Loss of representation in the 1990s privatized voting into an emotional act

Evidence

Yet the triumph of the private also entailed a thoroughgoing subordination of the public. At some remove from Tillmans’s epic of liberation, Ernaux documented the transition to postpolitics with a focused ambiguity, seeing around rather than through the new order. “Since no one represented us,” she writes, “it was only fitting that we do as we pleased, so that voting became a private, emotional affair, governed by last-minute impulse.” “One needed the habit and long-standing memory of ‘electoral duty’ to bother to go to the polling station on an April Sunday in the middle of spring vacation.” — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 67

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter’s claim that politics without representation converts participation into private emotional gesture — the seed of Jäger’s later ‘emotions without organization’ thesis in hyperpolitics.