From Affect to the Line of Flight: Mapping 15-M (part I of III)

Empire constitutes the ontological fabric in which all relations of power are woven together—political and economic relations as well as social and personal relations. Across this hybrid domain the biopolitical structure of being is where the internal structure of imperial constitution is revealed, because in the globality of biopower every fixed measure of value tends to be dissolved, and the imperial horizon of power is revealed finally to be a horizon outside measure.

Hardt and Negri, Empire 354

The ongoing financial crisis since 2008 and its social implications have come to bear upon Spanish residents in immeasurable, powerful ways that far exceed any thermometer for a given country’s economic downturn. In this light, the ratios and statistics of the housing crisis, unemployment, and the markets are but a quantified abstraction for their real lived effects—evident in demographic trends emerging from hardship, in everyday practices of communal and family living, in some cultural responses in film, literature, the arts, television. For, the crisis has pervaded most all spheres of life and indeed serves in part to structure them, indexed in changes to consumer habits and casual social exchanges, in the televised speech of politicians and public posts on social networks, in renewed vindications of nationalisms and even collective patterns of decision-making against great risk.

Here I set out to analyze how the first protests of 15-M, characterized by general outrage and indignation, formed the multitude through a constituent act to articulate demands and then operative working groups in Spain. This conjecture passes from the biopolitical field of social production (affect), to a mass demonstration (enunciation), and will require analysis of the social and political circumstance of the crisis which has continued to fuel mobilizations and motivate protesters to take action. (NB readers will note that here I refer to some conclusions from a separate section that hasn’t been posted yet, on Foucault’s notion of biopower and neoliberal practices of government.)

In what follows, I find that the circumstances of the crisis since 2008 have been articulated in powerful discursive formations on sacrifice, charity, excess, and criminality, to name a few. When deployed in the media, the workplace, and the rhetoric of politicians, these discursive formations carry the weight of a powerful paradigm of subordination in different spheres of life. Spanish residents are told time and again, directly or indirectly, that they have outlived their means irresponsibly, that demonstrations are not the solution, that the government’s policies are the only effective resolution to the crisis, among other statements that circulate in all spheres of life and as they do, acquire social cachet as truth. They become, in a sense, powerful tools of social conditioning to conserve the status quo. Nevertheless, as these imposed “truths” serve in part to legitimize the art of government for the governed, they also become fodder for demonstrators who read critically—and resist—the discourse of power behind them: “We are not goods in the hands of bankers,” “They don’t represent us,” “We are the alternative!” These constituent discursive formations are never static but are mimicked in this or that news source or online social network, are recited with difference in the context of specific social interactions, are spoken publicly in press conferences and thereby transform as the circumstances of the crisis create real, lived economic hardships and new social meanings. But is this enough to understand why demonstrators, called the indignados, came together for multiple reasons?

Indignation has become somewhat of a reductionist but necessary catchword that stands in for the plural reasons motivating protesters to take action. On the other hand, it appropriately names one intimately personal and yet shared response—or, outrage—to the crisis and the government’s policies and statements, presumably without the need to describe this response in greater detail. As I argued in the previous section, the use of “spontaneous” by protesters to describe their actions plays sincerely, though indirectly, on politicians’ fear of the incalculable multitude, which elected officials attempt to criminalize undemocratically. This relational field of indirect address (i.e., of a multitude that reads the discursive formations of politicians and their attempt to render the protesters’ actions criminal) demonstrates how indignation in this case is not a purely emotive or emotional reaction (i.e., “outrage”), but is necessarily rooted in the immediacy of critical response as the very basis for action. Were it not so, the demonstrations against police brutality in summer 2011 and ever since would not have mobilized massive numbers of protesters simply from indignation, but from an outrage produced at the same time as a critical response that underpins this reaction: that if the Spanish State is to call itself a democracy, police brutality against peaceful demonstrators should not be tolerated. When taking into account its mobilizing potential for action, affect is inextricably bound to the immediacy of critical readings to events and statements, and is thereby also intimately formed by contexts, experiences, and systems of thought that inform interpretation. Affect in my initial reading is the nexus of intensity for action and critical response that are bound together, arising at once, in the same way that one who views a video clip of a policeman beating an unarmed protester recognizes “that’s wrong,” without necessarily passing through the cognitive process to articulate that democratic ideals inform the immediacy of this response in this viewer’s specific context. Or, in the same way that one who hears an analyst on television argue that Spanish residents have outlived their economic means irresponsibly, which stirs an indignant response without thinking twice, “that’s simply not true, what about politicians’ squandering of public funds?” And yet, certainly not all viewers will respond similarly.

Therefore, as I explore in the context of Spain’s crisis, affect also bears the possibility for powerful discursive strategies to condition one’s reading, critical response, or possibility for action when taking into account its potential intensity to act upon individuals to conserve the status quo. In this sense, when developing my reading on the affective potential of the multitude hereafter, I refer to and depart from Brian Massumi’s definition of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of affect in A Thousand Plateaus in which affect describes the “ability to affect and be affected” into action or movement. “It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act.” If we read the practices of the indignados, the potential for affect to move one to act is not a prepersonal intensity, but arises instead from a specific sociopolitical context and from critical responses to this context by some-bodies affected to take action. In other words, indignation here is not a feeling or an emotive trigger, though it may produce feelings and emotions, nor is it purely pre-cognitive in character, but is inherently bound to a simultaneous interpretation that affects one to take action and allows one to be affected into action from the immediacy of thought. Thereby critical reaction is a necessary condition to understand how “indignation” and its many forms arise as an affective critical response for action, not only from specific social circumstances of economic hardship, but from the multitude’s plural readings, for example, of how politicians justify their adoption of economic policies against the interests of the multitude. Or, of how televised commentators attempt to recast citizens as irresponsible economic decision-makers, to name only two interpretations for now. In this light, my reading of affect is derived from the critical practices and responses of the indignados and thereby privileges the potential affective intensity for mobilization (e.g., demonstrations, actions, etc.) and common creative production (e.g., Camp Sol, initiatives from the popular assemblies, etc.). On the other hand, when taking into account its potential intensity to conserve the status quo, affect may be deployed from powerful discursive strategies as a tool for biopolitical conditioning, to which I now turn.

La crisis

From 2008 to 2011 the burden of the financial crisis, well underway, came to bear directly on residents in Spain with inseparable economic and social significance. The vast majority of Spain’s homeowners experienced a short-term spike in mortgage payments and then the devaluation of property value, marking the end of the so-called housing bubble and construction boom that had characterized the particular gravity of the financial crisis for Spain. Successive state interventions to rescue semipublic savings banks seemed not only to echo first news of a compounded crisis rippling out from the United States and the European financial economy, but of a greater crisis for business ethics and practices at large that favored the wealthy at the expense of the middle and working classes. For, the construction boom in Spain had produced abandoned or unfinished tourist destinations, ghost airports in small cities, and housing developments—the subject of artist Hans Haacke’s installation “Castles in the Air”—in exchanges benefitting contractors and local politicians at great costs to homeowners and public funds. Semipublic savings banks that had overestimated their possibilities for loan and investment required government intervention, whereas directors and their leadership teams received healthy severance packages with benefits. News of unethical and illegal practices from big business and the abuses of power by politicians in corruption scandals such as Malaya, Gürtel, or Pretoria, among countless others, served in part as the primer for growing distrust in big business, banks, and political privilege. Many of these figures’ apparent immunity from trial and conviction further deepened popular distrust in the judicial and political mechanisms that protected them.

During these years unemployment rates reached historical records and would continue to rise thereafter. Fearing that businesses would fold, the ruling Socialist party (PSOE) passed into law urgent labor reforms of a neoliberal stripe, which among other concessions allowed employers greater leeway to fire employees at less expense to companies. Underpinning these measures was the justification of an end—that of diminishing the state’s juridical role in guaranteeing job security, furthering the deregulation of the labor market as one speculative remedy to the crisis. Following the pretense of the government’s utilitarian decision, it was more advantageous for the economy to suffer a short-term rise in unemployment than to face the long-term consequences from companies forced out of business. And so the Socialist government advocated a law that would cut Spain’s expected losses by providing employers with greater freedoms to downsize. In September 2010 the labor unions Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) and Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) called for a national strike, denouncing reforms that would indeed contribute to precariousness for workers, corporate and manual laborers alike. That this scenario would repeat itself after May 2011 in a second general strike—against the Popular Party’s urgent reform that allowed companies to fire employees based on projected future losses—seemed to confirm the common assumption that politicians ignored massive demonstrations and labor actions altogether. In a parallel to Sergio Villar’s argument in La década sorprendente, if the Socialist administrations from the Transition era (1982-1996) had disappointed the political left by abandoning the party’s founding ideological principles in favor of neoliberal policies, then the PSOE’s navigation of the financial crisis proved to be an evocative reminder of recent history, both in the administration’s cutbacks to the social programs it championed and in the popular disenchantment this provoked.

During these years the Socialist government adopted a battery of neoliberal interventions in response to the crisis, which were pursued thereafter with sharpened severity by the conservative Popular Party (PP): cutbacks to social programs, tax reforms that favored the wealthy, bailouts of public funds for the banking sector, further deregulatory measures for the labor market, among other corrective instruments for the markets. The dismantling of social programs and the welfare state was inaugurated amidst public speculation about a new wave of privatizations, primarily in healthcare and education. Demonstrators holding signs with “PPSOE,” which fused the letters of the conservative Popular (PP) and Socialist (PSOE) parties into one, pointed out the lack of distinction between these parties’ economic policies and the growing popular disenchantment with bipartisan politics in a plural democracy. One sign of this equation between parties materialized four months after the first massive protests in 2011; the PP and PSOE bloc would eventually agree to amend the Constitution, without calling a popular vote by referendum and despite opposition from minority parties, to include a future cap on the deficit that equated to a limit on public spending. Nevertheless, this measure was applauded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as Spain had “chosen the path of reason” for “the common good” of the European markets. It became increasingly evident in policy-making by Spain’s major right and leftwing parties that both were subservient to the influence of banking and financial capital, whose objective was to conserve the neoliberal projects of the Euro Zone at great economic and social costs for residents.

In turn, the PSOE and PP leaders’ successive attempts to demonstrate their allegiance to the solvency of European neoliberal projects constituted a dual crisis of sovereignty, on the one hand for Spanish citizens who paid the social and economic expense of the crisis against their will, and on the other for state leaders who faced the increasing intervention of European administration in domestic affairs, whether economic, social, or political. Some peripheral indications of the deterritorializing effects of late capitalism were evident in the Spanish state’s weakened autonomy in policy-making decisions within the European Union. In 2011 the European Commission evaluated Spain’s economic and fiscal policy in at least two public reports, which urged greater liberalization of the labor market and tighter centralized monitoring and controls of the autonomous regions’ decision-making on public spending. However, in the public eye, the Spanish government’s displaced role in its administration of domestic affairs became more evident only after the first demonstrations in 2011, in successive news stories in which domestic issues were addressed not with Spanish officials, but with European administration: in Chancellor Merkel’s exceptional meeting with union leaders Cándido Méndez (UGT) and Ignacio Fernández Toxo (CCOO) who denounced the Spanish government’s deregulatory measures for the labor market and the deteriorating welfare state; in the European Central Bank’s conditions for the government to reduce spending on social programs in preparation for a potential bailout; in the European Commission’s position on Catalonian independence, to name a few. Whereas the deterritorializing effects of capital contributed to a crisis of sovereignty for the state, they also laid the conditions for new forms of transversal solidarity in the constitution of a multitude, both locally and on an international scale. What remains unclear at this time, however, is how this crisis of sovereignty laid the foundations for renewed social cohesion to national projects of different ideological or simply populist stripes.

Meanwhile, those who remained in the workforce faced the precariousness of a job market that enabled potential abuses by employers, one motive for the demonstrations in Madrid called by unions UGT and CCOO in 2009. Some common consequences for workers who consented to measures in order to keep their jobs were the suspension of contracts for unpaid vacations, the demand to work extra hours without compensation, the negotiation of extended leaves for a company to avoid reporting a collective dismissal (expediente de regulación de empleo - ERE), and the restructuring of positions to distribute greater job responsibilities among fewer personnel. For workers in the public sector who generally benefitted from greater job security (i.e., in education, healthcare, social services, law, administrative offices, etc.), the government announced later that state employees could expect to receive one monthly paycheck less in 2012, which consolidated participation in mobilizations across these sectors. Residents in Spain were told ad nauseam that they had lived well beyond their means and according to the neoliberal axiom, that either increased productivity or lower wages were the only viable solutions to the crisis. Facing growing expendability, employees were expected to be “overworked but thankful” or mindful of sacrifices required for corporate downsizing and cutbacks, which may describe the discourse of power-subservience permeating the workplace. On parodying the expectation of servile gratitude from the employed, with relevant Christian undertones, comedian Eva Hache joked in one stand-up routine that summer vacations had changed since the crisis, since workers who returned to find the office still in business kissed the ground as Pope John Paul II would have done.  

In domestic affairs, the economic forecast that warned of a long-term crisis eroded popular support for the PSOE and President Rodríguez Zapatero’s administration, which had initially downplayed its impact in light of a “robust” European and Spanish economy on the whole. The Bank of Spain, which supported this assertion, became another focus of popular skepticism, echoed by analysts in debates on television and radio, and in humor. Late-night host Andreu Buenafuente summarized this popular distrust in his monologue on the Bank of Spain, corrupt politicians, and loaning agencies, whose representatives had abused credit-lending with a soothing smile worthy of Michael Landon’s in Little House on the Prairie. On a more serious note, in his recognition of the immense hardship experienced by many, Socialist President Rodríguez Zapatero reminded Spanish citizens that combined “great effort and sacrifice” was the only viable solution to the crisis, an assertion that would be taken up in the rhetoric of the Popular Party, and as well cited verbatim every year in king Juan Carlos I’s Christmas Eve address since 2009. The notion that administration was left with “no alternative” but to adopt austerity measures and neoliberal policies circulated with growing political currency among politicians and media commentators, and even inspired a direct replication from economists Vicenç Navarro, Juan Torres, and Alberto Garzón who dissented with alternative proposals to sustain the welfare state in their reply Hay Alternativas. The dominant discourse of “no alternative” (i.e., from Spain’s major political parties on the right and left, from neoliberal analysts in the media) was recast as a powerful tool to legitimize the government’s choices in policy-making, and to a certain degree acquired its status as truth through habitual repetition. Although perhaps the most burdensome feature of the crisis, “no alternative” would be contested later in Camp Sol’s open call for new proposals on change as the very possibility from which to imagine alternative models of democratic participation, constitutionalism, and inclusive social wellbeing.

For university students, the Bologna Plan had sparked an awareness for local, national, and European politics in the public university, including the rising costs for higher education, the elimination or standardization of degree programs across Europe (particularly in the Humanities), and the exclusion of faculty and student interests from the plan’s design or implementation. Renewed activism in the university provided the grounds for networked communication to mobilize in specific actions, in which the use of online social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Tuenti, etc.) played a key role to draw supporters, project the visibility of a given cause, and ultimately organize against national and European measures adopted without local democratic participation.

In the overall demographic picture, trends in relocations began to take on multiple forms. For working- and middle-class families no longer able to pay the costs of nursing homes, many elderly were moved from residences with specialized care to their children’s homes, where care depended primarily on their relatives. Spanish citizens—from middle-class workers and graduating university students, to high-earning business professionals and executives—became “emigrantes otra vez” in ways that newspaper editorials associated with a strong evocation of the past, while many immigrants in Spain likewise returned to their countries of origin for greater work opportunities. Many of Spain’s nearly 50% of young adults without jobs had fewer possibilities to become independent from their parents, while many others moved back to the nest, which contributed to the depopulation trend from Spain’s urban centers to provincial hometowns and to the city outskirts where the costs of living are usually lower. Although television series before the crisis tended to focus on questions of “convivencia” in the family and neighborhood community (Aída, Aquí no hay quien viva, etc.), others have come to make this circumstance—as well as bartering and exchanges of favors without currency—the very premise of episodes (Con el culo en el aire, La que se avecina, Stamos Okupa2, etc.).  

As unemployment lines grew, rightwing politicians and media sources spoke of the abuses of those collecting unemployment from the government, thereby promoting the image that those who could not find work were not demonstrating effort to do so. Keeping in mind that wages in Spain are notoriously low—with more than 7.8 million mileuristas earning less than one thousand euros per month (National Institute of Statistics, 2010)—the imperative to assume greater long-term expenses equated to a vital threshold, if not poverty, for many middle- and working-class households and retirees. The derogatory term “thankful stomachs” circulated in the rightwing media, aiming to portray leftwing voters as dependent on “a free handout” from the state in exchange for their votes. In its direct attack on social programs and the voters who support them, statements such as these contributed to justifying the elimination of the welfare state by imposing a reading of pure contract-exchange (i.e., social services for my vote) upon citizens who are assumed to be uncritical thinkers. Returning to my previous argument on Foucault, this discourse emerges from the biopolitical production of neoliberal government in social relations, in which the dominant economic paradigm and its practice becomes the lens through which all political and social relations are explained and organized. In the same vein, the alleged abuses of the welfare system by the unemployed became a powerful discourse of political leverage to inaugurate the dismantling of social services through the criminalization of the jobless. The casual and often repeated phrase “chupan del bote” to describe welfare recipients as moochers or slackers, tended to shift public attention from the markets to the unemployed. Policing of the jobless would become evident later in a statement from Madrid’s future mayor Ana Botella who proposed that the unemployed perform obligatory volunteer work, from street cleaning to staffing public libraries, in order to minimize their abuses of the welfare system. In this sense, the neoliberal art of government is reproduced in social attitudes towards unemployment and poverty, not only to justify the elimination of social services, but to recast those in favor and dependent on them as economically irresponsible decision-makers, or even criminals. This is the stuff of the social production of class difference in neoliberal systems of thought, which following Foucault, not only reaffirms the fully autonomous, enterprising homo oeconomicus as the ideal model for upstanding society, but furthermore contributes to justifying the subordination of this model’s exclusions from the inequalities implicit in socioeconomic status.

Democracy, to use retrospectively the words of the first public demonstrations, had been “held hostage by the elite” political class governing for the interests of the few. The demand for “Real Democracy Now” embodied the estrangement from democratic participation—in the university, in state politics, in the public—from a field of juridical and economic interests that protected financial and banking capital, neoliberal European projects, and partisan power. In the everyday, this usurping of agency equated to frustration, exasperation, and other indignant responses to the intangible trappings of discursive power in its multiple forms. From the material and social consequences of the financial crisis, different responses crystallized and circulated within a dispersed field of social relations, which found their public expression primarily through the Internet, the media, and television (editorials, televised commentary, entertainment, blogs, social networks, etc.). A vast and often contradictory field of irony, fear, cynicism, willfulness, resignation, optimism, outrage, empowerment, to name only a few, were some first responses to a shared condition collapsed into a term readily identifiable to others living through the same: la crisis.

Repeated and mirrored in the media, in official state discourse, in social exchanges, were some common threads of what could be construed as a form of self-pedagogy in circulation: that there is no alternative to resolve the crisis other than the sacrifice of labor conditions and public services (e.g., healthcare, education, social security, etc.); that living beyond one’s means excludes the privileges of the wealthy; that the employed working “to lift Spain up” should be thankful despite managerial abuses; that the unemployed and demonstrators are irresponsible or even criminal in their actions. Pointing generally towards a system of thought on the crisis, these suppositions in circulation form the topology of biopower, which produced real effects in everyday social relations. As Foucault reminds his readers, if neoliberal economic policies are designed to correct the markets as needed—not through direct intervention, but through specific instruments that produce correction from their secondary effects on the markets—then we might draw a parallel to the neoliberal techniques of government and its social instruments of “correction” in civil society. For, in the imposed truths on sacrifice, charity in work, excess in lifestyle, lack of alternative, and criminality, one finds the corrective instruments of discursive power that, when taken uncritically, may produce emotive responses that conserve the status quo—a sense of shame, gratitude, humility, irresponsibility, etc. These are the secondary (biopolitical) effects of corrective instruments that tend be constructed around the provocation of moral judgment toward oneself and others, or even abstractly towards entire socioeconomic classes, in the justification of economic and social policies. Effectively, they contribute to defining civil society and class difference through an economic and sociopolitical paradigm, as I argued earlier. Perversely, they also serve to legitimize the neoliberal art of government (or generally speaking, the governments’ economic policies) as the only valid solution to the crisis by tangentially drawing from narratives of exclusion and subordination that define sacrifice, the shames of excess, gratitude in charity work, and the criminal nature of social and economic irresponsibility. This point might help readers understand why, then, “humility and modesty” in times of austerity were touted by conservative politician Sáenz de Santamaría (PP) as the crisis’s saving grace, for in her view Spanish society had recuperated important values once lost.

In this specific context, one confronts a distinguishable characteristic of the possible political implications between emotion and affect, particularly as emotion here is deployed as a powerful persuasive tool—not of intensity for action, like affect, but of adherence to and alignment with the discourse of power (i.e., to reify upstanding citizens and their “others” through a neoliberal paradigm, to legitimize the art of government for the governed), inasmuch as emotion can persuade or debilitate one into stasis or compliance without critical thought. To explore this point further, having detected that emotions play an important role in response to economic hardship, the progressive think-tank Fundación Alternativas published a study of some 250 participants in the 15-M movement in 2011 in which the survey describes the participants’ “fear of unemployment” and the emotions that “may energize mobilization” when thinking about the unemployed. Notably, “outraged” tops the list, followed by “angry,” “sad,” “guilty,” and “hopeful,” in what could be said within the limits of the study is an indiscriminate grouping of emotive and potentially affective responses to economic hardship, comprised of both critical reactions to the crisis and their more debilitating effects (Likki, 10). However, this sociological approach to emotions (and potentially, affects) removes practices and critical responses from their contexts, whereby “outrage” shares its place with moral judgment and its debilitating effects, “guilty” and “sad.” Stated otherwise, the study does not distinguish between the emotive effects of persuasion and conditioning, indexed in the powerful rhetorical instruments in circulation between the art of government and the governed. Thereby emotional responses to powerful discursive strategies on employment are indistinguishable from their affective potential for action and critical response, which in practice is not the case. Moving beyond the study then, a more concrete distinction between emotion and affect is made in the practices of the indignados, summarized in one platform’s open invitation to participate in dialogue with other young adults: “Organize your anger, but don’t forget to defend your happiness” (JuventudSinFuturo). Affect in the practices of the indignados, in other words, requires a critical response in order to affect one and be affected into action (i.e., organization) from stasis, from the status quo. Affect, through its potential intensity, likewise bears the possibility of resisting emotional persuasion when the latter is dispatched as a manipulative tool to conserve power.

The indignados do not read these messages as truth, by any means. So, although the social and economic burden of the crisis contributed to generating what I called earlier the “tipping point” for outrage, it is the critical practice of reading the government’s policy-making and public statements, and those of likeminded commentators and analysts in the media, which further regenerates the intensity of affect as a critical response and mobilizing potential for action. In other words, indignation may be reactivated when watching the news to hear a politician make similar claims, or to learn first on Twitter that the monarchy is also involved in a multimillion-euro corruption scandal. Thereby the critical responses of the indignados produce, in Deleuzian terms, the creative line of flight for the movement’s resistance which escapes this powerful discourse and resists its effects; it is a line of flight potentialized by its mobilizing ability and the imaginative capacity of renewed activism in Spain today. This line of flight is also, at once, the multitude’s production of a multiplicity of imagined alternatives to a social, economic, and political paradigm that claims there is none. Thereby affect sets into motion the constitution of the multitude through critical responses that detect and reject the corrective instruments of discursive power in the everyday, in a line of flight that escapes and resists their burdensome effects.

Part I of II to be continued