After the excitement of election night - undoubtedly the most mediatised general election night in British history, permeated on all sides by the TV debates, automatically updating 'live' webstreams and Twitter feeds, 24 hour commentary - the disappointment, but also the boredom. Alain de Botton in The Guardian is as vacuous as ever, merrily reducing 'philosophy' to the level of an airport self-help book, diagnosing our "nostalgic, helpless" post-election frame of mind. But de Botton does remind me of a curious feeling in the days immediately following the Big Night, that after weeks of scaremongering and ramping up the tension, there was a perceived necessity on the part of the political class to go round calming things down a bit, recalling Mario Tronti's notion of democracy as 'anti-political' - "There is a process of depoliticization and neutralization that pervades it, impels it, stabilizes it." Throughout the horse trading between Lib Dems and the two other parties, it was felt essential for some senior politician to pop up on the news every now and then to assure everyone - and most particularly 'The Markets' who have become, as is rather convincingly argued by Aditya Chakraborty here like a kind of new religion, the most prominent face of the Big Other today - that everything was going to be alright, and nothing much was going on. It was rather like those moments when the disembodied voice of the London Underground announces that there are "no unexpected delays or closures" (because that is now more newsworthy and noteworthy than when there are). The most bizarre aspect of this act of suggestive stabilization, this process of making boring the news again, was the sudden resurrection of former prime minister, John Major who spent much of last weekend touring the TV studios insisting on not very much at all. It's as though someone at Tory Party central office had got in a panic - shit, people are interested in politics again, what are we going to do? I know, we'll send them our most boring man, a man so dull he was depicted on Spitting Image with grey skin, talking mostly about the peas on his dinner plate. Let's roll out John Major! Nothing to see here ...
