because it
> > is so accurate. Tony Blair did describe globalisation as a process as
> > inexorable as the weather, and that is also how neoliberals described
> > the economy – a thing that happened to you. “This is the ambiguity of
> > the post-politics of the 90s,” Jäger says. “Politics is no longer
> > something that you see as effecting large-scale social change, and the
> > forms of liberty that are available to you are now more private, more
> > intimate, more individual. At the same time, the idea that you can
> > collectively bundle together with other individuals and change society
> > starts to appear very, very remote.”
> >
> > There was also a lot of beauty to that time, which he describes
> > through the photography of Wolfgang Tillmans and the novels of Annie
> > Ernaux and Michel Houellebecq. We were obsessed with Houellebecq in
> > the 90s, but we will have to talk about why, and the direction his
> > novels took, and whether we will ever again live in a world whose best
> > cultural artefact is the novel, another time. “The fact that Tillmans
> > as a gay man is able to express and experience the rave culture of the
> > 90s and 00s as a new form of collectivity that wasn’t available to him
> > in the 70s and 80s, I don’t think we should deny the liberatory value
> > of this. It very clearly is the case that there are individuals who
> > did not feel at home in the families, or the communities or the
> > neighbourhoods in which they grew up, in which they finally find a
> > kind of new community that is much less demanding and is less exigent
> > than what they had before. The ambiguity is, of course, that it also
> > implies a profound disenchantment and cynicism around what politics
> > can do.” That’s politics with a capital P – you might see a community
> > animated about an issue, but with no faith in parliamentary channels.
> >
> >
> > There is a critical and rarely mentioned adjunct to the neoliberal
> > destruction of institutions and the post and antipolitics that came
> > afterwards, which is that it didn’t only come for the left. “Thatcher
> > basically did a controlled demolition of popular Conservatism,” Jäger
> > says, “and replaced much of this with PR spin, and also a lot of
> > private funding, because the idea was: ‘We can get rid of our mass
> > party because we’re in control of the media, we can win elections with
> > that.’” The right today, he says, is just as inconsequential as the
> > left, and for exactly the same reason, that it’s hyper but not
> > formally organised. “The people who go on marches subscribe to the
> > same podcast, might follow the same pages on Instagram, might be on
> > the same Telegram channels, but they don’t have an organisational
> > history they shared before they entered the march. This is different
> > even to the BNP, where marchers had a shared history in football
> > hooliganism, and the National Front. That shared subculture is no
> > longer there.”
> >
> > He says this is clear with Reform UK, “which is so heavily
> > leader-dependent. The entire movement is at risk with this scandal of
> > the crypto-billionaire, because there’s no party infrastructure. There
> > is just Nigel and a smartphone and then a couple of private donors.”
> > To me, this fails to take into account that the right is different to
> > the left: they have more money. “Maybe I understated the availability
> > of private funding,” he says mildly. “The fact that we can even talk
> > of a trillionaire, such as Elon Musk, means there’s a complete
> > secession of that individual from what we could even call society.
> > That is a variable in explaining why hyperpolitics on the right
> > thrives and why hyperpolitics on the left has found it much more
> > difficult to achieve tangible results.” They are not more organised or
> > more ideologically coherent or more strategic; they are just better
> > funded – which puts quite a lot on the shoulders of capital itself as
> > the overarching organising principle of global politics. Money might
> > not be the only thing talking, but it’s the only thing getting what it
> > wants.
> >
> >
> > The more immediately controversial proposition of the book, though, is
> > that what we are watching in Trump’s US is not fascism, because the
> > right only travels to that extreme in the face of a direct threat of
> > organised socialism. “The left is doing itself too many favours by
> > considering its opponents fascists,” he says. “You’re overestimating
> > your strength. The contemporary far right is more a function of the
> > crisis of liberalism than it is a function of the strength of the
> > left.” What we’re looking at instead, with Trump, is “Bonapartism”
> > says Jäger. He writes that Trump, and everyone else who has ever got
> > ahead by championing the “left behind”, isn’t representing a strong
> > mass movement or class, but, like Napoleon, relying on “the largely
> > passive support of impoverished peasants … not a collective but
> > ‘formed by the simple addition of isomorphous magnitudes, much as
> > potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes’.” (That bit about potatoes
> > is from Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.) We
> > skirmish a little about the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement as
> > a standing army that looks extremely fascist, until Jäger concludes:
> > “The spectrum from fascism to Bonapartism can flip into something more
> > radical. At the same time, I’m still more struck by the differences
> > than the similarities with these 20th-century phenomena.”
> >
> > Neal Lawson, guru of Manchesterism and an Anton Jäger fan, lays these
> > arguments over the predicament of our new prime minister. “It isn’t
> > just lack of money Burnham has to contend with but the absence of
> > secure political footings. Temporary hyper-political swarms have taken
> > the place of substantial and secure alliances. He must find a way to
> > surf these volatile waves or be another victim of them.” But we, the
> > volatile waves, also have to figure out how to re-engage with
> > institutions and build new ones, and is that possible? Jäger pauses,
> > dispiritingly, like a mechanic who is about to give you bad news about
> > your fanbelt. “This is an interesting and scary question. We do live
> > in a society in which the incentives for leaving rather than entering
> > organisations are much higher. Recent experience, whether joining a
> > party or joining a union, often militates against the idea that
> > there’s any sense in collective action, and the rational response is
> > helplessness. And yet, repoliticisation is good. Hyperpolitics has
> > increased people’s consciousness of the fact that politics matters.”
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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