HAL Id: hal-01414030
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01414030
Submitted on 12 Dec 2016
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of
sci-entific research documents, whether they are
pub-lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.
L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.
An ambience for indifference: On the ethics of exclusion
and the Greek debt crisis
Leandros Kyriakopoulos
To cite this version:
Leandros Kyriakopoulos. An ambience for indifference: On the ethics of exclusion and the Greek debt
crisis. Ambiances, tomorrow. Proceedings of 3rd International Congress on Ambiances. Septembre
2016, Volos, Greece, Sep 2016, Volos, Greece. p. 653 - 658. �hal-01414030�
An ambiance for Indifference: On the Ethics of
Exclusion and the Greek Debt Crisis
Leandros KYRIAKOPOULOS
Research Center for the Humanities (RCH), Athens, Greece, [email protected]
Abstract. By focusing on the years after Greece’s debt crisis announcement
and implementation of austerity measures, this article examines the affective formations that render the project of neoliberalism a necessity. Since neoliberal politics recognise debt crisis as an ‘opportunity’ for strengthening the state via austerity measures, deregulation and state properties privatisation, deprivation of assets and work becomes an inevitable byproduct suffusing the sense of ‘security’ and ‘protection’ with affective value. By investigating indifference as a societal ambience, this presentation questions how the experience of loss and the longing for security met amplifying the further dispossession of the afflicted other.
Keywords: Neoliberalism, debt crisis, Greece, dispossession, affect, ethics
In the present paper, I am trying to tackle a vexed issue that has preoccupied academic thinking in the first post‐war years, as in the works of Hannah Arendt (1991) and Emmanuel Levinas (1987, 1990), yet it was later neglected in favour of seeking more explicit answers about crisis’ causes and resolutions. It is a question that accounts for the sense of collective responsibility and accountability for the distressed present. And it is a question that, as theorist Judith Butler (2005) have posed it, it requires an understanding of responsibility that extends beyond the scope of intention precisely because it implies the involuntary dispossession of the Other. By reversing this argument, I could add that it requires an understanding of intention freed from the responsibility of exclusion. What I am asking is how in times of emergency people engage to political projects that entail the exclusion of others. I ask how the implementation of austerity measures in Greece in the time of its debt crisis – measures supposedly necessary for Greece’s return to a much anticipated financial stability – works with exclusion politics in order to invite the afflicted citizens to engage further to the vision of success that austerity implies. Such a question seeks to examine the affective formations governing the acceptance of others’ exclusion based on an impression about the afflicted present. It seeks to understand indifference as a societal ambience of synaesthetic understanding. It is a well known fact that since 2010 and the Greek government’s official declaration of the ‘state of emergency’ due to the country’s high debt, Greece was excluded from credit markets, and its economy was taken under the supervision of the European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – the famous Troika – for its financial support on the conditions that it would follow a strict reform program to reduce the deficit. The reform program consists exclusively of welfare cuts that as I argue are tied to desiring‐images of success,
which together with political gestures of incrimination, create the affective space for indifference towards the weak or dispossessed. It is not by any means the Greek case alone that affirms such a claim. The dismantling of the welfare state by means of decreasing health costs and cutting wages and pensions, and by way of a politics of accusation, has been the par excellence political way, in the postwar western world, to overcome financial crises.
The case of Great Britain in the years of Margaret Thatcher’s government, in particular, is the most emblematic one in how the social welfare was related to state fund’s misuse and corruption. Stuart Hall (1988) is revealing in his reading of that attribution of the crisis to the welfare state, as well as of the restrain of the ‘much needed’ entrepreneurial investments to the labor union’s politics. Similarly, cultural critic Henry Giroux (2009) informs us that in the United States, at the time of the welfare cuts of the 1990s, the images of the young black male ‘gangsta’ and the ‘welfare queen’ were portrayed as grave threat to the financial recovery. Giroux says that what was demanded was again the deregulation of the welfare state, downsizing of services and regressive taxation. As he argues, the undermining of the weak became the state’s vehicle to justify the need for reforms.
Such a persistence to the downsizing of welfare cannot but be tied to a rhetoric of accusation that presents the state control of economy and management of markets as responsible for the recession and, particularly in the Greek case, debt crisis. Yet, it is this metonymic relation between the welfare provision and the bureaucratic state – its alleged corruption, inefficiency and ‘bloatedness’, along with the ‘mentality’ of clientelism, that conceals the emotional formations – which creates affective surplus value to the desiring‐images of success that austerity presupposes. It is as if, the state that supports austerity negates worker’s benefits, unemployed insurance funds, budgets for people with disabilities, homeless, drug‐addicts, refugees or migrants, in favour of creating the emotional space for one to identify with the reforms. After all, what we witness is an emotional space that encourages the collective sacrifice of individual assets insofar as the state is reorganised on the basis of a redeeming model that acquires its value through the neoliberal vocabulary: self‐interest, management, competitiveness, possession, expansion. Once such qualities ‘signify’ a subject’s body, introduce its self‐presence, are presented in its physiognomy, then they bestow it with the promise of the one that not only will survive crisis but also will pull everyone else out of it. On the other hand, the body of the one in need is assumed to cause injury to the state by absorbing its now much needed strength. Its prevalence is even implied as a possible origin of crisis.
Most studies dealing with financial crises, especially the Marxist studies, view the deregulation of state control, privatisation of public property and withdrawal of welfare provision as the main policies that the most powerful institutions and agents push for, for the own interests. Many other readings, post‐structuralist mostly, focus on financial and political strategies, and discursive or somatic technologies. In such cases, neoliberalism is seen as a logic or a logistic that becomes intelligible as an experience of self since it refers to techniques of self‐formation, self‐care and self‐ governance (see Ong 2007, Athanasiou 2012). Social theorist Loïc Wacquant (2009) is very accurate to highlight, in a critical evaluation of such readings, the peculiarity of our historical present in which the thriving of neoliberalism is followed by the ascendance of a penal state. Specifically, he views the tightening of the punitive
system in the US as a political response not to rising criminality but to the defuse sense of social insecurity caused by welfare cuts and labor deregulation. And, most importantly, for my argument, he believes that this becomes possible only through a philosophy of moral behaviourism that embeds values such as ‘zero tolerance’, ‘the worth of work’ and the ‘rule of the strong’. Indeed, to be identified with the individual sacrifices needed for the restitution of the state means to accept the undermining of the ‘weak.’ Hence, to raise a question that accounts for the sense of collective responsibility and accountability for the distressed present, we ought to recognise that such an undermining is symptomatic of an affective complex that encourages the release of the emotional cost of attachment to the necessary individual sacrifices for the recovering of the endangered state.
The state is imagined to be endangered by people‐in‐need whose presence threatens to consume the state’s resources. The recognition of people‐in‐need as a threat corresponds with the acknowledgment of a self with rights and a state having the right to disregard. Yet, such a recognition is affected by the awareness of both the rights of self and the abilities of the state to regulate resources as being in crisis. This is the fantasy of potency where an ‘ordinary citizen’ may view ‘people‐in‐need’ as resource consumers. Certainly, a production of ordinary affects, as Kathleen Stewart (2007) has it said, is at stake because of the grounding of neoliberal grammar in everyday life due to austerity. There is a deep‐seated relation fabricated between the caricature of the corrupted, wasteful and needy state and the fantasy of the competitive hard‐working subject. On account of this magical relation between the face and the state, whatever kind of exclusion takes place becomes symptomatic of indifference toward the subjects who cannot engage with the vision of success. In addition, any action against the strengthening of the state is stigmatised as unpatriotic and hostile.
In Greece, within theses last seven years and over the course of four different governments, eight austerity packages were implemented that demanded up to 50% cuts in salaries and minimum wages, the termination of all holiday wage bonuses, cuts in overtime salaries, cuts in pensions up to 30%, the firing of 200,000 public sector employees, in a population of 10 million people, jobs cuts, combined with elastic laws regulating lay‐offs and overtime pay in the private sector. The Troika also demanded tax hikes (up to 30% on luxury goods, 24% on consumer goods, 15% on petrol and up to 30% on income taxes), health and defense spending cuts, privatisation of a vast number of state properties and goods, and the deregulation of health, education, real estate, tourism, and energy markets. With the constant and repetitive implementation of austerity measures and the continual degradation of the Greeks’ living standards, and within an incrimination rhetoric about the past, and promises about seeing the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ as well as future successes, there is created an affect of shared responsibility that nourishes a collective feeling of loss. A nourishment which is more like a skill people are invited to learn in order to make manageable the truth of crisis and mostly to engage themselves with the efforts needed to make intelligible the possibility of a success story.
In feminist studies, the issue of loss features prominently in the discussions of the dispossession and marginalisation of bodies through gendered normativity. In the most critical approaches, loss refers not only to the impositions of the patriarchal establishment but also to the metaphysical condition in which having drives the moral economies of self‐belonging and personhood. The conversation between
Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou on dispossession (2013), in particular, highlights the metaphysics of presence as a performative production of selfhood via the sense of belonging: having in the western world is required for a proper sense of being. It is no wonder that Athanasiou views the financial dispossession due to the debt crisis as a process of intensification in which the affective values of having – and especially losing – are re‐acquired as new dexterities. To perform a sense of self by losing through accusation and the ghost of success means to revalue the affect of having and through that to re‐appropriate ways of possession and protection. The affective formations of loss and failure that largely follow the implementation of austerity reforms become the space that the politics of exclusion are built upon and justify precisely because such politics correspond affectively to the lost sense of power and order (see Ahmed 2004). It is in that sense that the affect of indifference towards others constitutes the space to understand the current political theatre of crisis‐management, both in Greece and Europe, wherein the apparatus of security plays a prominent role and the affect of loss matters most.
These relationships between loss and demand for protection, accountability for the crisis and rhetoric of accusation are integral to the development of the ambiance of indifference. For we might examine the affect of loss as a paradoxical internalisation of a coercive dispossession of assets within a justification rhetoric that may become an everyday practice in the skills of having, gaining and winning, yet responsibility toward the other cannot be considered just and only a skill. Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1987) in particular asks us to consider responsibility as an aporetic reflex we exercise due to our immanent receptivity to the presence of others. In his long study on ethics he argues that responsibility is a constant existential aporia we face when facing another. Responsibility is not merely a skill. If one would not accept being accountable for the actions of others and the dispossessed demand an explanation for their afflictions it is because responsibility becomes an issue of moral economy – to whom I feel responsible and how to compensate. If morality in the strong sense lies in the accountability for one’s actions towards the Other within a habitual, so to say, code of conduct, ethics comes as the way to incorporate the responsibility towards the people we never face; as a way to incorporate a responsibility that extends beyond the scope of intention into the existential play of personhood. Political theorist Hannah Arendt (1991, 2006) above all has extensively reflected on the state’s capacity to embody the subjective concerns in times of emergency. In a few words, she believes that when the populace experiences loss, they become conscious of their right to be protected and, for that reason, subject to the regime’s ability to produce a narrative for all. Both Levinas and Arendt try to understand the foundation of the Nazi regime through the ethics of relating. They claim that once there is a certainty of an actual social dimension, people await the resolving of their aporias from the outside. Indeed, the pending issue of accountability for austerity becomes the space wherein the state assumes its imaginative release via exclusion. Accordingly, the reactionary reflexes of the state materialise as long as there is collective belief in the success story. It is the magic of the state as anthropologist Michael Taussig (2007) would suggest. The state evokes power by narrating (and, thus, providing) what it lacks: strength (both as fantasy and politics).
Hence, indifference becomes an ethically acceptable affective attention to the weak not just because their public image acquires negative worth due to the dominant specter of the strong that acquires affective surplus value in conditions of
deprivation, accusation and ideals of success; neither because there is a supposed understanding about the collective sacrifices needed on the basis of a rational thinking that will favour the ‘strong’ productive forces of the country. It is by performing loss with cruel optimism at heart, to borrow Laurent Berlant (2010) words, and by stifling rationalism that individualism and possession – not as psychoanalytical categories but as socio‐existential ways to participate in the public – become an active response in times of crisis: In times of deprivation and within the ethics of the strong, indifference becomes an affect with surplus value because it acts as a substitution to the sense of having.
To ask how the sense of protection is produced by the state through a politics of hate and exclusion is to over‐emphasise the monovocality of a total acceptance of the reforms, wherein indifference becomes an ‘uncomplicated’ emotional response, which is never the case. The recent developments in Greece, in particular – the turn to left politics, the scandal of the negotiation for the debt release and the overall public acceptance of the Syrian war refugees – are evidence of the different voices that may sprung within such harsh political conditions. Yet, in no way such developments should be considered in transcendental ways; that is as a given proof of the possibility for alternative politics or of a revolutionary subject that exceeds the emotional horizon of its historical presence. To the contrary, such turn of events is embedded in the peculiar history of colonialism, civil conflicts, refugee experience, Nazi occupation and military junta of Greece, and should be examined as such (see Panourgia 2007). Besides that, Greece in the period of its debt crisis offers many examples of politics of hate and exclusion, which are, indeed, concealed in the need for protection and the desire for success (see Kirtsoglou 2010, Dalakoglou 2013). There is no better way to picture the institutionalisation of exclusion as a release from debt crisis’ responsibility, than to look at the expansive growth of the nationalist party of Golden Dawn. A development that is more of a harbinger of what looms in the political reality of today’s Europe. Since the implementation of austerity, the party gained seven percent of the parliamentary seats in Greece. And despite the fact that nowadays most members of the party face charges for instigation to violence and murder, and for criminal association, due to the hate acts against immigrants, leftists, and gays that the party supports, Golden Dawn still enjoys high acceptability. In any case, such reactionary voices are only expressing a demand that most dominant political powers will try to wield by initiating similar politics of exclusion. The most alarming incident of this ritualistic weaving of the phenotype of the Greek victim (of circumstances) who deserves/demands protection being a police operation for the tidying up of Greece started in 2012 that led to the arrest of 80,000 immigrants. What is happening in today’s Europe with the ways that the Syrian war refugees are handled – their differentiation using bracelets and the order to confiscate part of their assets upon entering specific European countries – is indicative of such affect of indifference.
Indeed, in order to seek protection from the outside, in times of crisis, the subject needs to feel recognised as someone ‘that matters’. And the acceptance of the austerity reforms ultimately expresses a wish for protection toward the one authority that can legitimately name those that deserves protection from the effects of crisis. Hence, to understand what is at stake with the austerity measures we should not consider neoliberalism as if it is abstracted from everyday relations. To the contrary, we ought to confront the politics that strengthens the affect of
possession within everyday relationships, precisely because austerity measures acquire their meaning within the self‐referential narration of crisis, which encourages the subject to engage with fictions about success stories for surpassing crisis’s dystopian realities. Within narratives of accusation and promises for future successes, a politics of self‐affirmation (both individual and national) becomes the recommended way to accept crisis and deal with the financial, social and psychic difficulties it entails. Indeed, indifference becomes a privileged affective space in conditions of deprivation for those claiming a ‘deserved’ protection. It is an affective space institutionalised in order for the subject to free itself from the responsibility of the exclusion of others and make intelligible the affect of having as a desired eventuality. The current debt crisis can be seen as a powerful colonising force in ethics. It is, certainly, a forcible way to embed a specific affect of having in the relationships of everyday life.
References
Ahmed S. (2004), Affective Economies, Social Text, 22.2: 117–139
Arendt H. (1991), Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility, in L. May and S. Hoffman (eds.)
Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics, New York,
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp. 273–283
Arendt H. (2006), Eichmann in Jerusalem (…), N.Y., Penguin books
Athanasiou A. (2012), The Crisis as a ‘State of Emergency’:, Athens, Savvalas
Berlant L. (2010), Cruel Optimism, in, M. Gregg and G.J. Seigworth (eds.) The Affect Theory
Reader, Durham, Duke University Press, pp. 142–180 Butler J. (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York, Fordham University Press Butler J. and Athanasiou A. (2013), Dispossession (…), Cambridge, Polity Press Dalakoglou D. (2013), Neo‐Nazism and Neoliberalism: A Few Comments on Violence in Athens at the Time of Crisis, WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society, 16.2 Giroux H. A. (2009), The Biopolitics of Disposability. In: U. Linke and D. T. Smith (eds.) Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader, New York, Pluto Press, pp. 304–312 Hall S. (1988), The hard road to renewal: Thatcherism and the crisis of the left, New York and London, Verso Kirtsoglou E. (2010), Introduction, Rhetoric and the Workings of Power – the Social Contract in Crisis, Social Analysis, 54.1: 1–14 Levinas E. (1987), Collected Philosophical Papers, Dordrecht, M. Nijhoff Publishers Levinas E. (1990), Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, Critical Inquiry, 17.1
Ong A. (2007), Neoliberalism as a Mobile Technology, Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, 32.1 Panourgiá N. (2009), Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State, New York, Fordham University Press Stewart K. (2007), Ordinary affects, Durham, Duke University Press Taussig M. (2007), The Magic of the State, New York, Routledge Wacquant L. (2009), Punishing the Poor (…), Durham, Duke University Press
Author
Leandros Kyriakopoulos is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Research Center for the Humanities, Athens, Greece, working on the topics of Cosmopolitanism and Aesthetics. His main academic interests include cosmopoltanism, urban nomadism, new mobility, new technologies, aesthetics, senses, affect, biopolitics.
