From The Point Magazine, February 22, 2023:
Estragon: I can’t go on like this.
Vladimir: That’s what you think.—Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
The photographs come in a bright, nearly fluorescent hue.11. This essay is drawn from Anton Jäger’s forthcoming book, Hyperpolitik, to be published by Suhrkamp in 2023, and adapts some material that was published in Tribune and the New Left Review’s Sidecar blog. Their connecting theme is “love.” In a portrait called Love (hands in hair), a woman with reddish hair and shuttered eyes is clutched by a pair of male hands reaching from outside the frame. In another picture a man in a jean jacket dances alone, almost reaching for a nearby hand. In Love (hands praying), a woman with closed eyes folds her hands amidst a crowd of partygoers. As if in a secular ritual, she meditates in the anonymity of the nightclub. The people in the photographs dance to music modeled on noises emitted by the industrial machinery of Detroit and Manchester, the twin birth cities of techno.
In 1989, however—the year in which these photos were taken—the machines are no longer operative. Most of them have downsized or relocated to China, whereas the twin cities of techno have deindustrialized. Traveling through a Chinese megacity some years before, the German photographer Hilla Becher noticed a reassembled copy of a steel mill she once shot in Europe. Now, the youngsters in Wolfgang Tillmans’s nightlife photographs seek to dance away industry, politics and history itself.
The time and place of Tillmans’s shots are worth noting. They document a Thatcherite London and a Berlin in which the Wall is crumbling. To the east, state socialism is nearing collapse. A fully global capitalism is triumphant. Western deindustrialization is accelerating. Deployed the same year the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama published his fabled essay on “the end of history” in the National Interest, Tillmans’s camera becomes witness to an exercise in collective amnesia: an attempt to banish the ideological specters of the last century and quietly stride into a private utopia. An age of “post-politics” has opened. As Tillmans later recalled in an interview:
That’s how living together could be: being peaceful together and enjoying the senses. It seemed a very tangible and inherently political thing to me… suddenly everybody felt that there was this utopia that was very real, and you could actually live this utopian dream.
By the close of the 2010s, however, Tillmans’s world already looks disturbingly different. He has begun to photograph Black Lives Matter protests. He travels to refugee camps. His recordings now come in a chrome-like, grayish veneer, a clear contrast to the motley colors of 1989. He begins to engage in mainstream politics, launching a series of posters for the 2016 Remain campaign to safeguard the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union: “No man is an island. No country by itself,” “What is lost is lost forever,” “It’s a question of where you feel you belong. We are the European family.” The slogans are set against Tillmans’s heavenly backdrops, images of the sky as seen from an airplane window. From a distance they look like digital renditions of a Caspar David Friedrich painting. As a boy he had first been to Britain in the early 1980s; his flyers for the Remain campaign now were to save the lost worlds of 1989. “As usual, of course, it didn’t last,” he remembers.
Tillmans’s romantic references are understandable. For the photographer an overpowering nostalgia for post-history had kicked in. The artist’s personal utopia of forty years was fracturing, and he responded with a search for analogues from the very same 1990s: figures of empathy, unity, love. In this respect he proved a representative child of a post-revolutionary age. As the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard noted in 1994, “human rights, dissidence, antiracism, SOS-this, SOS-that” were “soft, easy, post coitum historicum ideologies, ‘after-the-orgy’ ideologies for an easy-going generation which has known neither hard ideologies nor radical philosophies.” The contrast with the politically overcharged twentieth century was striking. In Baudrillard’s view, Tillmans’s generation had “rediscovered altruism, conviviality, international charity, and the individual bleeding heart.” The new generation were “spoilt children of the crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed children of history.”
Tillmans’s gathering with “the spoilt children of the crisis,” however, would come to a close, just like Fukuyama’s end of history would. A species of “politics” returned to the world after the 2008 credit crash, one that forced the artist to confront, in one critic’s words, “the fragility of the political consensus on which his personal utopia depends.” Yet the new political age did not witness an integral rebirth of the “mass politics” from which Tillmans’s partiers were liberated in 1989. It was “political,” to be sure, but in a way that uneasily superseded and complemented the post-politics of the 1990s, drawing private and public back together on terms wholly unfamiliar to us from democracy’s classical age.
The resultant order, which I’ve referred to as “hyperpolitics,” presents a challenge. While the expiry of “post-politics” is plain to see, so is the insufficiency of the political vocabulary we have inherited from the twentieth century for describing its successor. This indicates the need for a new framework adequate to the present. Yet if hyperpolitics offers some tentative clues for analyzing the post-2008 epoch in the West, the concept can only be fully grasped as part of a broader chronology of the political forms—from mass politics to post-politics—that ran across the twentieth and 21st centuries.
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Halfway through her novel The Years, French novelist Annie Ernaux gives us a rearview rendering of the mid-1990s that recalls Tillmans’s nightlife photographs:
The rumor was going around that politics was dead. The advent of a “new world order” was declared. The end of History was nigh… The word “struggle” was discredited as a throwback to Marxism, become an object of ridicule. As for “defending rights,” the first that came to mind were those of the consumer.
Born to working-class parents in 1940, Ernaux had already become one of her country’s most celebrated writers before she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2022. First published in French in 2008, her “collective autobiography” of postwar France appeared shortly before Lehman Brothers went bust and induced a heart attack in the international financial system. The English translation of The Years came out in 2017, at the close of the populist decade....
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