Open AccessDialectics of the Swing (Voter)
Author(s) -
Andrew Pendakis
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
brock review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1188-9071
DOI - 10.26522/br.v13i1.1423
Subject(s) - hegemony , harmony (color) , ideology , opposition (politics) , politics , rhetoric , dialectic , aesthetics , political radicalism , dissent , sociology , philosophy , epistemology , political science , law , art , theology , visual arts
This paper aspires to offer a brief genealogy of a new figure of political discourse and imagination I call the "radical centre". In opposition to earlier centrisms, discourses which emphasized moderation, harmony, and balance, this new configuration imbues the centre with a kind of revolutionary or radical potential linked to its capacity to avoid being "trapped" by the traditional political poles. Though this thought envisions itself as beyond ideology and in some sense beyond repetition of any kind the tropology of the centre is filled with repeating motifs and figures susceptible to analysis and critique. The claim of this paper is that the radical centre has become the dominant political rhetoric of our time and that its hegemony works to preempt the possibility of genuinely new (and inventive) forms of political imagination.