[2] The term "post-politics" carries negative connotations of depriving the electorate from voting on issues deemed settled by the elites while "depoliticisation" is neutral.
Rancière argued, however, that after the collapse of Soviet system, the resulting "end of history" feeling caused "an internal weakening of the very democracy that was assumed to have triumphed", and that the neoliberal state institutions increasingly started to make decisions that traditionally belonged to the legislatures.
[3] The term "depoliticisation" (also American English: depoliticization) has been used extensively in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in many contexts, ranging from central banking to philosophy.
[6] Depoliticisation can be broadly described as politicians offloading the decision making to technocrats or "the strategic shifting of blame and responsibility away from political actors and the removal of potentially contentious issues from the realm of public debate"[7] Peter Burnham observed that the politicians usually retain effective control by proxy: depoliticisation is "the process of placing at one remove the political character of decisionmaking".
[1] Post-politics replaces disruptive citizens ("the people") with consumers ("the population"), expected, through elections, to make a choice of managers based on private economic necessities.
[1] Researchers of populism generally agree that its growth in the 1990s is the result of political elites accepting certain concepts (like free market) as unalterable truths.
Due to growing inequality part of electorate found itself on the losing end of these policies, but the agency of voting became hollow, as no mainstream parties were able to challenge the consensus.
With the fall of state-communism in Eastern Europe and Eurasia as the final blow to an already crisis-ridden system, the USSR as a key political player on side of communism abandoned its social democratic, Keynesian form; and neoliberalism entered a new global phase.
In the USSR the main driver for this change was idea of "convergention" between socialism and communism formulated by Andrej Sakharov in his Nobel prize speech.
Against Giddens' "social reflexivity"-based account, Rose's study of this new "ethopolitics" suggests that it is the strictures of the new, market individualist (Schumpeterian) forms of governance-beyond-the-state that has driven the recent emphasis on the autonomous, freedom-aspiring, self-sufficient individual.
[24] Likewise, Beck celebrates the new scepticism associated with post-modern, identity-based politics as a progressive consequence of the universal uncertainty that characterises risk society.
While translated into English simply as "disagreement" (with obvious reference to the constitutively antagonistic element of politics, as discussed above), in French mésentente also implies, in a speech situation, the fact of misunderstanding between parties, or more precisely in the Rancièrian sense of "talking past one another".
[37] Rancière's point here is to underline that the fact of misunderstanding is not a neutral one: rather, the partition of the perceptible given in the police order decides whether an enunciation is heard as speech or instead as noise; as rational discourse (as in deliberative democratic theory, such as that of Jürgen Habermas or John Rawls), or instead as a grunt or moan.
'[45] Rancière's claim is that this distinctly universalist gesture works to deny the particularist logic that partitions social space into a series of private, proper places, functions and parts, thus resolving the aforementioned contradiction.
In this respect, the ontological status of the remainder in Žižek comes closer to that of the privileged figure of Badiou's "non-expressive dialectics": the generic set.
[47] With genericity being closely associated to universality in Badiou's work, the latter therefore contributes a great deal to developing the notion of "surplus" or "excess" in both Rancière and Žižek.
In this respect, her theory of the political differs widely from the above-mentioned philosophers, all of whom, while inspired in various ways by it, are careful to distance themselves from post-structuralist thought, not least on account of the contribution it has in their eyes made to the consolidation of the post-political Zeitgeist.
With the market and the liberal state as it organising principles, the present global "meta-level" consensus has taken cosmopolitanism and humanitarianism as the central and uncontestable tenets of its corresponding moral (rather than political) value system.
In so doing, it has also stepped in as one of the primary post-ideological "ideologies" of the present age: as Swyngedouw notes, as a concept sustainability is so devoid of properly political content that it is impossible to disagree with its objectives.
[46] Although certainly exercised in a democratic fashion (i.e. via the deliberative engagement described by Giddens' social reflexivity thesis (see above)[60]), expert adjudication nonetheless comes to substitute properly political debate.
By contrast, ‘…the fact-value divide of the Modern Constitution acts to obscure the work of composition that goes into the construction of a matter of fact’,[62] thus giving way to the post-political configuration, in which politics is reduced to 'the administration and management of processes whose parameters are defined by consensual socio-scientific knowledges'.
[63] In environmental politics, then, 'disagreement is allowed, but only with respect to the choice of technologies, the mix of organisational fixes, the details of the managerial adjustments, and the urgency of the timing and implementation'.
Meanwhile, one need only point to the predominance of quantitative measures such as Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) or the vast regulatory apparatuses associated with the new and burgeoning carbon markets as evidence of what Mitchell Dean[68] has labelled "post-democratic" concern with metricisation, accountancy, auditing and benchmarking.
The homogenising, unifying effect of this invocation is what produces the mythical – but more importantly reactionary and invariably exclusionary – notion of "the people" that is so central to the populist gesture.
Following other scholars who have analysed the alarmist tone of climate discourse,[74][75] Swyngedouw also underlines that the millenarian, apocalyptic imaginaries called forth by the latter create an external threat, while also giving way to an elite-led, almost crusade-like action (the latter being a further classic feature of populism).
On the other hand, properly political claims that resist both consensual strategies of incorporation[56] and what Žižek has called "the populist temptation" are made audible only as violent or fanatical outbursts.