The realities and codes of modern politics as a series of negotiations and compromises between political actors over distributional, international and regulatory affairs are giving way to something more viscous and difficult to map. The codifications of politics as a delineation of ideological variation between competing but generally set groups whose ideas were known through manifestos and negotiated through shared axioms are now being de-codified as situations are becoming more and more complex, eating away at these institutional capacities to cope. The axioms that were before set in place through loose constitutional frameworks and arenas for debate (parliaments, congresses and ballot boxes) are now becoming battlegrounds and fissures where difference gives way to disconnection and insularity, and where the totality of politics that was previously found in negotiated strategies is now found in singular issues and neo-tribal forms.

This is the transcript of the talk I gave for the Wyrd Patchworkshop Quattro – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYXemShH_Yo&feature=youtu.be

I define patchwork as the adaptation and fragmentation of institutional structures through the processes of exit and voice. In this sense patchwork can be seen in multiple real-world vectors where developments are creating institutional complexification and blurring the lines of jurisdiction and sovereignty. Spontaneous disorder, the overload of socio-economic information, is accelerating financial and logistical matters beyond direct control and thus altering and de-codifying the decentralised plans that Hayek described as integral to markets. These restructuring dynamics are part of what I would call our intertechnic period of socio-economic-technological capacities and apparatuses which gives precedence to communication, inter-operability and speed.

The intersection of social media and governance present an interesting dilemma between communication and commodification, as the pull of both produces disequilibrium between and amongst the various platforms and their relation to governing structures. There is a segmented relation between the use and reproduction of human capital (as represented through data, influence and images) and the possibilities for resistance and world-building that these platforms allow. “Images, information, knowledge, affects, codes, and social relationships . . . . are coming to outweigh material commodities or the material aspects of commodities in the capitalist valorization process” as “living beings as fixed capital are at the center of this transformation, and the production of forms of life is becoming the basis of added value”[1]. The governing of the interactions of socio-economic spheres have found a new force to contend with in the form of the platform and the social media network, as issues of data management, image control, proprietary rights and arbitration become central to people’s existence on online forums. A swirling disequilibria develops between the processes of social communication outside the market/company moorings, and the processes of commodification/valorisation that pull these communicatory nodes back into the circuits of capital.

The recent political scene of the West can be seen as the growth of fragmentation of nationality, social identity and the political collectivity. The most obvious events come to mind: Trump, Brexit, the Gilets Jaunes and other currents of populist fervour. However these events have greater lineages than is supposed in most media narratives. The tribalism present in modern politics and the ideological variation are built from blocks made during the fall of mass parties and the increasing relevance of policy automaticity and the growth of life politics. A politics of antagonism has built itself upon infrastructure of political disengagement and senses of consensus.