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The Implosion of ‘the Political’

Posted: 14/05/2009 by Aditya Nigam in Capitalism, Democracy, Governmentality, Nation-state,Politics, Theory Tags: citizens, media, refugees, representation

3Aditya Nigam

[This essay was first published in the Journal of Contemporary Thought, No 27, Summer 2008]

Nicos Poulantzas once made a distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘politics’ as such. In his rendering‘the political’ referred to what can be called, with appropriate modifications, the juridical-political levelof ‘the state’ (and we can include parties, elections and mobilization), while ‘politics’ referred to politicalpractices (Poulantzas 1968: 37).[1](/Aditya/critical%20encounters/implosion%20of%20the%20political.htm#_ftn1) ’Political practices’referred in his writings to ‘class practices’ but we can once again, suitably modify the term to includedifferent kinds of political practices along different axes – class, caste, gender, religious or linguisticcommunity and so on. Politics, thus seen, pervades life as such. We can also call it, after MichelFoucault, the micropolitics of power. Politics is there wherever there are power relations. And asfeminism once struggled to establish, at this level, the personal is political. That is to say, from relationswithin the family, to relations between ‘loving couples’ and between parents and children, nothing isfree of the relations of power. Indeed, the world has never been the same after that devastatingintervention, however much formal political theory may try to ignore it. The great classical distinctionbetween the polis and the oikos, reworked by moderns into the public and the private, seemed tosuddenly wither under that attack.

At this stage I would also like to point out that what applies to ‘the private’ domain also holds for themore everyday and local forms of domination and power such as in the ways in which the caste rulesoperate in the villages or acquire a somewhat modified class/caste form in towns and cities, structuringwhat appear might to be ‘inter-personal’ relations. We can witness this in the hundreds of dailyinteractions, say for instance, between middle class families and their domestic employees, or theirinteractions with rikshaw pullers, vendors and such like. These are certainly not ‘private’ but bear thecharacteristics of the private insofar as they lack ‘publicity’.

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