FROM BIOPOLITICS TO NECROPOLITICS
What is the intention of this lecture?
- to situate from which point I am talking and to bring into the story new positions of theory, knowledge and analysis
- to differentiate in- between biopolitics and necropolitics
- to take into an analysis an art performative project produced in Slovenia in order to see if contemporary art services necropolitics
- to see the linking of necropolitics and neoliberal capitalism and the relation toward institutions of art and culture
1. To situate from which point I am talking and to bring into the story new positions of theory, knowledge and analysis
New theoreticians are present and active in the neoliberal capitalist world, in its center Walter Mignolo (Argentina/USA) and as well outside the center, on its periphery, Achille Mbembe (South Africa), Madina Tlostanova (Russia)[1]and I found important to refer to them when writing on the “production conditions” and intervention logic of theory, transformation of capitalism and globalization. Why is important to enlarge, expand and open a different referential theoretical framework for our references and conditions of analysis? Theory is not just an abstract practice of interpreting and rearticulating the “World.” Theory is contextualized; it has its history and its byways and bypasses. Often, it is theory that provides a rational basis for the cruelest forms of exploitation, the legitimization of capitalist expropriation and for various racial, chauvinist, and anti-Semitic positions. Even when theory does not deal with these questions, but is directing us “elsewhere,” demanding so to say for a withdrawal from the World – this is also a positioning of theory; this is theory’s politics. The same holds true of art. Art without theory is dead; lacking critical discourse an artwork is only a salon decoration and an easy prey for the art market.
In order to understand a place from where I am speaking that is not outside theory and not less neutral, I would suggest three theses with which to frame the contemporary art – technology – politics relation.
The first thesis of the contemporary art – technology – politics relation states that contemporary art is the most accomplished form of capitalist commodity. Art and culture are constitutive to the functioning of late capitalism; through its form of aestheticizing excess, art is the most developed form of capitalist commodity. The institution of art is an ideological accessory to the incessant capitalist reproduction and is at the center of the formation of an aestheticized “re-commodification.” For this reason it is important to ask how it might be possible to form a different platform of contemporary art and culture production and interpretation that wrests itself away from the global neoliberal capitalist system through the process a) of de-coloniality ( Walter Mignolo’s term) and b) de-linking (again Walter Mignolo’s term) of art and culture from capital, and to think about a new possible radical break within the social and political, a break that will produce a liberation from the capital’ grip of continuous exploitation and expropriation.
Immediately I would like to as well think on the difference in between coloniality and colonialism. Coloniality that is different from the historical colonialism is the hidden logic of contemporary capital and makes possible here and now the imperial transformation and colonial management of the World in the name of fake but for capital constitutive parameters: progress, civilization, development, and democracy. This process of coloniality is grounded in the Western rhetoric of modernization and salvation, through which global capitalism attempts to disgustingly snobbish and when is not possible with pure violence and death of millions to reorganize what it calls “human” capital. In the capitalist apocalyptic scenario, technology gets out of control; it seeks only progress and development, and in this fake progress the only scientists, or artists, who can be involved are those from the First capitalist World. You will be hard pressed to find any trace of a position that originates anywhere outside of the Western (First World) neoliberal capitalism.
This differentiation as well makes a cut within postcolonial theory. I quote Achille Mbembe, listen carefully: “There is no doubt that postcolonial theory, under its many guises, has importantly contributed to the unmasking of Western hegemony in the field of the humanities and in other disciplines. But at the same time the postcolonial theory has revealed the violence of Western epistemologies and their dehumanizing impulses. This process is far from over. It has intensified in the situation when the imperial sovereignty dictates who may live and who must die.
When sovereign power has taken control over mortality and has defined life as the very site of the manifestation of absolute power, we need to start asking different questions. One such question is who has the right to kill? What does the implementation of such a right tell us? How can we account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective? The other challenge to postcolonial theory is what is referred to as ‘globalization.’ What is clear is that it opens awareness beyond the postcolonial theory of the 80s and the 90s.”
With regard to the relationship between globalization, capitalism and aesthetics, we should establish a critique of the formation of a so-called “universal culture and art” that takes place at three co-dependent and decisive levels (the economical, political and institutional) and that establishes culture as a hegemonic and ideological apparatus. Today’s frenetic global economy demands the production of more and more new commodities at increasingly larger profit rates and ascribes the essential role (position and function) to innovations and experimentation to the field of art.
On the other side while demanding for de-linking of art and capital, we have to ask for linking of contemporary theory and practices of intervention in the social and political. For it is precisely within this horizon (theory and political intervention) that a different type of “de-linking” is nowadays being promoted. This de-linking claims that it is sufficient to think about the critique of the world, to contemplate it within one’s mind and support it within oneself by reading and writing what is termed “real” theory, while what happens to the World “out there” is not important. Such a de-linking is very much desired and promoted in the name of active passivity, because activity is seen as an exercise in thought.
The second thesis of the contemporary art – technology – politics relation states that there is a process of subjectivization at work today in the field of contemporary artistic and cultural production, which does not take place through work, but through artistic creativity; the latter redefines precisely, or, if you want colonizes what work is. The production and instrumentalization of life (what is known as biopolitics) become in such a context (of a redefinition of labor) of a fundamental importance for capital.
However, even here we need to make a further step and point to the fact that today it is necessary to politicize biopolitics with – necropolitics. What does it mean? The concept of necropolitics was proposed by Achille Mbembe and it is connected to necrocapitalism and necroeconomy; all three working hand in hand within and with global neoliberal capitalism today.
With necropolitics we can precisely define the transformation of regulation of life within extreme conditions produced by capital. Necropolitics is a coinage in-between necro (DEATH) and politics. Necropolitics regulates life through the perspective of death, therefore transforming life in a mere existence bellow every life minimum. Necropolitics presents as well, I will state, a historicization of biopolitics! Necropolitics was primarily envisioned by Achille Mbembe in Africa or was taking place in the Third World, but today is more and more taking place in the First (capitalist) World.
With this proposed “transformation” of biopolitics into necropolitics, I am NOT asking to de-link biopolitics from necropolitics but to understand that the maximization of exploitation and expropriation of life, labor, and “humanity” that is put forward here and now by capital asks for the reformulation, or, better to say re-politicization of biopolitics!
The third thesis of the contemporary art – technology – politics relation states that new media technology makes a condition for contemporary art to be an important part of the functioning of capitalist society. Three strategies are at work here; the production of shock through the help of cloning, the strategy of creating simulacra that work outside the human perspective (say “paraspace”), and the strategy of mutation (theories of the “post-human”). These three strategies are a form of concealing, abstracting, and evacuating from the economical, social, political and artistic of the social antagonism, of the class war.
I suggest a stubborn insistence on a process of rearticulation of these three theses with a way of acting that I would like to define in relation to Alain Badiou as “FORCING,” implying a force that is a result of a constant and insisting approach that asks for a continued analysis of knowledge / colonialism /modernity. This forcing is based especially on the demand to de-link contemporary art and theory from contemporary forms of epistemological colonialism (as defined by Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova). Contemporary epistemological colonialism presents only the Western enlightenment matrix and does not take into consideration the epistemological breaks and shifts taking place in the so-called “exterior,” or rather at the “edges” of Western European scientific thought. Or as stated by Madina Tlostanova: “Only through alter-modern in the sense of other-than-modern perspectives, standing on the border of Western modernity and non-Western reasons, can we hope to work out a solution. Capitalism the way it exists now seems to be increasingly incapable of dealing with its own consequences. While alter-modern perspectives need to be redeemed from the discourse of modernity, which habitually has treated them as sentimentalist, romantic, archaic, and retarded in order to easier discard them and present the dominant scientific-technocratic ideal of the future as the only possible and reasonable one.”
Modern, non-modern, postmodern and finally alter-modern are the possible stages (where alter-modern is proposed as a radical break) not only in historization but re-politicization of the genealogy of modernism.
2. To differentiate in- between biopolitics and necropolitics
In principle it is possible to state that all the events in the World today are brought back to a single event. This event I will name in reference to Santiago López Petit as the impossibility of capital to restrain from exploitation and expropriation. This unrestrainment of capital is the accomplishment of co-property between capital and power. This was clearly seen in the way how the financial crisis that involved banks and their deficit was solved in September 2008, with a bill issued with one single move in order to save the capitalists and their banks’ savings. It presented the unification of power (political representatives) and capital (and note that nothing similar was proposed regarding for example New Orleans and the poorest working class that lost everything in the aftermath of the hurricane Katrina).
French philosopher Michel Foucault characterizes biopolitics as biopower, as a power that aims for the production and reproduction of life itself. Biopolitics thus practices sovereignty that can, today, also be connected to the processes of subjectivization, which does not mean only a production and reproduction of subjects, but – above all – the regulation and understanding what the process of subjectivization means in itself. Biopower is based on strategies of control that transcend those institutional frameworks which were important for societies at a time when domination was founded on punishment and discipline; biopolitics /biopower is based on control. Biopower is a matter of a direct instrumentalization of life enabled through contemporary new media technologies. Control is, thus, composed of surveillance systems (surveillance cameras following us everywhere); increasingly more detailed digitalized databases of personal information available to the state; as well as, it is composed of public opinion (market) researches and other forms of acquiring more and more precise personal data.
In the genealogy of the connections between institutions, money, and power that Foucault defines as one of the more important procedural processes of biopolitics, economy plays a very significant role. The politics of economy shows how finances are distributed in such a way that the government supports only those organizations, administrations, discourses, theories, and populisms that are vital only to that particular government and its commands, practices and governance of the social body.
Achille Mbembe in his book On the Postcolony: On Private Indirect Government (2001) stated, regarding the proposed accomplishment of co-property between capital and power in the time of globalization, and taking into account specific conditions of environmental exploitation and warfare in Africa, that while war tactics in Africa are quite rudimentary, they still result in human catastrophes. This is because, via Mbembe, “military pressure sometimes targets the straightforward destruction, if not of the civilian population, at least of the very means of its survival, such as food reserves, cattle, and agricultural implements. In some cases, these wars have enabled ‘gang’ leaders to exercise more or less continuous control over territory. Such control gives them access not only to those living in the territories but also to the natural resources and the goods produced there – for instance, to extraction of precious stones, exploitation of natural resources. The financing of these wars is very complex. In addition to the financial contribution provided by Diasporas and assignment of men and women to forced labor, there is resort to loans, appeal to private financiers, and special forms of taxation.”
He argued that these new forms of more or less total control not only blur the supposed relationship between citizenship and democracy, or, I will add biopolitical forms of life, but rather and more deadly incapacitate whole sections of the population politically, economically and structurally. Therefore it is possible to state that what is becoming evident with reference to Mbembe (and in relation to Africa where we see the intensification of many exploitation processes established and empowered through colonialism) is the emergence of a new form of relation in-between capital and power named “private indirect government.” It presents new configurations of power, the privatization of violence (myriad of militias and private armies) that works hand in hand with economy that is as well put through the process of privatization and therefore is completely informalized. In an interview given by Mbembe, on the occasion of the publication of his book On Post-Colony, he stated firmly that democracy as a form of government and as a culture of public life does not have a future in Africa – or for that matter, elsewhere in the world – if it is not rethought precisely from the crucible of “necropower.” By “necropower” Mbembe refers to a sovereign power that is set up for maximum destruction of persons and the creation of deathscapes that are unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.
Today these deathscapes – if we only think about what has been going on in Gaza from December 2008 to January 2009 – are not, as is pointed out by Mbembe, “a peculiar African reality,” but something that is becoming more and more of a normal “landscape” in all the territories outside of the First capitalist world (just think about Palestine, Chechnya etc.). Even though such deathscapes were once reserved only for the third and second worlds (Balkan’s Srebrenica was such a clear deathscape) with the present recession deathscapes they are now becoming slowly normalized within the First capitalist world as well (thousands of jobs will be lost, low middle class will be transformed in a new class of “poorscape” and therefore a deathscape reality, etc).
3. To take into an analysis an art performative project produced in Slovenia in order to see if contemporary art services necropolitics
In February 2008 the Journal for Critique of Science, Imagination and New Anthropology (Časopis za kritiko znanosti) published in Ljubljana, Slovenia, released its special issue entitled The Story of an Erasure.I called this issue a bright moment on “the dark side of the Alps” as it is possible to describe the situation in Slovenia.
However, to put clear why this special issue The Story of an Erasure, published in 2008, is the bright moment of a radical intervention within the Slovenian social and political right wing dark landscape, I must question the establishment of an art project/art performative “body” that was constituted in the 2007/2008 in Slovenia as well. It is important that the establishment, or if you want “the event” of this body happened within the Slovenian reality of a clear link of turbo-capitalism with its clerical fascistic liaisons. Nota bene: that the turbo fascism with which Žarana Papić described the reality of Milošević’s Serbia is in the case of Slovenia “upgraded, ” it is neoliberally urbanized and intensified.
The body I want to refer to is what I termed ventriloquist three-headed “Janez Janša” monster figure founded in 2007/2008. In 2007/2008 three visual-performative and media artists from Ljubljana, Slovenia (Davide Grassi, Emil Hrvatin and Žiga Kariž) changed their names into “Janez Janša” – not only symbolically, but as well materially and administratively (changing all identity documents from identity cards to passports into Janez Janša). I propose a thesis that these two art/cultural and performative projects, one is The Story of an Erasure and the other is the Janšas performative body, though both are to be seen as critical discourses, present a diametrically opposite performative-theoretical and politico aesthetical intervention within the art and cultural space of Slovenia. One, the Story of an Erasure intervenespolitically directly, the other, the ventriloquist three-headed “Janez Janša” simulates not only the proper position, but as well obfuscates through cloning the right wing politics in Slovenia and aestheticises the present ideological and administrative State apparatus. To understand my thesis it is necessary to answer to two points, who is Janez Janša and who are the “Erased people.” Both projects refer to them in/directly.
Janez Janša is a right wing Slovenian politician that was running the Slovenian government from 2004 to 2008; he and his party lost the new elections in September 2008! The genealogy of his formation is double and not historically fully evaluated. In the 1980s he was the political figure that provoked through a discovery of secret military documents the declaration of independency of Slovenia in 1991, today he is the most clear representative of a new turbo fascistic and clerical entity in Slovenia that synthesizes precisely the genealogy of the Slovenian reality from socialist into neoliberal capitalist. Janez Janša – nomen est omen[2]– the prime Minister of Slovenia in the period from 2004 to 2008, was as well one of the most ferocious political force to prevent the possible process of putting an end to the necro reality of the Erased people. In essence Janez Janša’s political methods can be described as necrocapitalist and dysfunctional. On one side, he is implementing totalitarian Communist methods of absolute power (total party discipline and control of mass media) and on the other he is exposing the clerical-fascistic connection with the present turbo-capitalist Slovenian reality. For example, he pushes forward a European policy of privatization of education, and demands for equalization of Partisans and the Slovenian Nazi collaborators’ (the Domobrans) and so forth.
Therefore, if we make a relation between the “ventriloquist three-headed “Janez Janša” monster figure” and the real Janez Janša, it is necessary to emphasize that what is at prima vista seen as two different contexts of these two “projects,” one is art and the other is politics, must be seen together. We should not de-link the ventriloquist three-headed “ Janez Janša” and the real Janša, as they did not stay on opposite sides, the theater Janša is not only symbolical, while the other is simply “real.” Both of them are real, having their documents fully registered by the State.
Further it is necessary before providing the answer to the question who is the erased people to expose on what possible historical reference is based the constitution of the “ventriloquist three-headed “Janez Janša” monster figure”? Or to formulate this differently, on what relies this total identification with the right wing populist political leader by the three-headed “Janez Janša” body?
The idea of the three-headed “Janša” can be conceptually defined as a re-enactment of what was strategically invented by the music group Laibach in the 1980s; Laibach a music group from Ljubljana (still active) re-appropriated the German name of Ljubljana (the name became especially controversial at the time of German occupation of Slovenia in the WWII when the Nazis exercised aggressive Germanization of Slovenes) and performed in a style that was a mixture between a party rally and a Mussolini speech; they performed in the 1980s without offering any further explanation of their action. Laibach’s gesture, which is also known as “over-identification” in psychoanalytical terms, or a total, complete identification with a body (Mussolini), name (Ljubljana) etc. succeeded as well to subvert at that time the exhausted strategies of parody and irony performed by the Western contemporary field of art in the 1980s. Therefore over identification (as a total simulation strategy) on which Laibach insisted presented a complete destitution of their individual positions. Laibach “real” member’s names were totally disclosed in the 1980s; their public appearances, be it in music concerts or interviews, did not produce a relief or catharsis in terms that we know that in the end it is a mockery or a parody that is at stake of the political body, or of a certain social ritual and etc.
Almost three decades later, in 2007/2008 the three-headed “Janša” started though refereeing to Laibach to exploit them but on the “reverse.” The three-headed “Janša” inaugurated in a spectacular way their name changing; they sent several and several mails. The act was announced spectacularly by each “new born baby Janša,” through mails and in other formats of communicating with the general public. Every time they proudly announced their act, I will state not as subversion, but as a spectacular power demonstration that they have the pleasure, time and money to change the names. Therefore I will name this act as pure parody exhibitionism. They sent mails just in case that we, the public, won’t miss who have actually changed the name in the last instance. I will call this a gesture of securing the terrain for future branding and money. In fact the three-headed “Janša” artifact was abundantly supported by the government on power! The Ministry of Culture abundantly supported almost all projects in which at least one, if not all the three “Janez Janša” took part, while many other artists applying for co-financing from the Ministry of Culture in 2007/2008 were rejected and pushed into the grip of the fatal process of neoliberal pauperization.
Now let’s answer briefly who are the erased people and how is it possible to state that the “truth” of the three-headed “Janša” and their relation to the real Janez Janša can be understood only through the Erased people.
The Erased people are the only possible context in which to read the act of performing of the three-headed “Janša,” as the Erased people, as it will be presented, are an outcome of necropolitics that was implemented by the Slovenian state through taking/re-issuing and nullifying their residency papers and documents. Through this act of re/naming and re/taking their identities, the Erased people were deprived of the social and economic status that is granted to individuals through such papers and documents; in the last instance they were deprived of life.
Therefore as the three-headed “Janša” developed their project precisely on the same “act,” it is possible to state that the truth (in a Badiou’term) of their performance, of their act of changing all their documents and taking, spectacularly – as was described – the new identity can by definition be conceptualized and politicized only in relation to the Erased people.
Who are the Erased people?
In February 1992, at the time when Slovenia was still in its infancy, the Slovenian government which was headed by then-Prime Minister Lojze Peterle and the Ministry for Internal Affairs, Igor Bavčar, (and with the support of the State Secretary the Ministry for Internal Affairs, Slavko Debelak), adopted a macabre necropolitical measure of erasure, transforming 30,000 people into people without residency permits and deprived of any rights. This 30,000 people were mostly workers and internal migrants that were working and living in Slovenia being of non Slovenian ethnical roots, Bosnian, Croats, Serbs, Roma people, Kosovars, Macedonians and etc… What happened on February 27, 1992 was the total confiscation of their status of permanent residence, and this confiscation was triggered by a simple bureaucratic telegram sent by Slavko Debelak on 27 February 1992. The number of the telegram is 0016/4-14968. Slavko Debelak was at the time subordinate to Igor Bavčar. Janez Drnovšek was elected president of the Slovenian government in April 1992. Matevž Krivic is referring to the recorded transcription of the first meeting of Drnovšek’s cabinet on June 1992, when Bavčar, being the Minister of Internal Affairs in Drnovšek's government as well, informed him about the “problem regarding the violation of human rights in Slovenia”.
Today, Bavčar, due to his political connections, is one of the most influential capitalist in Slovenia and in charge of the multinational corporation Istrabenz, but recently he “succeeded” through privatization processes to ruin totally Istrabenz (one of the prosperity corporation of Slovenia). Though Bavčar transformed in a “deathspace” the corporation and will left its workers without jobs and futures, he is not facing any legal charges at the moment.
To put an even more clear light on the 1992 event in the darkness of the present reality, lets read carefully how the 1992 case is explained by the Erased themselves: “It is important to state that the status of permanent residence, at least in a state of law, that respects human rights, can be obtained or confiscated only on the basis of law, administrative acts, or court decisions. The status of permanent residence is provided by birth or through other legal means. This status provides duties and rights. Slovenia was in 1992 the legal successor of the former common federative state of Yugoslavia, together with permanent residents appurtenant to it, regardless of the nationality, sex, race, or religion of respective individuals. The basic existential status of the Erased has been taken from them without any law, legal act, or notification, only by a simple telegram!”
Therefore the truth of the three “Janšas” is to be found in their over-cynical gesture par excellence through an “esthetical-artistic” level of “fun” that allowed them to change all the documents, while not taking into consideration what this means within the present Slovenian reality that has “still” 18.000 people from the Erased contingent, without papers and their status is not solved at all, not even after 17 years! (The others 12 000 witnessed different macabre consequences, some described in the mentioned special issue.)
“Janšas,” in turn, when they were asked in 2008 to write some kind of circular letters to each other, which were then published in the weekly supplement of the daily Ljubljana newspaper Dnevnik, used this very important public space for weeks to amuse the readers. The “Janšas” did not give any criticism of the cultural politics of the right wing government their just wrote speculations on their traveling and the reminiscent sentimentalism about their different places of birth and origins. This is interesting enough as they said they use the name as a “criticism” of Janša politics.
I called the act of Janšas “three headed body” as parody exhibitionism that did not provide a critique but additionally reinforced the blurring of the political/artistic situation. The right-wing political space on the other side needed and needs such multiplication, such a spectacular cloning and branding of nothing, of the same nothing produced by the government and parties on power. “Nothing” as an act of total nullifying of 30 000 people. However, this nothing had and has social and political effects, for it reproduces something. This is, first) it aestheticises a necro social and political space of misery and control, and second) transforms administrative State procedures into a playful game. On the other part now after Janša lost the elections in September 2008 the whole project of Janšas “three headed body” started even by itself to expose that all was actually taking part only and solely as a playful act of renaming, saying that does not matter which is the name, as is just about to change it! At the present they are already sending some mails with their old real name, at least one of them is using the real name: Žiga Kariž!
Therefore instead of developing a criticism, the “Janšas” even more obfuscated the real Janša, duplicating him ad nauseam and providing an artistic flavor to necropolitics. I can further insist that it is not so much about testing our capacity of producing all sorts of supplementary meanings; rather, we have to rearticulate the relation of meanings to hegemony! We have to surpass the fascination with new meanings (the fun, indeed, for example, produced through the triplication of the name, etc., used by mass media abundantly) and analyze the hegemonization that is produced in such a situation and as well to see the role of such a renaming within the biopolitical, and “necropolitical”[3]logics of the contemporary (Slovenian) neoliberal capitalist space.
In order now to connect the two projects the special issue entitled The Story of an Erasure and the “Janšas” it is as well necessary to make a direct and precise relation to the past, as these both cultural events are relating to the past. The special issue entitled The Story of an Erasure relatesto a 17 years old necropolitical event of the erasure of 30.000 people, the “Janšas” are relating to Laibach and its almost 30 years’ old art strategy.
In a talk with Alexander Skidan and Dmitry Vilensky in the newspaper What is to be Done? published in St. Petersburg, Artiom Magun presents a very simple but crucially important difference in understanding the past in relation to two remarkable theoretical cases. One case is Walter Benjamin and the other is Alain Badiou. Following Magun, I can present this difference in the following way, “Badiou proposes that we find our support in something necessary and important that happened in the past and move on from there. Benjamin, on the contrary, searches for something that was suppressed in the past, something that did not happen, that perished and is reawakening only now. The event that, for Badiou, happens in the past, is taking place right now for Benjamin. That is, they both look back to the past, but from opposite points of view. This is important as we try to understand potentiality: either potential is the impulse generated by a positive past or present event, or it is something that has not happened yet, that was interrupted in mid-sentence.”http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=327&I... (28.3.2008)" href="#footnote4_2ignkl4">[4]
“Janšas” obfuscate and foreclosure the cultural and political space in Slovenia also because of the impossibility of making a connection to past events; notably to Laibach to which they conceptually refer, not to mention the reference to the Erased people! If this will be a case indeed, they will be capable of opening the present space of art and culture as a space of potentiality. If the “Janšas” based their concept on fidelity to Laibach, or to the Erased people, then they could connect and re-perform differently the art, social and political space, while opening the space of criticism and emancipation today. They could have transformed “the three-head monster Janša” into a real political subject able to subvert the real Janša and the right wing necropolitics. They could make a reference as well to the 1980s and 1990s events; to a) the underground (subcultural movement) of the 1980s, and b) the powerful awakening of the independent cultural and social structures situated in a squatted and empty military barrack complex in 1992 in the centre of Ljubljana known as Metelkova city. If they made a connection in terms of understanding what were the political implications of these events, they could produce a political subject capable of emancipating the social and political space of Slovenia today; by contrast, contemporary art today is perceived as a branding, as a luxury subjectivity field feeding the neoliberal turbo capitalist machine!
Going back to the initial point of this analysis, I stated there is also a bright moment of cultural production on the dark side of Slovenia: the thematic issue of the Journal for Critique of Science, Imagination and New Anthropology entitled The Story of an Erasure. This issue offers an in-depth presentation and analyses of the 17-year agony of the Erased people. This is a clear Badiou’s position, as it maintains a political fidelity to the cause of the Erased people that is not yet solved even 17 years after the case started. On the contrary, today, different stories try to depict the history of the Erased as a simple mythology.
I can state that the thematic issue of the Journal for Critique of Science, Imagination and New Anthropology: The Story of An Erasure is a bright light at the end of a dark tunnel, as it presents a gesture of a radical fidelity to a historical event that put a deep shadow on the new born Slovenian state – only when it will be fully terminated will it allow for a clear potentiality to Slovenian social, political, and art spaces.
4. To see the consequences of necropolitics in relation to neoliberal capitalism and the relation to institutions
The most important point is to understand that neoliberal necrocapitalism lives from the intensification of its two primal conditions of reproduction: deregulation and privatization. In what follows in talking about and explaining the logic of these two conditions and other characteristics to be put forward as being internal to neoliberalism, I will make a reference to two texts and a small vocabulary published recently in Chicago, in the magazine area # 6. I will refer to Daniel Tucker and his editorial text “Inheriting the Grid” and to Nik Theodore, Jamie Peck and Neil Brebber’s text “The City as Policy Lab,” both published in Area Chicago (ART/RESEARCH/EDUCATION/ACTIVISM), no. 6, August 2008.
To refer to these two conditions means to refer to a situation of psychosis or to a situation of exceptionality at first, that is soon to be seen as completely normalized and accepted. Privatization means that the state withdraws from social, cultural and public life step by step, and leaves these public sectors to struggle for private money. But privatization also implies a format of private property or of a private instrumentalization of the public institution by those who run it. To precisely understand these processes and neoliberalism, let me refer to the short, but extremely precise vocabulary of terms published in Area Chicago, no. 6. I quote: “Neoliberalism is a project of radical institutional transformation. This term refers to a unique period in Capitalism in which some economic elite of some countries has encouraged a free-market fundamentalism that is unprecedented since before the Great Depression. This fundamentalist ideology has promoted a reversal of much of the regulation that has protected local and national economies from foreign competition, in addition to much of the social and political gains of social movements (including organized labor). Much of this transformation occurs through the privatization of industries and services previously monopolized by the State, and many of the social programs associated with Welfare. This period is also marked by the opening up of new markets in sectors of life previously untapped for profit-making potential – including those basic services provided by the state, as well as the growing importance of industries like culture, health, environmentalism, and education (to name a few). Neoliberalism is considered to have grown out of the University of Chicago Economics Department, promoted by its ideologues such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. The concepts grow out of a ‘liberal’ tradition, dating back to the theorists of early capitalism in the late 1800s, who were compelled by pure concepts of freedom. For the liberal, ‘freedom’ was the ideal. For the neoliberal, the ‘free market’ undisturbed by any State intervention is ideal. What must be constantly kept in mind is that the ideal is far from the truth, and current so-called neoliberal policies require massive State intervention – only this time around it is exclusively on behalf of economic elite with no attempt to promote policies of economic redistribution, equal opportunity or civic participation.”
Therefore, neoliberal necrocapitalism has an impact on every sector of life, production and labor. In neoliberal necrocapitalism, the whole of society has been transformed into only one BIG INVESTMENT sector that provides for a capitalization of capital. I want to emphasize that the time of the particularization of levels of society (let’s think about culture and art, being “outside” the processes that are going on in the wider economical, social and political contexts, so to speak) are over. There was always a firm relationship of interdependency between the superstructure (art, culture, the social field, etc.) and the economical base. The difference was that in the past this logic was hidden, but in neoliberalism these connections are clearly visible. What we see is that these artistic, cultural, social, health, public, etc. sectors that were before primarily used for ideological reproduction of the mode of production and its labor force, are vital for the direct capitalization of capital today. Therefore, when we speak about the neoliberal necrocapitalist radical deregulation of each and every institution in society, be it the institution of art, culture, politics, health, social security, public, law, religion, etc., it means it affects not only its (dis-)investment policy, but its histories, strategies of interventions, ideologies, rituals and forms of organization.
In neoliberalism, as the Area Chicago team formulates, four processes apply: financialization of capital, speculative movements of financial capital, interspatial competition and place-marketing. My proposal is not only to term the processes that are going on in the field of art and culture as overtly restructured and deregulated, but also to envision a radical process of not only the financialization of capital, but of the financialization of (cultural) institutions as such, with speculative, interspatial competitive and place-marketing as highly visible characteristics as well. In neoliberal necrocapitalism, a process of overdetermination that is definitely financialization, affects not only every level of society, but it is also highly operative in contemporary art and culture.
Financialization of capital means that the surplus value as the only drive of capital is produced with a bubble mechanism of “virtual” money movements, investments, etc. This is not rooted in “production” any more so to speak, as was the case of the direct expropriation of people, regions and territories in the not so distant, clear capitalist colonial past. Even though such a process is still active, if we think about oil, financialization makes money from money (virtually) without the so-called background of production. It does not come as a surprise that in the last week of September 2008, in the week of Wall Street’s darkest scenario of collapse (after the 1929 Great Depression), billions of euros simply disappeared overnight, so to speak. We witness a performative aspect of the speculative power of capitalization of money that has no base in anything but itself. The outcome of such a situation is at once an auto-cannibalization and super-vampiric blood thirsty condition. What do I want to say? If the financialization of capital means the domination of financial markets (foreign exchange trading, futures, debt trading, US government securities trading and other forms of speculative investment) over industrial economies in contemporary capitalism, as stated by the Area Chicago team, I therefore put forward the financialization of institutions as a paradigm, to be parallel to the financialization of capital, meaning the over-empowerment of institutions, but only and solely through performative speculative processes that have no base in anything other than the institutions themselves. These speculative processes are becoming more important than any art and cultural production, more important that any art work, more important that any artist or artistic group position, etc.
As it was formulated by the Area Chicago group, speculation “could be understood as buying, holding and selling something (anything from real estate to fine art) in order to profit from the fluctuations in the market (something like ‘buy low, sell high’).” What is bought and sold here is information itself, devoid of any content, so to speak. Additionally, a process of “a cleansing of the terrain” is to be added, as was learned from the Balkan Wars. Practices and theories that disturb the flow of incessant production of information should be erased, and have to vanish. Very similar processes were and still are –not only in relation to the brutality in the Balkan Wars in the 1990s and in Chechnya, etc. – implemented in relation to the erased people in Slovenia. Therefore, to summarize what is taking place is a twofold process; on the one hand, speculations are the outcome of a hyper activity, not of (art or cultural) productions, but of a hyper production of information itself, and on the other, institutions are activated as incubators of constant production of information – about themselves. The outcome is, to say it simply, a daily bombardment of information of an unbelievable quantity about projects and activities that nobody can follow anymore. A boom is made with the infinite speculative sending and distributing of whatever. On the other hand, we see a completely psychotic process of total evacuation.
In short, financialization means not only capitalizing off of “nothing,” through pure speculative strategies of information. In the case of talking about the financialization of the institution, it means transforming the whole art production as such into NOTHING. Please make a reference of this nothing to the nothing I developed in part 3; they are both something of nothing.
A case to understand what is going on, is possible to be illustrated by the official institution of modern art in Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija. In the last period from 2008 early on Moderna Galerija is without the main exhibition space due to renovation. Moderna Galerija found itself in an extremely disturbing situation, not only for itself, but also for all of us who are without a major institution of contemporary art in Slovenia. Moderna Galerija “temporarily” lost the space due to its (needed) renovation, but was not granted a temporarily substituting exhibition space (which is a normal practice in the contemporary world when a national institution of art and culture is at stake). The refusal to provide the substituting space to Moderna Galerija by the state and the respective Ministry was a process of disciplining the institution by the Minister of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia that was elected from the right-wing party in power (Janez Janša political party) and other lobbies. Though under pressure, the Moderna Galerija failed to initiate an international action of pressure on the Ministry through activating an international petition force of support.
This “incapability” from 2008 on of the Moderna Galerija, by not “provoking” or initiating a call for an international solidarity action that could force the right-wing party in power to offer a substitutive space (and I can claim that such a call would receive important solidarity support from the national space), can also be seen as a process of withdrawing from a proper responsibility to what is necessary to be done in a situation when it is important to “fight” for the institution of art as such. Instead, a process of mimicry was put forward; Moderna Galerija was invited to present its different exhibition projects (through logic of “squatting”) in different cultural spaces in the city of Ljubljana. It seems cozy to act as a homeless person, but the problem is that the national institution in such a way normalizes wrong state decisions and procedures; it will be necessary to act completely differently (instead of behaving as an impoverished NGO); the national institution should use its power (and international recognition) to ask for the change of the situation publicly and internationally, to almost provoke a war that will force the state and its ministry to at least try to save face internationally and do something about the state of things. On the contrary, Moderna Galerija behaved completely speculative; withdrawing, abstracting, and evacuating itself from the situation precisely when it was necessary to draw a line or when it was necessary to act in order to re-articulate a proper position in a broader sense; the way of functioning is similar to the banks on Wall Street in the last week of September 2008. All these institutions, and especially those who run them, are displaying their unbelievable capacity to survive at the expense of the whole artistic and cultural sector.
It is important to state in this respect that Moderna Galerija is working hand in hand with parallel institutions, that it is possible to call “shadow public structures.” They are, so to speak “non-institutions,” as they are not really public institutions, but private funds that function as NGOs and are getting public money. These non-institutions live in shadow of the institutions and are more or less left-overs from the 1990s, post Soros institutions. What do they primarily do? Such institutions are seen as over rapid “incubators” that over rapidly produce generations of different structures that are operative within art and culture: curators, organizers, even artists, etc. Along with this process of over rapid production of new (human) structures, these non-institutions produce over rapid genealogies of art. It is important to understand that this over rapid process is taking part contrary to genealogies of the First Capitalist World (that is patiently and constantly being (re)constructed). The over rapid production of genealogies present a process of “enterprised-up genealogies” – it is a form of deregulating, and it is the way to (over rapidly) construct and conceptualize history. These traits are not psychological descriptions, but are constitutive to the way neoliberal capitalism functions structurally today, and show that sped up time processes are part of finanzialization and speculation.
As a result of these processes, the categories of public space, public money and the public as such have been totally instrumentalized and privatized.
At the point of a conclusion, I can state, that as institutions and non-institutions are functioning through a process of financialization with fully speculative scenarios similar to banks and non-banks, they have to be aware of their possible total collapse. This is precisely what is going on in Wall Street. Elements of the collapse are already possible to be seen in the way the art institution functions publicly, going beyond every border of good taste.
In short, neoliberal necrocapitalism is continually being produced and reproduced, not only economically and politically, but obviously institutionally. All these processes have an effect that is totally and straightforwardly completely socially “dysfunctional.” It generates consequences that are very difficult to be fully understood. Nowadays it is necessary to de-link ourselves from a war of everybody against everybody, ex/changing everything with everything, everybody with everybody; it is necessary to be capable of drawing a line of differentiation in the space, while building local and international alliances. These are the only possible ways for changing the deregulated and privatized present economic, social, and institutional spheres of our life and work.
And now, at the end, it is time to ask if with the present recession neoliberal global capitalism ended? I will say that the financial crises actually created conditions for a new global and if you want internal restructuring, for en even deeper dysfunctional deregulation. Therefore what we can expect is the intensification of deathscapes with processes of creation of massive pauperization and poverty. On the global scale in order to curb mass hunger (but actually to provide the terrain for new technologies) biotechnologically developed and genetically modified foods will be introduced, not only in the World as general, but in Europe as well. This will be done “tout court,” without objection and will be going side by side with realities of environmental crisis. These realities are and will be the result of the lack of energy supply that will give in turn free hands to all sorts of murderous usage of uncontrollable ways of energy (from the most dirty to the most “clean” atomic one!)
It is important to add that the present situation will give free hands to capital’s most urgent task and this is the intensification of collapse and /or of a complete de/re/structuring of the working class within the described line of regulation of life from the biopolitical into the necropolitical. This will be conducted through an intensification that is already taking place and can be named, according to Ignacio Ramonet, as four great rationalization principles:
Reducing the number of employees
Introducing more and more work obligations
Restructuring companies and the redistribution of good and resources.
These processes will be performed in many different situations by capital: in executing control over life, pushing war on terrorism or civilizing those that are not yet civilized enough!
Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur (text) and Belinda Kazeem (visuals), In: Reartikulacija/Re-articulation, no.1, Ljubljana 2007. http://www.reartikulacija.org/pozicioniranje.html
Časopis za kritiko znanosti, domišljijo in novo antropologijo: Zgoda Nekega Izbrisa (The Journal for Critique of Science Imagination and New Anthropology:The Story of an Erasure), February 2008.
Matevž Krivic, "Izbrisani, Bavčar: Odmisliti človekove pravice!" ("The Erased, Bavčar: Ignoring Human Rights!"), Mladina, no. 9, 2004.
Sebastjan Leban, “Procesi pavperizacije” ("Process of pauperization"), in M. Gržinić, S. Kleindienst, S. Leban, “Sodobna umetnost in kultura na Slovenskem: procesi getoizacije, pavperizacije in apolitičnosti” (Contemporary art and culture in Slovenia: processes of ghettoization, pauperization and apolitical stance), 2008, published at www.reartikulacija.org
Maria¸Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System”, in Hypatia, 22.1, 2007, pp. 186–209.
Santiago López Petit, El Estado-Guerra (War-State), Editorial Hiru, Hondarribia, Spain 2003.
Artiom Magun, Alexander Skidan and Dmitry Vilensky, “Potentialities”, What is to be Done?, no. 16, March 2007
http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=327&Itemid=167 (28.3.2008)
Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, University of California Press, Berkeley 2001.
Walter Mignolo, “The geopolitics of knowledge and the coloniality of power. An interview with Mignolo.” Catherine Walsh, in: Zehar, no. 60-61, San Sebastian 2007.
http://magazines.documenta.de/attachment/000000345.pdf
“On Private Indirect Government,” interview with Achille Mbembe by Christian Hoeller,
Reartikulacija, Artistic-Political-Theoretical-Discursive-Platform and Journal, no. 3, March 2008, www.reartikulacija.org
Madina Tlostanova, “Re(dis)articulating the Myth of Modernity through the Decolonial Perspective” text for Transmediale, Berlin, 2009.
- [1] Cf. Reartikulacija, Ljubljana http://www.reartikulacija.org/. Gržinić as well invited these theoreticians to Ljubljana. They will lecture in the beginning of February 2009 in Ljubljana as part of the course on art and culture within the postgraduate school established by ZRC SAZU and The University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia.
- [2] In latin nomen est omen means the name is a sign.
- [3] J.-A. Mbembe, “Necropolitics”, Public Culture, vol. 15. no. 1, Winter 2003, pp. 11–40.
- [4] Artiom Magun, Alexander Skidan and Dmitry Vilensky, “Potentialities”, What is to be Done?, no. 16, March 2007; http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=327&Itemid=167 (28.3.2008)
