Parallel Lives

According to the Greek left newspaper Avgi of Sunday July 8, 2012, ¹ in the month of June 354 Greeks tried to take their lives; 50 of those were successful. Over the last two years suicides in Europe have increased exponentially. Povoledo and Carvajal of the New York Times ² report that despite the lack of full statistics from certain European countries it can still be stipulated that there is an increase in the rate of attempted and successful suicides in countries which have been affected by the economic downturn and the austerity measures. These statistics are higher in countries that have been affected the worse; Greece, Italy, Ireland. More specifically they report:

In Greece, the suicide rate among men increased more than 24 percent from 2007 to 2009, government statistics show. In Ireland during the same period, suicides among men rose more than 16 percent. In Italy, suicides motivated by economic difficulties have increased 52 percent, to 187 in 2010 – the most recent year for which statistics were available – from 123 in 2005. ³

Regardless of the absolute accuracy of the statistics or, its particular emphasis on male suicides we can undoubtedly say that the global financial crisis, which became more visible on the shores of the 21st century in September 2008, has brought about an increase in suffering and deaths from suicides to Europe. The suicide toll was indiscriminate of age, race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation; small-scale entrepreneurs, single mothers, young graduates, pensioners to mention just a few of the reported cases that allow us to form a less skeletal and more biographical image to those that have attempted to take their lives.

Michel Foucault in “The Simplest of Pleasures” ⁴ dedicates two pages and some lines on suicide. This small essay aims at understanding suicide as a fine art, focussing therefore on the techniques of suicide, the thoughtful selection of place, the instruments that will enable one to exalt from life and at the same time is critical of those that either try to understand the psychological profile of those that commit suicide or call for the moral and legal recognition of suicide. Such discourse he writes is both uninteresting and boring to him. ⁵ To this effect in the fourth paragraph before the end of this essay Foucault writes:

Some advice to the lovers of humanity. If you really want to see a decrease in the number of suicides, support only those suicides which are committed with forethought, quietly and without wavering. Suicide must not be left to unhappy people who might bungle it or make a mess of it. In any case there are lot’s fewer happy than unhappy people. It’s always struck me as strange that people say that death is nothing to worry about, because between life and nothingness death is nothing but a border. ⁶

The ‘‘Simplest of Pleasures” which was published on April 1, 1979 in La Gai Peid ⁷ begins its reflections by referring to certain psychological studies that allay homosexuality to suicide tendencies. To quote Foucault the study reports: ‘‘Homosexuals often commit suicide.’’ ⁸ The essay was written in response to such psychological studies. Such psychological studies and the discourses that they produce as Foucault tells us, imply that homosexuals take their lives because they are unable to enjoy heterosexuality. In problematizing this discourse and the connections that psychological research in the late 1970s between homosexuality and suicide Foucault encourages us and this not because he is an advocate of suicide, to read these acts as the only moment whereby one can exalt from the oppressive governmentality of our western neo-liberal world:

I believe that we’re witnessing in these times a “suicide spiral” because many people are so depressed at the thought of all these nasty things that are forced on someone who’s aspiring to suicide (things including the police, the ambulance, the elevator man, the autopsy and what not), that many prefer to commit suicide rather than continue to think about it all. ⁹

One chooses death over and above the thought of the totalizing government of life. And thus, we can read these suicides as acts of both self-annihilation and release, as moments akin, as he writes to the pleasure of releasing one-self from all stereotypes – something that happens when one has anonymous sex in Japanese love hotels. ¹⁰

This sense of having done with the neo-liberal governmentality and its effects – the un-bearable thought of not being able to fetch for oneself in a dignified way (searching in a bin for his sustenance) – was echoed in the stoic suicide letter left behind by the 77-year-old Greek ex-pharmacist and pensioner who committed suicide in Athens’s Syntagma square on April 4, 2012:

“The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma Square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.” (Source: The Athens News) ¹¹

The biography of the effects that the financial crisis had on people’s lives is one of suicide, of withdrawing from thinking about how financial and state apparatuses control in totality our lives, of withdrawing from engaging with how a galvanized neoliberalism, capitalism and governmental sovereignty have created our conditions for apnoea. This may be not the only biography that we can give about the effects of this financial crisis. Indeed there have been many biographies. Most of them have focused on the uprisings of people all over the world (Tunisia, Egypt, the Indignatos in Spain, Ireland and Greece, the student protests in London and the Riots in London in August 2011, strikes all over the globe, and the Occupy movement starting in Wall Street on September 17, 2011) or, on the police brutality and policing mentality that has been and is still being exhibited all over the world whenever the status quo (democratic or otherwise) is being contested; most accounts we can say have focused on what appear to be the affirmative effects of this financial crisis ¹² ; the rising of the people.

Most recently, for example, the philosopher Alain Badiou in The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings ¹³ argues that today we witness globally the ‘‘rebirth of History’’ ¹⁴ or a demand for a brand new social ‘‘contract’’ (‘‘those that indicate the possibility of a new situation in the history of politics’’ ¹⁵ ). This claim is evidenced upon the uprisings that have taken place globally over the last two years. He then continues to provide us with a tripartite categorization of the uprisings. He suggests that they can be categorized into: a) immediate riot (those uprisings like the London riots of August 2011). Such uprisings have more often been headed by youth ¹⁶ ; they are local ¹⁷ ; they could be contagious (imitated in other areas) ¹⁸ ; we cannot clearly identify whether they are political (are intentionally making a political demand) or they are acting out a purposeless rage. ¹⁹ b) Latent riots (those uprisings which accordingly express the dissatisfaction of the people with the provisions of Western Democracy). Actions that fall within this category are strikes, ²⁰ blockades by farmers and industrial workers ²¹ and occupations of schools, factories etc. ²² For Badiou this type of uprising ‘‘… attests to the fact that circumstances can extract from our apathy an unforeseeable life beyond our lethal ‘democracies’.’’ ²³ And c) Historical riots are riots that move from the latent stage of latent riots (which accordingly are considered to be less political ²⁴ ) to ‘‘a pre-political riot.’’ ²⁵ For this category Badiou chooses the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings. What makes these riots Historical as opposed to latent riots (apart from the fact that they move us always according to Badiou into a new politics), lays precisely in their ability to transform their actions; the combative and localized actions (skirmishes with the police or localized assemblies) into actions that get centralized in a space (Tahir square in the case of Egypt) ²⁶ and operate discussions in a peaceful and deliberative manner ²⁷ ; they unify people (Christian, Muslim, men, women, youth, workers and unemployed) without losing the plurality of voices ²⁸ ; and they manage to utter a common demand: the outing of a ruler for example, in Egypt it was manifested by the demand to out the Mubarak regime and what it symbolized. ²⁹

Reading Badiou we may be forgiven if we begin to believe that the world is currently transforming, or has the potential to morph into something else, something more communal or communist or at least that it has not remained apathetic to the assaults of neoliberalism. Indeed it will be preferable if we did try to understand our contemporary environment through the prism of optimism and enthusiasm that these uprisings have emitted. In my eyes Badiou’s analysis, despite its thoughtfulness raises more questions than answers and while the production of more questions is always welcomed it may be misleading if the tonality of the writing and the propositions made, as in the case of this book by Badiou, are represented as some kind of total truth. I deal with these un-answered points in the next paragraph but here are some of the questions that this book left answered for me. Why do we need to categorize uprisings? Isn’t such categorization superimposed and artificial? Why for example latent riots just symbolize an antagonism with democracy? Why aren’t strikers and occupiers etc., not demanding the impossible, that is the complete transformation of our Western and dominant Capitalist logic? How does Badiou account for those that do not rise, and are not just the 1% but rather continue to go about their everyday lives as if there is not fiscal crisis?

Writings like that of Badiou, that attempt to provide a theoretical account of the present (and do not just try to document it) I contend remain at best speculative and at worse short-sighted. While there is nothing wrong with being speculative, indeed we can do nothing but speculate about our present, to view at our present, we must also be careful of making claims that attest to a universal truth, as Badiou’s account does. Giorgio Agamben reminded in his essay “What is The Contemporary?” ³⁰ that a contemporary (a very rare figure) is one that notices the darkness of his/her times and simultaneously apprehends a light (an opening) through this darkness; a light (an opening) that both approaches us but that also distances itself from us. Put otherwise the contemporary is the one that is in between the ‘‘not yet’’ and the ‘‘no more.’’ If we are to take Agamben’s analysis of the contemporary seriously, then an attempt of a contemporary account may not just look at the openings, the flashing light, the uprisings just as a sign of the transformation that is about to take place in our horizon. Such account of the present, of the contemporary, and I would suggest Badiou’s accounts falls into this category is short-sighted, and I mean this literally, it looks at the darkness of our times too quickly (of course he accounts for the catastrophic neoliberal logic) ³¹ and only to be utilized as spring-board for organizing the ‘‘light’’ that uprisings emanate for our future. This limits any speculation of the contemporary, or it erases from its horizon, the light that moves away from us, those lives that move away from our horizon, that kill themselves – commit suicide. From Antigone Claim ³² to Frames of War ³³ Judith Butler urges us not to ignore who counts as life in the public domain, how this counting comes about, and how we can begin to undo the accounts that keep erasing from our horizon certain lives; homosexuals, refugees, prisoners of war, the Palestinians, non-combatants that die every day as a result of international interventions in their countries. Butler’s urge is not gratuitous. If we are to account for the contemporary and our times we need to account also for those acts that do not appear in the public domain, those glimpses of light that move away from our horizon of visibility, that are not taken as political manifestations but rather are locked into a room that we have learnt to call private.

I began this article by focusing on the increased toll of attempted and actualized suicides. On March 26, 2011 a TUC demonstration took place in London against the UK government’s public sector cuts which I participated in along with 500,000 other workers. They have been parallel to the demonstration actions that were instigated by various groups around disparate sites in central London. These parallel actions incidentally varied from the occupation of Fortnum & Mason by the UK Uncut (a rhizomatically organized group which was formed to publicize and politicize the economic inequalities that the austerity measures were introducing to the vulnerable classes and the benefits that the rich classes were enjoying from tax evasion) to damage of property that symbolized greedy capitalism (i.e., paint thrown on Top Shop – a UK high street clothing chain). I was a witness to some of these actions. While watching the various actions I noticed that despite the mayhem that these actions were producing in the most busy shopping streets of central London (Oxford Street, Regents Street, Bond Street) there were passer-byes who were going about their everyday business, mainly shopping and could not understand why the demonstrators and more radical activists were complaining. I witnessed a woman and her daughter whispering to each other, ‘‘I don’t understand why they are protesting.’’ When Occupy Wall Street made popular the slogan we are the 99%, a slogan that was meant to empower us and scandalize the 1% by pointing to the un-even distribution of economic power, I kept thinking about those shoppers in Oxford Street last March. I kept asking myself to what extent are we the 99%?

I find Foucault’s account of suicide, as the act whereby one frees one-self from all stereotypes as a way of both accounting for those lives that are left aside from the narratives of the effects of our contemporary financial crises and of enabling us to understand the political terrain of the contemporary a bit better. Foucault’s account of suicide enables us to understand why there are more than the 1% that are not protesting. What I am about to suggest is merely speculative, another way of viewing the story of the ‘‘not yet’’ and ‘‘no more’’ (contemporary). So how can Foucault help us then understand our present better? If suicides signify freeing oneself from stereotypes, if the person that takes his/her own life is refusing to think of the logic of neoliberalism ³⁴ how can we relate both to the uprisings that we are witnessing to the question or problematic of why are a great number of the people not rising and more importantly can’t understand why ‘‘we’’ are protesting?

Here is what I suggest. Riots, strikes, occupations of factories, squares, universities etc, ‘‘revolutions,’’ may be understood as a sequence of acts that have at their core an expression of freeing oneself from all stereotypes, of the stereotype of being for example a dutiful daughter, a teenage shopper, a worker, just a man or woman of faith, a good gay subject. Suicide, riots and revolutions are in this respect a variation of the manifestation of the aforementioned expression. To be clear, this is very different from Rancière’s understanding dissent and politics. Rancière suggests that such uprisings are:

… the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself. Political demonstration makes visible that which had no reason to be seen; it places one world in another – for instance, the world where the factory is a public space in that where it is considered private, the world where workers speak, and speak about community, in that where their voices are mere cries of expressing pain. ³⁵

For Rancière these demonstrations may merge the private and the public, make visible the political voices of those that previously have thought to have none, but there is no suggestion in his writing that such acts, demonstrations, riots, etc., express the desire or the actual freeing one from all stereotypes. In a workers’ demonstration, for example, one will always remain a worker though what he or she will make visible is that he or she is not just a worker, alienated by their labor, he or she is also a political subject, able to govern the domain of the public like any professional politician. Here I am suggesting that the crucial distinction between those that rise and those that do not (and they are not just the 1% that the Occupy movement declared), could be the distinction between wanting to annihilate oneself from all stereotypes, from stereotypes that are at the very heart of this aggressive form of capitalism that is eating out the possibility of any pleasure.

“The Simplest of Pleasures” enables us to see this distinction. It enables us to see that what may be at the heart of our discontent with our contemporary may be simply a discontent with the accelerated branding and stereotyping of who we are and what we can do. Looking into the dark effects of this financial crisis (suicide) we can slowly begin to see why so many (not just the 1%), even us, even me, continue living despite the catastrophic consequences of this 21st century fiscal crisis; it is simple, we are unable to give up to free ourselves from the attachment to our stereotypes. Until this attachment to stereotypes lives the current neoliberal system may survive. Until we are able to repetitively live the ‘‘simplest of pleasures,’’ we may not be able to talk of a rebirth of History. I may be wrong but as Auden puts it, ‘‘If I could tell you I would let you know.’’ ³⁶