.pdfMarina Gržinić
REARTICULATION OF THE STATE OF THINGS OR EURO-SLOVENIAN NECROCAPITALISM
The passage from a socialist republic within the former-Yugoslav state (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia or SFRY) into an independent neoliberal capitalist society brought with it as well all the “illness” of a contemporary capitalism. Slovenia therefore displays in its 17 years of independence a history of exclusions and evacuations that is, on the one hand, directly linked to processes of “kidnapped creativity” by various economic, political, ideological and institutional forces of power in Slovenia, and, on the other, to traumatic and obscene procedures that can be termed as éclatant examples of violence against basic human rights in Slovenia and in Europe at large. It is necessary to rearticulate precisely these points, to politicize them in order to make visible antidemocratic and racist processes in Slovenia and through it in the wider EU space. What is going on in Slovenia is not far from processes of discrimination, deportation, etc., similar to the EU politics. An example of this politics is a statement on new border-security measures presented by the European Commission on 14 February 2008. Brussels has proposed fingerprinting for all foreign visitors to Europe, and electronically registering at each entry and exit. Some of these control measures are already being used by major airports in Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands. A European Border Surveillance System for the external land and sea borders is another possibility for boosting internal security, Brussels officials said. More member states’ joint operations would also see the role of the EU’s border control agency FRONTEX expand. My thesis is therefore twofold: the case of Slovenia is not possible to be properly understood if not enlarged on the one hand as being the symptom and the rearticulation of the process of necropolitics (Achille Mbembe) in European Union today, and on the other as being the symptom and the rearticulation of the turbo fascistic processes (Žarana Papić) in the post-Yugoslav territory (mainly analysed by Papić in Serbia). In “Necropolitics,” (2003) Achille Mbembe discusses the spatial demarcations of the state of exception as the geopolitical demarcation of zones, and the more recent mobilisation of the war machine. Mbembe concludes the essay by arguing that the concept of biopolitics might be better replaced with necropolitics. I am making a reference to both symptom and rearticulation of it according to Santiago López Petit, who in his essay “A civic democracy: a new form of control,” employs the word articulation as a process and as well as its result. Although it seems that these two processes are very different and is not possible to establish a platform of a common, though hidden genealogy, my thesis is that these processes are connected and therefore even more effective as they are part of the wider European Union space politics. This space can be described, if I make a reference to Nataša Govedić analysis of the Dogma 95 film movement, as “wonderful fascism and ugly freedom.” Are not the new proposed Schengen border-security measures precisely picturing such a new condition of living in the EU today? The post-Yugoslav situation is not a condition per se, i.e., a condition separated from the current situation in the neoliberal global capitalism. On the contrary, rather than “outside” of this framework, I can fully argue it is most internal to it.
Let’s in the first part of this essay expose the changes that affect the position of contemporary art today, its institution and the art market due to which contemporary culture is being transformed into the most repressive field within contemporary capitalist societies. On the one hand, what we have today is the complete institutionalization of the field of contemporary art. The practices of critic and theory of contemporary art and culture are part of a very powerful Institution of art where there is a mixture of younger and older generations in “search” for possibilities to organize different formats of art and critique. But in reality all those who are seen as a new generation depend terminally on the old structures; few names are organizing the space, mostly men and some women (the gender division becomes unimportant as both groups of mostly or maybe is possible to say solely white middle class are subordinated to the power of capital that, through multinationals, banks, assurance companies and family powerful businesses, decides who will be part of the core and, from time to time, who among the younger generation will be chosen to refresh the art scene). They are all themselves as well in charge of selection (of who will be the next curators) and organization of the most powerful and notable festivals, biennales and other formats of art and cultural presentations of world wide importance. They are in charge of state and powerful associations, funds on national and international European levels are as well part of such visible and less visible boards that are connected to each other and support each other. The reasons are very simple; the contemporary institution of art depends on money, the market and collectors and will not jeopardize this power; what all of them have in common is the ideology of neoliberal capitalism; this is the ideology of good life, as Suely Rolnik would say, they are caught in the vicious circle of luxury subjectivity production, of being part of the middle class elite, travel around art festivals, eat and drink well, and have fun. This is common to all of these structures, be it a private, state, semi-private or semi-state structure. All of them have only one agenda, power and more power based on different channelling of the neoliberal ideology that translate this strive for good life in the vocabulary of a fancy theory using words as democratization, efficiency, development. In short, it is possible to say that for example because of globalization and ICT technology, the quantity of information and the quantity of critique and analysis rise proportionally. Therefore, coming to this second part of the essay, it is important to state that the horizon that today organizes the lives in the post-Yugoslav condition and as well in the former eastern European block is the “standards” set by the first capitalist states. If so maybe the biopolitics that is operative and is managing this life needs to be intensified. Therefore, instead of talking about biopolitics, we should talk, in Mbembe’s words, about necropolitics. Biopolitics is a horizon of articulating the politics of life, where life (does not matter any more, being bare or life with forms) was seen as the zero degree of intervention of each and every politics. But today the capital surplus value is based on and capitalized from the perspective of death (worlds). Also in the First capitalist societies, the logic is not the maximum of life but the minimum for living and sometimes not even this. It is this logic that organizes the contemporary neoliberal global capitalist social body. The minimum that is imposed is possible to be captured through analysis of all the battles that are going on at the moment in Europe; from the demands to control the processes of precarity, the loss of the social state, social and health security, not to mention the politics of improving measures of control on the Schengen borders throughout the whole EU space. The new proposed measures to control the Schengen borders are seen as those lines of division that will regulate the process and politics of death, those who will be stopped at the EU’s frontiers are already the living dead, those who have nothing to lose not even life. EU’s improved and coordinated politics of immigration and possibility to arrange the status of immigrants and all others is nothing more than the policy enabling to set up a system of how to kill, exterminate and get rid of all these bodies without a life (if being rejected) at the Schengen borders.
In his essay, “Live and Let Die: Colonial Sovereignties and the Death Worlds of Necrocapitalism,” published in 2006, Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, referring to Agamben and Mbembe, discusses how some contemporary capitalist practices contribute to necropolitics. Necropolitics is connected to the concept of necrocapitalism, i.e., contemporary capitalism, which organizes its forms of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death. The necrocapitalistic capture of the social implies new modes of governmentality that are informed by the norms of corporate rationality and deployed in managing violence, social conflict and the multitudes. No conflict is tolerable that challenges the supreme requirements of capitalist rationalization – economic growth, profit maximization, productivity, efficiency and the like. My thesis is that this necropolitics has to be implied in all the politics that lay down the condition of originating the social and political space of the post-Yugoslav reality. Let us just draw in details these elements. In Slovenia, this necropolitics is put on motion in at least two very precise situations. One such case that has to be “internationalized” and politicized further is the so called “erased people” or in Slovenian language “izbrisani.” On 26 February 1992, eight months after declaring independence from Yugoslavia, the new Republic of Slovenia deleted some 28,000 residents from its civil registries. This happened long after hostilities between Slovenia and Yugoslavia had ended, so war cannot be used as an excuse for the mass cancellation of these residents’ legal status. These people, who came to be known as izbrisani, or the “erased,” are Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Albanian Kosovars, Roma and others non-ethnic Slovenians originally from other parts of the former Yugoslavia who had lived and worked in Slovenia for many years, some of them for decades. They were suddenly deprived of all official status in Slovenia. Their citizenship papers were confiscated, destroyed or invalidated, which meant that other official documents were also made invalid. As a result, they found themselves deprived of the right to work, to social insurance, indeed the right to live a normal life. There are many names for this massive violation of human rights by the Slovenian state: soft genocide, administrative genocide, administrative ethnic cleansing, civil death, mass denationalisation and so on. These are all names for social and political elimination in the de- and re-territoralisation of bodies and lives in a textbook case of contemporary not biopolitics, but necropolitics. As a result of this policy, some 12,000 members of the targeted groups (out of approximately 30,000) left Slovenia. The 18,305 “erased” who remain in Slovenia exist between two deaths: the physical – since without papers they cannot function – and the symbolic, resulting from the horrific psychological pressure of being expelled from the social context, cut off from their own families and from all manifestations of public life.
In 2003, the Slovenian Constitutional Court proclaimed itself in favor of the erased asking to retroactively recognize the erased people and to give them a status since the erasure on 26 February 1992. The right wing nationalistic coalition on power in the present moment in Slovenia opposes the Constitutional Court Decision. In the end of October 2007, the Government of the Republic of Slovenia presented a Draft Constitutional Law for the Implementation of the Fundamental Constitutional Charter on the independence of the Republic of Slovenia, concerning the erased people. With this Draft the present Slovenian Government creates different categories of the erased people, it is fully discriminatory towards the erased, enables new withdrawals of statuses, denies responsibility of the state bodies for the erasure and annuls the right of the erased people to compensation. Instead of finally giving a stolen life back to the erased people the Government tries to implement further unconstitutional, unlawful and discriminatory procedures. The Draft is a measure with which the present Slovenian Government want to “solve” the demand from Brussels, from the EU, that the erased problematic has to be resolved before Slovenia takes over the EU Council presidency in 2008. (Cf. the statement issued on the case by the Piece Institute, Ljubljana http://www.mirovni-institut.si/Main/Index/en/). This situation is as well connected with the position of those who are not erased but are workers that from former republics are living in the most precarious situation, they are the new lumpenproletariat that is not even included for example in the syndicate demands for better life that are presented today to the neoliberal capitalist Slovenian state and government. Second such case that has to be “internationalized” and politicized further is the so called Strojans, an extended family of 31 Roma, 14 of them children, were forced to abandon their land on 28 October 2007 when a mob from Ambrus and other nearby villages surrounded their homes, threatening to kill them and demanding their eviction. While the police kept the crowd back, Slovenian government officials negotiated the blitzkrieg family’s removal from their land. Because of the government’s role in the forced removal of the Strojan family, the incident ranks as one of the most serious attacks on a Roma community in Europe in a decade, according to rights groups.
Therefore, putting these two “situations” together it is obvious that it is only possible to think about the history of the critique of the institutions of art and culture in connection with the social and political spheres in Slovenia. Therefore, the most important task in contemporary art and culture situation in Slovenia is to develop such analysis and art projects that are through such events capable to universalize politically and socially the so called “autonomous and only to creativity dedicated space of contemporary art and culture.” At the local level of art and culture, it is necessary to detect the universal (meaning EU as well) question of exploitation by capital. This exploitation is visible also in small groups of specialized new generation of curators and artists that are not able to connect transversally and fully the question of the lumpenproletariat of neoliberal global capitalism with the perverse commercialization and specialization of art as space of good life where art is only and solely a question of trends and brands. Moreover, these local processes are enforced and institutionalized by different levels from outside the post-Yugoslav condition, reinforced by the neoliberal global system in Europe. These specialized managerially motivated and through different channels groups and positions established networks are in most of the cases asked to join European Union presentations, being themselves as well changed in the brand of what is seen as the “normalized” – Intercultural dialogue as a fundamental value of the EU – status. In his already mentioned essay, Santiago López Petit writes that the discourse on civic behaviour implies and requires two elements: the first is war state, which is a capitalist mechanism that produces orders based on war, and the second is postmodern fascism. Civic behaviour, argues Petit, is a spurious way of determining today the intervention by the largest population in the social and political sphere, while contemporary neoliberal global capitalist states try to depoliticize such interventions by transforming the “citizen that urinates on the street” and the “protesters that try to improve social conditions,” in equal group of citizens; the state qualifies them as just two type of criminals.
What we have in the case of erased people or in the case of the Roma family Strojan is precisely these two conditions coming together. They present as well a never ending state of exception. The war state as defined by Petit is capitalist mechanism that produces order based on war that needs a permanent individuation of the enemy. In practice, this is a war that, in Slovenia for example, ranges from war against poverty to the war against the journalists, who in 2007 sent a petition to the EU institution describing the situation of media in Slovenia as totalitarian to the present moment when the Slovenian government is in a war against the so-called tycoons or ultra capitalists. Petit says that postmodern fascism acknowledges differences so that they can be used to unify order. In this context, as argued by Petit, the defence of personal autonomy is actually a form of control; freedom of choice means that nothing really changes. According to Petit, democracy today is practically the re-articulation of the war state and postmodern fascism. These are not only the two major features of the post Yugoslav condition, but as well of the EU, if we just think of the mentioned task of changing the control policy. However, each democracy, as argued by Petit, is implementing a specific articulation of these two features. Today the state in neoliberal global capitalism is pushing, realizing and articulating a strong policy of de-govermentalizing sectors of what was seen in the past as public life, social and health agendas of common interest that were after decades of class struggles (nothing is given in capitalism) set for the majority of citizens. It was the idea of the European social state, which was also active in the Yugoslav context in the time of Socialism. Today this de-govermentalizing process is going on with the total and complete privatization of all these public fields. In order to cover this complete privatization and the role of the state in neoliberal global capitalism that is just the agency of capital and multinational interests processing necropolitics (the minimum that is beyond the minimum) a whole set of ideological practices are re-implemented on the whole territory of EU. In order to obfuscate the necropolitical practices through Blut and Boden ideology, the state and its apparatuses, respectively in specific condition and through specific language, knock on the 19th century national pride and rights of Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and as well French and Germans, etc. We have to move further within this postmodern fascism and reflect on the post-Yugoslav condition through Serbia and Kosovo. Why? As the post-Yugoslav condition of Slovenia is not possible to be analyzed if we do not connect it with the larger EU space on the one side, and with the Milošević nationalistic and fascistic politics and as well taking into the story the holocaust by the paramilitary and regular Serbian forces effectuated in Srebrenica and BIH (and safeguarded by the UN peacekeeping forces), on the other side.
As reported by Amnesty International in 1998 in the article “A Human Rights Crisis in Kosovo Province. Background: A crisis waiting to happen” after the Second World War and the creation of the second Yugoslav state, Kosovo was given increasing degrees of autonomy. This culminated in the 1974 Constitution of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), when, as a Socialist Autonomous Province it had almost the same degree of autonomy as the constituent republics of the SFRY, albeit lacking the constitutional right to secede from the SFRY. In March and April 1981, ethnic Albanian demonstrators voiced calls for Kosovo to be made a full republic. The demonstrations were broken up violently and Amnesty International later learned that the Central Committee of the League of Communists was informed that over 300 people were killed in the process, although published reports claimed no more than 11 dead. A state of emergency followed for a period and to a greater or lesser extent there has been increased policing in the province ever since. In the late 1980s, Slobodan Milošević came to power, first as President of the ruling League of Communists of Serbia and then as President of Serbia, with a heavily Serbian nationalist program which focussed on Kosovo. In 1989, he succeeded in abolishing the province’s autonomy and soon reduced it to a mere administrative region of Serbia. The ethnic Albanians’ new political leaders boycotted the Serbian and Yugoslav political systems altogether, declaring instead an independent “Republic of Kosova” and establishing a parallel parliament, presidency and government. In addition, parallel or private health, educational and other institutions were created. Their creation had a political aspect, but also stemmed from necessity, as many Albanian workers were dismissed en masse from employment (sometimes after refusing to sign declarations of loyalty to the Serbian authorities), and teaching in the Albanian language was effectively suspended in the state-run system. The Albanians from Kosovo, being treated as second range citizens through all former Yugoslavia and especially in Serbia were a product, as noted by Žarana Papić in 1994, of the hegemonistic nationalisms; national separatisms, chauvinist and racist exclusion or marginalisation of (old and new) minority groups are, as a rule, closely connected with patriarchal, discriminatory and violent politics against women and their civil and social rights previously “guaranteed” under the old communist order. Later, Žarana Papić describes the process in the 1990s and at the beginning of 2000 in Serbia, saying, “I am freely labelling this as Turbo-Fascism.” She continues, “It is, of course, known that Fascism is a historical term; that the history of Nazi Germany is not the same as that of Milošević’s Serbia. However, in post-modernist and feminist theory we speak of ‘shifting concepts,’ when a new epoch inherits with some additions concepts belonging to an earlier one, like, for instance the feminist notion of shifting patriarchy. In my view, we should not fear the use of 'big terms' if they accurately describe certain political realities. Serbian Fascism had its own concentration camps, its own systematic representation of violence against Others, its own cult of the family and cult of the leader, an explicitly patriarchal structure, a culture of indifference towards the exclusion of the Other, a closure of society upon itself and upon its own past; it had a taboo on empathy and a taboo on multiculturalism; it had powerful media acting as proponents of genocide; it had a nationalist ideology; it had an epic mentality of listening to the word and obeying authority. The prefix ‘turbo’ refers to the specific mixture of politics, culture, ‘mental powers’ and the pauperisation of life in Serbia: the mixture of rural and urban, pre-modern and post-modern, pop culture and heroines, real and virtual, mystical and ‘normal,’ etc. In this term, despite its naive or innocent appearances, there is still fascism in its proper sense. Like all fascisms, Turbo-Fascism includes and celebrates a pejorative renaming, alienation, and finally removal, of the Other: Croats, Bosnians, and Albanians. Turbo-fascism in fact demands and basically relies on this culture of the normality of fascism that had been structurally constituted well before all the killings in the wars started.”
In order to come to a conclusion about the post-Yugoslav condition as a condition of specificity, but as well a unifying moment that overdetermines, as Louis Althusser would say, the whole space of post-Yugoslavia and connect it directly to the EU, I will call the economical, social and political situation in Slovenia turbo neoliberalism. By presenting an ideology of neoliberalism, with clear turbo and clerical fascistic patterns, it disrupts straightforwardly, and at all levels, any kind of a possible social state.
References:
Amnesty International, “A Human Rights Crisis in Kosovo Province. Background: A crisis waiting to happen” (30 June 1998) at http://asiapacific.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGEUR700321998?open&of=ENG-SRB
Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, “Live and Let Die: Colonial Sovereignties and the Death Worlds of Necrocapitalism,” in borderlandsejournal 2006, volume 5, no. 1, 2006.
Nataša Govedić, “What a Wonderful Fascism: Claiming the Real in Lars Von Trier and Dogma 95,” inFilozofski vestnik special number The Body edited by Marina Gržinić Mauhler, Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana 2002, pp. 167–179.
Marina Gržinić, “Euro-Slovenian Necrocapitalism,” (2008) at: http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0208/grzinic/en
Santiago López Petit, “ A civic democracy: a new form of control,” in Panel de Control.Interruptores críticos para una sociedad vigilada, edited by Fundación Rodríguez + ZEMOS98, Sevilla 2007, pp. 184 – 187.
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” inPublic Culture, volume 15, no. 1, Winter 2003, pp. 11–40.
Žarana Papić, “Europe after 1989: ethnic wars, the fascisation of social life and body politics in Serbia,” in Filozofski vestnik, special number The Body, edited by Marina Gržinić Mauhler, Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana 2002, pp. 191–205.
Suely Rolnik, “The Twilight of the Victim: Creation Quits Its Pimp, to Rejoin Resistance,” Zehar, no. 51, San Sebastian 2003.
Marina Gržinić is philosopher and artist. She is researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana. She is professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
