Biopolitics is overly rigid and fails – prefer contentment realities

The concepts of post-politics and biopower may be helpful in theorizing the current mutations of neoliberal power but they are not fully up to the task. They have been rightly castigated for constructing an overly rigid and all-encompassing regime of power which lies beyond challenge and change. As Bonnie Honig (2009: xv, 66–7, 88) makes clear, the apocalyptic image of the state of emergency and biopower in Agamben rules out the possibility of democratic response and cements ‘emergency’s closures’. It postulates an all-too solid, omnipotent, top-down sovereignty which takes exception to the law and cannot be resisted, covering over remaining fissures, opportunities, drives and invitations to collective mobilization. Modern sovereignty could be thought, instead, ‘as a contingent formation that might get relocated or redistributed in contests over whether a state of exception should be instituted, in what such a state should consist’ (Honig, 2009: 88). In contemporary globalized capitalism, sovereignty appears to be a multipolar circuit of forces, ‘displaced from national to international territories and reconstituted for the benefit of financial capital’ (Saskia Sassen in Dean, 2009: 131–2). People’s power in collective action or electoral politics remains often a variable component in this mobile, complex and uneven constellation of forces, at least where liberal democracy has not been fully torn apart.

Likewise, the ‘post-political’ qualification of biopower has attracted incisive criticisms. Jodi Dean argues that left-wing laments about the rise of technocratic expert rule, the declining significance of democratic politics under the compulsions of the markets, the disappearance of the ‘political’ as radical antagonism are apt but partial descriptions of our state of affairs. They obfuscate the surviving sites of politics and politicization and the real energies of democratic agency when they are taken as full and comprehensive accounts. In this case, the emphasis on post-politics ‘cedes in advance key terrains of activism and struggle’ (Dean, 2009: 12). Talk of post-politics fails thus to recognize and to engage with the terms of political games which are actually being played, and it stops short of supporting emerging instances of democratic agency, producing a vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecies.

Biopower and post-politics apply demonstrably well to key facets of the contemporary rule of capital in flagging democracies. But they tend to acquire an implausibly totalitarian ring with de-politicizing effects when they are not duly qualified through the exposition of their cracks, imbalances and internal challenges. These do not only restore some common sense and motion to the picture. They provide openings through which politics is in play again and some hope of change can glimmer. So, in the Greek state of exception in 2010–12, effective sovereignty was unevenly shared among the ruling elites of the Eurogroup, the European Central Bank, the IMF, the potent financial interests weighing on these institutions, the national government and the political establishment in the country. Although power was asymmetrically distributed in this constellation of forces, it remained partly mobile and reversible. The insistence of Εurozone leaders on binding any future government to the new loan agreement ahead of the general elections in May 2012 (see Pylas, 2012) signalled how the national government retained in effect considerable elements of independent sovereignty which could severely impact on the entire constellation. And, of course, the general elections in May and June 2012, which brought about seismic shifts in the party-political landscape of the last 30 years, catapulting a radical left-wing party to a dominant position, have triggered unpredictable political developments, disclosing the instability of the hegemonic bloc of power and how even electoral politics can still make a difference.

The international components of this nexus of power do not make up a solid compound, as indicated by the dissonant dispositions of the new French president. The national constituents of the hegemonic constellation provide further sources of disquiet and potential disruption. For so long as electoral politics are not fully abolished, the ‘popular will’ can affect the dominant circuits of sovereignty through such formal channels, giving the lie to any closed, totalizing depiction of the current state of emergency.

But what keeps alive and kicking the ‘political’ in the mode of radical intervention, deep antagonism and reversal of hegemonic closures is the locus classicus of democratic agency: massive popular mobilization, the rise of a demos as a collective agent with sovereign rights. If liberalism’s cultural hold were total and seamless and the spread of a narcissistic individualism devoid of collective concerns were fully verified, the re-emergence of massive demotic politics would have the status of a true miracle. The Rousseauian paradox – how to institute a self-governing people out of a dispersed crowd of politically ignorant and apathetic individuals – would appear as irresolvable as ever (for the paradox, see Honig, 2009: 13–20). And yet the spring and the summer of 2011 witnessed unprecedented manifestations of grassroots democratic agency on many streets and squares across the country, belying any totalistic account of biopower and liberalism’s empire (for this mobilization and its features see, among others, Douzinas, 2011; Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos, 2011). The singular feature of this collective movement, which brought together hundreds of thousands of people in its heydays from May to July, is that it did not confine itself to reclaiming some space for people’s power and voice within the dominant nexus of sovereignty. For the first time since the restoration of representative democracy in 1974, after the fall of the colonels’ junta, a large multiplicity of citizens did not simply protest or press demands on the political establishment. By contrast, they asserted themselves as the collective subject of a real and direct democracy to be enacted here and now and to embrace the entire country in order to institute an effective alternative to a defunct political system in chronic malaise.