Neoliberalism, Crisis, and Transformative Experience in the Syntagma Square

Spatializing Radical Political Imaginaries: Neoliberalism, Crisis, and Transformative Experience in the Syntagma Square Occupation in Greece Dimitris Soudias, [email protected] Pre-Print of article published in Contention: https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/contention/8/1/cont080103.xml Abstract: This article seeks to make sense of why participants in square occupations point to the transformative character of their experience. Drawing from narrative research on the 2011 occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens, I argue that the transformative quality of the occupation lies in the spatialized emergence and practice of radical political imaginaries in these encampments, which signify a demarcation from and an alternative to the neo- liberalizing of everyday life in Greece. By scrutinizing the spatial demarcation between the “upper” and “lower” parts of the Syntagma Square occupation, one can think more carefully about the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the radical imagination. Keywords: Athens, austerity, Occupy, radical imagination, social movements, space “If you have not lived it, you cannot understand it,” Vasilis told me of his experience in the 2011 occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens. Back then, Greeks of all ages and across most political persuasions had set up a protest camp in the heart of the city. Lasting more than two months, the occupation contested the Greek government’s course of implementing the infamous austerity “measures” set out by the EC-ECB-IMF troika.1 Vasilis was not the only 1 participant to point at the transformative quality of the occupation experience. Many others drew from the arcane and metaphorical to portray what they had lived through in the square, describing Syntagma as a “magical space” not least because of the square’s “aura” or “spirit.” Partaking in the occupation was an inherently transformative experience, one that “changed” them, made them “wake up,” and become “politically mature.” Such accounts are not unique to Syntagma Square. From Gezi Park to Euromaidan, from Zuccotti Park to Tahrir Square, participants have emphasized a “special world” in which people are “unified” and “completely themselves” and where “different rules apply” (Ayata and Harders 2018; Bondarenko 2013; Schumann and Soudias 2013; Soudias 2018). This article seeks to make sense of why participants in such square occupations point to the transformative character of their experience. Reconsidering the latently functionalist relationship between individual participation and biographical “impact” in the fields of social movement studies and contentious politics (Fillieule and Neveu 2019; Giugni 2004; McAdam 1999; Vestergren et al. 2016), this article views the transformative experience of participation not through the lenses of psychologized individual behavior, but rather as the product of the social relationality of crisis, spatiality, and subjectivity. Conceiving of transformative experience as a dialectical process produced by the relationality of crises, subjectivity, and spatiality allows us to think of each of these concepts in a Bourdieusian manner as structured structures that are predisposed to act as structuring structures. Put differently, the reconciliation between structure and agency allows us to view the relationship between subjectivity and transformative experience as a dialectical process structuring and structured by the particularities of crisis and space that my interlocutors experience and practice. 2 Building on what I call an “abductive-situational analysis” (Clarke 2005; Tavory and Timmermans 2014) of the 2011 Syntagma Square occupation based on interviews with and observation of 29 participants,2 I argue that the transformative quality of the Syntagma Square occupation lies in the spatialized emergence and practice of radical political imaginaries in these encampments. First, this is because the extraordinary practice of occupying is an act against the ordering of the status quo vis-à-vis the neoliberalization of everyday life in Greece. And second, the social order within the occupation of the square offered a radical alternative to the status quo. With the costs of the crisis in Greece being socialized downward through wage cuts and tax hikes, and with institutional spaces for the expression of political disagreement virtually shut down, the country was hit by a wave of protests that began in February 2010 and started evolving soon thereafter. Although mostly organized by such groups as communist labor union organizers, the antiauthoritarian milieu, and members of the radical left (Kousis 2015; Psimitis 2011), people who had so far been barely or not at all exposed to street politics started to join these mobilizations against austerity. Among them were my interlocutors. Inscribed in a wider “movement of the piazzas” (Leontidou 2012) that unfolded in over 38 central squares in cities all over the country, the Syntagma Square occupation lay at the heart of the movement. Starting on 25 May and lasting until August, Syntagma represented the convergence of a socioeconomically and ideologically heterogeneous “multitude” animated by those directly hit by the economic crisis (Kaika and Karaliotas 2017; Katsambekis 2014; Sotirakopoulos and Sotiropoulos 2013) with previously existing groups of anarchist and radical leftist activists.3 3 This article seeks to theorize the conditions of possibility for the emergence of radical political imaginaries by investigating participants’ meaning-making practices with the Syntagma square occupation against the backdrop of crisis and austerity. At the heart of this approach lie crises and their inherently liminal quality. Because “it really does matter where the subject is” (Pile 2008: 214, emphasis in original) and because “we usually experience ourselves, and other things, in relation to places and spaces” (Malpas 1999: 10), this article argues that the spatial production of the Syntagma Square occupation cannot be seen separately from how participants signify crisis. The structuring quality of crisis produces the Syntagma Square occupation as a spatiality that is marked precisely by crisis’s antistructural capacity. As such, a spatial approach to the square occupation allows for an understanding of Syntagma as both a (structural) consequence of and an (antistructural) answer to the crisis in Greece. To make sense of the conditions for the emergence of radical political imaginaries in Syntagma, this article theorizes on crisis and its significations, before elaborating on their spatial manifestation within the square occupation. As early as May 2011, the square witnessed a profound demarcation regarding its territoriality. This spatially manifested cleavage was expressed by my interlocutors’ talk of the demarcation between the “upper” and the “lower” parts of square. Ever since May 2011, the upper part has been associated with nationalist and even fascist discourses (Bakola 2017; Goutsos and Polymenas 2014), while the lower square has been associated with discourses of political vision, organization, and assembly—discourses grounded in ecological, radical leftist, and antiauthoritarian ideas broadly conceived. Building on these narratives, I claim that this division is due to the “upper” part of the square being marked by a “regressive” signification of crisis—where the imagination of what is possible is reduced to what is 4 necessary—and the “lower part” being marked by a “progressive” signification of crisis. In a Bourdieusian sense, doxic (i.e., uncontested, unspoken, and prereflective) assumptions are raised to the level of discourse, where they can be radically reimagined. As normative expectations “slip out of alignment” (Crossley 2003: 47) with the actualities of space, individuals are shocked out of their habitual acceptance of taken-for-granted norms and into a more critical attitude. These processes enable what I refer to as the “unthought-of,” an experience that transcends normative expectations and allows for reevaluation of the previously doxic and tacitly internalized. On Capitalist Imaginaries and Situations of Crisis In everyday life, habitualized patterns of thought and action guide our conduct in a self- regulating manner, rendering everyday uncertainties and those in the future somewhat manageable. In neoliberal societies, conditions of uncertainty are systematically cultivated, in order to impose stress and precarity upon individuals so as to drive them into competition with one another (Bauman 2008; Dardot and Laval 2017; Davies 2014). Because everyday life is firmly entrenched in the status quo of capitalist social relations—steeped into what Pierre Bourdieu (2013) famously refers to as illusio—our normative expectations of the world around us are deeply affected by them. Here, the assumption of being able to compete for middle-class belonging has been key for the pertinence of neoliberalism, for that belonging signifies “a refuge from perpetual insecurity” (Haiven and Khasnabish 2014: 115–116). As a structuring force, the social imaginary of capitalism succeeded in accounting for the constitution of needs and desires, for the existence of tradition, myth, and modernity, for the orientation of institutional arrangements and social relations, and for our imagination of what is worth striving for (see Castoriadis 1998; Lefort 1986; Thompson 1982). 5 In Greece, this imaginary has been as clearly hegemonic as elsewhere. In times of crisis, however, the cogency of social imaginaries can be called into

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