by
There
has never been so much talk about politics as there is now!
‘And so little about life…’
‘And so little about life…’
(A conversation with friends, in the ‘year of change’)
How might we understand the fundamental nature of the
political management of this economic crisis? I think we can find inspiration
in an authority on neoliberal matters such as Margaret Thatcher. In 1988, the
Iron Lady said, with absolute frankness: “Economics are the method; the object
is to change the heart and soul”.
It seems to me that it is from precisely this viewpoint
that we can best think about the policies that have been implemented in Europe
since 2008. It is not merely a matter of introducing cutbacks or severe
austerity measures in order to “come out” of the crisis and return to the point
we were before, but rather of radically redefining ways of life: our relationship
with the world, with other people, and with ourselves.
Seen from this angle, the crisis is the ideal moment
for undertaking a process of “creative destruction” of everything, in
institutions, in the social bond and in subjectivities, that stands in the way
or defies the logic of growth and neverending output: whether it is what
remains of the welfare state, formal and informal mechanisms of solidarity and
mutual aid, non-competitive or non-productivist values, and so on. By
destroying or privatising public systems of social protection and driving down
wages, a state of indebtedness and a no-holds-barred struggle for survival are
incentivised. Out of this emerges a type of individual for whom existence is a
constant process of auto-valorisation. Life itself is turned into work.
Does this sound too abstract, too conspiranoid, too
‘metaphysical’, even? On the contrary, it is completely banal and everyday, and
that is why it prevails. To give one possible example among thousands: what is
entailed by the Royal Law-by-Decree 16/2012, which was approved by the Partido
Popular and which excludes tens of thousands of people from medical care?
Activists from Yo Sí Sanidad Universal,
who fight against it daily, explain it to us like this: it does not mean there
will be fewer X-rays or fewer surgeons. Rather, it is a qualitative change, whereby
health is no longer a right for everyone, rich and poor, but instead depends on
whether you have insurance.
The decree is the method, but the object is to reprogramme society’s imagination regarding
the right to health. That is, we are to incorporate, as an everyday way of
feeling and thinking, through changes that very often pass unnoticed (talking
about ‘having insurance’, having to go to the Social Security Offices to pick
up one’s medical card), the terrible fact that health care from now on is a
privilege of those who deserve it. And we are to act accordingly: war of all
against all, and each to his own.
The skin…
In this perspective, one of the most politically
interesting moments of recent years was just at the end of the 15M camps. That
is, when the immense quantity of energy that had been concentrated in the
space-time of the squares spread out and metamorphosised through the different
domains of life. First neighbourhood assemblies are set up, then come the
mareas [tides] formed in defence of public goods and services, the PAH [Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca –
Mortgage Holders’ Platform] grows and multiplies, and seething and swarming
into every corner come a thousand capillary initiatives: co-operatives, urban
farms, time banks, solidarity-based economic networks, social centres, new
bookstores, etc.
Let’s say that the 15M event spread a kind of ‘second
skin’ over the whole of society: an extremely sensitive surface in and through
which one feels as one’s own what happens to others unknown (the clearest
example was no doubt the evictions, but let us also recall how the struggle of
the Gamonal neighbourhood was greeted by society); a space of the highest conductivity in which
various initiatives proliferate and resonate upon one another without referring
back to any central binding entity (or at any rate, to open umbrellas such as
the terms “99%” or 15M); a nameless lamina or film in
which there circulate unpredictable, ungovernable currents of affect and energy
that joyfully cut through established social divisions (be these sociological
or ideological), and so on.
We would be wrong in thinking of this ‘second skin’ in
terms of the classical concepts of civil society, public opinion or social
movement. In any case it is society itself
that has begun to move, creating a climate of politicisation that
does not know any inside and outside, above and below, centre or periphery, and
so on.
Why, then, would this be a particularly interesting
moment? Because it is when we took up the challenge laid down by neoliberalism
(as synthesised so well in Thatcher’s dictum) both in its breadth and its intensity. The struggle is over
desirable and undesirable ways of life, and the fight takes place in every
corner of society, without privileged actors, times or places.
In every hospital threatened with closure and every
school notified of cutbacks, in every neighbour under eviction and every
migrant at the door of a health centre without a medical card, the question of how we are going to live is
at stake. And this is not on a rhetorical or discursive level: it is practical,
made flesh and palpable. What matters to us and what we are indifferent to,
what appears to us as decent or indecent, what we tolerate and what we can
tolerate no longer. Do we want to live in a society where anyone can die from a
bout of flu, be thrown out of their home, be left without the means to educate their
children…?
Open skin, extensive skin, intense skin. Against the
war of all against all and the ‘each to his own’ fanned necessarily by the
logic of profit above all else, the common dimension of our existence is activated:
solidarity, care and mutual aid, bond and empathy. Against the passivity, guilt
and resignation sown by the strategy of shock, there is a contagion everywhere
of a strange joy: “we’re fucked but happy”, a friend said to me in the midst of
those days of assemblies and mareas. Happy to share discontent instead of
swallowing tears in private, to turn it, even, into potency of action.
In a very short time, this “change of skin” achieved
some truly impressive feats (that only the stubbornest of gazes refuse to see):
the delegitimisation of the political and cultural architecture that had been
dominant in Spain for decades, the transformation throughout society of the
perception of key issues such as evictions, concrete victories in the case of
Gamonal [a neighbourhood uprising against the construction of a boulevard,
leading to demonstrations of support throughout the country], the white marea [against health
service privatisation] or Gallardón’s abortion law, the neutralisation of the
emergence of macro- and micro- fascisms that is always a latent possibility in
times of crisis, and so on. It is not down to having any kind of power (whether
institutional, economic, or media, or other) but rather its strength to alter social
desire, to spread a different sensibility and expand new affects horizontally.
This sensitive strength is,
and has always been, the power of the powerless.
…and the theatre.
Where are we today, with regard to all this? The
predominant reading of the impasse that the post-15M movements entered towards
the second half of 2013 highlighted that they had hit a ‘glass ceiling’: the
tides hit against a wall (the institutional lockdown) but this wall does not
give way. There is no tangible change in the general orientation of
macro-politics: the evictions go on, as do the cutbacks, privatisations,
impoverishment and so on.
This diagnosis came with its own prescription: the
electoral route was set forth as the only possible way to go beyond the impasse
and break the ‘glass ceiling’. First came Podemos, and then the municipalist
candidacies, to channel (in very different forms and styles) social
dissatisfaction and the desire for change in that direction. (In Catalonia it
seems to be the independence process that diverts/railroads discontent, but
analysis of this situation is beyond the reach of this article and this
author).
How might we interpret the results of this ‘electoral
turn’? My reading and the feeling I get are ambivalent: we won but we lost.
We won, because with hardly any resources or structures, and
despite the campaigns of fear, the new formations have competed successfully
with the big machines of the classic parties, and have undone an electoral map
that appeared immutable. There are now reasonable hopes that the new
governments (municipal ones for the moment) might crystallise basic demands of
the movements (with regard to evictions, cuts etc) and alter some of the
normative frameworks that reproduce the neoliberal logic of competition in different
areas of life.
We lost, because what has been reinstalled in society’s
imagination are the logics of representation and delegation, centralisation and
concentration that were called into question by the crisis and the impetus from
the squares.
Let’s say that the centripetal force of elections and
all that goes with them has folded this skin into what we might call a
‘theatrical heap’, that is, a kind of (material and symbolic) space organised
on divisions of inside/outside, actors/spectators, pit/stage, stage/backstage.
To sketch it out very roughly: a way of doing that is
highly rhetorical and discursive, that brings to the fore the ‘most capable
players’ (leaders, strategists, politicians), polarised around very specific
spaces and times (the electoral conjuncture, the future time of the programme
or the promise) and focused upon winning over public opinion (the famed ‘social
majorities’), has taken the place of a way of doing that was based far more
upon action, within the reach of anyone, that unfolded in times and spaces that
were heterogeneous, self-determined and attached to the materiality of life (a
hospital, a school, a house) and directed towards other people, not as voters
or spectators, but rather as accomplices and equals with whom to think and act
in common.
If 15M placed the problem of life and ways of life at
the centre, the ‘assault on the institutions’ has once again placed at the
centre the question of representation and political power. And each option has
its implications. The inside/outside division installed by the theatre involves
a reduction, in terms of breadth and intensity, that weakens the
fight against neoliberalism.
On one side: what remains outside the walls of the
theatre loses value and potency, and winds up cut short and devalued. To give a
very clear example: the movements are the object of mere rhetorical reference
or are interpreted as claims or demands to be listened to, synthesised or
articulated by a higher entity (party, government), thereby completely erasing their essential dimension of creating
of a world in the here and now (new values, new social
relations, new ways of living). The theatre renders absent what it represents.
And in this way the living relation with the creative energy of the movements
is lost.
On the other side, what is seen outside the theatre
comes projected from the inside. Here I mean something very concrete and
everyday: the complete occupation of the social mind (thought and gaze,
attention and desire) with what is taking place onstage. How much time of our
lives have we wasted lately speaking about the latest act of one of our
superheroes/heroines (Iglesias, Monedero, Carmena, whoever)?
With the new
politics, the plays and the actors are changed, there are new sets and scripts,
but we go on just as reduced as before to spectators, commentators and
reviewers in front of their screens, thereby losing contact with our centre of
gravity: ourselves and our problems, what we are prepared to do and what we
already do, the practices we invent more or less collectively, and so on.
Hypersensitive to the stimulation that comes to us from above, indifferent and
anaesthetised to what is happening around us (closed skin). And it is useless
to criticise the theatre: one goes on focusing attention on it, even if it is
to be against it.
Re-opening the skin
To recap. Neoliberalism is not a ‘political regime’
but rather a social system that organises the whole of life. It is not a ‘tap’
that spills its policies downward that we can simply turn off by conquering the
central spaces of power and representation, but rather a dynamic of production
of affects, desires and subjectivities (“the object is to change the heart and
soul”) from a whole range of focal points.
The electoral-institutional route brings with it its
own ‘glass ceilings’. And perhaps it is this that we can learn from the tragic
soap opera of Syriza: within the established frameworks of accumulation and
growth, the room for maneouvre for political power is very limited. And turning
toward other models (think about degrowth, for example) cannot be ‘decreed’
from above. Rather it requires an entire redefinition in society of poverty and
wealth, of the good and desirable life, that can only be generated from below.
Hence to constitute powerby
dissolving strength (passing
from the skin to the theatre) is catastrophic. It is always new processes of
subjectivation, new changes of skin, that redefine social consensuses and open
up what is possible, for governments as well.
It is a matter then of reopening our skin (yours, mine, everyone’s).
At an intimate level, this demands that each person resists the capture of
attention and desire, of thought and gaze, by the logics of representation and
spectacle. The theatre is erected every day by the deathly marriage of political
power and communications media (including, unfortunately, alternative media,
also hypnotised by ‘the conjuncture’) but all of us reproduce it, in any
conversation among friends or with family, when we allow the frame of our
questions, preoccupations or options to become organised: populist or
movementist? confluence or popular unity? This guy or that guy? We need to
reverse this centripetal movement and flee [in Spanish, fugar] from any centre – centri-fugue. To retrieve our
bearings. To start from ourselves. To look around.
On a general level, it is a matter of starting once
again with experimentation at ground level and at the level of ways of life:
thinking and trying out new collective practices, inventing new tools and
instruments so as to maintain and expand them, imagining new maps, guides and
vocabulary for naming and communicating them. The impasse of 2013 had a lot to
do, if we look within what we were doing and not merely outside (the impact in
terms of political power) with the radical inadequacy of our schemes of
reference (forms of organisation, images of change, etc) to go along with what
was happening.
To rise to the challenge posed by neoliberalism
entails deploying an ‘expanded politics’: not reduced or restricted to certain
(media or institutional) spaces or certain times (the electoral conjuncture) or
to certain actors (parties, experts), but rather in the reach of anyone,
attached to the multiplicity/materiality of life situations, that creates
values capable of rivalling the neoliberal values of competition and success.
Of course, this is and will be a long road, difficult,
frustrating at times, but also real and in this sense satisfying. Because the
promise made to us from the stage about a ‘change’ that demands nothing of us
except going out to vote for the right party on the day of elections is a
bottle of smoke.
The word ‘politics’ itself perhaps no longer goes far
enough to name something like this. It seems to always betray us, by displacing
the centre of gravity towards power, representation, the State, politicians,
the theatre. This is not a matter of a change of regime, but rather of feeding
a multiple process of self-determination of life. Politics is the method, but the challenge is to change our souls
and our hearts.
This is a translation of an essay by Amador Fernández-Savater. It was
published on 16th October 2015 in eldiario.es, amid growing anticipation with regard to the Spanish general elections
that were held in December. It explores how electoral politics takes shape as a
spectacle, and explores the consequences for struggles against neoliberalism. It maintains its
relevance in the present.
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