one, is an opening up of new political domains which it is then possible to make
a corresponding political rumpus about. The book is, most especially then, an
attempt to produce an art of the invention of political invention by putting hard
questions to the given in experience, the overall intent being to call new publics
into existence who will pose questions to politics which are not yet of politics
(Rajchman 1998) – whilst recognizing that this questioning can never be more
than an inexact science^6 (Stengers 2002a). Bloch (2000 [1923]) called this ‘build-
ing into the blue’. That is not a bad description for the kind of resource I am trying
to construct.
But I need to severely qualify each of these goals. To qualify the first, like many,
I think that, in certain senses at least, the social sciences and humanities suffer from
a certain kind of over-theoretization at present. There are too many theories, all
of them seemingly speaking on behalf of those whose lives have been damaged by
the official structures of power.^7 A cynic might think that the profusion of ‘fast’
theories created by academics is simply a mirror of the rise of brainy classes, who
are able to live a life of permanent theoretical revolution whilst everyone else does
the dirty work. That would be too harsh. But the criticism is not therefore with-
out any force at all (Rabinow 2006). It seems to me, to qualify the second goal,
that this task is a necessary one in a time in which a globalized capitalism based
on the rise of the brainy classes has become ever more pervasive, and democracy
is in danger of becoming something of a sham, enacted as part of what Sloterdijk
(2005c) calls an authoritarian capitalism.
The mass of the population is periodically doused with the rhetoric of
democracy and assured that it lives in a democratic society and that democracy
is the condition to which all progressive-minded societies should aspire.
Yet that democracy is not meant to realise the demos but to constrain and
neutralize it by the arts of electoral engineering and opinion management.
It is, necessarily, regressive. Democracy is embalmed in public rhetoric pre-
cisely in order to memorialize its loss of substance. Substantive democracy- equalizing, participatory, commonalizing – is antithetical to everything
that a high reward meritocratic society stands for. At the same moment that
advanced societies have identified their progressive character with perpetual
technological innovation they have defined themselves through policies that
are regressive in many of their effects. Democracy is where these effects are
registered. By virtually every important official norm – efficiency, incentives to
unequal rewards, hierarchical principles of authority, expertise – it appears ana-
chronistic, dysynchronous. The crux of the problem is that high-technology,
globalized capitalism is radically incongruent with democracy.
(Wolin 2000: 20)
What seems to me more valuable, to qualify the third goal, would be to try to
construct practicesof vocation^8 that can begin to address the deficit of felt power-
lessness and to chip away at ‘our capacity to interiorize power relations, to delimit
by ourselves the realm of the possible’ (Ginsborg 2005: 20). These practices would
Life, but not as we know it 3