Marina Grzinic: Introduction to the panel “The List”

A)

Histories of the world (that seems to be without a world, as reference to Alain Badiou “worldless world”) cannot be read as an excess, or as an error or a mistake to be evacuated as soon as possible. It’s a paradox: developing such histories means today to link them to new media technology, and it is becoming obvious that what was very local has to be connected to global migration, to exclusion of bodies, – to migratory transitional bodies that are really push to the edge of society. If we are interested in what democracy is, in what are the possibilities of really radically rethinking the perspectives of society – if it’s possible to draw a society that is not just a neoliberal economic agreement but a society that can develop a community in which social questions matter and in which social alliances are important, we have to make a turn to real histories. This means that in relation to new media and technology, from Internet on, it became obvious that histories of practices like feminism, like underground, like radicalized theory have to be re-evaluated. It is necessary to substitute the discourse of identity with an analysis of ideology and reflect about contemporary art and culture in regards to biopolitics, capital, class struggle, as well as in regard with new institutional, theoretical, and economical forms of (in) direct expropriation, enslavement and colonization. If we are not to take such a path, then the proclaimed politics will remain justanever-ending play of empty signs. 

I will make recourse to Badiou’s logics of the world to develop another logistics that is that of contemporary Europe, and to describe a possible paradigm of what can be termed as contemporary politics of (anti)agency in the global world. My thesis is that capitalism not only produce different worlds and modes of lives, but as well cultural and artistic paradigms through which it is possible to say that wars between different worlds (that is as well presented as the “worldless” world) take place on the level of aesthetic, through specific concepts that hegemonize the sphere of art and culture, imposing today a certain way of political (anti)agency, of a status quo, that has to be precisely defined.  In 2007 it is a co-interdependency   established between anxiety, superego and the paradigm of the snob. A snobbish gesture reigns, that means a focus is on a certain form of an empty engagement without a real focus on any kind of content. Maybe “The List” is a platform for such a dead list CONTENT that asks for our radical agency, fighting the prevalent snobbish formalistic emptiness.

In short, what we see in the present moment is, making reference to David Harvey,   a deliberate project to restore upper-class power, through imposing structural mechanisms of neoliberal governance and of uneven world geographical and economical development.

What is taking place I would like to define as a transition from the politics of memory to the memory of that which used to be a political act.Or if, I chose to radicalize this statement, I can ask: What defines global capitalism and neoliberal politics today?  The answer is the evacuation of the political with processes not only of confusion and disappearing of borders and precise positions, but with an escalation (using the precise military term of the word) of abstractions, evacuations, empty formalization of protocols of performative politics.  It is a war going on, not only for oil, but for the “world(-less) world,” which  can only be less, as Suely Rolnik argued, an ever-expanding territory.

It is possible to state today, after the last events regarding the enlargement of the Schengen zone to be applied as well to the new 10 states of EU, implementation that was so shamefully postponed in the not specified future, that Europe does not exist as a relationship! It exists only as antagonism! In 2007 the EU allows full  mobility of goods, but NOT of people, at least not from these ten new states from the former Eastern European context. That “Europe does not exist as relationship,”  but only as an antagonism is  CONFIRMED by all the other former Eastern European states that will be left “for ever” at the borders of EU!

What is the specific history of this new Europe?  What can we learn from this history? We can learn not to think about this history as individual identity politics, but as something that can produce radical political concepts of  democracy looking historically. Capital emancipates unbelievably. It’s changing clothes, the way of behaving, if we just think of the names given to it  in the time we are living in: social capital, inventive capital, the capital that has a special social attitude, the capital that is emancipated in relation to culture etc. These names show the unbelievable flexibility of capital in coping with time.

Again, what defines global capitalism and neoliberal politics today?  The evacuation of the political. Everything is transferred to art and culture, to some kind of politics of moral, ethics and in the last instance it seems that it is about social help. This is how political questions of the world not only in art and culture but also in society are removed. It’s almost impossible to do something relevant today in the social and political space of  Europe and the world because of  fierce censorship through funding etc. installed and  constantly reproduced  relations of hierarchy, economical and structural  power’s interdependence that demands apolitical projects and (fake) morality. Just to point clearly in this respect, that  the project “The List” did not get funds from any Dutch institution, but from an American one!

Moreover,  the  public space is disappearing and private institutions and multinationals that have money are those who articulate, put in balance, sort public needs, histories and commons.  It is about the allocation of capital. Instead of identity politics it is important to analyze the ways we are attached/subjugated  to structures of institutional and economical power.

Therefore the only possibility is in the opening of the history of  Europe to those questions that was not until now part of  “the agenda,” from migration to inclusion and exclusion,  analyzing politically contemporary  strategies of biopolitics and the  allocation of capital and finance. France is an excellent example of contemporary biopolitics, all these so-called immigrants who as a second generation born in France was supposedly included, was in fact excluded precisely through a fake inclusion.!

 The regime of the EU – its laws, acts of trading, allocating, distributing and investing capital, structural funds, etc., imposed upon all the members of the EU, especially onto its new members (through a meticulous system of equality and inequality) – is not only regulating the mobility of migrants and the politics towards asylum seekers, but also regulating strategies of the labor market and the precarious conditions of labor, not to mention the uneven economical development. It would be wrong to think that all of these protocols have nothing to do with art and culture, and nothing to do with freedom of expression and creativity. They are in fact strongly conditioning the field of art and culture, and the ways in which we organize our lives, the ways we perceive and write history/and not histories.

B)

The Frassanito Network (Serhat Karakayali, Sandro Mezzadra, Vassilis Tsianos, Manuela Bojadzijev, and Thomas Atzert) provides with an important redefinition  of what is racism and how to think about neoracism today. The difference matters and as well to understand the line of demarcation between them: “What role does racism play in Europe today? It is necessary to draw a line between contemporary racism and classical racism. The current configuration of racism has been an anti-immigrant racism. Of course we find different features and traditions in the various European states. But they all, more or less, are based on two ideological schemes: the colonial and the anti-Semitic. This anti-immigrant racism, also known as neoracism, is far more flexible than traditional racism, which is based on absolute categories of race and segregation. Through neoracism, ethnic groups are being gradually differentiated and hierarchized in everyday practices and discourses. Far from working purely on culturalist grounds, neoracism shifts between biological and cultural patterns of explanation, ascriptions, and stigmatizations. Superiority and inferiority, inclusion and exclusion are being correlated with cultural norms and then biologically essentialized, or  vice versa. In this sense, any configuration of racism in history is a projective conception that attempts to explain social differences, social hierarchies, and domination. These “explanations” are inscribed in everyday practices or in state regulations on populations. In the case of anti-Islamism, the colonial and the anti-Semitic scheme are perfectly combined: here, notions of racist superiority are superimposed on cultural and religious rivalries. Whilst Islam has historically been Europe’s external enemy, Jews have represented its internal foe. In both cases, the conjunction of religion and citizenship helped to draw the line between inclusion and exclusion.”

If we are ready to take an even more profound look in what was just stated we are in a situation in which instead of dealing with the triadic form of the national state-imperialism-modernity (where imperialism was an extension of the sovereign power of the nation states in Europe, beyond their borders), we have to take into consideration the duality between the Empire and postmodernity.  This new historical formation, insist Hardt and Negri, with reference to Foucault (taking his ideas on the passage of the society of punishment to the society of control) and especially to Deleuze and Guattari (taking their view of biopolitics as the production of social beings), shows a high level of effective mobility of  power that relies today more than ever on techniques and paradoxical coherency of procedures of social control.  In short, the Empire (the First Capitalist World)  is not perceived only through economical moments, but even more so through institutional and organizational paradigms.  This flexibility allows the “imperial machine” to function for certain in a horizontal way, as a systematic structure, as well as hierarchically, as a regime of  “production of identity,” instead of differences today  we get processes of abstraction and evacuation.

A clarification: the Schengen agreement, which was first signed as an economic act of regulation in Western Europe in the mid-1980s, became in the 1990s a European Community act of severe regulation focusing on how to stop immigration, how to stop movements of “aliens,” how to regulate the visa application process, crossing borders, the seeking of political asylum, etc. In mid-September 2000 the representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, complained that if it is a process of immigration to be allowed in (Western) Europe, then it must be controlled and selected, i.e., cleansed of Muslim immigrants.

C)

To understand both the way racism changes over the course of history and the way it constitutes the subjects of the struggles against racism, I can make recourse again  to Frassanito Network (Serhat Karakayali, Sandro Mezzadra, Vassilis Tsianos, Manuela Bojadzijev, and Thomas Atzert)  and their concept of the autonomy of migration “that does not ignore the misery and the conditions of migration, but wants to open new possibilites to fight racism. These struggles imply a certain concept of autonomy, although not in the traditional, overt sense. The autonomy of migration is not intended to imply the sovereignty of migrants, but rather that migrants are not simply objects of state control – that migrants can defy controls and resist racist discrimination. The autonomy of migration represents the rather complicated fact that migration struggles constitute a specific level of the political. Autonomy is thus not a narrative about a new revolutionary subject called the migrant, but instead tries to manage all the contradictions related to racism and migration.”  

This is precisely in what I and we are interested, to form an agency, to shape  politics, to develop a platform of articulation  and change of the the Fortress of Europe and of the global capitalist system that produces today  a long list of dead bodies.

Dr. Marina Grzinic is researcher at the Institute of Philosophy ZRC-SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia and Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.