Thoughts from the Dean (part 2): Techno-Politics in LUC The Hague
One of the (many) questions that keeps me awake at night (and sometimes during the day too) is where people find politics. It is a slippery and difficult term, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that we use it so casually everyday. We use it for a great variety of things:
‘She’s always gets what she wants; she so political.’
‘It’s just politics – you shouldn’t trust what he says.’
‘They’re so passionate and political about equal rights.’
‘That was a politic choice; he’s a real statesman.’
‘I don’t like that book, it’s too political for me.’
‘I hate his politics; I don’t understand how you can like him.’
So, where is politics? For some, the answer to this question is very simple: politics is a sphere of activity that involves groups of people in collective decisions; politics is a category that overlaps with ‘government,’ or, as Aristotle would tell us, ‘the affairs of the state.’ For others, politics refers to principles rather than spheres: politics is about managing authority or power, in whatever social circumstances these problematic categories may be found. Hence, the various processes involved in (for example) building a new university college might be seen as political activities, not only because of the way that the hierarchies of authority within the university structure (and government structure) are involved, but also because of the complex matrix of the politics of knowledge that co-determine things like the content of what will be taught or, perhaps more importantly, what can be taught and what should be taught. The connections between knowledge and power, like those between politics and ethics, are deep yet deeply contested.
For me, one of the most interesting questions about politics, however, is not so much the matter of what kinds of social activities can be seen as political (although this is fascinating), but rather what kinds of thinking count as political thought. If it is true that we can find politics in so many different parts of our everyday lives – not only during elections or within the hallowed halls of our government structures – then should it follow that we can also find political thought in an equally diverse range of sources? Should we only be looking in newspapers, in governmental white-papers, in manifestoes, or even in elaborate treatises of political philosophy? Or does that range of texts only point to thought about a small range of the meaning of ‘politics’ for us today? What about looking at literature or film? What about the dynamics of cyberspace or interactions through virtual worlds? Can (or, perhaps better, when can) playing a video game count as an engagement with political ideas? Of course, the answers to these questions are political in themselves …
Whilst there is an obvious correlation between what we take to be political activity and what we understand as sensible sources of political ideas (particularly within the conventions of academic Political Science), I think we would be wrong to see this correlation as static. Time and space (history and geography, context and culture) both play a role here too. That is, it is simply no longer adequate to see politics as coterminous with the affairs of the state. In the world we live in (or, at least, in the world I live in) politics is immediately bigger and smaller than the nation; it is also other than the state.
My point here, just as it was in my last post about ‘Worldly Politics,’ is that academia must not stand still when it comes to defining its fields. It is not only the case that we should look outside European traditions for ideas about politics, but we should also look beyond the kinds of media that Europe has conventionally deployed to express its political ideas. Thinking about politics today can no longer mean simply reading Thomas Hobbes (a dead, white, male, English, philosopher, who wrote a sustained political treatise), undeniably important as he is; thinking about politics today might mean playing Grand Theft Auto IV. It might mean watching The Prince of Persia or reading The Watchmen.
We might even combine these two types of dysjunction (cultural and medial) and note that it is possible that in some other historical and cultural contexts political expression was more typically through the media of visuality (art, architecture, graphic fiction, film) or even musicality. We might point to cultures where rituals and games are a vital part of political processes. We might argue that politics is basically a game anyway; a game with real consequences. During the last general election in the UK, a well-known comedian attempted to explain to his daughter what an election was: it’s like the X-Factor or the Eurovision Song Contest, except nobody watches it on TV.
Hence, excluding these various media from our quest to understand political thinking risks not only being out-of-date but also continuing ethnocentricty. The politics of knowledge here is very complicated, but this is something that LUC The Hague should, can, and will engage with.
Chris Goto-Jones
Dean, Leiden University College The Hague