Why do we have a general feeling of powerlessness?
Simon Critchley , 16 Apr 2012
The celebrated Anglo-Polish social theorist Zygmunt Bauman captures the mood of today with the following story:
Imagine you are on an airplane, up there in the sky. You could be
reading, drinking, sleeping, playing video games, anticipating a
romantic meeting or an arduous work schedule of meetings and talks, or
maybe a pleasant vacation... you know how it is on a plane.
Then a nice voice, a soft reassuring voice, a well-educated and
welcoming voice makes an announcement, but it’s a recorded message,
recorded some time ago, telling you that there is no one flying the
plane, the cockpit is completely empty. Flight attendants still mill
around with drinks, but you have to pay for them. You only have a credit
card and they only take cash. You begin to get thirsty and slightly
anxious. You start licking your lips in fear.
The announcement reassures you that there’s an automatic pilot, but
then you find out that its a rather old model and the batteries that
charge it risk running down before you land. But you might still land
safely.
Then there’s a second announcement. This time about the airport where
you’re meant to be landing. It’s bad news: the airport has not been
built yet; it is still in the planning stages, held up by various forms
of red tape, corrupt local planning departments, a series of general
strikes if it were a Greek airport. Indeed, it then emerges that the
application for the airport still hasn’t even been submitted to the
right department and meanwhile the lead construction company is being
prosecuted for unpaid taxes.
For Bauman, and I think he is right, this story is an image of our
age. It expresses our sense of fear, which is the fear of not being in
control.
The truth is we are not in control. But that’s not the worst of it.
We suspect, indeed we know, that no one is in control: no God, no
glorious leader, no benevolent dictator, nothing and no one. It’s even
worse than the fantasy behind the
Wizard of Oz and the
Emperor’s New Clothes.
There’s no wizard and no emperor. This is the source, I think, of the
massive fear and anxiety that we experience on a daily basis.
Our fear is scattered and diffused. It doesn’t have a specific
object. One moment, the object of fear could be a hurricane. The next,
it could be a tsunami or it could be the downsizing of your company, or
your wife could leave you or your boyfriend suddenly gets sick or your
pensions have disappeared. It could be that your house is robbed, car
stolen. You could be diagnosed with a fatal disease. We live with a
generalized sense of fear, a feeling that I am not in control and that
nothing and no one is in control either.
It is as if we are living in quicksand. We try to dig ourselves out
and we dig ourselves deeper. The more we try, the deeper we sink into
the sand, or, as they say here, into the shit &hellp; quickshit?
Why do we have this feeling of not being in control? Why can’t we
pinpoint the source of our fear? Why do we have a general feeling of
powerlessness?
One reason, not the only reason but one important reason, is the profound separation of politics and power.
Power is the ability to get things done. Politics is the means to get
those things done. The location of the union of power and politics was
once understood to be the nation state. This was never the complete
truth, particularly for colonized or subjugated peoples, and it was
certainly never the full truth of our always interconnected economic
life (in a sense there’s always been globalization). But for a period of
time in many of the countries of the world, the countries that most of
us are from, it was a reasonable expectation that the nation state was
the location of the unity of power and politics and this was how we
could get things done.
Democracy is the name for a political regime or
politeia
that believes that power lies with the people. Representative liberal
democracy on the Western model (and there are other models, as the last
year of Occupy has reminded us) is premised on the idea that we exercise
political power through the vote and that these votes would be
aggregated by parties, representatives would be elected, governments
would be formed, and these governments would have power to get things
done. (Personally, as an old Rousseauist, I never really had much faith
in representative government, but let’s leave that aside.)
Our belief was that if we worked politically for a certain group, on
the right or the left, then we could win an election, form a government,
and have the power to change things.
The fact is that today politics and power have fallen apart in
liberal democracy. They are separated, maybe even divorced. We know
this. We feel this viscerally, I would wager. And every day brings new
evidence that confirms this view.
Papandreou – remember him?
Former Prime Minister of Greece George Papandreou’s idea of a
referendum to the Greek people to ratify the new EU bailout proposals in
October of 2011 is a case in point. Although he handled the referendum
idea incompetently, it was a democratic gesture of an old-fashioned
kind. Merkel and her sidekick Sarko (who are the punitive super-egoic
Batman and Robin of modern Europe – Sarko is Robin and Merkel is the
Dark Knight) were, of course, appalled because they know that this
referendum idea is a deep misunderstanding of contemporary political
reality, where power has shifted elsewhere. The referent of power is not
the people and is not located in national governments. It is elsewhere:
with financial institutions or the European Central Bank. And these are
the institutions that European governments serve, not the people. How
could Papandreou be so naïve?
Well, Papandreou is now gone and we have an unelected government of
technocrats in Greece and the same thing in Italy. I agree with Habermas
on this point. Democracy at this time in history, even representative
liberal democracy, risks being no more than a word, a kind of
ideological birdsong. Power has evaporated into supranational spaces.
These are the spaces of finance, obviously, of trade, obviously, and
also information and information platforms, obviously. But these
supranational spaces are also those of drug trafficking, human
trafficking, illegal immigration, the many boats that cross the
Mediterranean, and so on.
We know this. And yet power still feels local. We feel English or
Greek or Tunisian, but power has migrated beyond local boundaries.
Sovereignty lies elsewhere. It is certainly not populist or
people-centered. Politics does not have power. Politics serves power. Whereas power is global or supranational, politics is still local and there is a gap between the two.
The casualty of this separation of politics and power is the State.
The state has become eviscerated, discredited, and its credit rating has
been slashed. This is obviously the case with the Greek state, but I
think it is only a slightly more extreme example of the situation in the
USA and elsewhere, in Britain say. The state is in a state.
So, what do we do?
To be honest, I don’t know. Philosophy is the “owl of Minerva” and it
always spreads its wings at dusk, when it is too late. But this
separation of power and politics, I think, throws light on a number of
phenomena. Let me mention three:
One, I had a conversation with my 19-year-old-son in a favorite
London pub last Saturday – the Lamb on Lamb’s Conduit Street. He cares
about the state we’re in and is really worried and really fears and to
some extent hopes that something big might happen. He sees what is
happening across the world and doesn’t know what to do. He is part of a
huge culture of disillusionment and disappointment among youth. (And if
there is one central issue that the last year of global uprisings has
raised, then it is that of youth. The question of youth is the question
of the future, and that future has disappeared. We who are no longer
young have to try and understand this and not simply adopt a patronizing
attitude toward youth). My son is disillusioned and doesn’t see what
good it would serve if he got involved. He feels powerless. I think this
is a general feeling of his generation.
Two, another option is to accept the description of things as they
appear to my son but then to do something, to take arms against a sea of
trouble to take politics back from the political class through
confrontation with the power of finance capital and the international
status quo. What is so inspiring about the various social movements that
we all too glibly call the Arab Spring, is their courageous
determination to reclaim autonomy and political self-determination. The
demands of the protesters in Tahrir Square and elsewhere are actually
very classical: they refuse to live in authoritarian dictatorships
propped up to serve interests of Western capital, megacorporations and
corrupt local elites. The people want to reclaim ownership of the means
of production, for example through the nationalization of major state
industries. The various movements in North Africa and the Middle East
aim at one thing, one ancient Greek concept: autonomy. They demand
collective ownership of the places where one lives, works, thinks, and
plays. This is the most classical and basic goal of politics.
Contemporary conflicts are conflicts about ownership, about occupation,
about the nature of property.
Three, the Occupy movement is fascinating from the standpoint of the
separation of politics and power and is particularly fascinating to the
student of Athenian democracy, with its focus on the
ekklesia,
the general assembly, and the boule or council. To be with these
protesters when the chant goes up: “This is what democracy looks like!”
is powerful, really powerful. What was equally powerful was the way in
which OWS conducted general assemblies peacefully, horizontally and
noncoercively. So, given the separation of politics and power, the
Occupy movement is trying to remake democracy, direct democracy, with a
mixture of the old – assembly, consensus,
autonomia and
freedom – and the new, like Twitter feeds and flashmob demonstrations
organized through cell phones. The Occupy movement has thrown up some
amazing things, such as the Bank of Ideas in Bishopsgate, London that
occupies a disused UBS bank building and is a kind of free university,
and the St Paul’s cathedral protest, which raises the deep historical
questions of the relation of Christianity to property and
inequality – and Paul had some pretty radical views on this question.
But in many ways the Occupy movement simply underlines the separation
between politics and power that I began with. We are maybe living
through 1848 redux, that year of international revolutions. But that
ended pretty badly. What we don’t know at this point is how these
different movements will develop.
What is hard to imagine, really hard to imagine is some sort of
possible articulation between Occupy and the Democratic Party in the
USA. I am reminded of a poster I saw at an Occupy: “Obama, please say
something.” Sure, he is going to co-opt the movement for the purposes of
liberal oligarchy, but that’s all.
The disaffection with normal politics particularly among the young is
vast and something else has taken shape, something at once exciting and
frightening. We could be in the early stages of a perfect storm.
Simon Critchley is a professor of philosophy at
the New School for Social Research in New York City. He has authored
over a dozen books including the celebrated Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance in which he argues for an ethically committed political anarchism.
Support + Share
Help us spread the word. Share it online with your friends or subscribe to the print edition.
No comments:
Post a Comment