14

The governmentality of “crisis” and its resistances

AA: Under the truth regime of “crisis,” not only do people have to engage in a daily struggle against economic hardship and humiliation, but they are also called upon to bear all this without any sign of outrage or dissent. The current governmentality of “crisis” is enacted by means of the production and management of truth. Through the doctrine of TINA (“There Is No Alternative”), neoliberalism is established as the only rational and viable mode of governance. Predicated upon this doctrine, discourses of crisis become a way to governmentally produce and manage (rather than deter) the crisis. “Crisis” becomes a perennial state of exception that turns into a rule and common sense and thus renders critical thinking and acting redundant, irrational, and ultimately unpatriotic. The boundaries of political space are determined and naturalized accordingly. Thus, neoliberalism is not primarily a particular mode of economic management, but rather a political rationality and mode of governmental reasoning that both constructs and manages the realm to be regulated.

JB: I think you are right to point out how the discourse of “crisis” is already a way to “manage” the crisis. If the media representation of the situation in Greece (and Italy) continues to rely on the idea of “fiscal crisis,” then we expect a managerial solution to the crisis, and therefore an augmentation of managerial power. But this is very different from a radical democratic uprising against the massive spread of precarity, on the one hand, and the accumulation of wealth among the increasingly few, on the other.

AA: Undoubtedly so. Despite authoritative efforts to produce a single and monolithic narrative of crisis without alternatives and without heterodoxies, despite state coercion and police brutality, people seek to counteract the sense of helplessness. New political collectivities, such as the Indignados of Spain, the Outraged of Greece, and Occupy Wall Street in the United States, seek to reclaim democracy from capitalism and corporate power. As was the case in different locales and diverse instances of protest, from Tahrir Square and the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa to Puerta del Sol, Syntagma Square, and Zuccotti Park, the gatherings implicate fundamentally the very condition of corporeal standing in public – in the urban street. It is the ordinary and rather undramatic practice of standing, rather than a miraculously extraordinary disruption, that actualizes here the living register of the event. The very practice of stasis creates both a space of reflection and a space for revolt, but also an affective comportment of standing and standpoint. It is such a corporeal and affective disposition of stasis that derails, if only temporarily, normative presuppositions about what may come into being as publicly intelligible and sensible in existing polities.

The calls for “real democracy” (that is, self-constituting as opposed to market democracy), as they are emphatically articulated in the context of the anti-precarity movement, prompt us to try to unravel the foreclosures on which the space of the polis is constituted. When the movement of the Outraged in Athens planned a symbolic encirclement of the Parliament House to stop a five-year austerity plan, the police pre-emptively enclosed the parliament in an ironclad fortification in order to thwart the protesters. The image of the blockaded parliament, defended against the people’s demand for accountability, manifested nothing less than the sovereign gesture of closing the space of dissent by delegating the dissenters to a provisional outside.

As this (admittedly very diverse) set of dissenting practices does not emanate from a singular political logic any more than it entails fixed and unified political formations, these movements seem to have a mixed composition, ranging from radical left anti-capitalists and anarchists to eurosceptics and nationalists. Whether such lines within the (mainly horizontally configured) heterogeneity of anti-precarity mobilizations will stabilize or shift, as well as what direction they will shift in if they do, are questions that cannot and should not be answered now. Taking just such a position, for example, the feminist and queer collectivity that took part in people’s assemblies at Syntagma Square, in Athens, released statements counseling against idealizing references to ancient Greek democracy and alerting people to the patriarchal and autochthonic nature of the classical Athenian polis, which excluded women, foreigners, and slaves. Significantly, such feminist critique alerts us to the demarcations and pretensions of communitarian belonging through which the space of the social plurality comes into being, especially on the occasion of plural concerted actions and occupations.

Let me add here that this ordinary condition of publicly exposed corporeality in contexts of indebtedness and dispossession is portrayed eloquently not only in the current wave of street protests but also in contemporary art. In her 2010 street performance, “Liquidations,” in Rome, Mary Zygouri commented on current debt crises by mimetically borrowing from the corporeal affectivity of political demonstrations. She traversed the streets of the city, roped to a carriage loaded with heavy bags and followed by others, blocking the traffic at times. During that strenuous ritual procession, she made stops in front of suggestive places, such as a pawnshop, where she asked to deposit a pledge. Her enactment manifested the laborious process of engaging with the question of what we can do and undo – intellectually, politically, and artistically – in light of the current governmentality of differentially allocated indebtedness and socially assigned disposability, but also in light of different forms of sovereignty and control, refugee status and statelessness.

JB: Of course, we have to ask what we can do, but we can only know how to answer that question when we understand what is being done and how best to intervene upon those forms of doing, those ongoing processes in which we are, as it were, subjugated and subjectified. Occupying the public space is undoubtedly crucial, but sometimes public space itself has to be created, maintained, and defended against military incursions, or opened up in the midst of securitarian regimes. Sometimes there is no “street” for protesting, since what is needed is precisely streets. So we have to also stay critical about modes of political resistance that do not simply resignify an existing public sphere, but that instead dissolve the lines that demarcate the private, private enterprise, from the public, public security. We have to think anew about threshold zones, including the internet, that sometimes traverse those distinctions and other times retrench both military and securitarian power, corporate control, and censorship.

AA: It is through such enactments of publicly exposed corporeality, in all its passionate and vulnerable intensities, that certain questions are raised: Who is to inhabit public space, to be part of the public, and to lay claim to the public, where “public” refers to a shared affect of comfort and belonging? Does such collective action and affective alliance inadvertently create its own fixed assumptions of placedness and belonging, or does it work to interrogate existing schemes of normativity – be it economic, national, gender, or sexual normativity? To rethink the new contingencies and modalities of agonistic democracy is also to rethink and re-enact the conventional ordinances of participation, divisibility, partiality, belonging, relationality, and cohabitation, beyond linear models of consensual politics and claims of similitude, as well as beyond already constituted categorical schemes of pre-existing subjects ready to undertake action. This seems to be a critical task within the global Occupy movements today: the need to confirm the importance of alliances and cohabitation across established categorizations of identity and difference, beyond the very polarity of identity/difference. The heterogeneity of precarious bodies, actions, frameworks, and affective states invites and requires continuous political work of engagement, translation, and alliance, work that veers away from essentialized understandings of identity and representation, and, of course, that effectively opposes nationalist discourses and practices. I understand that such alliances today are confronted with the challenge to engage in an intersectional political reconceptualization of class, race, gender, sexuality, and ability. But it is critical that we bear in mind that it is not only the Left that is taking to the streets against precarious conditions today in Europe but also, occasionally, segments of the Right and even the extreme Right. So there is obviously a limit to our alliances as we live through historical moments of forced loss. In that respect, the battle against induced precarity ought to be simultaneously a battle against racism, nationalism, anti-immigrant politics, misogyny, homophobia, and all forms of social injustice. I am trying here to gesture toward a sense of proximity and reciprocity that demands a political analysis involved with modes of longing and be-longing in order to reconfigure sociality from a stance of left critical engagement.

So the question of what it means today to take part in street politics as a fractured, dispersed, heterogeneous, and provisional post-identity subject is linked to the question of what or who comes to be capable of being intelligibly, affectively, and sensibly shared in public. What does it mean for one to take part in a plural action of which one is not exactly part, given that multiple collectivities and singularities create a differentiated, ephemeral, incalculable, and transposable social plurality that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts? What does it mean to take part by not being exactly a part and yet by being tied into the lives and actions of others? In the context of formative and unbearable modes of “being-with” (including modes of unchosen proximity), the acknowledgement that the limits of the sovereign subject constitute the precondition of its agency and the ground of its action can serve a performative enactment of political engagement. Is there anything more politically productive and consequential than the denaturalization of agency as a property of an originating self?

These thoughts sum up a performative account of plural (rather than liberal-pluralist), contingent coalitional politics, whereby performativity is linked with precarity. But I think I would like to insist on the performativity of plurality rather than the ontology of plurality. What is at stake in this specifically performative account of social plurality is the troubling engagement with the established horizons of ontology within which subjects come to be crafted and re-crafted as intelligible, vulnerable, and relational beings.

At any rate, perhaps this is the spirit, and the lasting value but also the ongoing task, of agonistic democratic performativity: to disseminate its own fixity and certainty, to embrace its situated contingency and provisionality, to suspend definitional closures of political subjectivity and action, and to remain ultimately open to its incalculable potentialities and misfires. Perhaps this vision of agonistic democracy resonates with your commitment, Judith, to a constitutively open-ended and non-teleological conception of democracy – as you once put it: “democracy is secured precisely through its resistance to realization. Whatever goals are achieved … democracy itself remains unachieved.”¹ It might also resonate with a Kafkian poetics of non-arrival. (Let’s recall that the “very last day” in Kafka’s parable is beyond a chronology or eschatology of realization.) This impossibility of achieving a final realization (in terms of totalization and absorption by an already-established, normative political sphere) is resonant with what we discussed earlier, namely the messianic within the performative, but this time as a specific gesture of radical democracy. What is implied here is not a cynical or defeatist attenuation of struggle, but on the contrary an enactment of democracy as a commitment of incessant contestation: an unceasing engagement with a desire for the political, sustained by its ultimate unattainability. I guess this might sound like a call for utopian realism … and that would be fine with me.

JB: Athena, I thank you for this incredible description. I think I will simply affirm that I am now thinking about this importantly non-teleological trajectory of new struggles for radical democracy. I am wondering how you see your own philosophical and theoretical commitments coming together during this time in which you are daily living through this extraordinary upheaval. Can you relate what you have described above to your thinking about heteronomy and/or receptivity, for instance? What resources are drawn upon when the “resistance” to realization becomes the “end” that is no end? I take it that this is not a way to describe defeat, but rather a more radical opening of the future.

I am in complete agreement that what we are seeing on the streets are forms of plural performativity. One has one’s own story and claim, but it is linked with the stories and claims of others, and the collective demand emerges from those singular histories, becomes something plural, but does not in the course of that transformation efface the personal and the singular. This means shifting from a view of rights that calls upon and reenforces forms of individualism (and sees social action as nothing more than a collection of individuals), to a social form of agency, or performativity in plurality.

Note

1 Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), p. 268.