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by en arrêt! Berlin
The following essay by the political group en arrêt! Berlin originally appeared in German, in slightly modified form, as “Die Parties sind vorbei: Über Hyperpolitik in Zeiten von Correctiv und dem Kampf gegen Rechts,” in Bahamas 94 (Spring 2024): 24–28.
The return of politics came as a shock. At least for those who had proclaimed the end of history and settled into the illusion of post-political times. In 2016, Brexit, Trump, and the rise of the AfD encountered a social class that found it difficult to come to terms with the breach of the supposed consensus of the liberal order. The “basket of deplorables” (Hillary Clinton) revolted, its grievances became vocal, and politics returned: “The eschatological rumor that politics was dead has been disproved. For now, however, it seems as if the patient has jumped out of a coma and landed directly in hyperkinesis without ever having dealt with the previous symptoms.” So we have arrived in the age of hyperpolitics: hyper-excited, hyper-fleeting, hyper-erratic. Anti-political revolt on the one side, panic-driven activism on the other. Are these the new class antagonisms?
The diagnosis that “the ‘secret meeting’ in Potsdam is a wake-up call that is rousing many from collective lethargy and passivity” roughly sums up what the Cologne-based Rheingold Institute, a market research firm with a psychological bent, found out about the motivation of participants in the anti-right-wing demonstrations in January 2024. The institute’s founder, Stephan Grünewald, is somewhat more precise: “Demonstrators describe how they . . . were shaken out of their lethargy and passive resignation, which they had felt in recent months in the face of multiple crises.” Mood, wake-up call, lethargy: while a market research institute may not be a psychoanalytical association, it has correctly identified a recurring motif in a hyper-political society, namely, the “exhausted self” (Ehrenberg) attempting to break out of its melancholy.
The fact that such statements repeatedly refer to a “wake-up call” should strike not only readers who are attentive to such linguistic nuances. The metaphor of a sleeping majority that is finally being roused to a state of emergency and of politicians who must finally take action against the right wing is part of an inner monologue of self-talk. It is dog-whistling to the subconscious. When the left-wing daily newspaper TAZ in all seriousness expressed its delight over the demonstrators’ belated anti-fascism in the words “Deutschland erwacht” (Germany awakens), this not only revealed the intellectual void of its social media editors, but also clearly demonstrated the dual role of reporting and mobilization. “The only referent which still functions is that of the silent majority,” wrote Jean Baudrillard about politics in the late twentieth century. In 2024 Germany, it is not supposed to have a minute’s silence.
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