Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Michael Dutton. The Book of Politics: China in Theory. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2024. 440 pp.

Review by Andrew Pendakis

12 December 2024

Like everything else put together under capitalism, theory, too, has begun to show traces of the assembly line. All cheapness and speed, self-mimicry and repetition, one gets the strange sensation that many of the books are writing themselves. It is in this context of an industrialization of theory that Michael Dutton’s new book, his fifth, feels different, like something stumbled upon by chance in an antique shop or flea market. It is an eccentric, “somewhat bespoke” book, one marked by a Benjaminian interest in seemingly unconnected fragments and richly illustrated with curious images, maps, and diagrams (p. 12). With the exception of a late chapter on Chinese calligraphy, the book nevertheless feels like a carefully assembled whole complete with its own self-contained lexicon. Because its terms (“telluric,” “veridiction”) gain content less through definition than repeated use, the book at first eludes, then slowly illuminates.

The Book of Politics: China in Theory does three things at once. Along one path, it offers its reader a metaphysics of politics, embedding a theory of the specificity of the political within a materialist ontology that is probably best characterized as hydrodynamic (that is, concerned with fluids and flows). This aspect of his work is Marxo-Deleuzian with strong debts to Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin. Neither sacred nor profane, politics is a practice made out of bodies and affects as well as the various machines used by power(s) to channel, intensify or dissipate them. Flags, sculptures, and winter jackets, dance moves, nurseries, and slogans: the only boundaries to the formal play of these “political technologies” are those imposed on bodies by the laws of nature and the limits of the imagination (p. 282). There is no such thing as a political science. Rather, all politics is an art of shaping flows (of people, gazes, habits, bodily fluids, desire).. The existence of what Dutton calls “political Dasein” is verified by the presence of a series of abstract conditions rather than its alignment with a set of ideal spaces or practices (elections, voting, rallies, and others) (p. 111). These conditions include: the eruption of a Schmittian friend/enemy distinction around matters of ultimate concern; a relationship to the here and now that is existentially intense, simultaneously “life-threatening/life-affirming”; a conviction that absorbs the whole of one’s being into the luminosity of a project; and finally, the drama of a shared historical destiny or fate (p. 157).

Along its second path, Dutton’s book is a metaphysical history of capitalism. In line with his overall project, he sees the regime of “market veridiction” as a planetary organization of flows, an omnipresent structure of desire, the ultimate effect of which, alongside interminable growth, is the elimination of politics as a way of life. Using Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace as a metonym for the absorption of being into the logic of the commodity form, Dutton lays out the contours of a modern existence structured between the depoliticizing protocols of liberal democratic governance and the everyday biopolitics of markets. On the terrain of governance, political contradictions are transformed into differences, public opinion, and the rule of experts; on the terrain of every subjectivity, desire is dissipated into privacies, pleasures, wage labor, and entertainment such that the potential for political intensity is continuously drained off and dissipated. What replaces politics—“a life lived on a knife’s edge”—is Peter Sloterdijk’s “bored Dasein,” a subject that is on some essential level barely there, even when gripped by its most cherished private pleasures (pp. 154, 197).

Along its third axis, Dutton’s book offers a fascinating contribution to our understanding of the logic and meaning of (Chinese) communism. The subtitle of his book is a bit off: though China and its broader history appear in the form of tangential reflections on qi (with detours through yin yang philosophy and Daoism) Dutton’s main focus is squarely on the Dao of Mao—on Maoism as a historically singular form of life. The story that interests him begins in 1931 during the Chinese Civil War, when communists fleeing the repression of Chiang Kai-Shek escaped into the Jinggang mountains and formed the short-lived Jiangxi Soviet. Dutton here outlines the origins of Maoism as a political style, one that emerged out of a comingling between modernist urban cadres, many of whom were intellectuals, and the rough jianghu sensibility of mountain bandits. Comradeship and blood-bonded brotherhood, revolution and transgression, “scientific” Marxist-Leninism and a certain rural making-do here merge into a way of being political, the core logics of which could still be detected in the contradictions and excesses of the Cultural Revolution thirty years later (the equation, for example, of rustication and simplicity with Maoist virtue).

Like all great books, this one raises endless questions. Does politics have a prioritized relationship to being? Is there a special affinity between Maoism and the specificity of the political? Is politics even possible in the wake of its absorption into the regime of market veridiction or does it today live on only in the many museums that fill his book? And what of the former’s zombified afterlives, whether in the shape of neofascism or fundamentalism? Are Trumpists political subjects, or does a pit-stop at the drive-through for a Happy Meal muddle the Hier und Jetzt of the MAGA rally? There is urgent value in the book’s refusal to condemn politics or to dissolve the political as a practice into a vague sociality. In this, he diverges from the common sense of cultural studies, which has often moved away from the modernism of high politics and towards postmodern motifs of difference, resistance, and so on. Missing from the book is Alain Badiou, whose theory of politics both nicely contrasts and aligns with Dutton’s; it would have been interesting to set up these ideas in conversation with his work. Despite their differences, both would agree that political intensity, even when it passes into territory deemed dangerous by liberals, has an enduring right to exist, if only as a glitch in the otherwise on and on of things.