I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that our society has a ridiculously narrow concept of politics. We tend to talk as if ‘the political’ is what happens only in officially sanctioned avenues of political advocacy: elections, what goes on at Westminster or in Brussels, the to and fro of diplomacy within intergovernmental organizations etc.

Sometimes we include direct action under its heading, but rarely are the activities of corporations, universities, or NGOs labelled as ‘political’ save for when directly involved with government. This seems crazy if we agree, which I think any reasonable person who puts some thought into the matter will, that politics ultimately concerns the clash of disparate views over how we should organize that part of our lives which we share (the public sphere) and of determining its limits. So while government is in the business of creating and enforcing laws which regulate the public sphere, all kinds of other groups and activities besides the functions of government itself are ‘political’ as they, quite obviously, impact the shape our public experiences take.

I’m not saying that our ‘private’ lives aren’t also impacted by political activity. To be sure, the contest for and the resulting shape of the public sphere will massively impact how we live out those activities that involve only ourselves and our close relations. In our society, sexual orientation is officially deemed a private matter and so beyond the reach of political activity to regulate. Sexual orientation is consequently in a sense political, since it is political activity that has determined it to be a private matter. My point is that a great many institutions and practices outside of government are deeply involved in the struggle for organizing the public sphere one way or another and that we should therefore regard these as political too.

One important example of a political practice typically seen as apolitical is literature. And one significant illustration of its political function can be found in the writings of contemporary author J.M. Coetzee. Coetzee deals with an array of themes from animal welfare to post-colonialism to the stubbornness of reality at being evoked accurately in human representation. His writing resonates powerfully with modern readers, capable of illustrating aspects of human life perhaps previously unappreciated. In Coetzee, literature functions as experience by proxy, affecting changes in the attentive reader that can reverberate throughout a society given an adequately broad audience. It is a tremendously effective appeal to others for reconsidering how they live their lives, both with respect to themselves and other people. As a result, Coetzee contributes to the confrontation of perspectives which I have suggested we call politics.

For me, his treatment of romance in contemporary Anglo-American culture is especially forceful and, perhaps, unusual in this respect. Coetzee’s favourite protagonists are deeply troubled, sexually vigorous, intellectually ambitious, and romantically idealistic, middle-aged white men. We see the world through their candid eyes and are made to feel sympathetic yet disgusted with their frustrated desires for moral rectitude and authentic, profound intimacy. It is as if the world left to these clearly self-referential beings is one which presents so little opportunity for meaningful experience, especially in public life with other people, that a great burden is placed on intimate relationships, a burden that horribly backfires, reducing these last vestiges of profundity into shallow displays of vanity.

One of the problems philosophers have raised with the political function of literature from the very beginning of the Western tradition is its ability to simultaneously propound contradictory views. We can interpret Coetzee’s theme of romance, for instance, in quite different ways. My preferred interpretation sees him appealing to an expansion and enrichment of the public sphere, the area of our lives where we can participate in advocating for and against various ways of living together. It is because we have allowed the public sphere to collapse, greatly narrowing the extent to which we participate in public life and significantly reducing the quality and depth of that participation when it actually happens, that the human need for inspiring, profound experience has had to find new and unsuitable avenues in the form of intimate relationships. The beauty of literature, however, is that it enables Coetzee to evoke very different interpretations in other readers who might grasp a political appeal of a very different kind. Coetzee, then, is not only providing one new perspective on which to build political projects, but also enriching political contest by offering a host of such refreshing outlooks.

If you’re a Coetzee fan or interested in learning more about the man, he happens to be in Oxford next week for one of his incredibly rare public appearances. He will be speaking at the Sheldonian on June 11^th at 5:30pm. Tickets are available free with a Bod card from Blackwells.

Tags: Coetzee, Politics

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.