Impossipolitcs (September 2022)

Macon Holt

About 7 or 8 years ago I saw the theorist and activist, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, speak at Goldsmiths in London. He said something there that has stuck with me ever since. He claimed that politics is no longer possible. 

At least not in the settings that are typically thought of as the domain of politics. The reason for this was technical, or perhaps better put, technocratic. Put simply, neoliberal capitalist society has made a series of decisions to stop anyone from actually making a decision ever again. 

Because the line must go up. Be it GDP or house prices or productivity or consumer spending, the line must go up. More than this the line must go up as much as it can, even if doing so means other, less clean-cut, modes of measuring, like standards of living, go down. 

So anything that looks like a political decision must be made in adherence to this principle. Of all the actions that can be done in a given situation, the one that must be done is whichever comes with the forecasts showing the line going up the most. 

Thus in a sense, the decision is taken once the numbers are run. Maybe even before because a particular input going through a fixed process will always produce its particular result. The presentation of data to a politician is merely a formality that begins the actual execution of an already-made decision. 

This is what Bifo thinks has made politics impossible. And in the spirit of that irreverent autonomic, I’m gonna call this idea impossipolitics

This analysis maybe doesn’t hold in every case. But where it doesn’t, this is because externalities produced by the process have, at least momentarily, confounded unambiguous calculation. A public vote like Brexit or a pandemic may have shown how disruptable this way of doing things is. 

But as private companies take money from the state to perform mandatory testing and the free market opportunities of deregulation become apparent in the non-EU UK, we can maybe say that the models just needed a moment to adjust. 

What I want to claim here is that this suspicion of people making decisions is becoming a paradigm that extends into education and ever more corners of life. And I want to claim that part of what facilitates this is the disappearance and marginalising, problematic as it is, of aesthetics in education. 

I’ve spent a while thinking about decisions. Trying to imagine what would make one genuine and another merely execution of a pre-ordained procedure. In some sense, it may well be that all that there is is the latter. But if we entertain the idea that agency does exist, what makes a real decision? It’s not ignoring data. It’s not going with your gut exactly. It is not really a leap of faith. 

It might be less the decision itself that is genuine or not, but more how you relate to it. It’s taking some kind of responsibility for the intervention you have made in reality. 

In the world of neoliberal impossipolitics, the responsibility for every decision rests ultimately with the market as a form of just arbitration. And the market is an entity that exists only as an abstract concept that cannot be held accountable. 

We see this in how the resignation of politicians for political mistakes has become an increasing rarity. Public opinion was never really why they quit. They quit because they believed themselves responsible. Resigning was a way to illustrate the power they had. Working as they do now, they don’t believe that anymore. 

The presence of decisions, or put better their remnants and traces, is what I think makes certain works of art interesting, inspiring, important or not. This and not that is the start of any aesthetic theory. Even when you decide not to decide the impact of a preference can be felt. In the same way not deciding what to decide can invisibly cause a work to fall apart. 

This is where aesthetics reveals it was ethics all along. When choosing this and not that, you put value into the world and in so doing invite conflict or concordance and impinge on the decision-making of others. This isn’t necessarily bad. It can be. But it’s the only way to care about anything and attach yourself to the world. Making these kind of decisions are the only way to even consider things good or bad. In that way, it makes you responsible to some extent for what happens next. 

The business school would like to believe it instils this kind of responsible decision-making skill in its students. And from time to time it might. But every agenda point for education and research in every meeting I have been in has been constrained by the logic that the line must go up. Be this student employability, positive teaching evaluations or 4\* journal publications (not \*\*\*\*, no. 1, 2, 3, 4, 4\*. Which is a strange way to make a 5 point scale).

And this underlying logic of impossipolitcs seeps into them. Every exam must come with a recipe. Every theory must provide a model for action. Every data set must confirm or deny a hypothesis. This need for sure footing makes the world and finding out about it terrifying, while at the same time, because of their position, they feel entitled to do so. 

A pretty decent colleague said this in a presentation at a department retreat recently while talking about how they plan to integrate more businessy skills into the communication program at the students’ request. 

“The problem is the students really want these business and economic skills but they don’t want to acquire these skills.”

This basic idea was repeated by a number of program leaders. The students want to know how to deal with quantitative data but they don’t want to deal with the ambiguous abstractions required by high-level maths. 

The easy reading of this joke is that these students are lazy. The more worrying and accurate reading I think is that they are terrified of the commitment and responsibility of deciding to dedicate themselves to non-concrete study. Because everything around them tells them that in this economy, it’s too dangerous to do so. 

But the weird thing is that what I have found is that this resistance to abstraction can be broken for at least some of them. The resistance to abstraction can cause a strong reaction in students, and most staff are too busy to push through. 

But all it really takes is a willingness on the part of a teacher to repeatedly sit in the discomfort of an irritated, nervously confused young person a few times, and insist that even though it’s uncomfortable and difficult and seems pointless in relation to employment, this is what we are doing” for a good number of students to relax into different kinds of thinking. (maybe 30-40% of 120)  

Staff rarely have the time and energy for this. If you want to get a permanent position at the business school, as with all universities, you just have to teach in a way that doesn’t cause a scandal but then you have to publish research in the prestigiously ranked journals, regularly. 

If the class needs more work, fuck you, publish. 

If the data is still inconclusive, fuck you, publish. 

If the peer reviewers want you to argue for something stupid, fuck you. Publish. 

The line of science, published that is, must go up. Otherwise who would believe this place can award students a bachelor of science in business language and culture? 

This is why, when I teach my classes this year in the Price Waterhouse Cooper auditorium, I decide and take responsibility for making anyone who engages more worried than when they started. Or perhaps, if they already are worried, then it is about letting them be seen in their worry. 

What I mean by responsibility here is not an individual thing. Like to some extent it is about claiming ownership of what you do to people. But it is also about believing that they can respond. This in turn means, if you’re in a position of power, making it clear that it is safe for them to respond to you and each other. It’s about some kind of imperfect togetherness. 

The impossipolitcs of neoliberalism is, on the other hand, so beautifully encapsulated in the new Liberal Alliance poster. The strength they claim to believe you have isn’t really to do anything affirmative in your life or the world. It’s the strength to survive and function while you acquiesce to the demands of the system, the demand that the line must go up, without breaking. At my most cynical, I think that maybe the way a bachelor’s degree helps you get a job is it demonstrates your willingness to acquiesce. 

At its best though, the value of studying is found in whatever you manage to make happen with your friends while you’re haunted by the required reading.