Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Arts of the Political: New Openings For the Left, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2013, 240 pages. $ 22.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-8223-5387-4.

See David Featherstone's other contributions to Society & Space: Review: In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation State and Skills for Heterogeneous Associations: The Whiteboys, Collective Experimentation, and Subaltern Political Ecologies

Geographers, it would seem, have come late to studies of "the left." Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift find the left in desperate straits and in even more desperate need of some serious theoretical rejuvenation. Their book sets out to repopulate the political language of the left through "the three arts of imagination, persuasion, and fulfilment without which" they argue "a different future cannot be seen or desired" (page ix). Given the lack of purchase the "organized Left" has achieved in terms of shaping the terms of the post-crisis conjuncture this is clearly an important and timely project.

Amin and Thrift offer a capacious definition of the left as "a set of different political forces grouped around common matters of concern and affinity; although they are often very different in their character and contours, they cleave to the notion that all is not right with the world, and specifically, that the recurring evils of inequality, oppression and exploitation need to be fought" (page xi). The book's key aim to think about how diverse "matters of concern" are brought in to left politics is potentially a productive one and offers the promise of allowing an expansive understanding of what can count as left political practice and agency. Given the sprawling scope and ambition of Arts of the Political this review does not attempt to capture the entirety of the book’s project. Rather it considers some key elements of the geography of the left and the political that emerge through Amin and Thrift's account.

The first chapter orients their work in relation to contemporary debates on "politics" and "the political" noting that "the most important political movements" are "those that are able to invent a world of possibility" (page 9). This is followed by a chapter "leftist beginnings" that positions their project in relation to histories of the left. Amin and Thrift work, albeit rather fleetingly, through four distinctive moments, the emergence of the German socialist party, the formation of Swedish social democracy, the formation of the British women’s movement in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century and the activity of the Progressive movement in the United States. Taken together these moments produce a reformist, nation-centered "usable past" for their vision of contemporary left politics and set the tone for an account which largely confines the left to Europe and North America. This is both through the movements they invoke, but also more crucially through the treatments they offer; there is no space in their account of the suffrage movement, for example, for Sylvia Pankhurst who pioneered a militant feminism articulated with anti-colonialism.

Chapter 3 sets out an engagement with the political, re-defined as a "world making politics." The chapter develops a detailed engagement with the work of theorists such as Bruno Latour, but without pausing to consider the now voluminous debates about the political implications of such theoretical interventions. Chapter 4 offers a critical engagement with, and survey of, "contemporary leftist thought." It includes, perhaps unsurprisingly, an assertive dismissal of "anti-capitalist" thought. The terms in which this is done recalls some of the caricatured and entrenched positions which made the acrimonious debates between Amin and Thrift and David Harvey and Neil Smith so unhelpful and limiting. A fifth chapter offers a more interesting take on contemporary forms of left organizing and includes a rather brave attempt to (re)assert the significance of "bureaucratic" forms of practice for the left. The subsequent chapter demonstrates this argument, in one of the only sustained engagements with political practice in the book, through an intriguing account of the European Union’s modes of operation. While this gives an interesting, if largely descriptive, take on the practices of the EU, for me it is less clear how what is being described here is particularly "left." Further, given the recent displacement of any remaining vestiges of a "social European" project in the context of the ongoing Euro-zone crisis the failure to engage with the EU's most recent incarnation as a purveyor of pulverizing and deeply unpopular forms of austerity would seem to limit its analytical purchase.

A final chapter, in part recycled from Thrift's Non-Representational Theory, positions "affective politics" as a kind of theoretical panacea for the left. This chapter culminates in an exploration of what, following Raymond Williams, they term "leftist structures of feeling" (174). This is a suggestive term. The treatment of the leftist structures of feeling they invoke, however, oscillates between the vague and the disconcerting. In a startling phrase, pitched somewhere between a Stakhanovite and Iain Duncan Smith, they insist, for example, that "the fulfilment that sheer hard work brings should not be underestimated" (page 177). An epilogue begins to position the arguments in a rather more "worldly" way, though in no less an awkward fashion. An upbeat assessment of the "BRICs," for example, is rather haphazardly thrown into the mix with scant reference to the substantial literature, or indeed different left political interventions, which have sought to contest the effects of the "spread of the market economy" (page 189, for useful critical perspectives on just one of the BRIC countries, see Ahmed, 2012; Oza, 2010). They conclude by an appeal to an open left politics that "holds our hands out to the messy, perplexing future" (page 200). The remainder of this review considers some of the ways in which the geographies through which they envision such an "open left politics."

Firstly, from the outset the book frames the spaces of left politics and thought in restricted ways. Amin and Thrift develop a resolute, explicit and unashamed geographical focus on "the west." This has pernicious consequences in both theoretical and political terms. Their account reproduces, perhaps unwittingly, abstracted spaces of political theorizing which, as Partha Chatterjee has powerfully argued, are constituted by exclusion (2011: 1-3). Chatterjee’s critical assault on the terms of normative modes of political theorizing, however, signals that the spaces through which thinking the political are envisioned are not innocent or accidental. This casual, unthinking, disregard for theoretical traditions outside of, or perhaps more crucially, in conversation with "the west" is untenable. As recent interrogations of Hegel's debt to the Haitian Revolution and Foucault's intellectual exchanges with the Black Panthers attest, an understanding of the spaces of political theory which confine particular theorists and ideas "within" bounded European spaces is problematic (see Buck Morss, 2009; Heiner, 2007).

Attending to some of the diverse trajectories and intersections through which left political theorizing has been shaped and constituted would have been welcome in intellectual terms. It would also have opened out the text, for as Hamid Dabashi has recently noted in a set of reflections on the "Arab Spring" the "term 'West' is more meaningless today than ever before" (Dabashi, 2012: xvii). This is not an incidental point, but something which begins to structure the ways in which Amin and Thrift apply work around affect to the left. Their account of affective politics is structured by a logic in which particular claims around "affect" are given a "universal" reach and relevance, when they clearly are embedded in very "particular" geographical contexts. This is the case even if one accepts the very specific articulation of affect that structures their work (see Barnett, 2013 and Pile, 2009 for important skeptical readings).

In political terms, this geographically confined vision of the left, ignores and closes down some of the key tools that geographers have developed for thinking spatially about political alternatives. Amin and Thrift are largely blind to the important forms of translocal solidarity and internationalism that have been such an important part of left political traditions and which continue to inspire and animate left political imaginaries in the present. Now the terms on which left(s) have imagined such connections in both present and past, are clearly not without their tensions, but they bear and demand serious scrutiny. Any account of contemporary left politics, however, surely needs to engage with the inventive spatial practices forged through such organizing and the ways in which diverse movements have brought various forms of networked, uneven power geometries into contestation. Further, to reduce a sense of 'the left' to the Euro-American left is to do serious epistemic violence to contemporary left politics. The omission of any discussion of the Latin American left, neither Morales nor Chávez is accorded a mention, and the governments associated with the so-called "pink tide" are not even signaled in passing. This represents a significant failure to adequately engage with 'actually existing lefts' which have sought to challenge and offer alternatives beyond "neoliberalism." The claims and relations such left projects produce need to be interrogated, and they cannot be invoked as they sometimes are, as unproblematic "blueprints" for left alternatives elsewhere, but to exclude them from a conversation around the contemporary left seems wilfully myopic.

Secondly, the book tends to foreclose a sense of the generative character of political activity. Whilst there is much rhetorical appeal here to the productive character of political "arts," there is very little attempt to think about how left political practices proceed and engage with the world. Amin and Thrift don’t really seek to develop the implications of Latour’s analysis of heterogeneous assemblages as a mode of engaging with the conduct of left politics. One doesn't have to fully subscribe to Chantal Mouffe's rather brittle sense of antagonism as foundational to the political to wish to have a much clearer sense of how the heterogeneous assemblages marshaled by Amin and Thrift come to be contested through specific political movements and practices. Indeed one of the great paradoxes of this account of the left is that two theorists who have insistently argued for a focus on the "practices" constituted through social relations provide an analysis of the left which concedes very little to an engagement with the political practices shaped through diverse forms of "actually existing left politics."

An account which sought to patiently follow how left politics has politicized particular "matters of concern" could be of great utility. A focus on the diverse practices through which left politics is assembled and shaped, also offers the promise of a much more generous distribution of who/ what counts in shaping left politics. The foreclosure of attention to such practices here means, however, that the conduct of various forms and modes of left politics becomes rather marginalized. The often recursive relations between attempts at left theorizing and left political practices are also not given due consideration. This is something which hinders their engagement with contemporary left thought in chapter 4. Even Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, unaccountably absent from the field of reference here, which like the text under discussion is vulnerable to charges of theoreticism, was strongly animated by a concern with how "new social movements" were reworking and re-articulating the terms of left politics.

Thirdly, the book provides a very institutional and nation-centered take on left politics. One of the potentially valuable aspects of the book is to re-assert the importance of forms of left organizational practice and institution making together with a (limited) defense of the importance of various notions of the state and the public to left politics. This focus is very much at the expense of reproducing demarcations between institutional and extra-institutional forms of left politics. Amin and Thrift seem most at home in considering the formal institutional presence of certain kinds of "left" politics. Further, in chapter 7 they end up with a very functionalist account of the politics of affect where the role of a left politics becomes ‘more effectively modulating […] passions’ than the political right (page 163). This reductive approach misses the generative practices and affects shaped through diverse forms of left politics that exceed such narrow constructions of politics. A case in point here would be the significant resonance achieved by the political distinction drawn by Occupy between the "99%" and 1%. This distinction is of course not without its tensions, not least a tendency to ignore divisions within the 99% (see McGuire and Spence, 2012). As a form of politics that has offered practices of renewal for left politics and which have reached out to constituencies beyond existing left subcultures this movement clearly warrants discussion. The political potential of both the "Arab Spring" and Occupy, however, are assertively dismissed here in a sentence and a half.

Fourthly, the vantage point from which Amin and Thrift interpellate "the left" bears scrutiny. Again given their stated concerns with the "in process" and open conduct of political activity they present a curiously disembodied analysis of the left. In particular this is shorn of any sense of how articulations between their particular theoretical vision and situated left political practices might be produced.  The result is to fall back on a remarkably hierarchical, one might be even tempted to invoke the term vanguardist, account of how the left should proceed. The mode of address they adopt is telling in this regard. The book is littered with stark injunctions: they write of the "structures of feeling that the Left needs to cultivate," that the "Left needs to reclaim its place as the vanguard of democratic change" or more idiosyncratically they contend that the "the Left needs to design worlds that recognize that all political ideas and practices are like Frankenstein’s monster" (pages 15, 199, 133).

A curious absence in this regard is any discussion of, or sympathy for, thinking about left political formations as bearing on the "prefiguring" of alternatives. Doreen Massey has noted that a central contribution of feminist organizing, along with some other left traditions, most notably anarchism, has been a general challenge to hierarchies and a scrutiny of the power relations through which left organizing practices are shaped (see Massey, 2013: 260). To assert that unequal power relations have to be challenged both through and within movement organizing and cannot be deferred has been a key contribution of debates around prefigurative politics. In this regard, rather than reproducing hierarchical languages around "design," which implies that left leaderships work on relatively passive populations, it would perhaps be more useful to think about the terms on which different actors or groups might co-produce social relations in ways which are more equitable and generate alternative futures through doing so. A sense of co-production as method might also usefully have led Amin and Thrift to reflect on the relations and terms on which intellectual and academic work might intersect with left political practices and movements. The absence of any reflection on the terms of such linkages and how they might be nurtured is one of the most remarkable silences in this work.

E.P. Thompson writing in the context of an occupation at Warwick University in the early 1970s asked "Is it inevitable that the university will be reduced to the function of providing with increasingly authoritarian efficiency, pre-packed intellectual commodities which meet the requirements of management? Or can we by our efforts transform it into a center of free discussion and action, tolerating and even encouraging ‘subversive’ thought and activity, for a dynamic renewal of the whole society within which it operates?" (cited by Iles and Roberts, 2012: 234). Thompson’s injunction speaks directly to the challenge of reproducing left political cultures in harsh political times and the role that vibrant, unruly, left intellectual practices might make to that. It also speaks to the productive intersections between serious intellectual work and the practices of left politics. Such a disposition is markedly dissonant with the vision for the left outlined here.

Arts of the Political provides some significant intellectual insights and political challenges. In sum, however, it is an account which seeks to confine and contain the left both geographically and politically. In the final analysis it has little to offer the left other than theoreticist prescriptions which are largely abstracted from left political practices and which often feel like they are being imposed upon the left from above. It is through patient, attentive engagement with actually existing left practices, through being willing to learn from political movements and organizing that critical geographers might begin to contribute to a renewal of left politics. 

References

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