The
various possible answers to the question seem scripted in advance –
like we are arriving at this question too late.
In
the second half of the twentieth century, the domain of politics was
imagined to have shifted from a rarefied space (however historically
constituted, i.e., the polis,
the public sphere, etc.), to a decentralized and »capillary«
operation within all
spaces. This led to a significant blurring of boundaries, most
clearly elucidated in the key mantra of Second Wave feminism: »the
personal is political.« By the mid-1990s, however, locating the
political was a process marked by a certain melancholy, even
exhaustion. The Google Ngram below plots the use of the expression
»everything is political« between 1800 and 2008
by
Gavin Steingo
