Joonas S. Martikainen

This introductory chapter presents the central thesis of the book and introduces the concept of political poverty. I discuss the way political participation has become a social norm and present prior conceptions of political passivity and apathy. I then present the concept of political poverty and show its relevance to theorizing democratic participation. In the last part of the introduction I present an outline of the book and summaries of its two parts. In the first part I present a model for experientalist theorizing, discuss a prior conception of political poverty by James Bohman, and present the concept of faith in oneself and in democracy as a way to understand how freedom becomes meaningful in experience. The second part of the book consists of four chapters that discuss different experiential aspects of the loss of faith and a conclusion.

In this chapter I discuss faith as a practical sense of meaningfulness in experience which motivates political action and is an integral part of the experience of freedom. Such faith includes both a faith in oneself as a credible and capable political agent, as well as a faith in democracy as presenting meaningful possibilities for political engagement. I argue that such lack of faith is not only a cognitively held belief by those experiencing it, but also signals a broader fracturing of social experience. I put forward an account of faith as an aspect of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the “intentional arc” of perception and propose that an amount of faith is necessary for dealing with the ambiguity inherent to politics. I finish by outlining what the loss of such faith may entail to one’s ability to act politically.

This chapter begins by discussing the problem of political passivity. Passivity presents a dilemma for democratic theory. If we understand passivity as a result of a knowingly made choice, then one can be held responsible for the negative consequences of one’s own inaction, which can end up blaming marginalized groups for their own marginalization. On the other hand, painting politically passive people and groups as victims of a structural determinism denies them agency of their own, a similarly undesirable outcome. This book is an attempt to show how the problem is in the idea of understanding freedom as a matter of choice. I then discuss the problem with understanding political marginalization through the language of exclusion. I then present James Bohman’s capability approach to political poverty as a precursor to my own conception and discuss its limits, giving me a way forward. I finish by discussing the ways that complicity with one’s political domination through understandable abstention from politics appears to be a feature of political poverty as an injustice.

This chapter presents an experientalist model of social critique and theorizing. I begin from the tradition of emancipatory critical theory and then present the opposition between objectivist and experientalist models of critique. I then turn toward existential phenomenology for more tools for experientalist theorizing. I discuss Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception as a philosophical framework which allows me to show why perception matters when constituting theoretical accounts of freedom and political agency. I then discuss Hannah Arendt’s idea of freedom as only experienced in action within a public realm to show how the experience of freedom is always an intersubjective phenomenon and dependent on the existence of a public realm.

In this chapter I present an account of loss of hope as the fracturing of a sense of future possibilities in experience. I discuss such fracturing and even loss of future temporality in terms of Matthew Ratcliffe’s concept of “existential feelings” as constitutive of experience, and after him propose that hope can also be understood as the opening of a political possibility space in experience. Political poverty also means the closing down of a perceived field of possibilities for future political change. This kind of hope is engendered through participation in the rhythms of social life. Temporality forms an aspect of intentional experience, a way of inhabiting a situation in society in a way that allows for a meaningful sense of time flowing from past to the present. After Pierre Bourdieu I call this kind of lived temporality “human time” as separated from time as a measurable aspect of physical reality. I discuss the world of work and employment as providing an important avenue for experiencing human time in contemporary societies, allowing for the emergence of political subjectivity. Loss of employment and precarious work have effects on the lived sense of temporality which curtail the ability to experience political freedom as projecting toward possible better futures.

In this chapter I explore the diminishing and even loss of expressivity as a facet of experience. I claim that loss of political expressivity a phenomenon that is qualitatively different, if not separate from a lack of the communicative capabilities required for effective political participation. I give examples from sociological literature on social exclusion, and then diagnose them as a form of aphonia. A picture emerges of a loss of expressivity as the diminishing of the expressive modality of the lived body. This fracturing of the expressive modality of the lived body has perceptual implications, as perception itself is an expressive process. In this way the fracturing of the expressive modalities of the body can lead to the inability to perceive oneself as a capable public speaker and the public realm as a welcoming field of possibilities for political engagement. The kind of language required for public participation is itself an unequally distributed good. I propose that political theory should pay attention to the ways that the negative social experiences can diminish, or in extreme cases, even completely take away the capability to authentically express one’s own social experiences on one’s own terms.

In this chapter I discuss how one can lose a sense of being able to access the public world of politics from the world one inhabits in their daily life. I develop a conception of the public realm as an intersubjective world, a political field which is constituted by sedimentation of human interaction into webs of human relationships and accessible social meanings which can subtend a practical sense of freedom. I contend that one aspect of political poverty is the damaging of the human embodied capability to experience oneself able to access a shared civil realm or a public world. I conceptualize this loss of access by making use of Iris Marion Young’s conception of a “double spatiality” of here and yonder, as the split of the world into a realm one actually moves in and a realm one can perceive, but only from the outside looking in. I discuss how such a split can be the result of a loss of social institutions which allow one to learn a civic way of being in the world through bodily mimesis. In contemporary societies the world of work and employment is one such institution. I discuss how for this reason unemployment is often accompanied by political apathy and passivity.

In this chapter I begin my diagnosis of different experiential aspects of political poverty by discussing loss of trust. I present examples of how repeated experiences of humiliation and disappointment can cause persons to approach society as a place one does not belong to. This results in an attitude of distrust toward politics and institutions that makes it hard to perceive political participation as a meaningful possibility in one’s own life, despite being presented with opportunities for such. I then discuss the view that distrust is an integral part of democratic politics. However, such distrust is predicated on a prior sense of ontological security and an atmosphere of generalized or fundamental trust that allows one to “proffer” oneself to others in political action. I argue for the view that trust is a way of perceiving the social world as a field which solicits one’s engagement and participation. Loss of such trust is experienced as the closing down of horizons for political engagement.

Why are those with most at stake in politics often the least willing to become politically engaged? Why are those with most to gain from voting so often also those who remain at home on election day? While the rise of reactionary populism has grasped the attention of political theorists and political scientists, a parallel phenomenon has been passed over in relative silence. It appears that there is a growing number of people in Western democracies who have lost faith in the ability of democracy to deliver favorable outcomes and remain politically inactive, despite their frustration with their situation. Political Poverty puts forward an experiential account of political agency that can untangle theoretical knots of the discussion on the inequality of political participation. It also delivers a set of thinking tools that enable political theorists to better understand the motivational aspect of political agency, as well as suggestions on how even seemingly hopeless situations can be addressed by determined bottom-up efforts.

Termillä ”poliittinen köyhyys” on aiemmin tarkoitettu resurssien köyhyydestä erillistä köyhyyden muotoa, jossa ihmiset kärsivät vaikuttavan vapauden tasa-arvon puutteesta eli kyvyttömyydestä osallistua tasa-arvoisina toimijoina poliittiseen vaikuttamiseen. Tässä artikkelissa etsin filosofista lähestymistapaa, jonka avulla olisi mahdollista diagnosoida poliittisen osallistumisen epätasa-arvoa myös henkilökohtaisen poliittisen toimijuuden kokemuksen katoamisena. En käsittele niitä varsinaisia prosesseja, joiden myötä poliittinen osallistuminen käy joillekuille mahdottomaksi. Sen sijaan pyrin kuvailemaan poliittista köyhyyttä yleisemmin, osallistumisen kokemuksellisten ehtojen katoamisena. Poliittisessa köyhyydessä ei ole kysymys vain osallistumisen ulkoisista esteistä, kuten osallistumiseen vaadittavien materiaalisten resurssien tai kommunikatiivisten ja kognitiivisten kykyjen epätasa-arvoisesta jakautumisesta eri ryhmien kesken. Väitän, että taustalla voi olla myös ihmisen elämän affektiivinen köyhtyminen, joka ilmenee poliittisen toimijuuden kokemuksen murtumisena ja katoamisena. Käytän tässä artikkelissa Maurice Merleau-Pontyn ja Hannah Arendtin poliittista fenomenologiaa löytääkseni osallistumattomuuteen näkökulman, joka painottaa poliittisen toimijuuden ruumiillisuutta ja intersubjektiivisuutta.

In this article I use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology as a method for presenting a disclosing critique of aphonia as the loss of a political voice of one’s own. I claim that aphonia is a phenomenon that is qualitatively different from a lack of opportunities for democratic participation and a lack of the communicative capabilities required for effective political participation. I give examples from sociological literature on social exclusion and political apathy, and then diagnose them using Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of operative intentionality and the lived body. A picture emerges of aphonia as the diminishing of the expressive modality of the lived body. This can lead to the inability to perceive oneself as a capable public speaker and the public realm as a welcoming field of possibilities for political engagement. I propose that democratic theory should consider the way that the negative social experiences of social marginalization can diminish, or even completely take away, the capability to authentically give a voice to one’s experiences in public on one’s own terms. I conclude with a call for grass-roots alternatives towards engendering political participation among marginalized groups through a “therapeutic” approach to political inclusion.

During the last decade a new utopian horizon has emerged from the radical left: that of a future postcapitalist society in which technological progress and renewable energy finally take care of our material needs while robots do most our work for us, making paid employment a thing of the past. Instead, we can focus on fulfilling our desires and dreaming up new ones, leading lives of luxury and ease. This utopia, often called “fully automated luxury communism," could be reached through opportunistically accelerating features of the existing neoliberal capitalist system. However, behind this vision of a bright, sustainable future lurks a worrying political prospect. I show how the post-capitalist’s philosophical prejudice against work comes at a high political cost. By painting productive activity as mere drudgery that machines will emancipate us from, they also end up giving up on work as the root of radical democratic agency. The luxury communist proposal ends up resembling an extreme case of the neoliberal hegemony that it claims to be fighting against, a centrally ruled world completely focused on private enjoyment of luxury and devoid of any shared understanding of human flourishing on which democratic public life could thrive – a political dystopia.

The purpose of this dissertation is to design a conception of political poverty that can address the loss of the experience of political freedom. This form of political poverty is described as separate from poverty of resources and opportunities, and poverty of capabilities required for participation. The study aims to make intelligible how a person or a group can suffer from a diminishing and fracturing of social experience, which can lead to the inability to experience oneself as a capable and credible political agent, political engagement as a meaningful field of action, and democratic politics as a meaningful avenue for changing things for the better. This is a phenomenon which has been heretofore neglected by political theorists. The study presents a heuristic diagnosis of political poverty as loss of experiential freedom that involves four aspects of experience that have specifically political relevance: loss of trust, loss of expressivity, loss of a sense of access to the public world, and the loss of future temporality in experience. Diminishing and fracturing of these aspects of social experience can lead to politically impoverished persons and groups to become complicit in their own marginalisation by remaining unmotivated to challenge it. These aspects of social experience are approached through phenomenological portraits, chosen from literature on social exclusion and poverty. The diagnosis remains open to further development through exploration of other aspects of experience. The study draws on the thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt to present an account of political freedom as only experienced in co-existence with others. Through a critical discussion of their work, a more comprehensive account of political agency is developed. The experience of having political agency involves not just the cognitive and communicative capacities of the subject, but also the entire perceptual and motor intentionality of their lived body. The experience of meaningfulness is approached by exploring the intersubjective constitution of the self in a dialectical process with their social environment. This experience is described as a form of faith in oneself as an agent and in the meaningfulness of political engagement. Such faith is a practical, meaning-giving intentional relationship of a lived body to their social environment. This study emphasizes the experience of being a capable and credible political agent, and experiencing politics as a meaningful field for engagement, as important aspects of political freedom that should be considered alongside inclusivity of democratic processes, the equality of opportunity to participate, and the equality of the cognitive and communicative capabilities required for effective participation. In order to discuss political poverty as the loss of experiential freedom, we must go beyond objectivist models of social critique and approach the problem with the tools of existential phenomenology.