Their theory encourages political skepticism and gives a free pass to electoral abstention.

Political apathy is one of the most persistent threats to the legitimacy of a democratic society and a constant source of concern in the post-war Western public sphere. Nevertheless, it has never become a concentrated or specific field of inquiry (see also General Introduction). A brief sketch of common approaches should illuminate the distinctiveness of Cavell’s approach and terminology. Political apathy is generally approached from one of two opposite directions that can be placed on a horizontal line (see figure 1).

[FIG 1 OMITTED]

On one side of this division, apathy is conceptualised as a form of malfunctioning within a democratic practice that is otherwise acceptable. Taylor’s intervention in the ethics of authenticity to be discussed shortly would fall into that category. Such a view also emerges in pragmatic approaches within political and social science, for instance aiming to alleviate ‘shortfalls’ via democratic innovation (e.g. see Fung) or to address the disintegration of the age of party democracy (see Mair).114 On the other end of the spectrum, apathy is conceptualised as a symptom of victimisation or inherent structural oppression, visible in more radical critiques of capitalist democracy and embodied by for instance Marcuse’s work on alienation, Žižek’s on interpassivity, or Baudrillard, who sees apathy as a marker of resistance.115

In addition, approaches to political apathy differentiate along the line of a vertical opposition: either on the micro-level, concentrating on the affective and cognitive dimensions of the human individual (see Rosenthal), or focusing on the (macro-meso) economic and institutional structures that can be a factor in political apathy (see Snell). 116 In all these approaches, political apathy covers a variety of phenomena such as political indifference, ignorance, resignation, frustration, and disenfranchisement. What ties these terms together is a lack or negative amount of political engagement (mental and active), scholars here perceive a gap between a current and a desired sufficient state of subjectivity. Conventionally, conformism is seen as a condition where citizens actively accept the current state of societal affairs. Contemporary use thus presumes that a conformist feels or shows no ‘lack’ and acts out of agreement with the status quo. An example of this can be seen in this citation from a study in 2012: “Generation Y are often regarded as conformists who are committed to ‘making something of themselves’”.117 In the present day, conformism is thus not considered one of the forms of political apathy (negative) but associated with a kind of commitment (positive).

Crucially, Cavell’s philosophy gives a very different meaning to the term conformity. He makes conformity one of the central concepts within his ethical- political work, but this does not involve the present-day use of ‘conformism’. Through Cavell’s engagement with the 19th century writing of Emerson, the word ‘conformity’ reappears a century and half later in Cavell’s work to describe a condition similar to what we today talk about when we talk about ‘political apathy’. As a descriptive term, it helpfully conflates the characterisation of one individual with the portrayal of a widespread socio-political phenomenon. Perhaps counter-intuitively, these two dimensions should be kept intertwined to understand Cavell’s contribution and not placed in a schematisation that would try to for instance differentiate according to the two axes described above. Conformity, or political apathy, describes a kind of subjectivity as well as a kind of societal organisation. It is neither a malfunctioning of democracy nor a form of victimisation, but democracy’s infinite demand. What is unique to Cavell’s work is his focus on thinking through the conditions of overcoming - or transcending - conformity, and this is done precisely via engaging this interrelation.

Because of his emphasis on the ordinary, and one’s own relationship to language, Cavell is sometimes interpreted as focusing on the pre-political.118 However, I would argue that his work illuminates one’s uncannily intimate relationship to the political. This connects Cavell explicitly to the conundrum posed by the New Sincerity cultural phenomenon: How can such ‘political significance’ be given to films and works of literature that seem to focus on merely ‘moral’ quandaries of the everyday, thus omitting traditional political topics or questions of justice? By drawing our attention to other domains such as the everyday, ordinary language, scepticism and acknowledgment, it creates avenues beyond the boundaries set up by the private versus public, personal versus institutional, questions of the good life versus justice.119 It is precisely the boundary – or difference – between the ethical and the political that is so elusive and pertinent to today’s inability to effectively conceptualise political apathy (see also General Introduction).

Ordinary language and the everyday are crucial sites of moral repair and the overcoming of a kind of disappointment with the world. We are continually negligent of it, taking it for granted instead of being attuned to its power and importance. Cavell describes our attunement (or returning) to the ordinary as marked by uncanniness, a Freudian term for uneasy strangeness that for him expresses the instructions of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy:

“He speaks to us quite as if we have become unfamiliar with the world, as if our mechanism of anxiety, which should signal danger, has gone out of order, working too much and too little. The return of what we accept as the world will then present itself as a return of the familiar, which is to say, exactly under the concept of what Freud names the uncanny. That the familiar is a product of a sense of the unfamiliar and of the sense of a return means that what returns after skepticism is never (just) the same.”120

Here, the everyday reveals itself as stranger and richer, simultaneously the most intimate and most difficult area of knowledge. Returning to the world signifies the moments of overcoming sceptical avoidance, which can be prompted by pedagogical experiences such as that of particular films or conversations with others. Yet it is not something we can resolvedly ‘pass through’ but instead has a repetitive cyclical structure moving between avoidance and acknowledgement, reminiscent of the Schlegelian Romantic oscillating structure of ‘irony’ we saw in Chapter 1. The threat of scepticism is always present, but is overcome in a practical and not theoretical way: via the ordinary.121 The philosophical instruction of the (Wittgensteinian) ordinary is not a simple revelation but structurally ongoing and radically open-ended, its “seriousness is dependent on disarming our sense of oddness and non-oddness, and there with seeing why it is with the trivial, or superficial, that this philosophy finds itself in oscillation”.122 Cavellian perfectionism makes the ordinary central for the counter-intuitive reason that it directs towards the unfamiliar, therefore potentially more dangerous and threatening to the status-quo.