The politics of the unrepresentable
From the French banlieu riots in 2005 to their 2011 UK counterparts, from the politics of disruption and contagion of the Lulzsec and Anonymous hacking groups to the politics of “occupy everything” adopted by some strong tendencies within the global occupy movement, there seems to be a growing presence of contemporary radical political dynamics that are largely untranslatable in existing political terms and that cannot be easily represented within the existing political sphere. A common strategy of these new politics is the refusal to articulate political demands in the existing public sphere. The “no demands” or “infinite demands” strategy is the embodiment of the call for no mediation, a refusal to utter a discourse that can be mediated through representative political bodies (be it pro or anti-government, right or left wing), and, the argument goes, for preventing their ultimate appropriation by existing power structures, or capturing by financial and political interests. A common tactic of these new politics is the embracing of obscurity. Transparency is rejected as it is associated with the pervasion of control and, instead, tactics are adopted that attempt to obfuscate the divide between absence and presence, between anonymity and individual or collective identification.
