On Becoming Political: The Political in Subjectivity Jouni Häkli & Kirsi Pauliina Kallio Speaker Series, IASR/NSR lecture University of Tampere February 13, 2018
Mapping the landscape Radical expansion of the notion of politics (~ since the 1980s) Proliferation of the politics of Yet, the political often left undefined or unspecified
Outlining the theoretical challenge Questions concerning the political, politics and political agency map out a vast terrain of philosophical thought, and (abstract) political theory Our goal: to develop conceptual tools that facilitate the analysis of political action and events in everyday life
Outlining the theoretical challenge Sensitivity to the contextual openendedness of everyday political agency means that we start from not knowing in advance what issues, experiences, events or actions are, or become, political in a given situation The political everything? (Jodi Dean 2000)
Dissecting mundane political agency Only as someone can we have interest in something there is no political action without the political subject (Ringmar 1996) The political is relational, attempts to fix it ontologically risk closure: politics is already determined before anyone engages in it (Agnew, 2003) > To theorize mundane political agency, we must make sense of: what is the subject what enables undetermined and unexpected acts what is (the context of) the political
The question of the subject Substantivist : Liberal, self-sufficient, enduring individual, the sovereign source of consciousness and action Anti-subjectivist : The product of social and discursive construction / provisional singularity without stability, autonomy or unity of self?
Looking for a middle ground Conceptions of intersubjectivity, e.g. Judith Butler (1990, 1997, 2003): explores the dynamism through which individuals are always already subjected or undergoing subjectivation (Butler 1997: 11) works well for understanding the psychic life of power but fails to account properly for the subject s capacity to political agency Axel Honneth (1995, 2007): the subject s identity is shaped by a social dynamism of recognition and misrecognition addresses the locus for experience that can not be reduced into identity but risks essentializing the identifying subject, and employs a disembodied conception of subjectivity
The subject as I/me dialogue G.H. Mead: the subject as a dialogue / duality between me and I I refers to the embodied subject s presently ongoing agency me is intersubjectively constituted social self that acts as the subject s interface in the social world I has no social existence without me Me relates human beings to their social worlds, where their agencies are embodied in I This undetermined dialogue is the source of the subject s relative autonomy from the forces of its social constitution > the condition of possibility of political agency
Political subjectivity The self-controlled rational subject is a defunct notion Subjectivity is at once deeply personal and fundamentally social Subjectivities emerge through relational dynamics and exceed determination by power structures Enables subjective capacities to improvisation, unexpected action, the production of change
Phenomenologies of political agency Challenge of open-endedness: what is political, and for whom, in the flux of everyday life? Focus on subjective experience in mundane situations: the significance and importance of issues is an emergent part of everyday life (not a pre-given fact) the importance of issues can only be judged by the subjects involved importance is constituted contextually in settings where those involved have things at stake (Kallio and Häkli 2017) attention to seemingly commonplace, uninteresting, or unremarkable events
Illustrating mundane political agency Children are a critical case of political agency: If we can identify political agency where it is least expected, we can assume to find it among any human subjects Illustration with a scene from the movie Fanny and Alexander Story based on memories of director Ingmar Bergman s own childhood A possible event in children s life Realist fiction, not empirical evidence The plot in a nutshell
Alexander: a rational subject? In defying the Bishop, Alexander chose to act against his best interests what he did only made the situation worse The episode seen in terms of political subjectivity: Bishop and Alexander are contesting over Alexander s identity Alexander is rejecting the subject position of son that the Bishop proposes Alexander s irrational action is, in fact, his mundane politics
Politics in context: polis No issue is political in itself, by itself, but in relation to a context of politicization polis polis is a relational space, a constitutive context where matters gain importance politicize and are politicized a dynamic space with various shapes and compositions topologically bundles together people, issues, events, ideologies, places and objects, here and there, now, before and in the future, that make up the discontinuous ecology of people s concerns (Häkli & Kallio 2014)
Illustrating polis Focal event: the tragic death of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 Dec 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia Undeniably influenced the Arab Spring political mobilisation Two dominant readings of the event: Bouazizi as the hero of the Jasmine revolution and the Arab Spring (e.g. Mabrouk 2011) Bouazizi as a family man and a completely apolitical person (e.g. De Soto 2011) Focus on the polis of the event helps in locating its political moment (Kallio & Häkli 2017)
An alternative reading of Bouazizi s politics Nobody sets himself on fire for nothing Mapping a polis, starting from Bouazizi s experiential world, his matters of importance and things at stake Noticing his political subjectivity, a sense of self as a street entrepreneur not being respected, a sense of wrong Acknowledging Bouazizi s act of setting himself on fire understood as political agency in itself The broader consequences of his last action resulted from its dissemination in the public across the Arab world but not the only significant politics
Refugeeness as political subjectivity Analysis of refugeeness as a distance between one s sense of self and the figure of the refugee proposed by the migration control/humanitarian assistance regime Prompt political subjectivities that people struggle with, yet draw from, in their encounters with the regime (liminalities between rights and obligations, status and stigma, inclusion and belonging) Performative political agencies negotiated within the fissures of the migration regime Kallio, Häkli & Pascucci (submitted) Häkli, Pascucci & Kallio (2017)
Temporal dimensions of agency There are qualitative differences in the nature of human agency depending on whether it is enacting the past or orientated to the future as it seeks to respond to emergent events (Emirbayer & Mische 1998; Mead 1932) iterational routine agency as the non-political major part of the flux of our everyday lives projective agency is shaped in response to the challenges of social life caused by uncertainty regarding some aspects of the future the political practical evaluative aspect of agency entails interruption in the flux of mundane routines, pushing humans away from their iterative forms of agency, into a state of becoming where the past and the future intersect in the form of a challenge, uncertainty, or conflict where they have something at stake
Becoming/political: the political ordinary An argument for the inclusion of ordinary acts and events within what is conceived of as the political Acknowledging that the political exists in the capacities that all human beings have Accepting that many political struggles intertwine with the seemingly nonpolitical aspects of life (e.g. histories of gay and lesbian movements) In the political moment, people appear simultaneously as acting and developing subjects Political agency is the subject s action when in a state of becoming prompted by future-oriented demands and contingencies of social life Takes various forms (e.g. activity and passivity as equally possible responses to a situation)
Publications Kallio, Häkli & Pascucci (submitted). Refugeeness as political subjectivity: Experiencing the humanitarian border. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. Häkli, J. & Kallio, K.P. (2017). On becoming political: the political in subjectivity. Subjectivity [Dec 15 2017 Online First] Kallio, K.P. & Häkli, J. (2017). Geosocial Lives in Topological Polis: Mohamed Bouazizi as a Political Agent. Geopolitics 22:1, 91 109. Häkli, J., Pascucci, E. & Kallio, K.P. (2017). Becoming refugee in Cairo: The political in performativity. International Political Sociology 11:2, 185-202. Kallio, K.P. and Häkli, J. (eds.) (2015). The Beginning of Politics. London: Routledge/Taylor&Francis. Häkli, J. & Kallio, K.P. (2014). Subject, action and polis: Theorizing political agency. Progress in Human Geography 38(2), 181-200. Thank you!