Common Space by Stavros Stavrides

Author:Stavros Stavrides
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2016-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Occupied squares, societies in movement

A legitimacy crisis?

We can’t yet agree even on what name should be given to a series of phenomena that erupted almost unexpectedly throughout the world from 2011 and on. Was it an occupied squares movement, a worldwide set of collective acts of civil disobedience, a series of consecutive uprisings against undemocratic regimes or simply mass mobilizations against unjust economic policies? Maybe it is too early to try to distil out of these phenomena a common cause or common aspirations. It is important, however, to see them both as a result and as an aspect of a socio-economic crisis that is sweeping the capitalist world. What these phenomena clearly show is that capitalism has lost the power to promise a better future for all. And this happened exactly when ruling elites thought they had managed to reach the heavens of the absolute capitalist utopia: the heavens in which money begets money without any interference of often disobedient and unpredictable real people as well of always-problematic production procedures. The arrogance and power of bankers and stockbrokers is symptomatic of such a paroxysmal utopianism.

‘Those below’ have to be reintegrated into a system which, caught in its own paroxysmal utopia, thought it could do without them. As so many social eruptions and statistics show, people are losing their faith in a system which presents itself misleadingly as a mechanism of potential wealth distribution to which they expect to have access.

Collective disappointment, either explicitly expressed in riots or implicitly expressed in solitary depression, poses new problems of governability: it seems that two crucial tasks are laid before this necessary ‘return to politics’ for the governing elites. The first is to ensure that people continue to be defined by social bonds which constitute individuals as economic subjects, as subjects whose behaviour and motives can be analysed, channelled, predicted upon and, ultimately, controlled by the use of economic parameters and measures only. The second task is to ensure that people continue to act and dream without any form of connectedness and coordination with others. Collective actions and aspirations, especially those that produce common spaces, are to be blocked.

In a period of crisis these two priorities in population governance aim at producing individuals who share with others only fear.5 Fear about everything that keeps on destabilizing their life conditions and plans. At the same time, each one alone has to believe that he or she ‘will make it’. And that can possibly happen only at the expense of any other’s opportunity to make it too.

Cracks and ruptures manifest themselves, often violently, in the ambitious yet precarious edifice of this governing model. Outraged and rebellious people enter again the field of politics and acquire visibility and power to transform implemented policies. And out of these collective acts, public space acquires new meaning. It is as if people reclaim space as a locus of dissident acts, a locus separated from the dominant mediatic space of simulated participation. It is as if people explicitly or implicitly redefine the meaning of space sharing and of publicness.

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