THEME SECTION Introduction Desire for the political in the aft ermath of the Cold War

Dace Dzenovska and Nicholas De Genova

Abstract: In this introduction, we refl ect on the proliferation of an amorphous desire for the political in the post–Cold War era. Th e desire for the political, we argue, is shaped by two sets of tensions: the desire to criticize power via forms of action conventionally characterized as “politics,” but without a clear analysis of how power is organized or exercised; and the desire to overcome the present in the name of an alternative (better) future, but without a clear sense of the form that future might take. We start from the vantage points of critical scholarship that distinguishes itself from the mainstream, and people and places that are geopo- litically in Europe, but “not quite” European if viewed in relation to “Europe” as a normative trope. Keywords: anthropology, futurity, politics, postcolonialism, postsocialism, power

Since the 2011 uprising in Tunisia, the world expressions of discontent with inequality, pre- has seen the repeated eruption of mass protests carity, corruption, and democratic defi cit. Ac- and social movements. Th ese include the vari- tivists and scholars have observed that these ety of confl icts that came to be labeled the “Arab protests were both locally specifi c and globally Spring,” the anti-austerity protests in Greece oriented, connected by diff use hopes for a global and the struggles of the Indignados Movement insurrection against neoliberal capitalism (e.g., in Spain, Occupy Wall Street and its numerous Graeber 2013; Juris and Rasza 2012; Lorey 2011). off shoots, and the Black Lives Matter movement Moreover, practical and political connections in the United States (with increasing evidence of among these struggles were not only hoped for reverberations in Europe), among many other but also actively pursued and elaborated. For examples, globally. Some of these protests ini- example, activists from Ljubljana traveled to Tu- tially had very specifi c objectives, such as pro- nis and Barcelona to learn from the organizing testing the gentrifi cation of Gezi Park in Istan- experiences of their counterparts, while aft er bul or the increase of bus fares in Brazil, while the overthrow of the Ben Ali dictatorship, nearly others, such as Occupy, were more generalized 30,000 Tunisians migrated to Europe, mainly to

Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 80 (2018): 1–15 © Stichting Focaal and Berghahn Books doi:10.3167/fcl.2018.800101 2 | Dace Dzenovska and Nicholas De Genova

France by way of Italy, and some squatted in and scholars who have been hopeful that these buildings in Paris with bold proclamations that struggles could off er openings for thinking they had come in a spirit of revolutionary gen- beyond—and potentially overcoming in prac- erosity to assist the anti-austerity struggles in tice—the oppressive present generated by the Europe (Garelli et al. 2013; NKC 2016). hegemony of speculative fi nance capitalism and Most of the participants in this global wave security state formations. Notably, similar sen- of protest were not interested in “politics,” con- timents—though articulated with profoundly ventionally understood, and did not orient their diff erent understandings of the world—seem to struggles primarily to electoral politics, if at all. be present on the right-wing end of the political Th ey rebelled against the institutions of exist- spectrum as well. Here, hope attaches to polit- ing political regimes without proposing clearly ical formations that promise to deliver people articulated alternatives. As Ivan Krastev (2014) from disaff ection and dispossession, but also has noted, the protests were oft en explosions of from the domination of so-called liberal, multi- moral indignation, ends in and of themselves. culturalist, and cosmopolitan elites (De Genova Th is, however, does not mean that the move- 2018). Th ese elites are charged with failing to ments associated with them did not have any recognize the grievances of “the people” regard- goals at all. Occupy, for example, aimed to pre- ing deteriorating living standards, the paucity of fi gure forms of organizing collective together- life prospects, technocracy, and the alienation ness that the movement’s participants wished to wrought by the oblique forces of “globalization.” see in the future, such as horizontal and con- In this regard, it is instructive to recall Wilhelm sensus-based models of decision making (e.g., Reich’s ([1933] 1970) incisive refl ections on the Graeber 2013; Juris and Rasza 2012; Mitchell mass psychology of fascism and the aff ective dy- et al. 2013). While celebrated by many, these namics of its populist appeal among those who forms of togetherness have also been subject to would have conventionally been expected to re- signifi cant critique, pointing to the problem of spond to the appeals of the left . Reich’s poignant multiplicity and diff erence at precisely the point critique of the left ’s failure in the face of fascism of imagined unity and equality (see also Juris turns on precisely his appreciation of “trivial, and Khasnabish 2013). For example, Emahunn banal, primitive, simple everyday life … the Raheem Ali Campbell (2011) has suggested that desires of the broadest masses,” which the left the lack of structure that characterized the Oc- failed to comprehend or take seriously ([1934] cupy movement risked disabling the participa- 1966: 291; emphasis in original; cf. [1933] 1970: tion of Black people with distinct histories of 6–7). struggle and divergent organizational orienta- Th e discontent and deepening misery that tions (see also Rasza and Kumik 2012). Th us, can be found to motivate those on both sides of it might be the very emphasis on unstructured the conventional political spectrum can also be equality, contingency, improvisation, and radi- mobilized by political forces that seem to exceed cal openness within the Occupy movement that or circumvent customary left -right distinctions. both refl ected and constituted cultural homoge- For example, in response to racist oppression neity rather than grappled with diff erence. Hor- and related class-based grievances, some disaf- izontal togetherness risked being complicit with fected second- and third-generation “Muslim” structural racism by way of overlooking the Europeans have turned to Islamism. Plainly, a deeply consequential ways in which it has pro- “radicalized” politics of Muslim identity ap- duced real divisions among the people assem- pears to aff ord one kind of ostensible retort to bled together in the public square as diff erently the hegemonic anti-Muslim racism and gener- racialized subjects. alized suspicion against them that have become However fraught, recent protest movements increasingly prominent fi xtures of European have inspired great enthusiasm among activists sociopolitical life, and that oft en can be as vocif- Desire for the political in the aft ermath of the Cold War | 3 erous on the traditional left as among far-right tionally characterized as “politics,” but without populists (see De Genova 2007a, 2010a). At the a clear analysis of how power is organized or ex- same time, the mere fact that the term “radi- ercised, and consequently without any defi nitive calization” has been so thoroughly repurposed sense of how to eff ectively intervene in the po- to refer virtually exclusively to the amorphous litical fi eld; and second, the desire to overcome spectral menace of “Muslim extremism” re- the present—understood as a condensation of minds us that the viability of radical social and historically specifi c sociopolitical and economic political imaginaries for alternative futures pres- conditions, experienced in expressly temporal ents itself as an urgent contemporary problem. terms—in the name of an alternative (better) Th e precise ways in which forms of neo- future, but without an ideology of future and liberal dispossession and mass discontent get consequently without a clear vision or imagina- articulated through heterogeneous and diver- tion of the form that such a future sociopolitical gent political ideologies across the globe is, and and economic condition might take. should be, of urgent interest to critical scholars. It is useful for the purposes of analysis to In this theme section, we contribute to further- recall one version of the distinction between ing understandings of these contradictory pro- “politics” and “the political” that has become cesses by refl ecting on the proliferation of what quite commonplace across much of contem- we are calling the desire for the political in the porary political theory, and that has been ad- extended post–Cold War era. We are interested opted by scholars and activists alike. In one in the wider social manifestations of this desire, instantiation, Chantal Mouff e, drawing on Carl whether in mass protest movements or every- Schmidt’s elaboration of the concept of the po- day life, as well as in the ways that critical schol- litical, writes: “by political I mean the dimension arship invests hope in these eff orts to negotiate of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of or struggle with questions of an alternative fu- human societies, while by politics I mean a set ture. We seek to refl ect on aff ective attachments of practices and institutions through which an to actors, actions, and imaginaries that seem to order is created, organizing human existence hold the promise of overcoming the oppressive in the context of confl ictuality provided by the present and the dystopian futures inherent in it. political” (2005: 9). In the current historical mo- Ours is a situated engagement from the vantage ment, if we take the political to be that wider point of, fi rst, scholarship that distinguishes it- fi eld of contingency and struggle that exceeds self as a critique of the hegemonic status quo, established regimes of “politics,” the political and second, Europe, or more specifi cally, peo- seems to be more tangible than ever. With the ple and places that are in Europe, geopolitically neoliberal narrowing and fl attening of “poli- speaking, but “not quite” European if viewed in tics,” there is a proliferation of manifestations relation to “Europe” as a normative trope. Th is of a desire for the political that repudiates “po- theme section should therefore be seen as a con- litics” as such. More and more subjects eff ec- tribution toward provincializing both Europe tively come to be expelled from the dominant and critical scholarship, from within (Chak- political order of states and from normative rabarty 2000; cf. De Genova 2016; Dzenovska forms of political, economic, and social life, and 2013, 2018). are consequently taking action in response to such exclusions. Hence, there is a multiplication of populist revolts—both on the left and right, Desire for the political and oft en ambiguously straddling the two— against “politics as usual.” Nonetheless, simul- Th e “desire for the political,” as we are positing it, taneously, the political seems more elusive than is shaped by two sets of tensions: fi rst, the desire ever, because commonplace understandings of to criticize power via forms of action conven- how power works are insuffi cient, and the fu- 4 | Dace Dzenovska and Nicholas De Genova ture becomes diffi cult to imagine as anything for pluralism (Grandin 2017; cf. Cadena 2010; other than dystopia. Escobar 2010; Viveiros de Castro 1998). Th us, For much of the twentieth century, within on the one hand, the collapse of Soviet and East- the context of a bipolar Cold War geopolitical ern European socialisms and the associated un- world order characterized by the juxtaposition settling of the legitimacy of socialist imaginaries of US capitalist “democracy” and Soviet “com- in some parts of the world was disorienting and munism,” the diagram of politics seemed leg- demoralizing on the global scale by opening up ible, the workings of power seemed clear, and very material prospects for aggressive neolib- competing futures were easier to imagine. Class- eral capitalist strategies of accumulation. On the based political struggles in the West entailed a other hand, the collapse of Soviet and Eastern critique of power and imaginaries of the future European socialisms opened the possibility for that were informed by socialist struggles at home worlds beyond what was imagined or conceiv- while pressed to account for themselves, oft en able within the constricted horizon of the global agonistically, in relation to “actually existing so- bipolar order of things. cialisms” abroad. Th e collapse of Soviet state so- In some parts of the globe, the resulting mul- cialism not only heralded the end of the bipolar tiplication of possible worlds is accompanied by world order but also derailed imaginaries of the a sense of fragmentation and loss. Th is equivocal future associated with it, and still more impor- sense of loss is evident in contemporary forms of tantly, disoriented understandings of how power political desire—for example, in well-worn lam- is organized and exercised. At the same time, entations of the demise of more formulaic vari- while the newfound “unipolarity” of the United eties of (trade unionist) working-class politics States as the world’s sole superpower has plainly and class-based forms of solidarity in Europe. multiplied its imperial misadventures in recent Th ere is a parallel sense of loss of a “translocal years (Harvey 2003; Smith 2005), the disappear- vehicle for local dreams” in the places formerly ance of a globally tenable “communist” rival to known as the Th ird World (Prashad 2007). American “free world” democracy has never- Notably, this sense of loss is accompanied by a theless paradoxically cleared the space for an persistent search for incipient political subjects effl orescence of pro-democracy protest move- in both politics and scholarship. Th ese include ments that are oft en explicitly anticapitalist. In emergent collective subjects mobilized against Latin America, for example, pro-democracy and neoliberal austerity and precarization, such as ostensibly antineoliberal insurgencies have em- the Occupy or Indignados movements (Juris braced—rather than moved away from—state- and Khashnabish 2013; Mitchell et al. 2013). based varieties of socialism (Grandin 2006). Th ese also include marginalized subjects whose Notably, the resurgence of the Latin American marginality pushes them to craft strategies of life left has occurred precisely when there appeared and struggle in innovative ways, such as irregu- to be “no existing alternative economic system lar migrants (De Genova 2010b, 2017; Tsianos to capitalism” (Lomnitz 2007: 24). However, in- and Papadopoulos 2012) or people eff ectively stead of being globally oriented, post–Cold War abandoned by both neoliberal capitalism and Latin American socialism is predominantly the biopolitical state (e.g., Berlant 2007; Gibson- grounded in “national traditions and imaginar- Graham 2005; Li 2009; Povinelli 2009). Th e work ies of autonomy and self-governance” (Lomnitz of connecting forms of dispossession with en- 2007: 24; cf. Grandin 2017). In addition, the abling forms of politics consequently tends to Latin American left has increasingly come to be be undertaken by activist intellectuals (oft en in- articulated horizontally with a proliferation of cluding academics). While constituted through “new” social movements, prominently distin- contemporary forms of dispossession, however, guished by various indigenous and feminist pol- such subjects may or may not act in accord with itics of decolonization and accompanying calls the scholarly or activist hopes invested in them. Desire for the political in the aft ermath of the Cold War | 5

Political desire thus proliferates both within critique. Th is project of critique is informed by social movements and in critical scholarship. the imagination of the possibility that things Th ere are concrete relations and more diff use could be otherwise, and indeed that we could elective affi nities through which political desire be “other than we are” (Foucault 2007). While can be traced in both terrains, whether in the the precise contours of what counts as a modern form of participation in movements or in search- project of critique are constantly shift ing as it ing for alternative worlds and futures in these responds to political events and socioeconomic movements. But this political desire seems to be transformations, capitalism and the state, as confounded by the fact that there is now a multi- well as ways of being associated with them, re- plication of disparate forms of dispossession— main its consistent targets. Insofar as this proj- and of potentially incommensurable presents, ect of critique is conceived as pushing against pasts, and futures—and therefore also of po- the limits of the dominant ways of thinking and litical possibilities, without at the same time a organizing collective life, the nature and eff ects clear set of criteria for distinguishing among of critical intellectual work are also thought and them. On the one hand, this is to be celebrated, hoped to be meaningfully political (Foucault as much of critical scholarship has focused on 2007; cf. Butler 2001; Fassin 2017; Ortner 2016; multiplicity in lieu of homogeneity. On the other Scott 1994). hand, it is disorienting politically, insofar as po- Th e political antagonism of the Cold War litical action and the formation of collective po- period was a signifi cant if not defi ning context litical subjects requires an object of attachment, for the imaginaries of the political, as well as for whereas uniting around the idea of multiplicity the particular ways in which concrete politi- remains diffi cult, despite, for instance, attempts cal achievements took shape in the West—the to think of a collective political subject through welfare state and social democracy are only the the notion of multitude (Hardt and Negri 2005). most obvious examples. It was also a signifi cant In the absence of a unifying future and collec- context for a variety of developmentalist proj- tive political identifi cation, aff ective attachment ects in the Th ird World, oft en with the explicit seems to be increasingly directed toward the aim of “containing” the spread of socialism. Th e search process itself. Desire attaches to the search reemergence of developmentalist socialist proj- for alternative realities and futures, as well as for ects in Latin America aft er the end of the Cold political subjects that inhabit them, prefi gure War, furthermore, only attests to the salience of them, or can bring them about. But it is also the constraints of the preceding bipolar world haunted by aff ective attachment to futures past, order (e.g., Lomnitz 2007). Th us, “actually ex- that is, to critiques of power conceived within isting socialisms,” along with various strands of the bipolar world order, with its political antag- Marxist theory (which included important cri- onisms and specifi c ideologies around which tiques of “actually existing socialisms”), shaped people could craft collective political identities imaginings of alternative futures that animated and imagine alternative futures. the Western project of critique as a project of thinking beyond the present. Th ese visions of future continue to haunt contemporary critical Futures past: Critique and politics scholarship, even as it claims to keep the future in a bipolar world open. For example, in his critical engagement with the anthropological literature on hope—a Many scholars socialized in Western social the- literature that commonly emphasizes hope’s in- ory, whether the principal intellectual frame of determinacy (e.g., Miyazaki 2004, 2006)—Stef reference be Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, or Jansen (2016) reminds us that Ernst Bloch’s Th e the various poststructuralist variants thereof, Principle of Hope, which has served as an inspi- think of themselves as engaged in the work of ration for much of this literature, retained a very 6 | Dace Dzenovska and Nicholas De Genova specifi c idea of the “good society” to which hope ing the simultaneous existence of multiple reali- attaches, namely, a communist society. Quite a ties, including in Western contexts, and thereby few eminent social theorists—think of Antonio can recuperate minor traditions and subjugated Negri, Felix Guattari, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh knowledges. For so many anthropologists, (cul- Chakrabarty, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Jodi turalized) diff erence seems to off er an escape Dean, and Slavoj Žižek, to name but a few—who hatch. off er insights about what power, politics, and In their discrepant ways, these projects futures can or should look like aft er the end of the (among many others) are quite evidently in- bipolar world order have been shaped by simi- vested with hopes for an alternative future. lar political traditions. Consequently, the prev- However, some of them risk being complicit alent conceptions of alternative futures (open, with anthropology’s legacy of essentializing dif- multiple, indeterminate, or otherwise) oft en re- ference in their attempt to mobilize diff erence tain the residual political imprimaturs of “fu- for the purpose of liberatory political projects. tures past” that were forged during the defi ning Consider Graeber, for instance, in his plea for geopolitical confl icts of the twentieth century. an “anarchist anthropology”: For anthropologists and some postcolonial scholars, another source of inspiration for the Anthropology is particularly well posi- modern project of critique has been “non-West- tioned to help. And not only because most ern diff erence.” From Marcel Mauss’s ([1925] actually-existing self-governing commu- 2011) critique of Western exchange relations nities, and actually-existing non-market to David Graeber’s (2001, 2011) avowedly neo- economies in the world have been inves- Maussian theorizations of value and debt, to tigated by anthropologists rather than so- the recent “ontological turn” in anthropology ciologists or historians. It is also because (Cadena 2010; Escobar 2010; Holbraad and the practice of ethnography provides at Pedersen 2014; Povinelli 2014; Viveiros de Cas- least something of a model, if a very tro 1998), to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) call rough, incipient model, of how non-van- to “provincialize Europe” through the prism of guardist revolutionary intellectual prac- “historical diff erence,” the existence and per- tice might work. (2004: 11; cf. Sahlins sistence of “diff erence” in relation to capitalist 1996: 405) and state socialist forms of power has been ana- lytically and politically generative. In the current Not only does this approach tend to take at face moment of disorientation, many anthropologists value the reliability and validity of the ethno- have explicitly renewed their eff orts to bring in- graphic archive of disciplinary forebears as so sights about other—oft en non-Western—worlds many trustworthy (“true”) accounts of cultural and futures to bear upon the project of critique others, in disregard for the constitutive contra- and politics. Perhaps the most prominent ex- dictions of the colonial heritage of that archive, emplar, Graeber (2007), has sought to revital- it also risks lapsing into a dehistoricized essen- ize anarchist politics, specifi cally encouraging a tialism about more or less pure and pristine rethinking of anarchist confrontations with the models of “other cultures.” Th at is to say, the state by arguing that (“actually existing”) tribal critical and political traction of “non-Western “anarchists” in Madagascar live perfectly egal- diff erence” varies substantially depending on itarian lives by retreating from the state rather whether diff erence is conceived as existing “out than directly challenging it. Similarly, Ghassan there” or whether it is conceived as a relation of Hage (2015) suggests that the ontological turn in consequentiality that emerges through a histor- anthropology, inspired by Eduardo Viveiros de ically specifi c and oft en antagonistic (postcolo- Castro’s (1988) work on Amerindian perspec- nial) interrelation of concurrence and encounter tivism, can inspire radical politics by illuminat- (e.g., McClure 1995). Desire for the political in the aft ermath of the Cold War | 7

A noteworthy feature of anthropological elite and statist projects of decolonization could projects that have mobilized diff erence for rad- never really articulate viable visions of alterna- ical politics is that they tend to emphasize spa- tive political futures. tiality over temporality. In an eff ort to counter Th ose that did challenge anticolonial nation- the positing of alterity as not only “outside” alisms via anticolonial internationalism gen- but also “behind” on the Western temporal erally turned to Marxist visions of socialist and spatial map of modernity, critical scholars futures and politics. For example, Manu Goswa- have invoked “non-Western diff erence” as a mi’s (2012) work illustrates how particular for- tool for speaking back to power from various mulations of colonial internationalism “refused contemporaneous elsewheres. If these contem- to territorialize history in an ethnic register” poraneous elsewheres could provide resources by upholding an “internationalist conception for critiques of Western colonial capitalism and of historical time.” Th at is to say, the more ro- European cultural imperialism, however, they bust expressions of a temporal imagination of did not seem to generate imaginaries of futures the future in critiques of Western imperialism that could inspire collective political action be- specifi cally enunciated from the context of the yond their immediate contexts: they provided colonized world tended to be very much linked examples that were useful to think with, but with socialist imaginaries of the future (see also inasmuch as they were ethnographically paro- Buck-Morss 2000). Yet, at the same time, this chialized as the peculiar cultural confi gurations colonial internationalism also drew on non- of specifi c peoples’ “diff erence,” they largely re- Western pasts; there was, in other words, a dou- mained, like those “native”-ized peoples them- ble articulation of future corresponding to a re- selves, eff ectively “incarcerated in space” and doubled history, entailing the world history that time (Appadurai 1988: 37). integrally connected each and every colonial In contrast, anticolonial struggles for self- context as a necessary and constitutive moment determination meant that there was always within the global dynamics of capitalism and another Th ird World, which as Vijay Prashad empire, and the ostensibly “local” history that clarifi es, “was not a place” but rather “a project” was subjugated thereby, but which remained a through which the formerly colonized majority recalcitrant resource for anticolonial struggle of humankind “dreamed of a new world” and, in ways that bedeviled empire with historically indeed, hoped for an alternative future (2007: specifi c sociopolitical contradictions. xv). However, insofar as the hegemonic post– Over the twentieth century, then, critique World War II project of decolonization tended unfolded in a triangular manner between cap- to be posited in nationalist terms as one of state italism, socialism, and diff erence, with the lat- building, it too was spatially oriented and paro- ter two, taken together (with all their tensions chializing—inherently a politics of location—in and contradictions notwithstanding), serving as a manner that largely failed to account for the real-world counterpoints to capitalism and co- precisely global capitalist underpinnings of en- lonialism and a resource for imagining worlds during Eurocentrism and postcolonial misery. before and aft er capitalist and imperial forms Th e post–World War II project of decoloniza- of power. Th is triangulation was further com- tion criticized the violence of Western/colonial plicated by several partly overlapping and partly forms of power and knowledge, which subju- divergent articulations of “the West” and its oth- gated or exterminated other forms of life, but ers. Th e West of European colonialism and Eu- because it tended to embrace the postcolonial rocentrism was constituted in relation to what modularity of Western/nationalist forms of came to be known as the Th ird World, whereas power and knowledge, it reproduced and even the West of the so-called free world was consti- exacerbated colonial inequalities and antago- tuted during the Cold War era always in rela- nisms (Sharma and Wright 2009). As a result, tion to the communist “East.” Simultaneously, 8 | Dace Dzenovska and Nicholas De Genova this distinctly Cold War West was itself predi- inations. Similar to political desire, these are cated on the avowedly anticolonial imperialism inescapably linked to, while also exceeding, the of the United States as an ascendant hegemon spatiotemporal confi guration of the defi ning as much committed to undermining (indeed, political antagonisms of the twentieth century. parochializing) the European colonial powers As Susan Buck-Morss (2000: 22) has argued, in favor of a new world order premised on post- the juxtaposition of capitalism and socialism colonial independence and national sovereignty was also one between spatially and temporally (De Genova 2007b, 2010a). At the same time, oriented worldviews, the former associated with the communist “East” was itself fractured into a nationally ordered global space and the latter a Eurocentric or Russophilic Soviet/Eastern with global “internationalist” class warfare and European “East” and various orientalizing and world revolution. But the future-oriented tem- racializing visions of “backward” or “semico- porality of critical scholarship, past or present, lonial” places and “Asiatic” peoples within the does not only derive from socialism. It is part greater Eurasian Soviet socialist sphere of infl u- of capitalist imaginaries as well, or as Reinhart ence, as well as the People’s Republic of China Koselleck (1985) has argued, it is a fundamental and the ensuing proliferation of other postcolo- feature of the age of Enlightenment. According nial socialist contexts. From the perspective of to Koselleck, the Enlightenment replaced the many postcolonial or Th ird World projects, the cyclical temporality of Western thought and communist alternative associated with the So- practice with a “progressive” one, which en- viet sphere was itself always already part of the tailed the idea that the future signals progress, West, as was Marxism generally, thus giving rise whether socialist or otherwise. In Koselleck’s to activist and scholarly projects that have per- (1985: 272) interpretation, political action is sistently sought to problematize this relation- the kind of action that brings about the future ship, without the realistic option of repudiating as progress, whether understood as ever-more or relinquishing it completely. perfect iterations of the existing order or their Th e premier academic exemplar of this ap- radical transformation. Th e very split whereby proach is Chakrabarty’s (2000) aforementioned iterations of the existing order come to be Provincializing Europe. Chakrabarty’s work un- seen as “politics” and radical transformation derscores how critiques of power and imagi- as linked with “the political” is a product of naries of pasts (and potentially futures as well) this Enlightenment-infl ected teleological con- had to repeatedly renegotiate Eurocentrism and ception of progress. In the process of struggle navigate its diff erentiating logics. Notably, To- internal to the Enlightenment tradition, a capi- masz Zarycki (2014) has recently demonstrated talist version of progress comes to be articulated how (postsocialist) Eastern Europeans remain through the fi gure of the nation, albeit within a analogously caught in webs of orientalization nationally ordered (global) space, whereas the as simultaneously orientalized and orientalizing socialist version of progress posits radically dif- subjects—“Europeans” but not quite, with no ferent post-national (“internationalist”) futures clearly visible possibility of exiting this contra- confi gured on a global scale. dictory condition. It is not surprising, therefore, that a counter- politics articulated vis-à-vis one or another so- cialist imaginary is intrinsically future-oriented, Th e temporalities and spatialities focusing on overcoming the global present in of the political the name of something better yet to be realized, whereas counter-politics articulated vis-à-vis Critique—and politics—as pushing against the the imaginary of colonized spaces has been pre- limits of the present necessarily implies grap- dominantly oriented toward “decolonizing” these pling with particular spatial and temporal imag- spaces and the forms of life associated with Desire for the political in the aft ermath of the Cold War | 9 them, oft en in the narrow sense of driving out tinctly ill-matched for inspiring anything resem- foreign domination and liberating a would-be bling revolutionary passion. Even if we disavow “national” territory for “home rule” (Sharma offi cial “politics” in favor of a desire for alto- and Wright 2009). Th ere is a variegated nexus of gether diff erent ways of living and a hope for a gradations in between, especially in post–Cold radically alternative future, however, attempts War Latin America, where nominal postcolo- to reimagine the class struggle—as, for example, nial independence came much earlier, histori- vis-à-vis such concepts as the multitude (Hardt cally (Lazar 2014; Lomnitz 2007). Nevertheless, and Negri 2005) or the precariat (Standing this distinction works well as a heuristic device 2011)—have also been unable to put forth an for pointing out that the collapse of “actually ex- equally powerful and aff ectively appealing alter- isting socialisms” (and the associated discred- native. Meanwhile, critical scholars and activists iting of “socialism” in those parts of the world alike watch in dread and perplexity as alterna- that experienced it) has stunted temporally ori- tive futures are off ered by forces ranging from ented critique. Where, then—we must ask—is right-wing nationalist demagogues to religious the imaginary of a better future to come from? fundamentalists, even if those futures oft en bear It might be worth considering whether, in the a suspicious resemblance to near or distant pasts absence of a temporal framework for critique, that are surely impossible to rejuvenate. the political gets reimagined as a repetitive suc- cession of acts or gestures intended to reaffi rm the necessity to reclaim space (as in neo-nation- Nostalgia/hope alist populisms and anti-immigrant/xenopho- bic imaginaries, for example). Th us, while the In such conditions, it is not surprising to observe rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe and the among critical scholars and their interlocutors a former Soviet Union aft er the fall of state so- variety of aff ective attachments to what Kosel- cialism has been customarily linked with the leck (1985) instructively calls “futures past,” past, it should perhaps be rethought in relation that is, futures promised by previous hegemonic to the loss of the future in political imaginaries modes of power, such as the Fordist model of aft er socialism. Taking this further, we might capitalism, which have been thoroughly eroded then think of the resurgence across much of the or gutted in the neoliberal present (Muehlebach Western world of the political far right, and re- and Shoshan 2012; Weston 2012). For example, actionary populisms generally—from the Brexit Lauren Berlant (2007) identifi es a desire for campaign’s demand to “take back control of our capitalism’s promises of the good life as “aspi- borders” to US President Donald Trump’s bom- rational normativity” (see also Povinelli 2009). bastic pledge to “make America great again”— Importantly, “aspirational normativity,” as well in terms of their distinctly inward-looking spa- as the nostalgia for futures past, tends to be tial preoccupations and their pronouncedly exhibited by marginalized subjects for whom nostalgic and backward-looking sense of time as futures past were always futures deferred, that a peculiarly postsocialist phenomenon. Recog- is, the futures that others could access but that nizably “left ist” imaginaries, as represented by were always out of reach for them. For example, the anomalous rise of such fi gures as US Senator Andrea Muehlebach and Nitzan Shoshan argue Bernie Sanders and British MP Jeremy Corbyn, that the melancholic subjects that fi gure prom- are met with a far-reaching united front of de- inently in their special issue on post-Fordist rision fueled by the presumptuous confi dence aff ect “are oft en found at the bottom of the so- that socialism has already been conclusively cial ladder, scavenging for the approximations discredited. Moreover, these moderately “left ” of Fordist security and stability for which many alternatives within the dominant institutional of their hyper-privileged counterparts tend to framework of electoral politics seem to be dis- have little patience” (2012: 336). From the per- 10 | Dace Dzenovska and Nicholas De Genova spective of such futures past, the actual future crete collectivities may be viewed with suspicion oft en seems to be in decline; it appears only as or derision, political desire attaches to desire ruination or death (Dzenovska, this issue; Gor- itself—namely, to hopeful attachment to the dillo 2014; Ringel 2014). Ensuring a future in search for futures, politics, and subjects thereof. such contexts means preventing further decline, As Ghassan Hage (2015: loc. 156) argues, “a pas- sustaining rather than overcoming the present, sion for the political constitutes the very ground or at least extending it so as to go on living just a on which enthusiasm for the humanities and little bit longer. Th e future appears not as some- social science can take place.” Hence, we are thing that can deliver people from the present invited to contemplate whether the desire for but rather as something from which the present the political in critical scholarship may really itself needs to be saved. serve as a kind of performance or agonistic Th e simultaneous diminution and multipli- enunciation of a desire for desire itself—a desire cation of futures—be they messianic, dystopian, to rekindle or recapture a passion for political or pragmatic—have generated multiple aff ective struggle and social change that may have be- attachments. Alongside the post-Fordist (Mueh- come bewildered by the demise of the political lebach and Shoshan 2012; Weston 2012) and grammar of the bipolar geopolitical order now postsocialist variants of nostalgia, (Berdahl 2010; past, or that may have gone cold in the course Boyer 2006; Jansen and Löfving 2007; Shoshan of conducting academic careers within the con- 2012), scholars have also turned their attention straints of actually existing neoliberalism. to hope (e.g., Mar 2005; Pine 2014; Miyazaki 2004, 2006). Hiroko Miyazaki (2006) has urged anthropologists to “replicate the spark of hope” Political desire in “not quite” Europe that they fi nd in the world as a method in an- thropology that opens up to indeterminate fu- Th e contributions in this theme section engage tures. Jansen (2016), in turn, has pointed to the with people and places that can be variously possible pitfalls of such a project of replication. considered “not quite” European, that is, people Jansen contends that articulating hope with in- and places that are usually included in Europe determinate and open futures risks overlooking as a broadly conceived geopolitical space, but the concrete contours of hope as it emerges re- that are deemed to fail in various ways in re- lationally in particular ethnographic and histor- lation to the normative trope of “Europe” as a ical circumstances. Th e hope of ethnographic measurement of “civilization,” or moral, politi- interlocutors is not necessarily—or not only— cal, or economic conduct. Marginalized places open-ended aff ective attachment to indetermi- and subjects have a special appeal in critical nate futures. For example, Sarajevans hoping scholarship insofar as they can become sites for a win in a football game is a very concrete, through which to criticize forms of disposses- focused hope that gains its force precisely in sion, but also through which to trace practices of relation to a more general malaise of hopeless- resistance and political openings such as hope. ness. Quite oft en, then, hope attaches to specifi c In other words, marginalized people and places objects, such as a reasonably functioning state. can be both “not quite” in the sense that they do Jansen argues that these attachments should not live up to expectations of the “center,” but therefore be understood contextually, rather than they can also be sites of hope through which the folded into indeterminate political openings “center” wishes to reinvigorate its own political and utopian imaginings. dreams, whether those of reverifying the status Nevertheless, in the absence of the possibility quo or of ushering in radical change. Th us, for of attachment to concrete futures or collectiv- example, Krístin Loft sdóttir’s article (this issue) ities, or under conditions when an attachment on political subjectivities and the imaginations by critical scholars to specifi c futures and con- of Iceland aft er the economic crash begins with Desire for the political in the aft ermath of the Cold War | 11 an interesting episode where Loft sdóttir encoun- lem of the future, moving in space in search of ters an Austrian woman who looks toward post- what they imagine to be the present’s future, but crisis political action in Iceland with hopes for which is likely already the future past (Dzenov- reinvigorating democracy not only in Iceland ska, this issue), rather than wait for its always but also in Europe more broadly. already deferred arrival. For example, Latvians For most of the people who appear in the (Dzenovska, this issue) have migrated as EU cit- pages that follow, Europe has been a normative izens to the United Kingdom, where a campaign trope against which their practices and forms of populist hostility to “Eastern European” mi- of organizing economic and political life have grants has culminated in the referendum de- been measured by various monitoring institu- manding Britain’s departure from the EU. Others tions abroad and at home, as well as by intel- have suddenly become immobilized, as in the lectual and political elites and ordinary people case of Bosnia, where the political stalemate in alike. For example, in Latvia, postsocialist trans- an ethnically divided parliament prevented is- formations in the present, which have included suance of registration numbers to a newborn economic and political restructuring, as well child and thus hindered her family’s mobility as remaking socialist subjects into “European” in an emergency situation, provoking the mass ones, have been consistently viewed as a way protests known as the Babylution (Kurtović, this of “catching up” with a more genuine Europe issue). In the case of Bosnia, hope attached to whose present always signaled Latvia’s future the possibility of mass political mobilization, but yet to be achieved. It is not uncommon to hear also, perhaps counterintuitively, to being more in Latvia that something should or should not eff ectively governed. Th ere are still others who be done because that is how it is (or is not) done have stayed behind, as in the case of Latvia (Dze- in Europe. For example, despite the disposses- novska, this issue). Th eir vision of the future is sion associated with the depopulation of the either death or a little bit more of the present— countryside, public intellectuals have argued that hardly a site for the hopeful imagining of open- Latvia still has too many people employed in ended and indeterminate possibilities. And re- agriculture compared to other European coun- cent ethnographic insights coming from Greece tries. Or that Riga must have a contemporary art (Knight, this issue) suggest that middle-aged museum, because “Latvia is the only country in and young people increasingly desire disinher- Europe without a contemporary art museum.” itance, thus unsettling widely accepted markers Or that Latvia must ratify the Istanbul Treaty on of social status. What political subjectivities are gender equality, because, once again, it is the formed in the process? only European country that has not done so. Th e articles gathered here demonstrate that, Similar processes—analogous in temporal ori- alongside sharing a more or less amorphous entation if historically divergent—can be ob- desire for futures that would be demonstrably served in Bosnia, Slovakia, Greece, Iceland, and better than the grievous present, our ethno- any number of Europe’s other “peripheries.” As graphic interlocutors’ desire for the political is Michael Herzfeld (1989) has famously argued, not always tantamount to a fundamental over- Greece, allegedly the cradle of European civiliza- haul of existing political and economic systems tion, has emerged in the process of moderniza- in the name of a diff erent future. Rather, they tion as a backward “not quite” European nation oft en wish to make the existing systems work mired in traditionalism. Loft sdóttir (2014), in better, and sometimes they may even desire turn, has shown how the closure of McDonald’s more rather than less neoliberal capitalism. Th is in Iceland aft er the fi nancial crisis was widely resonates with Jansen’s (2015, 2016) recent cri- perceived as the sure sign of a loss of civilization. tiques of the anthropology of the state and the Some of the inhabitants of “not quite” Eu- anthropological literature on hope, which, he rope have sought a spatial solution to the prob- argues, exhibit a distinct preference for partic- 12 | Dace Dzenovska and Nicholas De Genova ular futures rather than any genuinely open- necessarily better than the present, and, more- ended multiplicity. As Jansen notes, “We must over, that there is no one—neither party lead- acknowledge that people hope for all kinds of ers nor collective revolutionary subjects—who things, oft en in wildly inconsistent ways. And can both promise to make it better and deliver many of these hopes, of course, are unrelated to on this promise. Th ere commonly appear to be the political making of a better world, however no viable alternatives available that would off er framed” (2016: 7). Jansen therefore remarks on something substantially diff erent than a perpet- the empirical selectivity in this literature, that uation of the present. Rather than crisis—as is is, the turning of anthropological attention to commonly assumed—perhaps we are seeing an spaces and subjects that are likely to produce impasse: the future seems inaccessible and, with the kinds of hope with which the scholar and it, political action confounded. People mobilize his/her assumed reading public (presumably politically but have diffi culties articulating their other anthropologists and/or critical scholars) demands or imagining a future worth fi ghting can identify aff ectively and politically, rather for, left with only the present or its despotic and than, for example, ethnographic instances of dystopian futures to resist. Th e articles in this people’s paradoxical hopes for authoritarianism thematic section invite us to inhabit this im- or fi nance capitalism. passe and think critically about the relationship Th is is to say not that there is political con- between what we fi nd in the world and what we sensus among anthropologists, but rather that (re)produce in critical scholarship, about where there is a noteworthy tendency toward the se- and how we reproduce sparks of hope or discon- lection of epistemological objects and analytics tent, and how we deploy these in our own critical that are thought to be politically progressive intellectual and political projects. or emancipatory in some way or another. Th is manifestation of political desire in anthropo- logical scholarship is surely related to a residual Dace Dzenovska is Associate Professor of An- collective sense of guilty conscience with re- thropology of Migration at the University of gard to how a politically “progressive” anthro- Oxford’s School of Anthropology and Museum pology can eff ectively situate itself in relation Ethnography. She holds a doctoral degree from to the vexations of the colonial legacies of the the University of California, Berkeley (2009) discipline itself. We are therefore particularly and has held a research and teaching appoint- interested in the mutually constitutive relation- ment at the University of Latvia. She writes ship between the desire for “the political” as a about rebordering and migration in the context preferred or privileged object of study, and the of European Union enlargement, as well as tol- analogous but possibly discrepant desire for erance promotion and the postsocialist democ- the political that manifests itself as an aff ective ratization agenda in Latvia. Her book School attachment to “the political” in critical/anthro- of Europeanness: Tolerance and Other Lessons pological scholarship. We urge attention to the in Political Liberalism in Latvia is forthcoming ways in which the desire for the political that with Cornell University Press. animates much of critical intellectual analysis E-mail: [email protected] may be at odds with the heterogeneous desires for the political that manifest themselves in the Nicholas De Genova most recently held a per- large-scale social confl icts that scholars take to manent appointment as Reader in Urban Geog- be their objects of study. raphy at King’s College London, where he was Th ere has indeed been a widespread sense also Director of the Spatial Politics research among scholars, activists, and people on the group. He has held teaching appointments at street or the square that “things are changing.” Stanford, Columbia, and Goldsmiths, Univer- Th ere is also a sense that what is being born is not sity of London, as well as visiting professorships Desire for the political in the aft ermath of the Cold War | 13 or research positions at the universities of Am- De Genova, Nicholas. 2010b. “Th e queer politics of sterdam, Bern, Chicago, and Warwick. His most migration: Refl ections on ‘illegality’ and incorri- recent edited book is Th e Borders of “Europe”: gibility.” Studies in Social Justice 4 (2): 101–126. Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering De Genova, Nicholas. 2016. “Th e European ques- (Duke University Press, 2017). 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