Kostis Stafylakis
The
idol of this age is community. As compensation for the hardness and staleness
of our life, this idea has compressed all sweetness into mawkishness,
tenderness into weakness, and flexibility into the loss of dignity. Molded by
this idea, what is repressed pushes the phantom of an overstrained heart under
a gruesome cruelness. An immeasurable chilling of human relationships by
mechanical, commercial, and political abstractions conditions an immeasurable reaction
in the ideal of a shimmering community overflowing through all of its
supporters.[1]
Helmuth
Plessner, The limits of community: A
critique of social radicalism, 1924.
During the last years
the Greek society experiences a revival of collectivities, collective forms of
protest, self-organization and participation projects. Especially in the past
one and a half years one observes an intense collectivization of life.
Interpretations of its causes abound: the growing deficit of representation in
the experienced parliamentary democracy, the need of supplementing the forced
isolation of a difficult everyday life – supplements for the alienating pace of
life, the demolition-loss of familiar spaces of
gatherings/meetings/socialization, the loss of working space, the recession of
entertainment and the repulsion towards forms of entertainment/relief that
dominated over decades; and the Dionysian seduction of the collective protest,
the glamour of “autogestion”, the ideological dominance of intellectual schemes
for a post-anarchical micro-utopian radicalism, the ritual anathema upon the
recent political history, the devaluation of parliamentarism, the “alternative
way of life” culture with its oriental extremities verging on and submerging in
paths of “wisdom”, the alternative vacations trend posed as anti-consumerism,
the abrupt proliferation of electronic social networks, and the “exit” towards
rural life.
Along with the revival
of collectivity, the idea of community, as a different form of organization of
the sociopolitical life, yet again appears to be glamorous in the eyes of
certain social strata and groups, mostly among the urban youth, which since
2008 has “been subjected to” or claimed an abrupt politicalization. Turning
towards collectivity doesn’t only signify a reaction to the established
democracy, but also a rekindling of the ineradicable schism between society and
community. Today, the radical discourse (regardless of its ideological stamp)
reclaims community as the fruit of social radicalization and the “exit” from
the mass political society of late capitalism. A brief research shows that the
radicalized subjects lack any care for distinguishing in a conceptual level
between collectivity and community while using the two terms. This lack of distinction
concerns not only various trendy discourses but also the essayist-type
theorized writing. For instance, groups of subjects criticizing, in the most
original way, the established gender identities of the Greek society conceive
of their strategy in terms of a bastion-like rhetoric of community and not in
terms of social participation-alienation.[2]
The referral to
community isn’t always that direct. It is no coincidence that the
political-ideological vocabulary of contemporary radicalism is organized on the
basis of the newly imported terminology of “the commons” – that is, a new
super-humanistic take on “community” that, nonetheless, obscures its origins.
No matter how much Hardt and Negri, the prominent ideologues of the commons,
and their worshipers, the contemporary commoners, avoid the classical
sociological problematique of community, they don’t succeed in hashing up the
basic secret of their updated theory: nothing is common unless it is something
we share in common – that is, the “common” remains unthinkable without a
concept of “community”, which is left to the randomness of “love”, of the
immanent resistance to late capitalism; the writers consider such forms to be
good by definition since, on a deeper level, “evil” is nothing but a carrot
proposed by theological thought.
A brief overview
suffices for us to reach the conclusion of a medley of collectives that
nowadays define themselves using the conceptual and semantic field of
community: groups of action for “the public benefit”, groups of urban
intervention, political collectives of the autonomous or antiauthoritarian
space, self-managed stamping grounds and parks, artistic collectives (visual
art, theatre, music) etc. Even in the passive domestic art field, the ideas of
participation and community have surely gained points comparing to the more
academic ones about the artistic subject. By the end of the 1990s and the
beginning of the new century, new artistic collectivities came about (Diadromi
49, Astiko Keno, Omada Philopapou), which put in use open participation
processes of artistic action, challenging the traditional artistic corporatism
and the institutionally mediated relation of production and acceptation of the
artistic action. Today one can hardly count the number of groups-collectives
acting in the domestic art field. Some of them claim a purely sub-institutional
space of action, consciously avoiding contact with institutions. Others put in
use a more “nomadic” model of entering and exiting the institutional
environment according to almost unaccountable conjunctures. But regardless of
any particular strategies, the thematic of “community” and the commons is not
anymore some “alternative” speculative occupation but an institutionally
accepted problematique. Recent exhibitions such as “Mapping the Commons” in the
National Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Daphne Dragona, show that the
problematique of “commons”, as alternative strategies of exiting late
capitalism, is not a marginal-sub-institutional questioning but a firm node in
the discussion about the contemporary radical artistic action. But in the
context of such a change in the conditions of discussion one may ask: how is
this process of collectivization experienced by the subjects that are summoned
to participate? Does the non hierarchical action of the collective really
“represent” them? If so, to what degree? And for what reason?
The exhibition “To the
limits of togetherness” seeks to register and display a certain “failure” of
the integration in the community or the collectivity, and the reasons of an
always partial “failure”, which is nonetheless a partial “success”. We choose
the sharpness of the word “failure” in order to highlight the quite significant
emotional consequences of the collectivization of life. Yet failure doesn’t
express a relation already decided, but the fundamental dimension of any
primary traumatic contact with the other and the desire of the other, the
“symptom” of any community – the always partial repression of the desire
misfiring on the altar of coexistence. As attested in any period of collective
mobilization, the always traumatic contact with the desire of the other can
lead no less to the sublimation of social relations, social change, than to the
denial of difference, the identifying love of community. To a remarkable
degree, the regressive nostalgia of community harmony, the reflective
representation of community as a harmonious environment for the fatal
rendezvous of desire with its object, echoes even in updated radical narratives
that idealize “libertarianism”, immediatism and the lack of representation.
This idealization echoes
even in the context of an elaborated “post-anarchism” that informs contemporary
radicalism. The surpassing of the psychoanalytical “ethics of desire” by the
“things” themselves is considered to be a fact by this post-anarchism –
surpassing by the new political actions that inspire the collective subjects
and by a kind of “ethics of the real” delineated by the definitive collapse of
the hope that the institutions of late capitalism, the politics of identity and
integration can bring about a certain emancipation.[3] Distancing
itself from the tradition of utopian socialism, post-anarchism rejects the idea
of a definitive utopian scheme and counter-suggests the contemporary social
experiments of alternative ways of social, political and economic organization.
This post-anarchism does challenge the messianic expectation for the redemptive
moment of the revolution, yet avoids to challenge an ideology of millenniarist
origin – the deification of “here and now” as a defined salvational becoming.
Clearly, the contemporary community building is the jubilation in limbo of post-anarchism – the
substitution of the present administration of everyday affairs by the phantasm
of a radical exit (under some precautions here, one can exclude the
post-anarchist thinking of Saul Newman).
This exhibition,
realized in the allegorical space of an old hospital in Amfissa, turned into a
folklore museum, aspires to highlight intersubjective obstructions inside a
collective process. These barriers haunt us all – regardless of the tension of
the experience and the degree of participation in the undergoing
collectivization of life. The exhibition tries to achieve this through the
narratives of the artists themselves. The artists were asked to contemplate on
the experience of the last one and a half years, to recall moments, points,
meetings, friendships, conflicts, thus contributing to a puzzle game that may
underscore something about the new glamour of “togetherness”.
“Togetherness”
in the new radicalism
The “climax” of
collectivization under description is certainly the emergence of the
so-called “Indignant Citizens Movement” and the collective processes
taken place in 2011 in Syntagma Square (let us not distinguish between the
“upper” and the “lower” part of the square). A narrative familiar to us all
describes a linear course, with intermediate stations, from the civic uprising
in December 2008 to the current of indignation. Everybody confesses that: the
void in the field of political representation and the gradual bankruptcy of
various social strata contribute to a highly flammable mixture that triggers
radical processes. Even more frequently, the “model of councils” put in trial
by the participatory processes of the (lower) part of the square tends to be
hailed as the progeny of the autogestion ethos that surfaced as the “legacy” of
December 2008.
Yet one wonders: is the
history of social changes a linear process where radicalization keeps up with
emancipation and vice versa? Whereas any possible answer is clearly difficult,
one can experiment with different interpretations regardless of the narrative
she gets to prefer. If, for instance, one studies the forms of insurgence based
on their symbolic languages, she may reach the conclusion of a non linear
representation of the social process. Some time earlier we proposed that the
purely subversive moment of December 2008, as a kind of symbolic representation
of the social rupture, was the setting on fire of the [municipal] Christmas
tree – an act of arson attributed by witnesses to a groupuscule of lesbians.
This burning down was not an immediate gesture of cruel destruction but the
climax of a gradual desecration of a symbol. Setting that fire was not the
outcome but the very introduction of a new “politics of aesthetics” with
respect to the public image of symbols. It was an act of separation from the
“old”, and a farewell for that matter. A symbolic castration. It might seem to
be a supra-performative act but, in reality, it was a fairly discursive
gesture.
If the December movement
managed to produce a rupture in the symbolic order, a breakup in the moral
self-image of society, materialized in the symbolic pseudo-luxury of the
municipal Christmas tree, the recent uprising of the Greek Indignant Citizens
produced the exact opposite. If the symbolic gesture of December was the
Christmas tree set on fire, then the central gesture of the indignant movement
was the traditional “moutza” [hand gesture of insult] towards the Parliament.
If the gesture of December induced a sense of breaking up with a traditional
representation, with the boring circularity of the traditional petit-bourgeois
social time, then the “moutza” by the Indignant Citizens was exactly the
confirmation of an established “togetherness” by means of a traditional
anathema – self-entrapment in a vicious circle of a traditional resentful
relation with anything that neighbors the I, the self. The togetherness of social ressentiment.
It thus becomes
difficult to represent the progressive collectivization of social life by means
of a linear course from an established vita
contemplativa to a vita activa of
movements. The discourse that understands contemporary radicalism by opposing the
indignant-insurgent citizen to the medial “stupefaction” of the 1990s may be
falling prey to its own solipsistic radicalitology. A similar kind of discourse
characterizes various attempts of anthologies and surveys of the uprising
events by authors and/or publishers. It is a discourse that, on the pretext of
the self-understanding of the insurgence instrumented by such anthologies,
deploys directly constructive tactics – something relevant, up to the point
that is not formulated as a dogma of interpretation. In their introduction to
the volume Revolt and Crisis in Greece:
Between a Present yet to pass and a Future still to come the two editors
describe the “primitive scene”, the event ground for the insurgence of December 2008, in terms
of a free revival of old-historical divisions and identities.
‘You are a
child growing up in Greece
in the nineties. There is a high likelihood that one of your distant relatives,
or even your aunt, your uncle, your grandfather, or your mother or father may
be haunted by the memory of a few years in their life from whence no bedtime
stories will ever arise. “Exile”, “dictatorship”, “civil war”: these strange
words ring about, yet remain lost behind the veil of the untold. Silent
grandfathers with lingering gazes, voters-for-life of a party that would
repeatedly betray them over the course of a lifetime too far along to change
its course. These were times passed, hidden by the thick screen onto which the
capitalist spectacle projected itself. By the mid-2000s, the spectacle has
grown to Olympic proportions. The Games were here: development fever, a certain
euphoria mixed with longing, the longing to become “Western”, to finally “make
it”. For a brief moment in time it actually seemed to happen.’[4]
One can imagine the way
this text continues. The explosion of December will tear apart any social
lethargy. In the authors’ introduction one finds inscribed the coordinates of a
selective-rhetorical atavism. The very first sentence of this introduction
confronts us with a forced identification with the past, which is represented
as dramatic yet glorious. One can very well ask whether a youth brought up in
the 1990s has really configured the symbolic horizon of her political and
social conscience based on some silent picture frame of the civil war, the
exile, and the dictatorship? Surely, through silences or cries, every family
can carry some traumatic experiences that either have healed or left their mark
for life. But can anyone believe that the symbolic horizon of a teenager growing
up in Greece
in the nineties consists of memories of political history in the civil-war and
the post-civil-war periods – such as the “Varkiza [treaty]” implied in the
watery eyes of the grandfather? Truth to be told, is this the compass of the
newly founded radicalism? Or is this constructed narrative offered as a
compensation for the growing disillusionment about today? In any case, isn’t
this narrative stamped by a nostalgic representation of the past as an era
where political and social identities appear to be pure, lucid and redemptively
heroic? Maybe the most ironic part of this introduction is the rhetorical
devaluation of the capitalist spectacle coming from a generation brought up in
the company of the private television, a generation that considered any code of
“resistance” to be closely related to the super spectacle, the music industry
and the mass production (and why not?). In the phrasings of this introduction
lies the construction of a generation as “togetherness”. The true spirit deep
inside such a venture is captured in the following lines by the well known
anarchist zine “ta paidia tis galarias” concerning the climate of December:
‘In the first
days of the insurgence you could almost smell in the air all those speeches and
then all those texts, articles, pamphlets that were to follow, written by the
insurgents or by sympathizers and “commentators” trying to acknowledge that
there was indeed “something deeper”. This “deeper thing” everybody was talking
about was the need to surpass the individual isolation from the real, communal
life [gemeinwesen], an isolation created by all the above historical reasons.[5]
The limits of community
There is really no
particular reason to doubt that the discourse on community is one of the
consequences of the extended precarity in the post-war prosperity societies.
This precarity is stratified inside the social body, yet concerns a general
feeling of discomfort that runs across social norms. This is to be mostly
attributed to the slow pace of “precariatization” and to the fact that
potentially any of us is a candidate for entering the “precariat” (if she isn’t
already a member). Economist and labor law specialist Guy Standing has offered
a quite clear view over the social consequences of global changes in the field
of labor. Apart from the few becoming rich, the neoliberal policies bring about
an emerging class characterized by the uncertainty of labor precarity. Up to a
certain degree, there remains today a class of employees and a class of
professionals with volatile work identities stamped by the ephemeral character
of projects they get to be appointed on. Underneath this class there is an ever
diminishing working class that is gradually mortified – along with the welfare
state of the 20th century designed for this class. Further below one
can discern the growing precariat and, even further below, the class of the
permanent unemployed, the class of a lumpen precariat.
But, for Standing, the
precariat should not be understood as a collateral damage of the greater
economic transformation. It itself was the target, the objective of the global
capitalism that needed it. The precariat isn’t a class in the Marxian sense but
a class under construction. It consists of subjects not having some clear
social-class target but being on the move in a nomadic way, under the reign of
necessity. Constant changes of work, professional occupation of limited time,
and the absence of any work identity amounts to the precariat lacking any kind
of “narrative” for their lives, and the introduction of a clearly cunjunctural
and ephemeral dealing with social relations. The precariat is characterized by
the absence of “social memory”, sociopolitical homelessness and lack of empathy
for the rest of society – a form of apathy caused by being unable to identify
with others. Some parts of the working class also pass over to the precariat.
The lack of education and cultivation makes them especially vulnerable to
right-wing populism, which has an easy way to manipulate them. Another part of
the precariat consists of “nomads” and immigrants, who in fact are excluded
from the political sphere and its institutions. A third category of subjects
belonging to the precariat is the significant number of young educated people
that, while they can’t easily get carried away by a right-wing/conservative
political agenda, nonetheless they experience intense stress and develop an
anomic stance of generalized disgust for the political sphere. [6]
Standing underlines the
fact that the generalized fear of the candidates for the precariat favors the
agenda of Neo-Fascist populism, since the latter can easily point their fingers
to “enemies” and target various minority groups. But here one reaches the political limits of
an economy-centered approach to the crisis, such as the one proposed by
Standing. This is because the emergence of the right-wing populism is clearly
subject to many factors and related to the consolidation, over the years, of
anti-modern traditions in the public sphere of local societies. Recently,
Nikolas Sevastakis pointed out that, with respect to the impressive rise the
Neo-Nazi far right wing in Greece, the reference made by the radical discourse
to the social, the appeal to social radicalism (in our own formulation) is
unable to reverse the invasion of nationalistic/racist discourses and
practices. As Sevastakis observes:
To put it simply: the social is not enough because the
far right wing, as it evolves hereafter in its brutal “Kasidiaris” version, is
in its own way social and plebeian, protective and resting under the
“anti-Occupation” sign· that is, it claims its own version of communitarianism
and popular-friendly “societism”, arguing for a chauvinist welfare state, in
the context of an aggressive challenging of the elites and their institutional
equilibrium states. That means that the anti-Neoliberal front and the constant
focus on the social destructions caused by the memorandum-dictated policies do
not touch on the subterranean dynamics of a cruel anti-liberal radicalism: the
latter actually attempts the reversal/reappropriation of values shared by the
contradictory movements of the squares, a model of popular insurgence
alternative to the one proposed by the left wing.[7]
There is a well known
anecdote told by Adorno about a seminary by Max Horkheimer. When Horkheimer
criticized Heidegger, some student objected that, at least, Heidegger was the
thinker who once again put human beings on the perspective of death. Horkheimer
replied: “Ludendorff did it better.” In an analogy, the Golden Dawn succeeds
today in expressing the need for a “community” in the most “authentic” way, by
means of the hypocritical participation in the parliamentary proceedings no
less than the “action” in the streets – the relief-inducing and participatory
action of the “storm detachments”. Sevastakis discerns the visible probability
of a contemporary radicalism deviating towards the tradition of the
“conservative revolution” of the interwar period, towards right-wing
radicalism. The fervent rhetoric of national alienation dominates yet again the
discourse of various rebel subjects. But Sevastakis doesn’t refer openly to
something that, in our view, is an “event”, at least from the point of a
qualitative account of far right radicalism.
Before the gradual rise
of the Golden Dawn one could observe a remarkable disintegration inside the far
right wing, of a character that is less a massive than a “qualitative” one.
From the wider body of the domestic far right wing there emerged (maybe for the
first time) groups of Autonomous Nationalism (Strasserians) – groups that
delineate their ideological identity by referring to early National Socialism
and right-wing anarchism, the anti-capitalist national communitarianism of
dissident Nazis during the Interwar. This trend, gaining ground today in
Germany, Italy, Poland, USA, Great Britain, Russia and Australia, counts years
of presence over the Web and has found a new audience in Greece after the
events of December. This commonality hosted not only Neo-Fascists but also
certain anarchists, maybe of the “free-floating” kind. The domestic autonomous
nationalists, drawing from the thought of Otto Strasser, Ernst Jünger, the
Italian representative of the radical traditionalism Julius Evola, the National
Bolshevik of Weimar Ernst Niekisch, no less than from more contemporary
versions of the conservative revolutions – such as the post-war Neo-Fascist
Francis Parker Yockey and the Terza Posizione by Roberto Fiore – belonging to
the trendy current of Third-positionism or Querfront. The autonomous
nationalists, the same as their comrades, the Nazbols (National Bolsheviks) in Russia, were
physically present in the “square” of protest. Their presence came as a little
surprise, next to the contemporary mouthpieces of the Popular Front tradition,
scattered all over the left wing, next to the “Spitha” movement and the
followers of the prophet-economist Kazakis. All these were nothing more than a
mainstream domestic version of “Third-positionism”. In any case, a blend of
conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism and anti-West polemic has dominated the
public sphere for decades, horizontally traversing political and partisan
identities, and paving the way to the “aleatory” patriotism of
indignation.
The aforementioned
trends cannot but get acknowledged as the most “authentic” cry for a community.
It is worth referring to a text that, even today, is able to inspire a critical
analysis of the contemporary radical communitarianism. This same text served as
a central source of inspiration for the thematization of this exhibition. It is
the classic work by social philosopher Helmuth Plessner, The limits of community: a critique of social radicalism (published
in 1924). The work is written during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic,
designed for deconstructing the glamour of the idea of community among
intellectuals and the youth. The pressure put by the industrial capitalism and
the shortcomings of the secularization in a fragile and, up until recently,
incompletely consolidated nation-state such as the German one, brought about a
composite subterranean current of anti-liberalism, anti-parliamentarism,
national communitarianism, racism and ultimately fascism. Plessner quickly
singled out that the dominant political culture led to the rise of autocracy and
the quest for a leader. Against the dominant current of political-philosophical
expressionism, he made the case for the value of emotional contraction,
interpersonal distance, even social alienation, as positive characteristics of
the modern society. The alienation, the “investment” of a social role, the
social form, the non authenticity, a certain coldness and privacy are
indispensable elements of the modern life. The state has to mediate between the
society and the community for the purpose of not letting the one crushing the
other. The modern subject, if she doesn’t want to regress to the more autarchic
social norms of the past, needs to accept a certain schism: on the one hand,
she cannot but search for the protection of a disguise that secures for her a
distance from the others, while, on the other hand, she has to claim the
attention and the significance of others inside the social field. The subject
is the bearer of a de-realization that composes reality and illusion.
For Plessner, the modern
society can be saved as much as it puts in use a series of strategically
significant values and practices such as the “ritual”, the “prestige”,
“diplomacy” and “tact”. The “ritual” dances like an acrobat on the very limits
of community – these are performances that secure the public sphere while
staging a social play on the precondition of a certain self-restraint on the
part of participants. It is also related with the avoidance of being ridiculed:
it answers the question “how can we coexist without being totally naked?” The
prestige, the subjective glamour, is also a strategy for the subject to avoid
being ridiculed: the emphasis is placed on what distinguishes her. The
diplomacy doesn’t refer only to the relations between state representatives but
it is diffused inside commercial and professional relations in order to disarm
crueler tactics by means of bargain, negotiation and argument.[8] The tact refers to the unofficial contact in the
sphere of everyday affairs, and serves the need for flexibility and lightness
in interpersonal relations.
Plessner made his
argument against neo-paganism and Nietzscheism of his days. He observed that
“The unmasking of the conscience did not return to the strong a pagan-like,
indeed, prehuman insouciance· instead, it is more likely that it paralyzed the
will from being used as a higher, more spiritual, and thereby more powerful
weapon – indeed, as a weapon more powerful than any to be found in nature
itself.” [9] Yet, while
condemning the Nietzschean idealization of “power”, he explained that he
doesn’t reject any experience of community but the advancement of community to
the humane par excellence and
dignified form of social life – the reduction of community to a privileged way
of life, the radicalism of community.[10] Such a critique is especially meaningful yet again in
a time where radicalism seeks refuge to the à la Hardt and Negri theory of the
“commons”. That is, to a theory that openly promises that can reestablish an
experience of community they way it existed before the capitalist-private
appropriation of the “common goods” and their socialist-statist administration.
The thing is that the vision for such a community was and remains the
fundamental phantasm of any anti-modern interwar ethnic communitarianism. The
multi-communitarianism of the contemporary commoners predates them long before,
to be sure. Otto Strasser had clashed with his fascist comrades for the exact
same reason. Strasser (this Trotsky of the right wing) and equally Evola was
interested in a revolution of the European “ethnic communities” against the
monopolistic capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Unlike the new
commoners, Strasser and Evola were ethnicists – something very probable for
someone in their time. But Hardt and Negri also flirt with contemporary
ethno-communitarianism – they understand postmodern “cultural differentialism”
as a useful stage towards the formation of the multitude. For the
super-humanists Hardt and Negri, the driving force of community is not the
nation as “ethnos”, of course, but love. But, as they say, “love can go bad,
blocking and to destroying the process. The struggle to combat evil thus
involves a training or education in love.” [11] That is, certain failure.
[1] Helmuth Plessner, The limits of community: A critique of
social radicalism, transl. Andrew Wallace, New York, Humanity Books, page 65.
[2] See for instance http://www.qvzine.net/koubas/qfest.htm
[3] This belief is deftly expressed by
Richard J. Fray in “To telos of igemonias: Anarchikes taseis sta neotata
koinonika kinimata”, Athens,
Eleftheriaki Koultoura, page 26.
[4] Adonis Vradis & Dimitris
Dolakoglou, “Introduction” in Adonis Vradis & Dimitris Dolakoglou (eds.), Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present yet to pass and a
Future still to come, AK Press & Occupied London, London, 2011, page 13.
[6] Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Bloomsbury
academic, 2011.
[7] Nikolas Sevastakis, I orati akrodexia in http://www.rednotebook.gr/details.php?id=6702
[8] Ibid, page 23.
[9] Helmuth Plessner, The limits of community: A critique of
social radicalism, transl. Andrew Wallace, New York, Humanity Books, page 68.
[10] Ibid, 81.
[11] Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
2009, page 195.
Some of the artists of
this exhibition may share some of the above thoughts. Others may not. This
brings us “to the limits of togetherness”. And, of course, a lot can be done in
those limits.
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