Cruising Politics

Cruising Politics revalues the weaknesses of weak ties in political life, considering instead how these conditions enable different relational forms and tactics of direct democratic action. By “cruising politics,” Galloway surfaces the novel affective intensities, modes of relationality, and ethical valences animating the political affairs of contemporary radical agonistic democrats. Through critical engagements across objects ranging from philosophical allegory, wartime surrealist verse, and pre-AIDS queer film to hacktivist memes and mobile performative critique, they demonstrate that the fleeting, anonymous, and public affairs of cruising politics are not only amenable to but are today driving radical democratic politics under conditions of networked publicity. Whether analyzing the queer vicissitudes of the “Ass Festival” that concludes Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, or examining how Critical Mass fashioned a radical democratic institutional form suited to recurrent events of contentious celebration, Galloway shifts our perspective on politics to the dynamics of the encounter, where receptivity to others responds to a shared desire while exercising a pluralist mode of judgment that conduces to concerted action around the pleasure of the deed and its recurrence.