Interview by Masoud Golsorkhi Portrait courtesy of Anton Jäger

MG How do you define hyperpolitics?

AJ Hyperpolitics means repoliticisation without reinstitutionalisation. It describes a change in political culture in the West across the last 10 to 15 years. There’s been an increase in political activity across several metrics, but there has also been an accelerated decline in membership of civil organisations in the Western world. Hyperpolitics tries to capture the dynamics of popular political engagement in the era of post-politics, in which it’s possible to be politically active outside of an institutional context. The Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 are estimated to have been the largest in US history, even larger than the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Both were prominent protest movements, but they took on different forms. Insofar as the BLM protests in the summer of 2020 were enormously energetic, populous and widespread, once they were over, the energy dispersed. There are a couple of short-term legacies, but all the police departments that were defunded have since regained or even increased their funding. Many of the social problems that were seen as targets in the summer of 2020, whether it was the scandal of mass incarceration or rates of police violence, have only got worse.

MG The BLM movement was effective on questions of visibility and representation. Where do you think culture fits into this political climate?

AJ A lot of new political activity has singled out the domain of culture as one of the privileged sites in which politicisation has to happen. Imagery, performance, visibility and a certain type of ritual are enormously important in contemporary politics, but these invite performative actions rather than substantive policy change. You can’t exclude performance from the repertoire of political action. But the performative dimension of politics in the 2010s has the capacity to convince people that politics is purely performative. The internet is lowering the costs of political expression while at the same time individualising these forms of expression. Posting the black square on Instagram or indicating your concern for a cause is doing your duty as a political citizen. This has to do with the structure of our new public sphere, where people are both more vocal but also more disoriented, and this makes for an exclusively performative conception of politics.

MG Prominent protest movements of the past decade have largely failed. Does the resulting sense of defeat make the problem worse?

AJ The lack of institutionalisation arose from both a failure to build institutions and a lack of capacity to shape them in an environment where the limits of institutions are very publicly visible. When you can’t see any institutional channels to pursue, protest activity becomes the exclusive outlet within the armoury of political options. Protest is also an expression of helplessness. This is not just a story about the left. There is also a hyperpolitical problem on the right, which has seen surges of protest in the last decade. In the 1990s and 2000s, the British National Party (BNP) held annual demonstrations in London, and the turnouts were in the thousands. Now, about 150,000 people descend, like in last year’s demonstration organised by Tommy Robinson, but protestors are not protesting around a coherent ideology.

MG The right has been criticising the personalisation of politics for 30 years, and has all but lost the cultural battle. There are so many Black and Brown people in far-right parties. How do you explain this adoption and then public disavowal of racist ideas?

AJ Many of the changes that hyperpolitical activity has ushered in are discursive or cultural.  If you look at the tolerance for interracial marriage in the US since BLM, the numbers are spectacular. But now you see this horrid paradox: a society which is increasingly outwardly committed to anti-racism, yet one in which a disproportionately high number of Black men are incarcerated and subjected to police violence. There is an ambient opposition to all kinds of social problems, but this doesn’t have concrete effects on entrenched power imbalances. There have been cultural achievements. Ethnic minorities have a firmer place in the new civic sphere. Reform UK wants to be more diverse than their own electorate, which indicates the cultural pressure they feel.

MG Protests cut across social boundaries. At the first Gaza demonstration I met a group of hijabi sisters from Yorkshire confronted with the queer block. One of these young girls came up to me and asked me, “Brother, are these people on our side?” She was astonished.

AJ Our contemporary public sphere might feel overheated, spasmodic and ineffectual, but the fact that people feel involved in politics is an enormously important change. It’s inevitable, when so much history and politics is now beamed right across our smartphone screens, that people feel compelled to formulate a response to the horror they’re constantly seeing. This has made it possible for people to mobilise and form new, unexpected coalitions. But we also live in a culture of distraction in which people can switch very easily from one topic to another. This makes it difficult to build up a durable challenge to existing power structures. It’s good that people are mobilising again, because history has returned in such a dramatic fashion, but it’s not clear now what tools there are to exert pressure on these existing structures. You can immobilise British weapons systems or occupy a factory, and then face fierce repression.

MG In the UK, we have seen several attempts at creating new parties, but their impact seems to be limited and there has been more success using an existing institution than trying to create a new one.

AJ It is increasingly challenging to draw people into certain institutions. Reform, for example, are thinking of creating local Reform chapters that can go door-knocking for council elections. But for a long time, Reform was not even registered as a party; it was just a private company that only recently became a company limited by guarantee. There are large private lobbies that would like to sink their resources into these parties on the right, because they know that these parties will cater to their interests, which is not the case for the left. If Reform wants to engage in its deportation programme, it will need both a British state that’s administratively capable of doing this and enough pressure from an organisation that can engage this. .