Critical Times in Greece

Anthropological Engagements with the Crisis

Dimitris Dalakoglou, Georgios Agelopoulos, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Georgios Agelopoulos

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315299013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

This volume brings together new anthropological research on the Greek crisis. With a number of contributions from academics based in Greece, the book addresses a number of key issues such as the refugee crisis, far-right extremism and the psychological impact of increased poverty and unemployment. It provides much needed ethnographic contributions and critical anthropological perspectives at a key moment in Greece's history, and will be of great interest to researchers interested in the social, political and economic developments in southern Europe. It is the first collection to explore the impact of this period of radical social change on anthropological understandings of Greece.

Part I

The state

1 States of emergency, modes of emergence

Critical enactments of ‘the people’ in times of crisis

Athena Athanasiou

Whither the demos of democracy? States of crisis and ‘the people’

The state of crisis as a mode of neoliberal governmentality raises difficult questions about the links between capitalism and democracy, precariousness and action, critique and subjectivation, as well as dispossession and popular sovereignty. More specifically, it compels a consideration of how precariousness might shape political action and how dispossession might become the occasion for reimagined critical intimacies and reactivated performative contestation. It is such an array of questions that animates this text. Current regimes of neoliberal governing through crisis management bring forth the (economized, but also gendered, sexed, and racialized) subject as a performative political arena of vulnerability and precariousness. They also bring forth the ways in which subjects are interpellated into crisis politics as subjects of vulnerability and precariousness.

In this context of crisis discourse, new configurations of crisis and critique are emerging with reference to questions of what counts as crisis and how critical responses are articulated. In other words, the question of thinking critically in times of crisis emerges and persists in complicated ways. This question(ing) involves also taking into consideration that critique is always already in crisis, as it pertains to interrogating the terms which determine what counts as an ontological claim. Thus, critique is about provoking crisis to established truth claims, including the truth claims of crisis. At the same time, this questioning involves reflection on conflicted temporalities of crisis: what matters as crisis, when and for whom; and what emerges as resistant. In light of this questioning, this chapter explores the possibility of figuring a break with the present order(ing) of things, by asking what it is that mobilizes radical social imagination in these times of neoliberal governmentality. This ‘break’ with the logics and logistics of crisis is about an interrupted and undecidable attentiveness, or a spacing, which inscribes an openness-to-come; and which constantly pushes toward the not-yet-here.

In this sense, I suggest that we consider Judith Butler’s engagement with Michel Foucault’s well-known essay, ‘What is Critique?’ Both texts pose the question of critique with reference to forces of subjectivation, self-formation, and desubjugation. Foucault writes: ‘Critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability. Critique would essentially ensure the desubjugation [désassujettissement] of the subject in the context of what we would call, in a word, the politics of truth’ (Foucault 1997: 47). And Judith Butler responds thus:

But if that self-forming is done in disobedience to the principles by which one is formed, then virtue becomes the practice by which the self forms itself in desubjugation, which is to say that it risks its deformation as a subject, occupying that ontologically insecure position which poses the question anew: who will be a subject here, and what will count as a life, a moment of ethical questioning which requires that we break the habits of judgment in favor of a riskier practice that seeks to yield artistry from constraint.

(Butler 2001)

To echo Butler’s formulation, I would like to argue that what is at stake in current regimes of crisis is precisely a contested domain where subjects ‘risk their deformation as subjects,’ ‘occupy ontologically insecure positions,’ and, at the same time, ‘yield artistry from constraint.’

In this chapter, I propose to explore current neoliberal governmentality as a distinct assemblage of power, knowledge, and subjectivation. Neoliberal governments use the ever-present emergency of crisis, with all its accompanying affective apparatuses of fear and insecurity, in order to legitimize the necessity to take action in the direction of managing uncertainty and establishing a new and secure normality. Crisis necessitates the realism of constant management – both preemptive and reparative. Anti-neoliberal politics, however, reclaims action not in terms of a return to ‘normality’ but rather as an occasion of bringing the seemingly settled social intelligibility of what matters as ‘normality’ to creative crisis. My purpose here is to unravel the affective and corporeal qualities of such critical action as desubjugation. To pose the question of desubjugation today is to engage with genres of crisis and critique that inflect critical political subjectivities in our late capitalist times. So I am interested here in the performative contestation at the heart of loss (loss of public education and health, loss of work, loss of housing, loss of rights, loss of dignity, loss of democracy): in other words, the emergent – always emergent – processes by which embodied subjects, simultaneously produced and foreclosed via multiple regulatory schemas, return to the space of their erasure and in varied contexts of unevenly distributed affectability. In reflecting on agonistic democratic subjectivity as a performative resource for political engagement and contestation, I seek to attend to the plurality, undecidability, and decent redness of ‘the people’: what Ernesto Laclau defines as ‘the specific subject of politics’ (Laclau 2001: 3). This is the subject that the antidemocratic force of neoliberalism works to hollow out. In Wendy Brown’s terms, neoliberal governance eviscerates, or swallows, the very space of the demos, the democratic space in which people assemble to articulate common claims of freedom, equality, and justice. Citizenship is being simply relegated to the medium through which the market administers public life and ‘human capital.’ In her latest book, where she examines challenges for democracy generated by neoliberal governance and austerity politics, Brown argues that the values of democracy are undermined today not only by the unfettered power of finance capital and by extreme economic inequality, but also by a normative economic mode of reason and governance that ‘undoes’ the constituent terms of democracy – freedom, equality, and popular sovereignty (Brown 2015).¹

In texts ensuing from the speech she delivered at Occupy Wall Street in October 2012, Judith Butler has explored the phrase ‘we, the people’ as an illocution, that is, as an utterance which provokes action: a speech act fundamentally related to the physicality of bodies actively making their appearance in the public. Either as anti-neoliberal protesters, or as transgender in a transphobic environment, or as criminalized sans-papiers, these assembled bodies, vulnerable but also dissenting, enact a form of political exposition (Butler 2013). In Butler’s thought, the assembled bodies come to be through their political exposition and action in the public; at the same time, their exposition yields, or makes possible, a call to action. In this context, political subjectivity is not understood as grounded in a pre-existing solid foundation of the self, but rather as brought about through collective political action and relational exposition related to the physical emergence of assembled bodies. ‘Modes of subjection or subjectivation,’ to use Foucault’s phrase, take place through performative contingency rather than ontological solidity, and it involves, as Foucault has shown, the desubjugation of the subject within a politics of truth within which norms circumscribe the human in its fraught relation with the political. In this vein, I would like here to consider the political performativity of ‘the people’ – through configurations of differentiated plurality and dissipative ephemerality rather than through conceptions of a unitary body politic. In tracing the condition of possibility for the ‘we, the people,’ my reflections gesture in the direction of its performative implications, and not in the direction of defining the proper subject of politics.

In this sense, my conception of ‘the people’ as resolutely political and radically democratic is partly and inconsistently consonant with what Jacques Rancière calls ‘the part that has no part,’ or those who have no share in the ‘distribution/partition of the sensible,’ or, as he differently puts it, the count of the uncounted/unaccounted-for (le compte des incomptés) (Rancière 1999). The ‘improper property’ of the part without part stages a post-foundational configuration of the political subject (1999: 13). There can be nothing essential, fully self-formed, or individualistically possessive about this (im)propriety. The latter is not rooted in the Kantian autonomous self; and there can be no enactment of it outside of a mode of subjectivation that allows, compels, and delimits the formation of the subject. As Butler has insightfully made clear, critique involves ‘the practice by which the self forms itself in desubjugation’ by enacting, again and again, the question: ‘Who will be a subject here, and what will count as a life?’ (Butler 2001). And so instead of a clear-cut division between those who have and those who have no place in the given order of distribution, I am more interested in mapping out the political performativity of departing, imparting, and partaking as a tenuous assemblage of possibilities for belonging and, at the same time, taking a critical distance from particular injurious conditions and established realms of intelligibility that have brought the subject into being. It is precisely this reflexive poiesis of ‘the people’ as non-identical to itself that might bring forward reordering of established intelligibility (rather than as asking for a share in it).

Biopolitics and governmentality of crisis

The current regimes of crisis provide the grounds for a critical re-engagement with, and a critical reimagining of, who counts as part of the public; how the political is performed; how and where it ‘takes place’; what qualifies as political subjectivity, and how it is gendered, racialized, and classed; and how bodies are subjugated and desubjugated in these times of neoliberal governmentality and precarization. Emerging critical gestures of relationality and collective exposure raise the question of the polis as a multivalent question of be-longing and un-belonging: who belongs and who does not belong? On what condition and at what cost? Which bodies are rendered visible and whose voices can be possibly heard and publicly registered as audible? In this context, new and unforeseeable modes of refiguring the subject and the political emerge. Rather than a pristine place of liberatory agency, ‘the people’ emerge as a performative event of critical agency, which is enacted by/through assembled bodies and their collective stasis and agonism. It is precisely this collective agonism, which Chantal Mouffe takes to be ‘the very condition of a vibrant democracy’ (Mouffe 2005: 126),² that creates space for the eventness of non-corporate, non-commodified relationality in the polis, in the face of losing a place, a home, a community, the right to assemble, hope, or one’s means of livelihood. And it is this collective agonism that reaffirms the unconditionality of a public hospital, a music scene, a public broadcaster, a park, a school, a theater space.

The state of crisis, where people are differentially faced with economic dispossession, the political violence of authoritarianism, and a state of deadly living, has inspired a philosophical and political critique of neoliberalism based on a theoretical reconsideration of Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, especially its emphasis on making live and letting die. But how might we rethink biopolitics as a performative resource for agonistic political engagement and contestation? How might we think together a politics of emergency and a politics of emergence? This question connects up with the way in which Bonnie Honig defines ‘emergency politics’ broadly to include the dimensions of possibility for radical democratic politics in emergency settings (Honig 2009).

As ‘crisis’ becomes a complex assemblage of power relations which both manage life and expose to death, the ‘state of exception,’ which is usually deployed to signify the element of emergency at the heart of the normative administrative discourses of crisis, proves to be not exceptional but rather ordinary, systematic, canonical, and foundational. The normative terms of subjectivity emerging from such a configuration are defined by exclusionary norms of gender, capital, and nation – norms which take place in the thick of the ordinary. It is through such pervasive, (un)exceptional forces of power and subjectivation that crisis becomes the production of life and death as economic and political currency, as an economic and political ontology of life and death itself.

In the analytics of biopower developed by Michel Foucault, if sovereignty seeks to rule on death, biopolitics is about administering ‘life’ through managing surplus populations. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault suggests that liberalism is the paradigmatic mode of governmentality for the exercise of biopolitics. Liberal forms of governing, contrary to the police like political doctrines of raison d’état, entail a limiting of the power of the state. The role of the state and state institutions is to ensure and safeguard the pervasive functions of the market. As Foucault writes: ‘One must govern for the market, not because of the market’ (1979: 121). Neoliberal governance for the ‘free markets’ entails the upward redistribution of wealth and thus demands the dispossession of bodies, spaces, rights, common resources, and livelihoods. For the free market and consumer fantasies and profits to be enjoyed by some, others must be rendered cheap reserve labor – utterly exploitable, dispensable, and disposable. The accumulation of wealth enabled by the expansion of the ‘free market’ not only necessarily implies and precipitates but also obscures normalized cultures of social suffering, abjection, and exclusion.

In this context, one must account for and critically engage the significant trajectories in Foucault’s method from the introduction of the concept as an aspect of his engagement with the problem of sexuality in The History of Sexuality (1976) and, especially, from a more totalizing treatment of biopolitics as a modern configuration of power in Society Must Be Defended (1976) to the lectures of 1978 (Security, Territory, Population) and 1979 (Birth of Biopolitics), where different co-present modes, structures, and techniques of power (i.e. the disciplinary, the juridical, security, population) are presented in their hierarchical correlations, re-articulations, and transformations. In Security, Territory, Population, biopolitics is interrelated with questions of governmentality (the linking of governing [‘gouverner’] and modes of thought [‘mentalité’] and what Foucault calls ‘apparatuses of security’); in fact, biopolitics tends to be analytically displaced by the idea of ‘governing’ and the organized practices (mentalities, rationalities, and techniques) through which subjects are governed. In this text, Foucault addresses the ‘pre-eminence over all other types of power – sovereignty, discipline, and so on – of the type of power that we can call “government’’’ (Foucault 2010 [1979]: 108). In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault seems to deploy governmentality to signify power relations in general. In this text, he continues to pursue the theme of a governmental rationality which seeks maximum effectiveness (in mastering life) by governing less, and focuses on a detailed analysis of the forms of this liberal governmentality, including the role of neoliberalism in twentieth-century politics.

So in order to deal with the multiplicity of directions in Foucault’s work on biopolitics and his closely connected discussions of governmentality, it is important to account for the ways in which biopolitics, in the form of a crisis-oriented normalization, gives the ground for today’s re-articulation and re-configuration of governmentality. This perspective runs counter to a teleological conceptualization of governmentality as a form of rule which gradually displaces those technologies of power, namely sovereignty and discipline, that are considered archaic, more ‘repressive,’ ‘authoritarian,’ ‘irrational,’ and ‘uneconomic’ than governmental technologies. In this light, neoliberal rationalities and techniques of power involve an articulation between ‘productive’ and ‘destructive’ aspects of power, discipline and freedom, choice and competition, authoritarianism and self-determination, subjectivation and subjection. The current crisis of late capitalism, as allowed to happen and become ordinary by neoliberal governmentality in order to turn into an object of management through ‘reforms,’ puts into crisis the bipolar conceptualization of the relation between the liberal-capitalist spirit of ‘good life’ and the neoliberal management of crisis. It enables a rethinking of capitalism through the very heterogeneous forces of its own becoming.

Neoliberal governmentality denotes an authoritative apparatus of producing dispensable and disposable populations, and, at the same time, producing and demarcating the normative codes of the human by regulating the (economic) vitality, affectivity, potentiality, embodiment, vulnerability, and livability of subjects. Within the purview of this governmentality, the bio-political imaginary and administration of life and death is reinvented, revitalized, and reconfigured, as resources and vulnerability are differently and unevenly distributed among different bodies – differently economized, racialized, and gendered bodies.

Thus, in the Greek neoliberal context of plurality of power technologies, steep economic disparities, and deprivation, the normalization of poverty and the widespread condition of precarity are combined with, and supplemented by, various forms of securitization, such as tightened migration policies, the abjection of undocumented immigrants, as well as an intensified politics of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Economic hardship and austerity measures required under the bailout, loss of jobs, pay cuts, disposable labor, unemployment, pension reductions, poverty, evictions, loss of dignity, and the dissolution of the public healthcare system are attended by an overall authoritarianism: emergency legislation is deployed to curtail rights; a citizenship law repeals citizenshi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on the editors and contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The state
• PART II The nation
• PART III Subjectivities
• PART IV Confronting crisis
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index