Category Archives: Greece

Waiting for Teargas/ Exit the Ghost.

Posted on by

Poet–How goes the world?

 

Painter–It wears, sir, as it grows

Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, I i.

Exit the ghost of Europe, pursued by teargas. A year after the self-styled “father of Egypt” was driven out, the Greek revolt saw the return of the spectre of global justice– and it has been driven offstage with teargas.

Teargassed woman by the Bank of Athens #12fgr

It has been known for some time that, in the words of Jacques Derrida, “haunting would mark the very existence of Europe,” a place designated by the “joining” of the ghost of Hamlet’s father and the spectre of Communism. Speaking in 1993, in response to the question “Whither Marxism,” Derrida appropriated Hamlet: “the time is out of joint.” As we ask, too insistently, “whither Occupy?” it might be good to linger a while in the place of the revenant. In that disjointed time we wait:

everything begins by the apparition of a specter. More precisely by the waiting for this apparition.

Allan Sekula, Waiting for Teargas

In 1999, the photographer Allan Sekula was in Seattle, covering the global justice demonstrations that shut down the G20. He was at 16 Beaver last night revisiting the project, with its haunting title: Waiting for Teargas. At once this evokes Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot I have already had cause to remember, and Walter Benjamin’s sense that the most modern place of all is the waiting room. Sekula recalls:

In photographing the Seattle demonstrations my working idea was to move with the flow of protest, from dawn to 3 a.m. if need be, taking in the lulls, the waiting and the margin of events. The rule of thumb for this sort of anti-journalism: no flash, no telephoto lens, no gas mask, no auto-focus, no press pass and no pressure to grab at all costs the one defining image of dramatic violence.

[my emphasis]

Waiting for Teargas

The waiting is a space in-between, a time out of joint. There’s so much happening and yet so little action in this photograph. A protestor displays the US flag at the heart of a miniature recreation of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, the legendary Earthwork of the 1970s. The gesture reminds us at once of the role played by forest activists and tree sitters in the Seattle protests, those who were used to direct action to defend the old-growth Pacific Northwest; and the soundtrack that Sekula reminds us was to come, Jimi Hendrix’s version of the national anthem, played over someone’s boom box, as the tear gas blew. Notice that the shop in the top right is actually called “Spray King.” And on the horizon, the cops, waiting.

In Athens yesterday, the tear gas blew into the Greek parliament from Syntagma (Constitution) Square. The Prime Minister Papademos demanded the sacrifice of Abraham, meaning that the son must die for the father. Or rather it was Papa Demos, the father of the people/demos, claiming the place of the sovereign, the place of the specter, even as he was tear gassed:

for the king occupies this place, here the place of the father, whether he keeps it, takes it or usurps it

(Derrida)

This new hauntology reconfigures all hitherto existing versions of Hamlet. Now we can understand that Hamlet tear gassed his father all along, in resistance to patriarchy:

The ghost of Hamlet's father from Olivier's 1948 film

It avails him little. By the play’s end, he has captured the conscience of the King but in so doing suicides himself and his friends, for patriarchal vengeance is nuclear. The Treaty has been signed: but it now awaits the approval of the German Bundestag. For in saving itself, providing for its own autoimmunity, Europe has ended. It is now an occupation.

So it is fitting that we ask the question: where does a bankrupt nation like Greece get the money for so much tear gas? And find that the answer is: Israel.

Israeli tear gas: Made in the USA

Or, to be more specific: US-made tear gas, delivered to Israel and then re-exported to Greece. It comes from a plant in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, manufactured by a company called Combined Tactical Systems-CSI. The company flies US and Israeli flags outside its buildings, just in case you missed the point. Occupy activists have already been protesting the use of this product in Palestine, and discovered that $1.85 million of tear gas was paid for by the federal government and delivered to Israel. No doubt it was easy enough to spare the 4600 units requested by Greece.

There were many spectres in the square yesterday. The present is out of joint.

The present is what passes, the present comes to pass, it lingers in this transitory passage, in the coming-and-going, between what goes and what comes, in the middle of what leaves and what arrives.

 

Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa–das Gespenst des Kommunismus.

Take a deep breath.

 

Greece, Slavery and the General Strike

Posted on by

Today the Greek parliament met to approve the deliberately humiliating terms of the German-backed bond rescue plan (aka the bailout). In the streets, it is more precisely defined as slavery. The response is, as it has long been, to organize the general strike. For globalized neo-liberalism this is the moment to bring an “end” to 2011, a year after their man in Egypt, Mubarak, had to step down.

Estimates suggest 50,000 people in the street in Athens, perhaps as many as 100,000 with thousands more elsewhere, and many buildings occupied. The inevitable riot police and tear gas have been deployed. Exarchia, the radical district resounded to explosions. As fires burned, allegations circulated that the police had started them or ignored them. (Watch on Livestream here.)

Athens 2 12 12

The scenes were extraordinary–Starbucks on fire, smoke bombs, riot police–with the word “chaos” on every Greek website.

General Strike in Greece

The troika-installed Prime Minister Papademos–whose name seems to evoke a patriarchal “father of the people”–pushed the market line about debt refusal:

It would create conditions of uncontrolled economic chaos and social explosion. The country would be drawn into a vortex of recession, instability, unemployment and protracted misery.

Such remarks fly in the face of existing reality, in which those are already the prevailing conditions. Official unemployment exceeds 20%. Reports have suggested people returning to family farms in the countryside and islands from the cities in order to survive. The Church feeds 250,000 people a day in a country of 11 million people. Homelessness has increased by 25% (although the absolute numbers are low by U. S. standards. The official EU statistics agency Eurostat reports that one-third of the country is living in poverty. And yet Papademos called for more “sacrifice.”

Nonetheless, even this is not enough for the one percent: “The promises from Greece aren’t enough for us any more,” the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, said in an interview published in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. When the vote is passed, the minimum wage will be cut by over 20%, pensions will be reduced and the already ruined state will cut back still further. The graffiti in the streets calls this slavery.

"We Should Not Live as Slaves"

“We should not live as slaves,” it reads [Na men zesoume san douloi]. Evocatively, the word “doulos” is used for “slave,” the same term used by Aristotle in his Politics to approve the institution of slavery. His meditation on slavery is in fact one of governance, which manifests itself as the necessity of dominance. I’m going to quote at some length because it is the inability to “reason” according the “logic” of the markets that is being used to justify Greek slavery today. It’s also important to read this to realize how thoroughgoing and long-lasting the Western commitment to slavery has been.It is also a passage that contains within it so many of today’s critical concerns from the human/nonhuman, to the “soul at work” (Bifo), governmentality, Rancière’s division of the sensible, and the persistence of slavery. Let us note this is not a coincidence:

for that some should govern, and others be governed, is not only necessary but useful, and from the hour of their birth some are marked out for those purposes, and others for the other, and there are many species of both sorts….Those men therefore who are as much inferior to others as the body is to the soul, are to be thus disposed of, as the proper use of them is their bodies, in which their excellence consists; … they are slaves by nature, and it is advantageous to them to be always under government. He then is by nature formed a slave who is qualified to become the chattel of another person, and on that account is so, and who has just reason enough to know that there is such a faculty, without being indued with the use of it; for other animals have no perception of reason, but are entirely guided by appetite, and indeed they vary very little in their use from each other; for the advantage which we receive, both from slaves and tame animals, arises from their bodily strength administering to our necessities; for it is the intention of nature to make the bodies of slaves and freemen different from each other {1254b-1255a}

The present rhetoric of the “lazy” Greeks, shiftlessly avoiding tax payments and demanding state support defines people driven entirely by appetite. They must therefore become the chattel of the troika, despite the likelihood that the cuts will still worsen the economy and necessitate yet more support for the external bond markets. What matters is that the Greeks be made an example: “Can’t pay! Won’t pay!” is reworked into “Can’t pay? Become a slave.”

In Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois insisted that the enslaved had ended chattel slavery themselves by mass migration from South to North at the beginning of the Civil War, long before the Emancipation Proclamation:

This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps half a million people.

The result of the strike was an abolition democracy, whose participatory process centered on education and the capacity to be self-sustaining. The measures have passed. The occupations have been ended. It’s up to us to keep this present, to remain in the moment, to be present.